Xerox Holdings Corporation (XRX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Day 2 of the TMT Conference. My name is Erik Woodring. I lead Morgan Stanley's hardware research here based out of New York. Before I get into who are with here, just a quick disclosure statement. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley research disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please return to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. So I'm delighted to be welcomed by Steve Bandrowczak, CEO of Xerox; and Mirlanda Gecaj, CFO -- new CFO of Xerox to the stage. Just a quick background, Steve. Steve has been at Xerox for more than half a decade, was President, COO, became CEO in August 2022. Mirlanda joined in 2022. And up until recently was Chief Accounting Officer, now CFO. So thank you both for joining us today.

Thank you. Great being here.

Thank you.

Perfect. So maybe I think it would be most helpful to start, Steve. Just look back on the last 24 months, a lot has changed both from the business, from a strategy perspective since you took the helm as CEO. What's kind of most important that has changed under your leadership?

Yes, I think a lot we've done over the last 24 months. We announced the reinvention of the company and really had a bunch of different components to it. First was how do we get back to operational efficiencies in our core business, generating roughly $400 million of incremental gross profit through our reinvention program. And that required a couple of different things. One is strategically what we did with Palo Alto Research Center, what we did with XRCC, which was the equivalent in Canada; what we did with our finance business and we called FITTLE, now with our forward fund agreement, what we're doing there generating free cash. It allows us to go and invest in our company, culminating in a new Board in May of last year, which allowed us to really kickstart and really drive the investment back into our business. And so last year, we went through an organizational change we put in we call GBS, Global Business Services. We realigned to our economic buyer and then we started to execute our overall reinvention strategy around geo simplification, operation, product simplification, more importantly, to get to our goal of how do we stabilize our business in terms of revenue, get back to growth. And then more importantly, how do we get back to double-digit operating profit. Two key components of that last year. We acquired a company called ITsavvy, which is growing our IT Solutions business. And if you think about today, we have over 300,000 SMB clients that we sell into today that we now can bring IT solutions to. That gives us and grows our TAM of about $60 billion in the print space to over $700 billion in the IT solutions space. So think about 10x our expansion in terms of existing accounts that we have today, we now can bring IT solutions into. Second piece of that is on digital services and our GDS business and really driving and helping our clients with this journey in digital services. How do you think about productivity in the workplace? How do you think about getting more out of data, whether it's in print or whether it's around any other type of data, how do you do things like intelligent document processing? So at the end of the day, really, how do we get back to growth in revenue in areas of getting back to 20% of our business as we look forward, will be in growth areas, right? The CAGR in terms of IT solutions growth is 7 to 8x in a $700 billion TAM and then GDS, and our digital service is $100 billion TAM growing at 10%, right? So that's how we're repositioning the company.

Okay. Okay. That's super helpful. I want to -- you went through a lot there, so I just want to maybe double-click on reinvention because it's kind of key to the story here. Maybe the question is like the key pillars there. I think you went through them, but if we could just like maybe into a little bit more detail. And what is the end goal of reinvention? Where do we get at the end of reinvention?

Yes. So let's state the end goal first, and I'll come back to it, right? So we get back to a business that's stabilized top line and growing and double-digit operating profit. That's really where we're trying to get to. The key pillars of that is, first of all, on what I call geography simplification. If you think about the amount of countries that we had direct business in, I mean, I had my own sales team, my own operations in country, we now have pivoted in certain countries where we can get more profit by going indirect and having partners. And so we went through a lot of that transition in '24, you will see more of that in 2025 on the tail end of it. Second thing is really what I call deconstructing our business and reconstructing it. What do I mean by that? So take a look at every operations from order to cash, you take a look at hire to retire, taking a look at and how do I simplify those processes and then automate as much as I can. So think about RPA, robotics process automation, now do about in transactions per month, where I have people that were manually doing things, I now can do with robotics. I use the same thing with AI technology, right? And so we are simplifying our overall end-to-end processes, driving technology, investing in technology and then driving operational efficiencies. The mix shift, we talked about the mix shift, and it's a big part of our conversation. How do we get to 20% of our revenue that's in growth areas, right? The print industry is not dead by any means, right? But it is declining single digits, 2% to 3%. We want to decline slower than that, which means we're taking share. So on the print side, we want to be able to take share. We want to be able to add value in the print space, right? If you think about what's happening in AI today. AI without data is like a cellphone without network connection. Where is that data? There's data in print, there's data in repositories in terms of documents and so forth. We've played in that space for a long time. We know how to encrypt data. We knew how to redact data. We know how to secure data. Security is a big part of the strategy going forward. One of the big vulnerabilities in most IT shops happens to be the print because the print device is a node on the network. People don't realize the vulnerability that you have in printers, as printers stay out there, they become more and more vulnerable. Think about a laptop that's been in the industry that's been on your network for 5, 7, 10 years, it has vulnerabilities, right? It's not passed correctly. And so we are a really important aggregate in terms of helping security in the IT space, specifically around that work. So making sure that we absolutely start to grow and then add to that mix shift, right? I got to get to 20% of my revenue that's in areas that are growing double digit that will offset the decline in my core business. So that's where we're going.

Okay. All right. Perfect. So maybe let's start at the top and take a step back and talk about the print market. You talked about low-single-digit declines. We've seen kind of behavioral changes, use of digital tools, environmental concerns, return to offices maybe here, but question mark. Can you just maybe help answer that question of what are you seeing from your customers when it comes to the print market? And how do you offset from your own business to take share? How do you offset those kind of headwinds at the market level?

Yes, I think everybody thinks about print just as the office. But think about what's happening with packages, what's happening in retail, what's happening in a lot of different areas? Print is shifting. So in the A4, very specifically A4 color, that grew last year. And so one of the reasons why we went after the acquisition of Lexmark is in the A4 market, that's actually a growth area that we're seeing in the industry, and we're seeing that going forward. Also seeing a shift in types of print and where print is, and we're also seeing a physical to digital, digital to physical world. So if you go into retail today, I don't care what retail it is, sometimes you start in a digital world, it ends in a physical world in a receipt whatever it may be. We're seeing tremendous amount and still have print inside of federal space, state space in areas like law firms and so forth. So there are statutory requirements that just require print. There are things that people don't think about in terms of print. If you go into a large retail store today and you look at things like marketing, right, whether it's on the wall, whether it's shelf pricing, whatever it is. And so there are different types of print. So we have to move where print is going and where the print is. There are billions of pages, billions of print images each and every month in the industry today. We've got to be able to take our share, we've got to be able to move. But more importantly, we've got to be able to add value around that. So we talk about intelligent document processing and the ability to think about everything that's digitized today typically isn't some sort of paper workflow. So you go to a motor vehicle, you go into hospitals, a lot of that starts with a paper flow and now has gone digital, but we're following that. So if you take something that was traditionally a physical paper, and now is inside of an electronic format, we're helping drive that productivity along that process because we understand the process, and we can bring value along that, right?

Okay. And then let's go to the other side of things where I hear from you over multiple quarters now excitement, which is digital and IT services. So the way I guess I kind of think about it is you have a ton of relationships already. You're using IT savvy as maybe the ballast to build out this strategy. It's relatively small today. The goal is to get to 20%. Maybe just help us understand what services are you selling? Is this a reseller business? Is this a VAR business? Is this a distribution business -- where does services fall in terms of value add for you guys?

Yes. So just a quick correction, like this is now approaching over $1 billion for us, right? So we think about it small, it's not small at all, right? It is now a growing piece of our business, growing double digits in a TAM that's growing high-single digits, right? So we're excited about just the overall market. As I said a little bit earlier, you think about today, the print client that we had was roughly a $60 billion TAM that we were selling into. We're now selling into a $700 billion TAM. What does that mean? I can easily double my wallet share on existing client simply by bringing IT solutions into existing accounts. Why am I confident that we can do that? The reality is in the SMB space, they don't have the same luxury as a Morgan Stanley in terms of the type of IT skills that you have at your corporation. They're struggling with security. They're struggling with how do I deal in this world of AI. They're struggling with this hybrid workforce. How do I deal with distributed workforce? How do I deal with workloads going from data centers to the cloud between clouds back to the data center, they have no help, right? And so now they see Xerox, we're already go to find the firewall, we're already trusted, we already have a relationship. What does that mean relationship? Not that we just sell a product to them. We're physically there on the ground. They look at us day-to-day in the eye where we service them and now bringing solutions. So now I can take network as a service, I can take security as a service, desktop as a service and I can bring it in and add it to what I already have in terms of managed print services, and now add another line item to a monthly cost. So if you think about the ultimate subscription model, that's what we're trying to bring into the mid-market. But more importantly, I'm not competing against the big SIs. I'm competing against local and I call it mom-pop shops, small regional players. And it's like, do you want to see Suzi down the block who's been in business for 3 years or you want to deal with Xerox. That's my competitor, right? You can ask me about the VARs. VARs sell product, but they don't have feet on the street and service people like we do, right? And so the way I look at it is we're a trusted relationship, we're on the ground, we absolutely have the right to play because we've been there a long time. We understand their processes and now bringing products and services they didn't have before.

And what are you hearing from your customers when it comes to that? When you hear the response from them, what is something that gives you the confidence that, hey, what we've already launched can become that much bigger?

One of the things we did before we started the reinvention, we went out and started to pull both our partners, big partners for us today, we've got 10,000 partners out there today, and our clients. And we said, if we had these solutions, would you be interested in buying from Xerox? And overwhelmingly, it was yes, okay? And the reason being is, again, we've been there a long time. We've been known innovated in the workspace today, not just in terms of print, but other things we did that came out of Palo Alto research that we put into the industry. And so we are very trusted behind the firewall. We're very trusted inside of these environments. We know what it means on 5:00 Friday night, you got to get print and you got to get paychecks out we're there every day. And we know that. The same thing with hospitals, the same thing with municipalities. And so we're very trusted, we did that survey. And we're seeing it in our early results in early first quarter since we've acquired ITsavvy and we've grown the strategy, we're seeing some very significant growth in our pipeline and we're seeing some early wins. So we're very excited about where we are.

Okay. Great. Two more questions and then Mirlanda we'll bring you into the conversation. Both of them are on print. So first one, you alluded to the Lexmark acquisition. I would love to just get your perspective. You've been partners for some time. Two questions. What are the key benefits that this deal provides Xerox? And then how do we think about kind of the long term or maybe not the long term, but the impact on your financials and the print trajectory with Lexmark in the business?

Yes. Let me take it from the strategic standpoint, and Mirlanda will comment on the economics because the economics -- and we got a question a little bit earlier, they like, how did you get it so cheap, right? How did you get it? And so number one, when we think about today, the growth in print is in the A4 space. Today, Lexmark is a leader in that category in terms of both manufacturing and selling A4 into the industry, number one. Number two, we've been working with them for a long time. So we know what their capabilities are, we know how they work on the supply chain, we know their manufacturing capabilities. This industry will consolidate just like it did in the IBM PC spin down and built Lenovo, started at $300 million, go to $50 billion when I left, right? And so this industry will consolidate. And you're starting to see the Fujis and the [indiscernible] teaming up without acquisitions. Toshiba and Shop connecting without acquisitions. And so they're trying to find ways of creating alliances that help with the tremendous cost pressures. We see the same thing, right? And so the acquisition of Lex helps us with a couple of things. Number one, gets us in a growth area of A4, helps us with manufacturing. By the way, we expand into Asia, which we're not in today. So it's a whole new geography that we bring Xerox into a geography that we've never played before. We also have a very complementary set of clients, meaning that I may have a large retail client that I do the back office. Lexmark does the front office. And so if you go into a lot of retails and you go into point of sales and you go into pharmacies and look at point of sales, you'll see Lexmark equipment because they specialize in that space, specialty printing in the retail space, and they've been very successful at that. They have a very unique channel proposition and their channel markets, which we'll leverage as well. So we see it both in terms of manufacturing, growth in A4, geography expansion and then obviously, very accretive to the deal going forward. Do you want to talk about some of benefits...

Yes. No. Yes, certainly. Thank you, Steve. So very accretive to EPS and free cash flow immediately, actually. So -- and Steve alluded previously to the goals of our reinvention being revenue stabilization as well as double-digit adjusted operating income, Lex helps accelerate both of those. More than $1 of EPS per share, once we realize the over $200 million of synergy that we are expecting from combining the 2 companies. Thinking about balance sheet provides for a much stronger balance sheet. Our gross leverage ratio at December 31, '24, was 6.1, immediately at close, 5.4; and once we realized those gross synergies 4.4. So again, putting us on path to get to our below 3x leverage ratio. So again, it's extremely beneficial financially stronger balance sheet as well as getting us much quicker to the reinvention goals with respect to revenue and adjusted operating income.

Cool. That's exciting. It's really exciting. And as a follow-up to that one more on print is just Steve, I feel like I hear from you more so than many others involved in the industry. This focus on like innovation and differentiation in print. You've obviously mentioned security is a big factor there. What can drive -- and push back on me if this is an incorrect question, but what can drive faster refresh cycles or faster or stronger upgrade rates than we have seen in recent years?

Yes. I think there's a couple of things. One is we've got to help our clients drive productivity in the workspace, right? So there's obviously innovation in and around our end devices. So you think about now, we've just launched a bunch of new products that actually have AI embedded inside of our devices today. We've got a GBU chip, we've got an operating system, and we now have AI capabilities inside of those devices. So if we think about, we now have a lot of our clients that do a tremendous amount of scanning, right? You think about how do you get physical paper into a digital repository? Well, as you're doing that scanning, if you're just going to put it in a back-end repository and you're not indexing it, you don't understand what data is when you're scanning, you lost half the value. Well, we can now help our clients with that, right, where you can scan an invoice and you can put it into your payables process. You can scan a contract, and we can store it and we could take the key terms in that contract that later when you're a legal team or somebody is trying to discover something, we can help you with that, right? So it's not just scanning for the sake of putting it in a PDF document and then storing it in some repository. We scan it, we index it and we give you value going forward, right? So the innovation is all around intelligent documents, but more importantly, how do we help our clients think about data in a different way. And when I say data, we're focused on paper. We can help you with video data. We can help you with voice data. We can help you with sensor data. All of that is extremely important in terms of how you aggregate that and serve it up into large language modules in the AI space. But we're never going to be the Microsoft, we're never going to be in play in that big high end, but somebody has to help these clients with aggregating and understanding how do you take that data and how do you serve it up and how do you make it more productive. So as we see headwinds in the industry in terms of whether it's interest rate increases, whether you have to get more labor out because your minimum wage is going up, all those things drive tremendous pressure on the IT organization to drive more productivity we can help in that mid-market space and help clients and help our customers be more innovative. We talk about how do we get more focus on industry, right? So productivity in a university, productivity in a hospital, productivity in terms of state and local government, productivity in terms of law firms because we've already been there, we can provide technology that helps and drive innovation in and around our print environment.

Okay. Helpful. And Mirlanda, maybe I'll wrap you into this before we move on to another topic is just if we take everything that we just talked about, pre Lexmark acquisition, what does this mean for 2025? Can you just talk about kind of market growth or market performance, share gains, pricing, kind of one-off headwinds and tailwinds, how do we land at how you're thinking about 2025 from a financial model perspective?

Yes. So overall, for 2025, we guided and expect a stronger performance of print. Let me digest that a little bit. So we said or expect revenue will grow low-single digit, and that includes the impact of ITsavvy. If I were to focus just on core print revenue, we expect that decline to taper off and do better than what the print market is currently doing. And we believe print market is declining 2% to 3%. So our expectation is we'll do better. And what is giving us confidence there is a couple of things. It's the double our market share only for we're making investment there through partners. And again, this is all before Lex -- our guidance does not include the impact of Lex acquisition, global rollout of our PrimeLink. We rolled it out in North America in Q1. In EMEA, we rolled it out in Q4. And then sales force productivity. We're doing a lot on with inside sales, clear the desk and all of those will contribute to the productivity of our sales force. And we said in Q4 that had improved about 20%, and we'll continue to see that improvement further in 2025. So with that, the key question that's hanging out there and all of us are grappling with is the tariff, what is the impact? Because our guidance does not have the impact of tariffs for 2025. Our expectation is that -- and again, we are listening every single day, the message is changing. Our expectation is that we will offset the impact of tariffs with pricing and review of our supply chain management. This is sort of what industry and our peers are doing. Already we're seeing price increases in the market, and we'll follow. We certainly are not in any worse position than our peers in relation to the impact of tariffs in 2025. So with that, when I think about also sort of headwinds, right, we talked quite a bit about reinvention, 2024 the impact, the headwinds of actions that we took ourselves, Steve covered geosimplification, product simplification, we will have about 400 basis points negative impact in 2025 because it's just the flow-through from 2024 actions, but we expect that the impact will end in 2025. So no more disruption on the top line revenue as a result of our reinvention action that ends in 2025. And also, we sold our paper business in EMEA, so that impact will flow through a bit in 2025, but it's part of that 400 basis points that I just covered. And all these actions that were took, they really are going to put us in a path of more profitable revenue and simplified processes. Steve mentioned, yes, you lose revenue immediately, but as we take off the fixed costs, for, let's say, the countries that -- or the manufacturing that we got out at that would more than offset the gross profit that we lost as a result of getting out of those countries from a direct indirect model or getting out of manufacturing high-end production and finding better ways to offer those to our customers.

Right. And all -- everything that you just said is inclusive within that...

That's correct.

Okay. Perfect. And Steve and Mirlanda, maybe if you could just quickly touch on financial services? Again, you mentioned it's gone through a bit of a strategy shift. Where do we stand with this business today? Kind of what's the key message on XFS today?

Let me just start from a strategic and then turn it over to Mirlanda for the financials, right? What we did with FITTLE, which was our leasing business and changing it strategically back to a captive and not using our balance sheet, was extremely, extremely strategic for us. Because we knew as we were going through the reinvention we had to make some significant changes and some reinvestment in our business, and that was going to take time. And in order to do that, we had to be able to finance that, right? So the shift of FITTLE to an indirect -- or to a captive and now all the things that we've done over the last 3 years and candidly, what we can do over the next 24 months, was strategic to have the underlying cash that allowed us to do things like ITsavvy acquisition positioned us for the Lex acquisition. So I want everybody to think about what we did with FITTLE and how we move back to a captive, what we're doing with peak as an absolute strategic underpinning to what we're doing at the outset of that when we stop with all the financials and driving free cash flow from financials, we will have all the changes we need from a company standpoint to then get back to operating profit and cash flow that's now going to drive us in the future.

Yes. I think really, we continue through the forward-flow programs. We're still going to get all the strategic benefits that we got today, but with a much lower capital-intensive strategy. So Steve mentioned the balance sheet just wasn't the best use of capital, and hence, the forward-flow agreement. And the expectation is that going forward, the reduction or the reduction in finance receivable will go into paying down debt and continue to delever the company.

Right. Okay. Let's go back to one of the key pillars of -- we've talked about kind of the demand side. Let's talk about the cost side because it's almost more exciting. If you go back to kind of pre-COVID Xerox, you were at double-digit operating margins. That is the goal to return back to double-digit operating margins. My question is twofold. What are the kind of heaviest levers you need to pull to get there? And can you do that with a flat to declining revenue base or do you have to grow to get to double-digit operating margins?

No, look, I think the operation -- if we go back and we look at project [indiscernible] which we did pre-COVID driving significantly $1 billion-plus cost out of the business. We're really more about cost takeout and getting efficiency through cost takeout. What we're doing in reinvention is really completely deconstructing and reconstructing our business. So I talked about GBS, Global Business Services. We're not aligned by function, meaning that I don't have finance, I don't have sales, I don't know sales operations. I have ordered to cash. And really, we look at from the entire process, how do we deconstruct and reconstruct it. Why is that important? Because that is not only a technology play, but it's also business simplification in terms of rules, right? I can't get to a touchless business without having to simplify a lot of my business rules, whether it's around contracts, whether it's around how we do service, how we do warranties, et cetera. So when we talk about the reinvention, it really is positioning our company for future growth. You've heard me talk a lot about the consumer experience, right? Every one of us today in our private lives is dealing with this consumer experience: easy, simple, touchless. We got to do the same thing internally within Xerox, not only in terms of our employees, but in terms of our clients as well as our partners. So the reinvention is really dramatically changing and implementing technology and simplification like we've never done before from a client standpoint. So irrespective of where the revenue goes, irrespective of where we are, we're going to do this and reconstruct and rebuild our business.

Yes. No, and just to add to that. I mean revenue stabilization is definitely key to us getting to that double-digit and we're going to do that, as we mentioned before, make shift to gain share. Those will contribute to our revenue stabilization. And what that means for us is that once you get there, all these $400 million of gross cost savings that we have in the pipeline and we expect to implement by the end of 2026, those will flow through the bottom line much quicker, hence helping and improving the operating profit to get the double-digit growth. And as I mentioned before, Lex acquisition, another enabler to get us there. So that's the combination in our view as to how we get there. But revenue is a key enabler.

Right. Okay. And I'm kind of doing this in reverse order. As I think about the income statement, so I just ask you about operating margins. Now I'm going to ask you about gross margins, and I think about it in reverse, but there has been pressure there. What -- how much of reinvention can address kind of that level of the cost side of things? And really what I'm trying to get is making sure that investors don't think this is just ripping out costs. It's much more intricate than that. But maybe help us understand how that affects kind of the gross margin side of the business?

Yes. So certainly, when I think -- when we think about our goal, we want to have a stable print gross margin, right? We've had -- our gross margin has been 40% range when you think about a few years ago and last year, we ended up 32%, and we expect to be lower. Now 2025 did get hit or 2 headwinds for us in the gross margin for 2025 that we just haven't seen those combine to work together. One of them is we had higher-than-normal price increases and that came as a result of certain product refreshes with one major supplier that we work with. And the second is ITsavvy certainly has a lower gross margin profile than Xerox. Now to be clear, ITsavvy has a need for a much lower SAG, so they have healthy operating margins, but do impact when you think about it from a gross profit at the Xerox level. Now with the Lex acquisition, we expect to gain control on manufacturing and be able to offset product cost increases going forward. So that's, again, adding to the financial benefit and strategic fit of Lex and Xerox acquisition, but that's sort of high-level view of our gross profit expectation.

Okay. Let's turn to kind of free cash flow, capital allocation before we end. So obviously, FITTLE plays a role in cash flow. So for this year, you've guided to $350 million to $400 million of free cash flow. Can you just walk us through the kind of underlying drivers of maybe core free cash flow generation versus kind of the forward funding agreement? And then how that kind of changes over the years, at least as you have insight into?

Yes, certainly. So one, we've been public, and we've mentioned that we expect sort of that finance receivable balance to be somewhere around $1 billion by 2027. So let me just go high level. In the balance sheet, at the end of the year, we had about $1.8 billion of finance receivable. So what that means is I have $800 million that will get benefit in the next 2 years. And I would say it's pretty linear. So that's the story when you think about the finance receivables, and what we expect to gain. Now expectation is that we'll keep looking at that $1 billion balance and see whether there is an opportunity to further reduce it and get the benefit to our free cash flow. Now going back to the free cash flow for 2025 in the guidance. For '24, as I mentioned, we still expect the sale of finance receivable to be having a large contribution to our free cash flow. It will offset some headwinds that we have in 2025. One of them is we had change in inventory terms with one of our suppliers. So that's negatively impacting the working capital. We are investing. So you'll see higher CapEx in 2025 as a result of our investment technology and tech stack going forward as part of reinvention. And then we have another year of higher-than-normal or higher-than-expected restructuring charges. We announced in 2024, beginning of 2024, 15% cut or reduction in our workforce, and that has an impact, right, the cost to get and what we're paying out for restructuring. So when you take all of those together, that's what's impacting our free cash flow in 2025. Now reinvention, our goal, increase in our adjusted operating profit going forward, all of those and improvement in working capital and expectation that your restructuring payments will come down, your pension payments will come down, all of those then will bring your free cash flow in a normalized range of adjusted operating income.

Right. Okay. Maybe let's end on capital allocation. Maybe love to ask each of you, Steve, just starting from kind of like the strategic side of things, how do you think about the priorities because they have shifted over the years? And then Mirlanda, maybe put some numbers behind that.

Yes. So look, we're going to continue to delever this business going forward. We talked about that as a key priority. We will look at some acquisitions and tuck-ins in areas that bring us innovation and accelerate on the strategies that we've already done. So if you think about IT solutions, is there a particular niche that we want to be able to acquire a small acquisition to tuck in. But just like ITsavvy and Lexmark, both very accretive and both are part of our reinvention story, either in terms of driving growth or helping us to deleverage or invest in areas that we know we can grow in. So Lexmark allows us to grow in the A4, allows us to go into Asia Pacific. IT solutions or ITsavvy allows us to get to a TAM that we never had before. So when we think about acquisitions and tuck-ins, it will be accretive and will help us grow and get to our reinvention strategy, but we will delever the company going forward.

Yes. And just, Erik, as you said, to put some numbers, and we kind of shared this at the Lex investor call. But our goal -- our #1 goal, it is reduction of debt, delevering to less than 3x in the medium term as well as continue to return capital to our shareholders in a form of $0.50 -- a dividend of $0.50 per share.

Perfect. We are just out of time. So Steve, Mirlanda, thank you very much for joining us, and good luck.

Thank you, Erik. Appreciate it. Thank you.

Thank you, Erik. Appreciate the time.