Rockwell Automation, Inc. (NYSE:ROK) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

And I think in general, that’s a positive read for us, but it creates continuing problems with these manufacturers in staffing those lines. And so they’re looking for augmenting the technology that we’re providing with highly trained workers as those workers are more scarce. And we’re seeing our offering result in some important competitive wins. We’ve added more ways to win. So it’s not just our core technology, it’s our cybersecurity services, and we talked about several wins with Plex as the synergy wins ramp up there as we turn on that market access machine. So those are some of the things that are driving the good food and beverage and home and personal care growth that we’re seeing this year.

Josh Pokrzywinski: Understood, appreciate it. Best of luck.

Blake Moret: Yes, thanks Josh.

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

Julian Mitchell: Thanks very much. Maybe not taking a step back. If we look at Slide 11, you’ve got the order trends line chart there. Trying to think about backlog-to-sales coverage and where you think that normalizes. As you said, pre-COVID you were 20% odd backlog to sales. Recently, you’ve been well over 50%, but that will come down. And I just wondered your sort of best views on where it settles out. Because I guess, if we look at some of your peers like FANUC, they’ve all seen this huge orders slump as well, and they’re talking about customer inventory depletion through next year. And I guess, one could also make the case perhaps that more localized supply chains can mean shorter lead times and order patterns, not longer ones. So just wondered sort of your perspectives on that and testing that conviction around why the orders improve from early calendar 2024?

Blake Moret: Sure. I’ll make a few comments, Julian, and then Nick may have some additional detail. As you think about the composition of our business, for a starting point, we said the backlog that we expect to finish the fiscal year in a couple of months with is remaining high between $4.5 billion and $5 billion, and 80% of that is shippable in fiscal year 2024. I think your question is, okay, how does that develop? And what is beyond that? Think about the product backlog as lead times return to normal for products at the end of this calendar year is getting back to its normal low levels of backlog. We traditionally looked at products as having lead times of days or weeks that either ships directly off our distributor shelves or we build it very quickly in our factories.

And I think that gets back in fiscal year 2024. There’s a portion of that product business within Intelligent Devices that is configured to order. And that continues to have lead times that are measured typically in weeks, sometimes in a couple of months. That business has been really strong for us here recently. We think we’re gaining considerable share there. And so that’s going to be a somewhat meaningful component of backlog even after 2024 within the Intelligent Devices area. And then as Lifecycle Services becomes bigger, continues to grow, then we typically have seen somewhere in the neighborhood of half a year of backlog for Lifecycle Services. So backlog becomes smaller as we leave fiscal year 2024, but it remains considerably larger than the $1.5 billion or so that you remember from pre-pandemic.

Because we’re a bigger company and we have some of these new components, I would also say there’s software and recurring revenue that continues to grow nicely. We talked about ARR growing 17% this quarter. And so that’s a part of the equation as well. Nick?