Zebra Technologies Corporation (ZBRA) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary
June 9, 2021
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Damian Karas
analystAnd thank you again for joining us as we round the bend and head down the home stretch of UBS' Global Industrials and Transportation Conference. I'm Damian Karas, analyst on our electrical equipment and multi-industry research team. We're very excited to welcome Zebra Technologies to our conference this year. Joining us from the Zebra team, we have CEO, Anders Gustafsson, as well as CFO, Nathan Winters. Now before we get into the Q&A session, let me first turn it over to Anders and the Zebra team to kick things off.
Anders Gustafsson
executiveThank you for having us. We are very excited about the business here and where we are. We've seen a great change from a year ago when -- as we went into the pandemic, we did see a great bifurcation of our customers where our larger, more sophisticated customers, particularly in retail or grocery, general merchandise and e-commerce and logistics having a great year, but a lot of smaller companies or manufacturing were doing not quite as well. They were often deemed nonessential and shut down. So I think now as we see coming out, we can see a lot of the trends that we had been supporting previously around digitization, automation, having been accelerated quite a bit. And we're -- I would say we're as excited about the business today as we've ever been.
Damian Karas
analystTerrific. Thanks for that overview, Anders. Just a note for all of those of you listening in, if you do have any questions, you can go ahead and submit them on the webcast on that little chat window, and I can ask them.
Damian Karas
analystSo I think before we get into some of the deeper questions, maybe you could just start by giving us a little bit of update on some of those trends. You've talked about what you've seen since the first quarter. And also, I'd be curious to hear a little bit about the larger projects, in particular. I think you said that they tend to be a little bit more second half-concentrated, but due to limited visibility, you hadn't really baked those into guidance for the year. At this point, what's your confidence that you'll see some healthy project activity in the back half?
Anders Gustafsson
executiveSo I'll start and take the first part of that, and then I'll ask Nathan to talk about some of our larger projects and the outlook for those. So we're -- as I said, we are as excited about the business as we've ever been now and the trends around digitization, automation have accelerated quite appreciably over the last year. The on-demand economy is causing changes across the entire supply chain. So if you think about, just as an example, buy online, pick up at store as the front end of, say, consumer-facing application, that was something that prior to COVID, was a very niche or embryonic capability for some of our largest retailer, but with COVID, that became the preferred way of shopping. So they scaled very quickly, both to all their stores, and more deeply into stores. So they instead of having 1 person do it, they had 10 people who are doing this. But it also drove a lot of -- or is driving a lot of other investments, using that as an an example for how kind of the digitization automation, the on-demand economy is rippling through the supply chain. But to offer that service, buy online, pick up at store as a service with confidence, you have to have much greater confidence in your in-store merchandise or visibility into inventory. So there's more investments coming then in enabling retailers to have better in-store merchandise visibility. But it's also resulting in retailers having to investing, creating much more dynamic workflow where having, say, static workflow where you come in, in the morning and you have a -- get a print of spreadsheet with a number of actions that you work your way through to today, that's no longer sufficient. Now you have to be able to get an order online at 11 to be picked up at 1 and dynamically insert that in the work stream and do that -- identify the best worker to do that, somebody who is, say, just finished an important work stream and can pick it up, rather than somebody who's on a break sitting in there, and having access to mobile computers as part of that. But they also rip those through to make the more dynamic shipments from warehouses, distribution centers. And if you're a big CPG company, you now have many more channels and much more complicated demand signal environment. So they also need to be more dynamic. And all of this kind of is resulting in an increased urgency in investing in solutions that digitize and automate their operations, and we've been pleased to be able to both support and benefit from these trends. Then I'll let Nathan talk a bit more about the bigger deals.
Nathan Winters
executiveYes. So if you look at our large project visibility, as we entered the year, we applied in our original guidance for the full year that the second half, the large deals will be flat. And if you recall, that was coming off a rather strong performance in the second half of last year. In our revised guidance, we have assumed that there will be growth in our large projects in the second half. Part of that is due to just improved visibility in the pipeline, working with our customers around their needs for the full year, as well as customers putting in orders or giving us visibility earlier than even typical due to the supply chain constraints across the industry and one to ensure that they secure their supply or their order with us earlier in the year. So again, large volume continue to be a source of strength. And again, we're expecting that to grow in the second half, which is implied in our last guidance.
Damian Karas
analystTerrific. And 2 follow-on questions on sort of the near-term trends here. So I think you're working pretty hard on executing the USPS project. Maybe if you could just give us a quick update on sort of timing of the remaining execution. And then once you do kind of finish that, how should we think about the nature of your business partnership with USPS?
Nathan Winters
executiveYes. So Damian, I can take that one. I think first, the rollout with USPS is progressing as we had expected, and both teams are working very well together to ensure the success of the rollout. And that rollout is around the first 300,000 units to the carriers, which includes the software, managed support services, to improve their visibility across the carrier network. So that resumed late in Q1 after pausing over the holiday season, with the goal to complete at the end of Q3. So again, no material changes to the deployments here in the year. And then as we look at the broader relationship, the contract we signed several years ago gave us the right to -- and the ability to work with USPS across their entire operations. So beyond the carriers, it's working with their storefronts, their logistics, their back-office operations. So that's where the opportunity is for us to continue to work with USPS on additional opportunities once this initial deployment's complete.
Damian Karas
analystOkay. That's helpful. And then I'm already seeing some questions coming in. I guess one of the investor concerns out there is that you've got this really sky-high kind of growth levels that you're experiencing right now. And so the concern is, is there potentially a cliff on the other side or at least a sizable step down in sales? So I'm wondering, how are you thinking about kind of the normalized growth rate for the business when we start lapping kind of the early recovery you saw last year in the fourth quarter. Do you necessarily have to have a reset? Or do you think you can continue to grow, but maybe it's just at a more measured pace than the last couple of quarters?
Anders Gustafsson
executiveWell, as I said before, we are very excited about the business and the trend lines and the opportunities that we see. If you look at Q1, we had a very broad-based recovery. There was -- all our main product categories, all our regions, all our vertical markets grew double digits. It's very rare. I don't think it's ever -- it certainly hasn't happened in my tenure at the company where we've seen that kind of strong growth across the entire business. So I'd say the trend lines around digitization, automation, the on-demand economy, those are, I think, strong secular trends that are here to stay. They were activities that we supported before COVID, but they have been become that much more important. And I think the urgency by which our customers are investing and those have increased since COVID. And we see -- the large -- our larger customers, say, many times are more sophisticated customers, they were the ones that were best positioned to pivot to COVID a year ago. And they invested to build new capabilities as they came out. They continued to build capability and kind of expand on those and roll them out more broadly. But now, what we started seeing in the first quarter was our smaller customers are coming back, and they also now feel that they need to invest in building this similar capabilities to be able to compete and hold on to their customers in many cases. So we -- while we don't think that 20% growth that we guided for on our Q2 call is the new normal, we do feel that our growth rates for the for the future will be -- is attractive, and we are well positioned to be able to capitalize on a lot of these trends.
Damian Karas
analystTerrific. All right. So maybe we can move on to some of the bigger picture, longer-term type questions. I guess one of the questions that I often get from investors after they've had a look at your core product offering, they look at these printers, barcode readers, the handheld computers. At first blush, I think they look easily replicable. But then they look at your margin profile, the leading market positions you've established. So I kind of ask on their behalf, like what is Zebra's edge? I'd love to hear your perspective and why you've yet to see new competition pressure, your market share or your profitability.
Anders Gustafsson
executiveYes, edge is a good word here because we talk about our -- how we basically enable frontline workers, the edge of operations, to improve their operations, to reduce friction in workflows to improve the service levels they offer their customers. So it's very much on how we help frontline workers at the edge of operations. And that is kind of a unique position. A lot of the, say, digitization trends started in the data centers, but they're moving now more towards the edge of operations. And we have a great position in that we understand our customers' workflows really well. And we have access to real-time data from those workflows through our devices more than anybody else, that unique data. And by leveraging basically the understanding of our customers' workflows and having access to that data, we can create solutions that are quite unique and help solve real-time problems for them. And we -- the gross margins we get then out of our device solutions is materially higher than what many other, say, hardware device companies get. And that is because of the software content we have in, which really helps to differentiate our solutions and help us solve those problems. So we are, you can say, a low volume, high mix that we are very much focused on solving unique customer problems. And it's not like our customers are not paying attention or negotiating. But we -- the innovation that we deliver generates that kind of value to our customers, so they feel that they want to invest in our solutions at these price points.
Damian Karas
analystRight, right. That's actually a great segue you kind of ended on innovation. I'd like to probe a little bit more into your R&D. In the past, you've consistently, I think, invested about 10% of your sales into R&D. Our team at UBS has done some analysis around intellectual property. And what we've found is that there's been a pretty significant uptick in the last few years in your patent activity. So could you help us understand why you're sort of all of a sudden seeing this acceleration in intellectual property? And then maybe beyond that, just talk about how you're prioritizing your organic investments across the organization?
Anders Gustafsson
executiveYes. So I'll start with kind of how we look at our portfolio and how we invest, and then how that translates into intellectual property. So we have our Enterprise Asset Intelligence vision that is the broader kind of North Star for how we think about the business. But maybe more concretely, we look at this sense, analyze, act framework. That is what we do for our customers. We help them sense what's happening in the physical world, we help them analyze that data and act on it in real time. So -- and when we now have looked at how we have allocated our investment dollars over the last several years, you've seen a couple of things happen over the past, say, 4 years, right? We've -- one, we have continued to expand our capabilities around the SEM side. We've added to reading barcodes or for the machine vision, object recognition as examples. Those are new areas. And we've added particularly if they are focused on adding capabilities around the analyze and act, that is how we can enable the outcomes for our customers. Ultimately, they are buying outcomes not, say, devices. And that has also been much more software-focused software-as-a-service focused. So that means also from a portfolio perspective that we were trying to align our investments to areas that we believe have high growth and higher margin compositions than our traditional markets. We're trying to make sure that we position ourselves to accelerate growth and expand our margins. But also as we enter into some of these new spaces, we look at how do we do this? What's our differentiation? What's our edge? How do we innovate? And that's where a number of the new intellect patents or intellectual property that we've developed is coming from.
Damian Karas
analystGreat. Great. So I do find the entrance into machine vision rather interesting. Maybe you could expand on the market opportunity that you see there. I guess I'm just thinking about in the past, how you've outlined, I think, about a $15 billion or more opportunity to expand your TAM. So how should we be thinking about how machine vision as well as the fixed readers that you're introducing to the market now, how they kind of stack up relative to that broader market opportunity you've outlined in the past?
Anders Gustafsson
executiveYes. So this will be a new expansion market that's over and above the original, say, $15 million we talked about. These were not in that market. We see machine vision and fixed industrial scanning as a near adjacency to our core markets, particularly our scanning markets. You think of reading 2D bar code. That is, in many ways, taking a digital image and extracting value out of that or information out of that. As we then look at the fixed industrial scanning and machine vision space, we're looking to enter it in spaces that are as close to our core as we can, where we have the strongest right to play, as we call it. So fixed industrial scanning is the first area we're trying to go after. That is looking at -- basically reading barcodes many times on -- in conveying systems over the head, over the belt or a situation like that, or in other more manual situations where the field of view or the depth of scan is different from what the scanner normally does, but it is a close adjacency in manufacturing and logistics to us. And then expanding into more manufacturing inspection applications, being able to read fill levels in a water bottle and check if the cap is put on right, or looking at an assembly of some sort and making sure all the bolts and rivets are in the right places. So we will continue to add capabilities in this over time, but we're starting from kind of our -- what's closest to our core competencies and strength.
Damian Karas
analystUnderstood. Understood. So I mean how then -- there's players out there like Cognex, Kiosks, others. I mean, how are you planning on differentiating versus those players that have been participating in machine vision for some time and building those businesses.
Anders Gustafsson
executiveYes. First, I think the machine vision space is a relatively fragmented market. Nobody has a kind of a really strong market position from overall perspective. I think people -- everybody has kind of staked out certain spaces, but not necessarily across the board. And we see 2 areas where we are trying to differentiate and drive innovation here. One is around the flexibility of our devices of our cameras. So as an example, we can We -- our cameras can be used in a number of different use cases, where our competitors tend to have many, many different SKUs. So we can -- as an example, we can upgrade the fixed industrial scanner to a machine vision camera by downloading software. I believe that is quite unique in the industry. Another area we see is the ease of use. I think the industry has generally been quite keen in this respect that you need to rely on having deep expertise to be able to set up workflows. And as part of the announcement, we also announced that we acquired Adaptive Vision. It's a company that has great capabilities around -- software capabilities around how to design workflows and applications and quickly get kind of all the devices to work together and start producing useful information and data for our customers. So the ease of use and the flexibility of devices are 2 areas that we see that we have an advantage.
Damian Karas
analystGot it. Got it. So how quickly do you think you can scale machine vision?
Anders Gustafsson
executiveWell, obviously, we just launched it. So we're starting from a very small base here, but we are now in the process of -- we have products that are now readily available. We have -- we are engaging with customers to demonstrate our capabilities. And as I said, we are new in the space, we're doing proof of concepts, pilots and so forth with customers to demonstrate what we can do. We're also working on our go-to-market. So we've established a sales overlay organization of people who are experts in machine vision and fixed industrial scanning. And we're engaging with the integrator or reseller community for this space to make sure we recruit new partners who can help us scale the business. So this year, we would expect the revenues generated from machine vision, fixed industrial scanning to be modest. But over time, we expect it to ramp quite nicely.
Damian Karas
analystGot it. Got it. That makes sense. Yes. No, I was going to ask you next, I mean, whether to some extent, you'll essentially be working with the same channel partners in these markets, but it sounds like you will need to foster some new partnerships. I mean, I'm imagining there's probably some very niche-focused integrators or resellers when you get into some of these machine vision applications.
Anders Gustafsson
executiveYes. It's -- you can think of it as a Venn diagram. Some of our traditional partners are also active in machine vision and fixed industrial scanning. There will be a natural partner community for us to work with and expand their relationship with us to include these new solutions. But there are also a number of other integrators that have been historically more focused on fixed industrial scanning and machine vision, who we see as being good potential partners of ours that are going after similar kind of use cases that we want to cultivate and recruit as partners.
Damian Karas
analystUnderstood. Okay. Well, maybe we take a step back and just talk about your Enterprise Asset Intelligence vision. You have talked in the past about the opportunity to drive higher penetration amongst the existing workforce. I think you've talked about the number of store associates that are carrying a handheld device or the number of nurses out in the field. You've also highlighted some of your increasing number of use cases. When you kind of look at all of this in its entirety, what inning would you say your customers are in, in terms of fully utilizing all the capabilities that Zebra is bringing to the table today?
Anders Gustafsson
executiveYes. It's -- not as a definitive, say, answer, as you might think because it is a moving target, right? If you were to think about where we were in 2015, say, after we did the enterprise acquisition. In retail, large supercenter-type stores, we would expect to see maybe 7 or 8 of our mobile computers running 2 or 3 applications per device. Today, I would say routinely, we would see more like 70 or 80 devices per store running 50-plus applications. So if you'd ask me that question in 2014 or '15, we would have given an answer that inflated or said we were in later innings than we really were. So I think we -- I would say we're still in the early innings of driving the overall penetration here because we are finding new use cases for our devices. We are finding more and more value of penetrating -- or our customers are finding more value of deploying our solutions deeper into their operations. So we estimate that at the moment, I would say, roughly 1/3 of the eligible user population in retail have access to a mobile computer. And there's certainly a desire and need for that to tend to much more deeply. And some of our solutions that we've added to our portfolio like Reflexis, I think, accelerates that need in that if you have -- the value of the Reflexis software solution and the value of our devices increases -- both increased by working together. So if you think of having somebody with a mobile device that can walking down the aisle in the retail store and see something is stocked out, they can scan it, the barcode on the shelf, and inform the system that, that's -- there's a piece of merchandise that's sold out. Reflexis can then look at that and say this is a high-value piece of merchandise that has high sell-through rate. This is a very important high ROI action. So it increases the value of the software here. But also then looking at, okay, I now want to mobilize that action. And by knowing where all the associates are, who is the most -- the best position to execute on that order or that action and allocate the action to that person, and you do that by knowing -- do you know who they are and where they are by the mobile computer. So we see opportunities to drive greater penetration by building up a broader ecosystem of solutions here.
Damian Karas
analystGreat. Great. And so that -- I'm assuming your larger customers are further along the curve to some extent. Would you characterize that early inning stage uniformly, though? I mean, is it not just your small or medium-sized customers, but the larger customers also are kind of in the early innings of all this?
Anders Gustafsson
executiveYes. The -- generally, our larger, most sophisticated customers are the first ones to adopt new solutions, and they are further along in that journey. I would expect them to always be ahead. And they are often driving the innovation around these things. But even there, there's a number of other solutions and use cases that have come out of this. So if you look at -- go back to where we kind of started the whole trends around digitization and automation. There, we see a number of new use cases, new opportunities come out of those trends that we would like to see -- participate in.
Damian Karas
analystOkay. No, makes sense. Maybe we kind of focus a little bit on the inorganic opportunity that you foresee from here. Obviously, you've got an increasingly healthy balance sheet. Maybe you could just outline your current thinking on capital allocation and what the acquisition priorities would be. Should we just kind of be thinking software, software, more software? .
Anders Gustafsson
executiveWell, the -- when we think of acquisitions, we restart by looking at our Enterprise Asset Intelligence vision. And any opportunity has to help us accelerate our ability to execute on that vision. And when we break it down, it become -- we go into this framework of sense, analyze and act, what -- this is how we basically deliver -- execute on the vision or deliver value to our customers. Over the last -- the 4 acquisitions we made have been pure software acquisitions. And over the, say, last 3 or 4 years, we have materially stepped up our investments and innovation around the analyze and act part of the framework, which is more software-dependent. But it's not exclusive. Machine vision is, in another sense, technology, another way for us to be able to read -- or connect the physical world to the digital world. And -- but as we look forward, I would expect that the analyze and act will play an important role and that our software solutions will grow faster than our more device-centric solutions.
Damian Karas
analystUnderstood. Anders, you mentioned, right, the last 4 deals that you've done have been pure software. So as you've kind of migrated a little bit and brought in a broader, fuller suite of digital solutions, just kind of curious what you've learned as you've done these software acquisitions and you've -- the business has transitioned a little bit to having some SaaS, direct software sales.
Anders Gustafsson
executiveYes. So I'll answer it by taking you to some of the things we have changed and done with this. We have created new business units, product development business units around software and machine vision. We've hired leaders from the industry with deep industry expertise to lead those and brought in other people who understand our space very well. We have also created sales overlays for both of those, where we compare people who again have the expertise around software-as-a-service and machine vision that we can bring in to our customers to really help to close opportunities and move the ball forward. We expect our more broad-based sales organization to be able to provide contacts and introductions to be able to identify solution -- a need for our solutions, be able to qualify them, but bring in the experts to help really close them. So it's meaningful investments on both the product and the go-to-market side. We've also created a new customer success organization. We previously had kind of customer success mixed into each solution. Now we brought it out to be more broad-based, so we can bring best practices across the entire portfolio and make sure that we nurture our customers appropriately after the first sale and make sure that they are happy with the solution. They use the solutions and identify additional opportunities for us to expand the services we can offer.
Damian Karas
analystGot it. Got it. So just curious if in your head, there's kind of like a sweet spot that you think that the business you'd like to get to in terms of level of software contribution. I don't know if there's anything kind of you're targeting sort of medium or long term.
Anders Gustafsson
executiveYes. We've kind of refrained from say we want the software to be X percent of our revenues. So I don't want the software business to grow to get there by default, right? We want our device, our [ whole ] business to grow as fast as we possibly can. We want to challenge it, and we want to invest in it, and we think we have good opportunities to continue to grow. But we -- I do expect our software business to grow faster than the core over the next several years and become a more meaningful part of the overall revenue picture.
Damian Karas
analystWell, I guess, thinking about it growing faster than the rest of the business, when you're going to be growing 40% in the second quarter, I'm not sure if that's the right way to be looking at it. But should we be thinking that kind of maybe normalized growth is mid-single digits to low double digits, you would expect software to kind of grow at double-digit plus?
Anders Gustafsson
executiveMaybe we can bring in Nathan to answer this one also.
Nathan Winters
executiveYes, Damian, I think if the -- as you stated, right, as we look at the businesses, the core business growing 4% to 5%, the software businesses that we've acquired and have grown organically to grow kind of that high single-digit, double-digit is how we're -- exactly how we're thinking about it.
Damian Karas
analystOkay. Great. And then just thinking about some of the pipeline and what may be out there that you guys could possibly bring into the organization, just wondering, is the current market valuation kind of making M&A harder? How are you thinking about kind of balancing out missing out on some opportunities that you might have to kind of flow some voids and move into some adjacencies versus being prudent with capital in the current market.
Nathan Winters
executiveYes. So Damian, I can take that. I think you start with what Anders had mentioned earlier in terms of the framework. And I think that hasn't changed in terms of does it fit the strategic elements of the company, does it fit within the strategy? Does it -- from a cultural fit and the management team, do we feel -- does it fit within the go-to-market and how we think we want to run the company. And those are filters that have not changed. And then we look and say, irregardless of the price, do we think we can drive an attractive return for our shareholders? And I think that's the framework we've used in the past and continue to do so. And with our strong balance sheet, we have the ability to support really many types of M&A opportunities. So whether that's bolt-on or larger, more strategic, we have the flexibility and the capital to do it. And so it's just a matter of, again, finding the right assets that fit those hurdles, but we haven't changed just because of where the market environment is today.
Damian Karas
analystUnderstood. Okay. Maybe we can switch gears and just talk a little bit about the margin profile here. How are you thinking about opportunities for gross margin and EBITDA expansion from where you are today?
Nathan Winters
executiveYes. So I'll take this one. I think number one, the company over the last many years has a track record of driving profitable growth, and we believe there's an opportunity to drive margin expansion from where we're at today, and we don't look at it as a ceiling to where margins can ultimately go. When we look at from a gross margin perspective and touching on many of the things we talked about today, higher growth, higher-margin solutions that we're launching and moving into, including software and Reflexis. The team continues to look at how to improve transactional pricing, improve efficiencies across our supply chain as well as driving scale both in our overall infrastructure as well as in OpEx. And then obviously, the headwind this year around premium freight, we're working through those. But again, we don't see that as a ceiling, and we believe we can continue to drive margin going forward from where we're at today.
Damian Karas
analystTerrific. Great. So you feel like there's still -- barring any additional kind of software-like acquisitions, which tend to carry a much higher gross margin. You feel like the kind of the portfolio today, you would have a GM opportunity in and of itself to expand the gross margins without any further M&A activity?
Nathan Winters
executiveThat's right. Yes. Again, growing what we have organically as well with some of the new solutions and again, improving the efficiency in the core business and scaling our core business all give us opportunity to drive higher margins.
Anders Gustafsson
executiveJust to that point, maybe look at some of the new solutions that we brought on board more recently, the software-as-a-service solutions, machine vision are all in areas that we believe to be faster growing than our traditional core and also have a higher margin profile than our traditional business. So we're trying to make sure we kind of align our portfolio with where we see the best opportunities to create long-term value.
Damian Karas
analystTerrific. Makes sense. So I think given where we kind of are in the world today, I think I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you a little bit about ESG and how you guys think about that. What do you think most relevant to Zebra's business -- is most relevant from a sustainability, ESG perspective? And I know it's something that you've been working on, so maybe talk about where you make progress in that respect.
Anders Gustafsson
executiveYes. Mike, I can start and Nathan can fill out some color here also. But we certainly think of ourselves as a very responsible corporate citizen. We're running a sustainable business, and we want to make sure it becomes even more sustainable over time and deliver, say, value to all our stakeholders. And this is something that is -- we work with broadly across the organization. Our Board is very involved in overseeing our activities here also, and we've hired a number of new people who are more experts in being able to pull together the programs and reporting. And we have actually been doing more than we probably have reported on historically. But we see the human capital side of it as being super important to us. That's something we definitely want to make sure we invest in and expand the pool of talents that we can tap into to make sure we identify and recruit and retain the best and brightest in the industry. The climate is obviously an important part also. We are a light footprint company, but still, we have opportunities to make a good impact here. And resource conservation, more broadly, are all things that are -- part of our objectives that we're trying to drive for. And maybe, Nathan, you can provide some more detail.
Nathan Winters
executiveYes. I think a couple of things I'd add around climate, in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy, we've committed to pursue science-based targets for carbon reduction across all of our operations. And we'll be enhancing, as Anders mentioned, our reporting on that as well as other climate-related opportunities and risks, as well as we'll be publishing a report later this year around -- under the FASB framework that will be on our website. So again, a lot of activity And then part of that is the reporting will come to show the progress we've been making and where the targets are at later in the year.
Damian Karas
analystOkay. Well, we look forward to that. And I think we have time for one last question. So Anders, maybe you could kind of close things out here and just -- I'm not sure if there's any areas in the business that you feel like you have some room for improvement, but maybe you could just give us your perspective on really what's front and center in your mind in terms of key thing that you're really focused on addressing to secure a bright future for Zebra?
Anders Gustafsson
executiveYes. I wish we were so good that we didn't have any areas of opportunities to improve. We clearly have opportunities to improve, and we work on it every day. It's -- we think of maybe gross margin will be a good example. It's a grind. We are looking at the pennies and cents to identify cost savings and efficiencies, and we are going after those as part of our culture. It's a daily grind for us. But what I and -- certainly are spending most of my time on, say, that is on the developing the vision and executing on the vision, figuring out how do we best now leverage this digitization of automation trends and the on-demand economy to identify opportunities where we can bring new innovative solutions to market that generate -- deliver a lot of value to our customers. So -- and then making sure we execute on those opportunities. So long-term profitable growth that will be -- the one thing that I would say, if there's one thing I'll focus on, that is my focus.
Damian Karas
analystTerrific. Well, I feel like we can talk about these opportunities the rest of the day, but I'm afraid that's all we have time for. So Anders and Nathan, I want to thank you again for taking the time to talk with us today. And I extend my thanks to all those who tuned in the meeting. I hope everyone has a great rest of your day.
Anders Gustafsson
executiveThank you.
Nathan Winters
executiveThank you.
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