Great. Well, thank you everybody for joining us. My name is Mark Delaney, and I cover Belden for Goldman Sachs. I'm very pleased to be hosting Ashish Chand, the CEO of Belden, and Jeremy Parks, the CFO. Thank you both for joining us. Thank you, Mark. Thank you. As many of you know, Belden is a leading global supplier of Network Infrastructure, Connectivity, and Automation Products, and reports under two segments: Enterprise Solutions and Industrial Solutions. The Enterprise Solutions segment offers enterprise, Data Center, and consumer network connectivity solutions, including Copper and Fiber Broadband and 5G products. The Industrial Solutions segment supports applications including Network Infrastructure, Secure Remote Access and Analytics. Belden generated more than $2.6 billion of revenue last year, with revenue roughly balanced between the Industrial and Enterprise Solutions segments. To get us going, I thought, perhaps, Ashish, you could summarize what you think is unique about Belden's product set and what differentiates it from competitors. Sure, Mark. If you think about Belden's history, we've always been in the high-end communication space, and we have a very broad portfolio. We make products that are used for Data Transmission, essentially our wire and cable portfolio. We make products that get used for data acquisition, which is all types of connectors, especially hardened differentiated connectors. We have products that are used in Data Orchestration, the switching, routing, and Protocol C onversion Gateways. Finally, as you said, we have products that are used in Data Management, which are more of a software-based, you know, it's more software-based portfolio. Essentially, you know, with the launch of Belden Horizon, we brought it all together last year as one Data Platform. In many ways, we are unique because we are the only company in the space that does all four. We go across Data Acquisition, Transmission, Orchestration, and Management, and this is what has allowed us to reposition Belden increasingly as a Solutions Provider. You know, we'll talk more, of course, about that approach. If you look at our Gross Margins, you know, you will see that across the board, we are fairly differentiated in our product categories. Yeah. Well, let's continue on that topic of selling more Full Solution Sales. This is one of the things you've really emphasized since you've taken on the CEO role a few months ago. Maybe give us a bit more detail, if you could please, around some of the steps the company plans to take in order to move more in that direction. Sure. If you think about the product portfolio we have, there are OEMs, Systems Integrators, and contractors that take those products and go to End Users with Sub-Solutions or Point Solutions. You know, that's great. We, we love that business. Increasingly, we've seen End Users coming back and saying, "Well, we are dealing with Islands of Automation, or we're dealing with Islands of Networks or connectivity and data, and it'll be really helpful if all of this could come together." About three, four years ago, you know, when we started receiving this kind of feedback from customers, and, you know, this was at the point where the Pandemic had, you know, become a problem for manufacturing companies, labor shortages, Supply Chains had become more brittle and complicated. Customers were really struggling to bring all their data together in a simple way. At that point in time, we launched the Solutions Offering at Belden. I mean, we'd been doing solutions more opportunistically, but this was more, you know, systemic. We basically said, "We would be in a position to integrate the entire network on which these Point Solutions sit, and we can bring all the data together." If somebody only wanted a Network Solution from us, that's fine. In many instances, customers upgraded to a Network plus a Data Solution. Think about a large factory complex. You have data coming out in audio, video, vibration, temperature, et cetera, et cetera, and all of it needs to come together. It needs to be cleansed, normalized before some application can process it and say something like, "Stop that machine," or, "Increase the speed," or whatever that insight might be or that instruction might be. I think that middle space of fetching the data, putting it all in one place and making it usable, was vacant. We jumped into that space. On the Industrial Automation side, it's proven to be very successful. We now feel very confident, and we feel that it's time to take that approach to our Enterprise space. There we see increasingly verticals like Healthcare, H ospitality, Higher Education, certain federal programs, and we see a number of Use Cases. You know, Preventive Maintenance, safety, customer experience, all of them need multiple sources of data to come together. If I kind of put a ribbon around it, our solution focuses on combining Islands of Data and allowing our End Users to design a more cost-effective way to do that. At this point, it's kind of in the Mid to High Single Digits in terms of our revenue, but we see it growing 3x-4x times over the next few years, and we are really excited about this. You mentioned having some success with this when you were running the Industrial Automation Solutions segment. Can you talk a little bit more about what you had to do in order to support this kind of a solution? Say, I mean, were there things like we place more engineers on-site at customers, or we had to hire different types of sales, support and engineering people? I mean, what are some of the things you had to do to enable this? No, there were three areas of focus when we started the program. The first thing was around how do you take these solutions to market. The second focus was in terms of changing our portfolio, in terms of filling certain gaps. The third step, which I think was the most exciting, also the most difficult step, was taking that jump from Network to Data. Being able to position data instead of just the Network Infrastructure, right? Each of those three steps came with multiple activities or, you know, investments. For example, in terms of selling solutions, we really had to go out and, you know, upgrade our sales force significantly. We brought in people to support them who are now called Solutions Consultants. Three, four Years ago, we had zero Solutions Consultants. As we closed Q1 this year, we had 125. These consultants start the engagement of the customer essentially by not talking about Belden. They talk about the Workflow and the KPIs that the customers have in mind. Their approach is that a solution is delivered when a KPI that is valuable to a customer can be impacted, right? It could be, you know, patient waiting time in a hospital. It could be the turnaround time for a hotel room. It could be the scrap in a plant, right? Whatever that KPI is. To start with that, they work through, you know, establishing a Data Flow to support that Workflow, and at that point, Belden enters the picture in terms of a commercial selling process, right? There's a lot of consultative discussion upfront followed by that. We had to do, you know, change our Go-To-Market Approach. We also had to build these technology centers that we now call Customer Innovation Centers. How that came about was that a lot of our customers work in the Mission-Critical Space, and they can't actually just take a new solution and put it on site. They need to build it, debug it, test it, you know, change it, validate it before they can deploy that solution. For example, in a nuclear power plant or in a hospital. In our Customer Innovation Centers, we allow customers to come in and do exactly that. In many ways, whilst we are not changing the products, we are changing how those products are configured together to form a solution. It's a very interesting process. I think we spoke about an example in our recent earnings call where we helped a power distribution company, that was at the Customer Innovation Center in Stuttgart, that solution was developed. There are other, you know, interesting applications. We worked on, you know, Anti-Collision Systems in a metro. We worked on, you know, safety and security systems in mines, on and so forth, and it's all been done in those Customer Innovation Centers. Third, we really had to plug certain gaps in our product portfolio, so we had to make sure that we embedded Cybersecurity. We had to make sure that we put in more Wireless Capability, more Fiber Capability, right? That was the second area, which was really more product-focused. Finally, we had to go out and hire a lot more Software Engineers to build data capability. You know, when we launched Belden Horizon last year, that was kind of after a Three-Year Investment in Middleware and Data Management. Really a lot of changes were made, and I think they've all been well-received. You know, I imagine there's better profit opportunity selling more of a Full Solution Sales. Have you seen, for customers that have already moved to this buying model, are you seeing any improvement in the Promoter Scores, retention with customers? I mean, are there longer term benefits beyond the initial opportunity? Yeah. I don't have empirical data as yet because it's still early, but we have a lot of anecdotal data and, you know, we see that customers in our new buying process who reach the Customer Innovation Center and do a Validation Test, typically the conversion from there, thereafter is 95%, right? Anybody who comes in to do a validation becomes the customer. The second thing I've noticed is anybody who deploys a solution on one site typically does multiple sites. That's a really good, you know, indicator of success. We've also seen people very transparently telling us the value they were able to achieve. For example, in the power distribution company's case, right? They were paying approximately $30 million-$35 million of, they had losses to that extent because of fines as well as lost revenue. Because of that, when we found a solution, that Intelligent Fault Locator System that reduced the time it takes to find the fault, they were more than willing to give us our fair share of the value. We realized a lot more revenue and margin on that transaction than we would normally get. Maybe you could elaborate a bit on the margins you get for a Full Solution Sale relative to a more traditional Point Product. I know you shared some details on this on the earnings call, which, but I think it's helpful, so maybe you can remind everyone what that looks like. Yeah. You know, again, it varies a little bit from vertical to vertical and depends on the Use Cases we are solving for and how valuable they are. Our Average Gross Margins are in that 36%-37% range, right? That's, that's where we come in. When you do a solution, it's typically more in the 50% range. It's, it's much higher. Again, it can vary a little bit, but that's the kind of value add we see and, but I think more importantly, it just makes us a lot more sticky. Once you create a solution, you know, customers do come back to you every time they have a problem. You mentioned the Horizon product a few times, and it was a big focus at the recent Investor Day that you held. Anything more you can share in terms of, you know, the traction you're having with that in terms of number of customers that are using it, revenue or just, you know, qualitatively, how is that being received? Yeah. When we launched Belden Horizon, the goal was not necessarily to sell it as a Software Product, right? The goal was to make sure that Belden Horizon becomes the overlay that combines and integrates all the data that's coming out of our networks, and we use that as the glue, so to speak, right? Here are some interesting things that Belden Horizon can do. First of all, you know, once you launch Belden Horizon, it can discover all the Network Devices in your infrastructure, and it can map them out, and it can, you know, find out if they're working as required, et cetera. That, I think, is a very basic, you know, functionality of Belden Horizon as it stands today. A lot of people just want that to start with, right? They're like, "We have so many devices on a network. We don't know how they're being used and how, you know, can we map them correctly? Can we secure them?" Second, it can then allow you to take certain applications, you know, in Containers, and then run them on those devices and manage that centrally. That's a very good second step for most people saying, "Okay, I wanted to do some, you know, Preventive Maintenance in that space and, you know, now I have that capability." Third, it can take the Network Data and analyze it for trends and patterns and look for anomalies, et cetera. It can say that, you know, there is an issue or there is a potential issue in that part of the network. That's obviously very helpful. Ultimately, and I think this is where the beauty of Belden Horizon lies, it can go beyond the Network Data, and it can look at the Operational Data. It can bring in, for example, if you were a warehouse doing automated gluing of boxes, it could tell you if a particular box did not have the right amount of glue applied on it, and it's gonna be rejected further down. You might as well take it out now versus putting something in it and wasting process and so on and so forth. It could reduce the number of Truck Rolls, you know, for repairs by pointing out an anomaly in the Operational Data. Really when you look at all these four things, you know, starting from Mapping Networks to running applications on them to, you know, Analyzing Network Data to Analyzing Operational Data, it becomes a very powerful tool for the user. In my mind, I kind of think of it like, you know, it's like your smartphone technology in some sense, and you can take a number of apps on your smartphone, and they can use the data from your phone. In many ways, this is the Data Repository that the End User has, and they can run any kind of app on it and feed data into it as long as they're comfortable doing that. They don't have to have separate plumbing for each application. That makes a lot of sense. You're sticking on the theme of product evolution. Fiber has been a big focus for the company over the last several years. Belden's Fiber Product Mix has increased and is now in the High 30% range of the Broadband Solutions market revenue, and that's up from a Mid-Single-Digit percent about five years ago. What's driven that mix higher in Fiber Revenue, and where do you see that trending over time? Yeah. We've grown at about 48% overall and about 30% organically, right? In that business. I think it's been both. It's been a series of well-conceived and executed M&A transactions, right? Most recently, we announced the acquisition of S in that same sequence. It's also been the capability to go out and do a lot more engineering with our OEMs and customers, so that they see the value of the packaged Fiber, you know, solution. We are less on the trunking. You know, we don't do the Bulk Fiber. We do the Access Fiber. It's more complicated. It's more engineering dense. You know, the customers we work with are really benefiting in terms of speed of deployment of connections. You have a little bit of a Data Center business, I believe, within your Enterprise Solutions segment. I don't think there's historically been much exposure to Hyperscale Data Centers. Is that an area you may wanna target going forward? I don't think we wanna go after the Hyperscalers in that sense because we, you know, they tend to be cyclical in many ways. We believe that in the attractive verticals that have, you know, long-term growth drivers, Healthcare, Hospitality, education, et cetera, and certain other kind of Hybrid Industrial Enterprise markets like Transportation, where, you know, you need a railway station which is more like a building or a warehouse. You know, sometimes you can argue a warehouse is a building versus an industrial location. If you look at these markets, they all need Data-Centric Support. We would rather focus on creating, you know, Network Solutions for those Data Center opportunities versus going after the more cyclical cases. I think we've seen certain companies in our peer group who've done the up and down on the Hyperscalers. You know, but those verticals are very long-term from our perspective. What's happening in that market, in those markets also is that, Mark, It's not necessarily about new construction, but about upgrading existing infrastructure. For example, in a hospital, right? Making it smarter. That's where we really excel. I wanted to cover some of the demand drivers. Jeremy, I did promise you that I would give you the hard questions, so here we go, which is on some of these government programs, right? The Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. There's a lot of funding allocated toward Broadband. Maybe help us understand what that might mean for Belden, even if it's at a high level, 'cause I know there's a lot of adjustments and calculations that could potentially feed into what you may actually realize from that. Yeah. I would say in general it's a very good tailwind for our Broadband Fiber business, obviously. There's a couple of big bills. There's the RDOF bill, which is roughly $20 billion in funding to expand broadband networks into rural areas, improve access throughout the country. That money started to be allocated late last year, we are already seeing some of that in our numbers, and I think that is a helper, and that will continue for some time as well. The Infrastructure Bill is about three times as large with respect to Broadband Funding, and that really hasn't started yet. I think right now there's still a lot of work being done in Washington, D.C. to work through mechanistically how is that money gonna get allocated and, the timing. I expect that to be a helper for several years. I think these are great tailwinds. I don't know how to translate that into an exact number as far as what we'll receive, but we sell a lot of Broadband Fiber. The products that we sell are very important and salient in expanding networks, the Broadband Infrastructure generally. I think it's a big helper. In addition to those, you've also got just investments that are being made by Cable Operators, right? There's a lot of competition between the telcos and the Cable Operators. I think all of that together makes us feel really optimistic about the Broadband Fiber market for several years. When you think about the business environment more holistically on the 1Q earnings call, you spoke about order trends and your confidence in the Backlog despite Supply Chain Normalization contributing to a slowdown in early orders from customers. Can you give us a little more color on what you're seeing in your specific end markets, and why you think orders held up pretty well, last quarter despite some of the macroeconomic headwinds that are out there? Yeah. I think I'll start, and then Ashish, if you have anything you wanna add, you can do that. From an order standpoint, orders were roughly flat sequentially from Q4 to Q1, came in exactly as we had anticipated at the beginning of the quarter. As you mentioned earlier, we're not really a Backlog business, but our Backlog had quadrupled over the course of the last 18 months or so. Some normalization was expected. It's not very surprising. I think the encouraging thing at this point is Sell-T hrough Data is still pretty good. Our trends in terms of Point of Sale from distribution to End Users and what we're seeing in instances where we're selling directly to End Users, we're still seeing growth. Good momentum there, even from Q4 to Q1. Q1 would typically be a little seasonally weaker for us. It was a very solid quarter. We were up sequentially. I think from an End Demand standpoint, we're not necessarily seeing any slowing at this point. Yeah, we'll see the Backlog come down a little bit, but that's not surprising. For either of you, do you think any of the demand that Belden has seen is being driven by Regionalization and an increased focus on doing more manufacturing in Mexico or the USA, in particular? Yeah. I certainly think Reshoring is a big tailwind for us, right? I think, I mean, if you looked at U.S. Manufacturing or North American Manufacturing in general, the infrastructure was fairly aged. You know, there was low capacity available for expansion. Most importantly, they did not have modern networks and data, you know, systems to improve. In fact, one of our biggest success stories has been taking our own Digitization Solution to our own factories in Richmond. We built a factory there in 1928, right? It's a very old factory. It was, you know, very difficult to get more out of that factory. We ran this project for One Year, and we found more capacity by using our Digitization and Data Solution. Certainly Reshoring, at a time when Supply Chain Constraints won't let you always get new equipment or new construction done, and you still have to improve what you have, I think, that's a big tailwind for us. I think this trend will continue for some time because increasingly companies are saying, "As we think about resilience, we want our Supply Chain to be visible, and we can't deal with these, you know, very large macro risks that seem to be, you know, prevalent right now. Speaking of Supply Chain, some industry participants have been commenting that the supplier environment has generally been improving. Is this consistent with what Belden has been seeing, and are there any specific Golden Screw type Chip Shortages or component shortages that you're still facing at this point? Well, as you might recall, Mark, from our Q1 commentary, we had a little better mix in Q1 because we shipped out more Active Products because, you know, some of the Chip Shortages abated. In general, I think our team had always done a good job of managing that partly by redesigning some of the products, partly by just being more nimble in terms of sourcing from a broader set of brokers and suppliers. Yeah, I think it's eased up and I think it's great because there is some Pent-Up Demand, especially in the Automation Space, and we are more than happy to fulfill that. Is Belden still seeing Inflationary Pressures and costs, either materials or labor or shipping? If so, what's your ability to offset that inflation? Yeah. We obviously saw a lot more inflation over the last 18 months, right? I think we were ahead of the curve in terms of honestly explaining to our customers, you know, how that was impacting Lead Times and, you know, our capability to deliver. We were able to realize better prices, you know, keep our promises, et cetera. That situation is no longer... You know, we don't have that same problem now, right? Inflation is obviously much under control. There is obviously some Wage Inflation, you know, across the board. I think that may continue for some time. In some sense, part of what we do as Belden is solutions to fight that, right? We make things more efficient. I think, just given the amount of Automation we have in our manufacturing, and then given the kinds of products we make, and you know, how much value does, you know, that labor contributes to the whole stack, it's not significant enough. You know, it doesn't really bother us at this point. I think, the company had said on some of the earnings calls over the last 18 months or so that your ability to maintain somewhat short Lead Times, especially relative to some of your competitors, actually has maybe led to some Share Gain. You know, maybe you can elaborate a little bit more on that, and do you think you can hold on to that Share Gain, or does, you know, a customer come back and say, "Oh, I gave Belden a little bit more. They could serve me, but I wanna keep the playing field balanced. Yeah. I think that's true if we, you know, for companies that are only doing products. I think the market where the Share Gain was the most pronounced was on the Industrial Automation side. In some sense, over the last two years, you know, 2021, 2022, we grew at approximately 20% Per Annum. The markets grew at about 10-ish, so we gained share. A lot of that share came from other companies that had Active Devices in the portfolio but could not supply. When Belden took that business, we not only sold the Active Devices, but we sold the whole portfolio and the solution. It's kinda difficult for a customer to then walk away from that and go back and say, "Hey, I'm gonna fragment my, you know, Bill of Materials and buy from separate people," because now they've got used to this convenience and higher value solution. Yeah, I think a lot of that Share Gain is very sticky. In fact, I would even argue that a number of those customers are now saying, "Hey, we used you in one part of the world because we really had a problem there, but now we wish to make you a global partner." In many ways, it's gonna amplify our share. Is there any changes that Belden may wanna make with its own Supply Chain or inventory management, having seen all of the things that have gone on in the world over the last three, four years? Again, I know you maintain pretty short Lead Times, but companies can always become more resilient and robust with their Supply Chains. Yeah. I think we've, you know, over time, because of acquisitions, we've got a slightly fragmented, you know, footprint and Supply Chain base. I think from time to time, it's good to make sure that's not overly complex, right? I think that time is now. It's a good time to do that. Our focus has always been on a regional footprint to make in region for the region. Keeping those two in mind, right, simplification of that, you know, fragmented Supply Chain and the in-region approach, there might be a few things that we need to do. For example, we would certainly be open to, you know, we have footprint in India and, you know, we have opportunities to expand that. That could be one way of, you know, getting more capacity in a fast-growing region whilst, you know, making it less complex, by consolidating. Nothing dramatic. I think it's more at the, at the edges. Speaking of the financial targets, Belden has a goal of generating at least $8.00 of earnings in 2025. Maybe you can talk about what some of the key drivers are in order to get there. I think first of all, just our guidance on Organic Growth, right? I think if you look at what we've said consistently, it's M id-Single-Digit growth, 30% Incremental, you know, fall through on that. That gets you about 60, 70 Basis Points of Margin Expansion per annum, right? I think that given where we are right now and given how that plan is going, given our, you know, Backlog orders, the markets we play in, we feel very good, you know, that we can certainly exceed that goal of $8.00 in 2025. Of course, we have a fairly healthy leverage position. Our Balance Sheet is strong. We are approximately 1.3 x right now at the end of this quarter. We've always stated we wanna be below 1.5x. Net Leverage. Yeah. Then really as we deploy some of that capability in terms of M&A, you know, we'll get some more EPS, you know, accretion there. I think our focus on Organic Growth Programs, some Bolt-On, and then obviously, you know, we've recently got this authorization to go and buy $300 million of shares. Those three, I think they put us on that path to exceed that goal. When you look at the M&A Landscape and the potential pipeline of things you could execute upon, and you think about this Leverage Target you mentioned, sort of 1.5x, I mean, would you be willing to go meaningfully higher if you found a really attractive acquisition? I think it's certainly possible. We wouldn't do anything that would be called a Transformative Type Acquisition. We're not looking for new verticals, new markets in that sense. If we found something that allowed us to accelerate our solutions in the markets that we really value, which are driven by, you know, Automation, Smart Buildings, and Broadband, and it added, you know, some unique capability to us, we would certainly, you know, consider that. I think there are ways of getting to our goals by staying pretty much in that range. You know, when we look at the pipeline we have, it fits into that kind of range. That's helpful. In terms of ability to get deals done, have you seen any change in that, especially with Capital Markets being a little bit more difficult, perhaps certain smaller companies may, you know, be more willing to sell? We're seeing a lot more companies coming forward than we saw at the same time last year, right? That's, that's obviously interesting. Now we obviously remain, you know, fundamentally very picky. It has to fit our Solution Story. It has to typically be accretive. I think if you look at our track record over the last three, four years, right, all those companies have Double-Digit Returns, and they're all part of our Solution Story. I think we'll just continue playing out that model. Yeah, there's more, there's more choice, certainly. Jeremy, maybe talk a little bit about the Buyback Strategy. You just re-up the authorization on the last earnings call, you made that announcement. I mean, how should we think about the pace of using that capital? Yeah. In terms of our allocation priorities, number one would be Organic Growth. Number two is going to be Bolt-On M&A, Strategic M&A that we can do to improve the solutions in the markets that we're selling into. Those are the priorities for sure. If we achieve our Free Cash Flow targets, $1 billion over four years that we provided in our Investor Day in Mid-2022, we'll have a lot of excess capital to deploy, I think even after M&A. From our perspective, I think Share Buybacks are still on the table for sure. Obviously, we have this new authorization. Our approach is that we are evaluating purchases on a quarter-by-quarter basis. We have a conversation with the Board once a quarter. We always look at the current valuation, which we think is extremely cheap right now, so I think they're a good buy, our leverage and other investment opportunities. I think it's still a very good option for us. It's not gonna take priority over those other two things. If we continue to generate Strong Free Cash Flows, I think it's a possibility for sure. Well, great. We are coming up on time here, so I'd really like to thank the Belden team for joining us today. Sure. Thank you. Sure. Very helpful.