Zebra Technologies at Stephens Conference: Strategic Vision and Growth

On Tuesday, 18 November 2025, Zebra Technologies (NASDAQ:ZBRA) presented at the Stephens Annual Investment Conference, outlining its strategic vision amidst a challenging macroeconomic landscape. Led by CFO Nathan Winters, the company discussed its commitment to "intelligent operations" and highlighted both growth opportunities and regional challenges.

Key Takeaways

• Zebra Technologies is focusing on digitizing and automating frontline operations, with strong growth in North America and Asia-Pacific, but facing challenges in Europe.
• The company is targeting approximately 6% organic growth and 17% EPS growth for the year, despite macroeconomic uncertainties.
• Strategic initiatives include share buybacks, the accretive ELO acquisition, and expansion in RFID and machine vision technologies.
• Zebra is actively mitigating tariffs through supply chain diversification and pricing strategies.
• AI integration is a key focus, enhancing frontline operations and customer experience.

Financial Results

• Q3 2024 showed strong performance in North America, especially in retail and e-commerce, with continued growth in Asia-Pacific.
• Latin America achieved its highest quarterly revenue in the company’s history.
• For the full year 2024, Zebra projects nearly 6% organic growth and 17% EPS growth.
• The company has deployed $300 million in share buybacks in 2024 and plans an additional $500 million over the next 12 months.
• The ELO acquisition, closed last month, adds $400 million in revenue and is accretive from day one.

Operational Updates

• Zebra resegmented into two new operating segments: Connected Frontline and Asset Visibility and Automation.
• The company reduced North American volumes out of China from over 80% pre-pandemic to less than 20% to mitigate tariffs.
• AI tools are implemented internally to enhance productivity across various functions.
• RFID has been growing double digits for several years, and the machine vision portfolio is competitive.

Future Outlook

• Zebra maintains a long-term compound annual growth rate target of 5% to 7%.
• Core business growth, including mobile computing and data capture, is expected to be 4%-5%.
• High single-digit growth is anticipated in ruggedized tablets and RFID, with double-digit growth in software and machine vision.
• Despite current challenges, long-term growth opportunities are seen in manufacturing and healthcare sectors.

Q&A Highlights

• Zebra experiences uneven demand, with strong performance in some regions and challenges in others due to macro uncertainty.
• The company has a two- to three-year roadmap with its largest customers, though project timing remains uncertain.
• Proactive price actions and supply chain diversification have helped mitigate tariff impacts.
• RFID is viewed as complementary to barcode technology, unlocking new use cases.

Zebra Technologies remains committed to executing its strategies and leveraging technological advancements for sustainable growth. Readers are invited to refer to the full transcript for a detailed discussion.

Full transcript - Stephens Annual Investment Conference:

Tommy Mull, Research Analyst, Stevens: All right, good morning, everyone. I’m Tommy Mull, Research Analyst here at Stevens. We appreciate your taking the time to come to Nashville to attend our conference this week. One of the companies I cover here is Zebra Technologies. We’re delighted to host. From the company, the CFO to my left, Nathan Winters, as well as Mike Steele, Vice President of Finance and Investor Relations, seated here in the front row. Nathan and Mike, thank you for taking the time to come to Nashville this week. We appreciate the insight.

Nathan Winters, CFO, Zebra Technologies: Yeah, it’s great to be here.

Tommy Mull, Research Analyst, Stevens: For those in the audience who do not know Zebra very well yet, I have about 20 minutes of high-level Q&A prepared to give a pretty good, I hope, overview of what the company does. The second half of our session, though, we should lean in, to the extent we can, on audience participation. If you have any question, by all means, shoot up a hand. If you have three questions you want to ask, ask all three. The more interactive, the better. Just to kick us off here, Nathan, the company vision here is to enable intelligent operations. That was a new one for me. You used to have a different way of describing the business, but I was corrected. Sketch for us, what do you mean when you talk about enabling intelligent operations? What does that reference, and what is the history here?

Nathan Winters, CFO, Zebra Technologies: Yeah, so I think the history is our vision. We had talked about asset intelligence, or enterprise asset intelligence, going back to the Motorola acquisition in 2015. To some extent, I think that term was somewhat made up at the time, where obviously the portfolio has dramatically changed from where we were 10 years ago. I think now the vision around intelligent operations, think of enabling frontline operations everywhere to be digitized, automated, and intelligent, which is how we’ve talked about the company for the last couple of years. It’s just formalizing that. We thought it was time, again, with the portfolio, how we talk about the company, how we think about the opportunity, is restating the vision to actually how we talk about it and how we think about it from maybe the vernacular we used over a decade ago.

Tommy Mull, Research Analyst, Stevens: I think it was, yeah, it was last quarter, perhaps associated with this new branding, you had a resegmentation where you reallocated some of your businesses from one segment to the other, which I know you know, but I will say again today, analysts get really, really excited or grumpy when we see one of those around earnings. I want to give you a chance to tell us, what should we take here? Clearly, you’re also communicating the business differently to the investing audience. What would you highlight for us here?

Nathan Winters, CFO, Zebra Technologies: We, again, resegmented from two new operating segments, connected frontline, asset visibility, and automation. Again, similar to the strategy and the vision around intelligent operations, I’d say it’s really more of reflecting what the company is today versus what it was 10 years ago around the segments, and give us a more intuitive way to talk about the company. The old segments, quite frankly, were just combinations of different products. That’s how we really talked about the company versus now talking about, what’s the strategy around a connected frontline? How do you bring the portfolio together to bring a better experience for our customers on that connected mobile computing, now with ELO, tied to software and AI, to bring a better experience to the frontline worker?

On asset visibility, again, it’s how do you give assets a digital voice, whether that’s through RFID tag, a barcode, and then visibility throughout the supply chain, whether that’s with, again, RFID, machine vision, or scanning. A better way to talk about the company, I think, a more intuitive way, so we can talk about what’s happening in those segments that I think makes logical sense versus jumping directly into product by product. Appreciating it was a lot of change at once, but it kind of coincided with the new vision. Little to do with the ELO acquisition. It was more just with the new vision, where we at, we thought it was appropriate to get it out there and kind of reset things as we go into 2026.

Tommy Mull, Research Analyst, Stevens: You’ve mentioned ELO a couple of times, so I want to make sure to hit on that. It was a $1.3 billion deal closed last month. In some of the key served verticals there, like retail and hospitality, Zebra has been known for a while in terms of automating the frontline workforce. ELO historically had been known more for automating interactions with the end customer, like in a point of sale context. What’s the strategic rationale for bringing these two together?

Nathan Winters, CFO, Zebra Technologies: Yeah, so really the strategic rationale is about how do you enhance that frontline experience, as I just mentioned. I mean, we’ve known ELO now. We’ve been looking at ELO as a potential target for several years. Just the timing finally came together around the right time, the right valuation. They have a very similar business model to our core business. I mean, they sell through tier two distribution. The personas within the customers, meaning the buyers, are very similar from our traditional core products and ELO. Just the overlap and synergies, again, we were on a diligence call, and you just say, they are us in terms of how they operate, how they run their business. It’s, again, a very natural fit within the portfolio. $400 million of revenue. It’s incremental, accretive on day one.

We can drive material synergies from both cost, but also commercially in terms of expanding their portfolio outside the U.S. The real value proposition comes from, think of today, if you have Zebra mobile computers, and then you have, whether it’s ELO or some other type of digital display, self-serve checkout, point of sale, they are likely, well, they are run on two different, even if they’re Android, two different Android instances, which means you’re maintaining two different instances, you’re security patching both from two different vendors. If you have the same application that you want to run both on a fixed and mobile device, it has to be maintained in two instances. Now over time, we can bring those together and provide that uniform platform to support both fixed and mobile applications. Customers have been asking for this. We launched a kiosk last year organically, our KC50.

It was really around a request from customers saying, "Hey, we love the Android platform. We use it across all of our mobile applications. We’d like to add these fixed applications on that same platform. How can you help us do it?" Obviously, this gives us a way to accelerate it. They bring to us a presence in quick-serve restaurant, which we like in terms of identifying incremental opportunities. We’re excited about taking ELO globally. They’ve been predominantly in North America, different parts of Western Europe. We look at markets like Australia, India, Germany, very small presence where we can leverage our infrastructure and our commercial relationships to gain some real traction here over the next couple of years. Again, we’re really excited about driving meaningful growth for the company, and really just a natural fit into the core portfolio.

Tommy Mull, Research Analyst, Stevens: Let’s talk about the demand environment here, Nathan. Last year, around this time, phrases being thrown around included continued momentum, broadening recovery. This year, or I should say this most recent earnings season, you talked about uneven macro signals. A lot of investors, in particular leading up to third quarter earnings, were looking for any sign of a recovery in some of the short-cycle markets here in North America in particular. Is there anything you can point to? Where does it feel like we sit in this cycle today?

Nathan Winters, CFO, Zebra Technologies: Yeah, I’d say if I take a step back, what I would say is the long-term secular trends we see in the business remain intact, meaning go back to the need to digitize and automate workflows and how customers are thinking about driving productivity hasn’t changed. The conversations we’re having with our customers are the same. I think what we’ve seen, uneven demand, I mean, look at our Q3 results, I think are a perfect picture of it, meaning really strong results out of North America, particularly in retail and e-commerce. Asia-Pacific had another strong growth quarter. Our Latin America business, which is relatively small, had its highest quarterly revenue in the history of the company, which again, all positives. On the other side, you see declines in Europe, kind of tepid demand across the region, particularly in markets like Germany, French retail in particular.

Large markets of ours that are challenged. Think about manufacturing, kind of, again, lagging growth across the portfolio. You just overshadow this with, I’d say, just the macro uncertainty, whether that’s what’s going on from a geopolitical perspective or tariffs here, there, what’s the rate. We see that playing out with our customers in terms of how they’re thinking about their capital purchases and then what’s the consumer going to behave here at the end of the year. That’s where we see this uneven demand, real pockets of strength and that continued demand and continued momentum, again, with some areas of the portfolio that are still lagging and struggling here in the moment.

Tommy Mull, Research Analyst, Stevens: You mentioned the customer capital planning cycle. In a typical year-end period, I’m thinking calendar year-end here, how much visibility do you have on the size and in particular the timing of customer deployments for the following year? How does this year compare in terms of that visibility?

Nathan Winters, CFO, Zebra Technologies: I’d say this year compares similar to prior years in terms of one of the key ingredients our teams use with our largest, most strategic customers is we have a two- to three-year roadmap with every one of them in terms of how are they thinking about their budget cycle, their refreshes of the portfolio, where are we at from a technology perspective in terms of what additional features, functionality, and offerings we can bring to their environment. That is no different, right? That obviously leads out to what kind of looks like could be 2026 projects versus 2027 and 2028. That feels very, very similar. I think where you, it’s still back to just the certainty of when they’re going to move forward.

Quite frankly, sitting here today, it’s the same situation we’re in every year, which is if there’s a pipeline of 12 projects, we need four, five, or six to have a good year. I don’t know which one of the four, five, or six they’re going to move forward, but you had confidence that they ultimately will. We’ve had years in the past, whether it’s 2018 or 2021, where we have more than our fair share within that year and projects are accelerated or moved ahead, whatever you might call it. We’ve had years in 2023 and the early part of 2024 where they can be pushed out or deferred and delayed. I think it’s, again, the conversations are still ongoing and happening.

You’d like to get to a point where there’s a bit more certainty around the overall economic environment, whether that’s tariffs, interest rates, whatever it might be, so that customers can move ahead. I mean, if you look at this year as an example, I mean, this year is playing out pretty much as we expected. The guidance has been relatively unchanged. If I look at first half, second half, this is more or less how we plan the year. And so projects that were in the pipeline have kind of moved ahead. If they were in the budget, customers aren’t backing away or pulling back on those projects.

What we’re not seeing is, I think because of that uncertainty, is accelerating and spending more, meaning they’re not moving ahead with something that might be in next year’s plan or on the cusp from above the line, below the line. I think that’s where we haven’t seen either the acceleration we were hoping for and that many were hoping for, which is kind of that, again, some of that uncertainty abating so that folks move ahead with those projects. It doesn’t mean they’re not out there. It doesn’t mean they’re not in the pipeline that the teams are actively working. We got to find the right moment for those customers to move forward.

Tommy Mull, Research Analyst, Stevens: Yeah. You mentioned the first half versus second half dynamic, Nathan. This is a question I’ve gotten a lot from investors, so I want to lay it out and let you attack it head on here. Point taken that the second half outlook hasn’t changed meaningfully. It does sound like there was some shift in terms of volumes that maybe came in 3Q versus originally you had penciled in 4Q. The point is the implied 4Q trend is a flattish volume environment. The question I’ve gotten a lot is, what are we to make of that? The big picture message is think about it in terms of the halves, but the leading edge indicator is that flattish trend in 4Q. I don’t think you were wanting to communicate something going forward with that outlook necessarily, but I do get asked the question.

To the extent you can help us unpack it, we’d appreciate it.

Nathan Winters, CFO, Zebra Technologies: Yeah, like I said earlier, that’s definitely not the intent. Again, I think the Q4 guide we think was, and believe is still balanced given the macro uncertainty. You see that with some of the more recent earnings announcements that have come out. What you see in the macro economy with a pipeline we had going into the quarter around where customers were planning or thinking they would spend some of their year-end budget, which effectively is flat to where it was the prior year, which was a relatively strong Q4 in 2024. I think the current quarter just reflects what we’re seeing here in the quarter, and there’s a lot of moving parts and uncertainty out there. I think I’ll go back to long-term.

We still believe in the fundamental growth drivers of the company, the pipeline of opportunities we have, the conversations we’re having with our customers. You look back on the year, we’ll deliver 6%, nearly 6% organic growth, 17% EPS growth for the year. On top of that, we’ll fully mitigate tariffs, which I’m sure we’ll talk about, exiting going into 2026. We’ve deployed $300 million of share buyback through the year and committed to another $500 million over the next 12 months. I think adding the ELO acquisition gives us a scaled $400 million of revenue that’s accretive on day one. We feel good about the execution in the year. Obviously, we’d love to see a higher growth rate here in the quarter.

Look, I think we’re executing, and when the customers are there, I mean, the good news about our business is if those budgets open up, if they see year-end spend coming strong and they have some budget to spend, we’re one of the first places they call because we can deliver a pretty short timeframe, whether that’s the end of this year or early next year, but we can capitalize on that upside if and when it comes and then keep executing and be there for our customers. That’s going to deliver the long-term growth we expect.

Tommy Mull, Research Analyst, Stevens: If we zoom out a bit to the serve-to-market growth rates that you’ve talked about, five to seven is the long-term compound annual growth rate. This is another common question I get from investors. If you use a pre-pandemic year as a base, let’s just say 2018 or 2019, and look at that average compound rate through, let’s say, 2025, you’re going to come in a little bit light of that five to seven range. The year you start and end the analysis can change the answer dramatically because there was quite a bit of volatility in between those two points in time. Just for that first cut that a lot of investors take where you come in a little bit light of the five, how would you address the skepticism there?

Nathan Winters, CFO, Zebra Technologies: Yeah, maybe just to start with the overall five to seven construct. If you look at how you break that down, you’ve got our core business, includes our mobile computing business, data capture, printing. If you include ELO in that now, it’s a $20 billion serve-to-market. We’re the market leader across the portfolio. We expect that to grow 4%-5%, again, over the cycle. We think of, even as a market leader, plenty of opportunities to continue to take market share and grow, whether that’s geographic expansion in places like Japan, Southeast Asia, where we have a lesser market share, or places like manufacturing, or which has driven a lot of our growth over the last several years within mobile computing is how do you enable more frontline workers with technology with different form factors.

Again, not every frontline worker like a greeter needs a fully ruggedized TCE7, might be a little bit overkill for that application. Having different form factors where you still want the technology so you can have the communication, the customer service that enables, those are all, again, incremental opportunities we see within that, opportunities we see in that four to five. You have our near adjacencies. Think ruggedized tablets, our supplies business, and I think more importantly, the RFID business, which has grown double digits here for the last couple of years. Again, growing high single-digit mix. The expansion business, whether that’s software or now really predominantly around the machine vision business, growing multi-billion dollar markets, still a relatively small part of the portfolio, but growing over time, double digits. It’s the mix of that to get to the five to seven.

Now, if you look back over the last five years, we always say over a cycle, and I see the only thing about the last five years, it’s been anything but a normal cycle, meaning we’ve had obviously two extraordinary years in 2021 and 2022. I mean, 2020 to 2021, we grew a billion dollars from four and a half to five and a half in one year. Coming out of that, you had absorption of all that capacity built out across the industry. Again, a gradual recovery out of that, but still, I’d say not back to fully recovered, whether we look at areas like manufacturing that still lag behind pockets within T&L. I mean, obviously, a lot of the T&L providers are going through a lot of restructuring and recalibrating of their business.

I’d say we’re still not back to what I would say a normalized level of large deal kind of refresh activity. We’ve had a few, but a lot of those refreshes that happened in 2021 and 2022 are still out there as incremental opportunity. Look, we look at where we’re at today and moving forward around the 5%-7%, I’d say a couple of key drivers. One, if you look at our mobile computing business, still the largest portfolio, it grew, the install base grew 35% from 2019 to today, which kind of puts you on that 5%-6% CAGR. Obviously, a lot of that happened in a two-year timeframe. That’s a huge install base to mine, to refresh. We think of opportunities, again, to drive that sustainable growth here over the coming years.

RFID and machine vision are a more meaningful part of the business today, both with, again, we think double-digit growth opportunities as we look out. I will go back to no matter where you’re at in the technology adoption, we provide the tools that enable customers to digitize, automate, drive productivity and efficiency across their business. Again, that’s not going away. That still gives us that belief that you can always pick the point you want to start from to start the analysis. We look here moving forward that there’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to continue to grow 5%-7% and drive attractive earnings growth on top of that.

Tommy Mull, Research Analyst, Stevens: Any questions from the audience so far? All right. Feel free to shoot up a hand and ask anything on your mind as we progress here. Nathan, you mentioned tariffs. At the peak, the expectation you had for gross profit headwinds in 2025 was $70 million. Most recently, you revised that down to less than $25 million. Suffice to say, there’s been some progress in mitigating the impact there. What are some of the moves you made here in terms of both price and cost? As you move forward, is it fair to assume that you’ve essentially mitigated all of the headwind, assuming no change to current policy?

Nathan Winters, CFO, Zebra Technologies: Yeah, I think this is one we’re really proud of in terms of I think the team’s done a phenomenal job of being proactive going back into late last year as kind of once you kind of knew where the pendulum was swinging from an administration to start thinking ahead of what moves do we need to make because these aren’t easy transitions. We will substantially mitigate this year kind of the net $25 million impact, substantially mitigate as we’re going to 2026. That’s a combination of the price actions we took in April, which are generating about a $60 million of annualized benefit. Plus, we’ll go to less than 20% of our North America volumes now out of China, which was over 80% pre-pandemic. Again, a lot of work diversifying the supply chain, moving around different parts of Southeast Asia.

I think not only has it helped mitigate the tariff exposure, but also I think built a more resilient supply chain in terms of having multiple sources and multiple areas to produce that. I think as we’ve learned, there will be something next. Not having that production diversified is a net good thing from a long-term sustainability. The team’s done a good job working with our suppliers to drive productivity and pricing where we can to help additionally offset. I think we have a track record going back to whether it was 2018, 2019, mitigating and doing this here now within less than 12 months. It is still obviously a dynamic environment.

Hopefully, as we were talking to an investor earlier, we do not have to talk about it next year, but I think the team’s ready for whatever it might come, we will take action to preserve profitability and mitigate as short as a timeframe as humanly possible.

Tommy Mull, Research Analyst, Stevens: I want to talk about AI. What are some examples you can give where you have deployed the technology in your organization and where do you feel you sit on this journey?

Nathan Winters, CFO, Zebra Technologies: Within the organization?

Tommy Mull, Research Analyst, Stevens: Mm-hmm.

Nathan Winters, CFO, Zebra Technologies: Yeah, I’m really excited. I think the team, we started out early on building our own applications in terms of letting teams kind of utilize the tool using whether it’s Microsoft Copilot, now using Gemini Enterprise from Google. We have our service center, our repair depot, our repair centers have used this a lot in terms of driving incremental productivity. I think where I’d sit here today is I think it’s just a journey in terms of how do you drive incremental productivity from Excel to a macro to an RPA now to how do you leverage AI for that next evolution. I mean, we’re using it in how do we prepare for earnings calls in terms of what questions could be asked, what’s the right way to answer. A good copilot to help out Mike in terms of how we prep about potential questions.

We’re using it in how do we provide better service internally on I have a question about AP, I have a question about T&E. I don’t need to ask a finance person. I can go directly to a large language model to get that answer and response. There’s a lot of and then we’re looking at different applications of how can you automate different parts of AP that are more complex and whatnot. The team’s using it across our software development of, again, how you drive real productivity and how we think about how we develop our own internal software. I think there’s a lot of great momentum, both bottoms up and tops down around folks being curious of how it can help provide. I think if everyone’s 10% more productive across 10,000 people, that’s a pretty powerful force multiplier.

Tommy Mull, Research Analyst, Stevens: If you think about your early initiatives to commercialize the technology for your customers, what are some examples you can give and what’s the pipeline look like?

Nathan Winters, CFO, Zebra Technologies: Yeah, so I think we’re, again, we’re really excited about the opportunity we have delivering AI solutions to our customers. We think we’re uniquely positioned to help deliver that for frontline applications. We’re not going to be the large language model hyperscaler, but developing applications that are unique and pointed towards a frontline worker. We’re in a unique position that given our presence, particularly with our mobile computing platform. We demonstrated some of this early at NRF last year, so the National Retail Federation Trade Show in January. We have multiple active proof of concepts in the market in terms of we think about our Zebra Companion Agents. Think of how do you provide better product recommendations, again, with a device.

You don’t have to be connected to the cloud, which is obviously a pretty big expense if you have a bunch of store associates connecting to the cloud every time you tap into the model. What wine do you recommend if you’re an associate working in a wine store? How can you give that real-time product? What’s a good Cabernet that’s at a price point of X? You don’t hope you find the right guy or gal. Someone can provide that. At NRF, Target showed a similar, which is they told the story around a store associate who’s a high schooler, happens to be walking down the baby aisle. A mother asked, "What’s a good formula for a baby with an upset stomach?" Terrified high schooler today, tomorrow could be someone who goes, "What’s a good formula?" Not only gets the response, but gets a picture.

What shelf is it on? If it’s not on the shelf, what’s the price point? And being able to do that real-time at their fingertips. The other one that’s, I think, pretty exciting is taking a picture of a shelf and instantaneously you can get there’s three items out of stock. Send the task directly to the back of the store to be fulfilled. No one needs to touch that workflow. What thing needs a price check? So again, take a picture. It can give you the 10 tasks and automate those directly to who’s the right person to execute. And then there’s some really cool applications for frontline delivery that we’re piloting with some large T&L providers of, again, proof of delivery. Obviously, when a package is delivered, it’s an important deal. And one thing is to take a picture and upload it.

It’s another thing, but you still have to check the box around proof of delivery that that package was delivered to Nathan’s doorstep. What if you just take the picture with the package with Nathan’s door and it knows it was my door, that was the right package, and it automatically completes that workflow without that delivery driver touching another button. Think of 20-30 seconds times every package. It’s pretty, again, it’s a lot of productivity you can generate. Those are all just, I’d say, different applications. I see the beauty is no different than what we do with anything. Some of these are going to be customers are going to do that themselves and build it themselves, and that’s okay. We’re going to provide the APIs and the platform to do that on.

We may develop some of that ourselves for those customers, or it could be partners doing it. I think that’s the beauty of the portfolio and the interoperability across those different applications that ultimately, if they’re doing it on our platform, that means they need our mobile computer. That probably means they need a new mobile computer with a higher processor and more memory in terms of an uplift and a higher price, as well as monetizing. Again, that’s kind of what we’re working through is what’s the monetization model where we develop it, we maintain it. What’s that monetization model look like? That’s going to be for certain customers as well.

Tommy Mull, Research Analyst, Stevens: I want to pause again in case anyone in the audience wants to shoot up a hand and ask a question, please do. All right. We’ll keep going here. You’ve mentioned RFID a couple of times, Nathan. That one, I think, has created some confusion among investors over the years. Maybe level set for us as to why you’re excited about the trend there.

Nathan Winters, CFO, Zebra Technologies: Yeah. I mean, look, we think RFID is a great growth opportunity. It’s been growing double digits now for the last several years. If you look, we have one of the broadest, if not the broadest, set of portfolio around RFID in the market, meaning we have fixed and mobile readers, printers that can print the tags with the inlays and embedded chips. We have our own tag business. We have worked with a whole host of ISV partners that can provide the solution that tie it all together.

I think we, whether it’s an Impinj, an Avery Dennison, or others in the market, we partner with them, sometimes compete a little bit, but I think it’s all within our best interest to expand the market, the addressable market, identify new use cases together because we don’t produce a chip, we’re not the inlay provider, but we want to read all of those and we do and work together on how do you bring those best solutions to our customers so that they can realize the value and continue to further adopt the technology. I think about it, and it’s unlocking use cases that just, quite frankly, aren’t available without it, meaning RFID is one of the only things where you can, again, think of theft.

Now we can read with proximity going, not just read it, but know is it walking out the door or in the door because just reading it and seeing it in general does not tell you a lot. If I know it is walking out the door, we are not preventing theft. If you know it is walking out the door, you know whether it was purchased or not. You can immediately update your perpetual inventory system, which is critically important if someone is thinking about buying something online, thinking there is one on the shelf and it is not really because someone just stole it. Right? That is a use case that, quite frankly, only RFID enables because you can see it and read it real-time as it walks out the door. Inventory accuracy on the shelf is a huge revenue driver or lost revenue for our customers.

Those are the kind of use cases. Think about produce, which seems fairly odd of why produce or fresh would be an area for RFID, but think of end of life, what do you need to replace? Is that bread old? The barcode will tell you it’s bread, what type of bread. Only a unique RFID identifier will know that bread’s been there for two weeks and whether that’s stale or not. Produce and fresh has been a new use case that a lot of folks are looking at because it’s a pretty high cost in terms of turnover and waste in the produce section.

Now if you know real-time how long those fresh items are there and when to move them and when to discount them and do all those different things, again, that’s a use case that, I don’t want to say only, but that RFID unlocks that you just didn’t have as an option before.

Tommy Mull, Research Analyst, Stevens: How about the concern that it’s a substitute for your core barcode business?

Nathan Winters, CFO, Zebra Technologies: Yeah. Every use case we looked at, it’s complementary, not cannibalizing the barcode. Right? If you think both of those examples, you still need the barcode somewhere in the supply chain to do that point transaction scan. The RFID label’s damaged. You still need to have that barcode on there as it. I think the number and then just the sheer value of most of the barcodes at this point are almost printed on the label as part of the process, basically at no cost. Again, every of those applications, they coexist together and RFID is just enabling some new application use case that was not possible with just the barcode because of the ability to read without line of sight directly to the label.

Tommy Mull, Research Analyst, Stevens: Let’s talk about another technology that you’ve added to the portfolio in recent years, machine vision. Can you just sketch for us your competitive positioning there? We’re now well into the Matrox integration, but to the extent you can give an update, that’d be great.

Nathan Winters, CFO, Zebra Technologies: Yeah. If I think about all the different expansion opportunities, Machine Vision is still one that we’re very excited about long-term. If you look at the history, we’ve started with organic investments in fixed industrial scanning. I think kind of one step beyond kind of a barcode reader or scanner, meaning reading barcodes at a high velocity from a fixed infrastructure. We added Adaptive Vision, which is a small software company, which has been an incredible asset that we acquired a couple of years ago to expand the library we have and the software platform. Matrox really brought us, I think, high-end inspection, so semiconductor, automotive presence around that high-end inspection. Photoneo, we added earlier this year, really specialized in 3D visioning. One of the faster-growing markets, but their specialty was, I think, guided robotic arms and being the eyes for a guided robot.

Where to go pick in a bin. It’s not the robot’s doing the picking, but the Photoneo is kind of the camera saying, "Here’s the depth and where to go pick." We now feel like we have, again, a comprehensive portfolio that we can go compete and win. The strategies, even back to the Matrox acquisition, have been diversifying. Matrox has a really strong presence in semiconductor as well as automotive, which have been through secular challenges here over the last couple of years. That is very similar to others in the industry. The focus has been on how do you expand into other new logos. It’s a long game you have to play there, meaning if you’re a customer as one of our competitors, you don’t just go rip out all the cameras and replace.

Something has to go pretty wrong to do that because obviously that’s a large disruption in your operation. Where you got to go win is new use cases, win those with proof of concepts, demonstrate the value on that use case. Traditional land and expand. Right? I think the team’s done a great job of building beachheads across new logos, demonstrating the value. We think 3D, the reason we like Photoneo is it’s a differentiated technology that, again, allows us to build relationships and then expand into accounts. We think about the portfolio we have today can compete across a spectrum of applications. We’ve invested a lot in go-to-market with the partner community. Now we need kind of the semiconductor market to stabilize, which we’re starting to see. It’d be nice to see automotive get back to growth, both of those get back to growth.

With the kind of, I’ll say, expansion we’ve seen across other use cases, I think sets us up for, again, get back to some nice growth here over the coming years.

Tommy Mull, Research Analyst, Stevens: Let’s talk about manufacturing for a minute, Nathan. That was one of the areas you called out as relatively weak or subdued. I’m just curious, have things gotten worse there or would you characterize it maybe just as stable at a low base? There’s probably a different answer you want to give for North America versus Europe. If you can, that’d be great.

Nathan Winters, CFO, Zebra Technologies: Manufacturing is weird where you look kind of long-term, all the secular trends are right for what we need and what we want to see in our business, meaning automation of the factory floor, track and trace across the supply chain, the need to automate to offset labor, right? The relocation of manufacturing around the world is always a new opportunity to embed yourself. Again, all of those are, again, strong secular trends of why we believe manufacturing is going to be a long-term growth driver for the company. I think that then you have the offset, which is the cyclical, and you see it with PMI and just I think that’s where you really see the uncertainty of the economy playing through with our manufacturing customers in terms of being hesitant to do big capital purchases or move forward on projects.

It is not as if it is declining. It is just not growing the way we just kind of see 1% growth. It has just been muted, stable growth, not what we would expect coming out of 2023 and 2024 where we would like to see more of a normal market growth rate in that mid-single digit. It has just been muted, stable growth over the last, call it, year and a half. I think you see that in that secular trend balanced with the cyclical volatility. It is somewhat global. You definitely see areas of pockets, Germany in particular, parts of Europe, automotive. We definitely feel it across automotive, both in our Machine Vision and our core business. I think this is where you have to play the long game.

I’ll go back to those secular drivers across that vertical market all favor what we do. We’re in a good position to do that. You just got to kind of work through here the short-term uncertainty and challenges.

Tommy Mull, Research Analyst, Stevens: Healthcare hasn’t been discussed, so let’s do that now. Typically, we would think of that as a high growth but small contributor to revenue. Describe some of the factors that would limit the adoption rate there.

Nathan Winters, CFO, Zebra Technologies: The limiting adoption, I’d say, is just more of the inherent nature of healthcare, meaning everything moves a little bit slower in terms of adopting technology. Very different in terms of, look, the beautiful thing about retail, e-commerce, even T&L, particularly around last-mile delivery, is they want a singular platform across their entire operating environment. Meaning you don’t want half of your stores in North America on an old version and the other half on a new. You want to get them all to the same platform so you have the same training, the same consumer experience across your operation. Healthcare still feels like you’re going hospital to hospital, department to department to get things fully deployed. Look, I spent a lot of time in that industry, and so it’s very similar to what it was probably a decade ago.

We have a portfolio of solutions that are custom-built, custom to healthcare, meaning they can withstand the cleanliness requirements. They are purpose built for healthcare. The need for the mobility, the efficiency, the communication across all the different departments within the healthcare environment are very similar to what you see in other vertical markets. It’s just a longer adoption cycle, penetration cycle. We’re still excited about that from a long-term growth, but I think that’s exactly what it’s going to be. Just long-term, stable growth and penetrate kind of one account at a time. Look, I’d love to be in a world where you see it grow 2x in a year, just unless something fundamentally changes in that industry. I think we’re still the long-term believer in it. ELO actually adds some new capabilities around, again, check-in in a hospital.

There are some new applications there that they’re excited about. They’re starting to see in the healthcare environment. Look, it’s going to be an important part of the portfolio, important part of the growth. I think it’s not going to be your needle mover in a year where it’s doubling in the size over a 12-month time horizon.

Tommy Mull, Research Analyst, Stevens: Last question, and then we’ll call it here. You’ve referenced omnichannel retail and e-commerce a couple of times, Nathan. There was a cycle there where early in the pandemic, as you referenced earlier, there were some big years of growth, and then there was a period of digesting some of the excess capacity. More recently, the trends there have been pretty positive. Where would you say we are in that build and absorb cycle?

Nathan Winters, CFO, Zebra Technologies: I think we’ve fully absorbed the capacity constraints of 2023 and 2024. I’ll give you a couple of anecdotes and examples around that. I mean, the beautiful thing about the business is if you have a large install base at any customer, whether that’s front of store, back of store, last mile, if they have a large install base, they’re buying new mobile computers every quarter, kind of a nice run rate business, which comes from adding new employees, new use cases around the fringes in terms of, "Hey, we gave it for our last-mile delivery drivers. Now we want it for the UPS store," right, as an example, or the postal store, carrier store. Adding new use cases along the way. Look, over time, these things are lost, damaged beyond repair for their own faults.

They need to buy more units to just keep their fleet up to date. That’s just a good recurring revenue that comes kind of out of these large install bases. We’re seeing that activity. I mean, that’s part of what’s drove the recovery here over the last 12 to 18 months is getting back to that, I’ll call it, normal level of business for those large install bases. I think the other one I went back to, this year we saw projects that were in the pipeline that they had budgeted, they moved forward with in terms of moving forward. We didn’t see push-outs, delays, whether that was tariff or budget-related, nor do we see, as we mentioned earlier, acceleration of projects because they said, "Hey, things are great.

Let’s accelerate projects that are in the pipeline. A lot of active conversations around where is the technology, what the refresh, it’s not just about, "Hey, the device is so old, it’s time because the battery’s dying." It’s about what incremental value, what are the new features it opens up over time, might have been 4G, 5G, Wi-Fi 6. Now it’s how do you embed, how we’ve embedded RFID on the device that opens up new applications or the more computing power that opens up those AI opportunities that I mentioned earlier. Those conversations are actively ongoing. I think once you get some of this uncertainty behind us, there’s a lot of added value that comes with refreshing your portfolio to the technology we have today, to the offerings we have today.

We believe that’s just going to provide more of that long-term growth driver here over the coming years that we’re excited about.

Tommy Mull, Research Analyst, Stevens: Nathan, we appreciate your time today. For everyone in the audience, we appreciate your interest in Zebra. I’m now the only thing between you and lunch, so I’m going to bow out. Thanks, everybody.

Nathan Winters, CFO, Zebra Technologies: Yeah, thank you.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.