All right. Thank you. Sorry for being a little bit tardy. Thank you, everyone, on the webcast. Thank you, everyone, for joining. I'm David Vogt. I'm the UBS Hardware Networking Analyst here. Thank you again for joining the UBS Tech Conference. We're excited to have with us this morning or afternoon if you're listening on the East Coast, CEO Steve Bandrowczak and CFO for another four or five months, Xavier Heiss, so we're gonna start off. I've got a bunch of questions. If anyone has a question, please feel free to use the app and submit it. It'll show up on an iPad here that I have. But so again, Steve, Xavier, thank you for joining us.
Thank you, David.
Maybe we could start with Q3. What's going on in the market? You know, obviously, there's a lot of cross-currents, company-specific, macro. Maybe we could start with what you saw in Q3 and where we sit today and how the company's positioning itself going forward post the quarter.
No, great, David. So I wanna take a step back and, you know, this time last year, we announced our Reinvention program. We had changed our shareholders. We had announced that we were going to launch a Reinvention. Reinvention was a three-year program to do three things. One, to adjust the cost structure aligned to the reality of what's happening in our industry, number one. Two, how do we invest in growth areas so that we can offset some of the secular decline that we see in the industry? And then, more importantly, how do we invest in areas of position Xerox for the future in terms of growth, right? And so that Reinvention's a three-year program. Major components to that. And I've said it multiple times that it is not a straight line to that three-year end result.
Right.
So I'll start with that as the foundation. In the beginning of the year, major restructure in terms of my organization to really focusing on client success, focusing on our partners. And then we created what we call GBS, Global Business Services, which is an engine to drive continuous improvement, simplification, automation, and invest in our end-to-end, whether it's procure to pay, order to cash, whatever it may be. The second piece of that was how do we start to free up our balance sheet so that we can start to invest in areas of growth? And you recently saw ITsavvy acquisition, $450 million of IT services that we're going to bring into our mid-market clients. That industry's got a CAGR growth of, you know, low single digits to mid-high single digits over the next five to seven years.
These are all products and services that our mid-market clients need, whether it's network as a service, security as a service, so I give you all that as background because the Reinvention, quarter over quarter, we're gonna have bumps, and we had a bump in Q3, obviously. Couple of areas that caused the bumps. Number one, in Q1, we made a major reorganization of our sales team and our go-to-market as well as the support functions, and so what we saw was an impact to our revenue, impact to our sales productivity. However, Q2 to Q1, we saw sales productivity increase. Q2 to Q3, we saw improvement from Q2 to Q3. Why? We've got a management operating system that literally, on a weekly basis, we take a look at the key KPIs and performance of our business.
We look at where did we create that disruption, put the focus and teams in place to go and fix those disruptions and get things back on track. Sales operations disruption. We also had a product launch disruption. We were gonna launch product in Q3. If you think about product launch, what do you try to do? Bleed off old inventory so that you don't have new inventory that comes in, and then you sit with inventory that clients don't want. Because we disrupted the sales engine, we didn't burn off the inventory that we wanted. It caused us a problem with our product launch going into Q3 into Q4. Most of that is understood in terms of what we need to do, and the fixes are in place to make sure that we get better. The sales productivity should get better.
Product launch will help us going forward, and then, obviously, the ITsavvy allows us to now start to grow in areas of our business that we think will offset our secular decline.
So, so against the backdrop of the Reinvention program and what just happened in Q3, where do we sit today in that three-year journey in terms of the asset portfolio you mentioned and the acquisition that you did this year? Where do we sit today, I guess, in terms of how the portfolio sits within Xerox and what needs to get done on the margin to kind of hit the milestones that you laid out for the Reinvention strategy over the multi-year period?
Yeah. I think in the cost side of it, we announced that we had $700 million of opportunities we'd identified, about $300 million we addressed in this year, you know, when over the next two years, we'll address the balance of it. So we've identified the cost takeouts in terms of what we're trying to do to simplify, automate, etc., our business, and that will come over the next two years, so very confident in what we're doing on the cost side of it. On the revenue side of it, we got a couple of things we need to do. Obviously, ITsavvy allows us to go and penetrate our mid-market clients. We got over 200,000 mid-market clients today. Why is that important? The economic buyer for us in the mid-market is the same economic buyer that buys print IT services.
Different than on the enterprise side where the print buyer in a Citibank or UBS, wherever, it's different. It's the real estate person. It's the procurement person. It's not the CIO. So our relationship in the mid-market is with the CIO, which is the economic buyer of what we just bought with ITsavvy, right? So what we need to do now is to get the sales engine to be able to double our wallet share inside of existing accounts in relationships that we already have. And that's gonna be the transition we need to do as we go forward. Second piece of it is, remember, I've got a large partner community. I got 10,000 partners out there that sell Xerox printers and services. I now need to help them with bringing IT services through that partner community as well. They have the same challenge that I do.
They're in a secularly declining industry. They need to look at selling things that allows them to grow. So I've gotta get my sales engine and my partner engine to be able to sell digital and IT services as we go forward. That will be the growth engine that will offset the secularly declining print.
Can I maybe go back to your internal customer list in the mid-market versus what they bring to the table?
Yeah.
How much overlap is there today? I know it's a very large number of customers.
Yeah, yeah.
but when you look at sort of the potential overlap and the ability to double that wallet share.
Yeah.
How should investors think about sort of a low-hanging fruit?
IT services and Xerox customer overlap very small.
Okay.
We have different relationships, different clients, different go-to-market engines, very small. In fact, the ability to take print and bring it into ITsavvy and them selling print into a customer base that they never sold print into is an upside for us. The ability to take ITsavvy services and bring it into mid-market, by the way, we can also bring it into state and local accounts as well, which we never had services before. So very little overlap. To me, it's around an execution. How do we get the sales team to be able to sell? How do we get the market to recognize Xerox is something different than print? And how do we get that message out there that we can sell these other solutions and services?
I know that question's gonna be tough, but from a sales force productivity perspective.
Yeah.
How do we think about that ramp? 'Cause these are very different offerings.
Yeah.
They're used to selling. So is this a 12-month productivity ramp kind of timeline to think about? And so as we sit here a year from now, as we're going into 2026, that relationship should be in a much stronger position than where we sit today, obviously, that you just did.
No question. So three things. One is, as you turn over your Salesforce, you recruit differently.
Okay.
I'm gonna recruit with both print and IT services, skills and background that can align to what I call client success. How do we solve client problems? So that's the first thing. Second is a training engine around training my existing sales force and, by the way, training my channel partners to be able to sell IT and digital services, right?
So you work with the channel partners.
Yeah.
To get them up to speed.
So we've developed internally. Xerox used to be one of the best places to come for sales training and management training. We were the best in the world, right? I remember when I was growing up as a CIO, you used to go to Xerox for, like, the best training and management training program. We're getting back to that. We're investing a lot in training, a lot in certification internally. I've got this vision of you think about Alexa at home where you go and you say, "What's the weather today?" or, "Order my dog food." I call it My Geri. It's kind of a laughing internal joke where I don't want people to touch keyboards. I want it to be voice-activated and simply ask the question, and the infrastructure will provide the answer. How do I sell AI?
Help me with a mentor, online mentor that can help me sell digital services or can help me sell RPA, and we're building all that infrastructure, which is being launched as we speak.
So, against that, against that construct of retraining your internal salespeople, rehiring, however you wanna phrase it, educating and training the partner community, the channel, when you think about supplanting or supporting a secularly declining print business.
Yeah.
What do you and you mentioned the low single-digit to high single-digit kind of?
Yeah.
CAGR earlier. Ultimately, what does the revenue model look like as this becomes more successful? Like, if we sit here and say, "Wow, we've nailed this 12 months from now," what does the top-line framework look like for Xerox under this new paradigm?
Yeah. So we talked about if you just take a look at the industry, not our numbers but industry numbers, you know, it's a 2%-3% decline industry over the next couple of years, right? So if you take a look at our top-line core print business, I've gotta be able to outrun that.
Right.
We're gonna outrun that. 20% of my business needs to be in IT and digital services in a growing CAGR market, right? So if I can get that balance right, by the way, with ITsavvy, I now get to about 15% of my revenue that is now in IT and digital services. And so we'll be able to now start to offset some of that secular decline.
Got it. So then does that beg the question, so you're at 15% roughly. Obviously, cash flow and capital allocation and your balance sheet are very important considerations today.
Yeah.
Does that mean that you need to invest more organically to kind of take that 15% number higher to 2025? Or is that an inorganic strategy or a combination of the two? Like, how do we think about getting you over that hump to offset that low single digit decline in print so that the mix supports, obviously, consolidated growth going forward?
Combination of, right? And so there may be specific tuck-in capabilities that I may need to augment and add into my IT and digital strategy conversation. I've been very vocal on inside existing accounts that we have. I believe we can double our wallet share.
Okay.
Because of the fact that they're already buying IT services. In the mid-market space, there isn't a dominant player that sells solution services into mid-market. So if I am a, you know, if I am a large OEM, I'm going through channel partners. But the reality is a local mid-market client today, there's somebody local that's selling. It's somebody's family member. It's some local person that's providing those services. And when we started the journey of the Reinvention, we went out and we pulled out mid-market clients. We said, "If Xerox sold security services, network services, would you be willing to buy?" And overwhelmingly, the answer was yes. Love your brand. You're already a trusted partner. You're already inside of our IT infrastructure, so you know our security. You know our data. You're trusted. If you had these services, we would buy them for you, right?
We've now taken that, and now we're gonna expand those services and bring them in.
I forgive me for not knowing this. When you think about the tip of the spear in terms of services perspective, what, when you since you mentioned this is why I'm asking, you pulled and you queried your partners. What are they looking for right out of the gate from you? Like, what is like missing in their stack that they don't currently have or they wanna replace with a trusted partner like Xerox?
I think every client is different, but if I had a macro trend, security is really important.
Security.
Security's important, right?
And that plays into, you know, Xerox's, you know, obviously.
It plays into.
Data, security, right? Your partners.
What most people don't realize is most CIOs see the print world as a vulnerable area in terms of security. Why? Because they don't invest in print infrastructure in terms of the same way that they invest in a server because they think a server that's sitting there four years is vulnerable.
Right.
Or a laptop that's sitting there three years is vulnerable. Well, guess what? The print infrastructure has the same vulnerabilities after five and seven years, right? And so what we're trying to do is bring education around security, around how do you deal with data in these environments. As we're having those conversations, oh, you can do network as a service. You can do cybersecurity as a service. You can do evaluation of our print infrastructure, tell us where we have vulnerabilities, and then bring a service to be able to patch all of that. Those are things that we're doing today. So I would say security is probably the biggest one.
Is it fair to say so that the segmentation of the market allows you to attack this mid-market sliver of businesses because, you know, if you're a large security vendor, you're not coming downstream?
That's right.
Where it's a local relationship built up over decades, if not longer.
Yeah.
And so that gives you the opportunity to be kind of their preferred partner of choice, effectively.
No question.
Is that kind of the?
No question.
Market strategy?
Think about a couple of things, right, so think about some big trends that are in the industry today. Everybody's thinking about, well, what do we do with this AI thing? Specifically, Microsoft, right, well, you don't just put AI on an infrastructure. You have to have orchestration of data. You've gotta be able to deal with the infrastructure that allows you to put AI on top of it, right, so we're never gonna be the LLM provider. We're never gonna be the AI provider. But what we can hand companies, especially in the mid-market, is to build the infrastructure to get ready for it. Second thing is, think about the challenges that are happening, so we saw this recently around VMware, right, cost going through the roof, CIOs dealing with it.
Now, if you're a mid-market client and you bet your entire infrastructure on VMware today, what are you doing?
Stuck.
You're stuck.
Yeah.
You need help, okay? If you're gonna think about ransomware, you're gonna think about all the different cyber threats. The cybersecurity threat doesn't care whether it's a mid-market hospital or whether it's a giant enterprise. So if I'm a CIO of a mid-market, I don't have the capability to be able to deal with these threats. Xerox, you do that with your own internal infrastructure. You're already making investment. Can you extend your network to my network and put a node, make me a node off of your network and secure your infrastructure the same way you secure Xerox assets? That's a value proposition.
Got it. So maybe for Xavier, as we move down the strategy, you know, we're inflecting hopefully positively on revenue growth. Margin should expand. I know cost has been a big focus from your seat. Maybe can you kinda walk us through where do you think operating margins can get to? I know there had been some, maybe backing away, maybe that's not the right phrase, of some of the cost-cutting initiatives given the revenue headwinds. But kind of as we go through 2025 into 2026, how should we think about this journey from a strategic perspective and what it means for the overall profitability of the firm?
Yep. I'll let Steve describe it. It's, I would say, quite simple. The Reinvention strategy is based on two pillars. One is the revenue shift. On the, if we execute, you know, what we just described there, 2026, 2027, 2028, the revenue mix will be 80% print, 20% IT and digital services. And you take this. So by doing this there, revenue will flatten and then grow. By the way, next year with the acquisition of ITs avvy, we will already show a year of growth, which is against or not in line with a traditional print secular decline. So revenue growth, you know, top line is, you know, first goal there. The second point is Reinvention is based on the second pillar, which is cost. And within the cost there, Steve mentioned $700 million of gross cost savings being identified, $300 million already being delivered.
And if you look at the margin this year there, you have seen quarter by quarter our improvement in operating margin. End goal strategy after Reinvention, 10%, double digit. We are guiding this year at 5%. And if you look at the prior year, we've been on this journey of improving step by step, sequentially, quarter by quarter, you know, the operating margin improvement. So that will be a three-year journey. We should not forget this. This is not managed quarter by quarter.
Right.
On this three-year journey, the 10% goal operating margin, this is what we are reaching.
How much of the margin improvement, in addition to reinvention, is tied to the new strategy from bundling or adding capabilities or driving wallet share from IT services? Like, could you have gotten to the margin targets over a multi-year period without this? Or is that critical to stem the revenue declines to actually grow top line and drive margin?
We need both.
Need both.
That means they won't work in isolation because in isolation, it will be closer to what we did before only program. There was a cost play. I say, "Let's get this business leaner and let's get it more efficient." We need both, and we need, you know, the revenue growth in order to sustain the margin improvement on a lower cost base. What does that mean? It means the efficiency of what is coming every revenue, you know, additional incremental revenue which is coming there is driving an incremental profitability here. So we need both there. But the cost play, it's an important one. That's the reason why we are targeting these $700 million. Behind this as well is, to complete the overall picture from a financial point of view, on the Reinvention strategy is also the leveraging, okay, from the debt point of view.
And we said it publicly, we have a target after reinvention of a three-time EBITDA leverage, gross EBITDA, where today we are higher. We just did ITsavvy here. But over time, we'll be in a much deleveraged strategy by having in, you know, behind us the acquisition we just did, paying down the debt, you know, that we have. But at the same time, I always remind this there, what we call the forward flow, we have this refinancing or this financing of the leasing business here that help us to deleverage significantly the company there.
I'll come back to leverage in a second, but so you mentioned for each incremental revenue dollar under the strategy, it comes in at a higher margin.
Yep.
Have you shared with your investors how that works? So we're taking margins from mid-single digits to double digits through revenue growth, through the you know, the incremental addition of, you know, the IT services acquisition. So by definition, that on a lower cost base, that would imply that these, you know, these new revenue streams have much better margin. Is that the right thing?
Yeah. So what we share, so, from a modeling point of view, what we shared with our investor is that there is often, like, an implied assumption that the margin on print, operating margin on print, is higher than IT or digital services, and that there will be a dilution if you have this. This is not correct, and if you really play on the IT services, not IT reselling, IT hardware there, then you can achieve operating margin. I'm not speaking gross margin. The distribution between gross margin and OpEx is different between the two segments there, but when you look at the bottom line, operating margin, you know, the IT services and digital services profitability is incremental. It is really accretive to the overall print business.
So, the way to phrase it, these are value-added IT services.
Yep.
Not run-of-the-mill block-and-tackle, low-margin offerings.
Yep.
That's what you've got. That's what I wanted to double-check. So, okay. So we'll come back to cash flow in a second. So we just did a deal. Obviously, you wanna get more mix shift towards faster-going IT services. Touched on it briefly earlier. If we don't do any future M&A over the next three years, I would imagine your targets for under Reinvention and this mix are achievable, right? We, you don't need to do anything or get.
Yep.
Inorganic, inorganically, excuse me, hit those numbers. Is that?
We've gotta grow the IT services.
For you.
Digital services. We get to that.
Organically.
Yep.
You don't need an inorganic transaction to get you there.
Correct.
Got it. 'Cause I know we talked to some people on the capital structure side, on the debt side, that are focused on where your cash flow is going, refinancing, etc.
Yep.
Okay. Got it.
There's two levels to this, right? It's driving efficiencies and costs as fast as we can and then changing the revenue mix, right? So as we look at this as a three-year program, and then we'll adjust accordingly, right? When we talk about the $700 million of identified opportunities, it is not all a perfectly linear, "This is what we're gonna do." It's a bucket of opportunities, some will overachieve, some will underachieve, right? So if I have my IT services that's growing at 10%-15%, that's a lot different than if I'm growing mid-single digits, right? And so we'll adjust accordingly.
Okay. Got it. We touched on it on the side here. I wanna get your perspective. Tariffs, economic conditions. I know you're dealing with a lot of company-specific and industry-specific issues.
Yes.
Do you have any thoughts on how, you know, maybe Trump 1.0 versus Trump 2.0 plays out? You know, supply chains are very tricky.
Yeah.
We were talking about this earlier, very ingrained in Southeast Asia. How should we think about it, and I know it's very early days. How are you thinking about it in relation to your strategy?
Look, I think there's a couple of things. First of all, you can't react to what is not fact yet. A lot of noise, a lot of speculation. When it becomes a policy or when it becomes something, we will adjust accordingly, just like we've all done through the years with supply chains and everything else that's going on. The beauty about what Xerox has done, and by the way, the industry has done, is we've reacted extremely well to these geopolitical changes. Remember, Russia, Ukraine, what's happening in the Middle East with Gaza. I've adjusted to all of those things over the years. The global pandemic, right? So tariffs to us is no different. We will react to when there is an announcement, when we see it. Is it on components? Is it on finished goods? Where is it? When that comes out, we'll adjust accordingly.
Do all of your products that are manufactured, assembled in Asia, is the bill of lading effectively in the U.S.? Does it come through a U.S. port, or do you ship directly not locally, but to other regions out of that market?
A couple of important things. First of all, remember, I got a big European business that has nothing to do with tariffs, right?
Right.
So yeah.
Like, what percentage of?
45%? Yep, roughly.
45%?
So 40%- 45% in Europe, right? So the tariffs will have zero impact on, okay? We have two very large OEM providers, Fuji and Lexmark.
Yep.
Right? Fuji, Vietnam, Lexmark, Mexico, and there's a variety of other different factors, okay? So it depends on where the tariffs originate from, how they come. Is it on components? Is it on finished goods? Is it on origin of where the product is shipped? We'll wait to see all that, and we'll adjust it as it goes forward, all right? But 45% of my business will have zero impact at all just because we sell into Europe and Middle East.
Right.
The other 45%.
That's a misunderstanding for a lot of companies. Like, it's only U.S.-centric goods.
That's right.
Effectively that are gonna be subject, well, hopefully.
Yeah.
To these tariffs, right? There's no global.
But again, we'll all see, right? And so all of us are sitting there waiting for what exactly do the tariffs look like? Remember, we had Trump tariffs back when he was in office, and we've adjusted to it, right? And we'll figure it out.
So along those lines.
Steve, the other point if I may as well, Jerome. If you compare versus our competitor, have also an Asian supply chain there, and if you compare because at the end of the day, the overall market could be impacted by this there. We are not worse or badly positioned versus our competitor. I would say we have a little bit of an advantage being an OEM and being less dependent on certain suppliers there, so at the end of the day, what will happen will happen, but this overall industry could be impacted. We do not believe it will be more impacted than competition.
So, maybe sticking on federal government changes. So, we've heard from a ton of companies over the last couple of months that federal spending has been somewhat challenging in IT.
Mm-hmm.
It's also caused, I think, some consternation and maybe spending in other verticals. How do you think about 2025? I know you're working through your own strategic plan, but if there is a sort of unified game plan from Congress and the president and all houses kind of pro-business, move things forward, have you thought about what that might mean for your business? Does the mid-market let's start at the mid-market. Does the mid-market exhibit more confidence quickly? Like, how is that reaction? How's that feedback loop, and how would that, you know, maybe affect your business?
So, I think you got a different couple of components. For the Fed business, it's not a huge percentage of our overall business. So what happens inside the Fed space, we will react to. We think that the ability to be able to have more advanced technology, digital services, transformation is a big opportunity for us, right? You think about how much of the government business today is in physical paper. How do you transform that? How do you help them with the digital roadmap? You got your paper here, right? And so we think we got a role to play, and we're excited about helping those agencies, whatever it is. We got large relationships with many of the federal government agencies. In the mid-market space, we also are excited about the opportunity from a couple of perspectives. You think about what's happening with capital being increased.
You think of what's happening with shortage of labor. You think of what's happening with potentially the cost of goods going up. What do CIOs have to do? Drive more productivity, efficiencies, right? That's what Xerox has been doing in the office space for years, right? And so we relish the opportunity of helping our clients in dealing with those things. Remember, subscription services we invented back in the '60s, right? So we talk about all these SaaS-based models. We did that back in the '60s. We now can take those same services and provide it to the mid-market, whether it's network as a service, security as a service, whatever it may be. So we think with the right relationships, with the right solutions, we can actually help our mid-market clients to be able to navigate the challenging world.
How quickly do they?
That we're gonna deal with?
I mean, if, let's say, tax cuts are extended.
Yep.
How quickly do they react in terms of exhibiting confidence in the health of their end markets and the economy?
I think every industry.
And how?
Every industry's different, right?
Right.
I think every industry's different. It really is. I mean, regardless of what happens with tax, there are certain industries that are just challenged. Take a look at the healthcare industry today, right? You take a look at what's happening in hospitals and infrastructure. Education today. The education is being challenged today with the cost pressures and what's going on. So I think the tax will help, right? 'Cause they're not having tax up. I think the investment in R&D will help, but I also think we need to help our industries and be able to drive more productivity.
Anything that we didn't cover that, you know, came up in meetings? I wanna give you an opportunity to kinda maybe, you know, educate, inform investors, you know, post the third, post Q3.
Yeah. I, I wanna keep reminding everybody, look, the Reinvention is not a straight path to success. It's a three-year program. Quarter- over- quarter, we're gonna have bumps. We're gonna have upsides. We're gonna have downsides. But at the end of the day, we are heading in the right trajectory direction, right? Look under the covers of not just what's happened in the quarter, but what happened to the other KPIs that are driving the overall program that we're doing. We said we're gonna invest in growth services, IT services. We said we're gonna streamline our business. You can see what happened quarter- over- quarter, year- over- year. $200 million of costs coming out in terms of Q3 versus Q3 last year, right? So the fundamentals of what we're doing, we're gonna have bumps. No question about it. We'll react to those bumps.
We'll fix it, and we'll get back on the right path. But our end goal of Reinvention has not changed, and we're on the right trajectory to get there.
Got it. So my final question for you is, if we're sitting here a year from now, what, what do you expect the message to be? Obviously, it's gonna be bumpy. It's not gonna be linear. We'll be another year into reinvention.
Yeah.
Where does the capital structure sit? How do we think about what we're planning for the next?
Yeah. So a couple of things. IT service and digital services growth for us, right? It'll be important in 2025, right? You're gonna see the stabilization of our core and our print business, right? Can we get back to the 2%-3% decline versus what you saw today? You know, if you take all the decisions that we made to purposely lower some of our revenue, like getting out of paper business, some of the geographies, roughly we were a point or two behind where the industry was. We've gotta get back to getting flat to the industry, growing our IT services business. So when I sit here, I'm talking through a flat company, and we're talking about the balance of that $700 million now becoming more solidified, cost growing, and we're moving down that path. We're also looking at deleveraging, right?
How do we take a look at our balance sheet and deleveraging and getting back to that, that goal of 3% as we talk about going forward? So those will be the proof points next year.
All right, so I think with that, I think we're out of time. Steve, Xavier, thank you for your time. Thank you for everyone for joining, and thanks again for coming.
Thank you very much, David.
I appreciate it.