Zebra Technologies Corporation

Good day and welcome to the fourth quarter and full year 2025 Zebra Technologies Earning Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Mike Steele, Vice President of Investor Relations.

Please go ahead. Good morning and welcome to Zebra's fourth quarter earnings conference call. This presentation is being simulcast on our website at investors.zebra.com and will be archived there for at least one year. Our forward-looking statements are based on current expectations and assumptions and are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially and we refer you to the factors discussed in our SEC filings. During this call, we will reference non-GAAP financial measures as we describe our business performance. with reconciliation shown at the end of this slide presentation and in our earnings press release. Throughout this presentation, unless otherwise indicated, our references to sales performance are year-on-year on a constant currency basis and exclude results from recently acquired businesses for 12 months. This presentation will include prepared remarks from Bill Burns, our Chief Executive Officer, and Nathan Winters, our Chief Financial Officer. Bill will begin with a discussion of our fourth quarter and full year results. Nathan will then provide additional detail and discuss our outlook. Bill will conclude with progress on advancing our strategic priorities. Following the prepared remarks, Bill and Nathan will take your questions. Now let's turn to slide four as I hand it over to Bill. Thank you, Mike.

Good morning and thank you for joining us. We delivered fourth quarter results above our outlook, driven by our team's strong execution and positive demand trend. Before discussing the quarter, I'd like to briefly reflect on the progress we have made over the past year on our vision to advance intelligent operation. In 2025, we expanded our connected frontline portfolio and customer base through the Elo Touch acquisition and expanded our 3D machine vision capabilities with the PhotoNeo acquisition. We advanced our market leadership with the introduction of our AI solutions for the frontline sharpened our focus on automation by exiting our robotics business to prioritize areas where we see better growth opportunities, including RFID, machine vision, and AI-powered solutions. Operationally, we delivered solid growth, generating strong free cash flow, and deepened customer and partner relationships. For the fourth quarter, we realized sales of nearly $1.5 billion, a 10.6% increase, or 2.5% on an organic basis, from the prior year and adjusted even a margin of 22.1% and non-GAAP diluted earnings per share of $4.33, which was 8% higher than the prior year. We drove strong results in our Asia-Pac and Latin America regions with EMEA returning to grow. Our healthcare, manufacturing, and retail and e-commerce end markets grew while transportation logistics cycled strong compares in North America. ELO performed well in the quarter and we are pleased with the early progress on driving synergies. We realized solid earnings growth by fully mitigating existing tariffs and driving operating expense leverage through productivity initiatives while continue to invest in our market leading solutions portfolio. For the full year, we achieved greater than 6% sales growth in line with our long-term expectations and 17% non-GAAP diluted earnings per share growth. We also generated more than $800 million a free cash flow, and closed on accretive acquisitions. Overall, our team executed well while navigating in a certain environment. Our strong financial position enabled us to return significant value to shareholders with more than $300 million of repurchases in Q4 and nearly $600 million for the full year. Given our progress, our board of directors has expanded our authorization by $1 billion. We will continue to execute on our disciplined and balanced capital allocation strategy, prioritizing investments in our business that elevate our portfolio of solutions while consistently returning capital to our shareholders. We are well positioned as we enter 2026 and excited about the opportunities ahead. I will now turn the call over to Nathan to review our Q4 financial results and 2026 outcome.

Thank you, Bill. Let's start with the P&L on slide six. In Q4, Total company sales increased 10.6% or 2.5% on an organic basis with growth across most categories. Our connected frontline segment grew 3.6% led by mobile computing and our asset visibility and automation segment grew 1.3% led by printing and supplies. We realized solid performance across our regions. Asia Pacific sales increased 13% led by Japan and India Sales increased 8% in Latin America with double-digit growth in Mexico. In EMEA, sales increased 4% with solid growth in Northern Europe and Germany. And in North America, sales declined 1% as we cycled large-order activity in the prior year, partly offset by solid run rate demand. Adjusted gross margin declined 50 basis points to 48.2%, primarily due to lower services and software margins. We fully mitigated current tariffs earlier than expected thanks to our team's successful efforts, including supply chain moves, product portfolio rationalization, and price execution. Adjusted operating expense leveraged improved by 60 basis points. This resulted in fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA margin of 22.1%. Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share were $4.33, an 8% year-over-year increase and above the high end of our outlook. In Q4, we recognized $76 million of restructuring charges relating to the exit of our robotics business and productivity initiatives. Turning now to the balance sheet and cash flow on slide seven. For the full year, we generated free cash flow of $831 million, or a conversion rate of 102%. At year end, we held $125 million of cash with a modest debt leverage ratio of two and $1.2 billion of credit capacity. We've been deploying capital consistent with our allocation priorities. For the full year, we repurchased $587 million of stock and acquired Elo and PhotoNeo with cash on hand and our existing credit facility. We continue to maintain excellent financial flexibility for investment in the business and return of capital to shareholders. As Bill noted, our board authorized an additional $1 billion of share repurchase, providing a total of $1.1 billion after the $100 million repurchase through early February. This action underscores the confidence in Zebra's prospects for continued growth and value creation. Let's now turn to our outlook. We entered 2026 with a solid backlog and pipeline that supports our first quarter sales growth guidance range of 11 to 15%, including approximately 10 points of contribution from business acquisitions and favorable effects. Our first quarter adjusted EBITDA margin is expected to be between 21% and 22%. And non-GAAP diluted earnings per share are expected to be in the range of $4.05 and $4.35. For the full year, we expect sales growth to be 9% and 13%, which reflects a strong pipeline of opportunities, machine vision returning to growth, continued momentum in RFID, along with manufacturing, and a seven-point favorable impact from acquisitions and FX. Our full year adjusted EBITDA margin is expected to be approximately 22% and non-GAAP diluted earnings per share are expected to be between $17.70 and $18.30. We are currently facing industry-wide price increases for memory components beginning in Q2. Our full year guide reflects us fully mitigating this approximately two-point headwind and driving profitable growth in 2026. through multiple initiatives, including collaborating closely with our vendors to manage supply, targeted price increases, net savings from the robotics business exit, targeted actions to drive productivity, as well as FX favorability. Free cash flow for the year is expected to be at least $900 million, which reflects free cash flow conversion of approximately 100%. We are continuing to optimize our working capital levels, balance with our supply chain resilience objectives. Please reference additional modeling assumptions on slide eight. With that, I will turn the call back to Bill.

Thank you, Nathan. As we turn to slide 10, Zebra remains well positioned to benefit from secular trends to digitize and automate workflows with their innovative portfolio of solutions, including purpose-built hardware, software, and services. We deliver intelligent operations by digitally connecting people, assets, and data to assist our customers with business critical decisions that drive meaningful outcomes. A $35 billion served market represents a significant growth opportunity. Zebra's complimentary and synergistic segments positions well to capitalize on this opportunity. The connected frontline provides the digital touchpoints necessary to improve efficiency, collaboration, and the customer experience. Our solutions include enterprise mobile computing, interactive displays, frontline software, and AI agents. Asset visibility and automation gives assets a digital voice to automate environments with technology that scale through printing solutions, advanced data capture, RFID, and machine vision. Turning to slide 11, Zebra solutions enable our customers across a broad range of end markets to drive productivity and efficiency and improve the experience of their customers, shoppers, and patients. We are accelerating our investments in RFID, machine vision, and AI, further sharpening our strategic focus. Zebra is investing in RFID solutions that advance our leadership and support emerging use cases. Our next generation mobile computers embed RFID reading capabilities to prepare our customers for the increased penetration of RFID tags across the supply chain. A North America telecommunications company recently selected our new RFID-enabled mobile computers for the retail location, replacing consumer devices. Our solution enables this customer to improve inventory accuracy and reduce shrink, as well as lowering IT support costs over the product lifecycle. We're excited about the momentum we are seeing in RFID adoption and our pipeline of opportunities. We are driving new opportunities in machine vision by investing in go-to-market initiatives for deeper engagement with our customers. There are many mainstream workflows that benefit from the proven return on investment from our solutions. For example, a large European parcel delivery company has selected Zebra's machine vision platform to drive productivity gains by identifying and sorting parcels, eliminating bottlenecks along conveyance systems. We have a strong pipeline of machine vision opportunities and expect to return to growth in 2026. Now turning to slide 12. At the National Retail Federation Trade Show in January, our team, along with valued customers and partners, demonstrated how our innovative portfolio advances the AI-powered modern store through engaged associates, optimized inventory, and an elevated customer experience. These outcomes are achieved through improved real-time inventory management, omni-channel execution, and technology-empowered workers and shoppers. The addition of the Elo Touch business enhances the modern store experience as our combined capabilities, along with AI, enable us to offer additional ways to digitize operations across multiple touchpoints. Together with Elo, we will deliver higher customer satisfaction and complete solutions through the intersection of frontline mobility, self-service, and digital media. This value proposition extends well beyond retail, including quick-serve restaurants, hospitality, healthcare, and other industrial markets. For example, a high-growth multinational fast food restaurant recently selected ELO's self-serve kiosk at its U.S. location to increase order size, enable faster fulfillment, and improve order accuracy. Looking ahead, we have an opportunity to expand our business across their entire point-of-service platform and also supply their international locations. Turning to slide 13. Our industry leadership puts us in a unique position to be a supplier of choice of AI solutions for the frontline of business. Our connected frontline and asset visibility and automation segments play a critical role in enabling AI for business operations. As AI transforms the frontline of business, assets visibility becomes essential, providing a digital voice to physical assets to identify, locate, and understand conditions. This real-time data provides critical insights, allowing AI models to better understand the physical world, which is fundamental to transforming frontline workflows across industries. Our connected frontline solutions unify a mobile workforce, which combined with our SaaS offerings, deliver the output from AI models to frontline workers, providing the right information to the right person at the right time. Mobile solutions will be capable of seeing, hearing, and understanding the environment while interacting with frontline workers in a conversational or vision-based way. We continue to invest in our AI solutions with our recently launched frontline AI suite comprised of three components. AI enablers are foundational to our offering, consisting of tools and APIs that empower partners and customers to build enhanced applications for mobile devices. Our AI blueprints combine enablers into purpose-built templates that streamline multi-step workflows. These blueprints integrate computer vision, voice recognition, and sensor data to automate critical workflows such as proof of delivery, material receiving, and shelf merchandising. Zebra Companion includes agents we design and manage addressing key responsibilities, including operating procedures, product knowledge, and sales enablement. Our frontline AI suite is a clear differentiator in the industry, enable us to meet a range of customer requirements. Our partners and customers can choose to build their own fully customized application using enablers, elect to adopt blueprints to more quickly address their evolving business needs, or deploy our fully functional Zebra Companion agent. AI enablers are a value add to Zebra's mobile computers, while AI blueprints and Zebra Companion are software and service offerings with pay pilots already underway and scale deployments expected this year. We are pleased that two prominent retail customers demonstrated the value of our frontline AI suite at the NRF trade show. And we look forward to building on our momentum to further elevate Zebra as a leading solutions providers for the frontline of business. I'll include on slide 14, which highlights end market trends driving our long-term growth opportunities across our end markets. These include several broad-based themes, including labor and resource constraints, track and trace requirements, increased consumer expectations, and advancements in artificial intelligence. Our customers rely on our solutions to advance their business critical workflows, and we are uniquely positioned to address the need for intelligent operations with our market-leading portfolio. I will now hand it back to Mike.

Thanks, Bill. We'll now open the call to Q&A. We ask that you limit yourself to one question or one follow-up to give everyone a chance to participate.

We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on a touch-tone phone. If you're using a speaker phone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Our first question today comes from Tommy Ball of Stevens. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and thanks for taking my questions. Morning, Tommy. Morning, Tommy. First one for you on memory. Nathan, I think I heard you say that beginning in Q2, you anticipate a two-point headwind that you can fully offset. So maybe we can just unpack that a little bit. Two-point, I presume you're just referencing a two-percentage point hit to gross margin? And maybe you can give us some context how that progresses from Q2 and beyond, or maybe you can quantify for us some of the initiatives that you have in flight to try to offset that headwind. Thank you.

Yeah, for sure. No, that's correct. What we said in the statement is about a two-point gross margin headwind on a gross basis. But obviously, the memory chip demand and price expectations have escalated quite a bit since the beginning of the year. But we are pursuing multiple mitigation strategies, no different than what we've done before, whether this was with tariffs or semiconductors. So we recently announced price increases globally. Over the past week, they'll be effective in March. Practically working with our suppliers around spot buys, co-planning around the demand trends, as well as looking for alternative memory sources. And then a lot of work from our product teams on transitioning to some higher density memory. So, again, quite a few active work streams in process. And if you look at the impact for 26, I mean, this is based on indicative pricing from our suppliers and where they see that going here over the next several quarters. The impact really begins in Q2 just based on the timing of those price increases as well as what we have in inventory going into the year. But we fully expect to mitigate that. within the year, and that's embedded in our guidance. About a half of that or a point is offset with just the other offsets we have in the business, whether that's the exit of the robotics business, some tailwinds from some of the lower tariff rates, as well as the actions the team has taken to mitigate the tariff exposure, as well as some of the favorability and effects. And then the other half coming through with the, as we realize the pricing benefits in the Q2 and through the second half of the year, as well as all the other mitigating actions the teams are currently working. So again, and our teams have done a really great job at securing supply to meet the demand we have within the guidance. So a lot of work, that's obviously a dynamic, but I think, you know, again, we feel good about where we're at with the work streams and working closely with our supply base.

Thank you. And I want to follow up on the repurchase update you provided today. Sounds like you've already done 100 million through the year-to-date period. And so my question is with the new authorization and assuming your stock is at similar levels, is there any reason why you wouldn't, or excuse me, why you would slow down the recent level of repurchase?

No, if you look, I mean, if you just take a step back, ending the year from a debt leverage around 2X We feel great about the overall capital structure, strong cash position, balance sheets in good shape. So, as you said, we repurchased $300 million of share repurchases in the fourth quarter. We have repurchased $100 million year-to-date leading into the call. So, right now, we're targeting to do share repurchases of around 50% of our full-year free cash flow of $900 million. That'll be primarily here in the first half of the year. So, again, we plan to be aggressive in the market here over the next several months, and this still provides ample flexibility as we enter the second half of the year based on our cash profile for the year.

The next question comes from Guy Hardwick of Barclays.

Hi, good morning. Bill, I think it's been a couple of years since you've referenced the pipeline, so I guess that's a very positive. So is visibility improving? But just more specifically in the near term, it appears the midpoint of your Q1 revenue guidance suggests revenues are above Q1 revenues are above Q4, which is much better than seasonalities. Any particular reasons for that? Is that ELO? Is it because of the pull forward from Q4 to Q3 makes an easier comparative? What other sort of issues are there? And is FX a big change sequentially?

Yeah, I'd say that the strong finish to the year certainly is playing into this as we exceeded our outlook. 2025, we drove solid growth, 6% growth and then 70% EPS growth, greater than $800 million of free cash flow in what was in a certain environment through the year. ELO added two points of sales growth. you know, to the year leading to 8% growth for the full year, really advancing, you know, our offerings in the connected frontline segment, and then also our capabilities across, you know, engaging customers in a digital way, certainly in that segment. So enhanced our modern store offering as well. We see that, you know, as we enter 26, that there's momentum, right? Is that We see re-acceleration of growth coming out of fourth quarter, led by manufacturing, our machine vision pipeline, momentum in RFID are all positives as we enter the year. We're seeing our customers continue to talk about investments in technology as we spent a lot of time with them at the National Retail Show. really were focused on higher growth opportunities across the portfolio and to drive, you know, productivity within the business, as Nate talked about, kind of offsetting memory. So I think overall, we feel that, you know, good as we enter the year and that the momentum's there to drive profitable growth in 2026.

And Guy, I think just if you look at the Q1 guidance, as you mentioned, in line or roughly flat from where we were in Q4. I think a couple of things in play. One, if you just look back over the last couple of years, linearity has been anything but typical. So I think it's hard to say what has been typical linearity if you look back just as it's happened over the past couple of years. But also, we didn't see, as we said in our guidance for the fourth quarter, kind of a surge in year-end spend. So we didn't see the same type of cyclical improvement from Q3 to Q4. And then ELO plays a small part, you know, just not quite the same seasonality, more linear throughout the year. So I think all three of those play a factor in why, as long with just the, as Bill mentioned, the demand environment, all play a factor in why Q1 is in line with Q4 and the top line.

So just on the memory issue, do you have much visibility to the back end of the year in terms of what could be the annualized impact as we kind of exit the year based on your discussions with your suppliers?

Yes, I mean, really the pricing we've gotten now is through the middle of the year. So I think that's, you know, and obviously that's what we've incorporated into the guide as well as some assumptions around just how that may play out in the back half. I think the way to think about it now would be you take the two points, really, you know, pull that over the back, you know, second, third, and fourth quarter, and then annualize that run rate on an annual basis. So it's, you know, not that much different from what we're seeing here in our 26 guides.

Our next question comes from Joe Giordano of TD Cohen. Please go ahead.

Hey, guys. Good morning. Thank you for taking my questions here. Yeah. Can you talk about, like, I mean, it's a fairly wide-ish, it's kind of a wide organic growth guide for the year. So maybe you could talk through, like, scenarios and what your visibility looks like and how you're, you know, what would be required from a, from like a market standpoint to get to that higher end? And how, like, do you risk as a low end?

Yeah, maybe just, you know, start with the full year guide, 11% at the midpoint, 22% EBITDA margin, and double-digit EPS growth. So again, I think we feel good about the overall profile for the year. And as Bill mentioned, I think the underlying theme of that is entering the year with a strong pipeline, the momentum across different parts of our business, whether that's RFID, manufacturing, machine vision. And I think if you take a step back, we believe the guide provides a balanced view of the environment where we sit here today, including still some macro uncertainty out there, the memory component challenges with the opportunities that we see in the market. So if you look at the 11% midpoint, About four points of that is driven by underlying demands. ELO provides five and a half points of the growth, and FX is a point and a half in there. And I think visibility is pretty typical for what we see at this time of the year. So I think the range is really bound around the midpoint. It's more how we think about it in terms of circular around the midpoint. Obviously, the macro conditions, timing of deals all play a factor in kind of the you know, the balance between the low and high end of the range. But I think we're confident in the full year outlook based on everything we have today.

Just a follow-up. Can you talk about price just like bigger picture? Has the way customers think about price of these types of electronics like structurally changed and maybe permanently changed? Is it I mean, how much of your revenue base now is almost like just pure pass-through of weird things that have happened, right? Whether it's tariffs or memory or et cetera, is it just like more acceptable behavior now and customers kind of can accept that price isn't just going to keep going down into like perpetuity for like existing products?

Yeah, Joe, I'd say that, you know, the things like tariffs and memory and others have, you know – allowed us to raise price where you know along with with our competitors as well i think you're just seeing this across the industry that it's not possible to absorb the the cost of tariff or memory and we've got to raise price and i think that look our customers are are price sensitive we have competitors in the market our our largest customers get our best pricing. That's just the way it works and we continue to work with them to make sure they're seeing the value. We're adding a lot of technology to our devices, not just we're raising price because we have to on memory and tariff and others, Also, they're getting a lot of value, right? We've added RFID to all our next generation mobile devices. We're increasing memory and processing speeds, working with our partners in Qualcomm and certainly Google on the OS to make sure that they can support AI models on the device. So they're seeing value in things like mobile computing. We're doing the same across the entire portfolio, adding AI capabilities to machine vision, continuing to enhance capabilities around scanning, our print portfolio, we're adding RFID printing to that portfolio. So there's a lot of value as well that our customers are getting from our solution. Certainly there's price sensitivity and competition and that all matters. But look, we don't have a choice but to raise price when memory and tariffs and others are so significant. But I think our customers understand that. They're seeing that across not just our segment, but many others.

And if you just look back at last year, even with the price increase we did in April, it still represented a little over a half a point of the full year organic growth. So still the vast majority of the growth last year was driven by underlying demand. So it clearly plays a part, but that underlying demand is still what's going to ultimately drive the top line.

The next question comes from Rob Mason of RW Baird.

Please go ahead. Good morning. Maybe just an extension off that last question. As you think about the way you've laid out the guidance for the first quarter and how you're thinking about the balance of the year and when pricing goes into effect, are you giving any consideration to customers trying to get in front, moving projects, pulling those forward, trying to get ahead of some of the price increases or just uncertainty around memory in general.

Yeah, Rob. So, I think two points. On the first quarter, we're not expecting any type of pull-forward activity or that's not incorporated into the guidance. I mean, we just announced the price increase this past week. So, obviously, what we were seeing in the pipeline of opportunities was unaffected by the price announcement here just over the past week. And just how we implement that through our distribution channel with our partners in terms of honoring prior pricing that we have or updating the full backlog or what's sitting with our distributors. As we've done these price increases in the past, we really haven't seen a huge pull in of demand just based on how we administer that through our channel as well as honoring some of the PC price concessions we have with certain customers on deals. And then I think the other one, just as you look at the incremental price increase were announced this week, That's not been incorporated into the guide, similar to how we thought about last year. We want to monitor the impact. We just announced it, so obviously that's being absorbed through the channel. So I think as we sit here today, we thought it was the right move to say what's really what we're seeing from the underlying demand today, and then we'll update that as we go through the year in terms of how we see that as either incremental revenue or any type of tradeoff with underlying demand.

i'd say that maybe just to add rob that you know talking to our partners at our channel partner conferences uh you know we've been through north america and asia pacific already and you know the message they're sending to customers is you know let's talk about these major projects early let's get those orders in um not the idea of to save on pricing or others but more just to make sure we've got supply for them ultimately and i think that's that's the message they're sending so i don't see people buying early because of it. I think it's just a reality of what's happening across memory, but I think it allows our partners to have the conversation early with early visibility to especially larger opportunities with our customers to make sure that they understand that, you know, um, the more, the more visibility we have the demand on the specific product they're looking to utilize to, you know, then we can go meet that demand with, with the memory we have.

Makes sense. Uh, and the bill, you, you mentioned this, uh, you know, return to growth in machine vision. I think, you know, historically, we're aware of where you had some maybe over indexing to certain verticals. Are those the verticals that you're expecting to see recovery in? Or do you have some new ones that, you know, you're looking to drive that return to growth?

Yeah, we see that machine vision is really an integral part of the asset visibility and automation segment for us. And I think that, When we look at machine vision, we saw sequential growth in fourth quarter. So we feel good about that. We've seen some new wins both in, you know, as you know, the machine vision market, there's two sides of that. One is T&L. So we've seen some large transportation logistics wins and the other inside manufacturing. So we've seen at the high end of our portfolio, some, you know, automobile manufacturing wins. So that coming back a bit. So I think manufacturing in general on the machine vision side, recovering in addition to TNL is a good sign. We expect sequential growth to continue through first half, but solid growth for the full year. I think the pipeline is, you know, we've been working hard to diversify the pipeline of customers, but everything across inspection, you know, dock door, pack bench, stand tunnel, optical character recognition, so a broad breadth of opportunities the team's working on i would say as we're looking to diversify the business as you said into into numerical markets i think our value proposition is strong we've got you know we focus around ease of use the unified software platform that that we've brought across the portfolio we've invested in go to market we've changed out some leadership in in the business uh acquired photo neo to have another um offering at the high end of the market so i think you know We feel good. The market's recovering overall as, you know, in machine vision as manufacturing covers and T&L spends again in that environment. So we see, you know, solid growth, quite honestly, into 2026. So, you know, overall, I'd say we feel good.

Our next question comes from Keith Housem of North Coast Research.

Please go ahead. Good morning, guys. Appreciate the opportunity. Sorry to harp on the memory issue a little bit more, but I appreciate, Nathan, the visibility through the first half of the year, but you're hearing more and more concerns along the industry, perhaps product shortages and limitations to sales in the second half of the year. Can you talk about any confidence you have that, you know, regardless of the price, that you're going to have the availability there of the products?

Yeah, of course. Look, I think the team, as I mentioned earlier, the team's done a great job Working with supply, as Bill mentioned, part of this message through the channel with our partners is getting the visibility on those projects to what SKU, what product you want, and getting those visibility early allows us to then shape demand. So it's really around, you know, a bit of can we get the product as much as get the right memory for the right product that we need and making sure that that precious, you know, components are going to the right product families as we build out the, you know, build out the pipeline. So that's where the team is really focused on now is shaping demand, working with our customers around the particular skews they're looking for around projects maybe a bit earlier than normal so that as we build the build plan, work back through our supply chain, we're getting the right memory through the pipeline. And then the other thing the team is working actively is moving to the higher density memory, which a lot of that capacity plans to come online in the middle of the year. Part of that is also shifting to the newer memory, which, again, we expect for that supply to increase as we go to the back half of the year.

I think, Keith, maybe just to all add really quick, just strong supplier relationships is critical to this and that we know coming out of COVID, that's critical for our business. And we've worked really hard to make sure that we've got the right relationships in place with our suppliers. And they're quite honestly guiding us through this, as Nate said, you know, we've You know, months ago we had the conversation around moving to new memory that would be more readily available. And we've got early samples of that. We're working with our other suppliers to go test that and make sure that we're ready. So we're doing everything our suppliers are asking us to go do to get the most access to memory we can. And those relationships really matter. And ultimately we're working closely with them. And as Nate said, on the other side of it, on the part of our customer side to say, look, we don't want to build product and put memory in it that we don't need for customer demand. So we want to make sure we've got the right SKU, the right product, the right timing around it. And the analysis we've done so far is that we're going to mitigate the pricing and we're going to have the supply we need. There's always some risk in that. We feel good about where we stand today. The team's done a lot of work on this.

Okay, great. In terms of that memory, is it primarily the mobile computers that are at risk here, or is it also a point of sale with the ELO or the printers? Is that experiencing some of the same issues, or is it really concentrated with mobile devices?

Concentrated in mobile devices. ELO and the POS and kiosk business has similar, but it's predominantly in those two portfolios.

But again, the teams there are working closely together. Our supply chains are you know, tied on exactly what we're doing from a pricing perspective, but also a supply perspective and leveraging the strengths of both of our, you know, both ELO and, you know, Core Zebra to make sure we've got supply across both.

The next question comes from Andrew Buscaglia from BNP Parvath. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning, everyone. Morning, Andrew. I just wanted to get a sense of these kind of customer conversations you're having in terms of what they're thinking for 26. It sounds like, I mean, you have a, it sounds like you have a healthy backlog and your Q1 guidance implies some, you know, improving spending, but what is, what is the, what are the customers saying in terms of the biggest, you know, impetus to spend here? Is it like in the past you talked about clarity around tariffs? Is it, Are they taking advantage of accelerating depreciation? And is there an upgrade cycle? Maybe they just haven't bought in so many years and they got to move forward this year.

I'd say that the customer conversations are really around the idea that they're continuing to invest in their business. And that's across all verticals. We've spent, even though it's early in the year, a lot of time with customers. I mentioned the National Retail Show, but Our largest T&L customers, because T&L is so critical to retail, also are at that show. We've got our healthcare show coming up in hymns over the next X number of weeks. So we're preparing for that. So across all verticals, our customers are really talking about continuing to invest in their business and technology. I would say that we enter the year with a solid backlog and really a pipeline. We've got momentum, as Nate talked about, around our core business overall, including scanning, printing, mobile computing, but also manufacturing, seeing more strengths in that, which has been a focus area for us. EMEA returning to growth. I would say that the demand remains strong for ELO, so we're We're certainly excited about that acquisition. You know, I think that the breadth and depth of our solutions portfolio, including the addition of Elo and the new opportunities around our AI suite and the idea that customers are thinking about how are they deploying AI at the front line of business overall, those conversations continue. And I think that, you know, customers are really focused on how do they serve their customers better and get better experiences, whether that's omni-channel or it's self-service or point of sale. They're talking about driving efficiencies within their business. How do I lose our solutions to go do that across RFID, machine vision, and others? And I think it's how do you increase inventory visibility, which is still challenging across our customer base. And that's everything from printing to scanning to our mobile devices. So I think that we're confident in delivering solid growth in 26. And our customers seem to be really focused on continue to deploy technology across their business. And I would say kind of playing their game, right? They've got a plan, they're executing on it. And there's been really no talk about kind of anyone holding back or others. It's all been kind of positive about, you know, what are their plans for 26 and, and what are the opportunities we have to work closely together?

Yeah. You know, sort of on that note, Um, you know, a lot of, a lot of people like looking at things like the AI effect and certainly your customers are trying to find ways to leverage it and, you know, reduce costs and, and, you know, um, improve productivity. I'm wondering, um, you know, years ago, you, you had this windows, uh, based devices shifting to Android, which prompted a big upgrade cycle. And I'm wondering, are you, do you, do you sense like these new AI products you're talking about? You've been talking about them for awhile. could have a similar effect in terms of prompting new spending or an upgrade cycle here?

Yeah, I would say that, you know, if you look at the portfolio overall in relation to AI, that, you know, we're uniquely positioned to where, you know, Zebra can position itself really to be the leading AI solutions provider for the frontline. And I say that in a couple of ways. One is that the asset visibility and automation segment gives a digital voice to assets, to inventory that's necessary to feed AI models if you're going to leverage those at the front line of business. You have to have, give everything a digital voice and have visibility to be able to leverage the AI model. The second thing is you need something to, the output of the AI model is what needs to be done. You need to be able to connect that information to workers. And the way you do that is through mobile devices and our SaaS offerings like communication, collaboration, task management combined together, take the output of the model and allows a worker to drive a behavior or do something, put inventory on the shelf, move something in the back room to front of room, pick up a pallet and move it to the next location that drives ultimately the outcome in your business that gets you to be more effective and more efficient. So it plays a critical role across our whole portfolio. Specific to mobile computing, the idea of you know, we've, our latest mobile devices certainly will support memory processing power and others and the software to support AI models on the device or in the cloud. And we're seeing, you know, customers move to those devices as their next generation devices as they're beginning to refresh. So, yes, we're seeing that clearly AI will drive, you know, the upgrade of those devices, ultimately, you know, higher ASPs on those devices with higher memory and and also will have an opportunity for us across the idea of enablers and blueprints and companions we talked about to be able to drive ai software revenue for ourselves as well our next question comes from piush avasi of city please go ahead good morning guys and thanks for taking my questions morning morning

I think you mentioned a decline in gross margins due to lower service and software margins. Can we double click on software margin performance? Like anything you want to call out? Is it just the investment that you guys are making that's pressuring the margins? And when we can expect that to reverse like, and anything on the receptivity of the software offering that you're coming out with, like how the customers are kind of, you know, buying and procuring those, that would be helpful.

Yeah, for sure. I think the, if you look at it, The real driver within the service and software margin impact is primarily, and obviously it represents the vast majority of the revenue, is in the service portfolio and the just higher repair costs that we've seen over the past couple quarters. Now, the good thing is the overall margin rate improved in the fourth quarter, improved from where we were in Q2 and Q3. But this is really due to the age of the install base. And we're starting to see that play out in terms of driving the overall number of repairs. We expect to see that level out here as we go through the year and see the overall margin for the services and software to be flat, kind of look at it year on year throughout 26. Specific to software, the two real things the teams are working on, one is a lot of energy and efforts going over the last couple of years. And so this is unifying the platform, bringing together kind of the architecture to ultimately lower the overall support costs that will improve margins as we go forward. really into the back half of this year and into next as some of that effort is starting to come to a closure in terms of transitioning customers to the unified platform. And then like anything, then it's about scaling on that in terms of as revenue grows, getting the scale to drive gross margins further. So I think those are the two aspects. If you look at that line, it's really driven by service, but within software, a lot of work over the past couple of years around the platform and unifying the platform and We're getting close to the end of that activity, which then gives us some runway to improve margins as we move forward. Gotcha.

Helpful. And Americas was soft in 4Q and understand that there were some really tough comps, but can you elaborate on the underlying demand environment and trends you're seeing in the region? And as you think of your 2026 guidance, like based on your conversation with your customers, how do you think America is contributing to your 2026 guidance?

Yeah, I think that I would say that overall, you know, we saw relative strength in fourth quarter in North America around small and mid-sized business. But as we talked about cycling, large order activity in T&L and retail in the fourth quarter. So I think we feel good about the pipeline of opportunities that is healthy in the business. I think it really is just cycling a compare. We didn't see as, you know, large, deals, very large deals in fourth quarter is, you know, that we've seen in past year. Nate talked about that a little bit in the seasonality idea. So that's really what it's about. We feel across North America that all vertical markets, all product areas, we see no real challenges there other than a tough compare in fourth quarter. If you talk about the other regions, I would say return to growth in EMEA, really driven by strength in North and Central Europe. I'd say double digit growth. We saw, you know, so strong growth in mobile computing print RFID. So broad based and we're seeing opportunities in europe around retail with personal shopper refresh opportunities and new so you know where the north america market is really more um self-service checkout uh in kiosk where you know elo plays the european market is a combination of that as well as self scan which is a large opportunity you know growth across most of the region Japan and India certainly were bright spots. Those areas are places where we've been investing, certainly the amount of manufacturing investment happening in India. We've changed our go-to-market model in Japan several years ago, continue to win opportunities in Japan. Latin America, strong growth in Latin America, broad-based. I would say Brazil and Mexico outperformed with large retail deployments, but broad-based growth across Latin America. We're not concerned at all about North America. It really is just truly cycling compare. And we feel good about, you know, broad-based growth across the regions and product areas as we enter 2026.

The next question comes from Jim Ricciuti of Needham & Company. Please go ahead.

Thanks. I know it's early. I'm wondering what kind of assumptions are you baking in for the large project business this year, you know, what kind of visibility do you have? It sounds like just based on what you're hearing and the concerns around memory that maybe these discussions are happening earlier.

I'd say that they, you know, given the install base, right? Certainly a Zebra's install base overall that, you know, these, large, very large orders are really tied to refresh cycles and activity, you know, across our customer base. And that, you know, remains an attractive opportunity for us overall. We're assuming the same, you know, a similar level of refresh activity in 26 that we, you know, saw in 25. And I'd say, remember that every customer's refresh cycle is different, right? It's really driven by things like supporting new applications, driving, you know, higher processing power or memory or new features like we just talked around on AI or new features like, you know, RFID being embedded in the devices. It's driven by, you know, obsolescence of OS or, you know, the security lifecycle. It's driven by technology transitions, but everyone's on a different cycle. And I'd say that, you know, when customers refresh, the opportunity for us is not just the refresh cycle, but they typically buy more devices. because they're extending their use cases and putting devices more in the hands of more associates overall across all industries. When we look at things like retail, the refresh cycle is really normalized over the last several years, and we're seeing some retailers spread their purchases over a longer time horizon. From a T&L customer perspective, I would say, They refresh at a slower pace than retail, which is typically four to five years, driven by really the fact that the devices have higher durability and are using fewer applications than we see in retail. But as you said, those discussions are, you know, with large T&L customers are progressing. We're talking to them earlier about these refreshes and the pipeline continues to grow for multi-year deployments that, you know, likely begin in 27. So, in 26, we'd see, you know, about the same level as we saw in, in 25, but this is clearly an opportunity out there for us. And, and we would see that, you know, these, as these conversations continue to progress and progress earlier with, with challenges, things like memory, we get more and more visibility, the timeframe from our customers.

You mentioned RFID several times. What kind of growth rate are you assuming in the RFID business this year? And, You know, are you seeing more of the activity coming from the emerging areas like food or the traditional areas, logistics and retail?

Yeah, we see, you know, 26 high double-digit growth continuing in RFID. We had a strong year over the last several years, including, you know, 2025, and we see that continuing. The opportunities have really been broad-based, all the way across the supply chain from retail to transportation logistics to manufacturing, now opportunities in government. We're seeing, you know, clearly the move from retail apparel. We saw a move to broader merchandise inside retail. You mentioned fresh food inside grocery is a new opportunity in things like bakery and around the outside edge of the store, higher margin perishable items. We're seeing that opportunity there. Parcel within T&L remains a large opportunity. Quick serve restaurants, you know, we think of automation always is, you know, but quick serve restaurants are moving from pen and paper to RFID. You know, we're seeing healthcare and just broader track and trace across the supply chain so i think that we're seeing broad-based growth we're we've got number one share in fixed and handheld readers um we continue to have strength in our uh we're the leaders in rfid uh printers um you know across our labels business we're seeing strength so i think it's broad-based i think we'll continue to see the adoption it's why we're adding rfid capabilities to the Majority of our new mobile computing devices is that customers continue to want to adopt RFID within their environment. So really broad-based and not driven by just one industry or segment, but across all the vertical markets we serve.

The next question comes from Brad Hewitt of Wolf Research. Please go ahead.

Good morning, guys. Thanks for fitting me in there.

Good morning, Brad.

So curious how you see channel inventories as they stand today, and does the guide embed any meaningful changes in channel inventory levels as you progress through the year?

Brad, no, we've seen channel inventories as we exit were in good shape, pretty similar to what we saw at the end of last year, so no meaningful change. You definitely see variability quarter to quarter, just whether that's timing of deployments on their end, prepping for year end, et cetera. So quarter to quarter, you see some variability. But I think as we look at the full year picture, no major changes in terms of measuring it on days on hand. So how much are they carrying on a daily basis? And we don't expect a material change in that as we go through the year.

OK, that's helpful. Now that the tariff situation seems to have stabilized a little bit overall, have you guys seen any change in customer willingness to go ahead with projects versus three months ago? And to what degree is any macro-driven change in customer sentiment baked into your 2026 outlook? Thank you.

I'd say that customers were, on the retail side, a bit concerned overall about just the secondary effect of tariffs as they've you know, had to push that through, you know, on their inventory to their customers ultimately. But I think that we're really beyond that. That's all kind of flowed through their supply chains and they've had to raise price in the places that they have. So I'd say that, you know, again, these conversations with customers today, there hasn't been concerns of tariff raised. There's always, you know, challenges. There may be future challenges around trade, but we don't don't see those as of today that the bigger challenges we talked about multiple times in the call is probably memory that that we've you know um we're going to mitigate in the year so i think that you know i think tariffs have have um not factored into a lot of conversations with customers at this point this concludes our question and answer session i would like to turn the conference back over to mr burns for any closing remarks And I thank our employees and partners for delivering a solid 2025 results. We certainly, as we look ahead, we're focused on advancing our portfolio of solutions and driving profitable growth across our business. Thank you, everyone.

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