Johnson Controls International plc (JCI) February 19, 2026 Conference Transcript

Very excited to start day three of our conference with Johnson Controls. We've got Mark Van Diepenbeek with us who is the EVP and CFO of Johnson Controls. Mark as I walk over, a lot's been going on over the last year for you guys. I want to start with JCI's transformation over the last couple of years because I think it's been pretty remarkable. You have a much leaner portfolio, the team has been working on cost actions. You've been CFO for some time and Joachim has been CEO for almost a year now. So maybe you could just highlight for us earlier wins that you've had. And, you know, what would you say you and Joachim have had the most impact on so far?

Yeah, so the early wins are obviously the portfolio simplification that we embarked two years ago with the disposition of, you know, ADTI as well as our residential and light commercial business and addressed the stranded cost that came from shedding off about 30% of our revenue. But beyond that, the execution discipline that came on the back end of that simplification really showed and translated into our financial performance, both from a margin improvement standpoint and our cash flow generation has continued to perform well and to drive kind of a quality of earnings over time. That's for the early win. Now, over the past year particularly, the acceleration of that transformation came with Joachim joining in and bringing a rigor to standout work and to the way we approach the business system. We were a fairly weak business system enterprise prior to him joining. And, you know, a strong business system is not something you put on a piece of paper and communicate through the enterprise. It's a way leadership behaves and engages with the teams. It's a way leadership and the rest of the organization aligns on critical ways of working. And we are seeing the early stage of that transformation and some of those benefits. It's a multi-year journey, so it's not something that's going to revolutionize JCI over the next quarter or two, but as we embrace that business system and as those ways of working become really the standard of how we deploy our resources internally, that will really transform and simplify and create more consistency how we operate, and then obviously kind of accelerate our path or journey towards margin improvement and accelerate growth. It's not just a margin play. It's also a growth play because it really focuses the enterprise against the parts of the market that are the most attractive, and it really simplifies what success looks like. We have deployed what we call the critical enterprise KPI, a few KPIs for customers, a few KPIs for people, a few KPIs for shareholders. And if you think of those three dimensions, those KPIs are the same across the enterprise, from the leadership team of the CEO all the way down to the market. So the clarity of what success looks like for customers, for people, for shareholders is clear across the enterprise. And how you address when you see challenges in any one of those KPIs, That's where the business system comes into play and how you problem solve, how you address opportunities or challenges, how you keep pushing yourself and improving on your financial performance. So that's the journey we're on. It's been a great two years. I think we're set up for an acceleration of that success. And I think the strategy is now starting to define itself with greater clarity. and we are starting to deploy that strategy further down the organization as we look at how we invest against different product lines and different geographies.

So, Mark, I know we're going to talk about data centers a little bit more later, but it's very topical that you announced a deal last night, so I just want to talk about it briefly. You announced that you're going to buy Alloy Enterprises, which specializes in next-gen thermal management. Maybe you can talk about what next-gen thermal management means. You've been very active in this space, obviously, lately, introducing a CDU and so on. So maybe talk about how it augments your business.

Yeah, so this is really a capability acquisition. Let me start with that right off the bat. The team at Alloy, which is about a five-year-old company, has really created a differentiated technology through proprietary IP and proprietary process to actually manufacture what they call stack forging, which is a combination of laser cutting and diffusion bonding, allowing you to create pretty complex microgeometries with metals that are critical for creating differentiated thermal solution. Those thermal solutions are applicable to the data center world and will create an enormous advantage as we continue to develop new differentiated CDUs and thermal solution for data centers, but it also has application beyond the data center against mission-critical vertical where solution and precision thermal management is important, and we're really excited to have those folks joining the company. I think from a culture standpoint it's going to be a fantastic fit, and And we really see that capability adding to our end-to-end terminal solution capabilities in data center and other verticals. Is this something that the customers ask for from you? This is part of a roadmap to create differentiated technology solution, mostly right now for the data center vertical, where there is a lot of demand for the customer to kind of improve on the capabilities. Right now, the pre-packaged CDU solution you find in the market is not very differentiated. We think we've brought a product to market five, six months ago that is differentiated, but it's not to the level that you would anticipate given the demand and the problem hyperscaler and colocators are trying to solve in terms of thermal management and so as you start thinking about not the next year but the next five years that demand constraint dynamic you see in the market where players that just have capacity managed to win share in the market we believe that that will even out over time and best technology, best capability will win out and we want to be prepared for that shift in the market and we want to create differentiated technology that actually provide clear value proposition to the customer and what Alloy brings in terms of like value proposition to the customer, it's about that end-to-end solution from a thermal standpoint is about 35% more efficient than what you find currently on the market on a direct-to-chip cooling technology. That's a substantial differential. This is what exists in the market, and that's a clear demand coming from the hyperscaler and trying to find e-cut every possible percentage of efficiency through the cold chain.

Yeah, and it's helpful color. So maybe Back to the business system, Joachim talked about being in the early stages of implementing the business system and mentioned 80-20 predominantly, I thought. As you said, JCI has been complex historically. What you're doing have more immediate impacts on JCI and how far are you along in the process?

The business system is not just 80-20 or it's not just lean. It starts with simplifying, taking complexity away from processes, complexity away from organizational design, complexity away from priorities from a day-to-day basis is critical to success. So we start with simplifying. 80-20 is a great tool to think about that, and we're teaching the team to deploy that. The second aspect is, how do we accelerate? Now that we focus on the right thing, how do you accelerate that capability? Speed is a critical element to success and differentiation when you're trying to compete in the market. And that's where the lean journey really will shape the way we accelerate that transformation. And then there's the digital transformation that allows us to take the benefit of the first item and really amplify it further throughout the enterprise. The capability that AI brings of basic digitization or, you know, leveraging digital tools to actually do the work easier, faster within the company, that allows you to take those lean principle and 80-20 principle and really amplify it quickly. Where we are on that journey is, I think it's early stage, but you see a clear ignition within the organization of what the business system can do because we've taken very narrow, very specific parts of the organization and we fully deploy the capabilities. And we've shown the team what it can do, what it can do from a speed of transformation, what it can do to help our frontline colleagues to be more productive, have a more enjoyable ways of working, have better clarity on who does what where, on reducing the red tape or the number of handover, on eliminating waste in the way we approach that. So we've started to really demonstrate, but it's very deep, very narrow, and it's now starting to expand and trickle to the rest of the organization. And then there's a big element to cultural change and training that comes with that. And we've deployed what we call Growth Summit. Those are large gathering of, call it about 100 people. and we've done probably three or four of those by now where we've taken all those colleagues and we spent three days first really explaining what this is all about in theory and then do on hands trained by leader so you came directly training people on how you run an ops review how do you efficiently look at solving the problem how do you speak the truth think the truth within those those challenges I was personally involved in one of those but we have all of the leader training other leaders and showing them the path to success it's not like an e-learning or these are the 10 steps of how to be successful it's real hands-on training and those training have now deployed to the rest of the organization with about a thousand colleagues now that have not only been trained but are starting to fully embrace and deploy that business system, and that will, over time, come to the rest of the organization. And you see that dynamic that's exciting as a leader when you see that you have people that are begging for the training, like, why did this team get a chance to get that training? I see what's happening in business A. I want this to happen to my business as well. Can we participate? Can we join? Can we spend time on understanding how to better problem solve and how to manage our critical KPI in a more efficient way? It's exciting, that cultural transformation, but it takes time. This is not a one, two quarter and done. This is a multi-year journey. Many have tried and have not always successfully done so. We are extremely committed to do this right, effectively and efficiently, but it will take time.

It's helpful, and then maybe one more big picture question.

I think Joachim talked about improving GCI's pricing muscle you know through 80-20 in the business system so maybe talk about how that could evolve and then you know obviously the commodity inflation environments pretty dynamic you know how should investors think about GCI's ability to stay in the green in this environment so so so pricing is a multi-dimensional challenge first of all it starts with strategy meaning are you bringing to market products that you can actually command price against aka margin are you addressing and market verticals that are willing to pay for your product do you have a good value proposition because your strategy was on do you have solution and an outcome that the customer feeling the value for and therefore willing to pay where historically sometimes we've had challenges at diffusing ourselves to addressing parts of the market that we're not looking for differentiation or we're not looking for outcome based type of solution we have now much more focus against those end market and that That creates two dynamics from the pricing standpoint. When the environment around you change, you can more easily command price with the customer, whether it's tariff, commodity prices, whatever headwind you're facing, you can more easily explain and justify that. If you're in a more transactional part of the market, it's going to be who's the first one to blink type of effect. and what often happens is nobody blinks and the price of no eroding margin or everybody blinks and now you have a downward spiral on pricing. We've been able to pivot a large part of our portfolio, not the entirety, the large part of our portfolio against end markets where we feel that given the customer intimacy, the type of solution we've created and kind of the outcome-based package that comes in, it's easier to have those conversations with customer I'm not telling you pricing is perfect as we've navigated to tariffs our ability to command margin when we pass on really large tariff bills to some of our larger customer but back to data center large hyperscaler receive you know tens of million or sometimes hundred million dollar bill from us for which there's a five or six million dollar tariff surcharge associated to that. It's very hard to justify to that customer that I deserve a 50% margin on that particular tariff line. But over time we've priced in the tariff to a normal pricing backlog and therefore over time we're going to be able to kind of protect margin better than we've been able to over the past probably six months.

I'm not saying this hurts from a financial standpoint dollar for dollar because we recoup the vast majority of what the tariff and then some but we've not been able to maintain margin rate because recovering margin rate on top of those tariff surcharge has been a bit of a challenge yeah that's helpful mark and so maybe just to get out of the way just sort of the current environment you reported order to growth last quarter of 40% yeah number backlog growth of 20% those in your fiscal Q1 so it seems like judging though from your comment from on the call, right? You talked about a healthy pipeline that was basically filled even after the orders. So it tends to mean that we can expect another healthy quarter of orders in Q2. Like, how should we think about that?

So two, three things I would say. You know I don't like projecting order rate. And I'll tell you exactly why. We knew a very large order quarter was in the hub. We can see the shape of the pipeline. We can see the maturity of those opportunities moving down the pipeline. That level of order we saw in Q1 could have very well happened in Q4 last year. And me predicting with great precision whether it's going to happen in August or September versus October or November doesn't drive any value for for us or for anybody else we just know it's coming so so predicting order because of timing elements and and also the size of what's coming down the pipe there's so much variability to it I don't think it's worth doing it we sent a signal and and and we're almost halfway through the quarter here, I can tell you that on a normal double-digit order quarter, what would naturally happen is you have an opening pipeline that's probably a double-digit and then you book all your orders and then your closing pipeline has been impacted and therefore your ability to print orders the following quarter is probably limited and you're managing to a single-digit, maybe low single-digit level what we saw over the last quarter is and it's not just a good old double-digit quarter 40% all the rate in the US in America's 56% all the rate we opened a quarter double digits we booked 40% of all the my pipeline is still have double-digit after that. And that's the level of demand we're seeing in the market. That's the level of work we see in churn of new opportunity that are coming in. And so I don't want to outlook the quarter, but the next couple of quarters, it wouldn't surprise me if we would have, again, double-digit orders in some quarters, and it's not going to be flat to single-digit the rest of the year, and we just banked the whole pipeline in the first quarter. That's not at all what happened. It's a testament to the work that the commercial team has been doing. It's a testament to the demand and the capabilities that JCI brings to that demand in the market because it's exciting to see double-digit order with double-digit pipeline exit growth within a given quarter. Well, in my 21-year GCI, we've never seen that.

It's very, very interesting. So, Mark, obviously we're going to talk more about data centers in a second, but I just want to ask you about X data center order strength for a second because I think you've talked to us about other large markets, such as PharmaBio, advanced manufacturing.

So where do you think those other sectors are in their cycle, and how much are they contributing to the strength and orders? yeah so if you look at the incredible order rate we had in in the first quarter and you change the world and assume data center wasn't a thing you look at what pharma and particularly biologics manufacturing has done in the quarter this would be the entire conversation we would have right now this was a very healthy double digit and it's also by the way a vertical where we saw double digit orders and an exit backlog that's also double digit and and the dynamic that are happening there is i think we are really at the corner of bringing capability solutions and account management at a different What I mean by that is we are one of the few providers in the market that can provide a solution for air handling, air management within the building, chiller meaning temperature, and then the controls aspect that comes with the demand. You've got to understand that within pharma, and particularly biologics, the size and scale of those new factories is just mind-boggling, but also the thermal precision of the environment within that building is far greater than it's been historically in the pharma industry. Because you have live matter within that building that moves around, the precision of the temperature, the air pressure, the air quality, the relative humidity is far, far greater than it's been historically. at scale that's also greater at the same time. And so you need a player that can provide differentiated solutions that are very particular for that end market, that can cover AHU, chiller, and controls at the same time. And while there are certain system integrators in the market that are able to do, we are the one OEM that brings that full value to that particular vertical, and I think we've benefited to the boom you've seen. There was a big boom a year or two ago around the GLP-1, but now you have new drugs that are coming in for other diseases like Alzheimer's, and that capacity building that is happening in the US and in Europe is extremely exciting for us.

So I'm going to open up to the audience in a second, but Mark, let me ask you, you already – so I want to talk about data centers, but you, I think, already answered my question about where we are in the cycle. It seems like we still have ways, right? So maybe, like, Alloy is actually interesting from a—because I wanted to ask you about sort of maybe dollars per megawatt in terms of, like, it seems like your content is going higher on data centers as you've introduced CDUs and now you're about Alloy. So is there any sort of thoughts around that as to, you know, what is Johnson Control's dollars per megawatt in data centers? Or, you know, how are you progressing on that?

So depending on the end markets, because we all think data centers are one big blob, but there's great variation per customer, per application, per geography on what the addressable market for GACI is. It's between $2 million and $3 million per megawatt on every opportunity. There is a little bit of a dynamic that is happening between the old air-cooled solution, which was cracks and craw solution within the white space, and the liquid CDU, coal plate, et cetera, opportunity that are coming into play. So there's a little bit of cannibalization. So it's not like one plus one equal three. It's more 1 plus 1 equal 2.2, 2.3. It's still growing from an addressable market per megawatt, but it's also growing because the amount of demand and megawatt itself is growing at the same time. But it's not like we're doubling our addressable market per megawatt, but it's improving slightly. I think what we are trying to do is change the dynamic of our ability to win within the data center by having truly differentiated solution. We've had enormous success in the air-cooled chiller. We've taken a leadership position and have had that leadership position for quite some time and we are continuously innovating to try and catch up to that. Now, we're trying to recreate the same success with CDUs, with some of our control solution, with our handling solution, and ultimately with the full thermal suite that comes for an AI factory like the modern data center that are being built for the next three to five years.

Yeah, very helpful. Any questions from the audience? Any questions?

Luckily, we have a question. just you touched on ally um the ally acquisition what so can you give us any more specifics on that like what that means in terms of like potential revenues down the line and and what that how that changes your business so it's a capability driven so so i want to be transparent with you we've not acquired a whole bunch of revenue that's going to convert next year uh or next month what we've done is um acquired capabilities and technologies that are going to allow you to create differentiated product solution that differentiated product solution will come into the road map of our product probably within six to twelve months of us closing the transaction which is likely sometime in in our third fiscal quarter second calendar quarter of the year and so as we integrate this capability as we scale that manufacturing capability throughout our processes we are going to be able to increase our win rate and provide differentiated solution at much greater margin for parts of the market that were i would say a little bit more mundane for example in the cdu part of the market um we launched that cdu about i said about five six months ago our pipeline of opportunity right now cdu is multiple hundreds of millions almost reaching a billion dollar with just five or six months of uh of existence of a product line that's really unheard of from our capability standpoint the goal is to bring that technology combine it together and make the win rate on that pipeline much much greater than what we think we have been able to do without it so I want to shift mark to margin for a second I think you've been open about having pretty significant gross margin and SG&A opportunities you know you You have a long-term algorithm of 30% plus, but you're going to do 50% this year.

Some of that is unusual, as you've talked about, but you're still in the second half I think you're supposed to be above 50%. As you said, you're still in the early going of ramping up savings. Why would you do 30% plus long-term? Why couldn't it be more like 40% or what have you? Any more color would be helpful as you go into 27% and beyond.

30 is not good enough and yeah I mean like in the day it was like 30 would have been good for JCI so yeah kind of amazing no so I understand over the last couple of years we've been able to achieve you know 40 plus and so why wouldn't we commit ultimately to 40% all the way well first of all it makes me to you what the size of the prize and the opportunities and then let me dimensionalize how quickly we can actually achieve that and what what the pace of progress is if you look at the face of our financials right and you start at gross margin we have overall better gross margin than than our peers but i would say we are far from being at entitlement from a gross margin standpoint why are we far from entitlement we are the one player with a real service franchise and what i really define as service is a recurring revenue based on a service contract not a retrofit not an overall of a machine really just servicing that machine we've been able to achieve margins in our service business about 45 percent which is I mean it's good margin it's solid but if you look at other mechanical product industries think about oil and gas, think about air compressor, industrial tools, some of those players, by productizing their service offering and create a better service delivery model than we have been able to, but overall our industry in the HVAC universe has been able to do, you can see their margins are probably between 50% and 60%. And so how they got there is very clear. And so we have a roadmap to try and improve that service margin over time. Now, we talk about data center and we talk about that incredible growth. What comes with that growth is long-term an incredible opportunity on service, but short-term a mixed challenge for us because our sale of new units is going to far outpace the growth of our service contract because those units are coming well ahead online as the ability for us to start service contract. It's just the natural dynamic of how that market operates. And so that mixed shift will create a little bit of headwind on gross margin, and so it's critical for us to improve our service margin to find ways to offset that. The other thing is the business system and the 80-20 lean journey will bring some simplification on the type of costs that are absorbed within our gross margin. A good example is our manufacturing footprint. We have about 42, 43 factories, distribution centers around the world. Seems like an exciting number, but if you look at what an ideal footprint would look like, it's probably a little heavy. And so can we consolidate some of that capability, reducing the fixed overhead that's in gross margin and improve margin over time from a manufacturing standpoint, absolutely. And so is that opportunity on margin like 100, 200, 300 basis point, maybe a little early for me to say, but I think long-term the opportunity is probably moving from that mid-30s to high-30, potentially over the long-term 40%. Now, you come down that income statement and you look at our SG&A, we've had a pretty heavy SG&A load over the past few years. We've addressed it quite a bit. We came from about 24%, 25%, down about 22%. But the entitlement, what good looks can be found with others, and it's vastly below 20%. We have a roadmap to address that. Some of it has to do with pure, brutal cost restructuring and cost takeout. Some of it has to do with the business system and simplifying our ways of working. our cost to serve some of the functions are a little too high because the complexity of how our operating model was our business system lack of maturity created redundancy and complexity that really created cost within the enterprise and we're mapping out the road map to simplifying that cost so there's a few hundred basis points there of opportunity so a few hundred basis points of opportunity on the gross margin a few hundred basis points on the SG&A comes obviously pretty substantially incremental from where we are right now. I'm comfortable with the 30 plus. There's a plus percent ahead of it because we know what the size of the price is. It's the timing and the roadmap that comes with that and the effect that the mix I just described has over the short period of time versus the longer period of time. And like most companies, we have scorecard on a quarterly basis. And so could we get quarter in the 50s and then quarter back in the 30s or 40s? It's possible, depending on where the growth really came in and where the leverage through the P&L really translated.

Maybe there should be a plus plus instead of plus. All right. I'll add another plus. All right. There you go. So I did want to ask you about getting service up is also part of that opportunity, right? And so I think you grew high single digits in revenue in Q1 and service. But Joachim has talked about sort of, you know, freeing up your salespeople to have more time sort of selling and all that kind of stuff. So it's probably a good time to ask you, you know, service resiliency to grow high single digits or more, and how are you infusing AI, and do you worry at all about disruption and open blue from AI, you know?

Let me address that very last part first because that's the attractive part of really the service delivery model and has a lot to do with the amplifier I was talking about earlier on the business system. The way of tools are right now being deployed for technicians to be able to operate in the market and serve the customer, That's where AI has and will continue to play a critical role, not only in their productivity, but in their capability, aka upskilling the capabilities of those technicians. The number of type of chillers a chiller technician has to address in a given market, like Miami here, is mind-boggling. It's thousands and thousands of pages of specification. there's different particular applications some customers have had customization of that trailer so the level of complexity is absolutely hard to comprehend and historically those technicians would have a bunch of books go online and have 500 PDFs that they would have to navigate through between the connected solutions and an AI infused chatbot that technician can use to actually ask normal language question around a particular unit. They can arrive at the job site pretty much knowing what 85% of the problem is going to be, and already have the parts and items that are needed to fix that problem. And for whatever's left that they cannot solve right there, there's an AI agent that really allows them, instead of spending hours going through the booklet, to really ask a natural question of what is like i see this compressor number one and there is this particular issue what could be the root cause and you have the system like going through all of those uh all of that information and and bringing an answer so that's the that's the ai opportunity and journey the adoption is far from 100 right now and it's not like we have connected the entirety of the fleet that exists right now everything that's coming out of our factory right now is connectable, but a lot of what has been installed historically is obviously a legacy system. We still service chillers that have a 40-year life that came well before connections were even a thing that people could talk about. Now, the opportunity in service is twofold. Improving our attachment rate for every unit we sell. We've started to make progress there, but it's very early stage and then second is i was mentioning that earlier is that productization of of our capability meaning when you come to a customer right now we are really selling terms and contract time and labor if you want um is there a way and we know there is to actually create a more attractive value proposition to the customer that is more geared towards the outcome they're looking for, whether it's uptime, a budget, a quality, a problem-solving turnaround time, whatever that could be, and selling that capabilities instead of time and material. The last thing I would tell you is the biggest impediment to service growth for a company that has a service franchise of all size is the attrition of the existing customer base. When you've built such a large base of contracts around the country, you naturally lose some of those customers for many different reasons. Most of the time, by the way, we lose those customers not to the other OEM, but more towards the mid-market independent service provider. And we need to address that attrition over time. Now, that productization I was talking about, that is something only an OEM can deliver. And we think addressing that productization will also address, over the longer term, the attrition we've seen within our contract, where somebody comes in and says, you know, the JCI labor is X, I can do X minus 10%, and please choose me, and naturally some more price-sensitive customer will end up opting out. But we're still very excited about the service opportunity. We still think that the high single-digit, long-term algorithm growth is the right one. As soon as we see that productization, that service delivery model that I'm talking about really taking roots, then maybe we'll update that algorithm around service. But right now, high single digits is where we see it.

That's helpful, Mark. So we only have a couple more minutes. So let me just ask you a couple of quick questions. Portfolio management, you mentioned in the beginning, one of the things that you guys have done, but you still talked about divesting up to 10% of the portfolio. So maybe just any sort of progress update there. What do you think the appetite is in the market for your assets?

So portfolio is generally an outcome of strategic reviews. And Joachim brought an extreme level of clarity as to what our strategy needs to be and how do we deploy it across the enterprise. And like many companies, there are parts of our portfolio that have a hard time fitting squarely within the strategy. And it's a spectrum, right? Some assets fit perfectly and then some assets clearly don't fit at all because the end market they serve or the ability to create product differentiated it's just more challenge or lower and then you have a bunch of assets that sit in between yeah you can make a case one way or another there's some dynamic that are at play sometimes it's about have we performed and managed those assets the way they should have been have we really deployed the full power of the strategy against those end market if we like mismanaged them or left them alone for too long so so as we look at the whole portfolio you have parts of the portfolio that are clearly belong to our strategy think about HVAC and controls and and and obviously everything that comes with the data center and then on the other side you have things that address and market that that are less attractive to us that don't fit all of long-term strategy, whether it's addressing we still have some residential and light commercial parts of the market through our security portfolio and other part of the portfolio where we need to find what's the best outcome strategically for those assets. We've been very diligent at looking at our portfolio and taking action that are not overtly dilutive over time. And when they're dilutive, and the best example was the residential and light commercial, we only execute that transaction if there's a clear roadmap to addressing that dilution over a short to medium term. And so it's not just about like, can we sell these assets that we're not interested in because of their strategic impediment, but can we create a roadmap of shareholder value creation against those assets and not a pure, like, we don't like it, let's simplify, let's sell and deal with the dilution. There's a real thoughtfulness around how we prioritize those transactions and address them. Well, we're out of time, so we appreciate it.

Thank you very much, Mark.

Thank you, Andy.