Roper Technologies, Inc.

Good morning. The Roper Technologies conference call will now begin. Today's call is being recorded. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing star zero. I would now like to turn the call over to Zach Moxie, Vice President, and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and thank you all for joining us as we discuss the third quarter of 2024 financial results for Roper Technologies. Joining me on the call this morning are Neil Hahn, President and Chief Executive Officer, Jason Conley, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Brandon Cross, Vice President and Principal Accounting Officer, and Shannon O'Callaghan, Senior Vice President of Finance. Earlier this morning, we issued a press release announcing our financial results. The press release also includes replay information for today's call. We have prepared slides to accompany today's call, which are available through the webcast and are also available on our website. And now, if you please turn to page two. We begin with our safe harbor statement. During the course of today's call, we will make forward-looking statements which are subject to risks and uncertainties, as described on this page in our press release and in our SEC filings. You should listen to today's call in the context of that information. And now please turn to page three. Today, we will discuss our results primarily on adjusted, non-GAAP, and continuing operations basis. For the third quarter, the difference between our GAAP results and adjusted results consists of the following items. amortization of acquisition-related intangible assets, the financial impacts associated with minority investments, and lastly, transaction and restructuring-related expenses associated with the completed acquisition of Transact Campus. Reconciliations can be found in our press release and the appendix of this presentation on our website. And now, please turn to page four. I'll hand the call over to Neil. After our prepared remarks, we will take questions from our telephone participants. Neil?

Thank you, Zach, and thanks to everyone for joining our call. We're looking forward to sharing our third quarter results with you this morning. As we turn to page four, you'll see the topics we'll cover today. I'll start by highlighting our third quarter financial performance. Jason will then go through our financial results in greater detail, review our balance sheet, including our M&A capacity, and discuss our very strong cash flow performance. Then I'll walk everyone through a summary of our most recent acquisition, Transacts Campus, then discuss our segment highlights, and review our increased guidance for the full year. After our closing remarks, we'll open the call for your questions. So let's go ahead and get started. Next slide, please. As we turn to page five, the four key takeaways for today's call are, first, we again delivered another solid quarter of results and expect an acceleration in sequential organic revenue growth heading into Q4. Second, we completed the Transact Campus Acquisition a very attractive business at a very attractive net purchase price. Third, we're raising our FOIA guidance to the high end of our range. And fourth, we continue to be very well positioned relative to executing on our capital deployment strategy. Now, digging a bit deeper into these four key takeaways, we drew total revenue by 13%, organic revenue by 4%, and EBITDA by 10%. Importantly, we grew free cash flow by 15% in the quarter and by 20% on a TTM basis. Operationally in the quarter, Neptune performed slightly better than our expectations as a result of last quarter's mechanical meter production challenges. And also, importantly, we're encouraged to see strong organic enterprise software bookings momentum continue this quarter, growing in the double-digits area up from last quarter's high single-digits bookings growth. Also in the quarter, we completed the acquisition of Transact Campus. Our C4 business is being combined with Transact, and integration activities are well underway. This is yet another very compelling value creation opportunity for our shareholders, which we'll discuss in a bit. Based on strong enterprise margin performance, we're increasing our four-year 2024 depth guidance to the high end of our range. In addition, we're increasing our outlook for total revenue growth to be 13% plus given the addition of our most recent acquisition, Transact Campus. Finally, we're maintaining our approximate 6 percent organic revenue outlook for the year. If we step back a bit, we recognize we just posted back-to-back 4 percent organic growth quarters, although not unexpected, without question unsatisfying. That said, we do see quarterly organic growth momentum improving and expect our Q4 organic growth to sequentially improve given back-to-back quarters of strong enterprise bookings growth, stabilizing freight market conditions, albeit at the bottom, a resolved Neptune operational issue, and NDI returning to growth in Q4. So, with this mostly behind us, we're confident we're seeing a reacceleration of our growth. And finally, we continue to be very active on the M&A markets, an environment that continues to improve, and one where we have a very large pipeline of highly attractive opportunities. We continue to be quite bullish about our ability to be active on the M&A front. So with that, Jason, let me turn the call over to you so you can walk through our quarterly and full-year financial results, as well as our very strong financial position. Jason?

Thanks, Neil, and good morning, everyone. Let's take a look at slide six. Revenue was $1.76 billion and up 13% over prior year. Acquisitions contributed 9% led by ProCare and Transact Campus, and organic growth was 4%. Just unpacking organic growth a bit, in application software, revenue grew over 5% with recurring and reoccurring growth in the high single-digit area. Non-recurring revenue was down low single digits, led by declines in new license sales. New business activity for enterprise software continues to lean towards SaaS, which ultimately creates higher customer lifetime value while yielding a slight drag on near-term non-recurring revenue. In network software, recurring revenue growth of 1% includes temporary headwinds at DAT, LINK, and Foundry. The balance of the segment saw growth in the mid-single-digit area. As Neil will discuss later, we see stabilization in freight markets and expect some improvement in Q4. TEP organic growth of 4% was underpinned by strength at Verifon and prior year comp challenges at NDI, Innovonix, and RF Ideas. As we discussed last quarter, NDI had a very significant customer program in 2023 that created year-to-date comparison challenges. However, we expect a return to growth in Q4. Separately and importantly, Neptune rapidly resolved its mechanical meter production challenges in the quarter. EBITDA $717 million was 10% over prior year, and EBITDA margin came in at 40.7%. On debts, we posted $4.62, which was above our guidance range of $4.50 to $4.54. Of note, the Transact acquisition contributed $0.03 in the stub period, as the third quarter is seasonally the highest, driven by fees from annual tuition payments and annual renewals of term license. Excluding Transact, our guidance beat came from strong over-margin performance in our application software segment. Turning to free cash flow, we had our highest ever quarter with free cash flow of $719 million, up 15% over prior year. Transact was cash accretive in this debt period of ownership and off to a fast start with Q3 being, once again, seasonally strong for this business. We also had a simply great execution across our software and tech product businesses. Of note, networking capital as a percent of revenue, excluding acquisitions, was negative 19%, a new Q3 record. A special thanks to our world-class finance teams across the Roper family who are laser-focused on cash returns and cash flow growth. Tremendous job. The bottom line chart provides a trailing 12-month view of free cash flow over a four-year period. The CAGR from the corresponding 2021 period is 12%. If we adjust for the Section 174 that went into effect in 2022, we've compounded cash flow in the mid-teens area. The strong Q3 results places our year-to-date cash flow at 31% as a percentage of revenue. And with renewal season at many of our software businesses in Q4, we expect free cash flow margin to be north of 30% for the year. Turning to slide seven, I'll now discuss our balance sheet. So net debt of $8.1 billion on trailing EBITDA of $2.75 billion yields leverage of three times at the end of the quarter, and a bit lower if we perform it for the recent acquisitions. In the quarter, we entered the bond market and issued $2 billion across five, seven, and 10-year tenors for a blended rate of 4.8%. This was used to fund the Transact deal and partially pay down the revolver, which has a quarter in balance of $925 million. As we move forward, our strong cash flow and use of investment-grade leverage provides us with $4 billion or more of capacity to deploy towards high-quality acquisitions. To that end, I'll turn it over to Neil to talk about the Transact deal and its compelling combination with our Seaboard business. Neil?

Thanks, Jason. Let's turn to our most recent acquisition overview. Transact Campus is another fantastic addition to the Roper portfolio. Let's start with the investment highlights. We paid $1.5 billion net of a $100 million tax benefit for the business. We expect Transact to deliver about $325 million of revenue and $105 million of EBITDA next year, which means we paid about 14 times the EBITDA we expect this business to contribute next year. Transact is adjusted debt break even this year be accretive to our adjusted depths next year, and is immediately cash flow accretive. And we report Transact as combined with Seaboard at our application software segment. On a standalone basis, Transact meets all our longstanding acquisition criteria. Leader in the niche market, delivers mission-critical, verticalized software solutions, competes based on customer intimacy, operates an asset-like business model, and is led by a skilled, passionate leadership team. Let's talk about what the company does. Transact is a leading provider of mission-critical and purpose-built software and integrated payments to higher education institutions in two focused areas. First, in campus identity management and second, related to tuition management. The market itself is quite attractive and in the midst of the long-term secular tailwind of universities working to improve the on-campus experience required to attract and retain the next generation of students. We estimate the combined market size to be in the $1.5 billion range and growing 6% to 8% per annum. As previously mentioned, we're integrating our Seed Board business with Transact. Seed Board will combine its university campus ID business with that of Transact, creating a leading provider of these solutions. We expect the long-term organic growth rate of the combined business to be in the high single-digit area. The Go Forward leadership team has been announced. The 2025 $20 million cost synergy plan is well underway, and the initial set of customer feedback has been quite positive. As you can see, Transact is a highly compelling value creation opportunity for Roper and our shareholders. As we turn to page 10, Let's review our application software segment results. Revenue here grew by 23% in total, and organic revenue grew by 5.5%. EBITDA margins were 43.6%, and core margins improved 20 basis points in the quarter. Before getting into the business-specific details, I would like to share a few macro trends we're seeing across this segment. First, we continue to see improving organic enterprise bookings performance growing in the double-digit area in the quarter, following HSD growth in Q2. Importantly, the enterprise-class customer sluggishness we saw during 2023 and the first quarter of this year appears to be waning. Finally, we continue to see strong growth in recurring and reoccurring revenue in this segment, growing in the high single-digit area in the quarter. Prior to our business unit-specific commentary, we'll start with patterns. our software business focused on the needs of large law firms. Adderick continues to perform incredibly well in the market and had another great quarter. Over the past few quarters, we've highlighted Adderick's improved product development velocity, and in particular, with GenAI-powered features. Now, this innovation activity is adding to their already strong bookings momentum, including very nice new customer additions, and continued progress in adding new and expanded products within their existing customer base. Dell Tech, our software business serving government contracting, architecture, engineering, and construction markets, was strong in the quarter as well. In particular, Dell Tech's enterprise-class government contracting customer activity improved in the quarter, which is encouraging to see. Also, and as a reminder, Dell Tech continued their ongoing cloud-based software momentum and expanded their GenAI-embedded functionality. PowerPlan, our financial planning and tax software business serving heavy fixed-asset industries, continues to impress with their operating and financial results. PowerPlan has done a tremendous job over the last three or four years on improving their customer experience, accelerating their software innovation velocity, and improving upsell, cross-sell activity. Great job by Joe and his team in Atlanta. Frontline continues to perform nicely and has strong renewal activity and delivered excellent, seasonally high cash flow. Of note, we're excited to announce Matt Straza as Frontline's new CEO. As some of you may recall, Matt joined Roper as Dell Tech's go-to-market leader, then was promoted to be the CEO of ConstructConnect. Matt did a wonderful job at ConstructConnect, and we're excited about having this growth-oriented leader at the helm at Frontline. Also of note, We promoted Buck Brody, ConstructConnect's CFO, to assume the CEO role. Buck has been in the Roper ecosystem mostly as a CFO over the past 13 years. This is one of the first, though certainly not the last time, we'll promote leaders across and within Roper. We continue to remain quite bullish about the future for Frontline. Our healthcare IT businesses, led by Strata and Data Innovations, were also strong in the quarter and delivered excellent growth. Finally, ProCare continues to execute well. Importantly, as part of our evolving governance processes tied to faster growth or maturing leader nature of our portfolio, ProCare is working to improve its go-to-market capabilities from lead generation to deal execution, as well as go-to-market leadership. We really like what we're seeing here, although it's early days. As it relates to the guidance for the final quarter of the year, we expect to see mid-single-digit organic revenue growth.

Please turn with us to page 11.

Organic revenue in our network software said we grew 1% in the quarter and was impacted by the fact we continue to experience pressure with our freight matching businesses and work through the impact on foundry from the recent actors and riders strikes. Excluding our freight matching businesses and foundry, the segment grew in the mid-singles area, which demonstrates the underlying quality of this group of businesses. Even our margins continue to be strong at 56.2%. Let's dig into the details and start with our freight matching businesses, DAT and Lululek, which declined slightly as expected due to the continuing challenging freight market conditions that adversely impact both businesses. That said, we continue to see further signs of market stabilization for both carriers and brokers. During this software period, GAT continues to invest to accelerate new product development velocity. Now, let's turn to Foundry, our post-production media and entertainment software business. Foundry continued to roll out innovative product updates and ML-powered functionality this quarter, meaningfully enhancing the creative process for high-quality post-production visual effects. Given the continued impacts related to the recent industry strikes, Foundry declined in the quarter as expected. We now expect the hangover from the strikes to carry into next year as Foundry's customers continue to navigate through tight economic conditions until the creative pipelines matriculate to the post-production phase, which is expected to be sometime during 2025. As mentioned, the balance of this segment grew mid-singles organically in the quarter with solid execution across this portfolio. In particular, ConstructingNet continued its solid march of improved financial results and bookings momentum. In addition, ConstructingNet continues to lead the market with their GenAI-powered takeoff and estimating solutions. Finally, our alternate-site healthcare businesses performed well led by our software solutions at MHA, SoftRiders, and SHP, and further benefited from improved senior care occupancy. Starting through the final quarter of the year, we expect organic revenue to improve a bit but remain in the low single-digits area as we continue to experience stable but muted freight market conditions. Now, please turn to page 12 and let's review our test segment's results. Revenue in the heater grew 4% in total and on organic basis, and EBITDA margins came in at 35.4%. We'll start with Neptune. Neptune rapidly resolved their mechanical meter production issue within the quarter, performing slightly better than we anticipated. Importantly, during this short-term bespoke manufacturing challenge, Neptune was able to deliver on all their customer commitments. In addition, Neptune continues to see solid demand for both mechanical and static meters, positioning Neptune very well for the foreseeable future. Next, we'll turn to Veriton. Veriton continues to perform exceptionally well with solid growth across our GlideScope and BFlex product offerings. A particular note, we're pleased to report that Veriton is the market share leader in the U.S. for single-use bronchoscopes. Five years ago, We entered this market with a strong belief that we had a higher right to win given our incumbent Glidescope position, and now we have claimed a market share leadership position, and Verathon is not done. Great job by Team Verathon. Northern Digital, or NDI, declined as we expected in the quarter based on customer program timing that led to a very difficult comp. That said, OEM order activity remained strong in the quarter. Finally, antibiotics and RFIDs each decline against difficult prior year comps. As a reminder, these businesses started recovering from supply chain challenges last year. For the fourth quarter, we expect to improve to high single-digit growth given Neptune is back on track operationally and NDI's customer program timing begins to normalize. With that, please turn with us to page 14. Now let's review our full year 2024 guidance and discuss our fourth quarter outlook. Based on strong application segment margin performance and the addition of Transact Campus, we're increasing our total year growth outlook to be north of 13%, and we expect full year organic growth to remain consistent in the 6% area. In addition, we're raising our full year guidance to be in the range of 1821 and 1825, the high end of our previous range, and an increase of 6 cents at the midpoint. Please note, we expect Transact to be debts neutral for the full year. Our guidance continues to assume a full-year effective tax rate in the 21 to 22 percent range. The fourth quarter, we expect adjusted debts to be between 470 and 474. Please note, our newest acquisition, Transact, will be about 3 cents dilutive in the quarter. Also, as a reminder, the impact of our $20 million synergy plan meaningfully skews to 2025. Now, please turn with us to page 15, and then we'll open it up for your questions. We'll conclude with the same key takeaways with which we started. First, we delivered a solid quarter of financial results and expect an acceleration in sequential organic revenue growth heading into Q4. We completed the acquisition of Transact Campus and convinced the integration with Seaboard. Third, we're increasing our outlook for a full year. And finally, we are very well positioned relative to our capital and employment strategy. For the quarter, we delivered 13% total revenue and 4% organic revenue growth, while increasing our EBITDA 10%. Of note, we grew our enterprise software bookings in a double-digit area and continue to see high single-digit ARR growth. Importantly, free cash flow was impressive, growing 15% in the quarter and 20% on a TTM basis. Next, we completed the compelling acquisition of Transact Campus. The combination with Seaboard creates a leading software and integrated payments business that helps universities solve the pressing issue of making the student campus experience more compelling. The cost energy execution risk here is quite low, most of which has already been actioned, leading to a very attractive shareholder return. Next, we're increasing our full-year outlook for total revenue to be north of 13% and maintaining our approximate 6% organic revenue growth outlook. In addition, we're increasing our full-year depth outlook to the high end of our prior guidance. Finally, we continue to maintain a strong financial position with over $4 billion of capacity for capital employment. The M&A markets continue to be very active. We have a robust pipeline of attractive acquisition opportunities that we're excited to pursue with our unbiased and disciplined approach. We remain quite bullish about our ability to execute this part of our strategy. Now, as we turn to your questions, and if you could flip to the final slide, our strategic compounding flywheel We'd like to remind everyone that what we do at Roper is simple. We compound cash flow over a long arc of time by operating a portfolio of market-leading, application-specific, and vertically-oriented businesses. Once a company is part of Roper, we operate a decentralized environment so our businesses can compete and win based on customer intimacy. We coach our businesses on how to structurally improve their long-term and sustained organic growth rates and underlying business quality. Finally, we run a centralized, process-driven capital employment strategy that focuses in a deliberate and disciplined manner on finding the next great business to add to our cash flow compounding flywheel. Thinking together, we compound our cash flow over a long arc of time in the mid-teens area.

With that, we'd like to thank you for your continued interest and support and open the floor for your questions. Please go ahead, operator.

We will now begin. We will now go to our question and answer portion of the call. We request that our callers limit their questions to one main question and one follow-up. If you would like to ask a question, you may do so by pressing star followed by the digit 1 on your touchtone telephone. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then the digit 2. Again, we request that callers limit their questions to one main question and one follow-up. Your first question comes from D'Andre with RBC. Your line is now open. Thank you. Good morning, everyone.

Good morning.

Hey, maybe we can start with the strategy around Transact Campus. And I note that it's seaboards being combined with the business right away. And historically, ROPA really never clustered the application software businesses together. preferring more standalone siloed businesses. You never talked about scale. I don't think I've seen a cost synergy estimate coming out of a transaction in a long time. Does this Is this more of an opportunistic acquisition? You've done it before. You've combined medical purchasing. You've done some insurance, business, back office. So we've seen this before, but this is right out of the blocks. It's being combined, and the synergies look obvious. But just maybe is there a subtle difference here, more willingness to look at these attractive growth areas? Maybe start there. Thanks.

Yeah, appreciate the opportunity to talk about that, Dean. The short answer is yes. So even going back to our investor day 18 months or so ago, we outlined, I think, there a modest evolution of our capital employment strategy to focus on a bit more of what we call bolt-on activity and then also businesses that are you know, faster-growing, call them maturing leaders. And so since then, if you look at our acquisitions we've done since then, we've done Stratus and Talus, or Centalis and combined it with Strata. That was an archetype that's very similar to Transact. We bought ProCare, which was our first maturing leader, slightly faster-growing business, and then Transact. You go back to 2019, I think we've done 26-ish acquisitions, and there'd be a handful of platforms out of that. So We have leaned into a fair number of bolt-ons. I would say on the bolt-ons, the driving, the principal driving reason for that is to buy businesses or have a high right to win and adjacencies that are close to ours that we think increases the likelihood for accelerated organic growth once the bolt-on turns organic. So, yeah, it's very much part of our strategy and And we've tooled up the capital employment team that Janet has. We've got folks that are focused on partnering with our businesses, doing a lot of the development work in the marketplace. So, yes, it's a strategic intent, and we've started the execution pathway.

That's great to hear. And maybe for Jason, and I appreciate you guys putting the spotlight on the free cash flow compounding flywheel, because it seems like that's what you got this quarter with free cash flow up 15% and debts up 7%. So just talk about that spread. And was there any sort of seasonal contribution to free cash flow this quarter? Frontline typically has a higher contribution in the third quarter. Just any dynamics there? Thanks.

So, I mean, Q3 is now our strongest cash flow quarter. I mean, since we acquired Frontline a couple of years ago, and now with the addition of Transact, it's definitely our strongest quarter. You know, Transact's up a little bit, maybe a couple points of growth in the quarter. It's, as I mentioned, seasonally strong for them. But aside from that, we just had tremendous execution through, you know, the renewal seasons, which is Q3 and Q4 for us. So Q4 is expected to be strong as well. And I would just say, you know, DSO proved almost across the board for a number of our businesses. And so just good old-fashioned execution, I think, is what drove that outsized growth relative to debts.

Great to hear. Thank you.

Your next question comes from Brent Philwood Jeffries. Your line is now open.

Thanks. Good morning. Neil, you mentioned some of these macro headwinds. seem like they're turning a bit. I'm curious if you can just dig into what you're seeing in some of the tone and some of the buyers. And then just maybe for Jason, if you can just speak to Neptune and how confident that you think we're through some of the challenges that we saw and what are the reasons why you're confident in that recovery?

I'll take the first one, James. I'll certainly take the second one. So, first, I'd just remind everybody, we've worked hard over the last, you know, handful of years to really beat a lot of the cyclicality and macro out of what we do. If you think about in markets we serve, there's education, there's legal, there's contracting, there's health care, insurance. And What we sell and what we deliver is mission critical, the software, so we're generally not turned on and off based on the macro. And then most of our pricing is subscription-oriented versus transactional. So there's sort of three levels of muting in that regard. But still, we're not immune to the macro, but we muted it. I would highlight a couple that we've been talking about really since the beginning of last year first. We're talking this time we're even – interest rates and an economic slowdown it was i think the most anticipated economic slowdown in modern history and that psychology of that just slowed down to some extent the enterprise enterprise class buying activity across software um we're we're cautiously optimistic based on the last couple quarters of enterprise software bookings activity last quarter in the high single-digit area growth this quarter and the double-digit area growth. Pipelines look very robust heading into the end of the year, so we need to execute that, those pipelines, so we're encouraged by that. The second macro factor, certainly, that takes the headline for us is the transportation macro, you know, with our DAT and load link businesses. They're subscription-oriented on both sides of the network, both the carrier and the broker. But the number of carriers in the market loosely follows the amount of tonnage that flows over the roads. And so, as the tonnage has come down, so has the number of carriers that are participants in the network, which could put pressure on that. We've just seen there's probably been 20 to 25 weeks of negative brokerage loads compared to prior years. That actually in the last handful of weeks is more normalized to last year. So, we're very much just seeing a stabilizing and the freight markets. Those would be the macros that have impacted our business. Jason?

Yeah, and just to talk about Neptune a little bit. So if you recall, you know, we stood up the ultrasonic or static line last quarter, the second line. And so we had some constraints in our mechanical meter production. And so, you know, the root causes were identified, corrective actions implemented. We had some yield issues on plastic molding that got corrected. Some of the machines were creating some constraints as well. That's been remedied. We like the trends we saw through September, and those trends pretty much inform the production output for the fourth quarter and beyond. So we feel good about – demand is really strong there, so it's really just getting through this mechanical meter production issue, and we feel good based on what we saw in Q3 and the confidence the teams have in Q4.

One thing I'd add to Jason on Neptune, as I said in the prepared remarks, Neptune was able to deliver – There's no issue there. Kaizans continue to improve and get even further improvements, and Don and the team did a great job just going to GAMPA on the shop floor and getting through costs.

Great. Thanks.

Your next question comes from Julia Mitchell with Barclays. Your line is now open.

Hi. Good morning. Good morning. Maybe I just wanted to follow up on the macro context that pertains to network software specifically. As we're thinking out beyond this quarter, trying to gauge how you're thinking about the recovery slope at network software, caution that Foundry in aggregate next year may not see much growth because of the ongoing strikes, hangover. Just wondered on DAT and LoadLink, that portion, what the expectation is. Do you think it's plausible we could just keep moving sideways sort of sequentially for some time? And maybe just frame, as you see it now, how much are Foundry and the freight match businesses down in 2024? So I'll take the first part.

So on the DAT and load length, We would intentionally change our word choice this call to be stabilizing. So it is very much a stabilized market. We anticipate for until we see anything other than stabilized, we're going to be in this position from just a tonnage or load volumes that are going over the roads and into the network. That said, DAT does have a pathway and a plan, a high confidence plan to return to some modest levels of growth next year with no assumed improvement in carrier network participation through packaging price. And so we'll have, like I said, some modest growth at DAT next year that we have a pretty high degree of confidence heading into our AOP sessions that occur next month. And then on foundry, it's just the waiting for the post-production employment to return to its historical levels. I think we're about 15% below pre-pandemic or pre-strike, I should say, employment levels and post-production. And we just need the content is being produced. It's just got to matriculate through the pipelines, and that'll be sometime in 2025. So it's definitely taken a few quarters longer than we anticipated earlier in the year. Jason?

Yeah, so, sorry, frame matches is down, sort of low singles for this year. I think we definitely think for NS in general that the Q3 is the low point for us. And that'll start to trend up, as Neil said, through the fourth quarter and then into next year. And the pacing is just dependent on sort of the market momentum there. On foundry, it's been down double digits this year, and that's been pretty consistent throughout the year. So we expected a little bit more of a recovery in the second half of this year. But as Neil said, it's taken a little bit longer. So. As we think about the trends for next year, I think the first quarter, just to remind you, we called out an MHA sort of one-time item this year. So beyond that, though, we expect steady growth in the next year for the segment.

Thanks very much. And then just my follow-up, switching tack maybe to the EBITDA margins at TEP. Those have been down year-on-year for a few quarters. You've mentioned the production issues. There are clearly supply chain inefficiencies moving around. As we look ahead at TEP, what's the confidence maybe that margins can return to year-on-year expansion in the coming quarters?

Yeah, no, you're right. I mean, the second and third quarter, we had, you know, if you recall last year, we had some big supply chain liberation for our med product businesses and our product businesses. This year, we're down a little bit. NDI is down, had a little bit of negative mix, and we're obviously investing for growth there just because it's always been a consistent trend. double-digit grower for us, so we're continuing to invest in NDI. But I think for the year, just thinking broadly, we're going to be flat, even on margin.

And so it should inflect back up in the fourth quarter. Great. Thank you.

Your next question comes from Terry Tillman with Truist Securities. Your line is now open.

Yeah, thanks. Hi, Neil, Jason, and Zach. My primary question is actually on the enterprise software bookings. I think you said double digits up from high single digits. I don't know what you could share in terms of what kind of budget flush you're looking for for 4Q. I assume there is some of that. So if you could make either a comment on that or just more importantly, if the bookings are picking up, do you think there's potentially an inflection in the first half next year or second half, just depending on how some of that activates the revenue, and then add a follow-up?

provide some color there, Terry. I mean, I think you're right.

The fourth quarter for us is not necessarily a budget flush. It's probably just more customer behavior. It's typically our biggest quarter. So we're obviously keen to see how that plays out. You're right. The last couple of quarters have been strong. I think just a little bit of color. I mentioned that Delta, the Algonquin Enterprise got a little bit better. So if you think about what happened from Q2 to Q3, that was a little bit of the Delta. Also, Vertifor was really strong, specifically in the carrier space. Also had good broker expansions, but carriers has been an area that has been a focus for them. So good to see some new logo wins there. And then Adder has been really strong, as we've mentioned, but it's really good to see the balance of both expansion of existing customers and then some new logo wins with their Sierra Cloud products. So it's good to see that they're continuing to win in the market with new logos. And then we think about the, you know, the foreign quarter is going to be important, as I mentioned, in terms of how that plays into next year and sort of how that will matriculate into revenue. But, you know, we're encouraged with what we saw the last couple of quarters.

enterprise tokens momentum it will matriculate into revenue and next year the time you'd wish depends on implementation time frames and customer go lives but yeah I mean it's definitely a trend that we're watching carefully that's good to hear and just my secondary question Neil you commented earlier when you get into kind of business level commentary and kind of talent management moves you make I think you talked about ProCare and Frontline and

I guess kind of what drove kind of some changes there, and I think you said go-to-market, is the idea that, hey, they're doing well, but they could be doing even better, or just maybe you could double-click a little bit into ProCare and Frontline and what to expect with some of those leadership changes. Thank you.

Sure. So there are two different things. I'll start with ProCare. So ProCare, we identified in our diligence process that there is an opportunity to improve modernize whatever work choice you want to pick, the go-to-market function. And so within a couple months of ownership, by the way, we shared those diligence findings and value creation lever with the leadership team of ProCare. They agreed with that. We made a leadership change. Like what's happening there, obviously, with the leadership change and go-to-market for ProCare, which, by the way, is an internal promote. It was somebody from within the company. Then you can start attacking the underlying opportunities. They actually staff the calls between inbound, outbound, between business development and closures. There's a compensation angle. There's call scripts around attach rates and upsellings. All that is happening. And it's very early days, but starting to gain some encouragement, starting to yield some fruit. So it was, again, a diligence finding where we thought there was a value creation lever attached to it, and the team sort of attacked it pretty quickly. It's completely different. So our existing leader retired or indicated he wanted to retire. So we had an opportunity with Matt Straza that we have a long history with. As I mentioned, hired and came to the organization as a go-to-market leader at Dell Tech. Did a wonderful job there. Then his first CEO opportunity was at Construct Connect. Just did a terrific job in terms of the way the business is run. It's very much run in a Roper style. and he's a very growth-oriented leader. And so given that Frontline is one of our more attractive growth assets, we wanted a growth leader there. And he's very early days. I mean, he's two months into the job or something like that at Frontline. And then the effect of that is the CFO of ConstructConnect, Bob Brody became the CEO of ConstructConnect, and then the head of FP&A became the CFO of ConstructConnect. So from an enterprise risk perspective, We're able to sort of promote and rotate leaders inside a roper. Essentially, the outside hire is an FP&A leader at the business versus the CEO at one of our larger businesses. So it's a win-win for the organization and individuals.

That's great. That's very helpful. Thanks.

My pleasure. Your next question comes from Scott Davis with Milius Research. Your line is now open.

Hey, good morning, guys. Morning, Scott.

I wanted just to, it's a little bit of a high-level question, but there was a lot of price, you know, in the last couple years, not just you guys, pretty much everybody out there. But have you found any harder to get price incrementally? Are we back to kind of more normal, you know, when we walk into 2025, for example, would be back to kind of the more normal price increase cadence, particularly in software, obviously. But... Just a high-level picture, what do you see there?

I would say I just – I would – I seem to recall you asking a price question a few years ago as well. So for us on software, we have always had a pricing mechanism in the ARR snowmobile. As a general matter, we have 95 or so percent gross retention, so we're going to trim 5 or so percent. We're going to offset the vast majority of that at each business unit level with price. It's just in the algorithm. It's in the price expectation with the customers. It's in what we do from a new product feature point of view with the R&D and efforts we support. Then, obviously, we have cross-sell and sell from there to get you net retention in the 105-ish range across the blended enterprise, and we have net deal on top of that. That, I would say, is a muscle that is very well understood and built. We obviously get better. You know, an example we've gotten better with that over the last few years is PowerPlan. Like, they didn't have that muscle built. Now it is built. But I would say we didn't get outsized pricing in software in the past, and so it's just reverting to normal. On the tech businesses, I would say that's a little different. You know, most of the businesses would take price when they launch a new product. Now there's just a more normalized inflationary every year, every 18 months or so opportunity to pass the regular way inflation across.

Yeah, typically in medical products, it's with hospitals and the like. But, yeah, I think Camille's point on software, it's been part of the rhythm for a long time. A lot of what we've done in strategic plan reviews is understand key purchasing criteria and really unpacking that at a more detailed level for each of our businesses, and that's helped them. It's provided some confidence or it's just some insight into what the customer thinks about the value proposition, and that's been helpful as well.

Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, and it's consistent with what you said a couple years ago. But, hey, guys, there's just a lot of debate as it relates to software around AI, generative AI. But, you know, I just wonder kind of your view now that you've had a chance to dig more into this and spend more time on it. It's certainly in your slide decks and your launching products. But Does generative AI essentially raise the barrier to entry because you have the relationship with the customer already and you can shorten your time to market on product innovation? Or is it the opposite and people can come in with a lower-priced product easier because just the development cycles are somewhat shorter? How do you guys think about that?

I think it's very much... the former, the first. I mean, it is, if you think about what we're doing, first of all, it's just the highest level. I mean, it's a real thing. We're definitely, I think the whole market is in sort of the trough of disillusionment, if you will. I mean, the hype is, you know, the reality is starting to catch up with the hype. I would say the number, the number of new use cases that are being created, I think just not only by Roper, but we read externally is slowing, but we're very much advancing the existing use cases, whether it's internal productivity or customer facing product stuff. I would remind you, everybody, that from why we think this is an accelerator and sort of raises the bearish entry is to do generative AI, I think you have to have two things. Well, right, and for my software businesses are naturally positioned better than others in regards to these two questions. The first is you need to have elements, I should say, versus questions. You need to have the data that is very, very specific to what the question is you're answering. But then you also need to know what question to ask. And again, the more nuanced the question, the better the generative tools are. I'll give you a very simple example. We have a legal assault in a business that is the PRP backbone for large law firms, right? It's professional services project-based billing. The question is not how do you create a professional-based bill. It's how do you create a – how does – How does law firm A create a compliant bill for roper technologies, right? And so the very specific bespoke questions, the nuanced questions, is where the generative tools really, really shine. So unless you have the incumbency really matters in that regard. So it's not about the, you know, we can't develop software as fast or faster than any startup can build software from a generative point of view, but we have the incumbency in the data. I would say protocolized software businesses generally have the incumbency in the data and the specificities. to ask, if you will.

That's good color and context. Thanks. Good luck, guys. Appreciate it. Thanks.

Your next question comes from Steve Tusa with JP Morgan. Your line is now open.

Hi, good morning. Good morning. Just following up on Julian's question on the NSS business for next year, Um, so, uh, which businesses are, are, you know, accelerating and how much of a headwind is that MHA, MHA, um, benefit in, in the first quarter? And then will you be able to kind of get into that mid single digit range for that business next year?

I think, Steve, I think we want to stop short of even implying any guidance in the next year. What I would say just broadly across the enterprise is we like the momentum we're seeing in enterprise software bookings and the fact that it's normalized, a pretty normalized 2024 year from which to grow. You see the reacceleration heading into Q4. We expect those Q4 trends to carry into 2025, but I think we want to just sort of stop there short of its next quarter. That's right.

I think on the MHA we can call that. MHA and Q1 is a couple of points of drag in Q1.

Got it. Okay. And then just lastly on cash, obviously a really strong result here. Seasonally it steps up. How does it now behave seasonally in Q4? Last year you were down, but not by much, like basically kind of flat to down. Is that kind of the new seasonality? Was there something unusual in Q4? Maybe just help us with this seasonality because it's definitely, you know, different than it's been in the past given the front line.

Yeah, Q4 used to be our strongest, and now, you know, like I said, Q3 is our strongest. I think it'll be – we won't see quite the same increase in the fourth quarter as we did the third. Obviously, we got – Transact came in, so that was helpful. But that's obviously their strongest collections quarter as well. So, you know, it'll be up, but not as much as Q3 in the fourth quarter.

Got it. Sorry, one more. Just on Vertifor, I didn't see it in the slides. Any updates there?

No, Vertifor had, I think Jason mentioned in his prepared remarks, they had a couple very, very nice wins in the quarter. You can't really talk about them quite yet, but we will be able to. Also, they had... a very impactful product release. And they have a product called Benefit Point, which is the leading product for sort of managing the medical health insurance book. And they have an automation feature that saves like 45 minutes per customer per benefit plan. So this is tens of thousands of hours of productivity that we're sort of given to our customers. It's a huge release. They've worked on this for quite a bit. So like what's happening with the new product, from a development point of view, a couple of nice, exciting wins, and steady as she goes.

Got it. Congrats on the cash. Thanks.

Thank you.

Your next question comes from Joe Giordano with TD Cowan. Your line is now open. Hey, guys. Good morning.

Good morning, Jimmy.

Hey, so on Neptune, it's good to hear the production issues have been fixed. Just curious, like we've been hearing some like kind of mixed, I guess, about order patterns in that business. Like I know almost everyone in that sector had like huge orders for a multi-year period and backlogs are really high. Are you getting any sense of like changing like the incoming flow from like a new booking standpoint for Neptune?

I would say it's very much what we expect and what you just described. So During the pandemic, I mean, pre-pandemic, this was a four- to eight-week lead time business, very much a book-and-ship type business. During COVID, you know, we got our lead times gapped out to maybe 12 or 14 weeks, but we had, you know, 12, 18 months of backlog, ordered the order activity, and now that order duration is compressing. But the number, the order volume, if you will, the repeat orders are not. So, we're not, it's just a, instead of booking a year out, they're booking, you know, whatever, six, the customer booking six or nine months out. So, that order duration is coming in as expected. But nothing, again, for repetitive purposes, nothing from a, from a, the number of meters that are being shipped to an account by account basis, that is all healthy.

Yeah, that makes sense. Just curious if any of your businesses, When you talk to the leaders, are any of them super excited or super nervous one way or another about the election outcome? I'm thinking maybe is Deltek excited about a potential inflationary kind of spending spree from the government? I guess across the portfolio, is there anything that you call out one way or the other?

As a general matter, I'd say we're apolitical and no. I mean, we're not really impacted positively, negatively by either administration. Relative to Zeltak, I want to remind you and others is that the government always spends. The administration determines the nature of the spend. So if you go way back in the Bush era, it was defense, and Obama was defense. education, health care. And so the spend flow changes, but the government contracts have just positioned their capabilities where the flow of the federal spending is going. And so that's relative. It's just what their business is. I would say for 25, the 25 appropriations are actually pretty well understood at this stage and aren't going to change based on the election. That's why I think we're starting to see some of the enterprise government contracting activity starting to thaw a little bit. at least for the one-meter target, if you will, is relatively well understood.

Great. Thanks, guys. Yep. Thanks.

Your next question comes from Joe Ritchie with Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open.

Hey, good morning, guys. So my first question, just a little bit longer term, Neil, is you have these ambitions to grow the portfolio at a faster clip over the longer term period. Do you think you have the right portfolio in place or is there maybe some addition by subtraction to help you kind of achieve the ambitions of maybe more of like a high single digit type organic growth number going forward?

I think the portfolio we like We think that there is, we have high confidence there is opportunity for every business insider roper to do better. No company has reached its full potential for its organic growth. What we like about our approach of organic growth is it tends to be quite sticky and sustainable. The downside is it takes time, right? There's no, it doesn't happen in a year. And, you know, we cited it, you know, on our investor day. I'll cite it here again. A great example for us in TEP is our marathon business. You know, eight or nine years ago, it was a low single-digit growth business. Now it's a low-teens, maybe higher-growth business, we think, sustainably for quite some time. It takes – just unfortunately, it takes time to get the strategy right, to enable the strategy, to build the talent offense, to seed in deeply a culture of continuous improvement. We're four or five years in across the portfolio for that, and so we're definitely gaining some traction. But we like our odds in terms of being able to improve the organic growth. Then, in addition, as I mentioned, I think one of the – definitely one of the – I think the first question today is, as we deploy our looking towards slightly higher growth businesses, like Transact, combined with Seaboard, iSingles, ProCare, and Teams. So there's going to be a little bit of mix-up over time in terms of the portfolio mix.

Got it. That makes a lot of sense. And maybe just following up on that last point, with your leverage now, you know, around three times net leverage – And I recognize that the pipeline is still strong. Do you expect to see any pause in M&A activity as you de-lever and then start to get a little bit more opportunistic? Or could you see yourself doing transactions in the next, you know, in the near term called the next three to six months?

Yeah, I mean, as Jason alluded, we've got, you know, $4 billion plus of M&A capacity as we sit today. um over the course of the next 12 months or so um we're very active in the m&a markets it's a very attractive market um there's lots of sellers um one of the largest sponsors in the world european sponsors on cbc earlier this week and asked about what's the mantra is it sell sell sell so there's a lot of uh a lot of lp pressure dpi matters a lot and so there's essentially uh three or four years worth of deals that are compressing here in the next year or two. And so it's a very attractive market. We plan to be active in that.

Great to hear. Thank you. Thank you.

Your last question comes from Christopher Glynn with Oppenheimer. Your line is now open.

Yeah, thanks. I was going to ask also about the deal dynamics out there. You answered the supply side. On the demand side, is that still very favorable to where you're seeing, you know, diluted buyer activity per deal?

In terms of the competitive intensity on a per deal basis, that's the question. It's hard to ultimately know. I mean, I would call out that we did the transact deal on a proprietary basis. I would say that our M&A teams are engaged in engaging in more proprietary or quasi-proprietary opportunities than I can recall in quite some time. And I think it's – so we know those are facts. I think where I would speculate a little bit with so many opportunities that are going to be coming out of pipeline, I think all buyers are going to be a little more discerning early in processes, which might lead to a little bit lower competitive intensity, but hard to know that to be an absolute case.

Okay. And then in terms of Dell Tech and the general GovCon exposure, a lot of the stimulus and megaprojects, a lot of compliance hurdles are gating that process. Are you seeing any, you know, increased letting or, you know, momentum in that? And what's the implication for those platforms in 2025?

I would say the – I would just refer back to what I was talking about before with GoCon. It has been for six quarters slow-ish based on the uncertainty – about four to six quarters slow based on the uncertainty of the government spending, the operation of the government. We saw some reissues here in the last quarter or two relative, especially in the enterprise class. Some of the larger customers are starting to be acquisitive again of Dell Tech. The exact underpinnings of the drivers, some of that might be infrastructure, but some of it might be other things.

That's not in our specific purview. Okay. Thank you. Thank you.

This concludes our question and answer session. We will now return back to Zach Moxie for any closing remarks.

Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. We look forward to speaking with you at our next burning call.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.