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With business in over 100 countries, the company supplies industrial sectors with automation technology for their manufacturing lines.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 66th running of the list.

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Milwaukee-based Rockwell is an industrial automation company that integrates information technology with manufacturing infrastructure.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 65th running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 64th running of the list.

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This year's Fortune 500 marks the 62nd running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 61st running of the list. Wal-Mart claims the top spot again. See who made the list.

Wal-Mart stayed on top as its sales crept closer to half-a-trillion dollars. Apple moved into the top five. And UnitedHealth Group continued its steady climb. 

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Rockwell Automation (ROK): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

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Rockwell Automation

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Thank you for holding and welcome to Rockwell Automation's quarterly conference call. I need to remind everyone that today's conference call is being recorded. Later in the call, we will open up the lines for questions. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Ajana Zellner, Head of Investor Relations and Market Strategy. Ms.

Thank you, Julianne. Good morning and thank you for joining us for Rockwell Automation's first quarter fiscal twenty twenty five earnings release conference call. With me today is Blake Moret, our Chairman and CEO and Christian Rote, our CFO. Our results were released earlier this morning and the press release and charts have been posted to our website. Both the press release and charts include and our call today will reference non GAAP measures.

Both the press release and charts include reconciliations of these non GAAP measures. A webcast of this call will be available on our website for replay for the next thirty days. For your convenience, a transcript of our prepared remarks will also be available on our website at the conclusion of today's call. Before we get started, I need to remind you that our comments will include statements related to the expected future results of our company and are therefore forward looking statements. Our actual results may differ materially from our projections due to a wide range of risks and uncertainties that are described in our earnings release and details in all our SEC filings.

So with that, I'll hand it over to Blake.

Thanks, Saijana, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I'll make a couple of general comments before we turn to our first quarter results. I'm pleased with the early benefits of our renewed focus on operational excellence and cost discipline as we create a solid foundation for market beating growth and performance. Continuing benefits from cost reductions in SG and A we took last year will be joined with benefits from reduced costs of direct and indirect purchases, manufacturing efficiency and additional price actions.

Overall, our plan to achieve $250,000,000 worth of productivity benefits versus last year is intact despite additional temporary headwinds such as the negative impact of currency. Additionally, we are confident that we're dealing with the recently announced tariffs in a way that mitigates the impact and maximizes our position as a large U. S. Manufacturer. We've been working on various scenarios since before the election.

Undoubtedly, there will be near term disruptions and volatility in the global supply chain, both for us and our customers, but we continue to believe Rockwell is a net beneficiary of policies that increase U. S. Manufacturing. Christian will cover some of the actions we are taking later in his section. In terms of demand, we are encouraged by better than expected order performance in the quarter.

We had mid single digit sequential growth overall with sequential growth across all regions and business segments. Orders exceeded shipments in the quarter, giving us some additional backlog for the balance of the year. While there is still macroeconomic and policy uncertainty weighing on customers' CapEx plans, Rockwell won multimillion dollar strategic orders across multiple key industries in the quarter, especially in The U. S, our home market. Let's now turn to our Q1 results on Slide three.

Our Q1 orders grew 10% versus prior year and as I said, were up mid single digits sequentially. We saw particularly strong orders for logics, controllers and IO. We believe our order outperformance reflects true underlying demand based on the broad geographic outperformance, balanced mix of hardware, software and solutions orders and the fact that distributor and machine builder inventories continue to reduce. As customers are waiting for more certainty in the macroeconomic and U. S.

Policy environment, they're balancing their automation spend between increasing operational efficiency and making longer term capital investments. Our Q1 order outperformance includes a number of large customer projects that are slated to convert to sales over the coming quarters. Our Q1 reported sales declined about 8.5% year over year with slightly better than expected organic sales being offset by about a point of headwind from negative currency translation. Remember, our sales in the first half of fiscal twenty twenty four were still supported by a sizable product backlog, creating a difficult year over year comparison for us in fiscal twenty twenty five. We expect to return to year over year sales growth in the back half of the year.

Organic sales in our Intelligent Devices segment were down 12% versus prior year and in line with our expectations. Both Cubic and ClearPath, our recent acquisitions in this segment, saw double digit year over year growth in sales. We continue to grow our pipeline of multi year projects here with significant wins across our key industries and global customers. I'll touch on some of these wins in a few minutes. Software and Control organic sales declined about 12% year over year, but were above our expectations.

Logix exceeded our expectations this quarter with both orders and sales up double digits versus prior quarter. Logic's orders have recovered sequentially during the last six months. Some of our newer offerings we talked about at our Investor Day in November continue to set us apart and help get new customers. One of these competitive wins in the quarter was with Convergex Automation Solutions, a leading global machine builder, who is partnering with Rockwell to help a German end user build their first U. S.

Greenfield plant. The customer chose our cloud enabled optics platform for its hardware agnostic nature and its ability to seamlessly extract and aggregate data from various devices on a plant floor, significantly reducing the time, risk and cost to integrate solutions for multiple vendors. Lifecycle Services organic sales were up 5% year over year. Book to bill in this segment was 1.05 led by strong orders in our solutions business and tied to some of the larger multi year project wins I mentioned earlier. We also saw good growth in recurring services with strategic wins across automotive, tire and food and beverage.

Total ARR for the company grew 11% in the quarter, led by strong growth in our software offerings. One of our notable wins here this quarter was with Meraca, whose dairy factory is powered by renewable geothermal energy and is one of the lowest manufacturing carbon footprints in the industry. Our cloud native Plex software was chosen to help Meraca enhance their product traceability, improve quality and reduce cost. Segment margin was over 17% in the quarter and adjusted EPS was $1.83 both well above our expectations as we continue to execute on our cost down and longer term margin expansion projects. As we reiterated at our Investor Day a few months ago, we are committed to delivering $250,000,000 in year over year benefits from these actions in fiscal twenty twenty five.

In addition to the structural productivity, we're deploying temporary cost measures to help mitigate the unfavorable currency impact on our earnings. Christian will cover this in more detail later. Turning to Slide four to review key highlights of our Q1 industry segment performance. Consistent with our overall sales results in the quarter, our performance by industry reflects difficult year over year comparisons with Q1 of last year still benefiting from a large product backlog. Our discrete sales were down mid single digits year over year with declines in auto and semi, partially offset by strong growth in e commerce and warehouse automation.

Within discrete, automotive and semiconductor sales continue to be impacted by delays as customers focus on driving operational efficiencies and profitability amidst increasing uncertainty from trade and policy changes in the upcoming months. E commerce and warehouse automation sales grew over 30% versus prior year and were above our expectations. We saw a significant uptick of customer activity this quarter, especially in North America and Europe. Our strong position with leading machine builders and systems integrators in this space is helping us gain additional share of wallet with key end users, both in the traditional e commerce space and global logistics sector with a common theme of facility modernization and optimization. Recent new product introductions have also enhanced our competitiveness in this vertical.

Given the acceleration in customer investments, we now expect e commerce and warehouse automation to grow high single digits year over year in fiscal twenty twenty five. Moving to hybrid, sales in this industry segment was slightly above our expectations led by better performance in Food and Beverage and Home and Personal Care verticals. In Food and Beverage, our customers continue to prioritize spend on digital services and modernization programs over large capacity investments. We expect modest improvement in this vertical as we go through the year. In Life Sciences, we saw a number of strategic wins in the quarter, showcasing the breadth and differentiation of our offerings to serve this market.

In addition to follow on orders for GLP-one related investments, we secured a large competitive win with our FactoryTalk MES software, helping one of the largest European life sciences companies standardize their global facilities on our platform to increase tech transfer speed and reduce cost. Another important win this quarter was with Thermo Fisher, our OTO autonomous mobile robots were selected to help address Thermo's workforce challenges by optimizing their warehouses through Auto's AI enabled path determination and movement flexibility and freeing up labor to focus on more value adding tasks. Turning to Process Industries. Sales in these verticals were down high single digits year over year on difficult prior year comps, especially within our energy market where oil and gas grew over 25% in Q1 of last year. While the new administration support for more oil production in North America should benefit our customers in the long run, we see a mixed reaction from our energy customers near term as they continue to prioritize capital discipline and operational efficiency over adding more production in The U.

S. This quarter, Rockwell and EPIC Industrial, a leading EPC company in the energy and chemical space, were chosen by one of the world's largest oil and gas producers to help achieve this year's this end user's goal of net zero emissions by 02/1950. Another important process win was in our mining vertical. Vale selected Rockwell to help increase production and reduce water consumption at their new processing plant in Brazil. Our winning combination of integrated hardware, software and services is the reason Vale chose Rockwell as their single partner to integrate end to end solutions for this greenfield.

Let's turn to Slide five in our Q1 organic regional sales. As you can see, The Americas continued to outperform other regions for us this quarter. EMEA sales were down 14%. We continue to see weakness across most of the region, particularly in Germany and France, with some early signs of stabilization at Italian machine builders. Asia Pacific sales declined 9% led by a double digit year over year decline in China.

While the automation market in the region is expected to stabilize later in 2025, we expect Asia Pacific to be our weakest region in fiscal twenty twenty five. Let's now move to Slide six to review our fiscal twenty twenty five outlook. We continue to expect a gradual sequential sales improvement as we move through this fiscal year. We're keeping our organic sales growth range of positive 2% to negative 4%, but we are updating our reported sales midpoint to $8,100,000,000 reflecting 1.5 points of negative contribution from currency translation. Christian will cover FX and the calendarization of our guidance in more detail later on the call.

Annual recurring revenue is projected to grow about 10% this year. As I mentioned earlier, we are taking additional cost measures to offset the negative impact of currency headwinds on our bottom line, which means we continue to expect segment margin in the 19% range and are reaffirming our adjusted EPS of $9.2 at the midpoint. We expect free cash flow conversion of 100% in fiscal year twenty twenty five. I'll now turn it over to Christian to provide more detail on our Q1 and financial outlook for fiscal twenty twenty five. Christian?

Thank you, Blake. Good morning, everyone. I'll start on Slide seven, first quarter key financial information. First quarter reported sales were down about 8.5% versus prior year. The impact of acquisitions was negligible and currency had a negative impact of 90 basis points in the quarter.

But one point of our organic growth came from price and price cost was favorable. Segment operating margin was 17.1 compared to 17.3% a year ago, with lower sales volume mostly offset by the benefits of cost from cost reduction and margin expansion actions like mentioned earlier. Adjusted EPS is $1.83 was above our expectations primarily due to the beat on segment operating margins. Looking into more detail when we discuss the EPS bridge and the cost reduction actions, but I'd like to take a moment to commend the team for outstanding performance in the first quarter. It was about strong execution and good cost controls.

The adjusted effective tax rate for the first quarter was 17.5% below the prior year rate of 17.9%. We remain on track to achieve a 17% ETR for fiscal twenty twenty five. Free cash flow of $293,000,000 was $328,000,000 higher than prior year. Free cash flow conversion was 140% in the first quarter of this year, reflective of continued working capital management by the team as well as zero incentive payouts on fiscal twenty twenty four performance. This is in contrast to the first quarter of last year where we had our cash bonus payout for 2023 performance.

Two additional items not shown on the slide. We repurchased approximately 400,000 shares in the quarter at a cost of $99,000,000 On December 31, we had approximately $1,200,000,000 remaining under our repurchase authorizations. Return on invested capital was 14.5% for the first quarter of fiscal twenty twenty five and four hundred basis points lower than the prior year, primarily driven by lower pretax income. Slide eight provides a sales and margin performance overview for our three operating segments. Intelligent Devices margin of 14.9% decreased by 130 basis points year over year.

Purely focusing on decremental conversion, the segment had decrementals in the 20s year over year in the first quarter, which reflects strong execution on cost out programs against the double digit organic sales decline. Software and Control margin of 25.1% was flat with the prior year. This segment typically has very high decrementals with strong execution on our cost out programs and good price cost performance kept our year over year decremental margins in the 20s, performing above our expectations. It's important to note that R and D spend in this segment was in the low teens as a percentage of sales, reflecting our continued focus on new product introductions and long term growth and differentiation. Lifecycle services margin of 12.5 decreased 190 basis points year over year and was slightly below our expectations, mostly driven by Sensia shipments.

Incrementals were solid year over year, reflecting the low single digit volume growth and strong execution on our cost out programs. Before moving on to EPS, let's expand a little on orders and demand. As Blake mentioned, orders came in better than expected, surpassing $2,000,000,000 in the first quarter and book to bill was greater than one, which hasn't been the case for the last seven quarters. This is a good sign, but didn't materially change the calendarization of our outlook. The outperformance was largely from project orders scheduled to ship later in the year.

Another favorable data point. In the first quarter, new demand placed on our distributors is slowing through at close to 100% in terms of new orders on Rockwell, matching historical levels giving us further evidence that the destocking cycle is mostly behind us. The next slide, nine, provides the adjusted EPS walk from Q1 fiscal twenty twenty four to Q1 fiscal twenty twenty five. Core performance was down $0.55 on an 8% organic sales decrease. Those sales declines were primarily in our higher margin products in both intelligent devices and software and control, which impacts flow through.

Importantly, the organization took some temporary cost measures in Q1, which helped keep the core decremental flow through on the high single digit sales decline to this level. Cost reduction and margin expansion actions, which reflect more structural productivity, provided about $70,000,000 of benefit in the quarter, slightly above our expectations and were a $0.5 tailwind. Compensation, which reflects merit and incentive compensation, was a $0.2 headwind. This year over year delta reflects merit increases that came into effect at the beginning of fiscal year as well as higher incentive comp versus prior year. Recall that our full year 2025 guide was for compensation and inflation to be about $190,000,000 headwind compared to fiscal twenty twenty five with $160,000,000 of that coming from compensation.

The inflation impact is captured inside of core in this bridge. We expect compensation to be about $0.9 of headwind for the remaining three quarters of the year spread about equally. All our items resulted in a $0.04 net benefit. Moving on to the next slide, 10 to discuss our updated guidance for the full year fiscal twenty twenty five. Our thesis for the year remains largely intact with a couple of changes.

We expect organic sales in a range from negative 4% to positive 2%. While our initial guide for reported revenue for fiscal twenty twenty five did not anticipate any significant impacts from currency, the recent strengthening of the dollar requires a modification in our guide. At current rates, we expect currency headwind to be about 1.5 points, which takes our guidance on reported sales down to slightly below $8,100,000,000 at the midpoint. We expect price to contribute about a point of growth for the year. This excludes any tariff related price actions.

At the midpoint of our reported sales guidance, which is now negative 2.5%, Our current expectations are for Intelligent Devices sales to be down mid single digits and Software and Control and Lifecycle Services to be approximately flat year over year. From a margin standpoint, we expect ITD margin to be down year over year on lower sales, Software and Control margins to expand year over year on flat sales, and we expect Lifecycle Services margin to be flat to slightly down year over year. Our adjusted EPS range is unchanged at $8.6 to $9.8 with a $9.2 midpoint. Talk about calendarization. The dollar strengthening late in the first quarter has continued into the second quarter and is a sequential headwind of less than 1%.

Our expectations for reported sales grow low to mid single digits sequentially from Q1 to Q2. After Q2, we are expecting gradual sequential sales growth through the remainder of the year. On a year over year basis, the 1.5 points of sales headwind from FX is expected to result in a $0.35 headwind on EPS, which is split evenly to the remaining three quarters of the year. As Blake said earlier, we're taking additional temporary measures on spending to offset this impact. The team performed well in spending control in the first quarter.

We're going to hold those range tight so we can continue to drive toward that adjusted EPS midpoint of $9.2 Specific to Q2, we expect segment operating margins to expand about 100 basis points sequentially on the incremental sales volume, resulting EPS of those sales and margin expectations would be in the neighborhood of two dollars per share. A few additional comments on fiscal twenty twenty five guidance for your models. Corporate and other expense is expected to be around $145,000,000 Net interest expense for fiscal twenty twenty five is expected to be about $140,000,000 We're assuming average diluted shares outstanding of 113,400,000.0 shares with about $300,000,000 of share repurchases targeted during the year. Moving away from the slides, I'd like to expand on a couple of topics. First, focusing on cost reduction and margin expansion activities, which gave us a benefit of approximately $0.5 of EPS in the first quarter.

For the full year, we continue to expect a benefit of $250,000,000 or about $1.85 per share. As discussed at our Investor Day in November, there are hundreds of projects supporting these initiatives. And while each one individually may only be a couple of basis points or 10 basis points of yield, when put together and annualized, they are giving us a yield in the hundreds of basis points. The timing and magnitude continues to fluctuate as we execute against these plans. The first quarter was a good one and we tracked slightly ahead of our goal for the quarter.

The primary driver of the outperformance was manufacturing efficiencies and effective sourcing. There's a lot of year left in front of us and a great deal of work to be done, but I'd like to thank the team for their efforts. Nice work. Well, you may see this initiative as cost out because that's what we're tracking and reporting to our investors. It's important to note that the ultimate goal of productivity is to drive revenue through competitiveness and speed.

These actions are setting us up for long term growth of both sales and earnings. To that end, I want to follow-up on some other operational excellence topics from our Investor Day. The Rockwell operating model continues to develop as we build a foundation to sustain our long our cost out initiatives as well as drive margin expansion for the long term. During the first quarter, we had another 1,300 Rockwell employees complete Yellow Belt training. In addition, we rationalized over 21,000 SKUs as we seek to simplify our operations and improve customer experience.

Our product resiliency index continues to improve as we steadily reduce single points of failure in our operations. While those initial efforts arose from the supply chain crisis, as we enter into an era of change in tariffs and trade, this resiliency enables us to respond to dynamic conditions. Moving on, I'd like to go into some depth around the potential tariff impact to our business, including our short term actions as well as longer term thoughts. As Blake mentioned earlier, the Rockwell team has taken initial steps in response to new tariffs. We had planned for a number of scenarios and remain ready to adapt quickly.

Our priorities are a combination of maintaining profitability and utilizing resiliency in our operations and supply chain to mitigate impacts under a variety of scenarios. I want to size our exposure so you have context. Cost of finished goods imported from Mexico, Canada and China in total were less than 10% of our U. S. Revenue in fiscal twenty twenty four.

Separately, in fiscal twenty twenty four, our direct imports into The United States from Mexico, both from third parties as well as from our own manufacturing facilities were approximately $350,000,000 Imports from Canada and China were each approximately $100,000,000 Our tariff mitigation plan is multifaceted. For the near term, this will be primarily through price and we have implemented price changes from the additional China tariffs that were enacted on February 4. We have made and will continue to make changes to manufacturing locations where there's an attractive ROI. Canada and Mexico tariffs, if they happen in March or sometime in the future, will impact both standard products as well as a portion of our configured order sales. We will enact price increases on impacted products and also intend to reprice our backlog to reflect our new price list.

These actions are disruptive for our customers, of course, and there will likely be some noise in the near term. We are working hard to minimize that disruption and ensure continued levels of customer service. With that said, due to our immediate actions and substantial U. S. Manufacturing footprint, we do not expect these tariffs to have a material impact on our profitability for the full year.

Beyond pricing, we have a number of projects that are in flight to mitigate tariff costs through alternative sourcing and movement of production locations. We'll be leveraging the resiliency that's been built into our operations and supply chain, including moving some production in response to tariffs. For example, we have some products that are produced in Mexico and destined for The U. S. But similar production that occurs in The U.

S. Where the destination is outside The United S. We're swapping those out, moving the production for non U. S. Customers outside The U.

S. In order to create capacity to manufacture production for U. S. Customers inside The U. S.

It's a small portion of our overall tariff impacted operations, but a good example of quick moves we can make. As Blake mentioned at our Investor Day, our operations team has done a good job of keeping infrastructure in place for second shift, sometimes third shift in locations that have been challenged with lower volume in the last twelve months. That creates an opportunity to move production into The U. S. To avoid tariffs with a limited time lag.

As you know, we're in a very dynamic environment, so we will continue to leverage our agile supply chain and take additional steps as necessary. With that, I'll turn it back over to Blake for some closing remarks before we start Q and A.

Thanks, Christian. As I mentioned, we're seeing some encouraging new project activity across multiple end markets. Many of these involve U. S. User sites, but they involve multiple points of influence around the world and we're doing a good job of coordinating this global effort.

We expect the impact of so called mega projects to be meaningful in the next few years. We continue to track new legislation and executive orders as they are announced. With our large U. S. Manufacturing footprint and strong market position, we're confident that we can respond quickly to these changes.

I'm pleased with the progress our teams are making toward our long term productivity and margin expansion targets, and I'm confident we are making the right investments to drive sustained growth and profitability. The framework for superior growth and performance through the cycle that we outlined over a year ago is intact and we are working that plan. I'm also taking a moment to thank our employees and partners for their dedication and hard work. I'm proud to have such a strong team to help us navigate through this dynamic period. Nobody is better positioned than Rockwell and our partners to help American manufacturers create the future of industrial operations.

Ayjana will now begin the Q and A session.

Thanks, Blake. We would like to get to as many of you as possible, so please limit yourself to one question and a quick follow-up. Julienne, let's take our first question.

Our Our first question comes from Scott Davis from Melius Research. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Hey, good morning guys, Blake and Christiane and Johnna.

Hey, I want to start with this SKU rationalization thing because it's kind of relatively newish for you guys and $21,000 sounds like a lot. I know you sell a lot of stuff, so maybe it's not. But in context, it sounds like a lot. But are there puts and takes on how that impacts 2025? Meaning I would have expected maybe some top line impact, but perhaps an offsetting impact on positive impact on margins.

Is that is there any way to kind of drill down into that a little bit?

Yes, sure, Scott. I'll start and if Blake wants to jump in afterwards, certainly. But from the SKU rationalization, let's be really honest here that this hasn't been done in the history of Rockwell. So really we're starting with a low hanging fruit. So that $21,000 really reflects a lot of no sales and low sales SKUs.

So from an impact perspective within the year, you should be thinking about it as any impact at all or no significance of impact. It's really again trying to help us streamline those operations. As we get farther along in the process and we've got another 39,000 that we're looking at right now, that will continue to have a little bit more of an adjustment. But again, don't expect it to have a material impact.

Yes. And this is think of this as part of a spectrum of activities as we go in and take a little bit closer look to those total SKU portfolio. As Christian mentioned, you have those that are easy to reduce from our bills of material. And then you look at what are the items that we might want to keep, but we can do something with price on beyond just the general price increases that we do. So we're working through that in a methodical way.

I expect this activity to continue on an ongoing basis, but the early results as you said are significant because when you can reduce those catalog items then it reduces the ability for those items to attract cost in some way as they move through the manufacturing footprint.

Yes. That makes sense. Hey, guys, this was

and positive call than you've had in a few quarters and orders obviously supportive of that and a lot of progress you've made on the margin side for sure and incremental certainly way better than you had in the past. But when you think about the guidance for 2025 on just organic growth, Considering the orders that you had and the commentary, I would expect that there's a little bit of a positive bias to that guidance. Is that fair to say? Would you characterize as you're still being just a little bit conservative and appropriately so I suppose given the state of affairs in the world, but it appears a bit conservative. Would you characterize as that?

Scott, there's no question we had a good start to the year. As we've been saying, we expected gradual sequential growth through the year. We over performed a little bit in order. So we're happy to see that early in the year. But it still keeps our thesis intact.

We needed to see growth. We've started off with growth and we expect to see that continue through the year.

Okay, fair enough. Best of luck guys. Thank you.

Our next question comes from Andy Kaplowitz from Citigroup. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

mid single digits sequentially. I know you had flash more color in terms of what you think happened in the quarter? It seems based on Christian's comments that maybe lack of destock was slightly better than expectations. And you did mention Blake the improvement in e commerce. You sound a little better on hybrid markets in Food and Beverage and Life Sciences.

How much of that improvement is actually markets getting better versus your improved product offering? And did the positive order trend you saw in fiscal Q1 continue in January?

Yes. I think that the performance in Q1 and then January, which does support the outlook for Q2 and the balance of the year does represent some improvement in the underlying markets. As Christian said, we saw the orders, the new demand placed on our distributors pretty much right on top of the new demand that we're seeing, which indicates that the destock is pretty much done in most parts of our market with the possible exception of China. It's broad based. Importantly, it was manifested in the hybrid space with food and beverage and home and personal care.

We We mentioned that we saw some green shoots in Italian machine builders, which is mainly packaging for life sciences in food and beverage. Within the discrete space, automotive is still challenged, But as we mentioned, e commerce, warehouse automation is quite strong. That includes a few areas. It includes e commerce as new fulfillment centers are being built. It includes the modest exposure we have to data centers, but that modest exposure is growing really fast.

And then it's a parcel handling companies that are looking to complement scarce people with technology and we're seeing some really good project activity in parcel handling companies. And this is also where we mentioned new product introductions, our on machine portfolio, FactoryTalk Optics for operator interface and edge data management, auto, mobile robots, all of those are playing a role. They're not only winning on their own merit, but for precisely the reason that we acquired these companies, they're pulling through larger solutions as customers are confident that we have the breadth to be able to meet their needs. And I'll finish by saying, process, we're not seeing a weakening in Oil and Gas. More of the performance there was based on very strong But we continue to expect energy to contribute positive growth in the year and then mining within the process industry is also a source of optimism.

Very helpful, Blake. And then Christian, your cost reduction and margin expansion actions, as you said, were at $0.5 in Q1, '1 point '8 '5 dollars expected for the year. I think, Christian, at the Investor Day, you mentioned the cost actions from your combined overall cost add program are going to continue to ramp as $25 evolves. And you mentioned slightly more positive impact than you mild in sourcing and manufacturing in Q1. So you actually see a little more benefit than that $185,000,000 I know it's early, but how would you respond to that?

Yes. Andy, it's really more about the timing of those. So we did certainly and again, I think we've understood the timing of magnitude is always going to be a little bit tough for us to gauge. And so some of it did come through a little bit earlier in the year in the first quarter than what we'd expected. It didn't see anything in there though that would say that we would be changing that number.

And so from the perspective of the overall program, the size of the program is still the same. And keep in mind that this program really started in the second half of last year. So as we're coming up against those comparables as we get into the second half of this year, Again, we're going to be building on that base, but we have to make progress against the cost of that were already in place from the prior year.

Our next question comes from Chris Schneider from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Thank you. I wanted to just kind of follow-up on some of that commentary around orders here improving into December. Do you think that there was any positive impact of moving past the election? We heard from a lot of companies in late summer and the fall that there was maybe some freezing ahead of the election. So do you think that had any impact, whether it's some of these projects moving forward or distributors or integrators just willing to hold a little bit more product given improved expectations?

I think there's a little bit of that. I think as we've talked to customers really around the world, but especially here in our home market, there is a general optimism. Now that being said, there's obviously remaining volatility, which offsets a bit of that. But the general mood out there as evidenced by PMI in The U. S.

Finally getting above 50 for the first time in a long time, is that there's a general optimism and these companies can't wait to get on with their plans for increasing efficiency or transforming their operations. And at some point, they're all concerned about waiting too long and losing share to companies that move more assertively. So I think we did see a little bit of that as evidenced by the broad based project activity that we mentioned in the first quarter.

Thank you. I appreciate that. And then for my follow-up and maybe one for Christian. So software and control margins obviously real stand up this quarter up year on year despite double digit revenue decline. I guess, what should we expect the rest of the year there for margins?

Because it seems like revenue should continue to build sequentially as the year goes on. And I would think with that, those volumes lift up margin for the segment as the

Yes, sure, Chris. So yes, as the year goes on, again, we talked about favorable mix and Blake specifically mentioned logic and IO being nice contributors in the quarter. And as we talked about for the full year, we are expecting that that business year over year is going to be in that flat range, but should get some expanded margins.

So really nice start to the year, but from an overall margin perspective, again, we're just looking for that to continue to progress gradually during the course of the year.

Our next question comes from Julian Mitchell from Barclays. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Oh, yes. Hi. Good morning. Maybe my first question was just around trying to understand again, sorry to go back to the orders and understood year on year is up double digits, but also very depressed based a year ago. So maybe if we think about the book to bill, it's a bit easier.

I think maybe that was about 1.07 in your first quarter. I imagine it's always above one early in the year and below one second half of

year. So is there any sort of historical context you could put around that book to bill kind of what is it typically in the first quarter company wide? Any way you could sort of flesh that out and how we should think about that book to bill moving over the balance of the year?

Yes, Julian, I don't know that we have as reliable a correlation in orders at the beginning of the year as we do with what you mentioned and that is at the end of the year, certainly Q4, you can typically count on higher shipments particularly in our configured order and lifecycle services business. We did see orders a little bit better than expectations in the first quarter. We mentioned mid single digit growth overall. Products were actually a

in terms of sequential growth. And products in terms of orders probably are affected by calendarization the least unless it has to do with holidays typically occurring in one quarter or the other. So to be sure the performance was a little bit better than expected in the first quarter. And then as we mentioned, January performance was consistent with our outlook for Q2 and the rest of the year.

Rockwell Automation (ROK) Q1 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

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