Trimble Inc. (TRMB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone. I'm Brian Gesuale, Senior Analyst at Raymond James. I cover Trimble. Delighted to have the company here to present their story. We think the timing is excellent. The company has had a significant transformation, is in the midst of a big buyback, very clean balance sheet. Margins are moving the right way, recurring revenue is moving the right way. And we think the stock remains an attractive value in here. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Rob Painter, the company's Chief Executive Officer. He's going to go through about 10 to 15 minutes of a presentation. We'll then take questions from both me and the audience. So if you have some teed up, please feel free to raise your hand as we get there. Thank you very much, and welcome, Rob.

Good morning. Good morning. Wake up. Nice to be with all of you. Thanks for taking the time to be here. Okay. I know we're being webcast, but I can see those of you in the room. I'll start with a little 5-finger poll. One means you can barely spell; Trimble and 5 means you could do a scale of 1 to 5, 5 means, you could do this presentation better than me. How well do you know Trimble, 1 to 5? Okay. So I see probably like a 2.5 here do an average presentation today for you. Okay. So I'm going to start with the what, the why and the how of Trimble. Anchor you in what we do, how we're doing it, what our strategy is and the why behind the value proposition that we drive to investor -- to our customers. I mean then what that looks like from a shareholder lens of a business model, all right? So let's get to it. You have been safe harbored and let's talk about what we do at Trimble. Fundamentally, we're serving markets in engineering and construction and transportation and logistics. We're doing that through 3 reporting segments. And our -- we call it our AECO business, by the way, AECO and field systems that represents engineering and construction and then we'll talk about transportation and logistics. In engineering and construction, the AECO is our -- essentially, think of it as our construction software that's serving architects, engineers, the construction companies as well as owners. In our field systems business, think about that as the hardware out in the real physical world that's doing the work for our customers. This gets to a lot of the roots of Trimble and serving and machine control and guidance markets. And then in transportation and logistics, we're serving shippers. We're serving carriers. We're serving brokers. We're serving them across the life cycle plan, procure to execute. By the way, that life cycle and engineering construction looks like plan-design-build-operate. There's breadth to what we're doing across the value chain serving what we see as the key constituents in each of these markets. That's the what of Trimble. Let's talk about the how of Trimble. We have a strategy we call it Connect & Scale. The strategy we launched in January of 2020, right? So we've been playing the same game with this strategy for the last 5 years, and we're going to continue to do so. It's paying dividends, it's working for our customers, and we think our shareholders as well. Now go back for a moment. We're doing a lot of things across these markets. There's the breadth and depth of what we do. We think it's pretty unique connecting work in the office with work in the field. That's connecting the hardware and the software of Trimble, thereby connecting the physical and the digital world. And we believe through that vision to deliver products and services that connect in physical and digital worlds that we can achieve our mission to transform how the way the world works. Thus, the connect and our strategy is connecting those users, the data, the stakeholder, the workflow across the served industries, again, mostly engineering and construction and transportation and logistics. Scale and our strategy is about making ourselves easier to do business with, so that we can efficiently and effectively grow and scale as a company, Connect & Scale. We've been a company that's been acquisitive over a long baseline, and the Connect also serves to us as, let's call it, a motivating factor to make the pieces of the puzzle we have work very well together, okay? So the what, the how and the why. Okay, why are we doing this? The industries that we serve have fundamental challenges with doing the work efficiently and effectively. We talk about our value proposition in the form of delivering better, faster, safer, cheaper, greener. Okay, construction. You can all -- I can find it in a room like this, people can tend to relate to construction. How many of you have ever done a remodel of some sort, remodel or a construction project? Help me out, raise your hands if you've done that. Keep your hands up if your project was delivered on time and on budget. And it was easy and a pretty awesome flawless process. We had 1 hand in the room. That's the Why of what we're up to. So it's a complicated, fragmented industry that requires communication, coordination and collaboration if we're going to deliver better outcomes. If you're using our technology out in the field and you're using machine control and guidance, that's a GPS-enabled equipment. We invented it in agriculture years ago. Today, we do it in the civil construction space. We take that 3D design model, and we turn it into a machine model. You move the dirt right the first time, guess what, you're getting 40% plus productivity improvements. when you do that. When you're using our software at Trimble, this isn't shelfware, this is a software that is a system of record. It's fundamental to the work that our customers do, that you're using it every day. Better, faster, safer, cheaper. I'll let you read the stats on the screen of the value proposition that we're driving for our customers, right? This is fundamental improvements. Customers have in our markets that we serve have challenges with productivity. They have challenges finding labor, much less skilled labor to do the job. There's risk that has to be managed on generally tight margins, and we help them do that. Let's talk about the transformation of our company. So start to look more at the model, the financial model. And I'll talk about it qualitatively on the left and quantitatively on the right-hand side of the screen. Qualitatively, over the last 5 years, as we've been pursuing this Connect & Scale strategy, we've had to transform and we have transformed ourselves such that we can transform the way the world works. We've done 23 divestitures over the last 5 years. Our mantra to a large degree, has been to simplify and focus our company. And I think we've done a pretty good job of that over the way. When I talk about connecting and scaling Trimble, hey, if we're going to connect Trimble, we've had to invest into the underlying systems ourselves, actually had to digitally transform ourselves so that we can go digitally, transform the customers and go after the market opportunity there, okay? So we've invested back into our business with enabling systems. We've transformed how we productize, we've transformed how we go to market as a company. The productization, it looks like a lot more of the bundling of our technology. I'll talk about Trimble Construction One is 1 example that's driving the ARR growth that we'll get to here in a bit. I said 23 divestitures, it's 22. That's the 23rd is -- comes in the form of a joint venture that we did in our agriculture business. We closed the sale of our transportation mobility business just a few weeks ago. Along the way, we've been paying down debt. We've been doing buybacks and then at our earnings call a few days ago, we announced taking the remaining $625 million of share buyback authorization up to $1 billion as a sign of the commitment we have to fulfill that promise of buyback. Simplification of the story. We went from 4 segments to 3 segments. And so I trust that it's getting easier and easier to understand the Trimble story and to be able to see a cleaner view of what we do and the metrics to support each of those. I'd invite you, if you were on the 1 or 2 side of that 5 finger poll of knowing us, look at our Investor Day material, we had an Investor Day on December 10 and we laid out the state of Trimble in depth on each of not only the company level, but each of the 3 reporting segments where you could find a lot more detail. Okay, that's the qualitative. What's the quantitative, may I start to get closer to where you're interested, is look at the ARR, so on the screen, you see a view of 2019 to 2024. It actually understates what we've done. If I look at ARR, which has almost doubled, where we've gone from $1.2 billion to over $2 billion in ARR. And I say it's understated because we did 22 divestitures. The 2024 captures that, the 2019 is where were the reported numbers. This isn't a mild shift or linear growth in the company. This is a fundamental transformation. This is moving from 36% ARR to 62% ARR. This is becoming over 70% software company over that time frame. Our business model is asset-light. We run negative working capital. We run CapEx that's less than 2% of revenue. Over the last 5 years, we've generated over 40% operating leverage over that time frame. That's driven over 500 bps of EBITDA improvement in the last 5 years. The structural transformation though, is the one where I think is most indicative of the work that we've done, over a 1,200 basis point increase in our gross margins. It's not a type of over 1,200 basis points increase in gross margins. We now have over 70% gross margins. So for those of you who may have known Trimble 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, this is a fundamentally different organization that's a software-forward business, transforming the way the world works. So let's talk about what's unique around Trimble. We think that we do think we're unique in that ability to connect physical, digital, hardware, software, office in the field. We also think we're unique and scope of what we do. I've talked about that in the form of trillions, billions, millions and thousands. We manage over trillion dollars of construction through our systems today. We manage tens of billions of dollars of freight at Trimble. We have millions of users and customers of our software generating millions of 3D models around the world. And we have hundreds of thousands of instruments and machines in the real world that are operated by Trimble technology, trillions, billions, millions and thousands. And if you subscribe to an AI forward or a data forward or AI forward world, that's the kind of moat that you would like to see. If you subscribe to that AI view of a world and you think about the LLMs, we believe institutionally that the vertical matters on top of that. But this becomes our strength. This work in the office and work in the field is unique, and we call it a physical AI layer that we can bring to the work that we do. And then let's talk about the view forward on the business with the last couple of pages. So at that -- at our Investor Day in December, we laid out the model for the company going forward. Think high single -- mid- to high single-digit revenue growth, the ARR growth in the teens. That's the one I pay most attention to. I'm on the right-hand side of the screen as I'm talking, we believe we have an ability to compound earnings, growing this earnings EPS in the mid-teens, so well in excess of the revenue growth, continuing to drive that operating leverage and drive the cash flow, again, we're an asset-light business. How are we going to drive that revenue? One of the things we talked about in ARR. One of the things we talked about at Investor Day was the cross-sell and upsell opportunity resident inside the portfolio we have. We believe we have an opportunity to address $1 billion of cross-sell within our construction software, and we believe we have an opportunity to address over $400 million of cross-sell and upsell within our transportation and logistics franchise. So we're quite oriented both with our capital allocation and our people systems, processes to go affect this -- positively affect this opportunity. We laid out a model through 2027, 3-4-30, let's keep it simple. We want to get to $3 billion of revenue, over $4 billion -- $3 billion of ARR, $4 billion of revenue and 30% and EBITDA margin. So to be able to continue to grow, that's the outcome that we would expect to see by 2027. And then so then I'll leave you this with a set of key takeaway, it is a little more qualitative on the left and quantitative on the right. The markets we're serving are large, global, underserved and underpenetrated. There's a secular digitization taking place in the markets that we serve. That's the top left with the size of the addressable markets. Our strategy, Connect & Scale, still on the left-hand side is simplified and focused our company and our teams. We believe our right to win in the markets and with our strategy happened at the intersection of having the right product, the right tech stack and the right go-to-market motions. And that these are unlocking the growth and the differentiation in the company. On the right-hand side of the revenue streams that we have, we believe the ARR is the highest value added of the stream. So over $2 billion in ARR, last year grew 16% organically. We believe that's rare ARR territory. And we've had the bookings growth in 2024 to support the guide that we put forward in 2025. gross margins over -- with a 7 in front of them now. That's a structural improvement in the company, helping drive that EBITDA margin close to 28% and reinforce that asset-light model. I think with that, that's my last page. And I wanted to make sure we left time, Brian, for you to go through the Q&A.

Perfect. That sounds great. Thanks so much, Rob. Like I said, we'll take some questions from the audience. But probably Rob and I will chat for a couple of minutes; if you have a question, raise your hand, and we'll take it from there. Okay Great. You want to have seat or you want to stand?

I think I want to stand.

It's Tariff Tuesday, right? So maybe we start off. Your business has got a lot of recurring elements to it. It's mission-critical. But maybe just talk about this uncertainty on tariffs and what it means when you look out and talk to your customers?

So I think about this at a couple of levels. One that you can see, which is a discrete impact of tariffs. And then even then you have to double click, which tariffs are you talking about? Are we talking about what was announced -- well, actually, what's in place as a 1201 -- or do we -- are we extending that to what could be reciprocal or ... It gets pretty complicated, right? If you -- so we can talk discretely about Canada, Mexico and China, by the way, let's not forget that if we want. And then there's a whole another vector, which is just what does uncertainty mean? You're right? And if the world decides to take a deep breath and pause, what is -- how does that flow through? I'll start a little bit with that one. On that one, I've yet to have somebody convince me that the world taking a deep breath is a good thing for the market. So I'm not going to stand up here and tell you that, that is. We haven't seen that in our -- in the demand profile in our segments yet. So I can say from what I -- what we see today, haven't seen it period or maybe comma yet. So I don't have an insight, a unique insight to offer of what we might see. What I can tell you, that's a macro. What I can tell you is a micro as we woke up on January 1 with over $2 billion of ARR and we woke up on January 1 with the bookings, the ACV bookings that we had in 2024 to be a growth layer on top of that. The visibility, predictability we have into our business is higher than it's ever been. So in terms of an ability to withstand any kind of whether it's a storm or a breeze, I'm as confident as I've ever been in my 19 years of working at Trimble. That would be the most definitive thing I can say is we've got more visibility than we've ever had into this business. And in a world that's unpredictable or, let's say, a world where the economy isn't as good, I go back to our value proposition because we deliver better, faster, safer, cheaper and greener. If you need to be more productive than ever, you want to use Trimble. We're not selling shelfware, we're selling systems of record. So I like the position that we have. I like the work that we do. I like the value that we deliver to our customers to work through. let's say, whatever the world might bring us. That's more of a macro. Do you want me to go deeper on?

No, I appreciate those comments. I think that makes a lot of sense to the audience here. I actually want to talk about the AECO business. It's the crown jewel of the portfolio from my perspective. I get a lot of questions on what exactly you're touching across each of those AECO areas and then who you're competing with and why you win? I think maybe that would be some helpful color for the group.

Yes. So if we talk about what's inside the A, the E, the C and the O; Architect is serving, our A is serving Architects and designers, excuse me, E is serving Engineering. We'll think we'll call them an engineering, if you know the term BIM, Building Information Modeling and for construction in the C, think about that serving general Contractors, both vertical and horizontal Contractors. And then O is the Owners. And we think -- well, we know within each of those slices A, E, C and O, each of them has over $200 million of ARR. So it's a rather diverse mix of business that we have. A little bit more than half of our business is in North America. So we're a global business as well. That's the highest level of who we're serving within AEC. And again, we think that is very unique. Who's got the most at stake when a project is later overbudget. It's the owner. That's why we believe in serving that market. If you work backwards from there and you have that belief set if you really want to drive productivity, we believe you need to connect and link that work between the architects and designers and those who are actually out in the field doing the building. Within engineering, we serve 5 main sub-trades; mechanical, electrical, plumbing, steel and concrete. And why would we care about this 5 because there's a lot more than 5 trades that come together to build something like the room that we're in or the hotel that we're in today, it's because those 5 represent 2/3 the cost of the building. That's the highest labor rates and the highest raw materials. So if you want to go drive productivity and efficiencies, follow the money, follow the problems, and that's why we serve that aspect of the contracting and engineering market. We believe very deeply in serving, we believe very deeply in 3D, the power of 3D, the constructible model, not just a pretty picture, but actually what you have to build. Just take a room like we're in today, or this facility, when you're engineering and designing [Audio Gap] accuracy. This isn't just a line, saying this represents the steel. This is actual dimensional accuracy you turn a fabricator of steel into a 3D printer because you're fabbing off of the 3D model. When you're doing your estimates for this building, you're doing it off the exact quantities. It's a model-based workflow. Now think about intersecting all those different models and you can eliminate the rework before it ever happens. That's the nature of what we're doing and why we're doing an AECO at a competitive level, I tend to view -- in fact, I do view most of classic competitors is also a big element of competition in our market. So I tend to think of it as more peers than I do competitors. We know all our competitors/peers pretty well. And a lot of our customers -- mutual customers, asked us to have interoperability between our technologies. The concentric circles of where we overlap tend to be small as opposed to fundamental overlaps and there's a bit of a difference of who we compete against in that, A, the E, the C and the O. So where we stand out and our unique is that ability to have the breadth and depth. That breadth and depth unlocks selling opportunities, the selling opportunities and how we go to market at a product level is we sell through a commercial framework called Trimble Construction One. So we're designing our products with over 25 pre-built packages, bundles to make it easier to serve the different customer personas. So take the bespoke nature out of creating a solution and prepackage a set of offerings. That removes friction for our sellers of knowing what to put together, it removes friction from our customers because we're making it easier to do business with us. We see that showing up in the business results, the AECO business delivered high teens, just shy of 20% ARR growth last year, on a well over $1 billion in ARR. That's not easy to do, it only happens with a great deal of intention. And the team grew ACV bookings in excess of that. So we believe it's competitively differentiating.

That's great. Now in AECO, you've got a mature blueprint of transformation, and we've really seen it across the business metrics and everything else. Where are you in the other 2 segments in terms of bringing that transformation on? And what are your thoughts on what those businesses can be over time?

It's an excellent point and good question. The -- I talked in at the beginning about transforming ourselves so that we could transform the way the world works. We put the transformation ourselves effort first and primarily into this AECO business. We felt 5 years ago that this had -- this was the best macro opportunity for us. It actually also happened to have the most complexity in the company because it had been largely built through a number of acquisitions. And so we went there first to develop the playbooks. So we want AECO to be the tip of the spear for the rest of the company. So I would tend to say we're closer to the fourth inning of the work that we're doing in AECO and in the earlier innings within field systems and transportation and logistics because we're beginning to take those playbooks and implement them into the rest of the company. And that's also played into that view forward we have in the business of where we -- if we can unlock even half or a fraction of what we've unlocked through these changes in AECO into the other parts of the business, good things should happen.

Right. Exciting to see that occur. One question I get a lot from investors is on the hardware business. If I look at that, some people might suggest, well, does this business fit? Could that be a candidate for divestiture? I think you see it as more strategic. But I also think that you've also got your market motion is a little bit different, and it's more recurring for you even on the hardware side. Can you maybe bundle those elements and kind of talk about the hardware business?

Yes. So I think we're -- I think the webcast is also not just audio. We each got one of these phones in our hand is this company this without the physical? I think it's owning the rails out into the field. And I think now in this era of AI having that reach into the real physical world is more unique and differentiated than ever, I see more lights going on with our investors these days to the value and the uniqueness of having that hardware. Construction doesn't only happen in an office, it happens out in the real world. Having that reach out into the real world, we think, is highly unique and differentiated. It's the only way you can connect the office and the field and the physical and the digital is actually having physical. So if you subscribe to that notion, then you would like having -- you would like Trimble having the business, the physical business, the hardware business that we do today. And as Brian pointed out, we also think about transforming those business models. Actually, the highest ARR growth segment we had in the company last year was in Field Systems, which is generally what I'm referring to as our hardware business. That means we're disaggregating the value of the system we sell more and more into the physical and the digital aspect. So having hybrid business models where we may sell that system at a lower cost than we did historically and monetizing the software and a recurring element. That's what's driving some of that ARR growth. In some cases, we go full subscription on the hardware. So something closer to hardware as a service. Now I'm not a believer that we'll get to full hardware as a service in the near future. So I also want to be careful not to overextend or get over my skiis on what I think is full potential. But I do think that it's a highly unique and differentiated what we can do in the hardware business through a monetization model. And by the way, this is a reporting segment distinction we make with field systems in AECO. I promise you, there's not a single customer that cares what segment of Trimble they're doing business with. They're doing business with Trimble. They expect us to act like it. It's a totally false distinction to see what we see on the -- or what I showed on the screen with reporting segments because if you're a civil contractor doing business with Trimble, you need an ERP. We have that. It just happens to be in our AECO segment. And if you are buying and you're buying machine control and guidance, which shows up in our Field Systems segment, you need estimating software, you're often using design software as well. It crosses the lines blur and more and more we're packaging the offerings across all of Trimble as needed.

Great. Maybe just a last one. Let's hit the leverage on the balance sheet, very clean balance sheet. Talk about the buyback and the timing and how you're thinking about that. And then you also indicated potentially the appetite for some M&A. Maybe just go through those and wrap it up here.

Yes. So we have a long-term leverage target to be below 2.5x. I think we're closer to 0.7x, 0.8x right now, so we've significantly delevered over the last couple of years. Between that and what we see as a bit of a dislocate in the stock price relative to peers, and we've leaned into -- we're leaning into, I should say, into buyback. And so that's why we took that authorization from the $625 million up to $1 billion a couple of weeks ago, and we said that we'd be active in the market here in the first couple of quarters, especially active on that first tranche of the $625 million before that incremental $375 million. We also, at the same time, have been an acquisitive company over time. Think about that in a couple of buckets. The first would be tuck-in M&A when you're selling a platform like we are today, that land and expand is a very attractive motion. So to bring in a new feature, let's say, onto the platform, and I said the word feature on purpose because I don't think of it as it has to be a new business in there. When we can put this in the hand of over 1,000 sellers in that software segment alone, we're seeing when we've done these tuck-in plays in the last few that we've done, we've been able to double the size of the customer count within a quarter or 2 of owning it compared to the baseline prior to that. Highly attractive stream. We will do those, let's say, wherever we can find good ones. We want to be intentional and fast on those. Those are -- and we see those as very high ROI opportunities that, that product and the go-to-market motion unlocks. And usually, that's a sort of an easy check mark. Second category of M&A, we talked about were some potentially larger acquisitions, very biased towards the construction software side of the house here in the near to midterm, given the nature of the strength and the competitive position we think we have that has us looking to play offense. Of course, that will always happen within ROI consideration. I think our job is to put capital to its highest and best order use and to really and we got to get that intersection of strategic and financial right. And so we'll be opportunistic. I want to be inside the tent always, if there's something happening out there. So not an over signal, so much as to just say we like the position we have and we want to play offense, and it just has to run through the right ROI filter.

Great. Thanks so much, Rob. We got a dip to the breakout room downstairs. So hopefully, you'll join us there and appreciate all your attention today.

Thank you.

Thank you.