Regal Rexnord Corporation (RRX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

I'm Kyle Menges. I'm the U.S. machinery analyst at Citi. Pleased to be joined by the team from Regal Rexnord. I've got CEO, Louis Pinkham, who's to my immediate right; and then Rob Rehard, CFO. Thanks for being here with us today, guys, in sunny Miami.

Maybe starting with you, Louis, just with your time at Regal coming to an end, would be great just for you to talk a little bit about the company you inherited and how it's transformed over your tenure and really what excites you about opportunities ahead for Regal?

Yes. So thanks, Kyle, for the question. First of all, appreciate the invite from Citi and thanks for hosting us. And thanks to our investors who are here and listening for your interest. Yes, it's been a fantastic 7-year journey. The business has completely transformed. I'm pretty proud of things like our gross margins were 26% when I started, they're 38% today and a path to 40%. We sold some commodity product when I started. Today, we're a technology-driven competitive moat business that's moving from just being a component supplier to a solutions provider. I'm thrilled with our free cash flow margins and the potential for improving that over time. But what I'm most proud of is how we run the business and the team that supports the business. When I started, the business was highly centralized. We now are fully decentralized. We run the business with 20 division leadership teams that focus on strategy, outgrowing markets by 50%, driving technology and product road maps and building a strong team for our future. So think about having 20 of them that report into 3 segments. And today, Rob and I spend most of our time orchestrating that activity. And the leaders of our organization are incredibly strong. And that's what I feel like if I could be humble enough to say, that is part of the legacy that I'll be leaving.

And maybe talk a little bit about just -- I think when you came in as CEO, you really doubled down on 80/20. Maybe talk about that journey and where we're at today versus where we were at 7 years ago.

Yes. And I think it's a really important point for how we've transformed the company. And you -- again, you see it in your gross margins. When I started at Regal, there was a belief that every customer and every product were important. But that just doesn't really make sense. So we went on a journey and a journey of driving 80/20 in the thought process around your quads, in particular, your Quad 1 and your highly valued customers and your A product and how do you grow with them. All of our focus and investment is in Quad 1. And so it's been a journey. The nice part about the Rexnord merger was they also were on that journey, and so there was a really strong fit there. And then we brought that to Altra, and I'd tell you, we're sixth, seventh innings of driving 80/20, and it's absolutely ingrained in the culture and who we are.

And would love to hear, too, just maybe from both of you, your report card on the acquisitions that you've done, the Rexnord mergers as well as Altra and success you've had on the revenue and the cost synergy front?

Yes. I mean -- I'll start and Rob can add on. The industrial logic was spot on. When you think about where we've taken the businesses and certainly, 80/20 has been a driver, but the portfolio that we've got and from Rexnord now we're the scale and scope player in power transmission with Altra and moving into automation and motion control. I give us very high ranks. If you think about it from just the numbers, $325 million of synergies came out of those 2 acquisitions. A path to what we said in '27 would be -- sorry, in '28 would be $250 million incremental cross-sell. And yet in '25, we were at $210, and so lots of momentum. And then moving from what was in 2024, high single digits of our growth, and I know we'll talk about ePods, but I'm not going to include ePods in this discussion, high single digit of our growth coming from solutions by '27, we said that would double, and that's absolutely the path we're on, whether it's electromechanical actuators for eVTOL or it's a powertrain system that goes into a mining application, where we sell the entire integrated solution that has higher reliability, lower energy consumption. This is who really Regal is. And I'd say they were great acquisitions.

Yes. I might add a couple of things. I think from the Rexnord acquisition, I think it was a home run. I mean, good timing, RMT, not a lot of debt. We just worked perfectly. And the synergies came straight through and the culture was very much aligned. Altra, hey, look, timing was always tough. The timing of that acquisition, if we would have known -- I don't think we would have done anything differently, quite frankly, but if we would have known that we were going into markets that we're going to go into a trough on automation and things like that, discrete automation that, I don't know if it would have changed anything per se, but it was tough. And so I think, though, that, look, we stuck to our guns. We knew the strategy made a lot of sense. And I think hanging in there like we did and sticking to hey, let's integrate the businesses. We're going to get through this. We're going to adopt 80/20 across the board, and there's no more Altra. There's no more Rexnord. They're just RRX and bringing everybody together on that front so that when we do inflect, we're at a great point is what we're seeing now. And so here, as Louis leaves the organization at a point where we're really kind of at the precipice of something really amazing happening in this company. And I know that the data center order is just one example, but there's many examples where we're just ready and we're poised to go. And we've set it up perfectly for that. And we've got the structure in place to support it, which I think is really critical when you have 20 divisions with presidents and support across the board, and we've got great talent on board who knows what good looks like and can advance us to that next phase is a really good time to be a part of Regal Rexnord.

Awesome. Maybe talk a little bit to you just on -- as the portfolio sits today, what percent do you think is still tied to the PMI? On top of that, just how should we think about the evolution going from maybe shorter cycle to a little bit longer cycle for some aspects of the portfolio? And you touched on also being -- evolving from an individual component supplier to delivering more systems, subsystems. Just how much runway do you think is left on this evolution? I know there's a lot of questions in there.

Yes. No worries. I appreciate the questions. We have historically been pretty well correlated to the PMI or to ISM. I'd say about 40% of the portfolio is. And now we, I think, managed through a tough last few years with the ISM being below 50% because of the successes we've had with cross-sell and sales synergies. I thought...

The other 2 were just what percent of the portfolio is moving to longer cycle versus shorter cycle, opportunity for that to go maybe more longer cycle over time still?

Yes. So this is back to the comment. We -- strategically, we are focused on driving solution sales. That's -- we have 65 brands in our portfolio. We have probably close to 100 product lines. Our goal is to integrate them together to be most efficient and effective. In '24, solution sales were about high single digits of our growth -- of our sales. Our goal is to be to -- to double that by '27. Now with ePod, it's going to accelerate that even further. But I would say solution sales as a part of Regal will just continue to grow, and that's what we want to have happen.

Yes. And what do you guys think is really driving that shift towards more solution sales? You've just gotten bigger with the customers? Is it just making it much easier for the customers? Is it saving them on their costs? Just how to think about that?

Well, it really depends on the application. So the electromechanical actuator that we're selling into eVTOL and partnering with Honeywell, they came to us. They can do a system like that, but they came to us because they wanted a supplier that they could partner with that could build at scale and understood the aerospace industry. So that's an example. Selling a powertrain solution is about us understanding the applications as well -- and sometimes better than our customers and saying that the product solution set of an integrated powertrain is best, more efficient, more reliable, better cost coming from an integrated solution from Regal rather than buying individual pieces of components and putting it together. Now every market is different. Some markets want to see you do this and others don't. And we're okay. We'll do whatever it takes to satisfy our customers' needs.

There's also -- I'll just add one more thing. The portfolio has certainly evolved over time and being able to provide the solution that we can today is much different than we could in the past, right? And the commercial organization has matured in their ability to sell at that level. And so it takes some time to get everyone on board and understand and trained and understand the applications like we do today, and that's evolving at the same time. And so all of this works together.

Yes, makes sense.

And which takes you to more longer cycle projects, right? So about -- historically, Regal has been seen as a short-cycle industrial. Today, 1/3 of our business is long cycle. Our AMC segment, and again, forget ePods, because that just screws it all up in a very positive way. Our backlog is 6 months in AMC. Our backlog in IPS is about 4. Our backlog in PES is 2. I mean, it turns fast. Our move is to move more into those longer cycles and solution sales gets us there.

Great. I'm seeing how long I can wait until I ask a question on ePods. But maybe before I jump into that, let's just talk about the gross margin targets, 40% gross margin, 25% adjusted EBITDA margin. Just how should we think about the bridge to get to those targets from where we're supposed to be at the midpoint of the guide in 2026. I know tariffs have certainly not helped. So maybe talk about dynamics there as well. But yes, just help us maybe with a bridge to get from 26% to the Investor Day targets for margins.

Yes. So let's take a step to -- from 25% where we ended at gross margin is about 38%. And so the center point of our guide, if you look at it today, it will get you about 39% this year. So we're starting off lower in the first quarter, as we've communicated, largely due to the fact that we do have tariffs that we're still catching up on, and we expect to be dollar neutral by the mid part of the year and margin neutral by the end of the year. So that's part of the equation to get you there. The other is around the rare earth magnet availability and supply challenges we've had, especially in our defense side of the business. And we expect that to be largely behind us by the time we exit the first half of the year. So get through the first half, we should be fine for the back half. If you look at from -- just talk about EBITDA margins for a minute, EBITDA margins start in the first quarter at about 21% and then they go up about between the first quarter and the fourth quarter kind of fairly ratably, they should improve by about 200 to 250 basis points off that 21%. And so that's all attributable to what I just described as well as the growth that we're seeing, the highest growth that we're seeing in the year is coming through the AMC segment, which has businesses within that segment that we see -- we have a backlog profile that supports a ramp in top line growth at a higher margin profile. So mix plays along with volume at the same time to get us there. So to go from the 39% as we exit this year to 40% is really not much of a bridge at that point. It's really just about volume and continuing down that path on mix because we should be where we need to be from a tariff standpoint, if you will, at that point. It will take us a little bit longer to get the EBITDA margins to the 25%. Again, it's volume. And when you're talking about the $735 million that we expect with data center, which you'll probably get to next, that you can see how that starts to come in line as you move into '27 and around that time frame, right, to get there.

Yes. Great. Yes. And let's -- we have to talk about the ePod product, certainly. Just maybe you can give a little bit of historical context on what products you're already making that fit really this data center market? And then how -- what drove you to develop this ePod product as well as -- yes, I mean, it would just be great to hear the demand traction you're seeing. And -- I mean, great orders last quarter. And how should we think about the capacity ramp, capacity constraints, the timing of those orders actually getting shipped?

Yes. So we're really excited about where we are in the data center marketplace and the potential for Regal. But it's a great example of 80/20 and how we apply 80/20. So 18 months ago, Quad 1, our highly valued customer, our A products. So this fits very well. And the products historically are low voltage and medium voltage switchgear paralleling switchgear, low voltage, medium voltage, power distribution units, automatic transfer switches. That's what we typically sold into data center markets, anything that needed backup power control. 18 months ago, we're talking to our highly valued customers. They see us, they're raving fans of us. I'm now talking 80/20 terminology, and they said, we're moving in this direction. You really need to be moving in this direction. And that's a modular solution that they would no longer buy individual switchgear component products. They wanted in a modular solution. And so we went down that process of developing our own, our own design and capabilities in this space. And coming out of third quarter, you've got a little bit of a taste of it from us because we said, we feel pretty good. We're going to expand our Canada facility. We're going to start up a greenfield in Texas. By the way, the greenfield in Texas will have product rolling through it by middle of this year. The ERP goes live actually this week. The Canada facility has already expanded. And so it's already -- we're utilizing that space. We feel we have plenty of capacity for this growth. But we knew something was going to come, and we said $400 million funnel at the time. It turned out to be a little bit larger than that, and we're pleased with it. And we -- now the reason why our customer sees us as a raving -- they're a raving fan of us is because we make it easier for them. We customize the solutions to their specific needs. And our say-do is quite high. Our service levels on traditional switchgear and switchgear products has been very high. And so we have a good reputation. Plus we have a strong company behind us, right? We're not a small OEM. We're not certainly a big company like some others who are in the space, but we're competing and we're competing on our service levels. And so where do we see this going? We want to continue the momentum from this. Now we've got expectation. We don't have finalized schedules from the customers yet. We expect that we'll ship a majority of this in '27. Some may hang over to '28, possibly a little into '26, possibly not in our guide at this point. But then we want to build off of this for '28, and we have the capabilities to do so.

Got it. And what do you think the appetite is from additional customers as you're looking into 2028 and wanting to build off of this momentum?

The funnel today is $600 million, and it's multiple customers. And so when you look at '25, we received about $1 billion of orders in '25 for the data center industry from multiple customers. And so now it's how do we continue to build that out. And so right now, like I said, a $600 million funnel. Our commercial teams are incentivized to grow. And as long as we execute on these programs effectively, that's why we have a strong reputation. I think we have opportunity to grow from here.

And so that $600 million, is that just total data center? Or is that for ePods specifically?

No, it's actually total data center right now, and it's more leaning towards switchgear than it is to ePods because we absorbed a lot of the funnel of the ePod in fourth quarter.

Okay. Got it. And yes, I mean, I guess, how are those conversations going? And do you foresee that pipeline expanding over time as well?

I think it will definitely expand over time. We think this market has room for growth. We think this market likely is going to remain fairly strong for the next 5 to 10 years. I think a lot of our peers are saying something similar. Are we going to bet on it? We certainly are. But the bet is not that challenging of a bet. The factory that we're setting up in Texas, the cap expenditure to set it up is about $5 million. And '27, we'll probably see a couple of hundred million or more go through that factory. So the returns are good. We like the space. We have the capability. It's more application-centric product. And so we'd like to see it grow further.

And maybe you could touch on the margin profile. I think you guys said the margin profile on the ePod was 20% plus EBITDA margin. How should we think about that, especially as you ramp up production?

Yes. I think it is going to be about -- it is 20% plus. I think like any product that you launch like this, there's opportunity to improve that as we move through the cycle and we get some cadence of production that shows that we have some opportunities for cost out additional productivity. It could improve a little bit. I don't think it will improve a lot more than that, but a little bit, I think, is reasonable to assume. But that should be the margin profile that we're thinking going forward for ePods specifically.

And some service tail to that as well?

We would hope so. That wasn't part of the agreement upfront. But the current business that we have, which is roughly $120 million business, about 10% of it is service, and it's service maintenance. We like that model. And so we like the recurring revenue perspective of it as well. We would hope that we'd parlay these programs into that, but it wasn't part of the original scope.

Got it. All right. I'll pause there and see if there's any questions from the audience. All right. I can continue for now. Maybe we can dig into the 2026 guide a little bit. You are guiding 3% organic growth. Just maybe walk through some of the key assumptions embedded in that? How are you thinking about end markets? And then I know there's price, data center, just all that.

Yes. So the way it breaks down is we assume 1.5 points of price. We assume about largely tariffs, tariff-related price, about 1.5 points from data center, in particular, specifically for data center. And then the rest of the markets, we say is kind of net neutral in the year. There certainly is strength in things like discrete automation, aerospace, defense, we certainly see strength in those markets. But we also see quite a bit of pressure in markets like residential HVAC, which we know is going to be down fairly substantially in the first half of the year. It starts to come back a bit in the second half, but we expect to be down for the year high single digits, if you will. So we think the net impact across all of our markets is fairly flat. Now that -- we also saw that the ISM, as we talked about, was close to 53% in January, which is great to see in a month. Unfortunately, where we have the highest degree of correlation, which is in our IPS segment, we actually saw order rates down about 0.5 point in January. So we want to give that a little bit of time and see if that's really going to take shape and the short-cycle side, in particular, start to improve. We haven't seen it yet. So we're being a bit measured the way we set guidance. And hoping that because we're at trough or near trough in most markets that we serve that we are going to see some level of inflection. We're just not banking on it yet. And so we want to see that come to fruition before we start making those calls and can be a little more constructive, if you will, in what we're seeing in the year. The other thing that we've done just -- from just a guidance perspective is that we have about $40 million of cost synergies that we expect in the year. I think this is absolutely something that will accrue, but we did not bake that into our guide. We're using that as kind of a derisker, if you will, for the year, gives us a little bit of a hedge to offset some other noise that we do think could be out there. It normally does, right? I mean, look what happened to us in '25. You never know. There's no certainty in anything that's going on right now. We've embedded all the recent tariffs and everything like that. but there's always noise in what's going on right now, and that level of uncertainty gives us a bit of a pause. We want to have a little bit of a hedge in our back pocket. That's the way we set the guide for the year.

Got it. And level of confidence that rare earths won't become an issue as you get into the second half of the year?

Yes. I think that we have a really good plan right now to get through that in the first half. And we're doing that primarily by resourcing from other areas of the world, areas like Australia or Japan or others that also provide rare earth magnets. We still have all of our applications in for everything that we've requested, and we work through that channel as much as possible, but we aren't counting on it. And so we continue to work the other avenues to ensure that we don't have this issue in the second half of the year. So we feel good about where we're going on that.

Great. And IPS, I think you guided up around low single digits organic for the year. I mean you have seen, by and large, positive order trends in that segment over, I think, 6 quarters in a row, backlog is up, I want to say, mid- to high single digits exiting 2025. So yes, I mean, I guess with some of that positive momentum you're seeing in orders, backlog, why not a little bit better on the organic growth side for IPS?

And I really think it comes down to how Rob framed up the earlier answer around the ISM and the market. And so until we start seeing a little bit more momentum, but you touched on some important points. Backlog is up 6% going into the year. In addition, we did see some nice cross-sell, and we're going to continue to drive our cross-sell in our industrial powertrain strategy. but we really would like to see confidence in the market, and we're just not -- we're not confident yet.

Remember, half of IPS is tied to short cycle in nature, right? And so what's in our backlog, what we saw the growth in our backlog is in the longer cycle, which we profiled, and we see that path pretty clearly. But the short cycle, it's just not there. And so as soon as we see that, we'll start to be more constructive. But that's why it's a little -- it's sometimes hard to understand unless you put it into that perspective that half of that business is absolutely tied to that through what we call like the book turn within a given period. If you don't -- it's short cycles. So therefore, you just don't have that level of visibility you'd like. So we want to see that come to fruition first.

Maybe we can pivot to PES as well, just your thoughts on that business. It is a little bit lower margin than the other segments. You've seen a lot of volatility recently in residential HVAC as well. What do you still think is really to like about PES as far as yes, fit in the portfolio, the stability, growth trajectory? And at what point do you think we could get a return to growth in residential HVAC as well?

Yes. So PES is critical to our portfolio and critical to our strategy. You can't have an industrial powertrain without a motor and the motor comes from PES. I think it's important to recognize a couple of things on PES. One, PES did grow last year, about 1%. So we saw organic growth out of PES last year. You have to also remember that PES, the invested capital is quite low. So PES is funding a lot of our acquisitions, in particular, Altra. So cash flow that we're getting out of PES is helping us significantly to justify Altra, and that was important. And we're investing -- PES was part of the old Regal, which believed all products and customers were great. Today, that's no longer true, and gross margins are about 33%, and we feel good about that, and they'll grow -- or with revenue growth, we'll see the benefits of that. And then lastly, we're also investing pretty heavily in new product. And so it's this pivot away from just selling a component to selling an air moving solution. And so we feel good about the future of PES and the growth potential. Now specific to resi HVAC, we're not real bullish about that market this year. It grew 1% for us last year. We're not real bullish for that this year. We're expecting the market to be down high single digits. That then because of comps means that first quarter will be down mid-20s. First half will be down, and we'll start some recovery in the second half. We're not seeing the drivers that would suggest anything but down right now. Consumer confidence is down, mortgage rates are still high, new starts are down. So when that starts to turn, we'll benefit. We talked about on the last earnings call, and I think it's important to understand this, is that we gained share last year in resi HVAC. And so we like our position, and we like the business. But yes, it's going to be, we think, a little bit tougher '26.

It tends not to be as volatile as perhaps it's been in recent years.

Yes. Listen, COVID -- I know we're 4 years after COVID, but COVID caused havoc to this industry. And in a good way and a bad way. The supply chain definitely negative to have it. And so in time, this will balance out. But hey, we generate not to be supplier, but a lot of cash out of PES, and that's good for Regal.

Yes. And maybe turning to automation specifically, just what green shoots are you seeing in that market as you're entering 2026? And just any trends you're seeing in discrete, maybe in some of the end markets within discrete automation as well?

We have a great reputation in the automation space and the discrete automation and in particular, motion control. You look at the last 12 months, the order rates are up rolling 12 months, up 6%, fourth quarter up 9% gaining some really nice momentum in the defense space. We have -- we're well positioned in Europe with the drive to sovereignty in Europe. We're winning some nice projects and business there. And then we also include in automation, our humanoid offering. And so in 2026 -- sorry, 2025, we saw $40 million of orders to U.S.-based OEMs in this space. And so we're excited about the future for automation for Regal, and we're investing. We're investing in new product. Our R&D as a percentage of sales in this space is about 6%, 7%, specifically for motion control. And we're known as a -- we solve the most difficult problems. That's what we're known for. And we do well there. But the available market is not huge. We launched in fourth quarter, Kollmorgen Essentials offering, which brings us down a little bit more and more standard offering for mid-high-tier marketplace. And we already saw $1 million of orders in fourth quarter. It was probably one of our strongest product launches in the history of Regal, which gives us some confidence that, that will gain momentum. And our goal right now is $50 million from that product line by 2028. So a lot going on in the automation space for us.

Yes. And maybe diving into some of those end markets within discrete, where are you seeing green shoots, areas where there's still some softness?

Yes, the greatest is defense, for sure. For us, the greatest green shoot is defense and the benefits that we're seeing there. We're honestly not seeing -- and we don't play in to the same extent, and this is why we launched the Kollmorgen Essentials offering. We don't play as strongly in factory automation, and we just haven't seen that really start to take off yet. But we do think with Kollmorgen Essentials, that will.

Got it. And that Kollmorgen product doesn't seem like there's really risk of cannibalization to the existing products in the portfolio. It's a new product for a lower tier?

Yes. No. And the feature function set is quite different from our higher-end product, and we don't see it cannibalizing at all.

Awesome. Maybe we can transition to humanoids. I mean it is a potentially exciting opportunity. $40 million of orders last year. That was really just for prototypes, right? Maybe you could talk about just what's your content on humanoids, yes, and just what are you hearing from customers in the space as well?

Yes. So we're pretty excited about the potential. This is a great example of proving out again the hypothesis of why we acquired Altra and Rexnord because if you look at what we can do on a humanoid, we can actually build joints. There's anywhere from 30 to 40 axes on a humanoid, and we can build that whole system. That whole system, though, comes from products from 2 out of our 3 segments, IPS and AMC. So again, an integrated solution where we bring value to the OEM. And the value is we sit down with the OEM, and we're designing jointly with them to come up with a solution. Where do they want to focus? On the controls? They're not really so interested in focusing on the hardware, and that's what we bring to bear. Now if you believed exactly their forecast of volume, we would need to triple the size of Regal in the next 5 years. So we're not there. But we're well positioned. We think there's a good opportunity for growth, and we're really happy about the momentum we gained in '25, and we'll continue to focus efforts in '26.

Got it. And maybe you can talk about the products you're supplying into the humanoid market? And are these already products that you've had in the portfolio, I mean, by and large?

Listen, we -- if you look at our position in China, we've been on humanoid platforms for years. And so these are products such as Servo motors, linear actuators, brakes. But then when you integrate them together, you can get a joint. And that's what we're trying to do. But yes, no, we've been playing in this space for a while. We have the right products for this space.

And you guys are already producing these products at scale. It's just if humanoids does take off, you need to maybe make some investments in incremental capacity?

Yes. That's right. We already do produce them for scale. We also need to help because the driver for this space is going to be -- is there effective return on investment. And we're a pretty big part of the bill of material. So that volume, we need to help with getting the prices down so that we can try to grow. But the OEMs have to focus on what are those use cases where there's really a return on the investment. That's going to drive this market. Now if it takes off like I said it could take off, then yes, we're going to have to add some capacity.

Got it. I'll open it up for audience questions one more time. All right. Yes. I mean maybe to close, let's just talk a little bit about the eVTOL opportunity as well, what you're doing there, who you're partnering with?

Yes. Listen, if you are excited about some of these up-and-coming markets, then you want to invest in Regal. Humanoid is a great example of that. We proved out on data center, that's a pretty darn good market for us to be in. eVTOL is another one. If you believe in the eVTOL space, we're positioned. We can sell individual components or we can sell an electromechanical actuator. And the partnership we announced about a year ago is with Honeywell. And hey, Honeywell can build this product. But they came to us because they saw a company that could build at scale an integrated solution. And if eVTOL takes off, you're going to need to build that scale. And so we're excited about the space. The L.A. Olympics are supposed to have 50 eVTOLs flying around. We would be in that mix. And hey, that would be a great future for this market.

We won't be in the eVTOL, we'll be in the mix.

Yes. We won't -- I'm not flying, anyway.

So 50, how much revenue is that for Regal?

The shipset on eVTOL on the programs that we're on is just over $200,000.

Per?

Per.

Got it. All right. Well, I think we can wrap it up there. Thanks so much to the Regal team for you guys joining us at our conference, and thanks to everyone who attended.

Yes. Thanks a lot.

Thank you.