AGCO at Jefferies Conference: Strategic Transformation and Growth

On Wednesday, 03 September 2025, AGCO Corporation (NYSE:AGCO) presented at the Jefferies Mining and Industrials Conference 2025, detailing its strategic transformation as a pure-play farm equipment maker. The company is investing in technology and restructuring to drive growth, but it also faces challenges, including market uncertainties in North America.

Key Takeaways

• AGCO is investing $2.3 billion in Precision Technologies Multiplied (PTX) to lead in precision agriculture technology.
• A $1 billion share buyback program is enabled by resolving issues with TAFE.
• The "Reimagine" project aims for $200 million in cost savings.
• AGCO plans to grow its parts and service business to $2.3 billion by 2029.
• The company anticipates a cyclical trough in 2025 but expects improvement in 2026.

Financial Results

• Anticipates 2025 as a cyclical low point, with a modest global improvement expected in 2026.
• Production hours are projected to decrease by 15% to 20% in 2025 compared to 2024.
• Restructuring is expected to yield $100 million to $125 million in savings by 2025, with an additional $75 million by 2026.
• PTX business aims to grow from $900 million in 2024 to $2 billion by 2029.
• Parts and service business is targeted to grow from $1.7 billion to $2.3 billion by 2029.
• Fendt sales aim to increase to $1.7 billion by 2029 from the current $1 billion.
• $260 million cash generated from the sale of TAFE shares supports the $1 billion share repurchase.

Operational Updates

• AGCO is implementing the "Reimagine" project to achieve $200 million in savings through offshoring, outsourcing, and automation.
• The "Farmer Core" distribution redesign aims to enhance customer experience.
• AGCO has resolved its relationship with TAFE, facilitating share buybacks.
• High farmer interest in PTX products was noted at the Farm Progress Show.
• AGCO plans to launch 11 innovations this year and 12 next year in precision agriculture.

Future Outlook

• AGCO anticipates slight improvements in Europe and South America in 2026, while uncertainty persists in North America.
• The company focuses on expanding PTX, globalizing the Fendt product line, and increasing parts and service business.
• AGCO is committed to a $1 billion share repurchase program and is open to technology-focused mergers and acquisitions.

Q&A Highlights

• Interest rates are expected to decrease, benefiting farmer financing.
• The "One Big Beautiful Bill" Act could positively impact farmer purchases, though uncertainty remains.
• North American used inventory levels are higher than desired, prompting close monitoring.

For a detailed account, refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Jefferies Mining and Industrials Conference 2025:

Steve Volkmann, Jefferies Analyst, Jefferies: Looks like we’re live here. Great. Good. Well, thanks for joining us for the AGCO session. I’m Steve Volkmann, the Jefferies analyst who covers AGCO, And very pleased to welcome Eric Hensiota, who’s the CEO, and Damon Audio, who is the CFO, and Greg Peterson, who handles IR, is in the audience if anyone wants to follow-up with him afterwards.

So I think Eric is going to make a few opening comments. We’ll do a little fireside chat and we’d love to have questions from you guys as well. So with that, Eric, welcome and thank you.

Eric Hensiota, CEO, AGCO: Great. Thanks, Stephen. Thanks everybody for joining us today. Just as a reminder, AGCO is the largest pure play farm equipment maker in the world. Essentially, we wake up and go to bed every night just thinking about farmers and how we can serve them better.

We don’t have any other adjacency businesses. And we’ve really been working hard over the last several years to reshape the company into the portfolio that we wanted. And so there’s a slide up on the chart here or chart up on the screen that you can see five things that have come together kind of from a strategic vantage point. Number one, about five or six years ago, we said that our vision was to become the trusted partner for industry leading smart farming solutions, essentially intelligent machines that can optimize their own performance. We doubled our engineering budget, bought several tech companies.

But then about a year and a half ago, we really made a big leap, 2,300,000,000.0 investment in creating this thing called PTX, Precision Technologies Multiplied. And we aim to be the biggest, best provider of precision ag technology, especially focused on the mixed fleet, meaning any brand of equipment, and selling it into the retrofit market. So that was move number one, and it was right on top of vision. We wanted to really make that happen. That enabled us to sell off our lowest growth, lowest margin business, grain and protein.

It didn’t have a lot of synergy with the rest of the business, and so we exited that portion, got the portfolio that we wanted. Third one is about removing the distractions we were having from the Taffy relationship. We’ve resolved that. That’s behind us now. It’s not so much an operating thing as a shareholder thing in terms of now we can do share buybacks.

And we announced our largest share buyback in history of our company, a billion dollar commitment to buying back our own shares. That was all possible now because of the TAFE resolution. And then two more that are in implementation mode. One is a project we call internally reimagine. It’s essentially reimagining how we do all the work in the company, looking at every single thing that we do and say, hey, for noncore things, let’s either offshore or outsource that.

And then everything else that’s anything repetitive, let’s automate it. And so everything across the company, we’ve got 700 projects that we’ve identified where we can do something better, take cost out and do a better outcome for the farmer or the dealer. Those are all, in implementation mode. We’ve we’ve committed to a 200,000,000 savings along with every one of those projects having a benefit of better performance. And then finally is farmer core.

We’ve redesigned the way distribution works. And instead of having the farmer come to the business, having to come to a brick and mortar store, we want the business to come to the farmer. So instead of going to the mall, we wanted an Amazon experience, and we’re implementing that, having remote monitoring of machines, all of the service work done out on the farm, and a full package experience for the farmer. So quick overview. Those are the things that we’ve been working on and are in implementation, and we’re excited about having the company that we’ve always wanted and now making it perform to its max potential.

Steve Volkmann, Jefferies Analyst, Jefferies: Great. Okay. So let’s kick off the conversation. And since this is webcast, I just feel like I should ask the first question about lots has been changing recently. Are there any updates relative to things like tariffs or end market conditions that you just wanted to

Eric Hensiota, CEO, AGCO: call out? No, we’re in a cyclical business. And we still see ourselves 2025 being the trough of that cycle, meaning it’s the low point of the cycle. We’ve been anticipating this. Our data models have been showing that this is what’s going to happen and we’re that’s all matching up with farmer sentiment and so on.

The projection models are showing that ’26 on a global scale will be a slight improvement, a modest improvement. Same no change from our earnings forecast, and we’re seeing that play out. Probably the most uncertainty is in the North American market. Most confidence is in Europe and South America in terms of recovery for next year.

Steve Volkmann, Jefferies Analyst, Jefferies: And we’ve had, I think, four zero seven new types of items added to steel tariffs recently. Does that cause any additional headache for you guys?

Eric Hensiota, CEO, AGCO: I mean, it’s a daily process today of managing all of the changing work environment. From a scale standpoint, it’s not a big change in magnitude, and it’s something our teams are well accustomed to managing through. We’ve got this massive spreadsheet where we look at we’ve got we’ve got a a table that shows where we buy every single component around the company, what from which country to which country, all the machines we make from what country to which where the export. And you can put in a changing cell then of what’s the new tariff on Mexico or Indonesia or Japan, and it calculates out what the net impact of cost is to the company. And we also do that modeling for our two major competitors, and we’re trying to say, is somebody impacted differently than the other?

So that’s how we understand our cost. And then we think about and remember, only 25% of our sales are North America sales. 75% are sales from outside North America. So we’re understanding the cost impact on that 25% bucket but managing pricing globally. So those two are two different conversations.

Just because the cost is incurred in one way, that’s not at all related to how we think about pricing. We’ll price wherever the market will bear all around the world on all products.

Steve Volkmann, Jefferies Analyst, Jefferies: Okay, good. So let’s go back to your comments that sort of 2025 feels like a cyclical trough. Maybe let’s take one step back and maybe just describe how the company’s performance has been different in this downturn relative to previous downturns.

Eric Hensiota, CEO, AGCO: Yeah, a couple of things. First of all, with our we put our best data scientists on modeling what will happen with demand Actually, was right around COVID time. We said there’s so many things going on. Let’s put these new tools on this topic.

Thank goodness we did. We actually had Amazon look over our shoulder because we felt like they were the best in the world at forecasting, And they said, boy, this model is really, really well built. And it’s proven to be quite accurate. So from a modeling standpoint, we saw it coming. We started taking actions early, and we’ve reacted way faster this time than in prior downturns, cutting back production and aggressively getting inventory where it needed to be in terms of months of supply and things like that.

That, combined with the strategic moves that I talked about at the top of the program of focusing on higher margin businesses, growing our high margin businesses, has allowed us to deliver a performance at this trough that is essentially double the performance of the last trough. And actually, our performance at this trough is very similar to the performance at our last peak in the last business cycle. So structurally, we’re driving a lot better margin sustainably into this business, higher lows, which will certainly then turn into higher highs as we as the market recovers.

Steve Volkmann, Jefferies Analyst, Jefferies: Okay. So let’s pull on that thread a little bit. If we go into 2026, and I’m just going to make this up, my forecast, not yours, but end market demand is flat. What are the key drivers of both revenue and margin for you guys against that backdrop?

Eric Hensiota, CEO, AGCO: Well, if you remember how I said we pulled the lever hard and fast on slowing production down. So we’re significantly underproducing to retail demand this year, especially in North America. But everywhere around the world, we had to do that in the beginning of the first half of the year. So factories were underproducing in 2025. If the world turns out to be this this scenario of flat retail demand and we’ve got our inventories right sized, then our production should be higher next year than it is this year, even if retail demand is flat.

So we should have a much better absorption cost position next year than this year as one factor. Second factor will be this PTX business that we’ve invested in, high margin, high growth business. We’ve declared that it’s or committed to that we’re going to grow this business from about $900,000,000 in sales this year up to $2,000,000,000 in sales by 2029. So that’s a fast growing tech business that will contribute. The other two big growth drivers are globalizing our FENT product line into especially North America and South America, and the third one is growing our parts and service business.

We have confidence in all three of those growth drivers continuing to be additive to the strength of our business on top of just the cyclical tailwind that we should experience from absorption. And then I’ll add a couple

Damon Audio, CFO, AGCO: more data points. Just for to quantify the number on the absorptions, as Eric said, if you look at our production hours this year, we’re expected to be down 15% to 20% in hours versus last year. So to the extent that that normalizes to retail under those assumptions, that’s close to 1% operating margin improvement year over year if we’re producing to retail next year. I think the other component and Eric touched on it in his slide here is the restructuring actions that we have in place. So we’ve been implementing restructuring over the last year.

We said by the end of this year, we would run rate somewhere in the range of 100,000,000 to 125,000,000 of cost savings. So there’ll be some incremental savings next year. And then we’ve also identified another $75,000,000 that we should be able to run rate by the end of next year. A lot of that has to go in consultation with Europe. So if you look at those two buckets coming in, that would probably put another, call it, dollars 60,000,000 to $80,000,000 of incremental cost savings into the P and L next year versus this year on top of the absorption and on top of the growth drivers that Eric alluded to.

Steve Volkmann, Jefferies Analyst, Jefferies: Great. And again, not really volume sensitive. Right. Okay. Let’s talk a little bit about some of those buckets of growth that you mentioned, Eric.

So maybe we’ll start with the technology since that seems to be kind of the biggest one. So what are you seeing right now? I mean, we’re at a low point in the cycle. Are farmers still willing to pay for technology at this point in the cycle?

Eric Hensiota, CEO, AGCO: Yes, so I’ve had the opportunity to actually run this tech business myself for the last seven or eight months as we had a leadership transition. We just announced a new leader coming in last week at Farm Progress Show. So I got really close to it. Spent a lot of times with our engineers, with our salespeople, with our dealers, and then at Farm Progress Show. And I can tell you that last week, the most active booth all day long every day was the PTX booth, our Precision Technologies Multiplied.

That’s the combination where we brought Precision Planting, Trimble Ag, and these other smaller tech companies together into one overall team. Lots of buzz all the way through the day. Every single one of our stations inside that booth was our experts talking with farmers, and there was never a gap in the action. So farmers are looking at the situation where even though they’re under pressure from their margin standpoint, they still are thirsty for becoming better next year than they were last year. And so they have the choice of buying a brand new planter or a brand new sprayer or upgrading the one they already have.

These machines last somewhere between fifteen and twenty years. We model seventeen or eighteen years as a typical. That’s how long they last mechanically. But the technology cycle is way faster than that. So there’s this need in the market.

There’s this inherent need to say, I wanna keep increasing the capability of my machine without having to replace the whole machine. And, that’s where we come in because not only are we a retrofit company, we’re an all makes or a mixed fleet retrofit company. Meaning, we’ll put that technology on a John Deere or a case machine and bring life to that regardless of what the brand was. And we do that all around the world. So that’s why we think that’s the technology sides.

And in in conjunction with that, we were establishing a tech channel that’s unique. We’re the only ones doing that. Everybody else sells their, if they do retrofit, which is usually not a main focus for them, they do it through their machinery dealers. We separate that. We say machinery dealers sell machinery and that’s what they’re gonna focus on.

We have a separate channel, separate set of dealers. All they do, they don’t sell tractors and planters and sprayers, they sell technology upgrades. It’s a different kind of dealer with a different overhead structure, with a different understanding of the depth of agronomy and farmer economics. That’s what we go after, this intersection of agronomy, farmer economics of how much is value it is for that farmer, and technology. That’s the secret sauce of the tech channel that makes us unique.

Steve Volkmann, Jefferies Analyst, Jefferies: So one question I get a lot from investors around this is that I think you have at least one competitor that’s bigger than you are. They probably have a larger R and D budget. How is it possible to assume that you actually can be competitive with this technology?

Eric Hensiota, CEO, AGCO: Well, I had a lot of experience with that competitor as I worked there many years, and so I know them very well. Great company. Won’t say anything negative about them. But what I would point you to is what’s the result? It’s not what you put into the black box that creates innovation, it’s what comes out.

And I’m thrilled and proud of our innovation team. If you take a look at what’s come out of our company compared to the other major competitors, we’ve won more innovation awards. I mean, the Outrun Autonomy kit won the Top of the Top Innovation Award again this year. We won it again last year. If you look over the last five years, we’ve won the AE 50, which is top 50 awards in North America.

If you add those five years up, we’ve won by far more than either of them either of the other two. Agrotechnica last year, it happens every other year. It’s gonna happen this year. It happened two years ago. Brand X got zero awards.

We’ve got six for innovation. So it’s what comes out. And our team, we have small teams, very focused on the farmer. We say we want to be the most farmer focused company in the industry. We get them out with farms, understanding their pain points, understanding agronomy, understanding farmer economics, and finding the lowest cost solution with the simplest user interface to be able to solve that problem.

So we’re not a technology out company, we’re a farmer back company. And I think that combination creates you know, I thought by now with PTX, we’d be sell we’d be delivering something like five innovations per year. We’re gonna launch 11 this year. Next year, we’re gonna launch 12. So our innovation flywheel is, I think, unlike anything else in the industry.

Steve Volkmann, Jefferies Analyst, Jefferies: And others have talked about trying to generate sort of a base of recurring revenue, almost like subscription type revenue. Do you sit in terms of that?

Eric Hensiota, CEO, AGCO: In general, farmers don’t like subscriptions. They would like to, when the years are good, they’d like to purchase their item, a machine or a technology, and have it paid for so that in the lean years they have the least variable cost. Now the exception to that rule are topics where there’s the sense that I’m getting an upgrade all the time. So more software related topics that I’m getting new software, new capabilities, new upgrades. And so in our autonomy kit, that’s the case.

We’ll have options for that. In our soil sampling, automated soil sampling, there’s a recurring revenue model in terms of how we price for the paid for sample type pricing. So there’s elements where it makes sense and we’re essentially gonna go where the farmers wanna go. If if that’s something they see value in, we’ll price it that way, but we won’t force farmers into a model that just doesn’t fit with what they wanna do.

Steve Volkmann, Jefferies Analyst, Jefferies: Okay. So

Eric Hensiota, CEO, AGCO: we’re kind of we’re we’re applying different ingredients to different solutions.

Steve Volkmann, Jefferies Analyst, Jefferies: Good. All right. Let’s shift to the globalization of Fent. Fent is a leading brand in Europe. People may know, but not so much in The US, at least so far.

How do you grow that business outside of Europe?

Eric Hensiota, CEO, AGCO: Fent is known its home base is Europe. And in Europe, it’s absolutely the aspiration brand of every farmer. If they had a dream, they would say, I wish I could own a Fent product. That’s what we’re establishing now in a very methodical way in North And South America. We’re being very careful, very deliberate about making sure we maintain that same brand promise and the same brand experience.

We do not wanna water it down 1% by as we as we globalize. And we think we’re doing it in just the right way, where, first of all, we had to redesign the product line to be applicable to North America farming applications, which we’ve done. We had to expand the product line to we’ve we’ve created a new planter, new combine, sprayer, redesigned all of the tractors. So we’ve got the whole fleet globalized now, and now it is the best of the best for the most demanding farmer anywhere in the world. And, and we’re matching that with the dealer experience.

So dealers had to apply to become a Fent dealer. You didn’t just get it because you had been an AGCO dealer in the past. You had to apply and demonstrate that you were gonna live up to technician training, parts stocking, service support, all of the things, brand building, to be able to make sure that we’re growing Fent as a very premium brand with the best of the best experience. We’ve done that and we’ve we’ve now got about 82% of the market covered with Fent dealers in North America. Our job now is to work with our dealers to penetrate more deeply.

So we’ve got the coverage we need. You know, you say 82 is not a 100. That’s okay. We’re gonna do a really good job in that 82. We’ll slowly close the gap on the the remaining white space, but our our primary focus is on penetration now.

Working with our dealers to get deeper and deeper exposure in the markets that they already cover. And one of the big things that was you know, a concern, you know, customers go through a series. Do I like the product? It was easy to get them to love the product. We demoed them 70% of the products that we take on a demo stay on the farm, so they loved the product.

Their second question was, what about the dealer coverage? We’ve done a great job on making sure the dealers are doing what they want to. And then we’ve also brought farmer core into play, which is that item I talked about where we’re bringing all of their work onto the farm. So where the dealer brick and mortar store is located is not that relevant anymore. So we we fundamentally changed the model.

Product, distribution, and then the third leg of the stool was on data. Because many farmers won’t flip their entire fleet at one swoop. They’ll they’ll they’ll sample some of our products as they into their existing fleet. And so they said, well, what about your data platform? All this data coming off of these machines, I need to be able to analyze it in a simple way.

And so at Farm Progress Show, we just launched FarmEngage, which we expect to be the very best data platform for the mixed fleet on the planet. And so that was the third leg of the stool that’s gone click now to be able to answer all the questions farmers have about transitioning from wherever they are to the Fent brand.

Steve Volkmann, Jefferies Analyst, Jefferies: Do you have any data about how many fleets are mixed versus kind of single color?

Eric Hensiota, CEO, AGCO: Don’t have great data. It’s more and more all of the time. More and more business decisions are being, you know, historically there was a pretty strong brand loyalty. This industry had oftentimes multigenerational brand loyalty where grandfather, father, son, because it’s often that way, is loyal to a brand. It’s becoming much less that way.

They’re much more bottom line oriented in terms of what products will give me the best ROI, and so you’re seeing much more of a mixed fleet outcome. It’s completely a highly, highly mixed fleet in Europe, a fair bit mixed fleet in South America, and the least mixed fleet in North America.

Steve Volkmann, Jefferies Analyst, Jefferies: Okay. And so just to wrap up on Fent, so where are our market shares roughly now and where can they go theoretically? Well our business started off

Eric Hensiota, CEO, AGCO: by 2020 at about $300,000,000 We’re now at about $1,000,000,000 and we expect that we’ve committed to get that to about $1,700,000,000 by 2029. We are we’re doing this very methodically. We’re wanting to make sure it’s quality versus quantity because we’re in this for the long haul. It’s a strategic fundamental pillar move for the company of establishing this best of the best brand for the most demanding farmers that want the latest in technology and have the very best support. So that’s kind of the numbers behind our commitment.

Steve Volkmann, Jefferies Analyst, Jefferies: Okay, great. And then maybe the final kind of growth driver, which I don’t think you mentioned, but I will, is parts. So you’ve done a good job growing your parts business, your parts penetration, obviously that’s a higher margin mix for you. Like how have you done that and how much runway is left?

Eric Hensiota, CEO, AGCO: If you go back several years, we actually weren’t great at executing on parts. When the customer would come to the dealer store and said, I want this thing, and oftentimes we wouldn’t have it in stock. And so that’s we measure that. It’s called parts fill. Our parts fill rate was the worst in the industry.

So we said, we’ve got to fundamentally fix that. And we targeted being the best in the industry, which we have become the last several years in a row now. We’ve become the very best in the industry, not measured by us, but measured by Carlyle, both in North America and in Europe. So parts feel we are the best, and we the gap actually separated during COVID. We prioritized if we only have a few parts and we don’t have enough for everybody, service gets priority, not the factory to build another new machine.

And so that’s been established. Then we could move into the shift from reactive to proactive. So with all of these connected machines out there, we monitor the fleet and move to a proactive situation where we can say you’ve either got a service interval coming up, maintenance interval, or we see error codes happening, why don’t you take care of that in advance? Secondly, we’ve moved to e commerce. E commerce is growing rapidly and what we see when someone investigates an e commerce search, it’s usually in the off hours when a dealer wasn’t going to be online.

And there’s about a 25% lift on what they purchased when they went online versus if they went into a store. Just like we all do, you go in to buy one thing and they there’s a recommendation of, well, why don’t you get all of the items that go with that to have the complete kit? Well, if we make it simple, that recommendation turns into a purchase. So remote monitoring of of equipment combined with, ecommerce is allowing us to move from reactive to proactive. And we expect our business in that regard to move from about $1,700,000,000 today to $2,300,000,000 by 2029.

So our three growth drivers are growing FENT globally, the precision ag business and service and parts growth. All three high margin businesses that can have lots of room to grow.

Steve Volkmann, Jefferies Analyst, Jefferies: Great. All right. Let’s take a quick break. Any questions from the field?

Eric Hensiota, CEO, AGCO: Yes? There’s someone coming around with a microphone. There’s a question up here. Lady in the front row.

Unidentified speaker: Hi. What’s your assumption on interest rates for this year and next year that could potentially help farm our balance sheets?

Eric Hensiota, CEO, AGCO: Damon, do want

Damon Audio, CFO, AGCO: to So add we don’t have a forward look at what the forward curve says for interest rates. We do expect them to come down. Those should help, as Eric talked about, some of the uncertainty with the North American farmers. As many of these farmers trade in a piece of used equipment, there is still a portion that they are financing. And so to the extent that interest rates come down that would help.

We have a financing company that we partner with Rabobank called Agco Finance. So its interest rates that it would provide the farmers would be influenced by The U. S. Interest rates as well. So it would be a slight positive to the extent they do lower them.

Unidentified speaker: And what are your assumptions on the trough in Europe versus or internationally versus The U. S. Seasonality?

Eric Hensiota, CEO, AGCO: Yeah. We expect Europe and South America to have a slight improvement in 2026 from 2025. And Europe is the least cyclical of all of the businesses. It’s a little over half of our total revenue. So we like having a very stable, predictable business that thrives on new technology and so on.

So we’re very pleased that we’ve got the mix we have for this part of the business cycle.

Unidentified speaker: Just a question on I have no full term. A question within The U. S, which I know is less of a portion of your revenue than Europe, but bonus depreciation and the big beautiful build. How do you expect tax regulation and initiatives to either help or basically be nothing for next year.

Eric Hensiota, CEO, AGCO: You know, we talked to farmers at Farm Progress Show and a couple other settings over last week, and what they would say is it’s certainly something they find value in, because the bill is written in a way that you get to take any profitable income from last year and this year, as long as you use it by the end of this year. If you don’t use it by the end of this year, it’s a lost opportunity. So there’s a sense of urgency for farmers that anything they’ve accumulated, they wanna maybe make sure that they take advantage of it in terms of purchases. Having said that, there’s still a high degree of uncertainty on what their situation will be until they get their crop in, and kinda what the rules of the road will be for buyers of their grain. So the you know, to specifically your question, it’s certainly a positive.

How big of an impact that will be is is a bit of a gray area yet.

Steve Volkmann, Jefferies Analyst, Jefferies: Anyone else? Maybe sort of tugging on that thread, is there anything in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act or any of the rest of these kind of government policies that have changed what you’re doing in terms of where you’re investing or producing?

Eric Hensiota, CEO, AGCO: You know, so there’s in general, most of that was net positive for farmers. Let’s say let’s start with the customer side of things. We talked about accelerated depreciation. There’s also more support for crop insurance and a few other things like that. So net net, administration is supportive of farmers.

Farmers a lot of farmers voted for the administration. So there’s kind of a hope and confidence that that will all be positive in the end. For us, in terms of supply chains, we’ve been working with our I talked about that spreadsheet that we look at, and we see where costs are coming from. And so we look at, hey, how do we manage those costs and try and mitigate those? So we work at our suppliers to try and take costs out wherever we can.

Sometimes we move components from one supplier to another to optimize the overall cost position. We may do that in our own manufacturing plants where we build the same product in multiple locations where we could shift it to a different location. We’re certainly willing to make those changes. We’re so far hesitant on tooling up a new location for a product. Those are larger investments with longer payback.

And in this environment of uncertainty about how long some of these positions will stand, we’re wanting to let a little more certainty work its way into the market before we make those big investments. And we don’t so we don’t expect anything big moving in those footprint changes.

Steve Volkmann, Jefferies Analyst, Jefferies: Great. Okay. Maybe a little switch. A question that I get a lot and you actually brought up earlier is just around used inventory and pricing. And maybe you can go around the horn for the major areas and talk about where you think we are relative to inventory and pricing in the used market.

Eric Hensiota, CEO, AGCO: Yes. Both new and used is where we want it pretty close in everywhere except for North America. North America inventory is still a

Unidentified speaker: little bit

Eric Hensiota, CEO, AGCO: high. And so we look at both new and used. New inventory is two to three months higher than our target. So that’s why we’re, like Damon talked about, we’re under producing the retail demand so far this year, and we’ll continue that through the rest of the year to continue to work that down. That’s a forward looking calculation, so we need to see what 2026 shows.

But if matches where we model it to be, we’re hoping to be closer to target by the end of the year. If the industry drops off further, then we’d have to take more actions. Used inventory isn’t as big a problem for us as it is for some of our competitors because our competitors have had this historical rolling of machines, meaning they have multiple buyers for the same machine. A machine will go through a buyer first for one or two years, that buyer will sell it to another buyer who will own it for two or three years, and then it’ll roll to the third buyer in four. So there’s kind of a a waterfall of kind of like five owners for that machine over its life of say seventeen years.

Our dealers don’t do that as much and so we don’t have this congestion nearly to the same degree as some of our competitors do of this fresh inventory. And so we’re trying to look at it as an opportunity where some of our competitors are not wanting to do that trade this time of that fresh inventory because they’ve got too much. We’re trying to approach those customers and say, isn’t this a great time to look at a different brand like FENT and see if we can get them excited about moving to us.

Steve Volkmann, Jefferies Analyst, Jefferies: How do you keep growing FENT in North America with sort of that European cost structure?

Eric Hensiota, CEO, AGCO: Well, we are accumulating costs on the one hand, but we’re managing price separately. And so Fent, you know, has still got very low market share in North America. It’s a premium brand, well respected and the admiration target brand in Europe, but it’s still a low market share player in North America. So we’ve got lots of headroom to grow in the market. And if there is a cost situation, our competitors are getting hit with cost of product coming in between components and machines too, It’s just on different things.

And I think they’re thinking the same way we are. What gets hit by cost is different from what you do with price. So we’ll spread prices wide as we can spread it globally on all products of all brands, and where we accumulate cost is different story. They’re in the same situation. They’re getting hit with different things because of where they source their products.

They’re not raising the price on those particular machines by that amount. They’re spreading it as well. Okay.

Steve Volkmann, Jefferies Analyst, Jefferies: All right. Two minutes left. Any last questions from the floor? No? All right.

You mentioned at the outset, think, with your slide that you’re excited that your company finally looks like what you want it to look like. So are there any holes to still fill M and A, tuck ins? What’s sort of priorities for use of cash going forward?

Eric Hensiota, CEO, AGCO: So two things. One, from a machinery standpoint, we have the portfolio we want. From a technology standpoint, we’re always open to bringing on folks that have good ideas. We think there’s lots of good ideas bubbling all around the world. So we’ve got this thing called AGCO Ventures as one mechanism to interface with startups or early stage companies that we can either partner with to bring into our portfolio, take an equity stake in, or ultimately maybe even purchase.

We’ve done that several times already. So that’s one avenue. A lot of folks we’re so well known now. This PTX brand is known as the the big precision ag brand, so many folks just come to us anyway. And so I expect over the next several years there’ll be lots of discussions around those, but they’re usually fairly small in size.

So then the second converse, that’s kind of where our eyes are cast in terms of M and A and the perimeter of the company. As it relates to capital allocation, we’re committed and very excited to be able to make this shift. Up until this point, we’ve been restricted to doing this special variable dividend and most investors haven’t liked it that much. And we’ve but we’ve been forced to because we didn’t wanna have any more concentrated ownership by by TAFE. And so now that that’s been resolved and they’ve agreed to do share buybacks, we’ve announced and are very bullish around this $1,000,000,000 share repurchase commitment.

And we’ll be in the market as soon as we can with as cash becomes available. We’ve got the sale of our shares in TAFE is $260,000,000 in cash that’s already been agreed to, along with our organic generation of cash and other things. So that will be a new thing for AGCO and one that we heard from all of our investors is one that matches up with your needs and interests.

Steve Volkmann, Jefferies Analyst, Jefferies: Alright, Perfect. And that is time. So thank you guys so much. Really appreciate it. And thank you all for listening.

Eric Hensiota, CEO, AGCO: Thank you everybody.

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