Great. We'll get started. Again, very pleased to welcome Rockwell Automation to the stage, and Christian Rothe, CFO, Matthew Fordenwalt, SVP of Lifecycle Services, and Aijana Zellner from Investor Relations as well. Christian, I thought maybe opening up with just top of mind issues for you, and perhaps we can get into Q&A. Yeah, absolutely. Top of mind issues for us, really strong Q2. Frankly, we felt good going into the quarter. I think the quarter itself outperformed what we were expecting, and it outperformed really across the board. All of our segments came in quite nicely on the top line. Lifecycle was probably closer to what we had expected on the top line, but actually outperformed our expectations on the bottom line. The end result was a really strong flow-through profitability, great performance on the EPS side, incremental margins that were really strong for Rockwell, and allowed us to have more confidence since we raised our guide. The raise of our guide was a full 3 points on the organic sales line. It went from a midpoint of 4% to a midpoint of 7%, and we took our EPS number up by $1 at the midpoint. Yeah, feel pretty good about how the first half shaped up. We obviously got a full second half that we have to go get, but feel like the setup's good. Great. That's a perfect way to set up. I do want to come back to the trading conditions and the way you're seeing the world. I thought it'd be good to step back and just kind of focus on what you've done and the changes underway in the two years, more or less two years you've been a CFO. I think you came in with a mission to really try and operationalize some of the way that Rockwell goes to market and some of the products pricing, cost structure. Maybe just talk about what you've accomplished, what needs to be accomplished. I think the thing about Rockwell is that the organization we started with, the company's got over 100 years of history. Our technology is arguably the most ubiquitous technology in the industrial manufacturing world and the U.S. in particular. Really strong, loyal customer base, a really good margin profile at its core with our technologies. To take that and say, "You know what, we've got a next level that we can do as an organization." All the different levers that are available to be able to do that, they're really all there for Rockwell. That is, we have pricing power. We have a really strong channel that can even do more for us. We have a really good relationship with machine builders and system integrators, there can be more there. We're finding areas and applications for our technology that we knew were there, but the market's starting to adopt more in things like data center. Operational excellence-wise, we have more that we can do in our factories, in our own operations, to bring more automation and ultimately autonomy to our operations. We're on that journey now, too, and we're seeing that with good expansion on gross margin. At the same time, we just went through, in 2024, went through a fairly large cost reduction process, which includes some headcount reduction. We were starting at a really solid base from our spend levels, but we feel like we're in a position to hold that in check. We're getting really good leverage on the P&L. Really, it's a lot of different factors that are all coming together. It starts with having an amazing product and really good relationships with customers, and then taking that and building off of it to drive really great profitability. Okay. If you had to think about what are the one or two single biggest drivers of further improvements, what would those be? Yeah. For me, it's always volume, right? Volume solves everything, right? To the extent we can get volume, that's the number 1 driver. The number two one for us, I think we've shown over the last couple of years that we're pretty good at the productivity play now, and we're continuing to enhance those activities. Maybe I'll set that one aside, and just say that I do think to take our business to the next level, it's about making the right investments that have a long-term ROI to position us for kind of that next stage of not just top-line growth, but also next stage of profitability. Okay. That's great. When I first picked up Rockwell eons ago. I heard 21 years ago. Is that right? 21 years ago, yeah. 21 years ago. That's great. It is literally a lifetime. Certainly a good career for the full. Rockwell was always a first quartile margin company, and certainly during sort of the period around COVID and supply chain, a lot of companies really kind of stepped up on margins, and you guys fell back. Maybe just talk about what happened, and does that mean there's a lot more catch-up potential for Rockwell, potentially? Yeah, there were a couple of factors that happened during that timeframe. We did a number of transactions. Those transactions were of a collection of businesses that we really love. They're great. They're new ways for us to win. It gives some real strength to our product offering, our overall offering with our customers, and especially in the production environment. A lot of those businesses were earlier stage than what you would normally want. That is, the profitability level was not strong. That collection of transactions were somewhat dilutive to our margins. That held our margin in check during that timeframe. On top of that, we also were adding more headcount. We were spending more. We were positioning ourselves for an automation renaissance, if you would, and that didn't materialize. There was a lot of stock-up that happened in the channel during that timeframe, of course, the destock hurts. It hurts for everybody when that happens. That allowed us to think about the right sizing of our organization and our spend levels. Yes, we do recognize that the margin profile for Rockwell over that kind of decade, and we've talked about this, that decade timeframe, margins were relatively flat, whereas the rest of the industrial world, there was some pretty good expansion. We see an opportunity for us to definitely expand those margins over the long term. Okay. That's great. Before we get into sort of the guidance increase, et cetera, and cycle and all that good stuff, you did sort of talk about tease out this sort of automation cycle and accelerating growth, et cetera. We do get these bouts of enthusiasm around automation, agent workforce, productivity, et cetera. What's kind of the current setup? How is Rockwell positioned for the next three, five years? Are you expecting 6% to 9% growth, 5% to 8% organic, 1% from acquisitions, or do you think it's going to be better than that? How are you positioned right now for that? Yeah. We have a growth algorithm that we put in place in 2023. It talks about kind of 5%-8% organic growth, with another point added on from acquisitions. That's made up of everything from what's happening with the general macro environment, as well as market share gains, continued growth with ARR. We're signed up for that. Again, that's a CAGR, multi-year, kind of mid-cycle to mid-cycle. We started off a little bit in the hole, we got some room to make up there. Q2, Q1 were a good start towards that. We've got some more space to go there. As far as what's going to happen over the next three to five years, I think we'll have to wait and see about it, but we like the momentum we're bringing right now. Okay. That's great. You've mentioned volumes is the biggest single driver of improved margins and improved performance. It does feel like you're starting to see that volume pick up right now. Obviously the second half of last year, we saw very attractive growth, but much more by easy comps, and now it feels like we're getting some real growth, if that's the way to put it. Yep. You've earned a reputation as a pretty conservative CFO, I think rightly. To raise guidance by 3 points in one single quarter is quite something. Yep Maybe talk about what happened, what gave you the confidence that what we're seeing is not a flash in the pan, that this is more durable? Our initial guide for the year at that 4% midpoint, that was really taking what we saw in the second half of last year and saying, "Okay, well, we know we've got some easier comps maybe in the first half," but acknowledging that we weren't fully seeing a really good ramp. That's where the 4% came from. We started to see a really nice sequential ramp as we kind of exited Q4 and went into Q1, and then into Q2. There was pretty good conversion on that. On top of that happened with more on the product side of the business, which allows us to convert a lot more quickly. Some of that had to do with just the performance that we had in the first half gave us, there was already an amount that we had to build in because we had already outperformed. The remainder was saying what we saw in development in Q2, and the very early part in Q3 would say, "We feel like there's still another movement up that's happening," and so we did build it in. I don't take offense to being called conservative, prudent, anything like that. No. I'll wear it as a badge of honor. There's no higher compliment, actually. Obviously you've got really good visibility on channel inventories, sell-in versus sell-through. Yep. Not so much on the machine tool builder side, maybe just talk about that. Are we seeing a restocking cycle here, or are inventory still quite balanced here? I think we feel like things are really balanced right now. That is, if you go back before the supply chain crisis, so you have to go back to the 2019 timeframe, and really the 50 years before that, Rockwell hadn't seen a destock, restock cycle before in our business at all. We feel like inventory levels in our channel can be relatively stable over a long period of time, and that doesn't have to be a restock. Right now, what we're spending a lot of time on is trying to make sure that there is not a restock happening. My team can attest to the fact that I'm fairly belligerent when it comes to, if we see something that looks like there's a stock-up that's happening, we want to make sure we're aggressive about it because we don't need to see it. That doesn't mean that we don't have project activity, that people have to put stock in place to get ready for those projects and stage. That's okay. We're looking at those data points as far as overall inventory level, especially price-adjusted, going back to 2019 levels. We're fine there. Distributor demand that turns into demand on Rockwell, we want that to be one-to-one. We're in that ballpark, too, we feel good about that. As you mentioned, the machine builder side's harder, we do have a lot of interaction with them. We do survey them. Feels like their stocking levels are in a good spot, too, especially compared to where they were in 2023. We feel like we're okay there. As opposed to maybe some others at this conference that do talk about the restock cycle, we're trying to keep it in check. Okay. That's great. Matt, I do want to come to you in a second. Touch on in your business. Coming back to the machine tool side, we're seeing really strong order growth for the Japanese machine tool builders where we have really good data. Are we seeing a similar trend for the European machine tool builders? We've had growth coming out of Italy in particular. Germany was a little bit behind. I think we're at five quarters now, at having year-over-year growth with those customers. You're seeing it in our European numbers, for example, were 9% growth organically in Q2 year-over-year. That was up against an easier comp. At the same time, a lot of that's being driven by what's happening with those machine builders. It's good to see that and recognize that it's a sale for us into Europe, that doesn't necessarily mean that's where the machine's destined. Right. Right. That would be more PLC centric sales. There's attachment as well. No, it's our entire offering, so you have on machine, you have intelligent devices, you have PLC, you have our edge software, you have FactoryTalk Optix, Emulate3D simulation emulation. It's pretty broad. Okay. Okay. That's great. Thanks, Aijana. Matthew, your business is a bit longer cycle, more product-orientated. Maybe talk about what you're seeing from customers in terms of CapEx intentions, product pipelines, et cetera. Sure. Across most industries we serve, we see a little bit of obviously, geopolitical instability and some uncertainty associated with trade. We're seeing capital projects being delayed or broken up a little bit. The project sizes tend to be a little bit smaller in the short term. I think there's a balancing that's happening that we've seen in the bigger buckets, what we call shoring, which would be mega greenfield, natural greenfield, semicon, data center, life science are really starting to percolate. My business doesn't participate directly from a labor standpoint on the data center side or the semicon side. We're really focused on the food and bev, auto, things of that nature. From a capital standpoint, a little constrained, and that's when we talked about at earnings a little bit was we're seeing green shoots across, good product demand, but that capital hasn't been going on a full release cycle. Our funnels are very healthy. Project quoting activity is very healthy. It's just this delayed decision-making process that we're faced with. Yeah. What do you think unlocks that uncertainty? I mean, this feels like we're in a bit more stability than we were last year, but that's not saying much. Do you think we just need even more stability here or what? Listen, everyone who's an industry leader and a leader eventually has to make a decision about their business. Yeah. Investment has to unlock at some point because otherwise you've competitive pressures. The pursuit of improving yield, improving quality, it's a competitive marketplace. It's more stability, I think in trade. I think some of the geopolitical things need to resolve as well, just because people need to understand the cost basis of the projects. Okay. Your segment's called Lifecycle Services, and we don't normally associate Rockwell with services. Maybe just talk about, kind of how, the model's evolving in services and how that can play out. Yeah. Lifecycle Services is a full life cycle business, meaning we meet customers where they're at. They could be designing a new plant, a new production line. We engage them early with consulting resources about how to create an autonomous operation. We can design, build, help them operate and maintain that facility, that line, that machine. Our services are architected for be it our higher end consulting to engage earlier in the entire cycle. It could be on our project engineering, through our partner network as well to scale out a rollout. A large part of the business also is on that operate and maintain side, where we are selling service contracts to help our customers be more secure, more resilient, and more productive. You think about the mixture of projects and contracts, that's really what this business is about. Either creating installed base in the market through the professional services and engineering services, or expanding the entire value proposition of why a customer is invested in automation in the first place with our service contracts. Obviously, growth has been moving up to the right nicely. ARR has been decelerating a little bit here. I think 6% was the number last quarter. Maybe just talk about what's been caused that deceleration and confidence in getting back to that 10% level? Sure. Yeah. Overall, ARR was a little bit above 6% last quarter. We're not satisfied with that. Our software offerings were in the high single digits, which was right along what we thought it would be. On the service contract side, it was more a little bit around mid single digits. Couple of factors after there. OpEx is constrained in the markets. The real indicator of success for us is we are getting more and more customers under contract. Our customer contract base is expanding. Maybe on a pure dollar standpoint, we've had a little bit of headwind there from some OpEx optimization as, again, customers are faced with input cost challenges, OpEx a little constrained, productivity challenges as they're looking. Our algorithm hasn't changed. Our goal is to get every contract, every customer in our installed base under contract. We work with them to move them to a managed service environment, which allows us to deliver more value to them. It's actually more accretive margin for us. Use our digital insights, our AI capabilities to address that cyber, that resiliency, that productivity, which is a lot easier for us to renew. I'm pretty confident given the contract base has continued to expand, that our algorithm will kick in and allow us to continue to that upward momentum of growth. Okay. That's great. Thanks, Matt. Any questions from the audience for the team? If so, put your hand up. Nope. Okay, great. Maybe Christian, back to you. Rockwell tends not to provide intra-quarter commentary, and I've got Aijana giving me the beady eye here. I thought I'd give you the opportunity to do any color in terms of what you're seeing right now. You talk about the sequential ramp through the first half of the year, and anything to say? Yeah. You're right. We tend not to give any intra-quarter commentary. We're only a couple of weeks removed from our Q2 call. As far as the cadence goes, it's no different than what we had talked about on the earnings call. Yeah. Just thought I'd check. Yep. Fair enough. Then. Just want to see if we're going to break some headlines here. Yeah, you never know. You never know. Exactly right. Or break something. On the end markets, I've been quite pleasantly surprised by the continued strength in warehouse and e-commerce. I know there's a bit of data center in that mix as well, but maybe just talk about that specifically and the sustainability of that strength. Yeah. E-com and warehouse automation has been a great market for us. It's been growing strong double digits for many quarters now. It's a compilation of different businesses within that, right? All of them are actually firing on a lot of cylinders. One part is the e-commerce part, the e-commerce player and the ecosystem that supports that player, we have really good business there. A combination of some new fulfillment centers and optimization of brownfields. You have also parcel companies. As you know, they are investing in automation and productivity. A lot of outdated warehouses and sortation facilities, lots of labor cost issues and labor union negotiations, there's a lot of drive to automate, we're nowhere near done. The network is outdated, they need to upgrade. Then you have another set of customers, basically traditional retailers, grocery stores, any company that has warehouses, and they need to automate that too, and so there's a lot out there that can be retrofitted, and it's a great business for us. Then finally, we do have a piece of our data center business that falls into that e-com and warehouse automation business, and that's really through our power distribution business through our CUBIC acquisition. So all of them have been growing nicely. We did increase our outlook for the full year, guiding to 20% growth now. We think there's durable demand. If you look at the consumer preferences, the need for flexibility, the need for automation, and also the labor scarcity part, we think we're in a good position there. Certainly, data center part is a great business for us. We talked about it. It's a combination of our power distribution business, but also our controllers, our Logix PLCs. With a lot of the need with the AI workloads and the need for a lot more robust, resilient, and secure data centers, that's where there's this market shift and customer need shift from commercial controls, DDC, to industrial-grade controls. This is where Logix, our controller, is a perfect fit. That's been contributing to our Logix growth as well, including in Q2. We get to play opportunistically in this great market with our offerings, and we see that business growing strong double digits. Okay, that's great. We met with your team at MODEX, the warehouse logistics show, and one of the themes, not just from Rockwell but from other companies was AI tools are actually helping to accelerate investments, raising ROIs, lowering time to decision. Is that something you're seeing more broadly across the portfolio? We do. We see it through the entire life cycle. We talked about on the design phase how it improves your productivity. You get to market much faster. You can design a system or a line or manufacturing cell much faster with our proprietary gen AI, a lot less coding, much more natural language instruction. That's great. You get to the runtime, the actual production, where the majority of the life cycle of our customers is. You get to produce. You don't want any unplanned downtime. That's where AI is fantastic for that continuous in-process optimization. We have offerings that LogixAI, Guardian AI, Vision AI. We help our customers use their existing install base of our offerings, overlay these AI applications, and drive outcomes. That runtime to help them continue to optimize, and then at some point, where they need to migrate, update, upgrade, how do you do it seamlessly? Of course, we all know that there's this whole change from predictive maintenance to prescriptive maintenance, and AI is all over that. Our approach is very practical, very pragmatic. It's at every layer of the tech stack, and we help our customers utilize their existing install base as much as they can to drive that benefit. At some point, they will need to upgrade to newer offerings to be able to handle more compute power and more security. We think we're very well-positioned, and we're using it internally for our development, software development, for our functional capabilities as well. Yep. That's great. Disruption. Let's talk about how the market's evolving, and so you touched on that, Aijana, but again, as long as I've covered Rockwell, there's always been these concerns of disruption, technology disruption, and now you've got potential AI startups. You got Bezos apparently raising $100 billion to accelerate 4.0 and humanoids roaming around the factory floors, et cetera. How do you think about how this market evolves next 5, 10 years? We take a lot of our competitors very seriously, and we do look at all of the technology and the potential disruptive technology that could be there, and we look at what could enable us, what could disrupt us, and where do we need to partner, acquire, develop. We look at that really decade out. When you look at what's been happening more recently with AI and SaaSpocalypse or some of the other dislocations. If you understand the system and where Rockwell plays, the majority of our software is very much embedded and tightly integrated with the physical systems, physical mechanical systems that are moving things, that are closing the loop, that are interacting with actual process. The rest of our software sits in very mission-critical applications where, regulated industries, where you're interacting with people, safety is paramount. You can't have any latency or any hallucination or anything like that, or deviation from the deterministic path. We have a really good moat. We have hardware, software, and services that are greatly integrated. We look at AI and what's happening there as an enabler. We use a lot of foundational models in a lot of our areas there, and we actually add our IP to drive our offerings and help our customers. No, we feel good about it. In fact, when you look at the type of data that's flowing through our controllers, the billions of transactions that go through our MES software, that's the most valuable kind of data because it's going through the logic. It's actually, it has the most context, it has the most information that's so valuable for training, and that data is not available for the public domain, right? It's not available for training for others. We feel good about where we are, but we're not complacent, and we're continuing to innovate. In fact, we are launching more and more offerings, including AI-enabled offerings, and the pace of innovation and NPI has only been accelerating. Yeah. Okay. That's great. Got five minutes left, there's three more topics I want to touch on. Matt, back to you. The unwinding of the Sensia JV with Schlumberger, or SLB, what it's called now. Number one, how does that reposition your business? Secondly, maybe just give us a bit of color in terms of what you're seeing in North American oil and gas right now. Sure. April 1st, we dissolved the joint venture with SLB. Amicable dissolution. We both took the aspects of the contributed businesses back in. Within Rockwell, our process automation expertise, domain experts in oil and gas, primarily upstream, midstream, rejoined my organization. Think about project deployment capabilities across the globe, be it North America, Middle East, Asia, Latin America. We're really excited to have that project capability back in-house. We've made advancements in our product portfolio, be it in process safety applications, which this domain expertise and project delivery capability allows us to approach every major producer across the world with modernization of their oil platforms, as well as, in this current energy challenging situation, be able to respond to our customers' demands across the globe. Really excited to bring that back in-house. It really aligns well with our broader energy technologies initiative. Alternative sources of energy, not just oil and gas. This expertise is really great to have in and to allow Rockwell to fully serve that market to the best of our capabilities. Any color on the market environment right now? Yeah, obviously the Middle East is one of the more challenging situations. We have a considerable resource there. To Rockwell, it's not a material impact. Most of the impact will be seen within my segment. We're really assessing damage currently, evaluating opportunities. Even with the Sensia resources coming back inside, we're looking at opportunities across the globe as people have to evaluate their options. Yeah. Okay, thanks. Christian, back to you for the last two. Couple deployments. We saw a spate of acquisitions around the turn of the decades as being more of a bias towards buyback stock recently. How do you think about capital deployment here? We're looking to do transactions again. We have a very narrow set of criteria that we've put in place around that. Again, we talked about the dilution that we saw from transactions that were completed over the last half decade. Again, great deals, great ways to win, really good offerings, but profitability maybe wasn't quite there. That's one of the criteria that we'd like to tick that box on the next set of transactions, is we'd like them to bring profitability with them. That's one aspect. From a focus area, definitely looking for market access. That is giving us access to the European and Asian markets that we have a lower amount of sales today. Anything that gives us opportunities to add to our portfolio that we can actually push back through our legacy channel, is another opportunity. Industrial AI is another area for us. All that being said, share buybacks, we're not opposed to doing those. It's really more about, we want to be in the market every day, and then if there's a moment of dislocation like we saw in Q2, we've got an opportunistic overlay that'll step in and pick up more shares, and so happy about taking advantage of that too. Great. Just wanted to wrap up on November, Rockwell Automation Day. Yep. Probably one of the few organizations that do an Investor Day every year. I know. Old school. Right. Yep. Right. Yep. It's great. It's great to see. You're going to be pretty darn close to your margin target, 23.5%, old money terms. Yep right now, real time. I'm guessing 2027 might be, I don't know, a little bit ahead of that. Just wondering how you think about that margin target. Yeah. The margin targets we put out there are really for our investors, and it's a way to frame discussions like this. The way we think about it internally, absolutely, yes, we want to have kind of medium long-term targets, and we do have those today, that maybe are, again, get beyond where we are right now. I mentioned this earlier, we see it, right? We can see the way to get to the prior number of 23.5%. Current, the way we're measuring it changed a little bit, and we put in corporate and other expense into that equation. On an apples-to-apples, it's 22% in the new enterprise operating margin metric. We can see that. We've got the ability to execute against that today. Now we're focused on that next level of investment in our organization to take us to numbers that are going to be beyond that. An appropriate time for us to do it would be at a year-end. Let's go execute. Let's see if we can get there this year or get darn close this year. I'm not saying that we're going to put new targets in place this year or next year, but hopefully it's right around the corner. Great. Thanks, Christian. Thanks, Matt. Thanks, Aijana Zellner. Thank you. Thank you. Great seeing you. Thanks. Thanks for having us.