Well, good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for being in the room. I'm very pleased to get the show rolling in with Vontier Corporation. And this is the first time I've done a fireside chat with Anshooman Aga, CFO of Vontier. And on stage, we've got Ryan Edelman, who heads up investor relations. So this is gonna be a Q&A. I will come to the audience for any hands in the air for questions from the audience. But I'll let maybe Anshooman kick it off. And you know, I think I was just talking to somebody in the audience, that a lot of conflicting data points out there right now. And I think that you sort of I think what you reported last quarter, so I think it's kinda like, it's almost an emblematic of what we're seeing out there. So we saw a lot of pressure in your retail fueling business in 2023. That's now, what? 2022, and then 2023, now we're back to solid growth, 2024. And then, you know, some pressure in other parts of your portfolio. So there's a l there's a very sort of, uneven, kind of trends out there right now. So maybe just kind of give us your perspective on sort of the macro. Let's just talk about the macro first, and then we'll get into your businesses. Perfect, Nigel, and thanks for having us here today. So what you talked about the pressure in 2022, 2023, that was the three-letter bad word that we don't use anymore, EMV. For those of you who weren't familiar with it, we had a big secular driver that started in the 2015 kind of a range, and that drove up volumes with a big upgrade cycle as convenience stores went from the swipe technology to the chip technology. And then, that run-up basically came to an end, and there was a decline in volume. So this year, we're printing clean organic growth. That EMV cycle is behind us. And if you really start looking at our end markets, let's start off with the convenience store, which is about 60% of our revenue. It's our environmental and fueling business, and it's also of our Invenco by GVR business. The end market's extremely healthy. If you look at convenience stores over the last two decades, they've grown at a 5% CAGR, and they've gone through a cycle through recessions. And if you look at the convenience store, the inside sales, post-COVID, they've been growing at about a 10% CAGR, so very healthy industry. Also, besides the strength inside the convenience stores, the gas margins are up. They used to be about $0.10-$0.15 pre-COVID. They're right now running about $0.35, so good gas margins also. So, also, this industry is very fragmented at this stage, and there's consolidation happening. If you think about 60% of the convenience stores are owned by operators of less than ten sites. So we're continuing to see investments not only as the sites become more relevant with modern formats to drive consumers with fresh food, but also consolidation happening. So significant investment and good health of this industry. If we move to another big market for us, which is about $650 million of our revenue with the repair solutions business. Here, we sell to the technician. When you look at the underlying fundamentals of that market, they remain healthy. The age of the car park is now up at 12.5 years. The miles driven is up. The complexity of the repair is increasing. Not only are you bringing more electric vehicles and hybrid vehicles into the car park, along with ICE vehicles, but also the sensors and automation that's coming into cars, that's making the car park more complex to repair. And then when you look at the health of the technicians, it's at record levels. Employment, technician employment is up. It's up 3% year-on-year, and it's at record levels. Technician wages are up about 7% to last year and again at record levels. So overall, the fundamentals are very strong. But at the same time, the technician is a U.S. consumer, and U.S. consumers are feeling the impact of high inflation. And, you're, you know, with energy prices up, with food prices up, housing prices up, the technician also feels that. So the technician is more selective in what they buy, and that's why product vitality and bringing what's relevant and drives productivity for the technician is more important now than ever. Then on the fleet side, that market remains very healthy. Our customers on the fleet side are not only thinking about productivity and driving improvement, energy being a large part of the total operational spend, but they also have sustainability goals that they're trying to achieve. And as a result, especially on our CNG, compressed natural gas, RNG, renewable natural gas side, we're seeing really good growth. That business has been growing well into the double digits, and it's a $100 million business now, and we think it's going to grow in the teens again this year. And then the final market that we're serving is the tunnel car wash space. The car wash is less than 8% of our total revenue, and what we've seen on the car wash side is some of the large enterprise accounts are taking a pause after a few years of exceptional growth. They've slowed down their M&A activity, and they've slowed down their greenfield activity to really focus on operations. In this space, in the car wash space, if you think of the smaller regional and township operators, those that are running 2-40 sites, they had been funding their growth through operational cash flow. They've been adding a few sites a year, and they're continuing to build out because the economics of a car wash still remains strong. It's just with the higher interest rates, some of the larger operators have slowed down and taken a pause. So that, that market, is actually slightly down this year. But overall, when you look at our bigger markets, lots of good strength that's compensating for some of this.... normalization of growth in the car wash. Yeah, great. Thanks, Anshooman. So let's break down the convenience store between the fueling sites and the payments and software and some of the automation stuff you do inside the store. Maybe talk about the payment solutions and, you know, where Vontier plays there, why you've got a right to win in that market, and what kind of growth rate you see today and kind of longer term. Yeah, so, we're in our Invenco by GVR business, which is really inside the convenience store. We have payment solutions, and we have productivity and automation solutions. When you think of payments, think of the point of sale, payment terminals, and some consumer engagement products. And then on the automated productivity and automation side, where we're driving enterprise productivity, think of that as automation solutions, asset management solutions on our new NFX platform also. When you think of payments, we see significant growth potential in that business. Our latest FlexPay 6 product is allowing for a lot of things that are not only improving the consumer experience, but also are going to drive revenue yield management. For example, on a new FlexPay 6, where we're headed with that is allowing people to order at the pump. So if you're ordering fresh food, instead of, gassing up your car in one transaction, going in and placing an order for a sandwich, and in a second transaction, you can do that, in one transaction. And really think if, your loyalty member, personalized experience comes on. The sandwich you typically order at lunch while you get gas is already pre-customized. You can pay, and by the time you're finished gassing up, either they could bring it out to your car because it's ready, or you could go in and pick it up. You don't have to run multiple transactions, so that drives revenue yield management for a customer, it drives productivity, and drives a better consumer experience. Also, on, FlexPay 6, one of the things we brought to market is over-the-air updates. In the past, you didn't have over-the-air updates, so every time you had a software update for the payment terminal related to PCI compliance, Payment Card Industry compliance, or just a regular update, you couldn't do it over the air, you had to roll a truck. Now, we've brought over-the-air updates, which will have a recurring revenue stream as we provide that service to our customers. Also, when you start thinking of our customers, as their sites are getting more complex, as they're bringing in more and more assets, and their labor is becoming a challenge, they have to have these automation and productivity solutions. One we've talked a lot about is NFX, which is a microservices-based platform, where ultimately this is going to become the site management platform for our customers, where each microservice or module can get connected in. You could have the Vontier applications, but you could also have third-party applications that you connect in through APIs, and we get a fee for opening up the APIs. So lots happening in this industry. We're at the forefront of driving this innovation for our customers, and we believe we're a couple of years ahead of our competition with NFX. Mm-hmm. And the growth, with what are you seeing today, and, you know, where do you see the growth going forward? We think this year, this, Invenco by GVR business will be growing, high single digits, and we think longer term, there's good potential to continue a high single-digit growth in the business. You mentioned, you know, the sort of multi-transaction nature of the fueling experience. Now, I think the holy grail is always to try and get the consumer from the pump into the C store. Mm-hmm. I never do that, by the way, but, I'm not aware that there's that many pumps where you can have that kind of transaction, so that sounds like an opportunity, like a big sort of upgrade cycle to come through. I mean, is that, is that fair? Yeah, I think so. Over time, you know, we've just introduced our FlexPay 6 on our dispensers, and we're working with our customers, bringing these new functionality and features. And what's becoming very important to our consumers because of not only managing the consumer experience, everyone talks about Starbucks app as best in class, not only managing that, but also driving personalized experiences, which leads to higher revenue for our customers. You know, many years ago, when I was still young, we went to the gas station to get gas, maybe we bought a Coke or something, but now people are going in for fresh food. My kids, they order sandwiches from Wawa and Grubhub. The experience and the offerings of our convenience store customers have evolved, and as they're evolving, we're providing them their technology and solutions to continue to drive good returns. Okay, that's great. And then does having the forecourt equipment help inside the store as well? Is there connectivity between the two sites? There is. When you start thinking about payments, there's connectivity between the forecourt and inside the convenience store. When you think about NFX, which will integrate payments in the forecourt, but that's the first microservices. But think about what exists at a convenience store. There's a car wash, there might be EV charging now. All the payments of that, and the integration, that NFX will allow for that, loyalty programs. So there's a lot of connectivity and work we're seeing to drive better productivity and automation for the customers, to drive better revenue yield management. There's connected hardware, application software, and scaling in the cloud, which is our connected mobility strategy, is becoming more and more important. Okay. So we do have questions about, you know, could you be disrupted by, you know, a Silicon Valley-based payment solution provider? I mean, is that... It sounds like it's really important to have the equipment on the forecourt, the payment solutions, and inside. I mean, is that how you see it? It is. And also there are other complexities. The point of sale system is doing a lot of calculations around fuel. There's a lot of reporting, compliance reporting requirements that's happening, and also some of these multinational oil companies have their own payment rails, and our solutions are integrated with that, which is another barrier to entries. Overall, with more integrated solutions, more complexity, we have more barriers to entry. Okay. So when you're going through that painful correction, I don't want to use those three-letter word again, but the EMV correction from $several million or so down to, you know, 300 or so. It felt like it was never gonna recover ever again. It felt like it was we might just have a dead cat bounce, neither bounce. It just might just be, you know, steady state or maybe, maybe decline from there. We saw growth leadership from the your environmental fueling solutions business in 1Q 2024. It sounds like it's gonna continue through this year. So how do we think about the growth potential for beyond 2024 for your fueling solutions portfolio? Yeah, we, we have a multi-year growth cycle for our fueling equipment. When you think about it, there's continued build-out of new sites, and that's driving revenue. Most of our customers have multi-year plans. When you talk to any of our large customers, they're planning out multiple years with their site build-outs. There's consolidation, which, as I mentioned earlier, bodes well for us. Also, at the same time, the average life of a dispenser is 10-12 years. So think of all those EMV dispensers that went in starting in 2014, 2015. All of those will come over the next few years, are going to—there's going to be a replacement cycle. In our Q1 earnings slides, we actually had a slide which showed that the replacement cycle will be about 5% growth over the next decade. </transcript Also, at the same time, there's continued regulation. There's regulation related to payments, there's regulation related to underground equipment. From a payments perspective, while there isn't a super cycle like EMV, there's continuous upgrade cycles. PCI 2, the Payment Card Industry standard two, will be sunset by 2027. The first EMV dispensers that had shipped out with the PCI 2 readers, so those will get replaced. Countries around the world are looking at fiscalization, which is another way of saying preventing tax fraud, so that's requiring payment updates. When you go below the ground, it's vapor recovery, and then in the U.S., we're in the early stages of a tank replacement cycle. 30-35 years ago, the underground tanks, which we don't make, used to be steel, and there was leaching of gasoline into the groundwater. EPA mandated double-walled, resin-based tanks, and their useful life is about 30 years. After that, insurance becomes hard. So all of these tanks are starting to get replaced, and while we don't provide the tanks, we provide the intelligence, the sensors, gauges, the submersible pumps that go with a tank, and we're in the early stages of a tank replacement cycle, which is good for our environmental business. So lots of legs to our environmental and fueling business, and we feel pretty good about this business. They can't just reuse those pumps. They have to replace those pumps and all equipment as well? All equipment has a useful life. So if a tank has a 30-year useful life, there's probably a mid-cycle replacement- Okay ... for equipment, and then at the end of the cycle, another replacement of our equipment. So you just painted a, a pretty bullish picture on EFS. I mean, if we think about, I don't know, 5% growth, the portfolio, is it- would it be a stretch to assume that EFS is not gonna undergrow that, that bogey? For this year, we've said EFS will be mid-single digits + growth. So definitely for this year, we're going to see good, strong growth, but longer term also, we feel very good about this business. Okay, that's great. Switching to the franchise tools business, we saw Snap-on, the other good competitor, really struggling in the quarter. You guys did well, but certainly the growth was decelerated to the low single-digit level. Maybe just talk about... You talk about the fundamentals are still good in this business, but you're seeing some pressure as a consumer because of the higher rates. Maybe just talk about how you see this business evolving the next several quarters. Yeah. So one thing I'll also point out, before I talk about, where I see the business heading. Last year, as supply chain started normalizing in the beginning of last fiscal year, for the first eight months or so, we saw benefit from ease in supply chain environments, and we were able to serve our backlog quicker, which, accelerated some of the growth last year. So it's a tougher compare for the first 2.5 quarters of this fiscal year. Having said that, the underlying fundamentals of the technician and the industry remain very strong. But as I also mentioned, there are U.S. consumers, and U.S. consumers are feeling the impact of higher inflation, so they've become more selective about what they're buying. If you can drive, improvement, to their productivity, they're still buying. And that's the benefit of our business model. We aren't vertically integrated. We leverage our supply chain, and as a result, we can spend a lot of time bringing in new products to market, and we measure that in terms of product vitality. And a one-year product vitality is about 25%. So 25% of what we sell is new to market that year, which is a benefit for us. Also, over the years, we're able to add the number of franchisees. We still have about 30% of the market unserved from a franchisee count perspective. So we continue to add 1% or 2% franchisee growth every year or so. We continue to focus on that. You know, inflation is coming down to. I think that will correct. For this year, we've said, low single digits growth for our macro business, but, mid to longer term, we still believe this is a mid-single-digit growth. 30% of the market not served, I think that's a bigger number than most people would expect, for a fairly mature business like macro. What's the opportunity to really accelerate that, you know, that underserved portion of the market? You know, you have to add the right franchisee because it's an investment in terms of time, and there's a financial investment because we're also having a financing receivable to the franchisee when they start the business. So it's really having the right franchisee and then managing the right franchisees to make sure they're successful, so we're successful. So we're very disciplined in how we add franchisees. So the right way to do it is about 1%-2%, which the business can sustain. Some years, it's a little bit higher, some years it's a little bit lower, but adding about 2% franchisees a year on average is probably the right way to think of it. Okay. I understand you've been going through a franchisee upgrade as well. You've been churning out some of the low productivity franchisees? Yeah, just like anything, you know, you have to performance manage. You know, most of our franchisees, they do a great job. They run great independent businesses. But in some cases where a franchisee isn't producing, we have to make sure we have that route filled by a right franchisee. So there's been some churn related to performance managing the franchisees, but we're talking about low single digits, very low single digits- Okay. - from that perspective. Yeah. You touched on DRB, you know, 8% of sales, so it's a relatively small part of the portfolio, but it was a large acquisition. It was a banner acquisition for the Vontier. I think the multiple was certainly at, like, a mid-teens plus type multiple. But it came in, and it's done fantastically well. Two strong years of growth. And this year, we've seen a little bit of a pause or pull back in growth. Maybe talk about, is this just tough comps? Is this the impact of higher rates? Has the sort of the trajectory of this business changed at all again? Yeah. So DRB has been a phenomenal acquisition for us. Yes, we paid high teens on trailing twelve months, but when you look at forward twelve months at the time of acquisition, which is now in a rear view mirror, we paid 10x. This business in the first 2, 2.5 years, grew over 50%. Operating profit margins expanded significantly. And even with the little bit of a pause this year, we're still over one year ahead of our acquisition case. So it's been a great acquisition for us. You know, after 2.5 years of exceptional growth, this year, some of that growth is normalizing. The large enterprise accounts, which I talked about, they are impacted by the higher interest rates, and they're being more selective, and they've scaled back on some of the growth aspirations as they're working on driving productivity and through their sites. At the same time, 40% of this business is recurring in nature. That recurring revenue is growing. We've also introduced recently our Patheon solution, which is a cloud-connected solution, so moving from on-prem to the cloud, which benefits our consumer in both driving revenue, but also reducing operational costs and scaling seamlessly. So as we think out over the next couple of years, there's not only an opportunity to continue to expand as our customers build out new sites, win market share by converting existing competitor systems to our systems, but also upgrading our installed base to our new Patheon software. We still like the market. We think, the market, the car wash economics are really attractive, and there's going to be continued build-out in the car wash space, and we feel really good about the market longer term. Great. I've got a few more questions, but anything from the audience? Any questions? No. Okay, I'll carry on. So DRB has been a home run. Sounds like you should be doing more deals, you know, given the success of DRB. Maybe just talk about your capital allocation plans, maybe this year, maybe kind of over the medium term, how you see kind of about your plans? Yeah. So our capital allocation philosophy is dynamic, and by that I mean, we always go towards the highest return option for our shareholders. We compete, whether we're investing in internal projects, doing acquisitions with buybacks, and we're looking at return on invested capital. For example, over the last two years, we bought back 10% of our shares outstanding at an average price of about $25 a share, which is a great return for shareholders. But during this time, we also did the Invenco acquisition, which we had said would be a 20% ROIC in by year three, and we're running ahead of that case again, and we think we can get to 20% in little over two years. So we continue to be very focused on return on invested capital, with our financial performance, where we believe our revenue growth, our profit margins, and our cash flow yield are top tier in the industrial space, and we're trading somewhere between a four and six turn discount to the average for multi-industrials. We believe our stock has, is undervalued and buybacks remain very attractive. But at the same time, we continue to look at acquisitions. We are very strategy-led in our acquisitions. It has to add to our strategy. It, we start off with the markets, we don't start off with a target. We have to really get conviction around a submarket where we have to believe not only does it fit from our strategy, it's a good attractive growth profile, the profit pools are attractive, we have a right to win, and we can get to a number one or number two spot in the market. If all of those are in place, then we cultivate targets, and we're very patient because we also want the financial return. Invenco, which was a great acquisition, we cultivated for two years before we acquired them. So we're disciplined, and we continue to develop our pipeline, which remains very robust. Okay. So this year we've got some deleveraging ambitions and targets out there. Once we, once we accomplish that, and maybe just remind us on, on what those are, 2025 is a year of deployment. Yeah. So we basically have $50 million at the end of Q1. We had $50 million of debt which is maturing later this year that we committed to pay down. We'll probably get that done in the second quarter itself. So our deleveraging will be done, and we'll continue to delever naturally as our EBITDA grows. We're at the end of Q1, 2.6x levered, so well within our target range of 2.5x-3x. We've committed to at least $75 million of buybacks. At least is important because I think it's going to be higher than that given our valuations. But again, this year, we're going to generate between 90%-100% of our adjusted net income in free cash flow, so that's somewhere north of $400 million. When you factor in the proceeds of Hennessy, which we sold in the beginning of the fiscal year, rounded, you can say we're going to have $500 million. We paid down $100 million of debt between the $50 we paid in Q1, $50 we'll pay in Q2. We'll do some buybacks, but there's a decent amount of cash that's still left over. We aren't afraid for the cash to sit on our balance sheet. It earns over 5% right now. But also, as we continue to cultivate our pipeline for bolt-on kind of opportunities, we'll be patient and disciplined. Okay. I do want to touch on one guidance item. You're guiding for 4%-6% growth for the full year. You got 2%-4% in for Q2. Just remind us why we're seeing slow growth in Q2, and the confidence in seeing that acceleration back half of the year? Yeah, it goes back to the supply chains normalizing in the first two and a half quarters last year, which, from a comparability perspective, just put some pressure on us. You know, and, and it's also timing of certain projects for our customers. Q1, we grew 4%; Q2, at the midpoint, about 3%, and then some acceleration as we go into easier comps into the fourth quarter this year. Okay, so it's mainly a comp issue. Is there a margin opportunity across the portfolio? I mean, you, you're in very healthy margins, you have fantastic growth margins. You're, you are the original Danaher company, so you're, you're, you've got a great operating system. But is there a kind of... How do we think about the margin framework going forward? Yeah, the margin framework, you know, our VBS business system really shines out there. We have a culture of continuous improvement, a culture of breakthrough performance, and while it also drives growth, it continuously expands margins for us. With our focus on prioritization process, which is very like the 80/20 process, we're basically going through and simplifying our portfolio. We started off with over 32 different global dispenser platforms. We're down to about 15, and we're going to end below 10. Similarly, when you look at Invenco by GVR, there were over 30 different hardware, software platforms. We're going to drive that number down to 10. The benefit of simplification is not only are you reducing the sustaining R&D cost, which you can then reinvest in new product development and continue to the cycle of growth, but we're also improving our manufacturing and supply chain. We're going to take out about 1 million sq ft of manufacturing footprint by the end of the product simplification process. We're going to have a lot more standardized components, which will help reduce costs. A perfect example was, about a year ago, we had a CEO Kaizen, and one of the projects within the CEO Kaizen week was around our fleet dispenser, AtlasX. Typically, because of the development cycle and going through regulatory approvals, it's almost a two-year cycle to get a new product out to market. We got a product out to market in less than 10 months, with greater than 80% standardized components. That's the power of VBS, that's the power of our continuous improvement. So by no means are we done with margin expansion. We're going to continue to expand margins. Our three-year guide was 150 basis points plus in margin expansion. The plus at the end of 150 basis points is important because in year one of our three-year targets, we've guided to 80-110 basis points of margin expansion. So you could expect we don't get a year off at the end of two years. Okay. And then finally, the portfolio, you've sold GGT and Hennessy. I know that the portfolio review process is a continuous process, but should we consider the portfolio today to be set, and this is the portfolio you're happy with right now? Yeah, we're happy with the portfolio right now. We continue to evaluate it, but we have leading positions across our portfolio. There's lots of synergies between what we're doing with different elements of our portfolio, and we feel we're in a good place. Great. Well, then, Anshooman, thanks, thanks for the detailed questions and discussion, answers even. And, Ryan, thanks as well. Thank you, Nigel. Thanks for having us. Great. Thank you.