Rockwell Automation, Inc. (ROK) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Thank you, everybody. I'm Chris Snyder, a U.S. multi-industry analyst at Morgan Stanley, super excited to be up here with Rockwell Automation. We have CEO and Chairman, Blake Moret; and Bob Buttermore, Chief Supply Chain Officer. Before we get into the Q&A, Blake's going to make some opening remarks.

Great. Well, thanks for the interest this morning. Looking forward to sharing some of the journey that we're on with you. We've been on a journey to add as Rockwell more ways to win to our sources of traditional value, so complementing our programmable controllers and our factory floor devices with software with high-value consulting services and with additional hardware solutions like mobile robots, independent cart technology and industrial PCs. Along the way, based on the volatility in the environment, we've had to add considerable redundancy to our operations, whether it's the speed with which we can implement price changes with the redundancy that we've built in our manufacturing footprint. And with a lot of these actions over the last few years, we've paused to integrate what we built and bought into a cohesive solution. And I think that's important for customers to have a simplified solution that integrates all these pieces together, for employees to be able to refresh that culture that Rockwell is famous for and for investors and by laying off new acquisitions for a period of time to be able to help expand the margins. And of course, that's been a big focus of our initiatives over the last year or 2. So it puts us in what I think is a unique position as an American manufacturing pure play. We have home field advantage for a lot of the activity that's going on here. But we're seeing a lot of success with our current position around the world. And I'll just finish with an observation that we are the most used technology in American manufacturing, and that's a place that I'm proud to be. And so with that, we'll turn it over to some questions.

Well, thank you for that. Maybe starting off at a high level, have customer conversations changed at all post election? Obviously, it's a huge focus of the administration to reindustrialize the country. There's a lot of policy that they're pushing through that is trying to support that. What are you seeing on the ground?

We're definitely seeing optimism about the importance of manufacturing in our biggest market. And that's encouraging. I would hasten to say that it is a worldwide game. It's not just American companies, right? There's lots of machine builders that participate in this around the world, engineering firms. And so it's giving us not only an opportunity to work closely and at a higher level with our traditional customers, but also to engage others in this value chain. And while certainly, Rockwell doesn't enjoy the same share uniformly around the world, we think that we're gaining share -- gaining modest share due in part to this increased focus on manufacturing in the U.S.

Appreciate that. I guess when you have conversations with customers, are there any verticals that stand out as maybe having stronger intentions there?

Sure. Just working through kind of our construct of discrete, hybrid and process markets. Automotive, there's, I think, a lot of pent-up demand, but I'm not ready to call an inflection point in automotive. They've got unique, specific situations that they're dealing with, determining what is the right positioning vis-a-vis electric vehicles and battery. Obviously, the tariffs impact domestic production quite a bit. But as we talked about in our last earnings call, we're seeing some great wins in this space, including with some companies that are not headquartered in the U.S. It's probably our oldest served vertical. And while, again, we're not seeing unfettered CapEx spend at this point, we are seeing a significant contribution. Also in the discrete space is e-commerce, warehouse automation, and I include in that as well parcel handling. And that's probably our single strongest vertical right now. And while it's not shoring or reshoring activities, they're seeing the need to build capacity and modernize existing capacity, and we have a great readiness to serve there with both our traditional offerings as well as some of our newer offerings like mobile robots. In the hybrid space, pharmaceutical is a bright spot, obviously, in part due to the rapid increase of GLP-1 sales. But in general, people want to live longer, healthier lives. These are well-funded companies, and we have a good readiness to serve both in terms of our traditional hardware, more on the packaging side, but also in terms of the software, the MES that's so important in a validated industry, and we've had a very strong solution there for a long time. And then consumer packaged goods, including food and beverage, home and personal care. Again, it's not so much about new capacity but modernizing, securing those facilities when we get a big cybersecurity contract for a multi-plant rollout in one of these areas, it's a big project for us. It's a multimillion dollar project that typically is heavy with annual recurring revenue. On a little bit of the more suppressed side in general is process due in large part to uncertain demand as well as volatile commodity prices, oil and gas, chemical, they're dealing with oversupply coming out of China. And so right now, the spending is not quite as great in those areas.

Yes. You kind of said it, obviously, you guys have the best share in the U.S. So when companies are thinking of where am I going to build my next factory, obviously, tariffs raise the cost of imports. But beyond that, we're also seeing policy come through to provide domestic incentives, the One Big Beautiful bill, accelerated depreciation in that. Can you maybe talk about any of the incentives that are coming through? What stands out to you? And when do you think those could start having a positive impact on the market?

Yes. To be sure, having a certain statutory rate for corporations is helpful. I think when we were originally looking at making provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act from the first Trump administration permanent, we saw that as a net positive. With the tariff uncertainty, we're seeing it more as roughly an offset to the volatility of tariffs. But having a dependable corporate rate is for sure helpful. Particularly for small and medium-sized companies, the immediate depreciation is helping. And we think that, that can spur some additional investment as well. And a big part of our business is small and medium-sized manufacturers. It makes up a large part of the employment, a significant part of the output and it's one of the areas that we're somewhat uniquely positioned to be able to address with our market access through our distributors. Remember, the vast majority of our business in North America goes through distribution and for every 1 Rockwell salesperson, there's 4 or 5 distributor salespeople with steadily increasing capabilities that can get to those classes of customers that our foreign competitors just don't have the resources to get to.

Appreciate that. One of the things that I think is interesting when I look at the landscape of U.S. manufacturing is that it feels like a lot of the CapEx and future capacity growth is different from the production base today. The biggest production base in the U.S. is food and beverage. Semi is relatively small, but we're seeing a lot of capacity come through there. When we look at Rockwell, your biggest end market is food and beverage. But I guess my question is, is that just a reflection of the U.S. production base? Or is it that no, Rockwell just has the products and the capabilities to do best in that market.

Yes. So a couple of parts to that. First of all, I think our focus on industries is due to a deliberate review of what are the industries that are big enough to be meaningful that have strong future growth potential and where Rockwell has the opportunity to differentiate. So it's no coincidence that some of our most highly penetrated vertical markets are in that hybrid space where you can use our single control platform to address all aspects of the production environment from the blending and the batching side, upstream at the wet end through the packaging requirements at the downstream side of the dry end with the same control platform. And that's a huge benefit to customers. And it's why verticals like food and beverage, home and personal care and pharma are some of our best producing areas. When you look at the other part of that, the investment in the U.S., while a lot of the initial investments have been in data center and in semiconductor, we're not strangers to that space. And I would say when we look at the overall potential of new capacity in the U.S. that we're tracking, it's split roughly evenly between those areas where Rockwell has a little bit lower share with the areas like automotive, food and beverage, pharma where we have higher share. And so it's a nice split between the 2, and we're seeing that play out in terms of orders in new capacity in the U.S. that were higher in '25 than they were in '24, and we expect them to be still higher next year as well. When I say that we're not strangers to some of those other areas of things like data centers and semiconductor, data center, we got great access through our Cubic acquisition where that's the single biggest served market when Bob was in his business role before -- business unit role before becoming Chief Supply Chain Officer, he championed that acquisition and that is by far the biggest served market for Cubic. But we're also doing work in data centers through building management systems, including activities that our distributors are participating in. And then again, in semiconductor, while it hasn't traditionally been the biggest market here domestically, in Asia, when you were in Asia, it was one of your very biggest markets.

Yes, it was one of our largest markets.

Maybe following up on data center because I think many people would not even think of that as a Rockwell end market because nothing is being produced. Can you maybe just expand on what you're doing in that market? Did it -- did you guys go out and try to get exposure there? Or did the market just kind of come to you with where the controls are going?

Yes. Let me position this appropriately to start with. Data center is low single digits of Rockwell's total growth. It's fast growing, of course, like data centers everywhere are, but I want to set it in the right context. We did when we looked at the Cubic acquisition, the Danish company we bought a couple of years ago, we were excited about the opportunity to get that existing data center exposure with a unique value proposition in the area of power distribution. I didn't want to go out and play someone else's game by going and purchasing transformers or traditional switch gear. I think that's a crowded field right now. But with the Cubic offering, it gave us that access and the ability to participate profitably in that fast-growing business. But the other area -- the other application is in the building management system. So the qualified building management systems for data centers, managing the environment, the safety systems, fire suppression, things like that is our applications that we understand well and have done similar things in, in the past in semiconductor, in the clean room environment. And we've seen a steady growth and an interest by the data center supply chain in the kind of redundancy and safety that we can offer in our industrial systems compared to what they've used in the past through some of the traditional building automation-focused systems.

I appreciate that. A year ago at this conference, the big concern or even I would say almost consistent view I was hearing was concern around Rockwell market share. I guess those concerns have calmed. Obviously, we've seen your growth kind of inflect above peers. Can you talk about competitive positioning, I guess, in the U.S. market specifically? And is there any impact from the policy -- the tariff policy given that your international competition base?

Well, let me start with the growth algorithm that Rockwell has introduced to investors a few years ago. We said that we're going to grow above the market. And the way that we're going to grow is -- has several components. The first is 3% to 5% growth from the market growth itself, we think automation is a -- has some good secular tailwinds because particularly as people seek to manufacture more in high labor cost locations like the U.S., the only way you can do that competitively is to complement labor with the thoughtful use of technology. And we think that makes sense around the world whether you're in Asia or Europe or in the U.S. I can't think of anybody who's saying, yes, I don't need that technology. I can just do these things with pure manual labor, says nobody right now. We think we can get 1 to 2 points of growth through market share as well as expanding our served markets. So think of mobile robots, which we really didn't have an offering for and now we're in that, and that adds a few billion dollars of existing market growing at 40% a year and so there's that. There is the growth just due to the wonderful compounding effect of annual recurring revenue. So annual recurring revenue, software and associated services is about 10% of our total business today from a very low base just a few years ago. And if it's growing around 10%, then the math of that yields about a point of growth and then another point of growth from acquisitions. So to your question, are any of the policies that focus on manufacturing in the U.S., helping that, I think they are and that's reflected in that 1% to 2% share growth in new served market because when the places where automation is being invested in are in your higher share growth area -- your higher share position areas like the U.S., then the math is in your favor. Now in terms of our competitors, a lot of them are having to deal with the volatility and relatively weaker business conditions in China. China is about 4% of our revenue today. And while China is and will continue to be the world's largest manufacturing economy, and we continue to expect to have a presence in China, not having huge current exposure at risk in China is something that I feel pretty good about right now and then opportunities in other places, while some of our competitors are playing defense there, maybe with a little bit of a lackluster machine builder market in Europe in places like Germany, I like the hand that we're holding right now and we have every intention of going on offense, not only in North America but around the world.

Your comment that the math is in your favor. That's effectively been my positive view on U.S. industrials is that activity is shifting to the home market, benefits, I think, to group broadly. I think you guys would be at the top of the list on that. Is there any -- can you provide any data or color on what your market share is in the U.S. versus international markets?

Well, strong double digits overall, in particular, in PLCs, which is kind of the heart of the control system. The PLC is the brain in U.S. manufacturing -- or in manufacturing, it takes inputs, runs it through an algorithm, either a set program or aided increasingly by artificial intelligence and then changes the state of outputs. That's kind of at a very high level the control system. And we have 10x the market share in North America of our next closest competitor in programmable controllers. So it's strong. We think we can continue to grow that. But obviously, to achieve our full potential, it's going to involve growing outside of North America as well.

Yes. No, I appreciate that. Maybe moving over to margins. It's been a really incredible turnaround over the last 12 months in a market that is still sluggish, I would say. If we -- you guys last quarter, there were some FX headwinds, incentive comp. But when we kind of look through the numbers, it doesn't seem like the company is all that far away from its 23.5% target. Can you kind of talk about the margin opportunity and kind of the progression forward from here?

Yes. So as you said, I've been very happy with the way that the team has responded. And quite frankly, Bob's organization has done a lot of the heavy lifting because that's where a lot of the cost base is and the make part of our enterprise, and I'll ask him to make a couple of comments in a minute. But we do feel like we're well on our way towards hitting those margin targets that we announced. We gave specific corridors of expectation by each of the business units, but it's a total company sport, right? So we can talk about getting to 22% to 24% margin in Intelligent Devices and 31% to 34% in Software & Control and 13% to 15% in Lifecycle Services, but that also involves the control of your SG&A, which is largely sitting in a unified central sales and marketing organization and making sure that we're making prudent investments but also controlling our current costs in our operations. And so where -- the margin initiatives were kind of catalyzed by a very difficult 2024 where a lot of the cost out was characterized by workforce reductions we're past those big layoffs. And now we're making sure that we're managing our headcount, but also working on the blocking and tackling, if you will, of things like reducing the cost of direct material and changing indirect cost to the most efficient and looking at supplier changes, refootprinting our manufacturing, things like that.

Yes, I'll make a couple of comments. Blake highlighted that well. Over 18 months ago, we really flipped to really reenergizing, reestablishing our continuous improvement and productivity initiatives across the enterprise. And we reestablished, expanded our continuous improvement team, put metrics and governance in place to help us drive this kind of the continuous engine of opportunities for us. And Blake highlighted some of the great ones. It started with headcount and SG&A and indirect spend. . But then it moved into areas where we have low-hanging fruit that we could go after with materials, with manufacturing with logistics. Now we're moving into those next phases of things that take a little bit longer, like product cost reductions and changing out parts to different forms and modes of transportation and our logistics, more automation, integrating more in-sourcing into our facilities. So we've started the journey, and it's just how do we continue this journey with things that have more meaningful impact over time.

I appreciate that. Just kind of given all the margin improvement we've seen, obviously, a new CFO joined about a year ago, a lot of opportunity. I don't want to like front run the '25 automation fair, but should we expect an update on those margin targets?

No, we want to finish the swing. Look, we're happy with the progress, but to use a baseball analogy, we want to look at into the glove and continue the progress we've made, while at the same time making the investments that will unlock the next phase of the journey because there will be a next phase of that journey with some longer lead time investments like the kind that we announced and that Bob's organization will be heavily really in the center of looking at the things that we're doing today that get us to what will be a blended overall corporate margin of above 23%. But then what comes next? Well, some of the things of what come next don't happen immediately. And so we're making the investments now, we're feathering them in to make sure that we first do no harm and don't elongate the path to the current set of objectives but that we're ready to go when we get there to be able to go to and through those numbers on a continuing journey. And obviously as we put that together with the return to growth, we think that the more complete result is going to be pretty exciting.

Appreciate that. We've obviously seen a very nice pickup in order rates over the last year. I guess, is that just simply -- we moved past the destock, things are starting to normalize. Is there early signs of maybe some interest in building activity in the U.S. You called out or said there could be potential, at least in last quarter, maybe a little bit of a pull forward in the numbers. Just kind of what's the update there?

Yes. I think we're in a decent spot with respect to the products that go into brownfield operations, part of maintenance and repair orders, line extensions. I think some of that is what I would characterize as healthy underlying demand, certainly getting past the effects of destock. With respect to potential for pull forwards, we took a prudent approach with the experience of 2024 pretty fresh on our minds, and said, while we haven't seen any specific examples of pull-forward orders and when we do, we cancel those orders, and we did that in a couple of cases, we want to take a really prudent approach and to say, there could have been, and we'll continue to look at that. We haven't seen explicit evidence of it, but we wanted to take a prudent, cautious approach in that respect. That's on the product side. On the CapEx side, the Engineered Systems, we have seen a weaker environment due to the uncertainty with tariffs. And as soon as we can clear that up and get past the period of as volatile of adding tariffs, taking them away, adding them back, that is suppressing some CapEx spend, and I think there is pent-up demand that while we're seeing some projects come through, in general, CapEx right now is due to -- is subject to a higher level of scrutiny at our customers. Again, some of it's getting through. We're testament to that with our announcements that we are going to make these expenditures. But in general, the faster we can reduce that uncertainty coupling more stability in tariffs with the tax bill, I think that's a pretty fertile ground for new investment and with unemployment staying at objectively low levels, that's another, I think, very important KPI that we keep our eye on.

Yes. Your commentary there that there's a lot of optimism and maybe positive sentiment about the larger greenfield projects. We're not necessarily or not seeing a convert yet to orders or revenue. I guess, what do you think could kind of help unlock that and kind of allow these to drive orders?

I think the single biggest thing is just laying off volatile new announcements with respect to trade and tariffs, not -- well, working on improving but not blowing up USMCA, for instance, making sure that we're not making more public announcements about what would be very big changes in terms of already announced tariffs, I think, is the single best thing that we can do to reduce that uncertainty and unlock some of that additional spend.

Yes. You mentioned earlier about the $2 billion spending plan that the company announced. Can you kind of maybe unpack that for us? Where is the investment going? And ultimately, how does that spend actually unlock that next leg of Rockwell margin expansion?

So a lot of the detail will come from our Investor Day in November in Chicago, the week of November 17. But broadly, we said we're making additional investments in plant, talent and digital infrastructure, digital infrastructure, our internal business systems as well as our ability to sell our digitization capabilities to companies that themselves are on their digital transformation journey, making sure that we have the right people for the most in-demand skills today in an age of AI, making sure internally, we have people who are comfortable with those technologies and as that continues to be a greater and greater part of what we're selling externally can represent those benefits and then plants which impacts the brownfield existing plants that we have as well as the potential for some new brick and mortar.

Yes, there's probably 4 areas that I would highlight in the manufacturing or the supply chain area that we're focused on investments. And one is facilities and expanding those, some new brick-and-mortar, including owning those facilities where the lease expense, the equation is good with our interest expense and our depreciation that would be one area. Second area would be around our manufacturing facilities, more automation, moving from automation to autonomy in places like Singapore and Twinsburg, Ohio and Mequon, Wisconsin. And I'll give you an example of that. We're integrated -- we've done that in Singapore where we went -- Singapore was already a world-class facility for us. We went and invested in a project there with CapEx and some OpEx over -- about 18 months ago. We implemented that 9 months ago, and it's really transformed that facility with automated mobile robots moving material from the inbound docks to the outbound docks, to integrating more automation and AI in our facilities. We'll talk more about that as we get to Investor Day. Some other areas that we'll be investing in is systems, systems outside of the enterprise systems that Blake was talking about like transportation management systems, advanced planning systems, global trade management systems that will help us drive productivity over the next horizon for us. And then lastly, continuous improvement in general, just creating that continuous funnel of opportunities. Some things we'll be doing there are like in-sourcing, in-sourcing as an opportunity for us to more vertically integrate and capture some of that margin that we've been giving away over time.

Yes. And just -- if I can add, each of these projects have to pass their own ROI hurdle, and we ourselves have the ability to feather these things in. So I mentioned earlier to make sure that we first do no harm to the current trajectory we're on, but set us up for that next phase of productivity.

No, I appreciate that. I wanted to follow up on Bob's point about in-sourcing. I think it's I guess very clear that if you in source maybe you could get some more margin from somebody else, more fixed assets, maybe better incrementals. But does it -- is there an impact on innovation? Could the company innovate at a faster rate with more vertical integration? Is that part of the thought process?

I think there is some of that in terms of the ability for continuous improvement; integration [ withhold ], when you think about that, if you have somebody who's a contract manufacturer for us, they don't really care that much about integrating with other disparate products or software elsewhere in the organization. But if you're part of, let's say, the Software & Control business unit, where within your own business, you've also got the cloud-native software, you're thinking a little bit more about how could I get data from this I/O card that maybe we were previously outsourcing and to be able to get that all the way up in a clever way into a cloud-based information management system. So I think certainly, theoretically, there's some of that. And then practically, with products like GuardianAI, where you're taking data from our dry products which we've been making for many years and bringing those up into our fixed maintenance management system that's probably a tangible example of innovation that if we had outsourced a lot of that then we might have walked by it.

Yes. I think there's some exciting things, too, in the manufacturing realm that will help us innovate there, additive manufacturing and the opportunity not just in plastic but in metals that will allow us to innovate in our products and be able to serve our customers more quickly when they have certain special things they want.

No, absolutely. Just last couple of minutes here, maybe I wanted to hit on some important end markets. Auto has been a big end market for U.S. industrial production, big end market for Rockwell, big focus for the administration. It's an end market that's been depressed, but the growth did pick up for you guys pretty nicely in Q3. I guess what are you seeing there? Do you think the momentum there can be sustained?

Yes, we were encouraged by a relatively better performance in Q3. We had some easy comps that were helping us out in that area. We did see some projects that we talked about that were good, including from some non-U.S.-based OEMs. And so automotive is a big industry for us, about 10% of our business and there's a substantial amount of maintenance of just the existing facilities. We have such a large installed base. That's a good part of the total business. Model changes continue to drive the spend there and whether it's in the most extreme case moving from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles but even within traditional vehicles when there's a change made that drives a lot of automation spend. And we continue to have just a great offering in terms of products, in terms of software as well as kind of intrinsic ambient expertise in the company that allow us to address that. Again, I'm not ready to call an inflection point in automotive. But as we see the reduction in uncertainty due to tariffs that's probably the industry that will most benefit from that consistency.

Well, we are up on time. I could ask questions all day, but I appreciate the conversation. Thank you, guys.

Thanks, Chris. Thank you.