Steven W. Berglund
Analyst · William Blair
Good afternoon. The first quarter included both disappointment and reassurance. The disappointment was focused almost exclusively on agriculture, which did not maintain the relatively strong growth we saw in the second half of 2013 and actually declined year-to-year against our expectation of growth for the quarter. On the other hand, most of the rest of the company's businesses exceeded the expectations we held at the beginning of the quarter. In aggregate, the other Trimble segments, excluding the Field Solutions segment, grew by over 14% year-over-year. Particularly encouraging was the growth in construction, core transportation and logistics and Geographic Information Systems. The other notable positive aspect of the quarter was the improvement in both the non-GAAP gross margin and operating margin as a percentage of revenue. This improvement occurred in spite of the decline in agriculture revenue, which carries strong operating margins. The non-GAAP operating margin for the 3 segments, excluding Field Solutions, grew by almost 40% year-to-year. The 16% year-to-year growth in the E&C segment was in spite of a market that remains constrained against historical standards. The catalog of constraints include Europe which while showing a few signs of life remains a weak construction market. The U.S. is showing signs of continuing improvement in commercial and residential construction, but Congress and the Administration have not resolved key infrastructure questions such as highway funding or the Keystone Pipeline. Effective action in these cases will produce meaningful benefits for our heavy civil and survey markets and to our results. Major international markets either remain in distress, such as Australia, or are drifting, such as Brazil. The reason for describing the current limitations of the E&C market is to make the point that the core construction business is growing more on the strength of penetration and less on the underlying strength of the market. We believe that technology is entering the mainstream and the multi-trillion dollar construction industry and that the rate of adoption is accelerating. We believe we also occupy a unique position in the construction market, with a portfolio of solutions that cover both the civil and building construction, and that can integrate both hardware and software across the entire workflow continuum. The response we've received at the CONEXPO tradeshow in the quarter validated this belief. While individual quarterly results for E&C will be lumpy given the uncertainties in the individual markets, we believe the secular trend for the construction market is stronger than at any point in our past. Subject to continuing qualifications about market conditions around the world, we expect a stronger 2014 market for E&C than we had in 2013. Currently, we are anticipating agriculture sales to stabilize in the second quarter, but given the surprises of the first quarter, we have been cautious in our outlook. Our issues in agriculture are primarily focused in North America although we are expecting to see a negative impact on revenue in Russia and Ukraine because of geopolitical uncertainties. The North America issues included weather for the second year in a row, which included drought conditions in the west and extremely wet conditions in much of the east, which kept farmers out of the field for much of what is usually a high activity period. In addition, the inventory of agricultural machines, both new and used, is running high, and we may be seeing more spillover into the market for agricultural technology than we originally anticipated. In addition, we may also be seeing some secondary effects from our strategic transition of the agriculture channel from a relative historical focus on hardware to a growing emphasis on solutions that enable data-driven decision making. This change of emphasis requires a remapping of skills and capabilities within the distribution channel onto the market, much as we have been implementing with the SITECH and building point construction distribution channels. The secular growth trend we are seeing in construction is mirrored in agriculture and reinforces the belief that the agricultural market can support double-digit growth over the long term. This next stage of growth in the agriculture technology market will be driven by a transition from a focus on vehicle guidance and control to a full integration of hardware, software and services that will maximize productivity across the entire farm. A specific example of this change in emphasis is our introduction of the Irrigate-IQ in the last 2 weeks. This release augments our past releases of variable rate control hardware and software, which have expanded the Connected Farm. Just as our construction business is migrating steadily away from a reliance on point technology solutions, agriculture is migrating towards whole farm modeling, which will balance input decisions, planting and fertilizing options and investments. This is the essence of our Connected Farm strategy in which we intend to provide a brand agnostic solution to allow the grower to plant, see and manage its total operation end-to-end. Our product portfolio of the future will consist of sensors, software applications, professional services with distribution partners playing a key role. While it appears we may have been over optimistic on the revenue potential for agriculture in 2014, we believe the growth potential for the industry remains in place and that we can play a central role in the coming transformation. The other major Field Solutions element, Geographic Information Systems, had a strong growth in the quarter reversing the significant slide we had last year. The Mobile Solutions segment provided us with year-to-year revenue growth in the quarter with particularly strong non-GAAP earnings growth. This result represents a mixed environment. The core of the segment is what we call transportation logistics, which accounts for roughly 3 quarters of the segment. These businesses grew revenue and earnings in double digits. The relative dregs in the business for field services, which was partially affected by delays in major contract awards, construction supply and public safety, which is only now beginning to recover from the 2009 meltdown of municipal and state finances. Within the Mobile Solutions segment, the rapidly improving health of the financial model allows us to more confidently emphasize growth. Growth in the segment will come from emphasizing enterprise solutions and geographical expansion as we continue to move away from track and trace functionality as the source of primary value. We are reinvesting some of the segment margin expansion back into accelerated R&D during 2014, which will begin to beneficially impact revenue growth in late 2014 and into 2015. The aggregate results for Trimble in the first quarter reflected a stumble against the improved standard we reestablished in the second half of 2013. This break in momentum is unfortunate because it camouflages what is occurring strategically. At the Analyst Day in June, we will be laying out our updated analysis of the market potential across Trimble's businesses and the actions required to realize that potential. This analysis produces a path to double-digit revenue growth for the long term. Part of this growth results from increased penetration of markets as they are currently defined. The rest is from the redefinition of markets that is made possible because of advances in technology. This redefinition provides us with an expanded role in a significantly larger market, which is substantially unpenetrated. The potential total market in our core areas of construction, agriculture, transportation and geospatial is well in excess of $25 billion, which we believe is currently around 25% penetrated. The core of our strategy will be to be the leader in the penetration of these markets and thereby, claim a disproportionate share of that future penetration. Although we're value add, we'll remain focused on a bundled hardware, software and services. Much, if not most of the expanded solutions set will be built around providing answers based on analytics associated with very large data sets and access through a SaaS solution. The physical implementation will then typically require a tight integration between the software solution and hardware. We look forward to providing a more extensive explanation on June 4. Let me turn the call over to Francois. Francois?