Regal Rexnord Corporation (RRX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. Good. We're going to move things along. Thanks, everyone, for joining. I'm Tim Thein here with Raymond James Industrials. Happy to have the team from Regal Rexnord with us here today, been very good and loyal contributors over the years. So thank you guys for coming.

And we're going to just do a Q&A with Rob Rehard, who's the CFO. I guess, been in the seat for, what, 7-ish years now. Seen a lot of changes certainly over the years. So maybe this conference tends to be a little bit more kind of generalist in nature. So maybe just start with a high level for those that are newer to the story, just been a lot of changes with Regal over the years. So just level set us in terms of where the business is today, and we'll go from there.

[Technical Difficulty] okay. Great. Thanks. Gross margin has gone from roughly 26%, we exited last year at 38%. We decentralized the business. We've we run at 3 different segments. During that time frame, we merged with Rexnord. We acquired the Ultra business primarily for the AMC platform, the automation platform. And it's all worked out for us very well over that time frame. We run the business through an 80-20 lens. That was something that Louis also brought when he joined the company 7 years ago. And it's worked very well for us. That essentially means that we focus on A customers, A products. And historically, the company really was more about -- every customer is treated equally, and we don't run the business that way today. So a lot of change over that time frame. Free cash flow has always been a focus for us. We've always done quite well. We traded at a free cash flow margin of roughly 9%. We see that growing here over the next year or 2 to low teens. And so this year, we've got a little more of investment related to data center, which I'm sure we'll get into a little bit here as we move through this presentation. But the business has transformed quite a bit, and we're really excited about where we are. We are exposed about 50% to secular markets today. And most of that sits in our AMC segment, which is the automation segment. And then we have also a fairly large part of our business is primarily in the power transmission side of the business that's also tied to distribution aftermarket. So a really strong part of the business, highly correlated to the ISM, especially on the short-cycle side. So when we're starting to see the ISM now start to inflect for a couple of months now, good to see. But the business has transformed quite a bit, and we're very well positioned. We've got -- most of the markets that we operate have been at or near trough. And so we're starting to see some green shoots here, certainly on the data center side, more than just some green shoots, but in other parts of the business as well, which is great to see. And so we're cautious as we enter the year, but feel really good about our prospects as we move through '26.

Yes. Great. Maybe we can just continue on that thread just with the PMI or ISM number coming out yesterday, obviously, some geopolitical wins starting to swirl a bit. But as to how you frame the year kind of targeting flattish volumes, it again, seems like maybe there could be a little bit more momentum there. But talk us through maybe a couple of the puts and takes as to how you view the year based on these initial outlook.

Yes. When we came into the year, we saw the January ISM above 50%, but then a little contradictory, we saw our IPS segment with orders down 0.5 point in January. So hey, listen, that's a month. Let's not bake anything in. Let's set the guide a little less constructively as we move through the year to start at least so that if it inflects up, that's great. That's our assumption in our guide at the time we set our guidance is that the ISM, we weren't going to see a big inflection. We're going to use the run rates that we had been seeing across the business to project the year. And therefore, anything above and beyond that is great to see. So 2 months now, great. We'd like to see 3. And I'm not necessarily going to be providing an update on order rates through February. But again, 2 months of ISM and being that roughly 40%, almost 50% of the business is correlated to the ISM should yield a nice benefit for us. The other side of the business that's going quite well and what's got the highest growth projection in the year is the AMC segment. We saw a nice continuation, if you will, in discrete automation as we exited the fourth quarter with orders up there roughly 9%. And so I think a rolling 12 of about 6% on discrete automation. So that's great. We're seeing that come back for us a little bit as well as we saw the large data center orders that came through, which is also very good to see. And that gives us a lot of confidence as we move through this year, not just in data center but other parts of the business and move into really '27 when that -- those new orders are going to start shipping, which is roughly $735 million worth of new orders just on the modular EPOS data center. So lots of great things going on in the business and some things that are starting to inflect nicely for us. But we entered the year really from a guidance standpoint, be very measured, especially across the IPS and the PES segments. PES, we believe order -- the resi HVAC side of that business will be down high teens, even low 20s in the first quarter, still be down through the second quarter, start to inflect in the back half, but resi HVAC to be down high single digits in the year. That's weighing down on the PES performance. So we expect that to be flat basically in the year for PES, that segment. And we expect IPS to be kind of that low single-digit rate from a growth standpoint. Again, there was no assumption that the ISM would continue to be above 50%. So should the ISM continue where it is, the opportunity for that to get better is pretty high. And I think -- and then for AMC, I talked a little bit about it.

Yes. No, that's good. Maybe just kind of the appetite for larger scale CapEx. The idea being you've got the Fed likely rates coming down, tax reform and presumably, and hopefully, we're kind of further from that shock to business confidence around tariff and trade uncertainty in the early part of last year. So it all sets up pretty nicely on paper. But it feels like when you hear from CFOs in your seat, it's almost like very much a mixed read on that in terms of the willingness and the appetite to actually move forward. What's your lens from your seat as to how that is developing? I'm sure a very dynamic situation.

It is. And we're not really seeing much on the CapEx side that's going to free up any real volume from that standpoint in terms of anything as of late that's going to change any of that going forward. I'd say the ISM is the best indicator that we have in terms of the correlation. And so if that stays above 50, well, then we should start to see some inflection there. But from everything that's going on from the tax law changes in that, we haven't seen much in terms of benefit from that up to this point. If it materializes, that's great. It didn't -- certainly doesn't influence any of the decisions we make from deployment -- from deploying capital or CapEx into our plants or anything like that. And so -- and I'm not hearing a lot of that feedback either from our commercial teams in terms of what our customers are communicating either. So that hasn't quite come through for us.

Got it. Maybe as you think about inventory levels in the channel, I'm thinking that the IPS segment maybe amongst the most relevant there. What's the feedback you're hearing from your large distributors, some of them will actually be here this afternoon. But in terms of their -- usually, when they start getting more confident, you start to see a little bit more aggressiveness in terms of them wanting to stock up in anticipation. What are you hearing from your team with respect to channel inventory and just the trends there?

Yes, we don't think there's a lot of inventory out there that's still being burned through. And so therefore, we see -- and we have good visibility in our large distributors to the COGS side of the business. So we know the ins and the outs. We did communicate in the first quarter that order rates were down a bit in the IPS segment, which is roughly 50% distribution aftermarket. However, we also talked about that we did start to see a little bit of strength there. I mean a lot of the weakness that we were talking about in IPS was really on more of the longer cycle side of the business and so not so much on the short cycle or the distribution side. And so it's good to see that, that could start to play a bigger part as we move forward. And -- but it's still yet to see. But what we're seeing from an inventory standpoint, we believe we're through a lot of the inventory noise across the business. I know there's still a little bit of noise in resi HVAC. But generally speaking, discrete automation, we think the inventory noise is behind us, and that includes the medical side of the business, which has been challenged for us. And so inventories across the rest of the business, we think are in pretty good shape right now. And so we're not seeing there's a lot of pressure there.

Got it. Maybe let's hit on some of the segments of the business that looked at where the growth has really accelerated, data center being one where we probably weren't talking a whole lot about it a year ago. Certainly, that's become a bigger part of the discussion. So maybe just help for those in the room level set in terms of where Regal plays and ultimately, just thinking from a visibility standpoint. I think like your old -- one of your old firms, Eaton would say there's a like 10-, 11-year backlog in terms of data center construction ahead of us. Where are you in terms of capturing that kind of opportunity?

Yes. So first of all, let's level set a little bit on -- there's 2 parts of the data center business that we participate, just the switchgear business that we participate. So we make switchgear and automatic transfer switches. And we've been in that business for 50 years. This is what we call our Thompson branded business. And so that business 5 years ago was roughly $30 million. Last year is about $120 million. It's been on this 30% CAGR over 5 years or so. This year, it should do about -- and I'm only talking about the standard switchgear automatic transfer switch side of the business is about $190 million or so. And next year should be even stronger, maybe as much as $250 million. So still very, very strong growth in the standard -- in that standard product side of the business that we've been operating for roughly 50 years. We then started bidding on the modular solution or the ePOD solution and had orders come in of about $735 million as we exited last year. We had a funnel of about $400 million that we had communicated after Q3 and ended up with $735 million in orders there on ePODs. And then we now have a funnel for both switchgear and ePODs going forward of about another $600 million. So not -- so outside of what we've already booked, there's a funnel of opportunity that we're bidding on that's about another $600 million. This solution -- so when it comes to, well, do we expect that this will continue? Well, these customers that we're working with today that we receive these orders from are customers that we've been working with for a number of years. And so there's a relationship there, and then they came to us and asked us if we could participate in this -- the way that they want to provide this solution going forward, which is in this modular solution. We said, sure, all we're doing is providing the same products. We're just putting them in a different form within a box, if you will. About 50% of the content in that box is ours and the rest is co-sourced. And so that's how we landed it. And so the question is, how do we see this continuing in the future? Well, we're still talking to those same customers, and they're still building -- they have build schedules that currently, what has been bid and won for us is the volume for this group that's going through '27. It could be more in '27, by the way. But this is for '27, primarily is what the shipping dates are expected to be. But we're talking to them about, well, what's the next phase. And so that's going to be '28. There's usually about a year or so cycle in terms of getting ahead of these things and getting the order into our backlog. So we do expect this to a large degree to continue, but there's no guarantees on any of this. It's a competitive process. We're going to continue to be competitive there. And -- but it looks really good for us because, I mean, like I said, we've been doing this for a very long time. We're known for our willingness to customize, our quality, our service levels. And those are the types of things. And the capacity is a big deal, too, right now. We've doubled our capacity in our Canadian site. That's done. We added capacity in Texas. That's up and running today, building standard switchgear, but we've got the capacity in Texas. We have capacity for anything that we have in backlog today, and we can scale that up. So it's really an assembly and test model when it comes to building these modular solutions. And so very low CapEx investment, variable model that you can scale up and down based on labor. That's how it works. And so we feel very confident in our ability going forward and feel good about this as a really nice market. For how many years, that's anybody's guess. But for now, we're very well positioned.

Maybe within A&D, certainly the D part, certainly more topical these days. The combination of Ultra and then Regal kind of gave a little complementary in terms of -- I think Ultra was strong with some of the primes and Regal historically more on the commercial side. Sometimes that business, the development cycle is so long that we can't see all the -- necessarily the program wins take some time to kind of play out. Maybe highlight an area, eVTOL would be one that stands out. But maybe just give us a minute or so just in terms of the A&D segment within Regal.

Yes. The aerospace and defense side of the business has been growing gangbusters. It's largely defense, -- quite frankly, most of the growth there has been in defense. We're very well positioned in terms of our ability to provide precise control, and that's kind of our [ Coll ] Morgan side of the business. That's the technology, the motor and control that we provide along with certain application software as well. So that side of the business is still growing very strong. We don't see that slowing down at all. We have backlog there that goes out multiple years, and we don't see that slowing down.

Humanoid robotics, another theme that gets the industrial crowd excited. What's the opportunity that you see there in terms of how Regal is positioned? And then one of the things we'll talk about is as you evolve to being more of a systems provider rather than just a component supplier. How does that factor into being able to participate in that specific market?

Yes. For humanoids, we have about -- we have a $200 million funnel right now that captures both humanoids and other robotics like surgical robotics, cobots, things like that. $100 million of that is humanoids. So how do we play in humanoids? We provide a solution, which is essentially a joint within a humanoid. So we can make any of the joints within a humanoid and it's a full joint, not -- we can provide components, but what our customers are asking for is a solution that provides the entire joint, which would include like the frameless motor or the actuator or whatever might be embedded within a joint on a humanoid robot. There's any axis. So it's the elbow, it's the shoulder, the knees, right? -- anything that you need, we provide that joint. And it's a solution. They don't have to put the components together themselves. We're providing that solution. We're really well positioned because we have the scale to provide that at volume. We can do that to -- for our customers. And we are in discussions with some large OEMs within North America that we're providing prototypes for today. We had about $40 million of orders here in humanoids last year that's primarily prototyping and that sort of thing to kind of get the ball rolling. it's an option. It's kind of like eVTOL. If it takes off, we're very well positioned and we can move at scale. And we are the only provider that can provide that entire solution for our customer, for the joint end-to-end in that solution. So that's a very nice competitive advantage for us at this time. I mean things change as we move down the road, but that's where we are, and that's where we're positioned today. If it takes off, we're in great shape, just like eVTOL with our partnership with Honeywell. If that takes off, that's also another one that we provide a solution. It's another -- it's kind of how we migrated the business. Your first question of the day was what's changed in the business. We've gone from being a component provider where we -- legacy, we're providing motors for HVAC applications or whatever it might be, maybe a bearing to solutions, a Honeywell electromechanical device that goes into the -- moving the pitch and everything for the eVTOLs or the surgical applications. We're in the -- one of our businesses, the medical business is in providing the miniaturized powertrains. We talk about powertrains in multiple forms, very large powertrains that can drive mining applications, right, from an electric motor all the way through the gearing and the bearing and everything you need to drive whatever mining application to very small miniaturized solutions for surgical tools. So you go and look at like a da Vinci machine used in bariatric surgery or whatever, we're providing the miniaturized powertrains that go into like the fingers of that da Vinci machine. So that's where we've come from this providing components to providing these solutions, and that's a big value prop for our customers and where we're starting to gain more and more traction.

I think I may get this wrong, but I seem to remember at the Analyst Day, which was 2-some years ago, I think Louis said something like 15% of your customers are buying more than one of your products, which seem awfully low. But is that just a function of just how the group has come into place, and it's just still early days in terms of just driving the synergies across those various operating segments? Or I mean, it would suggest there seem quite a bit of runway, but...

Yes. Cross-sell is becoming a very big part of our business, and that's part of the cross-sell opportunity where, yes, historically, we've sold maybe 1 or 2 components to a customer. But we know if they're buying a bearing, they're buying a gearing and a coupling or whatever it might be from someone else. The idea here is to communicate that we can provide all of those to the customer. And so therefore, we are gaining some really nice traction in our cross-selling over the years. And I think we improved it by $90 million this last year just in cross-selling. So we've really moved the needle on this front, and that's a great example where it's just -- some of it is just awareness and getting our commercial teams. We incentivize our commercial teams differently than we did historically. We incentivize also on their ability to cross-sell. That wasn't part of the incentive structure in the past, and that's making a difference.

How do you think about the through-cycle growth? I think you put out a 4% number. Obviously, a very dynamic environment. But where do you think about -- or how do you think about that and the components that contribute to that, meaning...

So you're right. It's through the cycle about 4%. The way that breaks down is AMC, we see maybe 4% to 7% through the cycle. Obviously, that can change now depending on kind of data center and what we're seeing there and how that's going to contribute here at least in the short term, but maybe through the cycle, stay with the 4% to 7% range. 3% to 5% on the -- from an IPS segment, so the power transmission business and then 2% to 3%, maybe even a little bit better on the PES side of the business. The legacy motors business, while there is roughly 1/4 of that business that goes through residential HVAC, there's a commercial HVAC side of that business, which is very strong for us. We've got an air moving side of the business that goes through and has applications that are relevant in data centers as well that go into an ePOD solution. We're building things like fan walls for data centers and fan filter units for clean rooms, things like that, that aren't often thought about within that PES segment, but there's some great opportunity there. And about $20 million -- we had about $20 million in orders last year that were specific in PDS for data center applications. So really starting to see that move as well and move out of that legacy framework of mainly selling, again, components to more solutions and everything I'm talking about is a solution sell.

Going back to the growth algorithm, where do you see -- or how do you see pricing contributing to that? I mean, given your gross margin structure would suggest that you have pretty high level of pricing power, especially I would assume in IPS. But just overall, how do you view that through a cycle and then more near term, how are you managing the whole kind of price cost dynamic with tariffs here in '26?

Yes. So first of all, I'd say that we have really good pricing power, roughly 90% of the business. The only place where we don't have good pricing power is within that 10% of the business that sits in resi HVAC, which is on 2-way material price formulas. The rest of the business, we have great pricing power. And where it's best is where you have the higher exposure to distribution aftermarket. So 50% of our IPS segment is exposed to distribution. Well, you're going to get the best pricing within the distribution side, less so on the OEM side. So -- and then within the rest of our business, even in AMC and that, we still have -- we've been able to capture price. We've been price/cost positive for over 4 years. I know that -- it's not -- that's just on material. If you talk about the tariff side, we got a little behind when the derivative tariffs came out towards the back end of last year and then the 50% originally on India, all of that. We got a little behind. And so now we weren't able to capture all that price as we exited last year. We expect to be dollar neutral in terms of tariffs by the mid part of this year and margin neutral by the time we exit this year. So you're talking about margins. We exited last year with gross margins at roughly 38%. We do think we'll exit this year closer to 39% as we capture some of that price on those tariffs. And it's not just price that we're doing -- that we're getting the margins back, but a piece of it is certainly price. So price cost is still a muscle for us in terms of our ability to capture price, and we expect that going forward. And we should see our margins get closer to that targeted 40% maybe next year when we are able to see that neutrality on tariffs and then start to see some of the mix come back and volume come back that we're looking for, especially in those higher-growth areas that have the higher margin profiles like within the AMC segment and also to a certain extent, the IPS segment. I mean we only have about a 3% growth on that this year for IPS. But IPS, the contribution or leverage on IPS volume is 40% plus. So if that comes back stronger, our margins will move much faster than what we're profiling today. So it's a great business to inflect.

Maybe we just start with the remaining time, just hit on free cash flow. There's been a little unevenness here recently, but the growth presumably factoring into that in terms of the investments. So maybe just touch on free cash.

Yes. So free cash flow did come down from our previous guide, primarily due to 2 main factors. One was we're investing about $100 million to $150 million working capital to support this new data center initiative. And then the other is we have inventory that we do think we can free up and become a source of cash for us. Historically, we've been a bit aggressive, I would say, in our -- because we have a history of being able to drive inventory out of the business. We're great operators. We get a legacy industrial company, we can drive inventory out of the business. But we've learned in this supply chain environment, we need to be a little bit more cautious as we enter the year. So I'd say about $100 million plus is that we took down because we said we're not going to bank on that. If it happens, that's great, but we're not going to bank on it. So that's about $200 million, $250 million between those 2 items that have come down from our previous estimates for free cash flow. That being said, we're still talking about generating good $650 million of free cash flow this year. Even with that -- all of that embedded, we should get to something closer to 12%, 13% next year. And next year is when we're thinking that the data center, at least based on the current expectations for shipping and when we can start invoicing, a lot of that cash is going to come through next year. So that's going to be a nice influx of cash for us as we move forward. It's a bit of a timing issue this year as we start to invest for that data center growth.

Excellent. We'll leave it there. There's a breakout downstairs for those interested. Thank you, Rob.

You got it. Thanks.