Okay, we have the thumbs up. Thanks for joining us, everyone, here in the Ritz Ballroom for the 55 Annual Baird Global Industrial Conference. My name is Dave Manthey. I'm the senior industrial distribution analyst for Baird. Great to have Wesco with us here today, and to speak with us about the company, we have Scott Gaffner, who's the Senior Vice President of Investor Relations, and John Engel, Chairman, President, and CEO of Wesco. I'm gonna ask John to give us a brief overview, and then we'll go right into Q&A. Large group today, so if you have any questions, you can obviously send them up to the iPad, which is sessionone@rwbaird.com, and I will field them from here, or you can raise your hand, and we'll call on you as well.
So with that, I will turn it over to John for a brief introduction.
Dave, thank you. Always a pleasure to be at your conference. We've had terrific meetings throughout the day. I'm only gonna stay on this page, make a few opening comments, and go to Q&A. So hopefully, you all know who Wesco is. So why invest in Wesco? It's the substantial value creation opportunity we have in front of us. We're outperforming the market by a good margin. We have accelerating business momentum vector, and improved results, which I'll talk about. And I think most importantly, you know, we did a transformational combination with Anixter five years ago. Took two leaders in our industry, put them together, creating the undisputed leader, and with three big businesses, electrical, data communications, and IP security, and utility, and broadband.
I think we're finally starting to see the beginning of good evidence on getting a multiple expansion as a result of putting these companies together, which is encouraging. Our momentum vector is, again, very strong. We grew 6% organically in Q1, 7% in Q2, 12% organically in Q3. We just announced our results a couple weeks ago. We have three big, strong businesses, leaders in their own right. Our CSS business is Communications and Security Solutions, an undisputed global leader in datacom and IP security. 40% of CSS's sales are data centers. The white space of the data centers, that grew 18% in Q3. Our Electrical and Electronic Solutions business, our EES business, also has a global set of capabilities, undisputed market leader in core electrical distribution in the U.S. and Canada, down into Mexico.
That grew 12% in Q3. I repeat, 12%. And in our last business, Utility and Broadband Solutions, again, absolutely undisputed leadership position in utility and broadband, especially utility. With Anixter and Wesco, we brought together one and two to create the undisputed leader. Three was a distant third. That grew 3% in the quarter, but I will tell you, and we may get into this a bit, as I look at our utility business, and this is an electric utility, power utility business, I look out mid to long term, it is an absolutely outstanding growth opportunities in that business. That industry historically has been cyclical, and I believe it's shifted to secular growth fundamentally, and I know we can talk about that. So our investor thesis is laid out on this page. We are the market leader.
We think we're best positioned because of this portfolio that right now none of our competitors have, the core electrical, electrification trend, a core datacom and IP security, AI-driven data centers, plus an amazing security business, and our utility and broadband solutions, so power generation, reliability down through the power chain into the grid, and we're uniquely, I think, positioned because 85% of our sales are in U.S. and Canada to benefit from reshoring, nearshoring, and the industrialization of the U.S., and reindustrialization of the U.S., so very well-positioned to drive outsized growth. We're committed to grow above the market and do that consistently. We got great cash flow generation across all phases of the economic cycle. 25% of our cash flow we cordon off and focus on supporting our common dividend.
We've raised it 10% every year since we put it in place several years ago, and as well as doing buybacks to offset any management equity or dilution. The remaining 75% provides great optionality to do acquisitions, share buyback, as well as work our leverage ratio or debt down. And then finally, the third thing is we're in the midst of a true enterprise-wide digital transformation. I know every company talks about digital. I'm sure we'll talk about that today, but we embarked upon this journey six months post the Anixter acquisition, so it was in the beginning part of twenty twenty-one. We closed Anixter in June of 2020. This is an enterprise-wide digital transformation of the entire enterprise. We're now ranked 200 on the Fortune 500 list, global company in 55 countries around the world.
When we're done, brand-new tech stack, every system we're using to run this Fortune 200 company will be new. And this AI-enabled tech stack will be sitting on top of, and exercising, and accessing, and leveraging one world-class data lake that houses all our proverbial big data. Not just the Wesco big data, but our pieces of our customers and supplier data sets as well. So the greatest asset a distributor has, and we're a business-to-business distributor, that's not on their balance sheet, is their big data. And so this architecturally will be positioned to unlock the power of our big data. This is not an ERP transition. This is not SAP or Oracle. This is very much a tech stack that looks like the tech companies, what they've built and how they operate.
And again, the power that they have is the power of their big data. So again, pleasure to be here. And with that, Dave, I turn it over to you to moderate.
Thank you, everybody. Drive safely. Everyone wants to talk about data centers. The data center growth has been phenomenal at Wesco. I think what was most interesting in the most recent quarter, and again, reminder, CSS, roughly a third of the overall business, with data center now, mid-teen-
4-14. For CSS, 40%.
of CSS.
Of CSS.
40% .
For the company, total company, we were 19% of our Q3 sales were data centers, 17% on a trailing twelve-month basis. We did $6.2 billion in sales in Q3, the first time we eclipsed $6 billion in a quarter.
It's really phenomenal. When I think about Anixter pre-acquisition and years prior to that, being a premises cabling company.
Right
Transforming into this, it's just, it's been phenomenal. But what I thought was interesting is in the last quarter, you-- there was obviously a lot of optimism around it, but you talked a lot about this time to power for data center applications and sort of that three to five-year outlook, the lags in, in, construction and so forth. I think there's a lot of hand-wringing out in the market today about, like, what happens with the cycle? Are we overbuilt, et cetera. Could you talk a little bit about where Wesco sits, what things look like over the next three to five years, and why you're so optimistic that this goes on?
Yeah. For us, exceptionally bright. I think, you know, everything that's catching the headlines today is the new data center builds, and these are larger and of more sufficient scale than ever has existed, whether it's 800 megawatts, a gigawatt, 1.2 GW. And it's obviously they're being built to sort of support not just Gen AI, but Agentic AI applications. And so, you know, we serve the hyperscaler data center companies direct as customers, directly, not through an intermediary, not through a contractor or integrator. We serve the multitenant data centers, the MTDC customers, directly. We serve also enterprise class customers directly, like big banks have their own captive data center. Anixter's been doing data center business for more, you know, for two decades, quite frankly, more on the enterprise class side.
But with the growth of the hyperscalers, it's been a big growth driver, and MTDC is for us as well. We have an unmatched set of capabilities in the white space, which I'll call everything that's under HVAC control. That's Anixter's deep roots. And our EES business is the gray space, and our utility business is the power. So we have, you know, we have ability to serve across all three. The white space, in particular, is where you're seeing tremendous amounts of design changes and evolution, with high-powered compute capabilities being built in to support the gen AI and agentic AI. And so what our unique capabilities are is none of our competitors have the white space for distribution. There's multiple gray space distribution players, and none of them, none, not a single player in the market other than us, has the global execution capability.
We're in 55 countries around the world, so we are working with our end user, hyperscaler customers and MTDCs to manage the supply chain and global deployment of their data centers. You could imagine, pick any one of the hyperscalers, I won't mention them by name, you know who they are, the Magnificent Seven plus. They are looking three to four years out on what their global data center deployments are. We have insight into those schedules. We are working with them because they, we are the one throat to choke on supply chain management and project deployment, again, centered around with the strength in the white space, and no one has that capability today. I think as far as we can see, Dave, it's exceptionally bright.
The one thing I will introduce, which may be a little different wrinkle, is all this. What's capturing all the headlines is the new data center build. Again, very exciting. These are massive, very complex. But to really unlock the power of AI at a given company, we're gonna need a lot more data center capacity that you cannot meet with just greenfield builds. Mathematically impossible. So what does that mean? I think you're gonna see a massive retrofit, renovation, upgrade market for data centers. And why is that important? The half-life of a data center before AI applications was four years. When you upgraded a data center pre-AI, you didn't change any electrical. You just changed what's in the white space, and the ROI was good. After four years, just Moore's Law has not reached its limits, there was good payback. AI is gonna shorten that cycle.
So I think what you're gonna find is, you just look around the world at existing data center capacity, you're gonna see a significant amount of growth coming from just let's upgrade and retrofit and renovate those to provide more data center compute capacity. That's what's gonna support even further acceleration of AI applications. Again, you're not reading or seeing any of that yet, and the reason you're not is because the hyperscalers and MTDCs with the new builds are squeezing out all the capacity. But I know there's all this talk about, "Oh, my gosh, this is a bubble." I see no indications of that in the short to midterm. Again, the growth opportunities for AI long term are staggering. I think what will kick in, though, as the new builds start.
You know, kind of slow down a bit and peek, you're gonna see this retrofit renovation market really kick in. It's analogous to the non-resi construction market, where you got the new construction and retrofit renovation and upgrade for certain types of equipment.
Yeah. It's very interesting. Thanks for sharing that. Let's talk about the EES business. As you mentioned, strong growth in the quarter, I think was surprising to a lot of folks. Talk about if this is a cyclical turn that you're seeing, some of it driven by maybe talk about the gray space as well.
Yeah.
But, just in general, EES, seeing that kind of strength is encouraging as it relates to just commercial-industrial activity in general.
It exceeded our expectations. This is the deep roots of Wesco as a distributor. We're an electrical distribution, and Anixter had wire and cable. Marry this together as a complete electrical solution. We grew 12% in EES in the quarter. It's the fourth quarter in a row of higher growth rates successively, so we got momentum vector there. What's interesting is we gave a new disclosure this quarter. I said 40% of CSS's sales were data center. 6% of EES's sales were data center. So even if you strip data center out, it still grew double digits.
Mm.
Which is really encouraging. It's basically got three businesses in it. It's a construction business, an industrial business, and an OEM value-added distribution business. Construction grew mid-teens, now that includes data centers. Industrial grew mid- to high single digits.
Mm-hmm.
Really interesting, 'cause a lot of other industrial players aren't seeing that kind of growth.
That's right.
And OEM, which is really, think of it as a value-added assemblies. It's more the direct material stream, whereas industrial's indirect materials and capital projects. But it's, for Wesco, it's always been a good leading indicator of industrial by a few quarters. That grew mid-teens. So we had construction and OEM at mid-teens, and we had industrial in kind of mid-single digit plus range. We were really pleased that all three parts of the business grew. And so, I think we haven't given a guidance or full outlook for 2026 yet. We gave a little bit of a framework, and part of that was that we see electrical strengthening. Now, to be fair, I'm not saying the market grew that. I think we do. There's enough data points out there, we can say with great confidence, we significantly outperformed the market with our EES business.
That's great to hear. I mean, one of the themes that we've heard, I've heard from investors here, has been that there's this, you know, stable kind of markets in a lot of cases. We heard, you know, some of the core industrial companies say that the market is stable, which sounds kind of pretty lackluster. This sounds a little more exciting than that, and with those leading indicators looking better, gaining more share, mid-single digit growth or better in that core electrical segment is certainly encouraging.
Yeah, I think, Dave, and you know the company exceptionally well over a long period of time. Our mix is really helping us. I do think that, you know, the OEM business is currently direct, the direct material stream, but it's industrial companies that are building stuff and building stuff on U.S. soil.
Mm-hmm.
So this reshoring secular trend feeds into that a bit. Clearly, that's secular, I think. Our industrial business is an MRO and capital projects business, direct with end user customers, not through contractors. So where we have these end user relationships, I think there's been a lot of supply chain reengineering and rearchitecting going on behind the scenes, post-pandemic. You don't read a lot about it, companies don't talk a lot about it, but there's a clear trend to kind of reengineer supply chains, to make them shorter, more efficient. That feeds the nearshoring, reshoring kind of secular trend. And in construction, you know, we saw decent, really decent results. Again, the mid-teens growth, but data centers helps with that. But still, it did exceed our expectations. Now, with that said, we had improving growth rates in Q1 and Q2 as well.
Mm.
So we were getting an improving momentum vector, but it did outperform a bit versus what we thought.
Yeah, sounds good. And then finally, let's, I wanna touch on when you were talking about UBS, the utility business. You said that there are these elements that are turning secular as you see it.
Yeah.
Could you talk about what those trends are?
Yeah, I think it's all things power. You know, total electricity demand in the U.S. in 2024 was flat to 2007. Think about that. How could you have flat electricity demand over a seventeen-year period? Last time I checked, GDP wasn't flatter for seventeen years.
More efficient, everything.
It's all the more efficient everything.
Yep.
If you look at the power demand curve, three years , five years , seven years , 10 years out from now, no way. You have a rising power demand curve. Everyone talks about data centers, rightly so. Data centers in 2024 consumed 25 GW in total across the U.S. There's all kinds of studies out there, but I'll give you a reasonable middle of the road. It'll be 80 GW in 2030. That alone, one gigawatt of additional generation, is one brand-new nuclear power plant. So, so that's just data centers. Think about all the other infrastructure projects that are underway, the so-called mega projects. When's the last time we built a wafer fab, semiconductor wafer fab plant in the U.S.? Decades ago. There's numerous ones underway now. Guess how much power they demand? What I'm telling you is, for my entire life, utility's been a cyclical industry.
It's GDP, plus or minus a small amount. 3 years , 5 years , 7 years , 10 years +, no way. It is secular growth. It has to be. If it's not, all this other stuff we're talking about will not happen. Hey, it's physics. We need that additional energy. It must be produced. So I think the utilities now, and again, we are by far the market share leading player in U.S. and Canada. We serve them direct, these investor-owned utilities, municipals, co-ops. 90% of our utility customer base is direct end user customers, not contractors. So we have direct access. They're majorly challenged now because they could predict and plan their businesses with 3, 5-year timeframes that had not much volatility, and now the demand curve, they're getting calls up, "Hey, I need 700 MW-800 MW in this zip code." What?
It's not like they have an extra gigawatt or two hanging around of excess capacity. So I just think this is a phenomenal opportunity for all of us. But make no mistake about it, for all this infrastructure build-out, I think there's three big constraints: It's power, there's still long lead times on certain equipment, and it's skilled trades, just the trade labor. Power, though, is the big determinant, in my opinion, and I think by definition, we'll figure out how to solve the problem because we have to, but it does translate into, meaning a very different growth equation than what we've had historically.
That sounds great. I got a question from the audience here. Companies are seeing component shortages in the data center. Are lead times extending with your vendors? I'm not sure exactly what that means.
For what we do in the white space, because we're not distributing the electronics, we're not a value-added reseller like a TD Synnex or an Ingram Micro. We're not doing, you know, the servers and switches. We'll do, in the white space, the rack, the rack design, the fiber optic connectivity, the cooling solution, access control, part of our security business, IP cameras, and a whole series of other things. That's our business. We're not seeing shortages there, period. However, fiber capacity has limitations, so you see a lot of interesting things being done all the way down with the fiber manufacturers to make sure...
Now, they've been expanding their manufacturing capacity, but you see a lot of, you know, work being done around, "Let's make sure we have the right fiber capacity to support these build-outs." So that's inside the air-conditioned space, the white space. If you go behind all the walls and to the foundation up, the gray space, the electrical distribution and control, again, there's, it's gotten back to more kind of standard lead times. Where you're seeing a significant challenge, however, is get outside that building, that data center, and go into the power part of the utility, part of the power chain, the power chain. Now you're talking about high voltage transformers, high voltage switches. Those kinds of things still have very long lead times, not one year, two years to three years.
Mm.
So you see that stuff being worked very thoughtfully in terms of, you know, projects that'll be multiple years out.
Okay, fair enough. John, you've always been a proponent of consolidation in the fragmented industry that you compete in, and Anixter being a classic example of that worked out extremely well, better than I thought it would, for sure. But you know, you've always been a major proponent of that. What do you see in the future? If we look out three to five years, are there additional opportunities for Wesco to continue to consolidate the market, and in what kind of areas would you be most focused?
So we have, Dave, to your point, we've always believed that strongly, I believe that scale is what matters in distribution, and that's true no matter what type of distribution company in every across all the industries. And so what did Anixter do for us? They were two equally sized companies, so there's the scale-up advantage we got, which is an economy of scale. But we've not described it this way. This turned out to be the more powerful thing. We have economy of scope. Because what we did was the portfolios only overlapped in utility. Wesco's utility capabilities went back to the Westinghouse days even before we were spun out, you know, decades of utility experience. And Anixter had bought HD Supply's Power Solutions group prior to merging with Wesco, prior to Wesco acquiring them, which...
And between the two of us, we were the leaders in US and Canada. So the two leaders came together. That was an overlap, but everything else, there was no overlap. Because what we had in electrical in Wesco, Anixter had in wiring cable. We had the switchgear and all the other ancillary stuff. Utility was the overlap. What Anixter had in data communications, IP security, and the global capabilities, well, no one else had. So, we both had some different stuff in broadband. So I just touch on that because I think it's a case study of economy of scope. You couple that with our end user relationships and where we don't sell through a contractor, we're this has been our cross-sell. So, so we've been leveraging cross-sell across the whole portfolio where we have end user relations. Let's pull the whole portfolio in.
We committed to 1% of combined pro forma sales. Both were $8.5 billion a year in sales and eight and a half billion in sales per year companies. That's $170 million through three years. We did $2.3 billion of cross-sell sales. We stopped measuring at the end of 2023. So we still see a lot of runway on cross-sell. So I only go through that because we clearly have seen the benefit of consolidation. With that said, our priority now is it would have to add to our portfolio or meaningfully scale us up in an area, and there's, quite frankly, not a lot of big targets that would do that in a very, you know, overwhelmingly accretive way. We have this accelerating business momentum organically in our business.
We're pedal to the metal on that, and we're looking at adding to our services capability. So there's the answer, Dave. We did a Rahi Systems post Anixter.
Mm-hmm.
That has been an outstanding acquisition in terms of giving us additional service capabilities to serve data centers. Done a few others along the way, the most recent was Ascent, not large, the end of last year in December. No products, no product distribution, pure services. They help run data centers and have people in data centers, making sure it stays operational. There's a lot more they do than that, but it's no product distribution. So we're really focused on adding these service capabilities, and at the end of the day, when you look at our business models, where they have the stickiest relationship with customers, where we're adding the most value add, there's a high services content. Where we have that, we got better EBITDA margins. Of the three businesses we have, our UBS business has double-digit op margins.
Mm-hmm.
It's really based on that business model with utilities that have a higher services content. So there's the answer, Dave, directionally, you know, kind of string of pearls for services. We're looking at some bigger stuff, too, but we're always considering the bigger deals because I think we would get the first call and probably the last call on many of them, not all of them. And if it makes sense, we'll look at everything, but as a priority matter, we feel really good about the portfolio, the global footprint, our position, leadership position with UBS and CSS and EES in US and Canada. And so the services play is really accretive and value add.
That's great to hear. Maybe in the last two minutes, you could talk about your own digital transformation and the progress. We're more than halfway complete now on a six-year journey. We're in the deployment and scaling phase. Could you talk about what that means and what we should watch for over the next few years?
When we're done, we'll have an AI-enabled tech stack that has full access and leverages and helps monetize our big data. So that's when we're done. It's a big statement. It's a huge statement. We're still designing and building all the capabilities into the system. We gave a brief update in our earnings call release two weeks ago. We now have all three businesses have one or just a few sites on the new platform. This new platform is end-to-end a new platform, doesn't tie to our legacy. So we're running transactions. In the coming months and few quarters, we're finishing design and build into 2026, and bringing online more of our higher-order business model capabilities that we have to get deployed in more complex sites.
And then we start to scale the deployment. The deployment is a heavy lift through all of 2026 and all of 2027, so it's not till 2028 that we will be fully deployed, and we see, we realize full benefits. Do we get any benefits ahead of that? Sure, we do. I mean, so we, we've been hydrating our big data, I'll use that term, our own big data, some customer supplier data into this data lake. The data lake exists now, world-class data lake. We're hydrating the big data. We have AI and GenAI applications running right now. We have a long list of use cases that we wanna get to, but we've got a number of them already running, giving us some productivity benefits in the company.
I mean, as we deploy across the enterprise, our AI maturity will strengthen dramatically. We haven't talked a lot about it publicly because, quite frankly, I think we're in a leadership position with what we're doing versus our peers right now. I will make the note, and it was a pleasant surprise that Fortune came out with an AI ranking. This is just a few weeks ago, all companies and AI applications as such, and they looked at the Fortune 500. We were ranked number 10. This is public. Now, they did that without even talking to us. They went out and used AI to gather data from conferences and other engineering symposiums we're part of, and stuff we're doing with our data scientist team and with other...
All kinds of stuff, and then knitted this together and came up, and they have their own algorithm in. But I thought that was an interesting, and we were pretty pleased with that. So, look, AI is the game changer for all companies to varying degrees, and, but for us, because the big data is the greatest asset we have, it's a breakout move.
We look forward to seeing it play out. Thank you.
Thank you all.
Appreciate it.