Motorola Solutions, Inc. (MSI) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. As we're getting settled in, I'll just start with the introductions here. Thanks, everybody, for joining. My name is Adam Tindle, and this is part of my connected devices coverage here at Raymond James. Thrilled to have the team from Motorola Solutions. They've been a long-time participant in the conference. And this year, we have the special privilege of having Greg Brown, Chairman and CEO. In terms of our format, just going to do a casual fireside chat. I would love to keep it interactive. If you do have questions, please feel free to raise your hand. I structured this fireside chat to give you a little bit better view of Greg's philosophy around capital allocation and the company's philosophy around capital allocation in particular. So we'll go through some historical examples because I think it's really important just to understand sort of the overall psyche that goes into making Motorola what it is today. For those of you not as familiar with the metrics on the company, Vicki and Brian have done a great job of just giving you a summary slide of how the business breaks out that you can see up here. And of course, if you need models or anything like that, I'm happy to provide those. So with that, Greg, thanks again for joining.

Sure. Thanks for having me.

Would love to start at a high level with your philosophy to value creation. And I asked you this question a couple of years ago. I just love it. I talk about an old quote that's attributed to you that says something like, ''I wake up in the morning, and I think about 2 things, my people and the allocation of capital." So I'd love to start with your high-level thesis or guiding principles on value creation.

Yes. I mean it sounds like CEO hyperbole, but it's not. Because capital allocation is my job as CEO, and that's a nice way of saying strategy and where we're going to spend money. What are the budgets, how much are we putting in R&D, what goes in sales and marketing, what should the dividend yield be? When should we or shouldn't we be buying back shares? When should we be acquiring a company? And I think we've gotten quite good over capital allocation, in particular, acquisitions over the last decade plus. And I focus on people because I can be the best speaker in the world. I can have power points that bring a tear to your eye. It doesn't matter, but it's all about the executive team in the firm. And do we have role clarity, can we execute? Do we have incentives that drive shareholder return? And I think that you talk about psyche and philosophical emphasis. It is very clear to me and the team that we're here for total shareholder return. There's a lot of other benefits in commensurate that a CEO and an executive team does running a public company, but it's about total shareholder return, and you got to grow the top line, but that's not enough. You got to expand operating margins, you got to grow cash flow. You have to have a competitive moat that allows some earnings and cash flow predictability and you continually have to innovate. So we have 80 vice presidents. We have about 23,000 people, 80 VPs. I probably stay in touch with, I don't know, the top 150 people. They all have my cell phone. We text, we call, I ask a lot of questions. I do many skip levels. I want to know because the biggest risk for a person in my job is not having the best information, the most current information and a lot of people want to tell me good things, right? Greg, I'm doing well. I'm going to make my forecast, I want to know what we're not doing well. And I have to create an environment that's disarming and transparent that I know the real deal about what's going on in the pulse of the company. So that's how we run the firm.

Love it. And when I'm talking to investors about Motorola, there's some misconceptions. A lot of people think about Motorola handheld phones that they may have known from many years ago. But Motorola Solutions or MSI was formed as a unique decision to actually shrink the company. We often come across the ''Empire Builder Syndrome'' or a leadership philosophy that would be resistant to shrink a company often to the detriment of shareholders. So maybe just take us through that initial decision and rationale? And how does that influence your decisions looking forward?

Yes. And my entire focus is about value creation, not size. When I first came into the firm in January of '23, I was running the ''public safety division.'' They've had an acronym called CGISS, not a marketing phrase: Commercial Government Industrial Solutions Sector. And I remember telling Chris Galvin, who hired me in a nice way, I said -- and remember, Motorola used to be a conglomerate. In addition to the cell phone, we had automotive electronics, we had semiconductor, which ultimately became a spin-off with Freescale. We had set-top boxes. And remember telling the board 9 months and they said, what do you think? You're the new person. And I was the only senior executive ''hired from the outside.'' And I said, I think there's one really good business in Motorola, one, and it's the public safety business, a business most people don't know about other than our end-user customers. It doesn't get capital oxygen or retention because it was a sliver of the conglomerate and the identity of Motorola was the cellphone because Motorola invented the cellphone in 1973, commercialized it in 1983. And over time, in addition to the brand identity, it became the largest revenue division of the firm. So there was the cell phone and then nothing else. I remember saying also that my view was we should get out of the cell phone business. This is pre-Android, pre-iPhone. I said, if you look at what Motorola has done well historically, it's a great company that innovates, but it fails to sustainably compete and going through the commercialization stage. We invented the car radio. We invented the portable TV. And in many instances, they were consumer innovations that got eviscerated by the Japanese, Taiwanese and Koreans on scale and margin. And I said the same thing is happening to us in cell phone at the time, LG, Samsung, we will lose. We're going to lose on scale. And the dirty little secret of the cellphone business was it had multiple chipsets, multiple software stacks. Again, pre-iPhone pre-Android, and I said this is a crisis waiting to happen. So then the iPhone gets introduced a year before I get the baton to run the company. Android came later, one of the best decisions I think we've ever made is to get out of that business. As you all know, 90% of the margin profit pool accrues to Apple. And the thing I knew Motorola wasn't, it's not a software company. It was a consumer electronics company, and I said the only difference is public safety. So I said we're going to get smaller to get more valuable, and it's about doing less to do more, focus, focus, focus, and the public safety business which we doubled down and tripled down on has served as the core engine to provide handsome total shareholder returns for the last -- since we split the company. Total shareholder return as of Friday, when we broke up the company and Motorola Solutions was RemainCo. We spun off the cell phone business. It got acquired by Google. They were going to be the vertically integrated. I'll do hardware and Android and compete with Apple's hardware and iOS. They didn't want to do that. They then sold the company to Lenovo. But PSR since January 1 of '11 is over 1,560%. I track it every week. It's ultimately our scorecard. And having said all that, no one cares about what was done. It's all about future value creation, which is my focus.

I'm going to ask one more historical, and then we'll get into current company. Just because it's -- I find it so interesting, your experience over the years. And along the way, you've worked with some high-profile investors, whether it's Carl Icahn, Silver Lake, et cetera. We often find CEOs that become threatened by key investors like this that can be a little bit more agitating. You embrace them. So maybe just speak to some of your key learnings from those investor interactions over the years and how that's helped to shape your thesis around value creation.

So I was saying to Vicki and Brian this morning, this is my 19th year as CEO. In every single year, we and I have had either an activist not just invested on the Board or a private equity firm not only invested but on the Board, 19 out of 19 years. Icahn actually was a choice. He kind of forced my predecessor out. I asked the Board to settle. I wanted him inside and not agitating because at the time, even though Carl would admit he's not an operator, he may not admit it, but a lot of his arguments were right. We were wasting capital on the cellphone business. We had excess cash. And I said, I don't want to fight Carl Icahn. I want him inside the tent, if you heard me say [ fishing out instead of outside fishing in ]. We signed a standstill agreement. He came in. I will tell you, Adam, I am a better CEO because of ICON, because of ValueAct. Silver Lake was on the Board 11 years, and they have 2 co-CEOs, Egon Durban and Mondre. They both were on the Board. And people said, you did a $1 billion pipe with Silver Lake. And you get them 2 Board seats. Why did you do that? And I said, because I couldn't give them 3. They helped in Board governance. They helped this pristine focus on TSR, alignment and clarity. And I like -- look, my view is we should have as many smart people challenging me, not just inside the company on management, but in the Board. And if I or we can't answer the questions, defend a point of view, not be threatened check your ego out the door and it's a meritocracy of ideas to drive value, then I don't think we should be and I should be in the job. So initially, was I concerned about it? Sure. And ICON was very intimidating. But over time, and I have friends with him to this day, I called them last Monday on his 90th birthday. He didn't pick up, that's okay. But it's definitely been -- it's gone from situational to where it's intentional on my part. I like an active set of smart people challenging me to drive value.

So fast forwarding to today, one of the key decisions, I guess it's been 5 years now kind of crazy to think about that, but investing heavily in capabilities around video, and you see on the screen how big that's become in terms of a part of the overall mix. And more recently, you made a significant investment to enter mission-critical mobile ad hoc networks. That's a mouthful. We'll get into specifics around that. So I want to kind of ask questions on both of these, but we'll start with video and kind of go in time order. I remember, it's obviously been a home run in hindsight. But at the time, there was a lot of doubts around the Avigilon acquisition was kind of the starting point to get into that. Just take us through the process at the time to make that move. How did you weigh the various strategic options? And why was video the right adjacency to pursue?

So higher level, right, think of us as a public safety and national security company, more recently with Silvus. But before Silvus, think of us as all things public safety. And when you're doing that, you want to combine incident management with situational awareness to maximize a first responder or dispatcher's view of a situation. We lead in mission-critical networks called land mobile radio, and we provide significant numbers of public safety networks in North America and international. Let me also stop and give you a very important distinguishing factor. So these "public safety networks. So they're private. When you subscribe to AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, they're public cellular networks. They're run by the operator. Your connectivity, your coverage, your connection, your throughput is dependent upon where you are and what their capital investment is. These networks, thousands of them, we sell are owned by the customer. They're private. They're not public. They're specialized. They're reliable. They're always on. They're designed for different coverage and capacity. They're fully encrypted. So these plethora of individual literally thousands of networks, you then build the infrastructure, monetize the services, provide applications and you do "device refresh. You change out your smartphone on average every 2 or 3 years, maybe it's 3 years. In the public safety market in the United States, a first responder changes out his or her radio every 7 or 8 years. So the other thing, and this goes back to ideology. We are not interested in being a commodity business. That's why we're out of the phone business. We're out of the end device business. We view things around a system orientation. And in land mobile radio for public safety networks, you sell the infrastructure, and you upgrade it, monetize services, provide later -- more current software releases and charge for them. You upgrade the devices and refresh those with spectrum efficiency and more capacity and you sell software. But it's an end-to-end system. In video, we bought Avigilon, not because it was cameras, but because it was an end-to-end system orientation. Edge devices infrastructure, software analytics. So we would go in and sell an end-to-end video security system to end-user customers. The other thing I liked about Avigilon was it was sound technology. They had a culture that was compatible with ours. I thought it could be easy to acquire. Integration risk was low because we left them alone. We don't do video. So I said we're not going to buy this asset and smother it under mother Motorola. We'll do economies of scale for procurement. We'll do supply chain efficiencies. We'll do some back office IT but get out of their way on innovation because they know something we don't know. We know RF, we know radio, they know video. So that clear role clarity and bifurcation of responsibility served us well. And I like it because it brings in video from a situational awareness standpoint into the purview of incident management around our installed base of land mobile radio network. The other thing I liked about Avigilon is when we bought it, I think it was 95% plus enterprise revenue. So I said, why can't we take this asset and put it over our existing sales motion and sales force in state and local government and public safety. And the last figure, this is a dated figure. When we bought Avigilon, they were $400-and-some million of total revenue. They're now over $1 billion, and we're over $400 million a year just in government, which was effectively 0 when we bought them. So I always think about what do we bring to the table that's differentiating in the competitive landscape. We bring our balance sheet. We can talk about that. We bring an incredibly impressive installed base with relationships that are created and customized by each municipality county, state jurisdiction, and we bring networks. We bring mission-critical networks. And we are the leader in mission-critical networks. So when we capitalize that on incumbent position, build products and services that are adjacent, but relying on those core mission-critical networks, and we have the balance sheet to grow organically or inorganically, we can create a lot of value.

So that's going to dovetail into my follow-up. And I'm going to ask this one and then pause for questions. So if you do have a question, start getting that ready now. So we talked about video and kind of your philosophy on going into video, how there was questions around that at first. Feels very similar to, I'd say, the past year, if you're looking at your chart of MSI and you look at kind of middle of last year, they announced an intent to acquire a company called Silvus which got them into a new market, and there was a lot of investor questions and still our investor questions around that. Significant acquisition, largest in company history, $5 billion.

$4.4 billion in cash. The earnout brings it to $5 billion. I hope to pay the earn-out. Love to pay the earnout.

So maybe you can compare and contrast the video entry to Silvus, the decision to enter a newer, less penetrated technological market and unmanned systems with a different customer base of defense seems kind of similar to what we're just talking about with Avigilon, but love for you to talk about that.

Yes. So we spent well over a year looking at Silvus, thorough due diligence. We went pens down I think, 3 different times. You're right. It's the biggest decision I've made on $4.4 billion in cash. By the way, even after buying that asset and closing on it last August, and taking out some short-term debt and commercial paper. We exited last year at net debt-to-EBITDA levered about -- a little over about $2.1 billion. Extrapolating going forward, it is very possible we could be underneath $2 billion from a leverage standpoint -- sorry, 2x levered -- less than 2x. Last year, we generated cash flow of $2.8 billion. And if you -- we're a CapEx-light model, I like this. So I know now it's like the magnificent 7, the hyperscalers, the Magnificent 7s going to spend $600 billion in CapEx, and this is fantastic. Maybe it is. But that's not the business we're in. We are -- our capital allocation framework, I'll get to Silvus, 60-30-10. 60% of operating cash flow is either share repo or acquisition. 30% is the dividend, 10% is CapEx. On Silvus -- so what makes Motorola special? Market leadership in mission-critical networks, market leadership in command center and a very competitive position in video security and access control, which is very fragmented. So we lead in 2 of the 3 technologies. In mission-critical networks, we have an RF or radio frequency culture, engineering orientation. We know how to curate customized build thousands of reliable networks. But they're mission-critical voice networks. They're mission-critical narrowband networks for voice for these public safety organizations. What I loved about Silvus is it's a market leader in mission-critical broadband, mobile ad hoc network technologies. What does that mean? It means that great applications like battlefield communications. So this is used extensively in Ukraine at the tip of the spear and then battle-tested, no pun intended for the efficacy, latency, throughput, 550-plus node coverage. So it is -- it's basically an infrastructure for unmanned, but it's infrastructure less. There's no towers or anything or fixed infrastructure. You buy these radios and you drop them into coverage and you instantly get a high-speed mobile ad hoc network. You can deploy it for wildfires. You can deploy it for a Super Bowl when multiple agencies and hundreds of thousands of people congest in an area. So it's best-in-class at the time, about 350 people out of L.A., spent a lot of time with their engineering group, wildly impressed. And when we bought them, Adam, I said whenever in August, we think they'll do about $475 million of annualized revenue. This is last year, with EBITDA of about 45% EBITDA. We -- every time we reported, we raised that forecast to now in 2026, we expect them to do about $675 million, growing very healthy, 20% plus historically and 45% EBITDA with the investment in R&D, with the investment in go-to-market sales force, Silvus was doing great with, I would argue, a fairly relatively skeletal sales force. So why does it make sense? Because it widens the aperture of our mission-critical network leadership, narrowband voice, mission-critical public safety, mission-critical broadband throughput in mobile ad hoc networking. We're entering new defense. I call it new defense because I distinguish it between the defense primes like Lockheed, General Dynamic, Northrop. This is different. Anduril is a partner. We sell to Anduril. We sell to AeroVironment. So this is the market leader platform that's driving sophisticated high-scale, high throughput, large coverage unmanned systems. You see -- unfortunately, you see in the last few days, another example of how important that is, but I think we're well positioned. So we bought a market leader. I think it can use the sales force of Motorola in NATO countries. It can use the sales force in D.C. for U.S. federal. It can use our balance sheet and capital to do other things. So I couldn't -- I'm as excited forget as excited. I'm more convicted today on whatever day is March 2, 3, than I was on the day we closed in August and the performance of that asset has been superb.

And I know you're headed to D.C. later this week.

I am. Thursday and Friday.

Good luck. Any questions so far for Greg?

Yes. Maybe -- so there has been [ deal ] from Ukraine and the [indiscernible]. Can you give us a sense of what will be the impact of [indiscernible].

So Ukraine has been a significant contributor to the growth of Silvus. In Q4, I mentioned Silvus overperformed as well, largely led by Ukraine, U.K. and Germany. And it provides pretty significant density of revenue in 2026 as well. Whether or not there's a ceasefire or a pause, our view and my view is you're going to need still this technology maybe there's a demilitarized zone, who's going to protect that demilitarized zone? You're still going to need the efficacy of border control. Who's going to survey that and defend against penetration on border? So I believe even in a different war environment, there'll be significant demand from Silvus ongoing. And even if Ukraine's contribution decrements slightly, even though there's other use cases to be used, we're seeing engagement in the U.K., Germany and NATO countries that's ascending. So I think as we broaden the revenue contribution over a wider mix of theaters, I still think we'll be able to sustainably grow. Thanks for the question.

So I actually work my first job out of college was for one of your competitors. One of your only competitors.....

Shame on you.

[indiscernible].

I am kidding. I am joking.

[indiscernible] , at that time, I were hearing a voice chip segment. If you ask a most value isn't there [indiscernible].

100%.

My question is that looks over 10 years ago, how has that changed with new technology....

It hasn't. It hasn't. And it's -- I'm glad you brought that up. I see a lot of customers and the radio is as critical to them today as it was. Most police officers will go a whole tenure. They'll never fire their gun. They use the radio dozens and dozens and dozens of time a ship. It is their lifeline. So it's critical. We know how critical it is. And in addition to always continuing to refresh the technology, expanding and building out a highly differentiated patent portfolio, we complement the technology with resources because, look, when you put these systems in or CAD, they're complex, something is going to go wrong. Motorola Solutions fixes it. and we take accountability. And we don't nickel and dime customers and change order them to death. You gave us a commitment, we gave you our commitment and we'll fulfill it. So I'm just proud of the superiority of the technology and criticality of it as I am the people and the resources that surround it. By the way, so we're also now selling public safety AI bundles, public safety assist suite around the first responder and a public safety assist suite around the dispatcher, which, by the way, the dispatcher is new in the industry. And I am amused by when I hear other people bundling products in an AI suite, they argue that it's the criticality and the nucleus of that is the TASER. Well, ask first responders, how often they use their TASER. It's highly infrequent. And so why would you build a bundle around a product that has low utilization instead of building it around a mission-critical product has high utilization. Also as it relates to AI, I'll be quick. We have multi-source ingestion of AI. So the difference between us and our competitor in body-worn camera. Their body-worn camera relies on an LTE network. That's fine. 5G. For those of you that have Verizon 1.5 months ago, how is that working out for you? The difference is our SVX device is not only ingesting multiple sources, 911 information. We're in almost 2/3 of the public safety answering points in the country. It's taking CAD information. It's taking radio audio which is not captured by the other guys, radio audio, all of the back-and-forth conversations on this fundamentally different. So what we're doing is taking that criticality of that radio and that network, which is as important today as when you were in the industry 10 years ago and building products and services that rely on that mission-critical always-on encrypted secure P25 public safety audio to differentiate ourselves from other offerings. So I'm glad you asked.

We're going to do a breakout in Cordova 3. We have time for you to bring us home, Greg. So if you do have more questions for Greg, please come down to Cordova 3, and we'll discuss further. But what's the final message you'd like to leave with investors as they think about Motorola today and in the future?

I think it's -- while we're proud of our record track record on TSR and capital allocation, you should know that we are focused about value to be created, not belts on the wallet in the case even last week or last month. Our team is focused on driving TSR. And by the way, if your stock goes up from X to Y, so what are you outperforming the peer group, are you outperforming the S&P? Are you expanding operating margins? Revenue growth is 15% or 5%. Well, tell me what the yield is on that. Tell me the operating margin expansion, the cash flow generation and then what you're doing with the capital. So I would just tell you that we remain maniacally focused on the value to be created, and we are not complacent or satisfied or taking a victory lap of what was. We're focused on what needs to be. And I appreciate that.

Let's leave it there. Thanks, Greg.

Thanks, Adam.