Gates Industrial Corp posts solid Q3 results with record adjusted EBITDA margin, updates 2025 EPS guidance to $1.50 amid subdued industrial demand.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. My name is Krista and I will be your conference operator today. At this time I would like to welcome everyone to the Gates Industrial Corp third quarter 2025 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, simply press STAR followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. And if you'd like to withdraw that question again, press star one. Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference over to Rich Quass, Vice President of Investor Relations. Rich, the floor is yours.

Greetings and thank you for joining us on our third quarter 2025 earnings call. I'll briefly cover our non GAAP and forward looking language before passing the call over to our CEO Ivo Jurek, who will be followed by Brooks Mallard, our CFO. Before the market opened today we published our third quarter 2025 results. A copy of the release is available on our website at. Investors section Our call this morning is being webcast and is accompanied by a slide presentation. On this call we will refer to certain non GAAP financial measures that we believe are useful in evaluating our performance. Reconciliations of historical non GAAP financial measures are included in our earnings release and the slide presentation, each of which is available in the Investor Relations section of our website. Please refer now to slide 2 of the presentation which provides a reminder that our remarks will include forward looking statements within the meaning of Private Security Litigation Reform Act. These forward looking statements are subject to risks that could cause actual results to be materially different from those expressed in or implied by such forward looking statements. These risks include, among others, matters that we've described in our most recent Annual report on Form 10K and in other filings we make with the SEC, including our Q2 quarterly report on Form 10Q that was filed in July of 2025. We disclaim any obligation to update these forward looking statements. This quarter we will be attending the Bayer Global Industrial Conference, the UBS Global Industrials and Transportation Conference and the Goldman Sachs Industrials and Materials Conference and look forward to meeting many of you. Before we start, please note all comparisons are against the prior year period unless stated otherwise. And now I'll turn the call over to Ivo.

Thank you Rich. Good morning everyone and thank you for joining our call today. Let's begin on slide 3 of the presentation. Gates posted solid third quarter results with positive core revenue growth of almost 2% under macro industrial demand conditions that remain subdued Our replacement channel grew low single digits supported by mid single digit growth in automotive replacement. Our OEM sales were relatively flat at the end market level. Industrial was mixed globally off highway realized positive growth with stabilizing demand in construction offsetting incremental weakness in North American and and European agriculture. Commercial on highway declined mid single digits, impacted by decreasing production rates in North America. Personal mobility generated another strong quarter of growth exceeding 20% year on year. Our adjusted EBITDA margin increased nicely year over year to 22.9%. We generated record adjusted EBITDA dollars and margin for a third quarter. Our net leverage ratio declined to 2.0 turns, a 0.4 turn reduction compared to last year's third quarter. With that we are on pace to reduce our net leverage to under 2 times by year end. We have updated our 2025 guidance raising our adjusted EPS midpoint to $1.50 per share. We have maintained our full year 2025 adjusted EBITDA midpoint of $780 million while slightly lowering our core sales growth outlook at the midpoint. Brooks will provide more color and comments about our updated guidance assumptions later in the presentation. Additionally, our board recently approved a new $300 million share repurchase authorization that will expire at the end of 2026. The new authorization replaces the prior authorization which had over $100 million remaining on slide 4. We have heard from a number of you on the call that you would. Like to see an update on what. Is occurring in the end markets. So we have laid out an updated view of our underlying end markets and how they have progressed during 2025. Coming into the year, we did not anticipate a broad macro recovery, but we have continued to see uneven end market performance since we set our initial expectations for the year in February. We did however enter the year with some expectations that the PMI could begin to recover in the second half of 2025 that has not emerged to date. Industrial of highway demand trends have continued to languish and softened a bit relative to our expectation during the third quarter in certain geographies on reduced build rates and dealer inventory destock. Additionally, in the on highway end market, the North American commercial truck production levels deteriorated as the third quarter evolved. Despite some of these near term headwinds, we are still outperforming our underlying markets and believe that many of our challenged end markets are troughing or are close to troughing. Our automotive replacement and personal mobility business continues to grow nicely while our data center opportunity set continues to expand. As such, we are optimistic that demand in the majority of our end markets will be more stable to improving at some point in 2026. Please turn to slide 5. Third quarter total sales were $856 million which translated to core growth of 1.7%. Total revenues grew 3% and benefited from favorable foreign currency. As I have highlighted earlier, the end market performance was mixed in a quarter. Personal mobility continued to trend nicely higher with its year over year growth rate accelerating compared to the second quarter. Off highway grew mid single digits with growth in construction and agriculture globally. However, Agriculture declined incrementally in both North America and Europe. Diversified industrial and energy were both down slightly and on highway demand was soft. Automotive grew low single digits with solid growth in auto replacement more than offset a slight decline in auto oem. Our key growth verticals, personal mobility and auto replacement contributed to the performance. Our revenues from data center also continues to increase although from a small base and we see the liquid cooling opportunity in early stages of more broad based adoption. Adjusted EBITDA was $196 million with adjusted EBITDA margin coming in at 22.9%, an increase of 90 basis points and represented a record third quarter margin rate for the company. Our adjusted earnings per share was $0.39, an increase of approximately 18% year over. Year. Operating performance contributed to cents while a lower tax rate and consolidated mix of other items each contributed to cents. We believe we are effectively managing the enterprise across all aspects. On slide 6 we will review our segment highlights. In the power transmission segment, we generated revenues of $533 million in the quarter and core growth of 2.3%. Most industrial end markets realized growth. Personal mobility continues to be a strong contributor with growth exceeding 20% in the quarter. At a channel level, replacement grew with automotive and industrial channel core growth each growing low single digits. Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) sales also grew low single digits with industrial sales growth more than offsetting a decrease in automotive. We continue to invest in our strategic sales initiatives and innovation to help drive potential outgrowth in the future. Our mobility opportunity pipeline is staying robust. In the Fluid Power segment our sales were $322 million representing core growth of just under 1%. Many of our key end markets in Fluid Power continues to experience various levels of demand pressure, but our teams have held its own. Commercial on highway sales decreased mid teens as industry inventories are elevated. Off highway grew with positive construction trends offsetting a low single digit decline in ag. The agriculture performance year over year was worse, impacted by incremental Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) production cuts. To better align our customers inventory levels heading into the year end. We believe the underlying ag market is troughing and should be better positioned for recovery sometimes. In 2026 replacement demand was strong driven by double digit growth in automotive replacement globally with broad based growth across regions. Industrial Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) sales declined mid single digits on a core basis driven by soft demand trends in agriculture and commercial truck. Our data center opportunity pipeline exceeds $150 million and design in activities remain robust with respect to profitability. Both segments expanded adjusted EBITDA margins and at a similar rate. I will now pass the call over to Brooks for further comments on our results.

Thank you Ivo. I'll begin on slide 7 and review our core sales performance by region. The majority of our geographic regions generated core growth in the quarter highlighted by EMEA's return to growth. In North America core sales were about flat. The incremental demand weakness experienced in agriculture and commercial on highway during the quarter was primarily concentrated within the North American region and led to a low double digit decline in industrial Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) sales. Industrial replacement sales were also down slightly. Industrial was offset by growth in automotive as automotive replacement sales increased high single digits supported by year over year growth contribution from our new channel partner. Automotive Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) sales grew low single digits. In EMEA, core sales grew 2.6%. Industrial end markets were mixed. Construction returned to growth and more than offset. Weak demand in agriculture on highway grew while energy and diversified industrial saw declines. Personal mobility was very Strong growing almost 75% at the Channel level. Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) sales grew high single digits supported by construction on highway and mobility partially offset by lower automotive Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) sales into replacement channels increased slightly. East Asia and India posted approximately 5% core growth. Most industrial end markets grew. Automotive Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) sales decreased slightly which was more than offset by high teens growth in automotive replacement. China core sales expanded 6% year over year with growth across all channels and most end markets. South America core sales declined low to mid single digits. On slide 8 we show the key components of our year over year. Change in adjusted earnings per share. Operating performance contributed approximately $0.02 per share driven by core growth and higher adjusted EBITDA margin. A lower tax rate contributed $0.02 per share. Other items including lower interest expense, lower share count and other income together generated about $0.02 per share. Slide 9 provides a summary of our cash flow, performance and balance sheet metrics. Our free cash flow was $73 million and represented 73% conversion to adjusted net income. Our restructuring cash outflows have increased which impacted our free cash flow conversion. Our net leverage ratio declined to 2.0 times at the end of the third quarter, which was an improvement on a year over year and sequential basis. During the quarter we paid down $100 million of gross debt. We expect our net leverage to be under two times a calendar year. End 2025, our trailing twelve month return on invested capital was 21.6%, an improvement sequentially as improved operating performance helped offset the impact from internal investments in high return projects. On Slide 10, we provide our updated 2025 guidance. We have trimmed our core revenue growth midpoint to 1% and narrowed the range from 0.5% to 1.5% to reflect current macro conditions for the balance of the year. In addition, we have maintained our $780 million adjusted EBITDA midpoint and narrowed the range to $770 million to $790 million. We have raised our adjusted earnings per share guidance to the range of $1.48 per share to $1.52 per share, the upper half of our previous range. The $1.50 per share midpoint reflects a $0.02 per share increase relative to our prior guidance. Our guidance for capital expenditures is unchanged. We have lowered our free cash flow conversion outlook to a range of 80 to 90% from 90% plus as a result of increased restructuring cash outlays as part of our footprint optimization and restructuring initiatives. Turning to Slide 11, we want to provide an update of our ongoing restructuring plans as well as a strategic system conversion that we have been working on and that we expect to be complete by the middle of 2026. Beginning late in Q4 2025 and finishing by the end of Q2 2026. We expect to close multiple factories, complete a labor realignment and go live with an ERP conversion for most of our European footprint. As we complete these activities, we will be focused on providing continuity and service for our customers and our affected team members. We expect to incur additional cost and other one time operational impacts from these projects in the first half of 2026. From a financial perspective, we anticipate an unfavorable year over year impact of 100 to 200 basis points to our adjusted EBITDA margin in the first quarter and a more modest unfavorable effect in the second quarter ranging from 25 basis points to 75 basis points you year over. Year. In the second half of 2026. As we look towards completion of these various projects, we expect operations to normalize and realize favorable impact to our adjusted EBITDA margin from our restructuring activities of 75 to 125 basis points year-over-year year, excluding volume considerations we expect our footprint optimization restructuring and material cost out activities to generate 0 to 25basis points Overall adjusted EBITDA margin improvement year-over-year year. For the full year 2026, we anticipate being at a 23.5% adjusted EBITDA run rate in the second half of 2026 in a volume neutral environment. As I said, we have not taken volume impacts into this analysis and plan to update those assumptions as well as provide further insight into our restructuring activities when we initiate our formal 2026 guidance in conjunction with our Q4 earnings call in February. I will now turn the call back.

Over to Ethan thank you brooks moving to slide 12 this is our illustrative update on our walk towards the midterm stated adjusted EBITDA margin target of 24.5 percent in 2025. We have experienced a highly fluid business environment and continuation of prolonged negative PMI prints resulting in constrained volume performance. With that as a backdrop, we now anticipate to complete our initial phase of the committed footprint optimization project by mid-2026 and still expect that those projects will achieve 100 basis points of savings from the footprint optimization program exiting 2026. Coupled with our ongoing focus on material cost savings in 80:20, we estimate that our adjusted EBITDA margin will be nearing 24% on a run rate basis exiting next year. Most importantly, this does not assume any margin benefit from a potential broad volume recovery in our industrial end markets. While the end market volatility has not been supportive, we are very pleased with our execution and performance to date. We believe the prospects for incremental improvement over the midterm and a positive especially as the end market conditions begin to potentially inflect. With that, let me summarize our views on slide 13. We believe we have executed well, delivering solid results given the lackluster demand environment we have encountered throughout this year. We generated record third quarter adjusted EBITDA margin rate and achieved our highest quarterly core growth rate since Q2 2023. For the year, we are on target to deliver adjusted EBITDA margin expansion and earnings growth in a muted demand backdrop. We continue to make progress with our personal mobility and data center strategic initiatives and believe we will encounter a better industrial demand landscape in 2026. We continue to adjust our structural cost base and we expect our savings to begin to compound during 2H26 and anticipate our adjusted EBITDA margin rate to be approaching near 24% exiting next year. With debt as a baseline level, we would expect any volume improvements to be additive to Our margin performance. Lastly, we believe we now possess a strong balance sheet that can be utilized to support various potentially value creating capital deployment options. Our board recently approved a new $300 million share repurchase authorization. Separately, debt reduction continues to be an option. We just repaid $100 million of debt during the third quarter. And of course at this juncture, our ability to execute bolt on M and A transactions is increasing as we move towards our midterm financial leverage target. Before taking your questions, I want to thank the approximately 14,000 global Gates associates for their diligence and commitment supporting our customer needs. With that, I will now turn the call back over to the operator for Q and A.

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad to raise your hand and join the queue. And if you would like to withdraw that question again, press star one. We do ask that you limit yourself to one question and one follow up. Your first question comes from the line of Nigel Ko with Wolff Research. Please go ahead.

Thanks. Good morning everyone. Thanks for the first question. I just wanted to maybe clear up some questions around Slide 12. So it's very clear that the 24% for 2027 should be viewed as more of a floor here, right? I mean, if we, if we continue to just bump along the bottom here, 24% is where you see margins and then volume gives us some upside. I just want to make sure that that's, that's the case and then maybe just, you know, kind of dig into some of these kind of costs you're flagging for the first half of the year and you know what sort of benefits you see from this ERP implementation.

Yeah. Thanks, Nigel. Let me take the first part of your question and then I'll pass it off to Brooks on the ERP side and some of the other attributes of the cost question that you've had. But you know, thinking about slide 12. Right. So that margin walk was created, if you think about it more, to provide you with an opportunity to model the impacts of the transitory costs to be incurred as a part of our restructuring program restart. And that program is intended to significantly improve our cost structure. All else equal. Right. So not representative of growth forecast for our top line in 26. So to your point, you know, this is kind of a foundational floor. We do expect growth in 26. The margin impact for the full year in our presentation deck, however, excludes any benefit from revenue growth, frankly, because we are not providing you an updated guidance for 26. Yet, as you know, we will do that at the conclusion of our Q4, Q4 fiscal year and we'll do that in January. Right. So we, you know, look, we, we certainly believe that many of our end markets are at trough or close to troughing as I said in my prepared remarks, and we believe that they will turn positive in 26. In addition, we are excited and I said it on number of these calls over the last couple of, couple of quarters. We are quite excited about the strategic revenue generation initiatives for next year and we certainly expect them to contribute nicely to our growth trajectory in 2026. With that, Brooks, if you want to.

Take the second part of the question, please.

Yeah. So, you know, there's several things that we expect, you know, from a one time cost perspective, you know, relative to the restructuring and the, you know, the headcount alignment as we do the restructuring, you know, they'll be, we expect some additional, you know, freight cost expediting costs, you know, redundant labor costs and productivity, you know, costs as we move through, you know, some of these, some of these relocations and that's normal, you know, normal course of business. We do expect, you know, to Ivo's point, I want to remind everyone a lot of, you know, the backdrop for the reason we're doing a lot of these footprint optimization activities is to support our future growth. And so, you know, yes, we're going to get a cost benefit, but even moreover, you know, we're going to have additional capacity both from, you know, machinery and equipment perspective, but more importantly more capacity from a labor perspective to ramp through the cycle. From an ERP perspective, we're replacing a fairly antiquated system with a new system that's going to provide us much more capability in terms of warehouse management, in terms of managing the front end of the business to the back end of the business. But we really haven't built any of those benefits into our outlook. We've been very neutral on building those benefits in, but we definitely expect to improve our efficiencies and capabilities and again support the strategic initiatives of the company with the erp. But it does take, you know, we do think it'll take us the first half of the year, you know, to get that all lined out, which is why we wanted to be transparent and provide you an update of, you know, the cost and the impact associated with those activities. Oh yeah, we definitely appreciate that. Thank you. Just wanted to double click on growth. You mentioned growth about four or five times there. What kind of tailwind or Visibility do you have right now on some of the structural growth vectors like your data center personal mobility, I'm guessing you're going to have some price carry for, for next year. But more importantly, when you talk about the bottoming in some of these off highway, on highway markets, how much visibility do you have on production schedules for your OEM partners and do you have any visibility or maybe kind of a turn in production for those, for those end markets?

Yeah, sure. So look. Great question, Nigel. Thank you for asking that. Very, very optimistic, as you probably noticed over the last couple of earnings calls about some of the growth factors such as personal mobility and liquid cooling in data centers. The personal mobility, I think on the last call we suggested that we anticipate kind of over the next three years. And again, while that's not going to be every quarter, I want to kind of remind everybody that things are not always linear. Right. But, but if you take next three years personal mobility, we anticipate personal mobility to grow kind of 30% year on year compound annually between 25 and 28. There'll be time that it's going to grow 22 to 25%. There'll be time that it's Going to grow 35%. But on aggregate we believe that that's going to grow about 30% compound annually. And we have that confidence because of the design wins that we've been talking to you about over the last couple of years. The Destock post Covid has occurred and obviously we are delivering a real nice acceleration to the growth trajectory and that will continue into the next couple of two to three years. So we are quite positive about that. We've talked about the accelerated adoption of liquid cooling and while I'm not ready to give you a forward looking revenue forecast for 26 today and I'll do more of that on our next call. We are seeing tremendous amount of activities out there and there are some real positive attributes because what we are realizing is there's more cooling that's required, not less in the projects that we are involved with. And we are seeing pretty substantial growth across the various customer base in the designing activity. And that's a really good precursor into. What will be occurring over the next 12, 24, 36 months. So think about it kind of in a similar vein as when we were discussing personal mobility. So we believe that over the next one to two quarters we're going to be giving you some more tangible attributes associated with the dollars and cents about what that's going to represent in 26 and 27 but so far quite, quite optimistic about what we see there. You know, our automotive replacement market, while we don't necessarily talk about it as a necessarily a gross pork, you know, we have been growing that market quite substantially and quite nicely over the last couple of years, provided a great deal of stability for our revenue generation and we believe that that's going to continue as we move into 26, 27 and 28. There's still plenty of opportunity, plenty of firepower left to be able to continue to grow that market in that kind of 2 to 3% range, which is rather nice for a more mature type level of applications. So put that aside from kind of the incremental over and above, if you would growth trajectory to kind of your standard base, then when I take a look at some of our more traditional end markets, look, we certainly believe that the auto, auto OE business, while it does not represent a significant size of our business, you know, that's stabilizing. And we believe that we will start seeing more additive growth rates in North America and ultimately in 2026 in Europe. So we believe that those markets are stabilizing. Post liberation day announcements of these companies are starting to different countries are developing different agreements with our administration and I think things are starting to stabilize there. I think people are becoming a little more optimistic about that end market. We see some positive, I would say formation of green shoots certainly in commercial construction end market. And we are starting to hear more positive news about what our customers expect day there. Ag is still a challenge. And I talked about ag actually got incrementally worse for us in Q3. While we have delivered, you know, maybe a positive core growth overall in ag, it got a little bit worse than what we've anticipated. But we do believe that that's troughing and that while it's not going to go off to the races in 26, it's going to be significantly less bad than it has been over the last eight quarters. And so we are somewhat positive about that. And then ultimately the diversified industrial market, we've talked about it being kind of more bottoming out over the last couple of quarters and we certainly believe that that's bottomed out and that should start being more accretive in 2026. So I don't want to give anybody an idea that we have come out and we have given a forecast that we will not anticipate to have an organic growth rate in 2026. We actually quite optimistic about it, but we just wanted to give you a visibility on modeling of certain structural Cost removals that are going to be going in and out over the first half of the year and resetting our cost structure, becoming more competitive and giving ourselves the opportunity to actually support the growth rate, which we are very optimistic about.

Great card.

Thanks, Eva.

Your next question comes from the line of Dean Dray with RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Hey, wanted to circle back on slide 12 again. I know you've given this as a margin walk, but, and I don't know if you provided this previously, but can you give us some dimensions of the restructuring, like how many plants, where are they, what kind of headcount reduction, the dollar amount being invested and the dollar kind of payback cadence. I know you're providing it as a margin, but it would be helpful if you provide that dimension to it as well. Maybe you're restricted. I know if it's outside the U.S. you've got some works council, but maybe if you could start there, that'd be helpful.

Yeah. So look, Dana, it's fairly complicated because it's a combination of, if you remember when we said we were doing the restructuring, it was mostly around North America and emea. Right. So we'll kind of leave it at that. We're closing multiple factories and, you know. There'Ll be. You know, hundreds of affected employees. You know, I would say the payback generally ranges, you know, from one to two years, you know, depending on, you know, the amount of severance, the amount of move, the amount of investment that we need to make. You know, when we talk about the headwinds, you know, just to kind of size it, you know, we talked about the 100 to 200 bps and 25 to 75 bips. You know, that's kind of a 30 to $35 million one time expectation for the first half of 2026. And that also includes the, you know, the system conversion and all the costs associated with that. And so, you know, from a, I would say the other part, if you think about our increased capital spend over the past couple of years, you know, that's part of the investment as well. Right. And so, you know, if you look at what we spent over the past couple of years, you could say, you know, maybe 20 million last year, 20 million this year. So that's part of the investment as well. So when you calculate all that up, you know, that kind of, you know, you know, gives you that, you know, one to two year payback again, depending on the timing of when the projects get implemented and when the savings come through. And as I said, you know, we feel, you know, we feel as we, you know, as we exit 2H26, you know, that the first part of all that restructuring will be complete and you'll see the flow through in the second half. But let me also say that we're still working on additional projects and there's still money that we're spending right now that's kind of part of that group that, that investment I talked about that we haven't put into our run rate yet, that we haven't disclosed yet. Right. Because when you think about the back half of the year, there's probably 5 million per quarter, so 10 million in the back half of the year of savings, which will also roll over into 1H27. So that's kind of 20 million or half of the 40 million. So we're still working on the other half and those projects will be implemented and we'll disclose those, you know, here over the next year or so. Hopefully that kind of gives you enough color in terms of how all those things are working.

Yes, it really did. I appreciate that additional color. And then as a follow up, I was hoping you could take us through kind of the tariff impact pricing. And do you see any. And it sounds like there could be some volume fall off because of some demand destruction, but just kind of where does tariff stand on a net basis?

So let me take the cost piece and I'll let Ivo talk about the volume piece. So from a cost basis, you know, we're okay in terms of the total EBITDA impact. What I would say though is you look at some of the gross margin dilution in the back half of 2025 and that will fall through to EBITDA dilution. We're probably seeing 30 to 40 bps of dilution because we're not getting anything in terms of bottom line, you know, bottom line ad from the, from the tariffs. Right. We're just kind of holding our own and making sure that we don't, we don't cost ourselves money. So the impact from a profitability perspective is kind of 30 to 40 bps, you know, $0 from a, from a total EBITDA dollars perspective. And then I'll pass it over to Ivo to talk about the volume.

Yeah, Dean, I think that that's, you know, I'm not sure whether that would call it volume destruction or what have you, but I think I would probably call it more of a short term transitory growing pains. I believe that there's probably some impact to ag in particular, certainly the freight environment has gotten more challenging, particularly for farmers. And that's kind of what we have seen in terms of probably delayed recovery in ag overall. And as I said on the call, AG in Q3 got slightly worse than what we've anticipated at the beginning of Q3 around the edges. But we do believe that that market will also start normalizing as we enter 26. And sometimes during 26 it should start getting little less negative. So around that I think that you're starting to see more stabilization around the auto businesses overall. I think you start seeing forecasts maybe getting a little more positive in terms of production output by the carmakers. So I think that some of those transitory headwinds are probably. And as we enter 26, I think the environment should be more stable. Thank you.

Thanks, Steve.

Your next question comes from the line of Julian Mitchell with Barclays. Please go ahead. Hi, good afternoon. Maybe just the first question, trying to drill into perhaps a little bit the sort of exit rate from 2025. Just looking at the fourth quarter, for example, you mentioned EVO was sort of firming of the industrial environment in the prepared material. But I think the revenue guide seems to embed sort of fairly normal seasonality for the fourth quarter. Just wondered if you could. Clarify that. And then similarly on kind of the EBITDA rate in the fourth quarter, often down sequentially, I think this time it. Sort of flat to up. Just wondered if there was anything to call out there in terms of enterprise initiative benefits or mix or something.

Yes. So look, Julian, I think that you said it correctly. I mean if you think about our Q4 revenue, it really is kind of taking exit rate, Q3 environment, applying normalized seasonality. So there really isn't anything peculiar. I wouldn't say that we have baked in any further recoveries. We obviously very cautious around aggressive, but we're taking that present environment and we say you're probably not going to really see any tangible change in Q4 and take into account that many of these end markets, many of our customers have had somewhat challenging years. I don't see anybody trying to pre position themselves for 2026. And that in a way I would say is, you know, is positive that folks are not repositioning themselves. I think that people are now focusing more on 26 and you know, we are seeing, we are hearing certainly more, you know, kind of an optimistic outlook about 26 and you know, certain segments of our business. So you know that, you know, that being said on the, on the demand and I'll let Brooks, chime in on the EBITDA for Q4.

Yeah, so from a Q4 perspective, you know, we're still seeing some, you know, we're seeing, you know, some of our initiatives roll through around material cost. You know, that's sort of, that's offset by, you know, some of the tariff dilution and the kind of normal, you know, normal seasonality in terms of Q4. You know, we're pretty, I think we're pretty happy with where our inventories are in terms of service and then building, you know, being ready for some of these activities in Q1. So we're not building, you know, significant inventories as we head into the end of the year. You know, so all in nothing, you know, some puts and takes, right. In terms of, you know, things working in our favor, you know, other things, you know, that we're, we're, you know, we're taking on and making sure that we're able to deliver EBITDA growth year over year. But nothing, you know, structurally different as we end up, as we end the year.

But Julian, we also executing rather well, right? I mean feeling 18% EPS growth in Q3, record level of margins in a reasonably muted end market environment. So I think that the organization is doing a good job in managing during some of these challenging times and frankly delivering differentiated operating results. Great.

And then just one quick follow up on the sort of cash conversion. I think you walked down the guide a bit there. There's some higher cash restructuring. Should we expect much improvement in conversion next year or. No, because of the EMEA and North America restructuring charges will sort of weigh on next year.

Yeah, we'll have to take a look at that. I mean I would, I would think that, you know, the bigger part of what's affecting us in 2025 is the restructuring charges that get that are an add back to ebit, adjusted EBITDA and adjusted net income, but flow through the free cash flow and then the higher capex as well. You know, I would say that, you know, we're going to continue to spend CapEx, although I would imagine it starts to dial down just a tad in 2026. And we will probably see some small headwinds related to the restructuring. You know, cash out versus how it shows up in adjusted net income, but probably not as much as we do this year. And again, you know, we called out the headwinds. Those are going to show up in the numbers and show up in the cash. And so that won't really affect the overall cash conversion number because those will be in both places. So we'll update that and we'll make sure that we call that out specifically when we update our guidance for 2026. But again that's really just a kind of, it's in one number, it's not in the other number. And so it's a little bit out of balance. We need to make sure we call that out in our cash conversion.

Great, thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Jeff Hammond with Keybanc Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Hey, good afternoon. Now appreciate all the color. So just, just to kind of, you know, put a bow on this, you know, noise around, you know, margins and the margin bridge because I think the, the message is getting confused that next year is a transition year and maybe your long term target's getting pushed out. It seems like to me. You had. Said to get to your margin Target you needed 100, 150 basis points from volume and that hasn't played out. And it seems like you've maybe outperformed on internal execution material savings and the volume has been the hole. But maybe just level set me on that.

I think Jeff, you said it perfectly. We actually delivering on our midterm targets without getting any help from the underlying macro. And we feel really good about that. Right. Because it's really tough to execute in such negative PMI environment. And so I think that was the point of delineation where we want to ensure that we communicate to the markets that the company is executing well. We certainly believe that the volume is going to inflect. We all certainly know that none of us are very good at being able to call the inflections in the macroeconomics taking into account that there are so many different moving pieces associated with trade policies and industrial policies and kind of the global behavior of these end markets itself. But I think all of us would anticipate that after 36 months of negative BMI we would be on a verge at some point in time to see some inversion. And when that occurs, obviously that's incremental to what we have described in our presentation.

Okay, great. And then just on capital allocation, I sense a little bit of a tone change where you'd kind of been saying before, hey, we're just going to buy back our stock, the market doesn't appreciate what we're doing here and the multiple hasn't expanded relative to our peers. But now it seems like you're maybe talking a little more about bolt ons. And so, you know, am I reading that right or do we, you know, lean in on A day, you know, where our stock's down 6% and the market's confused.

Yeah, look, I mean our stock is, you know, I think our stock is inexpensive. You know, it's a, you know, it's trading at, you know, evaluation that is not akin to the performance that the company is delivering. So we'll certainly lean into, into buybacks. The board authorized $300 million of buyback, so we'll certainly be utilizing what we can. But the company as well is generating tremendous amount of free cash flow. So I think that we can do all of the things that have been outlined as plausible outcomes for capital deployment. We've bought back, I mean, we've paid down some more debt. We will be strategic about buying back our stock. But we also believe that as our balance sheet is trending towards below the two times leverage that we have kind of put in a place as a demarcation point for us. And so hopefully I won't have to be talking about a leverage in the future. We believe that, you know, we can use all three levers for capital deployment and we will be leaning more aggressively towards both on M and A.

Great. Thanks guys. Thanks.

Your next question comes from the line of Andy Kaplowitz with Citigroup. Please go ahead. Hey, good morning everyone. Or good afternoon now. Hi, Andy. You've been talking about accelerating footprint optimization and doing 8020 since your investor day a year and a half ago. But obviously your growth since then has been somewhat slow. So I'm just trying to figure out if you're accelerating or enhancing any of your restructuring plans versus when you updated us at that investor day. And then maybe can you update us on how 8020 is impacting gates as you go into 26 and beyond? If you do organically grow, can you do core incrementals over 40%?

Yeah, look, I think that we, you know, I want to kind of be fully transparent. Right. So as deliberation day came forward in April, we kind of took a little pause to try to understand what will the new mercantile regime look like and how do we think about our overall operating structure as a company. And obviously we have been in Region 4 region for a long time. So we just wanted to reassess and get a better sense of what is happening in the world. I think that as we got more comfortable with what we are seeing and how we are organized, we've come to a conclusion that our original plan was the right plan. As Brooks indicated, we need to be capable of having an access to labor that will give us an ability to flex up and down as these cycles occur. We believe that we are on the verge of an upcycle, so we've got to be positioned well to support the growth that we anticipate over the next upcoming upcycle. And so we are really just executing on our original plan. Andy. Nothing really has dramatically changed around what we have anticipated vis a vis footprint optimization and restructuring. So I think we are in a very, very good shape. And it also validated that plan was the right plan. We just needed to hit a pause for a couple of quarters. So that's kind of beyond us. And we are moving Forward as to 80 20. Look, 8020 material cost reductions and driving a better operational focus have been really attributes that have given us the opportunity to outperform what we've anticipated during our capital markets day in 2023 and still deliver on our midterm targets without the growth. So it's a very powerful tool. We again believe that we have very early innings. We take a look at somebody like. ITW that has been doing it for. Over a decade plus, and they continue to deliver good, you know, good margin expansion. We believe that we not only have the opportunity for a very, certainly intermediate future to continue to support 8020 as the key attributes of our enterprise initiatives to add to our profitability, but also grow our franchise through our strategic, you know, growth verticals. So we think that we can do both and we think that 8020 is going to be very additive to us. And you know, if you exclude the benefits from restructuring, and again, I want to be very specific, you know, if you, if you exclude the benefits that we have Described on slide 12, we still believe that in a normalized growth environment that we anticipate kind of in 26 and beyond, we should be generating 30 to 35% incremental over and above the benefits that are described on that page.

Yvo, that's helpful. And then just in terms of growth by region, I think you explained what's going on in North America well. But you also mentioned EMEA return to growth, which is interesting. And China continues to put out durable. Growth for you guys. So maybe you could sort of click on or give us a little more color about what you're seeing.

Yeah, look, I mean, I think that, you know, North America has been probably most challenged from kind of agriculture and market exposure that got slightly, you know, slightly worse. And remember, we, you know, it wasn't a ton of dollars that we, you know, that it got got, you know, around the edges, less supportive than what we've anticipated. So it's just around the edges less supportive there. The other end markets look, I mean, automotive overall grew nicely. Automotive replacement grew really well for us in North America. Industrial replacement market is growing. So, you know, the things are not, you know, they're not, you know, bad in, you know, any form of imagination. They, you know, they're kind of around, around what we've anticipated with maybe slightly, slightly worse behavior in the ag environment. South America has been tough last quarter, but it's been predominantly tough after, you know, extraordinary several quarters or maybe six quarters of significant growth. So it's kind of more normalization. And we again anticipate that South America is going to start moving into the growth phase as we kind of exit 26, I mean 25 into 26. Europe, you know, I mean, Europe has been a little bit surprising to us, right? I mean, it's behaved a little bit better than what we've, you know, what we've kind of envisaged with positive core growth. I would say that the auto markets are quite negative in Europe. I don't think I'm telling you anything that that has not been already communicated. But our business is performing well. Industrial first fit, particularly around the commercial construction segment. And mobility has been performing quite well. And IR has been stabilizing and starting to perk up a little bit in Q, you know, in Q3. So maybe around the edges more green shoots than less. And China has been okay. Automotive has been doing quite all right for us in China. Industrial replacement has been doing quite all right for us. So China has been behaving more or less as we have seen over the last several quarters. And then East Asia and India is growing. We are growing nicely. Automotive replacement business in India, the industrial for speed business is doing well. I mean, I think that India is poised to continue to be on a trajectory of nice growth with the overall economy evolving nicely and becoming a real alternative to China over the midterm. So we are quite optimistic about what we can see out of India in particular. So, you know, overall we actually reasonably tending to be more optimistic than less. And we believe that 26 should be more positive than perhaps might have been taken out of, out of our release today.

Thanks for all the color.

Your next question comes from the line of Tomo Sanyo with JP Morgan. Please go ahead. Hello everyone. Hi, Tomo. Good morning. Hi. I'd like to ask about the data centers and of the 322 million employee power revenue this quarter, how much was related to data center sales and what is your expectations for 2025 data center revenue and the conversions of your 150 million plus pipeline in 2026, please.

Yeah, Tomo, good afternoon to you. Good morning. We're not going to be addressing exactly the revenue flows because it's still reasonably a small size of revenue that is growing rather nicely for us but from a very, very small base. So I don't think it's worth to at this point in time to spend time yet on the sizing of this. It's in the millions, not in the tens of millions yet designing activities remains very, very robust. I mean, we see significant number of new customers that are coming to us and we are working with on new designing opportunities. Then we will be providing you with some additional color in January, early February on our Q4 earnings call. But we do continue to be quite optimistic that the data center growth as a vertical is going to ramp up rather nicely. And we still feel that that 80 to $200 million, 100 to $200 million by 2028 is certainly doable for us as an intermediate target for us over the next two to three years. We also incidentally are going to be at the show Super Super Compute Next, I think two weeks from now in St. Louis. So we would invite anybody to stop by and have a conversation with us about some of the new products innovation and we can, you know, we can provide additional color on what we are working on from a technology perspective there as well.

Thank you, Ivo. And follow up on pricing perspectives. Could you talk about how effective you have been in passing through cost inflation in Q3 and what is your pricing strategy for 2026, please?

Well, look, I mean, we've all, you know, going back, I mean, we've always been, I would say, as effective as anybody in terms of price passing pricing through from an inflation perspective. You know, we, when the tariff, all the new tariffs came out, you know, for the most part we're able to cover that with pricing. I mean, there's certain regions where there are a little bit more pricing challenged, you know, particularly in Asia where we were able to offset it more operationally than through pricing. You know, we've always been very, you know, you know, very transparent in terms of, you know, we're going to cover, you know, material utility inflation on a yearly basis with pricing. And then, you know, the 80 20, you know, when we implemented 80 20, you know, we added a value pricing lever to our pricing, you know, kind of tactical approach. You know, we make, you know, hundreds of thousands of SKUs. Right. And so, you know, some of these SKUs, you know, you want to be more competitive on some of them. You're the only ones that make it. And you know, you can price those, you know, based on the value you bring because you may be the only one that makes that particular part. And so, you know, we continue to use our 8020 playbook to optimize pricing. And in the aggregate, you know, we're always going to make sure that we use pricing to cover our to cover our material and utility inflation.

Thank you. I appreciate it.

That concludes our question and answer session. I will now turn the conference back over to Rich for closing comments.

All right. Thanks everyone for joining. If you have any further questions, feel free to reach out. Otherwise, have a great rest of the week. Take care.

Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. And you may now disconnect.