Belden Inc

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to this morning's Belden Reports fourth quarter 2025 results. Just a reminder, this call is being recorded. At this time, you are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your touch-tone phone. If you are in the question queue and would like to withdraw your question, simply press star two. I would now like to turn the call over to Aaron Reddington.

Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for Belvin's fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings conference call. With me today are Belvin's President and CEO, Ashish Chand, and Executive Vice President and CFO, Jeremy Parks. Ashish will provide a strategic overview of our business and then Jeremy will provide a detailed review of our financial and operating results, followed by Q&A. We issued our earnings release earlier this morning and have prepared a slide presentation that we will reference on this call. The press release, presentation, and transcript of these prepared remarks are currently available online at investor.belden.com. Turning to slide two, I'd like to remind everyone that today's call will include forward-looking statements which are subject to risk and uncertainties as detailed in our press release and most recent Form 10-K. We will also reference certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measures can be found in the appendix to our presentation and on our website. I will now turn the call over to our President and CEO, Ashish Chand.

Thank you, Aaron, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining us. Let's begin with slide four, which highlights our key accomplishments and messages for the fourth quarter and full year. My comments today will refer to adjusted results. We are very pleased to report an outstanding close to 2025, with both our fourth quarter and full year results exceeding expectations and setting new records. For the fourth quarter, we delivered record revenue of $720 million, which exceeded the high end of our guidance range. Our adjusted EPS came in at a record $2.08, also surpassing the high end of our guidance. The strong finish capped off a truly exceptional year. For the full year 2025, we achieved record revenue of approximately $2.7 billion, up 10% year-over-year, and record adjusted EPS of $7.54, a 19% increase year-over-year. These results were driven by continued solutions growth and strong execution across our business. Our order momentum was also robust with record full-year orders. For the fourth quarter, orders were up 12% year-over-year and 5% quarter-over-quarter. A healthy free cash flow generation continued, enabling disciplined capital deployment. For the year, we generated $219 million in free cash flow and we repurchased 1.7 million shares for $195 million. further reducing our share count. These record results underscore the success of our strategy, and as we look ahead, we will capitalize on market opportunities to ensure this momentum continues. A key indicator of our strategic progress is the accelerating adoption of our solutions offerings. For the full year 2025, solutions wins as a percentage of total revenue crossed 15%. This represents a meaningful increase from where we stood just a year ago and was a major driver of our success this year. This growing contribution from our solutions portfolio reinforces our confidence in our ability to continue to grow earnings and strengthens our conviction in achieving our 2028 solutions target, which we set on our last investor day. To further accelerate our solutions transformation, enhance the customer focus, and unlock even greater future value, we are undertaking a significant strategic evolution at Belden. Effective January 1st, 2026, Belden transitioned from a legacy business segment structure to a unified functional operating model that applies across the entire enterprise, from executive leadership to our functional teams. This fundamental shift organizes us around core functions rather than separate businesses to better align resources and accountability with our continued solutions transformation. As IT and OT increasingly converge, realigning our organizational structure enables us to sell and deliver converged solutions more efficiently and consistently. Ultimately, this new model empowers us to leverage our full product portfolio for customers, speed decision-making, clarify accountability, and simplify the delivery of customer-centric integrated solutions. This isn't our first step in this direction. Over the past few years, we've consistently worked to break down internal silos to improve our solutions capabilities, including the successful combination of the sales teams in 2025. The current operating realignment is the next natural evolution of that journey, further enhancing our ability to deliver integrated solutions. This strategic realignment is the right move for our business, positioning Belden to maximize long-term growth and deliver on our financial targets. For a view of our executive leadership team under the new functional structure, please refer to page 15 of today's materials. Now, To illustrate the power of this unified approach and the benefits of ITOD convergence, please turn to slide five. We highlight our evolving customer engagement model through our work with a major U.S. grocery store chain. This customer operates a complex network, encompassing everything from the retail stores and gas stations to their warehouse, distribution centers, and manufacturing facilities. Historically, Bell's engagement with its customers was primarily as a supplier of cabling products for their IT network. However, as we have proactively worked to break down our internal silos, our solutions team has been able to significantly expand this relationship. Our deepened engagement now includes OT products servicing their manufacturing processes and fiber solutions connecting their fuel stations. This evolution from a component supplier to a more comprehensive solutions partner is precisely what a solutions-first strategy is designed to achieve. This is where a functional operating model and integrated business structure prove so critical. In the past, this customer might have encountered multiple Bellden sales teams creating a fragmented experience. Now, our integrated teams are empowered to bring in our full product portfolio to address their most pressing challenges, providing a seamless single point of contact. This not only enhances the customer's experience, but also allows us to solve for their most complex ITOD challenges more effectively. This example powerfully demonstrates how our organizational realignment directly translates into greater value for our customers and underscores its critical importance to Belden's future success. With that strategic context, I will now briefly highlight another key solutions win for the quarter. Please turn to slide six for another compelling example of a solutions-first approach, highlighting our work with a major urban transit system. The strategic challenge this customer faced was significant, maintaining reliable rail time, high-definition video feeds from trains moving at high speeds, all while navigating complex wireless environments prone to interference. They also required unified control and management across both operational and security networks. These are the kinds of complex, mission-critical problems that demand more than just products. They demand integrated solutions. In our solutions portfolio, Wi-Fi products play a critical role. enabling high performance and reliable connectivity essential for ITOD convergence across various industries. Belden stepped in with an advanced integrated solution. We leveraged the latest Wi-Fi technology and roaming capabilities to ensure seamless connectivity. Further, we provided a proprietary centralized management system to unify all disparate data sources. What truly set Belden apart and secured this win were our superior roaming capabilities, which delivered flawless surveillance feeds even in the most challenging environments. Complementing this, our holistic, unified management platform simplified the entire operational landscape, significantly reducing complexity and maintenance demands. This outcome is a testament to our strategy. We've positioned Belden as an end-to-end strategic partner, delivering critical value by enhancing passenger safety, security, and operational efficiency. This provided simplified, more cost-effective management of their complex infrastructure, demonstrating the power of advanced ITOD-converged solutions. I will now request Jeremy to provide additional insight into our financial performance.

Thank you, Ashish. My comments today will cover our fourth quarter and full year results, a review of our segments, the balance sheet and cash flow, and finally, our outlook. As a reminder, I will be referencing adjusted results today. Now please turn to slide eight for our fourth quarter performance. As Ashish noted, our solid execution this quarter drove consistent top line growth. which translated into record performance for the business. Revenue for the quarter was $720 million, up 8% year-over-year and ahead of expectations set forth in prior guidance. Revenue was up 5% organically on a year-over-year basis with automation solutions up 10% and smart infrastructure solutions flat. Orders continued to perform well. across the business, up 12% year over year and 5% sequentially. EBITDA was $122 million, up 7% year over year. Net income for the quarter was $83 million, up 5% from $79 million in the prior year quarter. And lastly, EPS was a record $2.08, up 8% from $1.92 and ahead of expectations set forth in prior guidance. Now, please turn to slide nine for our full year performance. For the full year, we achieved record revenue of approximately $2.7 billion, up 10% compared to last year. Revenue was up 6% organically, driven by automation solutions with organic growth of 11% and smart infrastructure solutions with organic growth of 1%. EBITDA was $459 million, up 12% from $411 million last year. Gross profit margins were 38.5%, a 40 basis point improvement versus the prior year. and EBITDA margins were 16.9%, a 20 basis point improvement versus prior year. As we discussed throughout the year, we proactively managed pricing in 2025 to offset the impact of copper inflation and tariffs and protect our overall profitability and earnings per share. Despite a full recovery of these incremental costs, The pass-through actions resulted in some dilution to reported margin percentages and somewhat obscured our strong underlying operating performance. Excluding the impact of these pass-throughs, gross profit margins improved 160 basis points and EBITDA margins improved 80 basis points year over year, driven by our growing solutions mix. Additionally, Again, excluding the impact of pass-throughs, incremental EBITDA margins were approximately 28%, in line with our long-term targets. Net income was $303 million, up 15% from $263 million last year. And lastly, EPS was a record $7.54, up 19% from $6.36 last year. Before reviewing our historical segment performance, I want to touch on the organizational realignment that Ashish discussed earlier. Turning to slide 10, you'll see that effective in the first quarter of 2026, we will transition to a single consolidated reportable segment. This reporting change is a direct outcome of our new functional operating model and leadership structure designed to accelerate our solution strategy and enhance our customer focus. For modeling purposes, the reporting change has no impact on our historical consolidated financial results. And going forward, while we will no longer report separate segments, we will continue to provide valuable insights and commentary on our performance across our market-level categories and key verticals. We are confident the strategic realignment is the right move for our business, and it reinforces our ability to deliver on the long-term financial targets we outlined at our last Investor Day. So with that context on our future segment reporting structure, let's turn to slide 11 for a review of our segment performance for the full year 2025. Our automated solution segment delivered another solid year, demonstrating continued recovery and steady execution. Revenue reached nearly $1.5 billion, a 14% improvement compared to the prior year, with EBITDA increasing 16%. Margins improved by 50 basis points to 21%, reflecting our effective management of the pass-throughs of tariffs and copper. ORDER TRENDS ALSO REMAINED ROBUST, WITH ORDERS UP 16% COMPARED TO THE PRIOR YEAR. THIS STRONG ORDER ACTIVITY DROVE THE SEGMENT'S 11% ORGANIC GROWTH, WITH POSITIVE CONTRIBUTIONS IN ALL REGIONS. THIS BROAD-BASED MOMENTUM EXTENDED INTO OUR CORE VERTICALS, WHICH ALL GREW FOR THE YEAR, INCLUDING DOUBLE-DIGIT GROWTH IN DISCRIME MANUFACTURING AND ENERGY. Revenue for smart infrastructure solutions topped $1.2 billion, a 7% improvement compared to the prior year, with EBITDA increasing 6%. Margins decreased by 10 basis points to 12.1%, reflecting headwinds from the pass-throughs of tariffs and copper. Within our markets, smart buildings grew 5% organically for the year, driven by strength in our key growth verticals as we continue to advance our solutions offerings. Broadband experienced a softer back half of the year due to a temporary moderation in MSO capital deployments. However, we anticipate stabilization and a rebound in 2026 driven by the adoption of new fiber products and the acceleration of DOCSIS deployments among our major MSO customers. Please turn to slide 12 for our balance sheet and cash flow highlights. Our balance sheet remains a source of significant strength and flexibility, enabling our disciplined capital allocation strategy. Our cash and cash equivalents balance at the end of the year was $390 million, compared to $370 million in the prior year. OUR FINANCIAL LEVERAGE STOOD AT A REASONABLE 1.9 TIMES NET DEBT TO EBITDA, CONSISTENT WITH OUR EXPECTATIONS. WE TARGETED APPROXIMATELY 1.5 TIMES NET LEVERAGE OVER THE LONG TERM, SO THIS MAY FLUCTUATE AS WE PURSUE STRATEGIC OPPORTUNITIES ALIGNED WITH OUR CAPITAL ALLOCATION PRIORITIES. FOR THE TRAILING 12 MONTHS, OUR FREE CASH FLOW WAS $219 MILLION. For the full year, we repurchased 1.7 million shares for $195 million, further reducing our share count, which is now more than 11% lower than it was at the end of 2021. At the end of the year, we had $145 million remaining on our existing repurchase authorization. Our capital allocation priorities remain unchanged. investing internally in opportunities to advance organic growth, pursuing disciplined M&A, and returning capital to shareholders through VIPACs. While the current financial market environment is dynamic, we continue to evaluate M&A opportunities with rigor and remain committed to deploying capital in ways that create long-term value. Early this year, We completed a successful debt refinancing by issuing 450 million euros of 4.25% senior subordinated notes due in 2033. This transaction allowed us to redeem all of our outstanding 2027 notes, effectively extending our overall debt maturity profile. Our debt remains entirely fixed, with an average rate of approximately 3.9%. Please turn to slide 13 for our first quarter 2026 outlook. Following a strong 2025, we are well positioned for the long term, leveraging secular trends like digitization and IT-OT convergence. While there is ongoing market uncertainty, Our growing solutions adoption and resilient operating model enable us to effectively manage near-term variability. Our first quarter guidance reflects these dynamics and our typical seasonality, as we remain focused on our solutions transformation and long-term value creation. Assuming the continuation of current market conditions, revenues for the first quarter of 2026 are expected to be between $675 million and $690 million. Adjusted EPS is expected to be between $1.65 and $1.75. That concludes my prepared remarks. I would now like to turn the call back to Ashish. Thank you, Jeremy.

Now please turn to slide 14. To summarize, 2025 was truly a milestone year for Belden. A record fourth quarter and full year performance clearly reflect the strength and resilience of our business and the accelerating progress of our solutions transformation. We delivered outstanding results in a dynamic environment marked by consistent order activity, record earnings, and healthy cash generation. Our performance is not an anomaly. It directly reflects our strategy's success in delivering tangible results. From 2019 through 2025, we achieved a revenue CAGR of 5% and an adjusted EPS CAGR of 12%, demonstrating powerful and consistent value creation over multiple years. The strong track record, coupled with the fact that solutions went as a percentage of total revenue, crossed 15% for the year, provides clear evidence that a solutions-first strategy is resonating in the marketplace and driving our financial success. Our progress builds a powerful foundation as we continue to execute our strategic evolution. The transition to a unified functional operating model is the right move for our business. It's designed to further accelerate a solutions-first strategy, enhance the customer focus, and unlock even greater future value by aligning our entire enterprise to deliver integrated solutions more efficiently and consistently. We remain incredibly confident in our long-term trajectory. The fundamental secular trends driving our business, digitization, IDOD convergence, and the increasing demand for data-driven efficiency are intact and building momentum. Belden is exceptionally well-positioned to capitalize on these trends. Our solutions transformation is already expanding our addressable market and driving consistent growth and margin expansion. Through disciplined execution and thoughtful capital allocation, we are committed to ensuring we create lasting value for our shareholders. Before I conclude, I want to extend my sincere gratitude to the entire Belden team. Your dedication, hard work, and commitment to our solutions transformation have been instrumental in achieving these record results and positioning us for continued success. Thank you all for joining us today. We appreciate your continued interest in Belden. That concludes our prepared remarks. Operator, please open the call for questions.

Thank you. If you are dialed in via the telephone and would like to ask a question, please signal by pressing star 1. on your telephone keypad. If you're using a speakerphone, please make sure your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. Again, press star 1 to ask a question. We'll pause for just a moment to allow everyone the opportunity to signal for questions. Again, if you'd like to ask a question during the Q&A session, please press star 1 on your touchtone phone. If you would like to withdraw the question, press star 2. The first question is going to come from Mark Delaney from Goldman Sachs.

Yes, good morning. Thank you very much for taking the questions. I was hoping first to better understand what Belden is seeing with demand trends. You already talked about how orders grew both sequentially and year on year in the fourth quarter, but can you share more on your view on demand trends by end market and what you're seeing so far in 2026? Yeah, sure.

So good morning, Mark. First of all, if I look at the total solutions pipeline, that's grown by 26% at the end of 25 compared to the end of 24, right? So that itself is a pretty good indicator at an aggregate level. Obviously, there's a lot more demand activity we're seeing on the automation side, especially true in energy, discrete, as well as process. And then we've seen a fair amount of demand in hospitality, which is more of an integrated ITOD opportunity for us. These are all typically in the double digit growth areas, these markets. We saw a little less robust growth in broadband, but we did see fiber growing and the demand for fiber growing there. strong you know some of the fundamental verticals that you would expect energy discrete process hospitality these are doing really well for us overall you know one quarter growth in our funnel for solutions so we feel pretty good it's very helpful my second question was about supply chain and from a few dimensions I guess

For one, does Golden think it can procure enough metals and also enough semiconductors and DRM in particular? And then two, as you think about what you're seeing in supply chain is from the rise in input costs, the company did well to offset the dollar pressure in the fourth quarter. Do you think you can continue to offset the input cost inflation as you think about this year? Thanks.

Yeah, no, I think that's a very pertinent question at this point. I think we are well positioned. The way we've you know, looked at manufacturing as a whole and supply chain is de-risked quite a bit by going more regional. Obviously, we are still dependent on certain commodities and certain electronic components with certain regions. But we've taken certain actions. For example, we are doing internally more surface mount now than we did before. So we've kind of, you know, we've We've removed some of the, you know, artificial points of consolidation in that supply chain so that we have more direct control over that. And then, of course, you know, with copper, that's a global commodity. You will see a higher emphasis from our side on both fiber and wireless. I think that is anyway happening as part of changing technologies, but it's getting accelerated. But at this point in time, just given how we are placed and, you know, Popper is not that large a portion of our fogs. We feel pretty good about being able to pass on because of the value we offer beyond the commodity. And we've had discussions with some of our customers and our partners about how this scenario might change. And we haven't heard anything that causes us concern right now. So yeah, so much like we did in Q4, We remain confident that we will protect our dollar margins by being able to pass on.

Thank you. I'll pass it on.

And our next question is going to come from William Stein from Truist Securities.

Great. Thanks for taking my questions. Aside from the rebound in MSO spending that you highlighted in the broadband business, are there any other clues that we should, pay attention to when we're contemplating modeling 2026 beyond Q1 that could drive above or below typical seasonality?

So there is a temporary, let's say, slowdown in certain architectural upgrades in that market, Will, that we've dealt with in Q3 and Q4. That we know now has been largely resolved because there was some interoperability issues that those, you know, the engineering teams were working through. So we expect that to start ramping up. Second, there was an overall inventory overhang that, you know, just even beyond that architectural changes in DOCSIS that were true in that market, which I think have all been, you know, they've all bled out. And then, of course, there's the bead dynamic. We know for sure that Beat Bunny will flow in 2026. So I think there are kind of two more neutral and one more positive trend that is there. But the other thing to keep in mind is our fiber content as a percentage of total broadband revenue has gone from 40% at the end of 24 to 50% at the end of 25. Fiber is growing and there is an increasing demand for both fiber connectivity and cabling in that market. And we've launched some new products that are fairly differentiated, that are protected with IP, and that allow us to take share in that market. So I think there are the three kind of more macro items, and then there's one Belden-specific fiber growth dynamic. And all of these should help us model the growth.

Thank you for that. I was hoping to hear an extension of that into any other end markets or the other segment that might clue us in, because I think you said this recovery, I would expect an MSO to drive some above seasonal performance. But what about in the rest of the business as we go through the year?

So just to clarify, Will, are you talking about the broadband portion of the business? No.

No. I'm talking about the whole thing because I think you gave us the comment on broadband, so I was hoping that you might extend that to the rest of the entire business.

Okay. No, I'm sorry. I misunderstood your question. It's all good. So I think, first of all, automation – very very positive uh performance in in 2025 uh you know with uh 14 growth 11 organic uh we saw double digit growth even in uh germany the dark region in china and really strong expansion in verticals like discrete manufacturing and energy so you know so i think those will continue uh we see more and more engagement around uh around physical AI, and this is especially happening in warehousing and smart manufacturing environments, especially in the US. And just as a reminder, we enable very closed-loop physical AI systems in collaboration with companies like Accenture, Nvidia, et cetera, where we combine vision, digital twins, real-time data orchestration, We have a deterministic secure architecture that's based on a time-sensitive networking protocol that delivers very low latency synchronized connectivity. So these are all being appreciated. We saw very strong interest in those discussions. A number of pilots have commenced. So if I look at just the vertical, you know, let's say the fact that certain verticals are very robust, and that we have this additional layer of ITOD convergence, including physical AI, we feel pretty good about the demand environment in that space. Interestingly, our smart buildings business has done extremely well once we started offering these ITOD convert solutions. So here's an interesting statistic. So our growth verticals in smart buildings which are essentially around hospitality, healthcare, education, and data centers, are now one-third of a total smart buildings revenue, while commercial real estate has become 10%. And at some point, it used to be the flip of that, right? So there's been a very marked interest in these converged solutions. So we're obviously doing better in smart buildings environments where it's not plain vanilla office space, but it's more demanding, you know, healthcare, hospitality kind of, or warehouse kind of environments. So I think these verticals are the ones that will drive growth. I think the US continues to be the leading market in terms of geographical expansion, but obviously it's good that China and Germany have also recovered. We see continued growth in infrastructure in India, especially for energy and mass transit rail. So, yeah, so those are the growth areas we're excited about.

If I can have one follow-up. I was hoping to ask about the organizational realignment you referred to in the press release and in the prepared remarks. Should we anticipate that having any effect on the P&L in terms of either reduced costs overall because of the, I guess, simplification that I'd imagine you'd get, any restructuring costs that we should prepare for?

So to be fair, when we planned this realignment, one of our goals was not necessarily cost reduction. It was more to align around the solutions for strategy. And also, if you notice, we've created a role around digital and operations leadership, which essentially means that We want to drive ITOD convergence within Belden much the same way we are enabling it for many of our customers. So, you know, I expect the benefits of this first and foremost to be around us becoming more customer-centric and then, you know, really pooling resources to build functional strength, whether it's in technology development or commercial, you know, skills, et cetera. Having said that, obviously, this is going to lead to efficiency. For example, when we combine all the disparate R&D centers across the world under common leadership, or when we bring more commercial resources together. So yeah, we will see more efficiency. We will see more leverage on those costs. We feel that we will continue to reinvest some of those efficiency savings. So the goal really is not to, you know, model some kind of restructuring saving at this point.

Thank you.

And our next question is going to come from Steven Fox with Fox Advisors.

Hi. Good morning. I guess first I had a big picture question. You highlighted how some of the inflation in materials is impacting your business, which is very helpful. And I was just curious. You know, there's inflation considerations across a lot of bill of materials, and there seems to be some better demand for 26. How concerned are you about just projects being negatively impacted, whether it's just the absolute level of spending dollars available or timing of projects based on what's going on in the supply chain as you think out for the full year? And then I had a follow-up.

Hey, Steve. Good morning. So in terms of end demand or inflation impacting end demand, I can't say that we've seen any evidence of that up to this point. Obviously, copper has been particularly volatile. The price of copper has been everywhere from $4 to $6 just over the past maybe four or five months. So there's been a lot of volatility. We've been dealing with it. Customers are still placing orders. So I think that's positive. We wouldn't expect it to have any material impact on demand, but like Ashish said, we're also concentrated on fiber and wireless and other technologies because we can sell all of those as part of our solution. So I don't think it's a major concern. We'll keep passing it on in terms of price. And I think we don't expect it to have a major impact on demand.

And then just, yeah, sorry.

Just one point, right? Keep in mind that inflation is what is actually driving a lot of customers to look at automation. And so if anything, when I look at our sales pipeline, I see a lot of cases where even customers who were not initially identified as let's say, priority markets or priority customers for higher-end automation have now entered that pipeline, and they're coming in talking about autonomous systems, more convergence. So I think it's actually a bit of a tailwind, frankly, unless there's something crazy going on with commodities, which we can't control.

Right. No, that's good food for thought. And then just from a cash flow standpoint, Jeremy, like Like you mentioned, the price of copper is pretty volatile. How do we think about your free cash flows for the year? Is there a working capital impact that comes and goes depending on prices, et cetera? Anything we should keep in mind there? Thanks very much.

Yeah, I wouldn't expect it to have a material impact on our cash flows as long as we're successful recovering through price. But it does impact inventory. So if you look at our inventories from the end of 2024 to the end of 2025, a significant portion of the inventory growth is just copper getting repriced. And the way it works is, obviously, we're buying copper. We've got a couple months of inventory of copper at any given point in time, and that gives us a few months to raise prices. So there's always maybe a slight lag between when we raise prices and when we realize higher input costs. It doesn't impact the P&L typically, but you're right, there is maybe a small impact on working capital. But I don't think at this point it's significant enough to really impact our view on free cash flow for the full year.

Understood. Thank you very much. Sure.

And our next question is going to come from David Williams at Benchmark.

Hey, good morning, and thanks for letting me ask a few questions here. I guess maybe first just kind of thinking about that transition to the solutions approach. You've talked about it being about 15% of the business, but just kind of thinking about the leverage there. But how do you think that the pace of growth in that solutions in terms of mix, how should we think about that maybe through the next 12 to 24 months?

Yeah, so they would, you know, read the – We had articulated this longer-term goal of being at least at 20% by 2028. I think we are well on our way to achieving that goal, even surpassing that goal. The reality is that the 15% that we've achieved right now has involved a little bit of brute force because we were not organized internally exactly to service customers on a unified basis. I think with this realignment in the org structure and operating model, we are now fully aligned. And the biggest benefit we now have is that we can scale. So if you think about that 15% base that we have right now, there's a fair amount of bespoke one-off solutions designs that we've done. And we haven't necessarily been able to either get both the ITOD converged portion of the opportunity or kind of repeat and scale the reference architecture once it's been established. And that is what we are changing now. So, you know, obviously you should expect acceleration in that solutions mix, and we should expect leverage on our fixed costs because we've already built the architecture, and now we're going to take it out to more customers. So it's not like we hadn't found, you know, as we mentioned on the call, we had already started that journey a few years ago. We would combine our go-to-market teams, and we'd combine certain other supporting teams. So we'd made progress in that direction, but I think this is very definitive now, and it's clear across the organization to all our customers that we are accountable to them for one combined answer.

Pretty good, thank you. And then maybe just on the physical AI, that is certainly an area that's gained a lot of attention more recently. Just kind of curious what you're hearing in terms of customers and maybe the activity going on from their perspective in terms of physical AI and that transition thing.

Yeah, so at the very basic level, how customers are looking at these solutions are that they integrate cameras, edge computing, AI platforms, know industrial ethernet to enable some real-time perception simulation and action real-time root cause analysis and they're very interesting for both brownfield and greenfield situations you know we have a number of active discussions going on in both categories especially in factories and warehouses so a lot of interest i think the kind of sobering moment for customers comes when they realized that they haven't built the foundation to get to physical AI. So in our mind, we think of four steps required, where the ultimate fourth step is autonomy. So you have to start with digitization. Everything is connected, is digital. You then have to go to harmonization, where all these connected systems are able to communicate with each other seamlessly using the same protocol, the same language, so to speak. Then there's convergence, where these systems that are more on the operating side and are speaking with each other can also speak with historical data and connect to databases on the ID side, and that's a two-way, bi-directional process. And then you get to autonomy, where you can actually have this real-time perception and actuation. So a number of customers come to us now and say, I want an autonomous system in my manufacturing plant or my warehouse. And then we have to guide them through that journey. And I would say that journey typically can take between 12 to 18 months, depending on the existing digital maturity of that customer. But a number of those journeys have started. Actually, I would say We've had more interest than even I expected at this stage, and part of that is driven by just the environment around bringing back manufacturing, using more automation, dealing with the shortage of labor, et cetera. So I think it's in a very good place, but it's not a market that's going to give results next quarter. And I think we are invested in this for the long term, and our customers clearly have understood that they have to go through these steps. Thank you.

And our next question is going to come from Rob Jamieson from Vertical Research Partners. And Rob, can you hear us?

You may have your mute function on.

Sorry about that. I was on mute. Morning, all. Just wanted to get a quick update on the data center for area opportunity and pilot that you mentioned a couple of quarters ago. I'm just giving it, you know, to help automate some of the power and cooling capabilities. You know, we saw huge orders from, you know, liquid cooling provider earlier this week. I'm just curious how conversations are going with maybe some of the other hyperscares, how that pilot's gone, and then just any kind of color around sizing or how big you all see that opportunity growing over time.

Yeah, so we see that integrated white space, gray space opportunity for data centers, especially for the AI data centers, as a very significant opportunity. It's one of our top growth areas. In fact, we've, you know, we've kind of expanded that team literally by 2, 3x over the last couple of quarters, right? So there's that much demand. The approach we're taking really is to cover both IT and OT. And, you know, this obviously includes... the critical modular cooling systems that we've previously highlighted. So, you know, that pilot actually went very well. It's now expanded into a larger commercial relationship where they want us to do the same thing for multiple data centers, and those negotiations are underway right now, and they're really, you know, heading in the right direction, very positive. And then since then, we've worked with about, let's say, half a dozen more large accounts. Some of them are more in the early piloting stage, but some of them have said, you can replicate what you've done in that other case. And we did actually book orders and revenue in Q4. They weren't as big as that first case we talked about, but the pipeline is certainly three to four times larger. So more to come here, Rob, but very, very positive engagements underway. Again, these discussions, because they go across, they straddle IT and OD, they take a little longer, because you're really addressing certain foundational aspects of their infrastructure. But I would expect some positive news in the first half of 26, and we will certainly share that with you.

That's great. Very helpful update, and it makes a lot of sense with everything that you discussed today with the, you know, simplified reporting structure. And just on the one-two guide, just one housekeeping item, and sorry if I missed this. It bounced around between calls this morning. What's embedded in there for FX? You know, on your top line guide, they're just giving some of the dollar weakness that Yeah, we saw in early January, probably around the time you guys had already finished your guidance and planning. So just curious what's embedded in there for FX at the moment.

Yeah, let me grab that for you, Rob. So FX should be actually a benefit for us year over year of call it roughly 2% over revenue.

That's great. Thanks so much. Sure.

If there are any additional questions, please press star 1 on your touch-tone phone. And our next question is going to come from Chris Dankert from Loop Capital Markets.

Hey, morning, guys. Thanks for taking the questions. I guess with the updated reporting structure here, I think that makes a lot of sense given the solutions approach being very holistic on space. maybe sticking point, I guess I don't generally think of broadband as being kind of a part of that, that solution sale. Maybe can you enlighten us? Is there more solutions opportunity inside of broadband? Is that a bit operated more separately? Just any kind of colors you can give us on, on that structure would be helpful.

Oh, no, that's a very astute observation. And, and I think you're right. So, so first of all, We are committed to this functional organization, and even broadband is set up functionally. So within broadband, it's set up as a functional organization. But we've indeed kept broadband a little separate because they service OEM customers, which are different to the more solutions-oriented, project-oriented customers we have for the rest of Belden. Having said that, products and technologies in broadband are available to our solutions teams to take to all their customers. So, for example, we talked about this large grocery chain win that we had recently, and we talked about it on today's call. That contains a few different products out of broadband, which are IP-protected fiber products that are pretty unique. And similarly, we've talked in the past about a warehousing automation, and we talked about that two or three quarters ago. That contained some content from broadband fiber. So the way to think about it is broadband continues to operate fairly independently within that functional organization. They continue to focus on their core customers, which especially in the MSO space. What broadband technologies are available to our different vertical teams to take to their customers? And this is becoming especially true in hospitality healthcare, but a little bit also in warehousing and logistics.

Got it. That's extremely helpful. Thank you for that. And then on the solution sales, obviously, this is going to help accelerate that. that pathway, but I'm curious before everything kind of gets a little bit combined here, can you give us the percent of solution sales by, you know, automation solutions versus smart buildings kind of as we're heading into this transition? Because I know we've been seeing extremely strong success on industrial, a little bit tougher conversion on the smart buildings. Can you just kind of give us some split there?

Yeah, so we're in kind of the low 20s right now in automation. That's a percentage of solutions in their revenue. It's become mid single digits for smart buildings. So that's actually impressive given that they were literally zero at the beginning of 2025. So they've really ramped up. And a lot of that has come out of hospitality, healthcare, And then taking some of the smart buildings offerings into combined verticals. And then obviously, you know, we don't really think of broadband. We don't measure broadband solutions presented. So 20% plus for automation, mid-single digit for smart buildings.

Got it. Thank you so much for the color there. And I guess if I could just sneak one last one in here. It sounds like there's a very nice opportunity pipeline on the data center front. But as we look at it today, it's a fairly small portion of the business, right? We're talking about less than 5% of sales. And please correct me if I'm wrong there.

Yeah, no, it is small. And part of that has been our own doing, so to speak, right? Which is why I made a remark about the fact that we had to grow the team two to three times. So we may have allocated fewer resources to data centers, let's say, pre-25 than we should have. Part of it was because the hyperscalers tend to be more cyclical. There's a little bit of margin pressure there. It's only in 25 that we figured out this more integrated white space, gray space opportunity. And we actually were able to build you know, an architecture and pilot it that made sense. So I expect that percentage to grow quite a bit. But you're right. We're starting off a smaller base because we didn't invest in it in the past.

Got it. Well, super helpful. And, you know, again, thanks and good luck in 2026 here.

Thank you.

There are no further questions at this time. I'll now pass it back over to Aaron Reddington. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and thank you, everyone, for joining today's call. If you have any questions, please contact the IR team here at Belden. Our email address is investor.relations at Belden.com. Thank you very much.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This concludes our call for today. You may now disconnect from the call, and thank you for participating.