Steven W. Berglund
Analyst · Ryan Connors from Boenning and Scattergood
Yes. So I think, certainly, from a secular strategic standpoint, this has been our assumption all along, is that in terms of the base capability kind of the box and the receiver, GPS receiver, that's in agriculture and it's not nearly as true as in construction, just as parenthetically. But in agriculture, yes, so the base capability, the ability to -- the box and the receiver will continually move more towards a factory install. Now our longer-term strategy is that's fine, we'll participate with the OEMs on that. Where we see the bigger dollars down the road is actually selling software and data-related services that utilize the factory installed capability for positioning computing power. So our model is more expansive than just being a provider to OEMs. Now here in the short term -- so that's a long-term trend, and so there's a secular trend, we acknowledge that, we accept that. But here in the short term, significant parts of the emerging world are still aftermarket. So you go to China, you go to places like that, it's aftermarket. Those are actually, at the moment, the more dynamic markets where we're seeing significant take-up. Our OEM channels were down in the quarter kind of more than 20%, whereas our channel, the Trimble channel, was down single digits. So there is -- at this moment in time, there is a significant difference in kind of just performance levels. And maybe that's to be expected is that a farmer if we achieve some level of stability -- now farm sentiment is still pretty rocky. The farm psychology is still pretty negative. But if a farmer feels any kind of stability, the farmer may choose to defer the investment in the new tractor for a year or 2, whatever, they just postpone it. Whereas with the new feature set technology, and Trimble has been coming up with -- continually with new features, features on our products, the farmer may decide to retrofit the existing tractor with a new version of the technology. And I suspect that's part of the story for why Trimble's aftermarket is doing reasonably well. We should be going back in either upselling or retroselling an installed installation because maybe after 5 years, the feature set has expanded enough to make it attractive for the farmer to upgrade an existing installation. So there will always be an aftermarket either selling kind of extended versions of the technology or selling software and data services. So it's not as though the factory is going to push the aftermarket completely out of the game. They will continue to exist side by side.