Rockwell Automation, Inc. ($ROK)

All right. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the session for Rockwell Automation. I'm Quinn Fredrickson, Senior Research Analyst at Baird covering advanced industrial technology. Most of you are probably aware, Rockwell Automation is the largest pure-play industrial automation and digital transformation company. With us today from the company, we have Tessa Myers, to my right here, who's the SVP of Rockwell's largest reporting segment, Intelligent Devices. And Aijana Zellner, who's Rockwell's Head of Market Strategy and IR. So Tessa is going to open up with a few comments, and then we'll swing right into Q&A.

Okay. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us. I thought I'd just make a few comments about the company to give you a little bit of insight overall to who we are and our focus for those of you that are both familiar with the name and where we might be new to you. We've built a more resilient and diversified Rockwell Automation over the last few years. As you can see, our industries are quite diverse. We have a meaningful amount of our business in discrete industries, areas like automotive and semiconductor, in hybrid industries where you have both packaging and processing, discrete and processing type applications, areas like food and beverage, health and personal care, life sciences as well as a meaningful portion of our business in the process industries, areas like energy, mining as well. We've also increased the diversity of our revenue mix. And so we've added annual recurring revenue to the company. That's a combination of both Software as a Service as well as high-value managed services. It's a fast-growing part of the business. It represents over 10% of our revenue to date and it is a representation of us adding new ways to win to our capabilities. We've also, over the last few years, redoubled our focus on operational excellence. And you can see that in how we're expanding margins of the business so far this year. We have a range of solutions that are really broad-based, are horizontal and cover a wide range of industries. Our focus as a company is really in the production environment and how do we help manufacturing and industrial companies be more efficient and more sustainable. And -- we introduced this growth framework at the start of our fiscal year '23, and it really outlines the expectation for profitable growth and adding new ways to win to the company. It combines what we think are secular trends and growth in automation and digital transformation with our confidence in our ability to gain share and expand our served market. It has annual recurring services and software contributing to our growth and a modest contribution here over the cycle with acquisitions adding about 1 point of growth. So that is about 5% to 8% organic growth through the cycle that we expect to achieve. We take a very intentional focus on the industries that we serve and in addition to our traditional markets in areas like automotive and food and beverage, we've added areas like data center and e-commerce and warehousing which are fast-growing industries for us today. There are a few enabling technologies that are important for us as a business. Software-defined automation is really across the automation content that we deliver and evolving that to a more software-defined environment, artificial intelligence, and we'll talk about that a little bit. I'm sure today of how we're leveraging that and embedding it into our capabilities to add value to our customers. And integrated robotics, the combination of integrating fixed robotics into automation systems as well as autonomous mobile robots to move materials through a plant. These are all important areas of growth for us and how we are expanding the value that we are delivering to our customers. Back in FY '23, when we introduced our growth framework, we also introduced margin targets for each of our operating segments across Intelligent Devices, Software & Control and Lifecycle services. And all of our businesses are either at or moving towards these margin ranges driven by volume, price and the work that we're doing around productivity. And we expect to move into this range and our goal is to move to and through this margin range. So with that, I'll -- I think we can start the Q&A.

Awesome. Thank you. And for the audience, any questions you can submit it to [email protected]. Aijana, maybe starting off for you. I just want to ask about the demand picture. You're coming off your March quarter where you noted some broadening out of demand. And you felt compelled to raise your core growth by a fair amount for Rockwell, I think, 3 points at the midpoint. Where are you seeing the most genuine demand inflection out there versus just easier comps? And how durable does this feel as you look out over the next several quarters?

Sure. In the first half, we did have easier comps from a year-over-year standpoint, really for the whole company for certain industries. But with that said, we did see a very strong performance in Q2 across a number of industries, across discrete hybrid and process end markets. What really surprised us and outperformed were really three or four industries. So data center, semiconductor, e-comm and warehouse and energy. And while other industries performed well and grew including automotive and did great and actually better than we expected, we didn't see a market change there in terms of CapEx activity. You still see a lot of projects being focused on productivity, optimization and efficiency. But the markets that I just mentioned earlier, they are seeing quite a bit of project activity. And so we felt comfortable and confident increasing our outlook. Data center business more than doubled for us in Q2. It's not a big part of our revenue yet. It's low single digits. That's sort of our total revenue, but it's growing strong double digits. We did increase our outlook for semiconductor for the year and for e-commerce and warehouse automation that was already slated to grow the fastest. And we do see some opportunity in our energy market, which is about 15% of our total revenue. So it is encouraging to see a broadening of this demand across more industries. However, we're not seeing a broad-based CapEx recovery yet. So if you look at some of the big markets for Rockwell, food and beverage, 20% of total revenue, automotive about 10% of total revenue. We're seeing some activity. We did see some program releases, great wins, but not quite the CapEx activity that is really needed to change our guide even further. So there's some opportunity out there, but the way we're looking at right now is 7% top line growth at the midpoint. And if there are some more program releases in other areas of the business, then that could take us to the higher end of our [indiscernible].

What do you think, based on talking with customers, what's holding back in some of those markets where you're not yet seeing that broader release of CapEx? Is it just geopolitical uncertainty, interest rates? Just what do we need to see to get that broader unlock?

Clearly, trade uncertainty has been getting back for quite some time now. The increasing geopolitical volatility is not helping. The input cost inflation is coming with that is not helping. And of course, everyone is watching consumer health in terms of the end markets that they're serving. So there are a lot of elements out there and the environment needs more stability to be able to really feel confident with the bigger, larger CapEx outlays. With that said, as I mentioned earlier, there are industries that are investing even today and are -- and it's both brownfield upgrades, but also greenfield as well.

And Tessa, just diving in a little bit more into your segment. The product side of the business, much of which is captured in Intelligent Devices, did see a significant step-up in the second quarter. And I think you called out some strategic AMR wins. But can we talk a little bit more about what drove the inflection there? How much of it was maybe end market inflections versus new products?

Yes. So we had solid growth in Intelligent Devices in Q2. We were up 9% organically. In that business, we have a wide range of automation products that are part of Intelligent Devices. In the business, our motion control business, so high-precision motion control, our input and output devices the kind of the inputs that you wire sensors into and run logic and then trigger an output for the machine to perform an action, the I/O portfolio as well as our sensing and safety portfolio where we have a range of smart sensors and industrial safety technologies. So we saw broad growth across those product categories in particular. Those are areas that we have a customer base in terms of machine builders. And so we saw a pickup in our machine builder business related to those product lines. And we also introduced some new products. We introduced the next-generation IO platform at the start of this fiscal year, and we're seeing good adoption in that as well. We also have a part of the Intelligent Devices business that does go into data centers. And so that's our Cubic power infrastructure products in our industrial control products. And so we saw data center as a contributor to the growth in Intelligent Devices in the quarter. And I would say lastly, you mentioned it, our autonomous mobile robot business, automotors, we saw nice growth in the quarter and into the first half of the year.

Okay. Maybe you can -- can we take a step back and frame up your broader strategy to address production logistics a little bit more? Maybe just what enables you to win if you can describe your logistics portfolio, why it might be differentiated?

We really launched a focus on what we call production logistics at the start of 2024. In production logistics is the concept of fully automating end-to-end material movement throughout a manufacturing plant. So today, there's a lot of labor that still goes into manually delivering materials to a line and taking those materials away -- finished goods away warehousing and distribution environment. And so we saw a significant opportunity for our customers to really automate that process. And so production logistics is a combination of intelligent material movement technology, so that's integrated robotics, autonomous mobile robots, independent cart technology, which is really kind of smart conveyance systems. Adding that to operations management and fleet management software that helps to plan, schedule, execute work orders in a manufacturing environment, and the consulting and engineering capabilities to really wrap around that to help customers understand where are the biggest opportunities for productivity and help them implement that solution. And so one of the biggest challenges in automating the full end-to-end material movement is the integration of mobile equipment into the production environment and integrating it into the fixed automation and fixed assets that you have. And so we really felt like there was an opportunity adding autonomous mobile robots to our portfolio for us to really enable customers with this end-to-end capability and really break down that barrier of adoption to make it easier for them to implement.

How about within CPG, I think you've mentioned or Blake mentioned on the conference call some newer offerings there. Could you maybe share what some of those newer offerings that you're having success with are? And I think it's specifically geared more towards midsized customers. So are you seeing your share rising with midsized customers?

Yes. I mean, food and beverage is part of our consumer packaged goods end market right? And so food and beverage, home and personal care, and we have very strong market share, strong moat there with our solution, given it's a hybrid end market. Specifically, when we talk about mid-market, we have a great distribution channel. We have distribution -- distributors who are selling to those small and medium businesses in the U.S., and it's a great opportunity for us to amplify our business. We -- of course, they sell our core offerings, our largest controllers, our drives, our on-machine devices, sensors. But increasingly, we're selling a lot more digital solutions and our cloud-native data software. If you think about whether it's Plex or Fiix software. So it's our cloud-native MES production operation management software. It's a great offering for a smaller customer who does not want to employ a large IT set, does not want to have the cost of managing the software themselves. And for them to be able to have -- to deploy a piece of software that's modular. It's quick to realize time to value much faster and it's managed by someone else, and it can be updated instantaneously and managed by someone else, that we're seeing great adoption. That's one example. AMRs is another example in terms of CPG, as Tessa mentioned, autonomous mobile robots and is providing a lot more of that autonomous material movement in an environment where it's not easy to get labor. It's not that easy to hire, train and retain labor and the labor cost is going up. So we're seeing a lot of different ways to play in that market.

And we -- I would just say automating production logistics really started I would say automotive was the first to adopt. And over the first half of this year, we've seen large-scale implementations with CPG customers. So really the diversification of the industries that are moving in this area included CPG over this past first half of the year.

Okay. We haven't discussed AI as much specifically yet. So maybe just to start off, if we could zoom out for the benefit of investors not as familiar with Rockwell and speak to how Rockwell has already incorporated AI into certain products.

Sure. Well, you may be surprised to know, we've been doing machine learning, which correlates with AI for quite some time, really focused around process optimization. And so how do you increase yield and throughput and quality of a manufacturing process really embedded in the control system. And if you think about AI from a manufacturing and an industrial perspective, I think an easy way to think about it is there's the life cycle of an automation system. So what happens when you're designing an automation system, you're testing and you're deploying it into an industrial environment. When you operate your production assets and when you're maintaining the systems that you have. And so we've actually done quite a bit across that entire life cycle in terms of embedding AI capabilities into the products that we deliver and the software that we deliver to customers and embedding AI and leveraging that to enhance and further differentiate and create value in our products, makes it easier for our customers to adopt. So on the design side, we were first to market with a cloud-based design software environment. That's allowed us to innovate at a really rapid pace in terms of adding AI capabilities. And so we've added AI agents to enable automation designers to evaluate automation code to develop code using AI to make it much more efficient to design and to test, to simulate and then deploy automation systems into a manufacturing environment. On the operations side, we've built a number of use cases that are used in the production process to improve how the process is operating. So whether that's process optimization, getting the right combination of temperature, material, flow in order to optimize the process and increase the quality and output, inline quality inspections, so we launched a product called Vision AI, which is quality inspection. AI. There's still a lot of manual effort that goes into evaluating products and their quality, taking samples and so the ability to do that in line and analyze the existing quality and predict the quality of a product is an important use case. And then on the maintenance side, we've done quite a bit of work around predictive maintenance. So in our fixed CMMS software, we've added an asset risk predictor. So based on the historical failure modes of an asset, we can predict when maintenance needs to occur. And Guardian AI is an application where taking the internal data from a variable frequency drive. We can monitor the electrical signals and we can indicate whether that there's an issue with a bearing or a motor preventing downtime and alerting a maintenance team that they need to perform maintenance on operation. So a wide range of capabilities that are already available today in the market, and we're continuing to build out new use cases for customers moving forward.

What would you say the barriers to broader adoption of AI for your customers are? And I mean, do any of these factors increase your moat or they open you up more towards competitive friction at all?

I think the most industrial companies are generally pragmatic, right? And so they want to ensure that there's a good return on investment for them on a project that they might do. And so I think as we prove out these use cases, we're making it easy to understand the to be able to implement these solutions and get the value quickly. And so I think that, that proof in these use cases that we're building, I think, has been really valuable for customers to understand the return opportunity that they have. And I think, generally, I view AI as an accelerator to automation because it's making the adoption of automation much easier for our customers.

Can you speak to within software, specifically investors are very focused on the defensibility. So could you maybe expand upon your offerings -- Agentic AI offerings across your software stack, where you are in that journey and how defensible it is for you?

Absolutely. I mean, at the end of the day, everything we do, as Tessa mentioned, is tied to the production automation. The way we approach how we work with the customer, it's really across the whole automation life cycle, from designing a system or designing a new plant to putting it in and then producing it for a long time and then eventually -- and maintaining it and eventually once it becomes old and obsolete you upgrade to the next system. So the way we approach whether it's software, hardware services, we want to make sure that we develop offerings for our customers that are easy to use, easy to deploy and easy to maintain it. And if you look at our software, software was about 10% of our total revenue. And the majority of it is very much tied to these and embedded and type of integrated with all of these stages of the life cycle. And everything we do is mission-critical, meaning it's important to have -- it's important not to have any latency, security is paramount, this process interacting with operators and people on the plant floor. The way we look at our software -- specifically to software development organically and inorganically is it needs to have a moat. It needs to accelerate and it needs to help customers get to their outcomes faster. For example, as Tessa mentioned earlier, the design software, our cloud-native design software that we were the first ones to develop. It's now perfect for Agentic AI to help our customers, developers interact with the system, design systems in a matter of hours. It could have taken -- it used to take weeks to deploy a system. You can do that in a matter of hours, a matter of days, much faster customer gets to value. And then they're producing, we're helping them in process optimization with our software. And so we think we are very differentiated. Our focus on software was different than some of our competitors. Some of our peers are really focused on other areas of the technology stack, on the product design or chip design or computer-aided design, we focus on manufacturing and production environment. And -- we think we've built a very differentiated offering. We always look at opportunities to accelerate that, whether it's organically or inorganically. And we always look for potential disruptors. But as Tessa mentioned, we see that as an opportunity to really scale and help customers adopt more offers across the global fleet.

SP33039678 And I believe it was high single-digit software ARR growth in 2Q? Just where are you seeing the most traction right now?

Yes. ARR, our annual recurring revenue is about 10% of our total revenue. It's a combination of recurring software and recurring services. Recurring software has been growing high single digits, and it's really driven by our SaaS software. So Plex, manufacturing execution system software and Fiix, our compute and CMMS software. So that's been growing nicely and a combination of really across many industries. We talk about automotive, CPG, life sciences, it's really across the whole suite. The recurring services piece has been decelerating in the last few quarters, and we talked about really customers grappling with a lot of trade uncertainty and increasing input cost and volatility, they are pushing out some of the important but maybe not as urgent services to the right of it as they reprioritize their spend near term, but we do see continued demand for our services, whether it's cybersecurity services, safety services, remote monitoring and things like that.

And does that services in the guide? Are you assuming that weakness persists? Or do you assume that, that there's any recovery there?

We continue to expect high single-digit growth in ARR for the full year, and we do expect soft -- the recurring software piece to grow faster than services in the near term, yes.

We should spend a minute talking about margins because that's been a clear standout as well. I think ITD and really Rockwell overall, both had really excellent margin expansion in the quarter, incremental margins over 50%. And Tessa, maybe can you give us a sense in ITD specifically where you've been seeing the most opportunity in productivity and also what would some of the remaining bigger priorities beyond this year be for your segment to continue to drive productivity?

Yes. I would say that operational excellence that's driving margin expansion is really a company-wide focus. And so all three of our business segments as well as all of the functions in our supply chain have been collaborating together to really drive the margin expansion that we've seen. And we have really taken a holistic approach as we think about productivity and margin expansion in the business in ITD. Clearly, it's a combination of volume, price and productivity. That's driving the margin expansion that we've seen. I think productivity is an important lever for us. And as a company, we've really been looking into at our operations and where we have the best opportunities to drive productivity. So that's from the products and their designs and how do we design them for. For cost and manufacturability. How do we negotiate and work with our suppliers to drive productivity within our supply chain. What are the indirect spend that we have in terms of services and materials that support the operations, logistics, how we deliver products to customers and driving productivity there. And we did have -- structurally, we looked at the organization and did take some structural action prior to this year that's having an impact as well. As we move forward, there's a few areas of focus for us. And really, as an organization, we're focused on a sustainable pipeline of productivity actions and projects that will drive ongoing improvements in terms of productivity. I think some big areas for us this year are around product design changes that will drive alternative designs that can drive cost of the direct materials that we use. There's ongoing manufacturing efficiency projects, investments in automation and AI in our own manufacturing facilities that are making us more efficient and certainly logistics. We think there's room to grow in terms of driving productivity from a logistics perspective. In-sourcing is an area that we're focused on, where are there materials, subassemblies that we've traditionally outsourced that we can drive cost and margin improvements by bringing those in-house. And so my expectation, we'll execute projects this year, but we're going to continue to focus on productivity as a driver for margin expansion and expect to maintain a strong pipeline of opportunities from this year and moving forward.

And maybe if you could touch on price costs as well. I think it was positive in the quarter. Can you speak to what you're seeing on items like memory, transportation, raw material pressures and just your confidence in being able to offset those in the back half with price?

Certainly, we are guiding to 250 basis points of price in total for the year, of which 150 basis points come from underlying price and about 100 are expected to come from tariff price. On the input cost inflation side, no doubt, we can all see that the cost of memory chips is escalating. And so we are expecting sequentially to see higher cost on that front. We don't have as much exposure to raw materials, but we do have some. And so there are some other input costs that also slated to go up. But for us, memory chips is the biggest one. And we feel confident in our ability to mitigate that and offset that cost. We talked about that price and cost and offsetting it might not all align perfectly well in any particular given quarter. But over time, we -- as we've demonstrated in the past, are planning to offset it.

Maybe just in the last remaining minute, if we could touch on capital allocation. You've outlined a $2 billion investment over the next 5 years, 80% is in CapEx, 20% in OpEx. Could you give us maybe a breakdown of what you're investing in and what those investments should enable for you?

Yes. As you said, largely, the investment is CapEx, and it's a combination of investments in our manufacturing capabilities and our talent and in our digital infrastructure. So included in that is investments in automation and AI in our own manufacturing facilities to drive operational improvements and efficiency. It does include brick-and-mortar in the U.S. with a new greenfield that we announced that's going to be located in Wisconsin. So the largest beneficiary of that investment is really going to be in our U.S. operations. And an area of focus is really around our talent and our digital infrastructure and, ensuring that we're making the right investments to tune the business for the future and the new offerings that we have and to support continued growth of the business as well.

Great. Well, management will host a breakout session following this. It will be in Aster Suite 2. But please join me in thanking the team for being here.

Thank you.