Fortive Corporation (FTV) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Great. Thanks, everyone, for being here. It's my pleasure to have up next Fortive Corporation. We have Olumide Soroye, President and Chief Executive; Mark Okerstrom, CFO. And obviously, this is the first time you're here sort of post the Ralliant separation. So thanks very much for attending.

Maybe, I guess, first question would be organic sales growth, there's been a lot of questions around any industrial upturn happening. You're obviously a more stable business than a lot of the other companies here. So just sort of set out how you feel about the demand environment right now starting 2026?

Great. Well, thanks for having us. It's always great to be here. So we feel really good about how we exited 2025. Q4 went beyond our expectations from a core growth point of view across both of our segments and every piece of our 2 segments contributed to the performance. So generally felt good about the exit conditions from 2025. And as we've said in our earnings call just less than 2 weeks ago, January played out really solidly and consistent with our expectations, and the way we have the year set up. I think we've all seen from a short cycle point of view, the PMI data from ISM, but I'm always cautious to call a trend out of January data, especially because there's so much noise in it. But everything we've seen looks promising and consistent with our setup for the year.

And the Q4 growth was, yes, better than I think everyone expected. Any kind of one-timers or pull forward helping that? Or is it pretty kind of normal underlying performance?

We saw strong performance across both segments and every single engine of both segments contributed to that performance. So we like that broad-based strength that we saw. So I wouldn't call out any onetime thing in Q4. As we look at 2026, we're presuming that the conditions we saw in '25, which were pretty noisy from a tariff impact point of view, health care funding point of view, government spending point of view. So we're not assuming that gets dramatically better in '26. But we like the setup that we're left in '25.

Perfect. And the IOS segment, particularly Fluke and some other pieces, that's where you have some of that shorter cycle industrial exposed activity. How has that trended the last several months? Have you seen that PMI and kind of animal spirits improvement in any of the bottom-up numbers? Or it's too early to tell?

Well, we see strength across the short-cycle business we have. And even if you look at that platform, North America from a regional point of view, continues to be our strongest region. And increasingly, we can see traces of tailwind from data center spending, distributed energy spending contributing to that. But it's more broad-based than any couple of end markets. And we like that breadth of the strength that we see. And for EMEA, we saw sequential improvement in Q4. Too early to call a trend from that, but we like seeing some improvement from an EMEA point of view. And APAC was very steady. So we like the setup from a macro point of view. Our bigger focus really is on our Fortive Accelerated strategy and our teams executing that to outperform the markets.

Great. And I think for Fluke, it's been a gem inside Fortive for some time, Danaher prior to that. Do you think it's possible to kind of keep taking market share in that business? Is there any kind of natural ceiling to that, that you worry about when thinking about the long-term growth of Fluke?

Yes. No, we don't see a ceiling at all. Fluke is just a terrific business. It has this incredible brand strength that's very global and very respected. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a stronger brand in professional instrumentation. And that's built on deep customer loyalty, premium product offering and quality set that's proven. The reason, though, that I think the ceiling keeps getting higher for us in Fluke is our team's execution on those same 3 growth accelerators that we talked about at Fortive. So if you think about the innovation pace at Fluke, it's never been faster than what we have right now. We talked about our CertiFiber Max product that we launched in Q4 in that data center, high-density fiber certification. That's just one example of many things Fluke is doing to solve new problems that weren't solved in the world before in really important markets. And I think as long as that pace of innovation continues, we're serving new needs and expanding the market. Second one is from a commercial point of view. As successful as we are with Fluke, there's still many geographic and end market pockets where we literally just could do with more sales and marketing capacity. And as we plant those seeds, we're seeing the results. We talked about India, for example, where we've seen double-digit growth just from pretty modest investment at Fluke and a couple of our other brands, on just sales capacity and some more local presence. And then from a recurring revenue point of view, another great story at Fluke. And now we have 15% of Fluke that's recurring, and that's subscription services that customers are buying on top of the higher-priced professional instruments to make sure they have the care plan over the life cycle. And that piece of Fluke continues to grow double digits. So I think as we drive innovation, drive those surgical commercial investments and keep driving recurring value for customers, it's just that the sky is very much the limit.

One of the softer areas, I think, last year for Fortive overall was, sort of, in many companies as government-related activity, obviously, leave aside defense on that front. How have you seen that playing out more recently? Do you think you get much of a rebound this year? Or you're not really factoring that in?

Yes. So government-oriented business for Fortive overall in 2025 was just about 8% of our total Fortive revenue. So it's fairly contained. And most of that is really state and local government businesses in our Gordian business, a little bit of government business in Fluke and our AHS segment as well, but mostly in Gordian. And the way I describe this is it's essentially stable. So after a period post-COVID of really strong spending in that sector, the fiscal constraints on the state and local agencies over the last 24 months has been pretty strong. But it's really stabilized as we exit 2025, and our team has just gotten really good at making sure that when that $1 trillion of deferred maintenance spend comes on board, we are able to capture those opportunities. So for '26, we're not assuming any dramatic improvement in the conditions around government spending, and we feel good about the setup.

Fantastic. And if we look at FAL within the IOS segment, so the growth there post the acquisitions that were done 6, 7 years ago, it was kind of underwhelming versus those initial deal assumptions. So maybe help us understand how much of that was just the TAM growth was slower than expected, versus kind of market share? Maybe wasn't as high as Fortive had hoped? And kind of what are you doing right now to get FAL's growth higher?

Yes. I mean, so first of all, we really like the FAL platform and the business is in there. It's continued to be a really strong accretive piece from a core growth point of view for iOS and for Fortive overall. It was in 2025 as a whole, it was in Q4. And if you think about the stages we've gone through, post-COVID, we had elements of that business growing double digits. A lot of our business is there. And that was really driven by this period of extra funding powered, extra spending in government agencies. And so that set up a really tough comp coming out of that period. And the last 24 months, really on that state and local government part of FAL has been more subdued spending. So that's really what we saw in 2025. And even then, again, we're still accretive as a platform to Fortive overall and to the IOS segment. I think going forward, we are excited about the impact of what our teams are doing with our Fortive Accelerated strategy in FAL. And it again goes through innovation. So if you think about every one of our brands there, they have the most exciting slate of new solutions that they're launching. We talked about ServiceChannel having 3 major product releases in 2025, including a lot of AI-powered use cases that customers are really loving right now. And second is commercial investment. So for those businesses, we continue to expand both geographically and into new verticals that help us expand the addressable market for the FAL group as a whole. And then recurring customer value, our customer experience and health score continues to get better and NPI continues to get better. So as we drive those 3 vectors, innovation, commercial expansion and recurring customer value. And at some point, we know that this government spending, and especially this $1 trillion of deferred maintenance is going to come back on [indiscernible], and we'll be ready to catch that tailwind. So we feel really good about the evolution [indiscernible] and FAL.

And when you think about how FAL is operated, different brands, there's different acquisitions 6-odd years ago. How is it kind of run today in terms of the centralization within FAL versus those original brands each doing their own sort of approach?

Yes. So for the most part, Julian, we've kept those brands really specialized in terms of what they do and the customer segments that they serve. Whether it's construction planning and procurement, in the case of Gordian, or it is enterprise asset management for Accruent, or facilities management and maintenance repair for ServiceChannel. So each of the brands have unique strengths, mostly unique customer segments. So we let them run and delight their customers. In the cases where it makes sense, and customers benefit from cross-sell across the brands, we do that, but in a very targeted way. And that's really been a good way to keep the customer centricity. With the Fortive Business System, we're able to transfer capabilities across the brands, so enterprise selling, things that we're doing with AI use cases, all the 3 brands are sharing. So that helps us balance this, keep the customer focus for each brand, but leverage synergies operationally where it makes sense.

Got it. And I think everyone is trying to figure out which industrial software businesses are sort of resilient to AI, have a moat, that type of thing. How would you describe, I suppose, the software assets inside Fortive from that perspective? You've got FAL and then you have, of course, some software within AHS as well.

Yes, that's a very popular question right now, I can imagine. And again, I think for me, having been around software for a long time, we've obviously done this analysis about our businesses. And I guess -- just to maybe distill it down, for any question about a software business, you really have to understand the details of what the business is because they're not all created equal. And we've, sort of, arrived at a number of attributes that you can look at. You can look at, does the software business have truly unique proprietary data assets? And everyone talks about data assets, we have to look at do they have it for an entire industry that's really hard to replicate? Do they have it over a long period of time so the longitudinal value is quite powerful? Do they have the usage rights for the data that really makes it a unique asset? So that's one question. The second question is do they have network effects built into the software business. I'll give you an example. We have businesses where beyond the workflow, you have 100,000 participants on one side of the transaction, e.g., maintenance service providers. And on the other side, you have tens of thousands of facility owners. So beyond the software, this is a meeting place where the matching happens between those two counterparties to the transaction. So anyway you have those types of networks integrated into your software solution, that matters for what AI means for it. It also really matters if you have regulatory, legal and compliance hurdles that new solutions have to pass through before they can get used. So if you're trying to get into a hospital environment with a solution like Provation, there's hurdles you got to go through. If you're trying to do a business like job order contracting in Gordian, where you have to be written into the law in multiple state and local jurisdictions across the country, that adds to the time to actually get into the market. And it also matters how deeply embedded you are into the customers' systems and operations. And as we look at our software businesses, and again, keep in mind that most of what we do at Fortive are differentiated hardware products like Fluke and Industrial Scientific and so on. For our software assets, they happen to have really strong scores on those modes that I just described. So think about ServiceChannel like Gordian, these are businesses that have networks. They have deep proprietary data. They have legal and compliance and regulatory hurdles that you have to pass through to partake in those markets. And you think about some of our businesses like Censis, that are really deeply embedded into systems of record and systems of action. What that means is customers have, in some cases, tens of thousands of employees who learn to do their job on the system. So for you to replace that system, you have to retrain all of your people. So we like the stature we have around software businesses. And what we found is customers coming to us saying we want to get value out of AI with real use cases in production. And we are the best partners to work with them on that. That's why you see every single one of our software company road maps has AI use cases. We've launched many of them. And it's been actually part of what's driving the momentum and the growth that we talked about.

Got it. And so when you think about the KPIs there that you look at, I suppose what -- where would be kind of the early warnings right? What are the things you're looking for as managers to say, okay, there's something popping up here that we didn't expect. Does it reflect something of AI starting to intrude? Like what's the sort of, again, early warning signs you might look for evidence?

Yes. No. So first is personally, I spend a lot of time with customers because I think ultimately, before the signs show up, you can hear, you can see it. So that's one. And everything I see right now just suggests our customers are asking for help from us. The second thing is we have customer health scores, and you can tell from that what the sentiment of customers are about your software solution because they are looking at the cost benefit. They're saying, how much value do you create for me? How much am I paying? And if you have that scale off, that's a lead indicator to what's coming. Then we look at adoption, like if customers are really heavily using our solutions, especially the AI use cases that we're launching, then we feel, you know what, we actually are helping them get the most out of AI, so the need for them to go to look at someone else isn't there because they're getting the value they need from us. So we look at that really closely. And then we look at the business metrics, which I always think about as more lagging. So are we -- what's our new logo win rate like? What's our MDR like? What are we find in terms of renewal rates and upsell and cross-sell? So that's the -- those are the sequence of things that we look at, frankly, in that order, I get the kind of intangible from direct customer interaction. We look at customer health scores. We look at what happened in terms of adoption, including AI use cases. And then we look at the more kind of conventional metrics on, is the business growing? Do we have momentum, and we feel good about what we're seeing.

And in terms of kind of the deployment of AI, maybe to help Gordian or Accruent, Provation with their own selling process to customers and win more business. Is that kind of decentralized? Or are you trying to push them from the center to all deploy AI at a similar rate in terms of their proposition to customers? How should we think about that?

Yes. It's a little bit of both. And it's interesting because as you know, Julian, we started our AI journey a long time before it was fashionable. We set up our AI center of excellence actually first time in 2017. And so we've been on this journey of building this capability for a while. And so what that meant is Gen AI and Agentic AI is just an evolution. It hasn't been a big transformation for us in terms of building a capability. And what we've done, to your point, is when we set up New Fortive last year, we took that AI center of excellence and we integrated it with our Fortive Business System office. And what that's meant is not just for our software businesses, but all of our businesses, and even our corporate functions now have access to all these AI capabilities for everything we do. Not just customer operations and how we do sales, and how we do demand gen, and how we manage, kind of, AI powered to have disability in digital marketing now, which is very different than SEO. But also how we do product development and every G&A function and Investor Relations, right? So we've really democratized the AI capabilities using our Fortive Business System as a platform, which has been really terrific. And our FAL businesses have benefited from that across the board.

Great. And then switching maybe to AHS for a minute. I think there's often a view out there that the ASP business within it around sterilization, has it lost share? Was it underinvested in? Kind of where do you think we are on the ASP, kind of, market share and growth entitlement?

Yes. Well, I think what we know for a fact is 2025 was not the best year for us in that business. And we know we're going to do much better than that. Now we also know that 2024 showed what's possible because that if you think about AHS and ASP in 2024, it was a great year from a growth point of view. And the '25 really was distorted from a capital equipment purchase point of view. Because if you look at what happened with software, you look at what happened with consumables and services, it was a solid year. Really, really solid year. It was the capital equipment purchase part of the business that was subdued. And so as we go into '26, first, the team is laser-focused on self-help growth. So the innovation pace has never been better in the history of ASP, and the segment in health overall. The commercial agility that we're showing and investing in the right places with sales capacity and local manufacturing in some international markets, and getting into some new segments like ambulatory surgical centers at more scale, that team has never been more agile at planting seeds commercially. And then the work that we're doing on making sure that the recurring customer value, which has always been a strength, the depth of customer loyalty in ASP is just incredible. And the teams continue to build on top of that with our customer relationships. All of those things, combined with the fact that the capital equipment subdued environment will ease at some point as the hospital systems continue to get less cautious. And now we saw that improvement in Q3 and Q4. Those things combined, we feel set us up really well for getting the segment growing faster. And again, we know what we saw in 2024 and really '25 is a unique story on this capital part of the business.

Have you seen those orders, or customer conversations, or book-to-bill for the equipment side picking up yet? Or you think it will be very gradual through the year?

I think yes to both. So the peak of the, sort of, tightness was in Q2 of 2025. And we literally had the book of business that customers held up and just said we're not going to place the order now. And then in Q3 and Q4, we saw that tightness a little bit. So things got better, some of them started flowing. And we expect that, that will continue gradually over the course of this year. We're not assuming in our setup for the year that things are going to dramatically get better or worse. But we expect there will be a gradual release of that pent-up order book over time, which provides a tailwind.

Great. And then I think the operating margin ambition sort of Fortive in aggregate, it's up in that kind of 50 to 100 bps of expansion annually. So what's the confidence level in that 6 months on from the big spinout of Ralliant? Any surprises on the, sort of, RemainCo cost structure? And any differences in -- between the two segments on margin expansion in title?

Good one for Mark.

Thank you. We feel good about it, Julian. I think we feel good about it from a number of perspectives. I think, first of all, we deeply understand our cost structure, and we've torn it apart. We understand all of the drivers sitting at corporate, sitting in the operating companies. So there's no real surprises. I think secondly, as part of our work to actually really deconstruct the cost structure, we went through and took out not only the stranded costs, but we also went beyond that, and you saw better margin expansion in the second half of of 2025 as well. And importantly, we've used that to be able to fund the organic growth initiatives as part of the Fortive Accelerated strategy. So we feel good about it. And the underlying businesses, if you look at the IOS businesses, Fluke being the largest. If you look at the AHS businesses, not only ASP, but the software businesses, the operating leverage in those businesses is very strong. And so when you put that operating leverage together with our ambition, which is to accelerate growth and to invest, it gives us a lot of control over where we're going to land in that 50 to 100 basis point margin zone. And we can do it from a position of strength where we're investing in growth, and not doing it to kind of offset lack of growth, if you will, and still deliver earnings growth.

And how much is left on the kind of stranded cost takeout? Is there much benefit this year or a lot of it was done...

It's done. So at the time of the spin, shortly after the spin, we got about half of it out. And if you recall, it was about $50 million in total. And then we went after it through the back half of the year and got that and some more.

Great. And lastly, I suppose on kind of capital deployment. There's been a lot of buybacks the last couple of years. When do you start to move towards acquisitions again? How should we expect the first kind of acquisitions of new Fortive? What are kind of the main signposts and gating factors there?

Well, I would say that a key pillar of the Fortive Accelerated strategy is disciplined capital allocation. And the approach that I think we have taken is one of just incredible discipline. And we've got clear priorities. Invest in organic growth. M&A and share repurchase are interchangeable. And then we've got a modest and growing dividend. And what you saw in the back half of 2025, where we bought $1.3 billion of stock, retired about 8% of our share count, give or take, was us viewing that as the best relative returns available. And so I think you're just going to continue to see that going forward. We did do a couple of small tuck-in acquisitions in the fourth quarter. Those happen to be ones that when we did all of our analysis, nicely outperformed, the returns we would get from the share repurchases. And I think you're just going to continue to see more of the same, which is always disciplined, always looking at relative returns, and a clear view on what our true goal is, which is benchmark beating returns over the next 3 to 5 years.

And when you are looking at acquisitions with that software derating, does that make the software acquisition pool kind of more attractive or not necessarily? Like we should expect a mix of hardware and software M&A from here?

Yes. Look, we try to make this really clear every chance we get. So I think where this starts from is at new Fortive, we have a portfolio that we feel highly confident, is going to deliver the financial framework that we laid out. And we believe that's going to create benchmark beating shareholder returns over the next 3 to 5 years. So we don't need to do dramatic transformational M&A, and we're just not interested in that. So that's the starting point, which means the M&A we're doing is really looking for bolt-ons, smaller bolt-ons that could help our existing brands grow faster and more profitably going forward. And I think what that means is the bar is really high. And if you think about the surface area of the company, majority of what we do at this highly differentiated hardware-centric technology products. Fluke, Industrial Scientific, ASP. So if you're looking at bolt-ons to help your existing brands, you're going to do more deals that help the businesses you have. And the software surface area we have is much smaller than the hardware surface area. And to your point, the bar is just really high on software M&A right now. Because not only do you have to make sure it's a great software asset, you have to make sure that strategically, the kind of attributes I talked about that make us like the advantage of our software businesses today in an AI world, that you have that in anything you're buying. So you got to ask that question. And for us, price is part of the strategy for M&A. So you have to make sure you've got a great asset that can withstand the scrutiny of AI, and then you can get at a price point that fits our criteria. So not that we wouldn't look at bolt-on software assets, but it's just the logic leads you down a very narrow path.

That's very clear. And with that, we'll switch to the audience response survey questions, please. So the first one is around sort of current ownership of Fortive. So a lot of room there for oppurtunity. Second one is general sort of appetite or perspective aside from ownership.

More opportunity. It's great.

Neutral. Third, it's around EPS growth profile, and that's really as compared with the sort of multi-industry average. It's about in line with the group. Fourth is around usage of excess cash. We just talked about that a little bit. So a bit of a mishmash, sort of bolt-on M&A, the biggest one. Next question is around valuation. What year 1 PE should Fortive trade at? So I guess you end up about 20x on the whole. And last question is, what's the main kind of anchor on that valuation multiple today? So organic growth would be our concern. Great. Well, with that, thanks so much, Olumide and Mark, for being with us today.

Great to be with you. Thank you.

Thank you.