Trimble Inc. (TRMB) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Trimble Inc. (NASDAQ:TRMB) Q1 2023 Earnings Conference Call May 3, 2023 8:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Rob Painter - Chief Executive Officer

David Barnes - Chief Financial Officer

Michael Leyba - Investor Relations

Conference Call Participants

Jerry Revich - Goldman Sachs

Rob Wertheimer - Melius Research

Kristen Owen - Oppenheimer

Jonathan Ho - William Blair

Chad Dillard - Bernstein

Jason Celino - KeyBanc

Tami Zakaria - JPMorgan

Josh Tilton - Wolfe Research

Rob Mason - Baird

Operator

Good day and welcome to the Trimble First Quarter 2023 Results Conference. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. [Operator Instructions] And finally, I would like to advise all participants, this call is being recorded. Thank you.

I’d now like to welcome Rob Painter, Chief Executive Officer to begin the conference. Rob, over to you.

Rob Painter

Welcome, everyone. Before I get started, our presentation is available on our website; and we ask that you refer to the Safe Harbor at the back. Let's begin on Slide 2 with our key messages. Annualized recurring revenue is our key top line metric at Trimble. Our team led by our construction software group achieved 13% organic growth in the quarter, 100 basis points ahead of our expectations.

We now stand at 1.65 billion of ARR, which compares to 1.2 billion when we began our Connect and Scale journey in 2020 and under 700 million at the beginning of 2017. Kudos to the Trimble team who have worked so hard to execute on our transformation.

EBITDA is our other key P&L metric, and we delivered EBITDA of 27.2%, also slightly ahead of our expectations, which was driven by record gross margins of 64.2%. For perspective, gross margins in 2019 were 57.7% and 56.3% in 2016. Free cash flow conversion of 1.14x was also ahead of our expectations.

I recognize that consensus numbers and the trading algorithm both still focus on total revenue and EPS. While these figures are important, they are secondary in relevance to ARR and cash flow, which are much more closely tied to fundamental value creation. Revenue and margins were both above expectations we set with the investor community back in February.

We believe the delta to consensus figures was simply a function of the challenge in getting our quarters mapped correctly against our annual guidance. As a result, we will be more prescriptive with our second quarter commentary. With respect to the macro, like most companies, we are navigating an economic environment with a heightened sense of uncertainty trying to find the signal through the noise. Despite the noise, what we sell to customers is productivity, quality, safety, transparency, and environmental sustainability.