Trimble Inc. (TRMB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon here in London. My name is Tami Zakaria. I'm the Head of Machinery, Engineering and Construction Equity Research at JPMorgan. It is my pleasure to welcome Phil Sawarynski, CFO of Trimble. I know Phil, you have a brief presentation, so I'll let you take it from here.

Okay. Can you hear me okay? Is this -- okay. Great. So hey, thanks, everybody, for attending. I thought we'd do just a quick overview of Trimble and where we're sort of at. And want to start with this sort of -- I think there's 3 key things that I'd sort of like to leave you with today. One is our Connect & Scale strategy. I'll talk a little bit about that, but where we pivoted, how we got there and ultimately, that it's working. With the results that we're delivering based on that strategy, our Q2 results in our AECO business, which is the tip of the spear for that strategy, 18% ARR growth, 14% revenue growth. So conviction around strategies demonstrating the results. The second piece is we are continuing to look at focusing and simplifying our business. And that comes about. We did a JV with AGCO earlier this year in April that we closed. We recently, over the weekend, announced the mobility deal with our mobility businesses with Platform Science and our resegmentation that we did earlier this year as well, subsequent to the AGCO JV formation. And then the third piece is all of that, what does that mean for the financials. This is the progression of our financial models, and we're seeing that, and I'll show you that. So those are sort of the 3 key points that I want to talk to. I'm going to go over this relatively quickly. Tami's going to -- we'll have more of a dialogue and get into some more details as we -- as this session progresses. So here's just an overview of Trimble. And again, high level, you can see the progression. A couple of the highlights there on the left on the company. We have scale, 1,000 unique patents. We spend money on R&D. We're a tech company. We reinvest in the business. Almost 13,000 employees in 35 countries. We are global. On the right are the financial highlights. Key piece, look at the recurring revenue. So between 2017 and 2023, that's almost 2.5x, right? We're transforming as a company, more recurring revenue. You can see the bars here. This is our strategy at work. The EPS, you can see the delta, $1.45 to the $2.66 in '23 EPS expansion over that time frame. The adjusted EBITDA margins, if you look down the lower left-hand side, that's 620 basis points of improvement. With the mobility deal that actually continues to improve, another 100 basis points as we think about 2024 on a pro forma basis, continuing to grow and expand our margins as we transform the company. So this sort of a backdrop before I get into the Connect & Scale strategy discussion, but how do we get to Connect & Scale? Well, it was our heritage and all the years that we've had before us. And what was that? We had a lot of sensors in the field. We -- when I started the company in 2009, we were much more point solutions. We were hardware centric. We've transformed the company over that time frame. But our ability to actually deliver on the Connect & Scale strategy really comes from our heritage and comes from some of the numbers you see on the screen. This is our access to the majority of the ENR 400 customers. Hundreds of thousands, actually millions of instruments in the field, so data collectors. So talk a little bit about one of our competitive advantages is the digital, physical connection we have. Over 90% of the top 200 trucking companies as customers. And with the Ag JV, we still have 15% ownership. We have a commercial relationship. We maintain our GNSS and our core technologies with the JV, but we have access to over 145,000 users of our correction services. So we have access to customers. And that is an enabler for what I'll talk about now, which is our Connect & Scale. So it's a simple slide but let me give you a little bit of background and context. When we started the company, as I mentioned before, we had a series. We had a lot of really good solutions, but they were in sort of different ERPs. They had different sales teams. We ran it more like a bunch of individual P&Ls as opposed to a collective. Our Connect & Scale strategy is us listening to customers. And our customers said, "You guys have a great breadth of product, but you're hard to do business with." It's hard for me to buy multiple products. You guys should do more connecting of the workflows with the products that you have. And so we listened to that. So we embarked on this journey. And so part of this is, on the connect side is connecting these life cycles, connecting these workflows, connecting the solutions and the data for our customers. That's the journey we're on. We're still sort of in the early innings, but we're demonstrating the proof points within our AECO business. We still have work to do, and we still have a runway there. But the other thing we're doing is we make it easier from a friction standpoint to do business with. As you can think about if we had multiple businesses under multiple legal entities selling to multiple customers -- or to a single customer, excuse me, what that ends up being is it becomes confusing. They have different multiple invoices. They have multiple bank account. It's hard if they're -- if they have one product, how do they add other products because they're on different contracts. So we have different sales people coming in. So our Connect & Scale strategy was bringing those products into a singular digital infrastructure that allows us under a single contract with the customer to start -- we can start with one product, and we can easily cross-sell and upsell other products under the same contract. So it becomes a lot easier for us to actually deliver products. It becomes easier for our customers to actually buy products. So that's part of our strategy. If you hear us talk about our TC1 bundles. This is then taking natural bundles for our customers. So we look at customers, if you're a contractor, if you're an architect, what types of products do you typically use, creating a bundle that's meaningful for you and being able to sell that on that same contract, right? So think about ease of use, ease of acquiring the new technology, easier for us to sell that technology. But then ultimately, those different products can communicate, can talk to each other, the data flows can be easier. And so you think about those multiple products and that becomes sort of a system-wide return on investment. We think about return on investment from a customer standpoint and what we sell. And the more of those individual products that now become interconnected, that now have easier data flows, when you think about as a, let's say, a contractor, you're interested -- if you're at the C level, you're interested in how your company is running, you're interested in how your project is going. So by having the data and the workflows connected and making it easier, you're becoming more efficient as a company, not necessarily just as a point solution, as a company with the interconnected workflows. That's the journey we're on. And again, we're delivering results. On the scale side, again, this is around a system. So you hear us talk about our DX, that's our infrastructure. So that's all the digital systems in order to be able to move the products to create the singular invoices to create these bundles. And that's, again, some of the work we're doing. We're still in the early stages. We talk about our AECO business. In that business, the AEC has been done within North America. We still have to deliver the O, which is the owner's piece into that. We still have work to do to expand that geographically. So again, we're still on this journey. But that allows us -- internally allows us to scale our systems, get better visibility into our customers, what they should be buying versus what they are buying, which allows us to cross-sell and upsell. In our Q2 earnings call, we talked about 2/3, 1/3. So excluding our SketchUp business, 2/3 of our new bookings were to existing customers, 1/3 to new logos. That's the visibility that we get and are able to cross-sell and upsell with the products we have with existing customers that we already have, which is a much easier sales cycle as we go forward. So that's some proof points, and that's how we're demonstrating that our strategy is working. The second piece, I talked about the simplification of the business. So earlier this year, in April, we closed the Ag JV. It was late last year when we announced this. So we took our Trimble assets aside from our positioning services, which is our satellite-based corrections, a subscription service within our Field Systems business, along with our core GNSS technology, we kept that. And we have commercial agreements with the JV to continue to deliver those products. But we -- it simplifies our strategy. We continue to simplify our portfolio. With the mobility business that I'll talk about -- the mobility transaction I'll talk about in a minute, that means that we've done 23 divestitures over the last 4 to 5 years, right? So we are thinking about our portfolio. We are looking at the strategic value and we're looking at alternatives and optionality. And so this is where, again, we're starting to simplify the business, we're derisking the company and with the AGCO deal, you can read some of the points here. That was largely a hardware business. So now coming out of Q2, the company is at 75%. Software services and recurring with -- 60% of that is recurring. The other piece of our simplification is this resegmentation. So here, you can see sort of the -- what's in our AECO business, our Field Systems and our transportation. And obviously, the telemetry is the piece on -- the transportation that's going to be going away to the Platform Science combined business. But again, what we're trying to do is be able to simplify the business, simplify how we run the business, simplify how you, as investors, can see the business. But this is really -- it's all -- it is driven by how we look at the businesses internally. So AECO is predominantly all direct sales, software. It's the tip of the spear for our Connect & Scale strategy. When we talk about Field Systems, 50% is software services are recurring, but most of our remaining hardware business, or all of our remaining hardware business after mobility, will be sitting in Field Systems. That's a indirect market that goes through dealer channels. And then the transportation logistics business without the telemetry business becomes much more of a software business. And it is a software business. There's really no hardware left in it. So this is part of our transition in the company as a company. A couple of points to note around the AECO, again, running the business. We've combined our sales forces. So we have a singular sales force now that are now account-based selling that focus on, again, the cross-sells and the upsells, looking at accounts and customers, understanding what their personas are and selling multiple products, selling bundles there versus selling individual point solutions. On the Field Systems side, we've combined our go-to-market sales team, which is really our channel management. We've reorganized that. One of the things you probably heard us over the last couple of years is we had destocking, which created some volatility in our P&L and our forecasting. And that's due to the COVID supply chain backup where our inventories -- our dealer inventories ended up being overinflated because everybody was ordering well in advance. It took us a while to sort of destock and get to a normal level. We believe we're at a really good level right now. We believe that by combining these go-to-market teams, we actually have better visibility into our dealer inventories and can better channel manage. So again, we believe that these new segments are actually going to be more efficiently and better run and make sense the way we're organized today. So Sunday, if you guys woke up, there's probably some news if you follow Trimble. So we announced our divestiture of our mobility business. This is our telematics business -- it's our global telematics business. And this includes our North American mobility business, our Brazil business and our European business. That was roughly, within the press release we announced, on a TTM basis, about $300 million of revenue, $200 million of ARR and about $30 million of operating margin. That's before we -- if you follow us, we actually have some big churn that's happening in the back half of this year. So that's an NTM basis. On a go-forward basis, those numbers would probably be less because we start to see the churn manifest later this year and into next year. But some of the key deal terms here is we're putting those businesses into, and combining that, with Platform Science. We're going to own 32.5% of the business. 28.5% of that's through preferred shares. Another 4.5% is through common stock warrants. They do have the right to have 1 Board of Director -- 1 Board member and 1 observer seat. And just to understand, we included this because sometimes you get questions around, well, how does this manifest in the P&L because we do have equity method investments, the JV -- Ag JV one, our JV with Caterpillar and others. This will not be accounted for as an equity method investment. So any of the P&L or the profits or losses from the combined business do not flow into our -- into the Trimble statements going forward. This will be -- it will sit on the balance sheet. And any sort of event, let's say there's a funding round where's there's a revaluation, then we write up or down our balance on the balance sheet. So I just wanted to point that out. We are expecting this to close the first half of next year. We're actively working with all parties to see if there's a way to get it. I would love to be able to get this done, so we have a clean read going into 2025. But ultimately, this isn't really -- a lot of this isn't under control because there's regulatory approvals that we have to go through. But again, I'll just -- here are some key points. We put this, and you can go to our Investor Relations website and see the slide here. But this business, by moving [ this ] out of Trimble that we end up with 200 basis points more on growth. So this has been, because of the churn, it was a drag on our ARR growth, a drag on our revenue growth by 150 basis points. Our EBITDA margins to expand on a pro forma basis by 100 basis points, so improves the financial profile. And we believe by putting this -- combining this with Platform Science, we actually believe that this is a better opportunity for our shareholders in the future because it puts focus on this business, it adds a breadth between our offerings in Platform Sciences, offer breadth of offerings and is a winner for our customers and it's scaled. By putting our business with theirs that we have a scale business, and we believe that's something you need to do to win in that -- in the telematics space and in the cab space. So again, continue to simplify and focus Trimble. And we believe it's going to ultimately provide shareholder value probably at an exit point when we can convert our shares into common stock and monetize this. Here are some of the numbers I mentioned. On the left were the Trimble numbers that I talked about. On the right, if you actually break this down into segment, it has even more of an impact. So you can see like, for example, on the revenue growth, what we would have guided this year is roughly flat to low single digits for the business. That actually moved to high single digits on a 2024 pro forma basis. So this also has a meaningful impact on the segment as well. And our remaining businesses would be our maps business, our enterprise business, which is our TMS for carriers in North America and then the Transporeon business, which was an acquisition we did a few years ago, which is a European freight platform that connects shippers and carriers. So all of that being said, what does that mean for the financial progression? This is something that I really like, and I think we'll continue to see. So if you look at the comparison between 2018 and 2024, we doubled the ARR in that time frame. Our recurring revenue getting doubled from 31% to 60%. Gross margins moving 58% to 68%. That will be even higher after the mobility business divestiture. And the EBITDA percent of revenue going from the 22.6% to 27%. So you're seeing and we are demonstrating that our strategy and our focus and our simplification is -- actually, is working and it's delivering results. So I think I'll stop there. I spent my 15 minutes or maybe a little bit longer, but I'll turn it over to Tami.

Of course. Thank you so much, Phil. This was a very insightful introduction to people who may not be familiar with the Trimble.

So I wanted to start off the Q&A but -- to the audience. If anybody has a question, feel free to raise your hand, and we'll address your question. So to start off, 2 top-of-mind topics. The first one is the reaudit process that you're going through. So could you share the latest update on that? And when you expect that to be completed?

Sure. So we -- when we did our earnings call, Rob and I talked about -- I'll say, there were 2 key items. One is at that time, and we've been months into the reaudit, that our -- there's been no indication -- nothing that we've seen so far would indicate a change in our financials. So I think that's point one. Point two is we did say that we thought we were at the end of -- or getting to the end -- the end was in sight, and we said we thought it would be about a month. We're at or over a little bit a month right now. We still have not obviously announced anything. But we do believe that we're getting to the end of the road. Ultimately, it's not Trimble that can dictate the timing of this. It's our auditors have to -- they're going to be done when they decide they're going to be done. I can tell you right now that we are -- this is my #1 priority. Company's #1 priority is to get through this. So we -- our resources that we need to do this, they are being pivoted and they're focused on this. Big kudos to the Trimble team, and I think this is a demonstration of our culture is -- as you can imagine, this is quite a bit of work that's not expected, and our teams are working nights, they're working weekends. They're very quickly turning around the request from our auditors. So again, we're anticipating that we're at sort of close to the end line. But ultimately, we're not at the finish line yet. And that time line is really going to be dictated by when our auditors are done.

Got it. That's helpful. And I think you are holding off the repurchase that you had announced. Do you still plan on completing that once this is behind?

Yes. So we did announce -- so back at the beginning of the year, we had an $800 million share repurchase authorization. In Q1, we used $175 million of that. So we have $625 million left in that authorization. We had said we were anticipating that being done using most or all of that by the end of the year. Unfortunately, with the audit, we suspended that. So once the audit is done, we would expect to reinstate that and continue. I don't know if we'll be able to do the full amount before the end of the year. But the plan is, as soon as the audit is behind us, and we can file our K and our Qs, that we would be able to then reinstate that plan. And we are still committed to using all of that $625 million that's remaining as soon as practical and as soon as we can get the buyback. And obviously, that's subject to share prices and other things because we want to be smart about how we buy it back, but that's what we would expect.

So moving on to the other top-of-mind topic, which is the telematics divestiture you just announced on Sunday. I don't think a lot of people know about Platform Science. So first question, could you tell us a bit about Platform Science? What motivated you to acquire the 32.5% stake? And also just stepping back, the background of this deal, why this transaction? Why now? What investors should take away from this announcement and hope for the next, not necessarily 6 to 12 months, more like 5 to 10 years?

Yes. So as I would say that, again, I mentioned we did 23 divestitures now in the last 4 or 5 years. We're constantly reevaluating our portfolio. And we look through it through the lens of our strategy, what's strategically important. We look at the financial performance, our ability to execute. We say our right to win in those spaces. Do we have the products? Are we executing? Can we actually deliver what the financial results that we're expecting out of that business? So the mobility business for quite some time, if you followed us, it was actually a very healthy business for many, many years. Recently, particularly with some of the market changes with ELD mandates in the U.S., we, quite frankly, had technical depth in that space, and we are playing catch-up. And that brought in a lot of new entrants and actually Platform Science being one of them. And we -- so we struggled. It's been -- we lost approximately 30% of our customers over the last couple of years. So it's a lot of churn within the business. We talked about more churn as we go forward. So as we do with all of our other businesses, we're constantly reevaluating. We looked at this and said, "Okay, what options do we have out there?" And so we did explore some options. It was a targeted process. And we looked at and talked to some companies that we thought would be good homes, and we looked through, let's call it, 3 different lenses. One is, what does it mean for our customers? What does it mean for our employees? And what does it mean for our shareholders? And so we think about and look at, okay, what is the value to Trimble and what is the value to the share -- the Trimble shareholders if Trimble continue to run this business and turn it around? And then how does that compare to what potentially is out in the market? And is there a better option? And so that's the process we ran. We've known Platform Science and have been -- worked with them for quite a while and have known them for quite a while. And they have a great culture. They have a great business. We like the leadership. It's a really, really good fit for our employees. So check the box on the employees. When we think about, is this right for our customers. When we look at the offerings that Trimble brings, we look at the strengths that Platform Science can bring, and we put those together, we believe that this is a great win-win for our customers. It gives them a lot more breadth and a lot of more options out in the marketplace. So works for the customers, great. And then the third one is really what does this look like for our shareholders. And we really believe, and this is one of the main reasons why we took a 32.5% equity stake is that we believe that ultimately, your point in a multiyear view of this, that, one, we can we realize the synergies of the combined unit, and we wanted to participate in the upside of that. And we believe that this business together combined actually has a lot of room to run. And therefore, we really look at this in a multiyear view and what we think the ultimate value could be compared to that with those other options. And when we looked at this, we decided that, yes, this is -- this makes a lot of sense for all of the constituents involved.

Perfect. So let's talk about the core Trimble business. You perform in a very fragmented market, especially if you look at the breadth of your product and point solutions. So what would you say are the 1, 2 or top 3 differentiators you have against competitors?

Yes, I think I'd point to maybe 2 main ones. First of all, it's the depth and breadth of our products. So as I mentioned before, we had a lot of point solutions. I think we probably have the greatest depth and breadth, let's say, within construction tech in the world. And so we compete -- if you look at it just a point solution then we do have competitors at a point solution. We look at the breadth of product, I think we're really unique from that standpoint. And this is when I talked about the bundles. We can go offer a customer bundles that have actually make it a lot easier for the data to flow and for the integration, that becomes really compelling. And quite frankly, it overwhelms or it takes more weight from a decision-maker standpoint than just a point solution, right? And Trimble has fantastic point solutions. In a lot of cases, we're best of breed. In a lot of cases, we're on par. But when the decision becomes, boy, the interconnectivity, the ease of use and the ease of the data flow and the integrations, that becomes more compelling than just we're looking at an individual point solution. And that's where we tend to win. Now the other piece of it that I would say is what's unique about us is where I started with the presentation and I talked about all of the sensors and the data collectors we have in the field. We do have hardware in the field. That's where most of these projects actually start is you need to know what's out in the world, what's physically out there. So with our surveying equipment, how we move the earth with our machine control equipment, all of that then is connected back into the office. So when you think about the field to the office and the digital to the physical, that's something that's very unique about Trimble and what we can do. And so we think that, that's a really compelling value proposition that no other, between the depth of the breadth and the connection to the field, that nobody else can actually duplicate. And so we believe that that's really a competitive advantage, and that's where we see how we can win.

Perfect. So breadth of products and also the hardware component of it. So let's talk about your go-to-market strategy. Can you sort of orient us to your go-to-market for each of the 3 segments? And can this go-to-market strategy that you currently have be an area of transformation down the line? Or you believe the current model is efficient and supportive enough to fuel your growth ambitions?

Yes. So I think with the resegmentation, we sort of already segment a little bit, and I talked about this around the go-to-market. So with the AECO being largely a direct sales motion versus the Field System, which is more indirect. Transportation is a little bit of both. But I think we've got the right blend because we do have both. And we've already sort of transformed. I think I mentioned earlier, around the AECO business that we used to have very siloed sales teams. And earlier this year, when we bought everything under the AECO segment, we combined all of those into a singular sales team. And again, this is -- now they're focused much more on account-based selling that they can look at the cross-sell, the upsell opportunities. We have a lot more visibility into those customers and where -- what products they should be selling. And so I think this -- we've already started to transform and continue on that. And I think we're demonstrating the results of that. Same thing within the Field Systems. Again, we combine the sort of the sales team around that go-to-market, which is the indirect and how we actually manage the channel. And I think we're doing a much better job now with the resegmentation on how we do that. So I think we've done a lot of progress over the year. I'm going to say that there's tweaks and we're constantly evolving that. But we've made some significant changes already this year.

Got it. And any questions from the audience? So let me continue. I want to focus on AECO for the moment. I think it's one of -- it's your biggest growth segment. A lot of investors ask how should they think about the growth algo of AECO specifically, more of a medium- to long-term view of the growth algo. So what would be a response to that question?

Sure. Let me up level that actually at the company -- to the company level and then -- and what you'll see is the AECO business is a big contributor to this. And I talked a little bit about this in my prepared remarks at the last earnings call. But the way we see the business is the software business is growing much faster than our hardware businesses. And so that's going to lend itself to a better mix, gross margin expansion. And then ultimately, as we think about that, the operating leverage, I mentioned at our last Investor Day, we talked about the 35% operating leverage. I said we expect to be north of that on a go-forward basis. So when you think about the gross margin expansion and then the operating leverage, and I talked about we can see 100 basis points of EBITDA margin expansion annually. That's largely driven by the AECO business, which is, again, a big driver on -- because it is disproportionately growing relative to the other businesses. And again, Q2, 18% ARR growth, 14% revenue growth. So that's a really big contributor to ultimately the company's margin expansion and the company's financial profile as we go forward.

So a quick follow-up on that. The 18% ARR growth in AECO, I think it was last quarter. Is the target to elevate that to 20% plus, 25% plus? Or some number you would want to throw out there?

I think that what we would say or we think about -- again, we're going to have an Investor Day, we probably didn't mention this, in December 10 in New York. So we'll probably hit -- we're going to have more details around our multiyear model and how we think about that. But as I think about the 18%, one of the things that we also have to consider is the sheer size of business and what you need in new bookings to do -- to actually keep at that level. So I think we would expect something more in the mid-teens on a more, let's say, the midterm basis. And that's largely just a function of how big the business has become and how much bookings you actually need to get in order to get to an 18% growth. So it's more of a function of that versus what we believe is ultimately what the market opportunities. We think the market opportunity is there to continue to grow. But again, the size and the year-over-year comps just become much more difficult.

So who are your main competitors in the AECO space? And how do you track market share gain or loss?

It's a great question, and it's actually a tough one to answer. As I talked about before, we compete probably an individual point solutions with multiple competitors. When we look at the breadth of products and we think about our bundling strategy, I think we're pretty unique there in a lot of ways. I mean a lot of companies, they may have a project management software, but they don't have an ERP. Or they may have an ERP, but they don't have estimating, for example, right? So that's where I think we're unique. So it's really hard to sit there for us to say, here's how much market share we have relative to the whole AECO business. It's really more around the point solutions, but that's less meaningful for us because really our strategy with this bundling and the Connect & Scale strategy is we believe we can win with those bundles. We believe we can win with that connectivity. And so it becomes really hard and probably less meaningful to try to get some market share with those individual products because again, ultimately, we think about the connectivity and the bundling, we think that's the winning formula.

A near-term question, are you seeing any slowdown or change in buyer behavior within AECO given all the macro noise around rate, election?

Yes. I think that -- particularly in AECO, when you think about construction, I'll start with -- we sell ROI. And a lot of the products we have are mission-critical products. So if you think about -- Viewpoint is a big -- one of our big products, that's an ERP for construction. Regardless of how well you're doing or you're not doing in any given year, you tend to not rip out your ERP. So we see very little -- low churn in a lot of those products because we sell ROI. And ROI is relevant, whether the market is good or the market is a little bit tougher. So that's one point. Now we did talk about in the -- in Q2, and one of the nice thing about our Connect & Scale strategy is we have much more visibility over what the market is doing, where the money is flowing. And what we're able to do is we were able to see -- we're -- let's say, our core has typically been in the middle market, we were able to see that there was more money and there was more opportunity in the SMB market, going down market a little bit. And Mark Schwartz, who runs our AECO business, he and his teams were able to see where those opportunities were. So we were actually able to pivot our sales organization to go after where the opportunities were. And we've seen really, really solid growth in the SMB market. And so we have seen a little bit of changes, but there's -- where there's sort of negative around the residential, you started to see positives. There's money still flowing from the IIJA. We see money flowing for the onshoring and the nearshoring, the data centers, EV battery plants, cement conductor and chip fabrication. So there is money coming in and it's kind of offsetting, I would say, some of the other negatives, for example, with residential. But again, we sell ROI. I think when you look at the numbers, the 18% growth and the 14% growth, yes, there's a lot of macro noise, but we're continuing to perform and deliver.

Wonderful. So let's switch to Field Systems. How should we think about the cyclicality of the Field Systems' business given it has a relatively larger hardware component to it? So any thoughts on the cyclicality of this piece?

Yes. So that is a book and burn business. And so that's one that probably has more exposure to macros than, let's call it, our software business. Now, I would say that, yes, there is some exposure there. If I think about 2024, specifically, we weren't bullish on the hardware businesses. We were sort of low single digits is what we predicted. We have some Fed dynamics, which I think we talked about a little bit, which creates a hard year-over-year comp. But I think the year is playing out where we thought it would be. And so when we think about our H1 numbers, I think they're pretty much in line with where we expected. So I think we have better visibility into the market and the expectations. Part of this is sort of the resegmentation and how we think about that. Now I will also say that some of the portfolio actions that I mentioned before between the Ag JV and now the mobility, that reduces our exposure to some of the cyclicality. If you think about mobility and telematics business, a lot of that -- those boxes can be tied to OEM and truck sales. And if that's down, that tends to put pressure on that business. Ag, for anybody that follows the ag business, you know that it's in a big downturn and it fell off relatively quickly. And again, so by moving -- when we move that into the JV, we weren't foreseeing the downturn the way it is. But it actually -- that was a significant part of our hardware business. That was cyclical, and we've really sort of removed that now, and I think we've lowered the volatility overall for the company. And you can see that in the mix when we talk about 75% software services recurring, 60% recurring. That mix continues to change, and that should continue to lower the volatility overall for Trimble.

So when I look at your Field Systems' performance, you've had very impressive growth in 2022 and saw some contraction in 2023 and you're saying 2024 is playing out part expectations. Looking ahead, are there any growth catalysts to look forward to for 2025 and beyond for this specific segment?

Yes. I think there's sort of some very distinct year-over-year issues that drove some of that. So if I go back to COVID, if you remember, we were all shut down, factories were shut down. And a lot of places, we -- our dealers and others couldn't actually sell products. We couldn't get products in a lot of cases. So what ended up happening is the supply chains were very tied up in that time frame. When we got out of that, there was a backlog of demand. And so we had a very good year. But on top of that, the dealers weren't just fulfilling sort of the backlog. The dealers were actually prebuying because the supply chains and the parts shortages were so lengthy, they were buying a lot more because they're prebuying for -- going forward. And so what that meant was, obviously, once we were fulfilling those orders, we sort of came off a low comp and then had a -- we're fulfilling all the backlog of demand and so that created that spike. And then what happened is we actually got overcooked if you will, or there was too much product when the supply chain actually freed up because of all the prebuying. And so then subsequently, we had to sort of clear up the inventory and get back to a normalized inventory. So that's -- it was kind of a trough and a spike and then another down because you get through -- those distinct events. For 2024, we also -- we had -- in 2023, we had a banner year. So we actually, for a lot of our geospatial gear, we actually sell to the government. That's a really lumpy business, and it's really hard to predict. Last year, we had a really good year. A lot of that happened in Q2 of last year. We knew coming into this year that we weren't going to get those levels of the Fed orders. And so that sort of created a year-over-year comp issue with our Field Systems segment. As we go forward, we think we're in a really good place with our inventories, both Trimble's and with our dealers. And so again, as we go forward, and we'll get some more -- some better numbers as we think about the Investor Day around there. But I think we're in a good place so that when we go into 2025, we're at a place that we want to be. But it's a tough business to predict to say, here's how I think in a multiyear -- I think we can look at a multiyear and say, it's sort of a GDP plus business. But in any given year, you sort of have these dynamics that could make it higher or lower based on -- relative to that.

Got it. So we have about 5 minutes. I want to spend some time on the transportation and logistics segment. So following the divestiture of the telematics business, you have enterprise software, you have maps and you have Transporeon. So on Transporeon, remind us what the growth expectations were for this business when you acquired? How has the growth tracked since? And has that growth expectation change either up or down since you acquired that business?

Yes. So Transporeon's -- first of all, I'd say it's a really good business. What ended up happening is after we announced that we're buying and we signed the deal, freight market in Europe. So it's focused in Europe and the freight market just went into a recession. And the way that Transporeon -- we monetized the transaction is really transaction based. And so when the entire market comes down, the number of transactions comes down, which means the revenue comes down. And so that was sort of the dynamic. We also have this other dynamic, which is our spot price versus our -- the contract rates. And so we get a multiplier if freight is procured via the spot market versus the contract market. And so those 2 things tend to, one, market goes down; and two, you tend to move more toward contract rates, which we monetize at a lower level. We have very little, if any churn in that business. It's a function really of the market itself. I will say the positives we talked about, we had record bookings in Q4, Q1. We had record number of bookings in Q2 of this year. The business is actually -- it's performing, but it's got sort of this -- a bit of a headwind because of just the overall market and Europe is down. Now what ends up happening is once the market recovers, that dynamic sort of flips, which is the volume of transactions actually go up. So we monetize more and there's very little incremental cost to do that because that's just a function of the number of transactions going through the platform. And as we see a mix shift, we should also see an inflection point there on the revenue. And so we're growing today. We're growing double digits in that business. But when the market comes back, we believe that, that can actually be an accelerator to even bigger growth.

Got it. 2 final questions. The first one, the T&L organic ARR growth was about 11%, ex the North American mobility business. Can this segment's ARR elevate to the mid-teens you just spoke about for the overall enterprise? Or how is the growth profile for this segment versus the rest of the portfolio?

Yes, I think there's definitely an opportunity. And I think what ultimately is really going to drive that is what I just talked about, Transporeon. Transporeon's going to be a big piece of the remaining business. And the expectations is that would sort of have outsized growth, which will bring up the segment. So -- but that's going to mostly be the catalyst for that, I would say, to bring that number up for the segment.

Got it. And no fireside chat is complete without a question on capital allocation. Any thoughts what Trimble's priorities are?

Sure. We talked about this and I get to repeat myself, which is a fun thing. And we'll get to do that -- well, maybe I should do it more often. Look, our capital allocation, we think about, let's say, 4 buckets. We think about putting money back into the business, so this is the OpEx. We've already talked about more than our -- more than the incremental year-over-year OpEx spend in the company is going to AECO and that's going to drive the revenue growth. Half of that spend is actually going in -- the incremental spend is actually going into the sales and marketing and about 1/4 to G&A and 1/4 to R&D. But all of those are really supporting the growth of that business. So that's number one, the organic growth of the business. Number two, we've talked about M&A. So M&A, our focus is small tuck-in acquisitions. So we have a methodology that we now -- or a playbook that we're running. And we've done it with a company called the Traqspera that we did a few years ago. It's a mobile app for time cards. Bought that company, quickly integrated it to Viewpoint and doubled the number of users within a couple of months, right? That's the playbook as we go forward with M&A. Third one is debt, where are we at in our leverage ratio. How do we think about that? Well, after the ag deal, we paid down $1 billion of debt. We have no prepayable debt left. So we're in a good spot. We're about 1x leverage ratio. Our target is about 2.5x, so well below that. So I think that's in a good spot. And then we talked about the share repurchases and the $625 million that we're committed to buying back once we get past the audit issue. So that's how I think about -- that's the framework as I think about the capital allocation. But more discretely, that's how I think about the capital allocation in the short term as well. That's what we said we're going to do, and we're going to do it.

Perfect. I think we're right on time. Thank you so much, everyone, for joining, and thank you, Phil. We hope to have you back again.

Thank you.