Landis+Gyr Aktie

Welcome to the Landis+Gyr Q1 2026 Trading Update. Please note that the call will be recorded. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to turn the call over to our host, Christian Waelti, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and good afternoon, good evening, everyone. I'm Christian Waelti, Head of Investor Relations. I'm joined today by Peter Mainz, our CEO; and by Davinder Athwal, our CFO.

As you know, earlier today, Landis+Gyr issued an ad hoc release and related presentation on the Q1 FY 2026 trading update, which are available on our website. This session will follow the structure of the presentation, so we encourage you to follow along. We'll conclude with Q&A, and the operator will provide further instructions and where you will be able to ask questions. Please take a moment to review the usual disclaimer on Slide 2 of the presentation.

After this short introduction, I'd like to hand the floor over to our CEO, Peter Mainz.

Thank you, Christian. Good afternoon, and good evening, everyone. I'm here at our U.S. headquarters in Alpharetta with Davinder, our CFO, and we are pleased to provide you with an update on our first quarter performance.

With that said, let's now start with a review of the key strategic developments over the past 3 months. Let's move to Slide 3. As you know, we held our Capital Markets Day in New York on June 1, where we presented our growth strategy and midterm value creation plan for the next phase of Landis+Gyr. Following the successful divestment of our EMEA business, we are now operating with a clear strategic focus and the structure that is better aligned with our core growth opportunities. As part of this, we introduced our new segment structure around Connected Platforms and Grid Intelligence. We believe this new structure enhances transparency for investors and improves operational focus across the business. Connected Platforms brings together our intelligence endpoints, secure grid communications and deployments and life cycle services, while grid intelligence includes our grid operations software, data and analytics and managed and advisory services.

We have also put dedicated segment leadership in place with announcements forthcoming. This is an important step as we continue to sharpen accountability, execution and commercial focus across the organization. In parallel, preparations for U.S. listings are progressing well and internal readiness is essentially complete. As we have said before, we remain committed to maintaining our Swiss listing while also advancing our preparations for a U.S. listing to better align our capital markets presence with the majority of our operational business activity. And finally, the acceleration of our share buyback program through a fixed price offer underscores our commitment to returning value to shareholders following the successful closing of the EMEA transaction. I will come back to this in more detail later in the presentation.

With that, let's move to Slide 4 and look at the highlights of the first quarter. Overall, business performance in Q1 '26 was in line with our expectations. In our first fiscal quarter, which is seasonally low historically, net revenue was down 6.8% year-over-year, primarily due to the timing of project deployments. At the same time, we continue to see pipeline activity at record levels, and our backlog remained very solid at USD 3.8 billion. Importantly, Grid Intelligence now represents around 47% of our backlog and backlog in this segment increased by 5.4% compared to June fiscal year 2025. This underlines the continuous momentum we see around grid edge solutions and the increasing relevance of software and services in our business mix.

Our trailing 12-month book-to-bill ratio remained at 1x, which reflects continued demand across our core markets and supports our confidence in the business outlook. A key highlight of the quarter was our profitability performance. We achieved a record quarter adjusted gross margin of 37.4%, up a staggering 280 basis points year-over-year. This improvement reflects operational efficiencies as well as a favorable shift towards recurring software and services. Adjusted gross profit increased to USD 87 million compared to the prior year quarter despite the lower revenue base.

Taken together, the quarter demonstrates that while revenue timing can vary from period to period, the underlying business remains resilient, our margin profile continues to improve and our pipeline remains exceptionally strong. Based on our Q1 performance, backlog visibility and current business momentum, we are reiterating our fiscal year 2026 guidance.

I will now hand over to Davinder, who will take you through the financial performance in more detail.

Thanks, Peter, and good afternoon and good evening, everyone. I'll begin with our first quarter financial performance, starting with the order intake and backlog on Slide 5. Order intake for the quarter was $167 million compared to $171.7 million in the prior year period. While quarterly order patterns can vary, the underlying demand environment remains healthy and continues to track in line with our expectations. Our backlog remains one of the core strengths of the business. The majority is supported by long-term customer programs and contracted software and services, providing strong visibility into future revenue streams and reinforcing the quality of our backlog. Especially encouraging is the continued evolution of that backlog mix.

Grid Intelligence backlog increased 5.4% compared to June 2025 and now represents approximately 47% of total backlog. This reflects growing customer investment in grid modernization, software, analytics and grid edge solutions, areas that support a higher quality and more profitable revenue mix over time. Our trailing 12-month book-to-bill ratio remained at 1x, while commercial activity and pipeline development continue at healthy levels. Overall, we remain confident in both the quality of our backlog and our ability to convert that backlog into revenue over the coming quarters.

Turning now to revenue and margins on Slide 6. Revenue for the quarter was $232.3 million, a decline of 6.8% compared to the prior year. The decrease is primarily driven by the timing of customer deployments within Connected Platforms and was consistent with our expectations entering the year. More importantly, profitability improved significantly. Adjusted gross margin reached a record 37.4%, an increase of 280 basis points compared to the first fiscal quarter of 2025. This improvement reflects the same strategic drivers we have discussed previously, a more favorable mix, including a higher proportion of software and software-enabled services, continued operational efficiencies across our product portfolio and supply chain and disciplined execution across our customer programs.

As a result, adjusted gross profit increased to $87 million, up 1% year-over-year despite lower revenue. While revenue timing affected the quarter, the underlying trajectory of the business remains consistent with our expectations. The first quarter highlights the continued improvement in the quality of our earnings and the operating leverage inherent in our business model.

Turning now to our segment performance, beginning with Connected Platforms on Slide 7. Connected Platforms generated $116.5 million of order intake during the quarter, resulting in a trailing 12-month book-to-bill ratio of 1. This reflects continued customer demand for our products and services, combined with disciplined commercial execution. Revenue was $161.4 million, down 13.9% from the prior year period, reflecting the expected timing of project deployments and customer implementation schedules. While revenue was lower year-over-year, profitability improved materially. Adjusted gross margin increased 520 basis points to a record 34.3%. This improvement reflects ongoing operational efficiencies and disciplined execution across the portfolio. Our focus remains on converting backlog into revenue while continuing to drive profitable growth and margin expansion.

Turning to Grid Intelligence on Slide 8. Grid Intelligence delivered another strong quarter. Order intake was $50.5 million, representing year-over-year growth of approximately 45%. Revenue was $70.9 million, an increase of 14.8% year-over-year. Growth was driven primarily by software and SaaS-related offerings, further advancing our transition toward a more recurring and higher-margin revenue profile. Adjusted gross margin remained strong at 44.7%, demonstrating the attractive economics of this portfolio and the value of our continued investment in software and analytics capabilities. Grid Intelligence continues to become a larger contributor to both growth and profitability while increasing the recurring revenue content of the business and improving the predictability and durability of our earnings.

Turning now to guidance on Slide 9. Based on our first quarter performance, the strength of our backlog, our visibility into customer deployment schedules and the momentum we continue to see across the business, we are reiterating our fiscal year 2026 guidance. We continue to expect net revenue in the range of $1.075 billion to $1.125 billion. We also continue to expect adjusted EBITDA margin of between 14.5% and 15.5% of revenue. Overall, the first quarter reinforces our confidence in the underlying fundamentals of the business. The strength and quality of our backlog, continued commercial momentum and improving profitability support our outlook for the remainder of the year.

That concludes my prepared remarks. Thank you for joining us today and for your continued interest in Landis+Gyr.

I'll now hand it back over to Peter to discuss the share buyback plan. Peter, over to you.

Thank you, Davinder. Before we move on to Q&A, I'd like to provide a few more details on the acceleration of our share buyback program. Following the successful closing of the EMEA transaction, we remain committed to returning a total of USD 175 million of the proceeds to our shareholders. This is an important element of our capital allocation approach and reflects our confidence in the company's strategy, financial profile and long-term value creation potential.

Under the current share buyback program, we have repurchased approximately 1.2 million of our own shares over the past 9 months, representing approximately 4.2% of our share capital for a total consideration of approximately USD 74 million or CHF 60 million.

To accelerate the return of capital to shareholders, we intend to launch a fixed price offer for a total amount of up to CHF 50 million. The offer is expected to run over a 10-day offer period and the details of the offer, including the buyback notice are expected to be published on August 3, 2026. Following the completion of the fixed price offer, we intend to resume daily share repurchases to complete the remaining portion of the USD 175 million share buyback program. This accelerated buyback is fully aligned with the priorities we outlined at our Capital Markets Day, focusing the business, improving our financial profile, maintaining disciplined capital allocation and returning value to shareholders.

This concludes my remarks. Thank you again for joining us today, and we are now happy to take your questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question today comes from Akash Gupta at JPMorgan.

I got a couple. The first one is on the phasing of quarterly revenue growth this year. If you look at the midpoint of your full year guidance, that would roughly imply 6% year-on-year sales decline and Q1 was minus 7%. So can you please help us how should we think about the phasing in coming quarter? And would there be a prospect of returning back to growth in Q4? That's question number one.

Thank you, Akash. You prefer us to respond to them one by one? I can take the first one. I think if you recall at the year-end results for '25, when we gave the guidance for this year, we articulated that in the fourth quarter, the ramp-up of one contract up in Canada will be at the pace that will match the revenues from a year ago. So that one we will see at the final quarter of the year. And if you think of the transition of the revenues through the year to get to the guidance you just mentioned, the first half from this year and the first half from last year, it's a pretty decent match on the pattern throughout the year to arrive at the full year numbers. And I think we disclosed that in the fourth quarter will be quite strong with the contract up in Canada deploying at the pace of the contract it is replacing.

And my follow-up is on the -- what you are hearing from your utility customers. I think you mentioned that your pipeline is at all-time high, but we also hear from utilities that they are seeing big demand for power gen from data center customers. And there are some concern that they may prioritize their CapEx on adding more powertrain capacity to accommodate these hyperscalers and other industrial customers that are asking for more power from grid. So yes, just curious what you are hearing from your utility customers? And what should we expect for pipeline and conversion from pipeline into orders in the course of 2026?

So a couple of things. The pipeline, and I think I articulated that already the last -- our last call is the record pipeline that we have seen. I haven't seen a pipeline of that magnitude since I've been in that business, and it keeps on trending upwards. And what we really like about the pipeline is that we saw the evolution of the pipeline consistently was trending to the Revelo to the grid edge offering that we brought to the market. And today, when we talk about the record pipeline that we see, it's 100% made up on the electric side from customers and utilities transitioning from AMI 1.0 to AMI 2.0 to grid edge. So we really see the ROI that the utilities expect to be one that makes them go and purchase this offering.

So we see the pipeline continue to grow, and we're really excited how quickly it grew, and it's really all AMI 1.0 to AMI 2.0 transition. There is nothing out there anymore that was greenfield. So we like that one a lot. And then obviously, there is always this discussion on where does the money go. We are closely aligned with the distribution spending of utilities. That's still the part. That's the portion that continues to grow extremely nicely. And if you follow the U.S. utility industry over the past decade, there was a substantial amount of disaggregation of integrated utilities and usually generation entities are not the ones we talk to or transition entities. We usually end up talking to distribution entity where -- entities, where all they do is focus on distribution of electricity in the most resilient, most affordable, most efficient way. And that's where the majority of our offering is targeted to. So it's probably an overall discussion in the utility industry, but not for our customer base because predominantly, they serve the distribution aspect of the utility operations in the U.S.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question today comes from Louis Billon at Baader Europe.

So my first question is on the Grid Intelligence. Could you give us more details on the reasons for this decline in gross margin year-on-year?

Louis, this is Davinder. I can take that one. Yes, happy to respond, and thanks for the question. So I think it's really just a quarterly impact, right? So given that 1 quarter is not really representative of the full year, it's just a mix of what's in that revenue for the quarter that we're seeing it. So we don't expect that to continue. If you look at the full year guidance that we're reiterating, it kind of like unwinds itself over the course of the year.

Okay. And maybe on -- still on Grid Intelligence. What proportion of the revenue is derived from a subscription-based revenue versus maybe onetime revenue related maybe to installation? Is there also fees based on usage? How recurring is the revenue in Grid Intelligence?

So a couple of things. You mentioned installation services. To be clear, that's something that we really do not do. And if we would do it, it would certainly not be a part of that segment. We articulated our annual recurring revenue. I think that's what you're referring to for fiscal year '25 at $207 million. And so that is really the majority of that segment of Grid Intelligence segment. And if you look at the quarter trajectory of that segment on the revenue base being up quite nicely compared to a year ago of almost 15%, and I want to be clear that's 15% organically, you can think of that as a good proxy how the ARR is tracking upwards as well.

Our next question comes from Jeff Osborne at TD Cowen.

Just 2 quick ones on my side. Peter, I was wondering if you could just update us on the semiconductor and in particular, memory situation. Have things gotten any worse since the Capital Markets Day that you had a short time ago?

No, I think it's a couple of things. Obviously, if you think of grid edge devices, memories and processors create grid intelligence and not just for our industry, those prices have been trending upwards. If you look at the gross margin evolution for this quarter, we've been coming out ahead. We've been able to deal with it, I think, exceptionally well. We confirm the guidance. But I would also say that our supply chain expert team is probably more active in that space than they were 12 months ago. But I think that's part of the task. So I think it's quite similar to when our Capital Markets Day was just less than 60 days ago. So I would say similar situation that is carefully monitored. But obviously, this quarter, we managed to deal with it. We confirm the guidance. So we feel we have the right measures in place.

That's great to hear. And then I may have missed it, but it would be helpful if you could share what the units in backlog are and how many of the Revelo meters have been installed. I think in the past, you've talked about, I believe it was 2 million installed and $8 million or so in backlog. It would just be helpful as you progress to track those metrics, if possible.

Okay. I don't have the exact numbers available here. I think maybe there's a different way to supply them. I don't want to give you a wrong number because we have been shipping -- continue to ship Revelos at exceptionally high levels. So we can provide that on a later time. But I don't want to mislead on any numbers and give just a guesstimate if that is okay for you.

Our next question today comes from Akash Gupta again at JPMorgan.

I have a question on the gross margin for your Connected Platforms business. If you look at, there is a big jump in gross margin year-on-year, more than 300 basis points, but sequentially, they are stable. And when we look at the distribution of gross margin in 2025, there is a big jump in Q4 compared to the remaining 3 quarters of last year and margin in Q1 this year are flattish. So I just wanted to ask what was the factor behind this big jump in gross margins in Q4 of Connected Platforms that has sustained in Q1? And should we expect a similar level to continue for rest of the year?

So I can tackle one, if you think the big driver on platform is really the Revelo, our grid edge device, which as we go down the cost curve as we continue to ship more and more volume of that device that keeps also driving the margin levels down. That's kind of like the new product offering, the existing offering, we have cost optimized for 20 years. Here, we are fairly early on in the cost down curve, and we continue to have success with the volumes that we ship on the cost down that continues to show and certainly started to show a magnitude in Q4 of last year and is also transitioning into the first quarter of our fiscal year '26.

[Operator Instructions] Looks like there are no more questions. So this concludes the Q&A session, and I'll now hand back to management for closing remarks. Thank you.

Yes. Thank you again for joining us today. Appreciate your time and interest in Landis+Gyr, and I look forward to meeting all of you soon, either virtually and in person and definitely look forward to the next quarterly update call, which for us is a half year results call. Thank you so much.

This concludes today's call. Thank you, everyone, for joining. You may now disconnect.

Good morning. Welcome to Landis+Gyr's 2026 Capital Markets Day here in New York City, and to those of you who are joining us from the webcast from around the world. My name is Lisa Magnuson. I'm the Chief Marketing Officer of Landis+Gyr. I joined this January, and I joined because of our purpose, our passion and our people. I'm so excited to spend the morning with you all talking about the transformation that's happening around our company, obviously, throughout the industry and the significant opportunity we see ahead.

So of course, before we begin, we have our customary disclaimer slide. We're going to leave it up for a few seconds. And as you're reading that, I also want to let you know that there is a card on the table. There's a QR code that takes you to today's presentation and some other Landis+Gyr materials. Also, the WiFi is marketsite_guest2 and the password is "rewrite tomorrow," which is what we hope we're doing here today.

So as you can see, we have a really exciting agenda for you this morning. Throughout the day, you're going to hear a consistent story centered around 3 themes: focus, execution and creating value. You're going to hear from the rest of the leadership team about our intelligent energy vision, the transformation of our company and our plans for growth, our technology and innovative leadership and how we're creating long-term value.

That's going to be followed by an incredible panel that we're so excited to host today of 3 of our utility customers. These are utility leaders who are shaping the future of the industry. They're navigating unprecedented changes while building the foundation for our future. This is an incredibly exciting time to be in the industry and to be here today. So what we'd like to do now is roll a video and let you see what our future looks like.

[Presentation]

And now it's my pleasure to introduce our CEO, Peter Mainz.

Hello. Welcome. Good morning, and again, welcome to our Landis+Gyr Capital Markets Day. This is a big moment for us as Landis+Gyr and this is quite an exciting way to start the week. I really -- I will promise, I will try to be very brief, and I really only have 3 things I want to share with you today. First, who we are, what we do and our vision for the future. Second, our market leadership and our opportunity. And third, our focused plan for growth to create long-term value.

So with that, let me get started. Today, we are a $1.2 billion trusted provider of energy technology, and we are listed on the Swiss Stock Exchange, and we have about 3,100 people across the world. And we've been delivering technology to utilities for 130 years today. If you go back 130 years, Thomas Edison was still at his prime at this time.

Our footprint today is global, but we are focused on execution locally, and we have utility customers in about 40 countries across the world. We're connecting more than 127 million intelligent devices and 1 in every 3 AMI devices is included in that number. And we also have 33 million cloud-based devices that are connected to -- cloud-connected endpoints under contract that are connected to the cloud and that delivering ARR and support our [ AAR ].

We continue to remain committed to make our future a better place. And just last year, we helped to conserve about 8 million tons of CO2 emissions just over a period of 12 months. And all of that is made possible by our leading technology platform, a platform that includes grid edge devices, a platform that includes sensors and applications, a platform that includes communications technology and a platform that includes cloud-based software. And all of that is backed by the very best support and delivery team in the industry.

We serve about 2,000 customers today across the globe from the very large investor-owned utilities to the municipality and the co-ops. If you happen to live in the state of New York and if you happen to live in the National Grid territory, we support National Grid. We support in Massachusetts, National Grid there as well. If you happen to live just across the Hudson River in New Jersey, PSE&G is a utility that comes to mind that we support today. And we are also honored to have several more utilities here in the room, and you will hear from them in the panel later on in the presentation today.

Throughout this period of time and for our customers, we have also enabled multiple waves of grid modernization. That included the foundational energy metering that really put us on the map 130 years ago, included AMI 1.0. It included secure communications, and it also included gas technology, ultrasonic gas technology at scale. And more important, we also created the category that today we referred to as grid edge. And this is the technology to this very day is driving the industry. In a very simple way to think of us, we are deeply embedded in the operating model of utilities for generations now.

If we think of utilities today, they are facing absolutely -- they are facing forces unlike anything that they have seen ever before. The pace of change is simply unprecedented. This is creating very unique challenges, but more importantly, it's also creating the conditions for long-term transformation in the industry. Think of electrification at scale, think of unrelenting load growth. Just think about the energy requirements for hyperscalers. Data and digital is expanding exponentially. AI, in a way, is just the beginning. And they have to serve a modern prosumer, professional consumer. This is very likely all of us here in the room. I am certainly one of those consumers that utilities are serving today. And all with reliability, resilience and security requirements and expectations that have never been higher in the industry before. And in order to tackle all those challenges, I just listed really a new category of smart industry is required.

If you think of the modern grid today, it must sense, it must communicate, it must respond, it must control and all of that has to be done in real time. The grid, it must be both connected and it must be intelligent. And intelligence requires trusted data, trusted data to fuel AI applications, to fuel analytics, to fuel new software. And trusted data, in turn, requires secure connected infrastructure that is embedded across the entire grid of a utility. And we at Landis+Gyr, we call this intelligent energy.

And here, we make it possible with an intelligent technology platform that delivers across 2 segments. Those are 2 new segments for us. First, connected platform. In this new world, everything starts at the edge, or as we like to say, you simply -- you have to be at the edge. These are secure grid edge intelligent devices. Think about our Revelo deeply embedded in the utility operations or ultrasonic gas solution as well.

In fact, when I come back to the Revelo again, we have 12 million of Revelo under contract in our backlog as we speak and we have already shipped and deployed more than 4 million Revelos, those devices delivering value to the utilities as I stand here in front of you. Connected Platforms, just think of them, they are the trusted, they are the secure and they are the standard-based foundation of our next segment. The second segment, we call it Grid Intelligence. And this is our software, our analytics, our AI applications that run real-time grid data to create operational insights and even more important today, operational control. Later on, Amith will give much more detail on the technology side, how we make that happen. But more important, I really want to give you a real-time at scale example how this is taking place today as we speak.

For that, we're moving to Japan, TEPCO. TEPCO is one of the largest utility groups on earth. They serve the Greater Tokyo area and the scale is that of multiple large utilities here in the U.S. or anywhere. And they partnered with us to deploy more than 30 million connected endpoints for the very initial AMI rollout. But already today, this expanded -- has expanded to much, much more than AMI. It includes electric, it includes gas, it includes water, it includes EV, it includes solar, it includes battery, electric panels and many, many more battery-operated devices. Today, this is the largest and most reliable IoT network in the world, and it's handling more than 4 billion transactions every single day, 4 billion.

Let me put that a bit in perspective what 4 billion transactions really means. This single system covers about this territory of the State of Maryland here in U.S., but it handles 3x the transaction volume that's happening in the U.S. and Canada for every AMI deployment today in every single day, 3 times every single day. So this is really what intelligent energy looks like at scale. We are obviously exceptionally proud that we've been delivering on this partnership with TEPCO for the past decade, and we are now embarking on the next generation of technology for them in TEPCO.

But more important, I believe that every utility can achieve results similar to what TEPCO has achieved. And I believe this is especially important as we enter a period of historic demand growth. If you think of utilities, think of them as the enablers of economic growth, think of them as the enablers of prosperity. They are critical for many elements of our core infrastructure, think of areas like AI, think of hyperscaler and to this very day, manufacturing. The AI data build-out, that's on the front page of every news is massive load growth -- driving massive load growth for them, especially in areas in U.S., in the south of the U.S., in the Midwest of the U.S. and the Virginia and D.C. corridor.

Overall, when we look at load growth data, we see about 2.8% annual load growth up until 2035. And this compares to a load growth that was basically nonexistent over the past decade, zero load growth for a decade, exponential load growth now over the next decade, 2.8%. And you will find many analysts that even show a substantially higher number, and you also find many analysts that go well beyond 2035 up to 2050 with substantial load growth numbers.

In the U.S., the spending from IOUs alone is expected to grow by $1.4 trillion, $1.4 trillion over the next 5 years. That's a 20% increase. And here, at Landis+Gyr, we are exceptionally well positioned to grow and take share during this investment cycle in our industry.

Let's talk a bit about our markets. We are focused on markets today that are not only large and very durable, but most importantly, we focus on markets that are highly profitable and markets that are growing. We see a serviceable, addressable market for us of about $120 million (sic) [ $120 billion ]. And of that, about $18 billion is our obtainable market just over the next 36 months. And more important, we are laser-focused, and we are exceptionally well positioned in those markets. We are the #1 in the U.S. We are the #1 in Australia. You heard me talk about the largest deployment in Japan. We have strong businesses -- exceptionally strong businesses across North America, South America and Asia Pacific, and we have the strongest technology platform in the industry. So let me be very clear. We are playing to win. We expect to increase our share as we continue to grow our top line and increase our profitability.

Growth. We have a very disciplined plan for growth, and it starts with a focus on the growth businesses. Just last fiscal year, we completed our exit from EMEA. We are now fully focused on markets where we have a leadership position, where we can drive profitability and markets that are growing. And the pipeline that we're looking at is the strongest pipeline I've ever seen since I've been with Landis+Gyr or since I've been in the industry. And this, for us, the pipeline is really driven by the very strong adoption of our Revelo, you heard me talk about the numbers before, and the beginning of the adoption and start to see in our pipeline as well as our offering around gas. These are extremely highly profitable businesses, oriented -- all businesses focused around our grid edge intelligence.

And to support that, we have structured our business now around 2 segments to drive the future of intelligent energy. We call them Connected Platforms and Grid Intelligence. And this allows us to be much more closely aligned how our customers are transforming themselves. Third, we've also created a purpose-built organization of a world-class leadership in place, but it doesn't stop with the leadership team. Our global team is doing an exceptional job in every aspect of our business every single day. And many of them, you will meet later on, and they're actually with us here in the room.

And we're also investing in many strategic areas like software and AI. If you think of Landis+Gyr today, about 1/3 of our employees are actually dedicated to software, 1/3. So we have 1,000 engineers -- 1,000 software engineers. Internally, we continue to implement productivity and digital transformation exercises as well. And today, we are much leaner and much more efficient and a much more modern organization.

And finally, we're here at NASDAQ, as many of you know, and we have articulated, we have completed also our internal preparations for listing, and we can now initiate the listing according to the plans that we have publicly communicated.

But all of that transformation, all of that growth builds on what we have completed over the past 18 months, substantial transformation that we undertook and that we have completed. We just go into '24. 18 months ago, we were extremely complex organization with growth and margin dilutive businesses across the EMEA territory. The return on capital in that geography was breakeven at best, and that led to EBITDA margin barely touching on 10%.

'25, we took significant steps to focus our company, successfully divested the EMEA business. We returned to top line growth in our franchise geography here in the U.S. And we have a much more focused revenue profile today, that is about 50% more profitable than it was just 18 months ago, that is 5-0, 50% more profitable than 18 months ago. Today, in '26, we're much more aligned, and we're executing on our growth plan. I've talked about these 2 segments. We have implemented the segments that support our growth. We have a clear focus on driving growth and increasing our profitability. And today, now we already have a return on capital that is well in excess of 30%.

But we're not stopping there. We're also investing in R&D, and we continue to drive innovation, and we're going to expand in several of our growth areas. I want to start with the core because we continue to invest in our core platform at the edge. This investment still continues to drive higher ASP. It allows us to expand wallet share with our customers, and it enables us to win market share. But we're also innovating on top of our core gas sector as well is going for a massive transformation as well.

And we are extremely well positioned, in particular, in combination utilities here in [ U.S.,] gas and electric combination utility. One utility that comes to mind is WEC Energy in Wisconsin, and they have been a very great customer example for us. We've been working with them for about 2 decades. And throughout this period, we deployed more than 1 million of intelligent devices across electric and gas. And they are now going forward, they will deploy 200,000 of our ultrasonic gas sensors. But we're also managing their network, and we have just extended to manage their network throughout 2038. That, of course, delivers ARR and also enables us to continue pull-through on our connected platform devices.

The next category we continue to invest in R&D and innovate is flexibility management. Think of flexibility management, that's a dynamic orchestration of new and distributed loads across the grid. An example that comes to mind here, that is facing an exceptional amount of new load, is Rappahannock Electric Cooperative. They're going from 4.2 gigawatts today, and they will add 26 gigawatts to that in the very near future, that is a 700% increase, a staggering 700% increase. And we're very happy to have Peter with Rappahannock Electric Cooperative as part of our panelists, and he will talk about the challenges and the opportunities created by that growth.

And finally, we continue to work with our customers and also of our partners. We are developing new software and developing new AI applications. We have over a dozen of those applications available today. And you heard me talk about the millions of Revelo meters that are deployed now in the field, and that is a foundation to roll out our application at scale as well, and we have started to do so.

You heard me talk about the focus on execution, you heard me talk about innovation, but the combination leads to much stronger results for Landis+Gyr. We have a broad-based backlog, a backlog that continues to be at record levels, and we have the strongest pipeline that I have seen in the industry. And this is really the foundation for everything that we're building on.

We have our new segments. Our segments are focused to deliver a higher growth and a higher profitability, substantially improved mix. And overall, we're looking at mid-single-digit CAGR growth for revenue over the next 3 years. And within the segment Grid Intelligence, we're looking at double-digit growth for this newly created segment.

Within Grid Intelligence, we have software and software-enabled services that already today are very much margin accretive, and they help increase our profitability. Talked about the top line growth. Top line growth drives operational leverage, it lowers our cost, and this continues to contribute to a much more profitable company.

Our adjusted EBITDA growth is substantially outpacing the growth that we see on the top line. And this, in turn, gives us a much stronger financial profile that allows us to continue to invest in growth, both organically and inorganically, should we elect to do so and return cash to our shareholders. Later on, you'll hear from Davinder, how our much simpler business that we have created today has a much, much stronger financial profile.

Trust. Trust in our industry is an important concept. In our industry, trust is simply paramount. And we have earned our position as the most trusted utility partner through a century of execution and working with them. When infrastructure is at the heart of both revenue generation and reducing operational cost, it simply becomes mission-critical for our customers. In a simple way, when you think about it, 40% of the electric revenue in the U.S. starts with our devices and connects through our infrastructure. And this level of trust is clearly a competitive advantage for us here in Landis+Gyr.

The proof point, in fact, we have 100% retention of our large customers over the past 15 years, 100% retention. And the flywheel that you see here behind me creates more value for both us and our customers. An example, again, that comes to mind here at Oncor in Texas. We've been working with Oncor for over 20 years now. We started to deploy and connect nearly 4 million devices. And more importantly here, we have been their innovation partner ever since in areas like MDMS and really important in Texas outage management.

The list goes on with similar expansions and being the innovation partner, Hydro-Quebec up in Canada; PPL, that's here with us today, predominantly in Pennsylvania; and National Grid, and that's just to name very few of the many partners that we have, we have been able to expand. But it's also important to understand that this trust also allows us to win business that was not our business, to win business from competition. I can't share the name yet, but just in the last quarter, we added to our backlog, a large Midwestern IOU service territory, and we -- a service territory that where we were not the incumbent.

And ultimately, the combination of everything I just mentioned, it shows up in our top line. Across the industry, when you go back to '25, we were the only major player that showed substantial top line growth in '25. When I think of partnerships, we really do cherish the partnerships with our customers. We also understand the responsibility, and this is absolutely embedded in our culture and in everything we do every single day.

Allow me to wrap this up for you here. We have a clear vision for the future, and we are creating long-term shareholder value. We are the intelligent energy leader today. We're delivering the industry's most trusted platform. We operate large and profitable markets. We have created a focused business, and we possess an exceptionally strong financial profile already today. We see the strongest pipeline, have the strongest pipeline that I have seen since I've been with the company, and we're absolutely relentlessly focused on execution.

So it's an absolutely incredible time to be in our industry. We're really helping to lay the foundation for the next generation of our industry. But it also represents a very unique investment opportunity to invest at a transformational company in a transformational time in our industry. I could not be more excited about Landis+Gyr, I just could not, or as we call it, the new Landis+Gyr. Thank you.

I'd like to ask PV to come to the stage and talk a bit in more detail how we deliver to our customers. PV? Thank you.

Thanks, Peter. Good morning, everyone. You got to help us here a bit. You need to pick the energy up. So thank you very much for all of you to be here. I'm very excited to be in this industry at this stage. I've spent 20 years in the industry, all of it at Landis+Gyr. And I used to be on the other side of the industry, which was with oil and gas. So I came to the good side of the industry.

Peter mentioned some growth numbers that are absolutely stunning. For years, this industry had no growth. We got up every year and planned the business around mostly zero growth. And in many cases, it was just negligible growth. If you look at the numbers he talked about, $1.4 trillion, 3% growth and all the way into 2035 and 2050. Those are things that never happen in this industry. For the first time, it feels good to be in the power grid industry and get the love from the folks that are following companies in this sector. It really is quite amazing.

I'm excited about Landis+Gyr for a few things. The new Landis+Gyr where we are really focused on our customers, focused on profitable geographies, and the other one is our backlog running at about $4 billion and our pipeline is very strong. And the focus is on the business here, especially in the U.S., which is more than 80% of our business. And I'm really, really excited about that because that's where the attention is and that's where the focus is.

So today, I'm going to talk about 4 topics, but it's actually one storyboard. And it's all connected, no pun intended. The connection is that utilities are grappling with the complexity in their system, and they have to prioritize the investment. The second bit is Peter spent quite a bit of time on customers and partnership and focus, but I'm going to walk you through how we're going to -- how we deliver value to our customers. And trust is an important piece of that, and that's what my team does. But investments in our business don't go without unlocking value for our customers. So we're going to spend a bit of time on how Landis+Gyr, especially with the next-generation AMI is unlocking value for our customers. And the last bit is how are we going to plan to deliver all the $4 billion that are in our backlog plus the new pipeline that we see ahead of ourselves in a flawless way.

Our entire management team plus all our employees were just most recently in Anaheim. We hosted 500 customers as part of our user group conference that we have here every year in the U.S. We had many panel discussions, met with many people and resoundingly, 5 things sort of boiled to the top. The first one is how do they still manage weather and weather-related events due to power outages. This is still front and center of all our customers' minds. This also increases their costs. So one of the things that they have to think about is how does the system provide precision location so that they can dispatch trucks and resolve it. And they have to do this in an environment where they have to keep OpEx down and also improve customer satisfaction.

The third bit is what is also important on their mind because it's not just about customer satisfaction, but it's also affordability. All of us are faced with increased input costs in our business and how do we manage this without passing it through our customers. This is just not a unique thing that's only in our industry. I think everybody is faced with this.

But the last 2 is something that we never saw in the industry before. Previously, the top 3, you would see it almost on every chart. Now the ability of managing EV, PV solar, batteries is an important aspect of the business. It creates grid complexity. We know that when we introduce these things, it does cause power quality and power reliability issues for our customers. And that becomes important, and we have to manage it. But this is also an opportunity. For the first time, we could use these precious megawatts to figure out at the distribution level, how can we give flexibility back to the grid. If we do that, we actually delay costly upgrades for our customers. And this is an important tool that I believe Landis+Gyr's AMI system provides in AMI 2.0.

But in the past, customers dealt with this in various ways, probably through various functions within their utility, maybe even different pieces of software and tools. They need one platform. The ability to bring infrastructure data with intelligence is key to success in the next generation of AMI. And that is where Landis+Gyr plays. We connect the physical infrastructure of the grid with insights, providing them valuable controls that they can use to manage the grid. And they need that today, and we provide that today to our customers.

Peter talked about trust and customer partnerships. But I actually want to wind back a bit. Utilities just don't buy a product. They buy a trusted partner that will stick with them for 15, 20 years. Think about the life cycle of their investments today. They buy this -- in their mind, this has to last between 12 to 20 years in some cases. And that's where Landis+Gyr steps in. We have a unique approach in the industry.

When we land a contract, we dispatch teams that works very closely with our utility customers. We put our teams with their teams initially in the first 5 years, and then we grow together. In the second bit, once the deployment is done, we operate it together. Our systems are closely embedded in the utility operations daily that they have to perform. The third bit is as we progress through this 15-year relationship, we also have to bring innovation in. We have monthly meetings, quarterly business reviews where we review each of those road maps because they're interested in Landis+Gyr's road map so that they can invest in their business and we need to see how the load is growing in their territory. So this becomes a huge bit of what we do.

So if you look at this entire cycle of 15 years, it's just not a one-and-done deal. So Peter talked about 4 million endpoints at Oncor. When we signed that deal, it was 3 million endpoints. 15 years later, Dallas grew. Dallas grew rapidly. I mean, in terms of gigawatts, their peak demand today is 30 gigawatts, but they plan to be at 270 gigawatts. That's the size of growth we are seeing in all these major cities. And we do this across the board with every utility customer.

As Peter said, we have not lost a single major customer. Our relationships are 15 years long or 20 years long. It's multi-decades. The logos that you see there is a very trusted, committed partnership. At all of these places, we have our people co-located with them. In the Northwest at Puget Sound Energy, we actually manage most of their operations today. So we land, we expand, we deepen the relationship, and we continue to provide value over the long periods of contracts that we have. When we are done and they're going into the next generation, like they are with AMI 2.0, that's the first place they look at us as Landis because the relationship is one that's trusted, and they want us to grow with them.

But we have to unlock value in the next-generation AMI. I'm really very proud of the Revelo platform. It is really a grid sensor. It's real-time information connected to a platform, giving valuable insights. For a moment, if you think about 1 million endpoints in a city, installed, real-time information, always on, we become the Google Maps for the grid. Think about it for a minute. It sees congestion. It knows where things went wrong. And we are able to use that information and immediately dispatch trucks and resolve it or fix problems. That is the new world that we live in.

So I'll give you 2 examples. Resilient grids. Resiliency is an important piece for our customer. In 2024, Clay Electric, which is located in Florida, was hit with 3 hurricanes in 1 season. They are right at the corridor where hurricanes happen. They used our system to pinpoint exactly where these outages happened and were able to dispatch trucks and crews and fix them. Last year, at Oncor, they were able to avoid 25,000 truck rolls because they were able to pinpoint exactly where these things happened. At $100 a truck roll, that is huge savings for the utility. And we do this across the board for all our customers in the next generation.

I talked about grid flexibility. Today, Landis+Gyr delivers 9 gigawatts of load reduction every year. This is across many customers. 9 gigawatts is like 9 million homes being powered in a single day, and we're able to provide that. So our technology is far superior and customers are adopting it at a rapid pace. As Peter mentioned, 12 million Revelos already contracted.

Our customers are looking forward to us deploying in a flawless execution model. We have world-class manufacturing that is supported by fantastic supply chain folks working tirelessly every day across our geographies. Peter talked about 1,000 engineers in the company. In research and development alone, we have 750. And all of them are working on the next-generation platform. This is about Grid Intelligence. This is about apps. And this is about how we service our customers better. This accelerates innovation and time to market, and we are very proud about the new apps that we're releasing to the market.

Our customer delivery is a core competency for us. Earlier on, I went through some of that. We operate on a hub-and-spoke model in the U.S. We have 20-plus brick-and-mortar locations serviced by 500 of our Landis+Gyr people located very close to our customers. And this is very unique in the industry. This has been proven at scale. During COVID, we had zero interruption. And that is something that we're very proud of.

Peter talked a lot about focus. For me, with $4 billion in backlog and a fantastic pipeline that I see ahead, it's important that we flawlessly execute. I'm very excited about the intelligent platform we're delivering to the market. Our customers are really interested in the solution, and we have a lot of activity around it. We have strong partnerships, trusted long term. Really looking forward to working with them. We deliver valuable ROI for AMI 2.0 next-generation business cases that are required. And lastly, we have proven this at scale. So I'll leave you with where I started: strong backlog, a huge pipeline of opportunities, and that's the journey we're leading.

Now I welcome Amith Kota, our Chief Technology Officer and Chief Product Officer for Landis.

Thank you, Prasanna. Good morning, everyone. My name is Amith Kota. I am the Chief Product and Technology Officer at Landis+Gyr as Prasanna introduced me. I've been with the company 11 years. I cannot be more excited than today where we are in the last 11 years. Peter talked about how our market is shifting, our vision for the company. Prasanna talked about how we're executing in partnership with our customers. What I'm going to walk you through today is the engine which powers our vision and execution. Over the course of the next 15 minutes, you'll hear 3 things from me. One, how are we enabling intelligent infrastructure at scale with our platform. Two, how do we take that enablement and demonstrate that our platform compounds in value. The last one is this is nothing in future. This has already started. So I'm going to show you why this wave is already here, and it's in motion.

Peter mentioned the 4 or 5 challenges utilities are facing today, right? Customer affordability. Bills are rising for a lot of customers. Two, grid resiliency and reliability. Utilities are worried how do they refresh aging infrastructure and they're planning to make that investment. Three, storms happen, how well are their grids resilient. And lastly, all of us know AI and data center growth is challenging them with respect to additional demand for energy.

But what we have figured out is one thing is common across all the 4, which is utilities need better visibility at edge of the grid where the supply of energy meets the demand. The only place where utilities get what the demand is, is at the edge, where consumers consume energy. And that's where we sit, the intersection of customer and the grid. And our platform is purpose-built to provide this visibility and control.

And our platform has 3 layers. Peter talked about this. Connected endpoints. What do they mean? These are electric, water, gas, street lights, home energy management devices, panels, which sit at the edge of the grid, which are sensing, processing, computing and arriving at decisions at the edge of the grid in real time. These generate data at unprecedented levels. Yes, there is value to make decisions at the edge, and we do that.

But utilities also need a system-wide view of what is happening. And that is where our second layer comes in, which is secure communications. Data is of no value if you can't move it securely or you can't move it in real time and fast. And what we have enabled with our secure communication fabric is this is the only one in the industry, which has the ability to move this data through a fabric of a radio, a cellular and a fiber-based networks. That means every one of our endpoints is connected always in real time. And that's our moat. That's the foundation we established in every utility we go into. That leads us to all the data which is generated needs a brain. And that is our Grid Intelligence. This is where we're very excited.

We have enabled AI capabilities, both at the edge to make those decisions and at a cloud and a cloud of choice of our utility customers that can process this data at scale like nobody else. TEPCO was a great example. And we're able to derive insights, decisions and control capabilities for our customers. Very excited about this, and I will talk more about in a second.

What does these 3 layers do? They're underpinned to be connected into the utilities ecosystem. So we're very well connected with these 3 pillars into utilities daily operations, whether they are planning where to place a solar farm, how do they engage customers and then how do they operate the grid from a reliability perspective and how do they engage customers offering them new programs. So our platform underpins everything what utility needs to do from an operations perspective. That's why we're very excited.

We continue to invest 8% of our revenue into R&D. What that has done for us is in the last 3, 4 years, we have enabled industry-first breakthroughs from an innovation perspective. And this is a clear moat for us and differentiates us from our competition. You heard about Revelo. I'll talk to you a little bit more in detail what that is because I think it is important, why we are so different from every one of our competitors. Today, utilities capture energy consumption every 15 minutes, and they get to see how the voltage is delivered to a customer every 15 minutes. Commercial, maybe 5 minutes.

What we have done is we capture 1 megahertz. What does that mean? So to give you an example, utilities are taking a picture every 15 minutes. We take 1 million pictures every second. That's the differentiator. It is like watching a 4K video every second. What does that do? It gives us visibility of everything which happens at every point of service for a utility. It tells us is there a challenge with customers' connection. It tells us how much energy they are consuming. We can start seeing signals of things which are turned on and off inside the house. We can start seeing if there is problems through the entire grid because we were able to connect all these signals from multiple endpoints. That is what we are so excited about. This platform is going to give visibility to utilities for the next wave of all the changes they're going to go through.

We didn't stop there. We added edge compute on top of that sensor. What does this do? We have enabled AI capabilities at the edge. So we not only are looking at the data, we're processing it. We're looking at these patterns, and we're recognizing the patterns, and we're able to automatically heal. This is the first step towards a futuristic vision of a lot of utilities called autonomous grid.

We didn't stop there, that's electric. We've also innovated in gas. You heard about Peter. We have a long history of gas. We have delivered 16 million devices globally over the last 20 years. We took that knowledge, and we brought the same platform to the U.S. Our differentiator in this market, we are the only ultrasonic gas sensor to be approved by the Department of Public Service here in New York, industry first. So we are very excited. This is going to fuel our growth, as you will see subsequently when Davinder presents the financials.

What this does is this establishes a foundation for us in every conversation we have with the utilities and every deal we do with the utilities. Once we have this platform, the capabilities are endless, the growth is endless because it all comes down to how you take this data and drive intelligence and drive ability to control and orchestrate, as you heard. This is where our Grid Intelligence segment comes into play, and we have started to enable all these into apps for our customers. We have released 12 apps to the market. And we actually are deploying at National Grid here and PPL, the first 5 at scale.

I'll talk to you about a couple of apps. These are not small. These are solving complex problems. Prasanna talked about locating faults in the grid. Today, utilities are able to see faults at a substation level or a feeder level, what they call macro. They're not able to see if there's a fault in a house any of us live in. And we are here to enable that with our applications. We actually are able to look at data across multiple parameters, which come through power lines, and we're able to correlate across multiple territories to give utilities fault location exactly to where it is all the way to the home or where they meet with the customer.

This is game changing because this changes completely in the operational models. They will be able to reduce their OpEx and deploy that capital into the assets where they need to with respect to growth. This is where we are seeing a lot of feedback and acceptance of our platform.

You heard about DER orchestration. And there's a demo. I would ask you to go see after this when we take a break. We have partnered with Sense to deliver visibility of every customer about their energy consumption. And utilities get to see an aggregated view of all this consumption. What does this mean? Utilities are able to plan affordability programs by combining all this data by load type. If a customer has a thermostat, they get to see how much energy is being consumed across their territory by their consumers for thermostats and are able to offer special rates around affordability. Second thing, we can even predict whether the HVAC has an issue that needs to be replaced. So utilities are becoming better engaged with their end customers.

Last but not least, I can go on and on, on this, by the way, because I'm very excited about this, is wildfires, wildfire storms. These are all top of mind of utility executives. You'll probably hear them in the panel next is how do you know when a power outage happened and how quickly can you restore because if they don't restore fast enough, they will be making the front page of the newspaper. So this is where we come in, and we're helping with apps, which gives them full visibility into where those outages are, how quickly can they manage their operations to restore power. And this gives them an unprecedented view and visibility and control.

Why am I really excited? I am part of a transition where utility used to be reactive. Now they're going to be more real time, more predictive, more future. This is what excites me. And that's why I work for Landis+Gyr and I come in every day to make this with my team. Okay. You may say, "Hey, this is all great. Great technology. You're excited, we get it. How does this add value, right?" This is where I said our foundation, which is the platform when we deploy utilities and the Grid Intelligence capabilities really set up us well from a structural point of view.

But the economics come with 4 things. One, you heard from Peter, we have 127 million devices in the field today. We've already started to transition them into our platform. Number two, we also are expanding our markets into gas, water and other devices, and you will see some of the examples. Three, once we have these devices, the economic starts with grid intelligence, adding a layer of applications and monetizing those applications.

And we didn't stop there. We said, we -- our focus is to make this an open ecosystem. Utilities should be able to write applications on this platform. Partners should be able to write applications on this platform. This is where we have engaged some of the industry-leading technology companies who offer solutions to utilities and beyond to partner with us to enable more applications on our platform and gives us the ability to monetize them. For example, Mitsubishi offers a lot of grid devices to utilities across substations and reclosers, but they are all, I would say, not smart devices. What we are partnering with them is put our smartness into that device. Now utilities have a better visibility of every asset in the grid. It helps us monetize even beyond our device. And that is the beauty of this.

As I started, I said I will cover 3 things. One is show you that our platform is enabling infrastructure, intelligent infrastructure at scale and we are with 127 million devices and more to come with our backlog. Two, revenue expansion is going to happen with 2 vectors. One, all the applications and intelligence are built on top of our platform is a one big growth vector for us. Number two, expansion into multi-commodities. And finally, I'll leave you with the thought, more data is got to mean more applications and more applications is going to get us more revenue. So thank you.

Next, I want to invite a panel of -- distinguished panel of utility executives who are at the forefront of this change and driving the future of our industry as we go along. I would like to welcome Dave Bonenberger, he's the EVP and COO of PPL Corp; Peter Muhoro, he is Chief Strategy, Technology and Innovation Officer at Rappahannock Electric Cooperative; and Jacob Tetlow, he's the EVP and COO of Arizona Public Service Company to the stage. And this panel will be moderated by Dr. Arshad Mansoor, one of the brilliant minds in our industry. He is the President and CEO of EPRI. Please come on the stage.

Thank you, Amith. You guys have been so quiet. So you heard about Landis+Gyr. So I thought what we'll do is get you guys engaged. Wednesday is the Knicks and Spurs game. So I mean it's amazing for you guys. I mean New York Knicks, who would have thought. Well, we'll do that during lunch. But really, it's an honor and pleasure. We have an all-star panel. I don't have to do anything. These panels knows -- these guys know what they're doing in their organization. But what I want to do is tee it up when you see the slide coming up. This is the first time you'll see this slide. I'm going to tee you up with first EPRI, who is EPRI? Our 1,500 engineers and scientists work with in more than 45 countries with power companies, hyperscalers, neoscalers, NVIDIA, Caterpillar on speed to power. That's what we are doing. We do that as an independent nonprofit organization, bringing speed to power.

But what I want to do is kind of set it up by the past that is shaping the present in the speed to power for AI and the present that will shape the future for this speed to power. So what do I mean by that? The past is November 2022, ChatGPT got dropped. And since then, next year, we were all working, one of the first report came out from EPRI, we said almost 50 gigawatt of demand we could see. Two years ago, it was like, yes, sure. And now just 6 weeks ago, we released our second version of how much data center we will build, and our high line was -- top line was around 95 to 100 gigawatts. After the first quarter earnings from all our utilities, that 100 gigawatt is already an old number. So that past of November 2022 is shaping today's present where not a single place you will go and not hear about power for AI, data centers, generation, transmission. So we'll talk about it. But let's talk about the present that will shape the future.

So what is present? A big thing about present is last week's NVIDIA's earnings call. And you guys look at the top numbers, bottom numbers and all the numbers. We as researchers look into where is AI going. And what we saw was, first time, Jensen announced that in their future earnings, they will break their revenues and show you the revenue that's going for the selling chips to the hyperscalers, but also show you the revenue that's going to, they call it Acie, A-C-I-E, AI, cloud, industrial and enterprise. So as we look into inference and as we look into the token costs are going sky high, and as we look into the need for latency becomes high, you will see AI also moving to distribution. I could come here next year for an event like this. I could see a lot of your vacant buildings, actually, are GPU clusters.

I could actually see -- today, I saw a water heater. Who would have thought a water heater would have a compute resource, just Google, somebody is coming up with a water heater. You'll see over there SPAN, a smart panel, a compute resource. So this is the present that will shape the future where Grid Intelligence becomes the key to unlock the future. This is distribution. So finally, distribution is getting into the game of AI. Generation and transmission has been in the game for a long, long time.

We've got a nice slide for you that will come up, and I'm sure Landis+Gyr will share the slide to talk about both the past that's shaping the present and the present that will shape the future. But now is the time to hear from our panelists.

And I'll start with -- we'll talk about Knicks later, don't worry. I mentioned Knicks and Spurs, so I'll have to talk about it. We'll start about -- maybe just say a little bit about PPL and all the companies and start with how the past is shaping your current future generation transmission. And then with all the need for CapEx, how you're prioritizing the need for distribution and all the things that are needed in distribution. And Dave, why don't you start?

Sure. So just a little bit about PPL. We're headquartered in Allentown, Pennsylvania, about 2 hours from here. We own 4 utilities. One in Rhode Island, which is a gas and electric utility. Pennsylvania is our legacy company and serves about 1.5 million customers, 10,000 square miles, electric. And then in Kentucky, we have 2 utilities, Louisville Gas and Electric and Kentucky Utilities, serving about 1.3 million customers there and with generation assets in Kentucky.

And just perspective of how our -- we're -- all 3 are over 100-year-old companies, right? And if you look at -- I'll pick on Pennsylvania, peak load about 8 gigawatts. In our pipeline for data centers, these are in advanced stages of data centers with signed agreements. We have 28 gigawatts of load coming online. Amazon just started a data center in our territory. And within 3 months, they'll be our largest customer, right? And so significant growth in data centers. Kentucky, not only from a data center perspective, but also bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. We're seeing a lot of Ford, Toyota, UPS making big investments in our states advancing that.

I'd like to talk a little bit about the future. Not only -- we talk a lot about grid edge technology, and we view the utility of the future, being able to integrate with many, many different companies and platforms, if you will. And what's critical to us to be able to maintain stability of the grid is be able to monitor and control the grid, having real-time view of what is the voltage on the system and be able to manage that and make adjustments. Not only can we save customers money and speed to connect. And without that information, basically, you have engineering -- engineers making very conservative assumptions. And so those assumptions end up in overbuilding infrastructure and allows us -- I can give you examples of where somebody is putting on a solar, 2-megawatt solar facility on top of their building.

We've been able to reduce not only their time to connect, but save them $600,000 in connection fees because we have that access to that data, right? Landis+Gyr has been -- we use them in all 3 of our utilities, gas and electric. We're in the process of finishing up our Rhode Island integration. We just acquired them just several years ago and immediately went to Landis+Gyr. And one of the first major projects we had was changing out all the meters to advanced infrastructure. So...

No. I think we'll hear the same theme. But the thing that I pick up, and this is for us really to keep in mind, I mentioned come next year and I'll see some data centers in these buildings. And as you see those data centers, you got to operate them in a flexible way. In July, when Con Ed is struggling to serve all the customers on the hottest day, you'll have to flex it. And that whole flexibility orchestration, you need Grid Intelligence all the way at the edge. That is what makes buildings a data center, warehouses a data center because that's what's going to come after the AWS and Googles that are already coming.

Peter, you're what data center valley or what is it? Tell us about your data center valley?

Well, so Rappahannock Electric Cooperative, we're a distribution-only utility in Virginia, sandwiched between Washington, D.C. and Richmond, Virginia, headquartered right in Fredericksburg, sub about 185,000 meters, about 18,000 miles of territory that we manage, about $1.4 billion in assets, about $700 million in annual revenue. We've seen the growth tremendously. Just if you think of all the data that goes through Northern Virginia, it's now coming a little bit more south. And so Northern Virginia was known as data center alley. We're now data center boulevard in context.

And it's a challenge where going back to where we've been for the longest, I mean, we hit our all-time peak at 1.2 gigawatts and that seemed like, wow, it's so big. And today, we're contracted in the next couple of years, we'll be at 5 -- actually, 6.2 gigawatts of load with another 20-something in the pipeline. That is unreal. It's not what we ever even thought 5 years ago we would actually see. And so what makes it unique about where we've come from and now I always like to say, what got you here will not get you there. And it's -- makes you have to think a little bit differently.

There's -- the amount of power that's going to be needed, first of all, there is not enough generation coming online as fast enough as the demand exists today. And so part of what we have to do is to manage what we have and manage it wisely. I typically say, many years I've said this is the most expensive unit of energy is the one you do not have. And we see still today, 1 billion people do not have electricity in the world. The second most expensive is the one that's not used wisely. And so as Arshad mentioned that how do you manage it where the computing is at t hat very end -- at the edge and being able to have the data, I think Amith pointed out very clearly is we've been very much a reactive industry. And now we're having to face a challenge of saying, how do we become predictive. It's doable. I mean Amazon tells me what to buy every time I get on Amazon, right?

And so why can't we as a utility be able to actually tell our consumers how to consume. That's the beauty of being able to have this data, this technology, and we pick Landis+Gyr specifically for knowing that computing at the edge and what that will help us in being very predictive in how we look at our data. So as we look at this growth and as we look at how consumers consume, we recognize that how we manage the grid has to look a lot more differently. And so the data piece of it becomes so critical in how we manage it.

Right. Data center boulevard, that's an address. So we're going to pick that up in the address. One thing I forgot to mention, and Jacob, as you take over and talk about where APS is now, think about this. Their clients -- by the way, so we are nonprofit agnostic, Landis+Gyr is a great company and there are a lot of other great companies. We're focusing on where this is going, where this hockey puck is going and it will move fast. Just like what happened last 2 years. And imagine their customers, our members, all the electric utilities.

If I have data centers and distribution, a warehouse, at one of the vacant buildings, a water heater, what it does to the distribution utilization factor. Our current distribution utilization, roughly 50%. So we got unused capacity, but during the hottest day, we need it. If I can get that utilization factor up by 5% from 50% to 55%, that is a huge, and I know we look into ROI, but we also look into customer affordability. We're focusing on society. So now we can power AI and actually do it in a more affordable way. So while we got to deliver today's -- what you got how many gigawatts at APS now locked up before this distribution starts?

Yes, that's right. Well, good morning, and I appreciate the opportunity to share. In Arizona, I don't know if we're data center boulevard or alley, but we're somewhere in the neighborhood. We are 140-year-old. We're the state's largest utility in Arizona, vertically integrated, been effectively serving the state for many, many decades. It's fascinating the journey that we're on. I've been with Arizona Public Service for 26 years, and it was less than 10 years ago when we were talking about the utility death spiral, where there was zero load growth, where customers were putting whatever -- and we've had strong residential growth in Phoenix for net migration. But even at that, with the proliferation of distributed generation, rooftop solar, whatever growth we had got consumed.

And so you fast forward to today and just in the last few years, going from -- we were an 8-gigawatt utility, similar to maybe Pennsylvania Power & Light serving 1.4 million customers, about 3 million people. When you think about that story of getting at 8 gigawatts, we have committed to about 4.5 additional gigawatts of primarily data centers, but we also have strong commercial and industrial growth. And we also serve Taiwan Semiconductor who's making the chips to feed all the data centers, which is a -- you've seen the headlines of north of $100 billion investment in the U.S. and tens of thousands of jobs, which then shows up in residential growth as well.

And in our queue of data centers that are in a holding pattern for service is about another 19 gigawatts. There's a lot of discussion amongst all of us around how real is that I'm not necessarily saying all of that's likely to show up, but there is some portion of that, that is eager to get served. And I think about this discussion today, we're obviously also a Landis+Gyr customer, have been for many years. And this nexus of -- in Arizona at least, it's generally energy is the constraint. You don't have enough electrons, but it's -- but not having enough electrons and Arshad said it, when you're focused on -- first, we focus on safety of serving our customers, the reliability because it is life and safety in Arizona when it's 118 degrees and you got to keep the lights on.

But there's also a big affordability element coming at us. And so we see that pressure on affordability as we're trying to grow, build infrastructure at levels that we've never done before. I'd love to share the story, like we're 140 years old. The largest customer in the history of our company was always a copper mine in Arizona. We've mined a lot of copper, 75-megawatt load. And today, you have customers asking for 2,000 megawatts. I mean the numbers are mind-boggling when you just think about the amount of energy and what they're asking for.

So if you want to focus on reliability and affordability, the combination between our generation fleet, the big wires, the transmission that interconnects all that and then now the distribution space and data is power, right? Data gives you information to make informed decisions. We talk a lot about demand response, virtual power plants, how can you act like a power plant without actually having to build a power plant. So I think the technology, the data and the opportunity are just huge in front of us.

And this -- it's important to realize this gigawatts that you're hearing about, the past the November 2022 ChatGPT that is shaping the future of the present, which is hundreds of gigawatts, it's going to happen. It's going to happen. Yes, there is -- you're hearing community opposition, and you will hear more about it. And there is not a single technology that has transformed the world that has not gone through significant community opposition. I asked the people, do you know what a devil's wagon is? And if you don't know what a devil's wagon is ask your ChatGPT, it is what the rural people called cars to be. When automobiles came in, that was a devil's wagon. There was 10, 15 years of -- and its railroad, it's electricity when electricity came in.

But as we move to this new future as well, while we are also building our generation and transmission, you said affordability, reliability, keeping the lights on, you have -- and you've got aging infrastructure that you've got to build. So you've got competing CapEx needs. And some of the CapEx needs, we are seeing innovative financing coming in, some of the hyperscalers are also giving it. So how do you see innovation and even meeting your CapEx need to make sure the bread and butter and getting ready for this future of distribution, AI moving to distribution happen.

Maybe Dave I go to you. It's a competing CapEx need.

Right. Right. So the way we look at CapEx and how we're going to allocate our funds, first, I would put it in buckets, capacity. So new customers, data centers, you have to invest in that because you have an obligation to serve those customers, right? Then there's the asset management component of aging infrastructure and so forth. And when we look to replace aging infrastructure, we look at our partners and say, okay, how do we replace that infrastructure with sensors and grid edge stuff that allows us to reduce our O&M, operating and maintenance costs, right? And the way we look at it is for every dollar I can save in O&M, I can invest $8 in capital and not impact the customer bills. So it's a way to self-fund and not affect affordability.

Reliability has traditionally always been the #1 driver of customer satisfaction. It continues to be that #1 driver, but affordability is a close second. And so we're very conscious about how do we make investments to drive O&M out of the business and continue to work on more efficiencies to drive cost out of the business. In our application of Landis+Gyr's products in our 3 -- 4 operating companies, we were able to take $38 million to $40 million, and this isn't just efficiencies and people don't go away or so forth. This is real dollars that came out of the income statement, expenses that came out of the income statement. So it allowed us to self-fund some of those other type of investments, right?

And so a lot of investment in, what I'll call, orchestration and be able to integrate all these different platforms into this. And again, more information allows you to make smarter decisions, increase the capacity of the grid and drive costs out of the business so that it can continue to be affordable for customers and adding more value to customers.

Peter, I was talking with you. We're seeing innovative financing models in the utility industry that I haven't seen in 30 years. So there is -- last time I checked, depending on whose math you believe, it's $1 trillion a year CapEx going on for this large data center. Some of those CapEx from hyperscalers and neoscalers could actually be funding bring your own generation, which will allow your money to get your distribution more intelligent and invest in getting all those grids. So tell us, are you seeing something in...

Sure. Yes. What's interesting is the growth is tremendous, right? And it's not only just the data centers. I mean, we talked about agriculture, indoor agriculture.

I put that indoor ag...

And the one that threw me off was it was a lettuce growing facility, 6 megawatts coming into -- and I thought, is this what we're calling it now lettuce and not -- that's what I thought. And actually, it is lettuce.

It is lettuce.

It is. It's not what I thought it was grain. But we have the obligation to serve. And so we have to assess how do we take advantage of some of the capital. And what we've been working with some of the hyperscalers is to say, okay, you bring in the capital, we'll build a generation for you. We'll maintain it, we'll operate it for you. And that allows us not to expand that -- those dollars. We could use those dollars to look at other ways of aging infrastructure.

In fact, looking at other innovative ways such as maybe the hyperscalers can actually fund other things such as upgrading someone's house to become more energy efficient. They get the capacity value that they need. We get to work with our consumers. We are not-for-profit utilities. So affordability is a #1 thing that we have to look at it, but we actually changed our terminology to go into affordability and value because we have to say what is the value that we can bring in. So we've had to be very innovative in the way we look at the different financing structures that have not existed before.

I don't recall any time we would say, "Hey, why don't you pay for upgrading someone's house so they become more energy efficient, they consume less." We don't have to build overcapacity based on what we traditionally have always done. You build for the hottest day or the coldest day for us, for example, with both the winter and summer peak, right? And so now we could say, actually, we don't have to build this. We can use less of this. We can look at other technologies and how do we use technologies to actually not have to build. So for example, if I could use a smart panel and not have to upgrade a transformer, I could save the dollars on that transformer. I could actually incent my consumer to put a smart panel at their house. And it's a win-win both ways. And so we're having to think very differently on how we do the financing side of it.

I think that's important. And I think, Jacob, I go to with a different twist to it. It's important to understand the financing because if there's a $1 trillion going on every year on CapEx, and some of it is funding some of these big things that create some headroom to fund into Grid Intelligence, to fund into things that are fundamental to operating the grid. So maybe, Jacob, as you keep the lights on. A lot of these are -- future is great. I'm sure you'll be ready in the future. Some of these may happen, may not happen. So -- and you're keeping the lights on, and I don't know, it's going to be 120 degrees soon in Arizona?

It's definitely in one direction.

So you hear about flexibility. We are big in flexibility. I think flexibility is what unlocks speed to power. At 125 degrees, who's going to flex their air conditioning?

Yes. Actually, surprisingly, customers are pretty good about flexing their air conditioning even today. We have a program we call Cool Rewards, where we interface to the tune of, I think it's about 100,000 thermostats in our service territory at about 170 megawatts. So that's a real amount of energy. That is a small combustion turbine or several small combustion and you flex it within 3 degrees for a period of time over the peak and you can roll through different thermostats. Actually, I would argue that's one of the best examples of leveraging technology that is existing.

Most homes have a smart thermostat today. And if it's interconnected through the WiFi mesh and you work with your utility, we provide a nominal value to them for the energy and the flexibility. So it reduces their bill. It's good for the environment because you're not dispatching what is likely probably you're not -- your cleanest resource is not your last resource to get dispatched and you're avoiding building infrastructure, which saves everybody money. So there's some really innovative solutions out there, and we have scaled that up at a level, and we continue to grow it today. We're also trying to do it at a larger scale with commercial and industrial, called Flex solutions, where you can start getting into demand response, access to micro-grids, backup generation. There's a lot of flexibility within the grid that could both ensure reliability and improve affordability.

Yes. And I think we've been talking about flexibility for a long, long, long time. The time has come. And as this AI also moves to distribution, flexibility will be key to unlock. I call -- I mean, we're not a hotel. But you can say a grid is like a hotel with a 50% occupancy factor. During spring break, we're full. You want a room? Sorry, can't get you a room. But other 360 days, I'll give you a room, if you can figure out how to pitch a 10 for 5 days, we can bring in a lot of more increased occupancy factor of the hotel. And this flexibility, if you have some time, just Google Flex MOSAIC, M-O-S-A-I-C. You will see we are now creating classification of flexibility. So when a load comes in, and you say, "Hey, are you coming in just as a load? Are you coming in as a load plus Class A flexibility?" Class A means you'll back off 3 to 5 hours. I'll call you 20 times a year. I'll give you a 24-hour notice. This is where the future is going to go. And I think what you're hearing from our panelists from all the -- it's -- we're seeing it across the industry.

When I get a time-out, it's your time to ask questions. You can ask me about Knicks and Spurs. So that's not off limits. Are we at that time yet?

We have 4...

A couple of minutes. So I'm going to go to -- so I'm going to have our panelists think about it. It's to start thinking about 1 killer app. So when I was thinking about AMI 2.0 at the event, PV, I was thinking what's this AMI 2.0. And we were there when AMI 1.0 was going on. So what is this big deal? I'm going to just change the meter and put some new meters because it's end of life.

And it dawned on me to explain it to me and a lot of other people. The best way to explain it is AMI 1.0 was BlackBerry. BlackBerry means my hardware and software were intertwined. If any of you are old enough to ever have a BlackBerry, you knew you didn't have an app store where somebody will create a new app and you can download it. AMI 2.0 is Apple. We have segmented hardware in the software side. I can create apps 5 years after the meter has been installed. So that allows us the opportunity really to innovate.

And if I come to you, you heard some of the apps that you guys were talking about, Landis+Gyr. What's a killer app for you?

So when -- I would say when utilities started replacing meters, it was -- the value was, okay, you no longer have meter readers. You get rid of safety issues, right? You get rid of vehicles and big savings there. That's like table stakes now, right? And so if you think of the functionality that we get now out of the AMI meter, I know customers are out of power exactly what -- in the past, we relied on customers to call us when they're out of power. Now I know about 28 minutes faster than I knew before AMI meters, right? I can restore quicker. When I'm battling a storm, we get a lot of what we call embedded outages, right, where there's an outage within a larger outage. And so now we know exactly where that is. It saves us days of restoration so that we're able to pinpoint where restoration is, right? We're able to use -- provide customers value with the Sense app, disaggregate their load, they can make intelligent decisions to use that information to lower their electric bill, right? And just I could go on and on and on of the benefits of the technology that's available to us.

Now I would say the biggest thing, and I tell our engineers as we rolled out advanced meters throughout our territories, you don't realize how bad our voltage is until you get an AMI data. And so when you talk about power quality and especially in manufacturing, where that voltage dip could shut down their manufacturing and then they spend hours and hours of cleaning, cleaning up their machines and so forth. It's so important for as everything becomes more digital and to provide that power quality needs.

What if you guys have a killer app here?

Yes. I would say my biggest thing is the killer app is, how do I get my consumers not to interact with me as a utility. At the end of the day, I mean, do we really care about your power company? We get 2 calls, why is my bill so high? And why is my power out? Those are the only calls we get, right? And so if I can use data, you're talking about, for example, load flexibility, if I can have my consumers be able to flex their load without them even knowing that they're doing it, that's a big win. And so if I can take the data and be able to use it where my consumers don't interact with me, they keep their bills really low, and we get to win at the same time. That to me is the biggest thing.

I was just going to piggyback on the flexible app that the customer doesn't have to do this idea that the customer can help support the grid. And while the technology is there and the concept exists, I don't think a lot of people do it because it's work. It's hard. It's not easy. The killer app would do much like Peter says, it would be interactive in a way that the customer experience has improved and it's much more flexible. That's the one thing that we've noticed. And Cool Rewards at our thermostat program is kind of a niche piece of the market. But the best is when customers tell us, "I had no idea you did it."

Let's go. So now I got the time out. So questions? Can be shy. Knicks is okay. Well, if you're shy, then at some point, when we do panels, sometimes we bring different viewpoint because different viewpoints -- and since I don't operate a grid, so I'll bring a different viewpoint than what I just heard on.

We got one over there.

We got a question. Let's get the question, then we'll go to the different viewpoint.

So it seems you individuals have choices of what you deploy. Why are you using Landis+Gyr's equipment?

Yes. So I would say 2 things. One is our utility is unique in the fact that we talk a lot, and we share information. We're not competing against each other. So we're always talking. We've known each other 15 years. And so first is the ability to execute. These are large projects. You're replacing millions of putting in the communication infrastructure, replacing 1 million-plus meters, right? And for us, that's table stakes. If you can't execute, we're going to be talking to each other and say, this group can execute. And so that's the first thing is their ability to take these large projects. Every one of our projects in all 4 of our utilities came in ahead of time, under budget and met all of our needs that we set out, all of our goals, right?

The second one, though, and you heard about it earlier is that relationship, their long view, how they work with us. They're truly our strategic partner, right? And as issues come up, instead of pointing to each other, or if I have to grab a contract to look at addressing an issue, that's not a partner I want, right? That we're able to work through problems, work through issues and problem-solving mode together and making each of us better. They make us better. They challenge us. And hopefully, we are able to make them better.

Anything in addition to that?

Yes, I would say when traditionally, a meter just a cash register. That's all we really cared for. You've got electric delivered, you get paid. That's it. We looked at what we needed and we thought what the future looked like, we're looking at that technology piece of it of what -- it's beyond just the cash register. It's everything that I could get in terms of the data and all the applications that I need to think about. And so when we looked at different technologies and different entities, it -- Landis+Gyr has a history. We've known Landis+Gyr for years. But not only just the side of the relationship and everything else is just thinking about who's at the forefront of thinking what's the next technology, what's the next level of really using that data for managing utility the best way. And that's one of the biggest pieces for us was to look at what that grid edge computing look like at the very end of -- at the consumer level.

Yes. We also look at it like a piece of technology when it used to just be a cash register. It's amazing how far our industry has come. I mean it wasn't 15, 20 years ago, people were still working off of paper wall maps with pushpins to figure out which customers called and told you they were out of power. And today, you're getting real-time voltage information, power quality information, you get indication outage notification.

So I think it's an exciting -- you want to be partnered with somebody who's forward thinking because what was originally started off as a way to take the cash register and effectively eliminate meter readers, people that would go around and read the meters and submit data and then you'd send them the bill. But today, it's a piece of technology that you're thinking about how do we modernize the grid at both the edge and the core infrastructure of our power generation side. And so you're really looking for a forward-thinking partner that brings new technology and functionality in a way that, frankly, I was part of the original team 15, 20 years ago, when we were evaluating Landis+Gyr. And we really did it -- we were thinking about meter reading and getting rid of old 5 dial meters and automating the process. And then to fast forward to today, you're looking for forward-thinking technology partners.

Yes. Trusted partner that comes to your house and lives with you for 20 years. Questions? Well, since you're raising your hand, if you raise your hand, I'm going to go to the contrarian view. I want a future where I'm going to call my utility and I'm going to call my utility because I'll say, "Hey, my air conditioning broke. I hear that if I get it from you, you have a grid connected AC that I can get it at 30% cheaper installed cost." And then I'll call you, "My water heater broke. I hear that there is an APS grid connected water heater with an NVIDIA chip somewhere that's going to do compute resource, and that's going to do demand response and my water heater will be free when it breaks." And I want a future where NVIDIA, I called through...

You sound like a very demanding customer. I'm just going to through...

I'll call through Jacob. I call APS and say, "Hey, I understand NVIDIA, if I put a small cabinet in my house, NVIDIA will pay for my electric bill for 12 months. Can you make that connection happen?" Because that's the future I want. Trust this transition of AI also going to distribution. 2.5 years ago, I was on panel and I was talking about 50 gigawatt, 100 gigawatt, people were like, oh, no, yes, sure. And this industry moves very fast, the industry that is creating this ecosystem. I would not be surprised. So let's do that. You guys all have our LinkedIn. So hold us accountable or me accountable after 12 months, that for a utility, you're getting calls from real estate developers, you're getting calls from your landlords here. Hey, I want to put -- my next tenant is going to be a data center.

And by the way, that's a totally different load. It's 50-kilowatt steady load. All of a sudden, you're the utility managing the grid, and it doesn't behave like a commercial customer. You need sensors everywhere to make sure you're operating your distribution grid. It's going to happen sooner than we say. And the beauty of it is, you got a $1 trillion CapEx going on. Now 60% goes to Jensen, whatever the number is. The others are going to gas turbines, transmission. You got a question there. Yes.

So the data center developers now are all about time to first token. And I'm just curious to know to the extent that the Landis System has helped you with your planning and how to accommodate these customers, whether it was where to site, how to accommodate behind-the-meter generation. Maybe just talk a little bit about how it played a role in your planning process.

Sure. So for us, they have all the data that feeds all the models and so forth around usage and so forth where you have capacity and so forth. So it really gives our planning engineers and our interconnection engineers, the ability to have 15-minute granular data to be able to make those decisions of where you have capacity.

I just want to go back to Arshad's comment. The customer won't be calling us with the data, we'll be calling them and say, "Oh, it looks like your water heater is getting ready to go." Because we have the data and we could build signatures around that data, algorithms and then we say, "Oh, we can offer you with our energy efficiency rebates, a free water heater with -- and NVIDIA would be willing to pay your electric and Internet bill for a year." So answered two questions, I guess.

Yes. And I would say really using that data to be able to really recognize where we have the capacity. We could talk to the data centers at whatever scale, not just the data centers, but our economic development team went from 1 person to a team of 12 in 3 years because now we're having more and more conversations with folks who are relocating. And our teams know exactly, we have the data to be able to tell this is where our capacity is. And we can tell them, hey, if you consioder locating here, you'll probably get online a lot faster than if you're thinking of this place. And to also go back to the contrarian version of it, not only do I not want them calling me, I want to call them, but also I'll add on to it. I'll finance it for you. So now you don't even have to think about the money. We're actually doing that today.

It's going to come. Maybe I should start working with Amith on the next app, which is transmission data always is open access, so everybody has the data. There are companies like GridCARE that is creating technologies. So now I see on the distribution side with all the data and you got access, you should be able to create an app that says, "Hey, if you're bringing in 3 hours of flexibility 20 times, I have these hotspots in distribution, where if there's a warehouse, if there's a customer, I can do that." That's an app idea that just came from your question and make sure we are working on it. And do not patent it. It's going to be open access.

Any other -- 5 minutes, any other questions? Any other questions? And you have -- all of us are on LinkedIn. So if you remember a question later, just ask us. Yes, please.

I was just curious if you could opine on the ROI of AMI 2.0, what you're seeing or expected to achieve with the upgrades? And then also seems to be a debate around sort of the big bang replacement, replacing everything quickly and getting the benefit all at once versus a more methodical approach that some regulators are implementing. So I don't know through your AMI 2.0 journey, if you can talk about the pros or cons of maybe being forced one way or the other in terms of the cadence or the pace.

Yes. So for us, again, each jurisdiction is a little different. In Pennsylvania, we implemented Landis+Gyr product in 2019. In Kentucky, it was 2025, and we're the tail end in Rhode Island. And the regulatory environments in each jurisdiction is a little different. Pennsylvania required all utilities to have AMI with certain functionality that Landis+Gyr provided. The regulators in Rhode Island, a lot more scrutiny and to prove that ROI, we had to make commitments of what savings we would get, what improvements we've been making on storm restorations and quicker restoration and so forth. We've hit every one of those targets.

I mentioned earlier, across the enterprise, we've had about $38 million in real savings plus the more efficient stuff that's not even counting in that bucket. So significant value for us. And as we -- we did all big bang, but as we get additional customers as meters start to expire, it will be more bringing them in piecemeal.

Any other?

Yes. I would just say, I think for us, our biggest piece of it was the reliability side of it. And the ROI looking at outage restoration was huge, just being able to have -- so as we've looked at our road map and we're going at about -- I think it's a 4-year time line for the full deployment. We see that, in fact, if we wanted, we probably could do it a little faster because we know that the value is there. But our plan was 4 years because we saw the value out of the reliability side of it.

Arshad, the only thing I might add to that is the easy ROI on AMI was around replacing meter readers and automating the process, if you will. The improved customer experience comes along with that and everything else. But I think the next -- and it's really a combination of the last 2 questions. I was going to go down this road of like integrated system planning. We're using that term a lot as utilities. How do we integrate all of our system planning? And that's really combining the constraints within the transmission system, the supply side on the generation, but also as you start to integrate in the distribution side and what the customer can bring to the table, and I use the term virtual power plant.

But if you think about enough customer interactions that are enabled by data that you have from the grid edge because you now know more information, you have a better interaction with them. Now you can treat them as if they're like a virtual power plant. People often ask, well, what's the resource that you need the most to serve this future? And I'm like, it's an all-of-the-above answer. We need solar, wind, batteries. We need natural gas, we need a nuclear renaissance in this country, and we need the customer to be part of that solution as well.

Well, no, this is great. So before we wrap it up, I know we are getting to the time where we got -- CFO is going to come at some point of time. But really, the key message here is things are changing, follow where the hockey puck is going. And where the hockey puck is going is we will see distribution demand surge. And we will see this distribution demand increasing that will be met through Grid Intelligence. We will actually see that $1 trillion CapEx over the next couple of years. Some of the CapEx money is going into intelligence, going into the edge of the grid.

I'm going to end up with -- I think, Peter, you mentioned it yesterday, and you haven't patented it, so I can say it now. What did you say, Peter, that...

You have to be at the edge for AI to maintain its edge.

You have to be at the edge for AI to maintain its edge. So with that, I have about a round of applause for all our panelists. Great panelists. Thank you.

Thank you. Great panel. And now I'd like to welcome you to a break. We are going to raise the walls now. So you can just go out. We have coffee and some pastries, and we'll be back here at 11:15. Thank you.

[Break]

I'll encourage you to take a seat because it's the moment you've been waiting for. Okay. Here it is. It's my pleasure to introduce our Chief Financial Officer, Davinder Athwal.

Thanks, Lisa. Good morning, and thanks for taking the time to be here today with us as we share our excitement about Landis+Gyr. With the exit of EMEA, we've become a smaller business, but we're also a more agile business, a more predictable business and maybe most importantly, a profitable business. So what I'd like to do today is share with you the financial profile of the new Landis+Gyr. And the way I'm going to do that is I'm going to first talk to you about the financial profiles of our new segments that Peter introduced. I'm going to talk to you about how we can grow this business. I'm going to talk about the mechanics of actually converting order entry into backlog and into revenue because that's not always that obvious when you look at our financials. I'm also going to talk to you about how we actually take revenue, convert that into earnings and drop that down to cash flow. And I'll also talk about our philosophy around capital allocation.

One thing you heard this morning, I think, across all the presentations was for the first time in decades, there's this excitement about demand growth, hasn't happened before. You heard about the statistics of $1.5 trillion coming down in new asset investment. And I can tell you, we're actually seeing that already in our leading indicators. We've now reported record backlog for 2 years in a row. We've reported a book-to-bill ratio 2 years ago of 1.8. We've recorded -- or reported, I should say, a book-to-bill of over 1 this past year, 1.4 on average for the last 2 years. That, to us, is proof positive that the $1.5 trillion is real, it's happening, it's coming down, and the distribution part of the grid is getting its fair share of that.

What excites me the most, though, is that we're in a very unique position where we sit with Landis+Gyr because I believe we can actually restructure and reorganize this company to actually grab more than our fair share of that $1.5trillion that flows through distribution and actually retain more of that on the bottom line. So when we look at this company, what we see is the company growing at mid-single digits comfortably. It's a company that's going to grow its bottom line twice as fast as its top line, and it's going to keep most of that cash for the benefit of the shareholders.

Before I move on, I want to just pause a little bit and walk you guys through the relationship between order entry, backlog and revenue. And I'll start by saying that in any given year, whatever order entry we have, 30% of that becomes revenue in the same year. What that means is the other 70% goes into our backlog. But importantly, that backlog, it's contracted, it's regulator approved and it's date certain as to when it gets delivered. What that means is if I look at my backlog at any given time, I can schedule out when it's going to become revenue. So if I take my backlog as of the last year-end, March 31, $3.9 billion is what we reported and look at how that schedules out, I can see exactly when that comes into my P&L.

If I take that and I add in the 30% that -- of ordering that converts every year, I've got really high visibility into what my revenue profile looks like. And to put that into words, what that means is that I've got clear line of sight to 100% of my revenue for fiscal '26. It means I've got 90% clarity on where my revenue is going to come from in '27. It means I've got 75% clarity where it comes from in '28. The 10% next year and the 25% the year after that is going to come from new backlog formation. And I will say that those ratios are lower than our historical average. So I feel really good about my revenue plan for the next 3 years. That's what makes this model predictable.

We've also talked a lot about how out of our backlog, about 43% we have said in the past is related to software. With our new segments, we can now give you a much clearer picture of exactly what that looks like, what's in there, how it unfolds into revenue and also what it grows at over time.

Let's move on to segments. Peter introduced our segments, we call them Connected Platforms, we call them Grid Intelligence. If you want to think of it at a really high level, you can think of Connected Platforms as hardware, you can think of Grid Intelligence as software. That's one way to maybe kind of just think about it at a very high level. Connected Platforms would be all the devices that we sell. So think of Revelo, think of ultrasonic gas or any other device that a customer may take from us. Any services that we sell to deploy those devices also goes into that segment as well.

Grid Intelligence is everything that our customers use to extract value out of that installed base. So the data that, that's generating, you heard a lot about that is one of the data that gets generated in these devices ultimately becomes intelligent. But how you apply that intelligence, that happens through all the products and grid intelligence. So you can think about software, data, analytics. We've got a lot of software-enabled services. All those types of things are what goes into Grid Intelligence.

There is a strategy behind these 2 and the why we came up with these 2 particular segments the way we did, and PV kind of hit that in his remarks. You can think about Connected Platforms as the land part of our strategy and Grid Intelligence as part of the expand or the expand part of the strategy. So Connected Platforms, this is what we use. This is our doorway into the customer to build trust, to maintain trust. You got to have that trust. I mean, that came up a lot. Peter talked about it. PV talked about it at length. This is a trust you got to have as a baseline to even have a conversation about doing anything else. Without that, you don't have that opportunity.

Grid Intelligence is what we use to then expand that relationship, move further up the value chain. Amith talked a lot about all the things that we can do to automate workflows at the customer. We can start making decisions for them within defined operating envelopes and they'll pay us for that. So we capture more wallet share.

Let's take a look at the financial profile through the lens of fiscal '25. And maybe it's not surprising when you look at these 2, the first thing you notice is they kind of quite closely mirror our strategy behind them. If you look at Connected Platforms and what you see is a large stable segment, $886 million of revenue in '25 with about a 31% gross margin.

If you look at Grid Intelligence and what you notice there is it's smaller, but it has 50% more profitability and it's growing at double digits. Connected Platforms, behaving more or less like an industrial -- a mature industrial company growing at low to mid-single digits. Grid Intelligence is behaving much more like a technology company, great margins, double-digit growth.

Let's go back to the land and expand because we've been at this for a while, as PV said. This is an actual customer example, but also a typical one. In this particular example, we actually signed a contract with this customer back in 2012 for a contract to provide AMI 1.0, which you heard about a couple of times earlier this morning. And the contract value of that was $400 million when we signed up in 2012. That deployment lasted about 12 years. During that 12-year period, we were able to upsell an additional $90 million to this customer. I come out of the software world. That would represent a net dollar retention of 122%. If you guys are familiar with software, you know that those guys would kill for a number like that.

More importantly, 2024, point of refresh, not only did we retain that customer, we actually upsold them on AMI 2.0 at over a 60% increase in lifetime value. So the contract is $650 million. That's the power of this business. It's long cycles, but it compounds.

So I just showed you at the customer, let's kind of take a look at how this works at scale. This is at the company level. The first thing I'd say is we've got a huge fishing pool. Peter talked about a TAM of $18 billion in the near term, the next 3 years. That sits inside of a SAM of $120 billion. That's where we go fishing. There's a huge amount of opportunity there. Again, once we have an order that's contracted, regulator approved and ready to go, it goes into what we call backlog, which you can think of as pending deployment.

Once it begins to deployment, that's when the revenue cycle begins. And there's a couple of different lanes that, that take off at that point. One is if it's a Connected Platforms device-like product, that typically, if it's in backlog, will come in over 3 to 5 years. Think about -- we talk about Nat Grid, Oncor. These are big territories. Think about New York here, right? When you're upgrading a territory, it takes 3 to 5 years to refresh that territory. It doesn't just happen overnight. But that's why that's a 3- to 5-year cycle.

At the same time, though, if the first time that meter gets deployed anywhere in that territory, we provision the software that goes along with it. That's typically a 10-year period. That's why that revenue comes in over 10 years. Those are the kind of the life cycles that I'd like you to think about. But something really else happened, that's really interesting. There's 2 different pathways for us to grow that relationship. The first one is while we're under contract for that 12-year life cycle, let's say, we've got that opportunity to sell them more stuff and upsell them. That's $90 million in the last example.

At the same time, though, we can continue to build trust with them so that when the point of refresh comes along 12 or 15 years later, it should be a no-brainer that they're going to stay with us. And I'll make another analogy to the software world. Software contracts typically are about 3 years. And I know from experience, what happens is in those 3 years is, there's a mad rush to sell as much as they can to the customer. When you've got a 10-year period to do that, the pressure is off. You can really build trust, you can really understand your customer and you can really bring value to them. And that's why you kind of see 100% retention that these guys talked about. Again, software companies would kill for that.

We kind of bring this together. So I want to just kind of show where we get growth in our 2 segments. If you think about Connected Platforms, again, the biggest growth driver for growth in Connected Platforms is going to be the refresh cycle. So think about a 10 to 15 years on average is what a system or a network last. At the end of that, you're going to refresh that. We're talking about AMI 2.0 right now versus AMI 1.0. And when that happens because you've got higher capability and higher value, that typically happens on a higher ASP. We see about a 20% to 25% uplift going from AMI 1.0 to AMI 2.0. During the lifetime of that deployment, you're also going to get just organic growth, right? There's new household formation, new business formation, things like that, that also contributes to a part of the growth in Connected Platforms.

You think about Grid Intelligence, the way that grows is first and foremost, just through the installed base. As we put in more AMI 2.0 meters, that's going to naturally increase the amount of Grid Intelligence that we have because more and more of the intelligence that we deliver, it's not in the hardware, it's actually in the software capabilities that goes along with it.

And then we talked about -- or actually, Amith talked about what really excites him is all that other stuff that we can do, right? Like the 4K camera, that kind of takes a real-time snapshot and you can use that data to, again, automate workflows for our customers or actually help them make better decisions, faster decisions. PV talked about 25,000 truck rolls saved. I did the math, that's about $25 million. And based on that, I'd say our product is undervalued, right? But again, it shows the ROI that you can get, right, from these solutions.

Let's switch a little bit now to the other side of the P&L and look at expenses. So I said at the beginning of my remarks, we think we can double the growth of EBITDA over the next 3 years. And we've got 4 unique identified levers to do that. The first one, we've talked about before, we call it dissynergies from -- related to the sale of EMEA. What that really means is that at headquarters, we had some costs related to running the EMEA business, and they fell away immediately upon the closing. So that's gone. And we've in the past talked about, that's worth about 100 bps to our bottom line. right? So that one you can think of as kind of already there.

The other 3 are a combination of us becoming more efficient because as we go from a regionalized structure to a global lines of business structure, we think there's a tremendous amount of efficiency that we can drive out of that shift. And as we think about best-in-class, top quartile, back-office cost benchmarks, we know we can actually make up some cost differences there.

Secondly, as we think about growth over the '27-'28 period, we will see operating leverage come back into the business. And then finally, we talk about how more and more of what we deliver goes into Grid Intelligence, we should see a shift of revenue towards that segment. And as that happens, you saw the margins are higher there. So we ought to see a mix shift benefit as well.

We've not broken out what the specific contribution from 2, 3 and 4 are. But I would say that, in our minds, those work together, they're interconnected. And our job is going to be to optimize those to make sure that we maintain revenue or maximize revenue as much as we can because they're different the way they interact with each other. But for modeling purposes, you can think about them equal -- equally contributing to that uplift.

PV talked about our asset-light business model earlier on, and that shows up on this slide. So you think about our EBITDA, we typically convert about 80% of that into free cash flow. And if you think about the kind of below-the-line cash expenses for taxes, interest, things like that, we're left with about 35% of that free cash flow available for growth initiatives. And as we think about our next 3 years, we think we're going to be generating about $350 million available -- or we'll have $350 million available to put towards growth initiatives, which brings me to capital allocation.

So let me start by saying anything we do around capital allocation always begins with what's the best way to maximize shareholder value. First thing I would say we would always love to do is anything around organic because we believe that the ROI on a risk-adjusted basis is always going to be highest on organic initiatives. After that, we would absolutely look at M&A. And I think the way to -- for us to think about M&A is it's got to be disciplined, it's got to be something that helps our customers. And from the perspective of the company, it's got to be either something that gets our existing products into new markets or gets -- basically kind of opens up new products into our existing markets is the way that we think about that.

And then obviously, the last part of this is we realize that sometimes the best way to create value is to return value to shareholders, and that would be a part of what we would be looking at as well. And again, our job is going to be to optimize the mix of those 3 to make sure that we're delivering the highest shareholder value back to our owners.

The bar charts on the right, I want to just kind of make a couple of remarks.

I mentioned on the last slide that we think we'll have $350 million available for our growth initiatives. If you think about where we are right now, we have about $160 million available. We need to keep about $70 million, let's say, for just running the business. But we've got about $160 million available. We've got some debt capacity. So we've got about a $250 million, call it, war chest to do organic things or inorganic initiatives with. If we kind of look out over the plan, our cash builds to $350 million, and we think we're going to have enough headroom of around $250 million to have total available capital of about $600 million. It's more than a doubling in the 3-year period to go do things that enhance what we're trying to do and create more value.

So that brings me to kind of maybe bring it all together in terms of our midterm outlook. So where we see Landis+Gyr over the next 3 years or the midterm is growing revenue mid-single digits, growing our adjusted EBITDA at twice the rate of revenue. And for the first time, we're now talking about our revenue CAGR. And we think our revenue CAGR, we can grow at 5x the size of -- as fast as our revenue.

We're also breaking out within our segments, Connected Platforms and Grid Intelligence. We expect Connected Platforms, again, to grow low to mid-single digits and deliver margin of about 30%. We expect Grid Intelligence to grow more than double digit or at least double digits and deliver a 50% gross margin.

So what I've described to you is a company that sits in large markets, durable markets that are at the beginning of a huge investment cycle. Within that, we've got a business that's growing nicely, bottom line growing faster than the top line. And I'll also note that this is a business that actually has within it a really nice software business.

If you go back to one of the slides that I looked at, I showed for the segments, we've actually got $207 million of ARR embedded in this business. I don't think we've ever said that before, but that's a new metric that we're going to be showing going forward because we think it's important. We've got a business that also converts free cash flow at 80%. And as Peter said in his remarks, we're already showing a ROIC of over 30%. To us, this looks like a top-tier investment.

I'm going to close by sharing a personal connection to this theme that you've seen today about focus, execution and value creation. When I joined a year ago, I had a chance to meet a number of you folks. And what I had said was that I was excited by the Landis story because to me, it was a good company that should be a great company. And the only thing missing in my mind was focus and execution. And I'm thrilled that Peter and the Board were willing to do the hard work to make that change from being good to great.

And when Peter and I started working together, we outlined 5 things that we said we would do this year. We said we would get the EMEA business sold. We said we would return proceeds to shareholders. We said we would deliver on our fiscal '25 guidance. We would re-segment the business and run the business according to what I just showed you and that we would complete internal readiness for a listing in the U.S.

A year later, well, we've sold EMEA. We've begun returning capital to shareholders as fast as we can. And in fact, we were so confident we began that even before we had closed EMEA. We delivered on '25. We've re-segmented the business and we can show you the metrics and talk about it in a way we never could before. And we are now ready -- fully ready internally to initiate a process for a listing at a time of our choosing. That's what gives us the confidence that we can deliver the midterm plan. Thank you for listening.

With that, I'd like to invite Peter to come back up on stage, and we look forward to any questions that you might have. Logistically speaking, there's going to be a couple of folks on the ends. They've got microphones. So please raise your hand if you want to ask a question. And I think the folks on the webcast, you know how to get questions in, but we'll read them out. But we'll be happy to take your questions.

Now that you're internally ready for a listing, Peter, what should guide the timing of the listing? Small caps in the space continue to sort of thrash around and be volatile. So I just wonder how you think about what should govern Landis+Gyr's process to getting listed in the U.S. and what happens with the Swiss listing?

So obviously, as you heard, there was a lot of work required in '25 to get this point. EMEA, the sale of EMEA was one point, internal preparation, all of that is done. And now we are ready to initiate the process, as Davinder said, as our liking. But at the end of the day, it's all about creating shareholder value. So that is a variable that we need to find the right point in time to commence and initiate that process.

I think you commented a couple of times on this being a record level of pipeline, I think, in your time in the industry, which is saying quite something. You talked about the addressable market over the next couple of years. Can you talk a little bit about the pipeline that's behind the backlog and how you see that sort of shaping up? How are you seeing some of the conversations that were quite helpful today from utility customers impacting the pace of converting that pipeline into additional backlog?

So the record backlog we have today, we have seen that evolve in the pipeline for the past, I would say, 12 to 15 months. And a couple of elements that are really extremely visible. First, everything in our pipeline is focused around Revelo. When grid edge came to fruition, when we brought it to the market, we thought there might be some people going with AMI 1.0, some people going with AMI 2.0, that has completely disappeared. 100% of our pipeline is now focused on AMI 2.0.

And second, there was always a question, what is the ROI on AMI 2.0? Will it happen? And how will it happen? And if I look at the pipeline today, 100% of our pipeline is actually customers that are in AMI 1.0 converting to AMI 2.0. So I look at that, that is the validation and the confirmation that we see ROI, and they are embarking on that journey. I like that a lot.

And then we also talked about gas. Gas was a small part of our business we have invested. We believe we've gotten the timing exceptionally right with gas being a destination energy resource, again. And just listening to the panel, I heard mentioning gas coming back multiple times. So we believe we got that one right. We got the timing right. So that also starts to play a substantial part of our pipeline today. And if you think of that $18 billion of serviceable obtainable markets over the next 36 months is quite an impressive number that we have right in front of us.

Could you possibly explain to us how your software business is built? Is it contractual based on number of users? Is it utilization based? Maybe you can get into a little more detail on how that part of the business is built. And then lastly, Peter, just maybe some more explanation around the timing of the listing relating to shareholder value. Are you worried about the share conversion of your holders in Switzerland? Like what is it -- what's stopping you from listing? What more specifically can you tell us about this sort of open-ended decision around it with the listing in the U.S.?

Okay. Which one should we start first?

Maybe the software contracts.

Maybe -- yes, let's start about the software contracts. And I think it's also important to understand and maybe when I highlighted the 1,000 people we have dedicated to software today, that's also an indication that we've been in software for an extended period of time. It was like 15 years ago or 20 years ago now, there was an acquisition of a company that was exclusively in software that is now the foundation for a North American business. So it's not just something that we stumbled across over the past 3 or 5 years. It's something that we've been doing for an extended period of time.

And again, you heard a lot about partnership and trust. So this is important today. So already today, when we talk about software, in particular, in North America, that's already about 30% of the business today. And this is the operational software that is required to operate the network, and there are individual modules on top of well, depending of the utility choose to pick our models or someone else that we get compensated for that.

And the next generation of software revenue is the app-based software revenue, as we said, Revelo, 4 million Revelo deployed at scale, and we have now the applications, more than a dozen applications available that we have now started to roll out at scale. It's a bit more of a complex monetization model and just a revenue per an app, but this one is now starting to take off as well. And we look at the Revelo as a foundation at the 30% that I mentioned today, that we can continue to increase that. And that portion will also play into the annual recurring revenue of $207 million that we already have today.

On the listing, again, there was a tremendous amount of work to be in the position where we are today that we can pull the trigger. So it's important for us that we are absolutely ready to pull the trigger. That's what we try to work on. That's what we had the control of. We talked about initiating it in '26, and we're absolutely ready with the Board to pick the right point in time to pull the trigger here.

Peter, well done today. I have a couple of questions. The first is on the SAM, the $120 billion versus the $18 billion. Could you kind of walk us through how you got to the $120 billion and why the obtainable is only 10% of that? Do you need to make acquisitions to get the $18 billion, higher? Or maybe explain that dynamic a little bit.

So the SAM is a whole market that we see and that for us, that is obviously in the markets that we operate in, to be very clear. We just exited EMEA. We're not looking at markets in that. So that's everything that is available in electric, everything that is available in gas, includes everything that actually would be available in water as well. So that is the total market. And then we said, within the next 36 months, what is available in the next 36 months, what we're focused in, what is obtainable. So the obtainable serviceable market and the pipeline, they're kind of starting to align a little bit. Maybe our pipeline does not necessarily go for 36 months, but those are similar numbers. So it's not what we expect to win. It's really a part of the serviceable addressable market, what is obtainable over the next 36 months. And if you listened to the conversation here, that usually means that today, we're already engaged in most of the conversation, what is in the $36 billion.

The other question was about if we look back the last 6, 12 months and the next 12 months forward, I think both for you and your largest competitor, just not a ton of revenue growth. I know you guys are at the end of the year, you have a timing of large contract ramp up forth. I get that. But is it -- the AMI 2.0 value proposition just seems very compelling. We're hearing utilities here in this room talk about how compelling it is, both ROI, both with respect to lowering cost, but also managing load, right? What's the holdup? Why are revenues slack right now? Is it about the data centers? Are they chopping the orders into smaller pieces? Why isn't this market more active in the last 12 months and the next 6?

A couple of things. We certainly see this more active than ever when we talk about our pipeline. I mean this is where we are focused on that keeps us busy every day. So in our pipeline, it is absolutely happening as we speak. When we talk about our backlog, to us, backlog is an indication that it's not just talk, but it's also translating into orders that show up in our backlog. But what -- when it comes to revenue, we also talk about sophisticated projects that require a tremendous amount of planning on the side of the utility. If you deploy 5 million endpoints and 5 million touching on every single home in your service territory and you're redoing the complete infrastructure in your back office, that's not just something you sign a contract and you start.

So on the revenue rollout, you will always see a bit of a lag from our pipeline conversion into our backlog. Those are at scale, a very, very sophisticated project that requires a lot of work on both sides on the planning. We are no longer delivering and haven't done so over the past 2 decades, delivering our products into a warehouse. They have to be integrated in the utility operation to deliver the value that they have committed to their PUC.

For the app-based system, can you go into the pricing opportunity on those app licenses versus the base software business? And kind of what level of app penetration are you assuming in your '28 targets?

So a couple of things. On the apps, it's certainly for us, I can only talk about us. It's not a revenue-per-app story that we have. I think it's a bit more complex story, how we bundle it with our offering. We talked publicly about National Grid. National Grid, 3.7 million Revelo meters deployed. And in the initial contract, that includes 5 apps that run across this deployment. And so it's much more bundled. And I would say, overall, on the penetration rate that we end up seeing, we are a bit at the early stages. But we have also National Grid, we were the most open. We talked about how many apps that we have for them. But I don't think we had a single Revelo deployment or a Revelo contract that didn't come with a number of apps at the get-go that the utilities committed to delivering.

Capital allocation question. In terms of the -- in excess of $300 million you guys see out to 2028, how do you guys think about M&A? Is that smaller accretive? Are you looking for one large-scale acquisition? Any preference between Grid Intelligence or Connected Platforms, just really kind of how you guys think about deploying that capital?

I'd say we -- our filter is actually how do we create value to start with and what actually advances our strategic road map. And I mentioned either it's existing products to new markets or new markets with existing product, if you will. That's the filter we're using. It could be any of those things that you mentioned. We're not going to start out with a preconceived notion of what we want to do. We'd rather be open and at the right opportunity, make it through our filter.

Yes. Just going back to the software contracts. I mean, is the right way to think about it, these are effectively enterprise agreements. So for example, like, let's say, you have a $10 million enterprise agreement, 5 apps included. It doesn't really matter whether they're turned on or not. There's not really an additional revenue opportunity. It's just like -- it's more like a -- yes, is that the right way to sort of think about it if it's not revenue per app?

There is incremental revenue opportunity. At the end of the day, that's the foundation of our Revelo platform that with apps, we can have apps tailored that are tailored to the utility to deliver ROI. So you absolutely have to think when they get turned on. This is part of our annual recurring revenue foundation and $207 million from the get-go, we just talked about the 10% plus growth in Grid Intelligence. So this apps revenue is a substantial part of growing our ARR in that segment.

Just a question, clarifying on free cash flow. So the free cash flow slide showed, I guess, use of free cash flow for, I guess, taxes and debt service. So are you defining free cash flow as before cash taxes and debt service? Or just want to clarify that and another element of free cash flow.

So we define it as operating cash flow less CapEx.

But then the operating cash flow would include the cash interest costs and the cash tax.

No, if you think about the cash flow statement, think about that first section, cash flow from operations. So your interest costs will be down below.

Okay. Even just the interest and the debt. Okay. And the taxes as well.

Exactly.

Okay. And then the, I guess, cash profile, I guess, looking out a few years, that is, I guess, implicitly a projection of free cash flow. But what are you assuming in terms of repurchases and dividends for that cash build?

Yes. So we have an ongoing buyback program of about $5 million a year. That's all we're assuming. That ongoing $5 million a year is basically to offset any kind of employee stock equity. There's no incremental in there. So if you think about the return of proceeds for EMEA, excuse me, none of that's in there. There's nothing else incremental beyond what's on that chart. So I take my tax -- cash taxes out, cash interest out. We have assumed a progressive dividend policy that continues. And then we've got that $5 million of buyback.

Okay. So it is post dividend?

Yes, correct.

Peter, one question for you. So of the -- I guess, we had PPL on stage, others, like who is the furthest along in sort of adopting Grid Intelligence? Obviously, National Grid, you guys keep talking about. So I imagine that's one of them. And then what percentage of like the endpoints are "activated" versus not activated? And the reason I say that is obviously that, as you said earlier, that's the revenue opportunity. And what's the major, I guess, bottleneck for like activation? Because I just see like, look, there's a tremendous amount of operating leverage in just those being turned on. And so what's the bottleneck in those being turned on beyond just like the backlog and pipeline and whatnot?

So when you ask me who is the most advanced when it becomes to Revelo, AMI 2.0 is always the newest customer that comes on board for us. So that is a simple answer for us. When -- I think the question of turned on or turned off goes back to apps. And I think there, you need to understand, you really -- you need to deploy the meters at scale. It's not -- it doesn't make economic sense that you deploy the first meter and the first meter comes -- or the first Revevelo, sorry, comes with an app deployed. So utilities are focused. We talked about 3 to 5 years to ramp up and deploy the Revelo at scale. And you need the foundation to be deployed at scale before the apps make sense to deploy them at scale. And these are the stages that we are in.

We keep on focusing on National Grid because in one of the territories, we're absolutely close to completing the deployment. So this is really the test bed on the scale adoption that we see and the penetration that we see in there deployed. But as we said, we have committed to 5. The network is ready, and we are deploying and rolling out at scale as we speak.

One more follow-up question, my third one. So as far as like deployment is concerned, right, you spoke earlier about the engineering room and you're upgrading software, like it's not an easy thing to do. So when you think about the aspect of like labor, right, like is this -- in order to sort of make these meter deployments work, like what is the quality of labor that's needed? Is it high skilled? Is it more lower skilled? And is the availability of labor there to sort of get these things installed quickly? Or is that not a bottleneck in your opinion, and it's really just sort of the engineering integration and back-office elements that sort of drive the deployments?

So a couple of things. We do not physically deploy the devices. It's usually either the utility has a contracted partner to do that or there are other third party. That's not a business that we're in. the closest involvement to that, we might run the project management to help people, train the people, but we are not involved in that. And that's a fairly established business that exists in every place. There are companies out there that provide that skill set. So installing those devices, I don't think that is a bottleneck anywhere. But again, that's not something that we do or operate.

Just a question in terms of your contracted -- similar to the last one, your contracted hardware business and availability of components. How you manage that in terms of escalators or inflation on your cost of goods? Is that created any bottleneck for you? Is there any -- anything around that and how that runs through your P&L?

So a couple of things. Obviously, I think by now, you're convinced that we are a technology company. So yes, we do use memory chips and memory chip prices, they have gone up over the past couple of months for us and for everyone else. On the availability, and PV articulated even during the times of COVID, we were able to continue to deliver and supply on our commitments. So the availability is definitely not an issue as we see. I mean, we have a supply chain that is dedicated 24/7 to deliver that. Prices, they have definitely gone up for us and anyone else in the industry, but we have protection on our contracts to pass it on to our customer if it's above and beyond certain threshold.

I just had two quick ones. One, Peter, how should we think about when a utility gets regulatory approval, how much IT spending is needed and what the lag is to start shipments against that? I think in your last earnings call, you talked about National Grid slowing down and then a new customer ramping up. I don't know if that's Hydro-Quebec or someone else, but like what type of heavy lifting on the back office needs to be done to accomplish all this data?

I want to be very clear that this gap was really created by the shape that we have in our backlog. I mean we have those customers, there are timings in there. It's not a problem with availability of our resources or availability of our product. That is just timing. We're trying every day of the year to align them completely, have every contract finished on Friday, the next start of Monday. Sometimes we succeed, but we don't succeed all the time, especially on the large ones. But again, those are big, big projects.

And then we talk about National Grid 800 million contracts. That was just a contract for us, then there is somebody installing their devices. There is an IT infrastructure required. So at the time, you put it in your backlog because they got regulatory approval. There is tremendous amount of work, mostly required on the utility side to plan that. It usually touches on every one of the operating processes that they utilize, how they do outage management, billing, we have to integrate that for 5 million customers, millions of customers touching every one of their homes. This is just a very, very sophisticated planning process that is required. And 15 months, 18 months is not a lot of time. And we were still based in Europe and Switzerland, I could say, just imagine replacing every electric meter in Switzerland in one project and completely replace the IT infrastructure to do so. You're not going to do that overnight.

Perfect. And then I just had a clarification on Slide 41. I imagine you don't have all slides memorized, but it had the breakout between Connected Platforms and Grid Intelligence, and then it showed revenue versus order intake from last year. If I'm doing simple math, it looks like Grid Intelligence book-to-bill was 0.8. And then on your connected platforms, about 1:1 last year. Is there any onetime items there just for a segment that you're talking about growing 10% or more? I would have thought book-to-bill would be well above 1. So what gives you that visibility that that's going to accelerate?

Yes. There are no one-times in there. So that's just normal kind of order entry, if you will. I think the key thing is as you think about the Revelo platform, as more and more of that comes online, more of that intelligence is actually part of Grid Intelligence. So as that lifts up, we'll see exactly what you're thinking about, Jeff. It just wasn't there in '25, but as that accelerates, we'll see that pattern.

I guess it goes back to the question that was asked before, is in backlog, the 5 apps for National Grid now, even though they're not turned on?

No.

No. Okay. Because I was confused. You said it was part of the initial. So it was a part of the initial scope, but it wasn't.

Yes, it was part of the initial commitment that they're going to bundle them and that they purchase them. But what will go into the ARR. The way to think about it is rolling them out and scale and deploying them across the deployment.

We have a couple more questions from the webcast. First one is from Akash. Can you tell us about the attachment rates of grid edge in your Revelo installed base and order book? Does your grid edge software work with third-party smart meters as well? How much of your grid edge order book is for non-Landis+Gyr meters?

There was a lot of questions. Can you repeat them again?

Attachment rates of grid edge in your Revelo attached base?

So when you -- first, when you think about the operational software, there is a 100% attachment rate. And I think I tried to articulate before, every Revelo deployment, now that we have contracted for, includes apps as well, certain bundle of apps, different apps for different utilities for different drivers for their ROI. So -- but every one of our Revelo deployment includes apps.

Second one was, does your grid edge software work with third-party smart meters?

Well, there are certainly -- the answer there is yes. We talk a lot about our open standards, and there are a lot of -- there are sometimes different grid edge devices underneath our connected platform and that we operate them as well.

And here's another question on R&D. You have about 1,000 software engineers and you spend about 8% of revenue in R&D. Is there any room to optimize R&D spend through new AI tools, which could, in theory, significantly boost productivity of your teams? If not, then what are the limitations?

So a couple of things when I talked about, it's 1,000 people dedicated to software. So that's across R&D, it's across delivery, it's across support, but it's an amazing number of 1/3 of our employees. The biggest software engineering facility that we have is for us in India, and we have embarked on utilizing AI for coding for about -- over the past 12 months, and we've been pretty far advanced in utilizing that internally for efficiency gain for faster time to market and a faster quality product on time.

And another one from Akash from the webcast. The demand drivers appear solid if utilities facing new challenges. Are they talking to you on faster deployment of new hardware than what was agreed in your original contract, which could put you potentially towards the higher end of your midterm growth target for Connected Platforms segment?

So a couple of things that we clearly see. We clearly see when we talk about the pipeline, we see an accelerated conversation on the conversion from AMI 1.0 to AMI 2.0. And if I -- if you listen to the panel, there was also a panelist that said we are looking at rolling out our deployment over the next 4 years, but potentially, we're actually doing it for 3 years. So that is always a possibility to do so.

Just two questions for me. On the addressable market, if you could, you mentioned it being focused on electric, gas and water. What proportion of that SAM is addressed in like the percent breakdown, if you could, like how much is in electric, gas and water? And then second, if you could break the attainable market down more into a unit basis, so we can kind of relate this more to the U.S., but how many meters exist in the U.S.? What percent of these are AMI 1.0 versus 2.0? And in that 1.0, I guess, what is your market share in the U.S.? And if you think about the transition to 2.0, where do you think that can be?

I think there are a couple of questions are perhaps too detailed, and we need to follow up, but I can certainly answer the one on AMI here in the U.S. as it relates to electric. Think about 165 million is probably still a good proxy if you think about the meters that exist in the U.S. I think that, that population has reached more or less 100% penetration of AMI 1.0. And as I said before, the transition of AMI 1.0 to AMI 2.0 has commenced and is ongoing, and we are somewhere around the mid-single-digit penetration of AMI 2.0 today as we speak. And we are obviously absolutely convinced that will also just be the start of a full transition to AMI 2.0 and the full penetration of AMI 2.0.

We have a question from Patrick at UBS for Davinder. Can you please repeat your comment about the annual buyback and how this relates to the employee stock compensation?

Patrick, first of all, thanks for joining. So we issue employee stock options every year and as part of our incentive programs. And over time, those get issued as new equity, if you will, in the company. So what we do is we spend the $5 million to buy back that dilution so that there's no impact on shareholders. That's kind of the short of it.

There was one more question here in the room.

In terms of the backlog converting to revenue, I guess two questions there. What are the conditions that can allow a large project to get pushed back within the backlog to revenue conversion? And that 30% that you book and typically revenue in the same year, is there a very narrow band around that 30%? Or can that fluctuate? Like how much certainty is there in the 30%?

So I'll repeat, anything that goes into backlog, it's already contracted. So the customer has to take it. It's already regulatorily approved. So those will never be an issue. There's a project plan. Peter described that these are multiyear projects a lot of times. We're a critical dependency on that project plan, if you will. So we're told in advance, you need to have your equipment show up at this place at this time. That's how we build that model, if you will. Highly unlikely for them to actually then move that because it causes them a lot of problems on their side of it. Could it happen? It could, but we think the likelihood would be pretty low. And it would be something outside the normal course of business that would cause that.

And I apologize, would you mind repeating the...?

On the 30% backlogs and revenues in the same year, how much variability do you see around that?

It's been remarkably consistent. So that's our book and ship business and it's our upsells. So it's actually very, very consistent is what we've seen.

And a big part of that is just the value of our brand of Landis+Gyr if you've been added for 130 years, every day orders come in that you didn't see in the pipeline, and it continues to be an absolutely stable 30%. That's just being added for 130 years and the brand recognition of Landis+Gyr.

So just two questions about AI. The first one is pretty easy. With your 100% retention rate, it doesn't sound like you're really concerned about someone coming in from the outside and presenting an AI solution to your customers. With that retention rate that's we can maybe -- we never want to put that to bed, but that sounds to me like what you're implying here. Maybe the AI in the facilities in your factories, you talked a little bit about on the R&D side that you have productivity initiatives. Can you talk about how you're using AI in your factories, maybe even in the back office to improve productivity from here?

Yes. I think we have a couple of initiatives underway. I think order intake for us, everything that we touch, I mean, similar to what we heard in the panel, everything that we touch, especially it relates to order intake as we touch orders, this is a process that is ripe for automation, and we're looking at AI to utilize it. We talked about utilizing in R&D. I think we're also using it in the process in the RFP process. So there are substantial efforts underway, not unlike many companies that help us on the journey that Davinder described, we're trying to drive our SG&A cost to a level that we look at best-in-class and AI definitely is one of the tools to help us to get there.

Maybe just to give you a more real example because you did say back office, that's kind of, where I live, right? So we actually have a team of 23 people in Mexico today whose job is to match invoices to goods received notes and purchase orders. And we have to do that manually because they all come in, in different formats, and there's no two that look the same. There is now an AI tool that can actually learn that over time. And we're actually thinking about implementing that type of a tool to take out those actually 21 people, you still need 2, but 21 people could potentially go. And the cost of that and the ROI is going to be exponential. So that's a real example of how we're thinking about it in the back office.

Just following up on the penetration question again. So if we're at a mid-single-digit kind of percent of AMI 2.0 today, is there something implicit in your target or your 2028 targets that kind of assumes where that level of penetration goes? How much of that is already kind of embedded in backlog?

Well, I mean, for us, the answer and if you look at the chart, a big part of that is in our backlog today because we try to articulate if we look 36 months out, a big portion of the backlog is actually contracted today. At the end of the day, that's how our business works and operates.

There are no more questions from the webcast.

Just a quick one on Connected Platforms margin target of 30%. It sounds like there is a healthy amount of simplification as you talked about with the business mostly being focused on North America and APAC and a lot of concentration around the Revelo platform. So could you talk a little bit about opportunities to push margins versus that target? I know that there's a lot of contract element in the manufacturing, but it wasn't really in the margin walk that you gave us. So how do we think about opportunities to provide a better margin profile on the hardware side of the business?

I mean, certainly, I'd say when we built our plan, look, we're living in a time of real uncertainty, right? So I think it's fair to say that we're probably more conservative than we would ordinarily be just to kind of account for that. That's one thing. The other thing I'd say is as more and more of our product moves to Revelo, most of that capability and the feature set is actually embedded in the intelligence and the software. So if we kind of split what used to be a shipment of 1 meter into 2 places, you're going to see a little bit of a shifting of that margin as well. So you see -- if you notice, we had 45% for grid intelligence in '25, that goes up to 50%. That's probably capturing a bit more of what you might be thinking about, Noah. But certainly, the 30% is -- we're trying to be conservative, just given everything that's going on.

When you think of margin opportunities, product, Revelo, certainly, we continue to go down the cost curve. We've just launched it a couple of years ago. Volume is the name of the game. We're not where we have been with the product that served us well for the past 2 decades. And then we're also launching ultrasonic gas here. We're going to start -- we have actually started last year. So there's also a lot of learning curve and a lot of volume ahead of us.

Just a question on -- given the new re-segmentation and just how your customers sort of rate base things. In terms of the actual meters themselves, I know they've been capitalized expenses. But in terms of the -- like just the management of those meters, et cetera, which has typically also been capitalized as -- which my understanding is on top of whatever the ASP is for the meter itself. Does that revenue item now like that's recurring to some degree? Or does that show up in networks -- excuse me, like the connected solutions? Or does that show up in GRid intelligence? Does that make sense?

Maintenance of the field?

I mean of the meters themselves. And maybe I'm misunderstanding it. So the service contract that sort of existed and what services you were doing prior to having Grid Intelligence, and where does that show up? And is that a capitalized expense? And then similarly, for the Grid Intelligence, is that also capitalized in terms of a license for the utilities or they sort of consume it as an O&M expense?

So I would -- so any -- I'll go back to what I said. So any services related to deployment, which I would consider that would be Connected Platforms. The only services that we have in Grid Intelligence, think about those high-value, high software-enabled type services. So anything that's maintenance related to the device, putting it in, maintaining it, actually, we don't really put it in, as Peter said. Anything that would have been related around that would be part of that Connected Platforms business.

I think there are no more questions. Then over to you, Peter, for any closing remarks.

Well, thank you so much for your questions, and thank you for joining us on our Capital Markets Day here in New York. Look, I've been in the industry for more than 30 years. And I can tell you, I have never been more excited. I can even tell you, I'm more excited now than I was like just 3 hours ago. And I really believe we're at the early changes of a generational change in our industry. And it's a change that is not only transforming utilities, but it is also making the lives of millions of people across the globe much better. I believe we're exceptionally well positioned to help our utility partners. And I hope by now, you're comfortable this is really a partnership by helping them on this intelligent energy transition that they are embarking on. Today, you've heard we have created a focused company. We are a focused company today. We are a great investment. We have the right plan in place. We have the leading technology platform. We have the team and the people to deliver on our plan, and we are committed to driving long-term shareholder value.

So again, thank you so much for your interest in Landis+Gyr. I hope you're just a small portion as excited as I am or as we all are here at Landis+Gyr. And for those of you that are here in the room, please join us for lunch, watch our demos and the ones, the people on the web that joined us today, I look forward to seeing you soon in the world of Landis+Gyr. Thank you so much.

Welcome to the Landis+Gyr Full Year 2025 Results Presentation. Please note that this call will be recorded. [Operator Instructions] I'd now like to turn the call over to Christian Welte, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, moderator, and good afternoon. Good evening, everyone. I'm Christian Welte, Head of Investor Relations, and I'm joined today by Peter Mainz, our CEO; and Davinder Athwal, our CFO. As you know, earlier today, Landis+Gyr issued an [indiscernible] and related presentation on the full year 2025 results, which are available on our website.

This session will follow the structure of the presentation, so we encourage you to follow along. We'll conclude with Q&A, where our moderator will provide further instructions and where you will be able to ask questions. Please take a moment to review the usual disclaimer on Slide 2 of the presentation.

After this short introduction, I'd like to hand the floor over to our CEO, Peter Mainz.

Thank you, Christian. Good afternoon, and good evening, everyone. I'm here with Davinder, our Chief Financial Officer, and we are pleased to present our full year 2025 financial results. With that said, let's now start with a review of the achievements in 2025. Let's turn to Slide 3.

Financial year 2025 was a pivotal and demanding year for the teams at Landis+Gyr, marked by the successful execution of our strategic transformation. At the same time, we remain firmly focused on operational delivery, and we met our targets. This highlights the strength and depth of our talent base, which continues to drive disciplined execution across multiple fronts.

We began the year focused on the process of divesting our EMEA business. In September 2025, we signed an agreement with a private equity buyer. And in April 2026 we successfully closed the transaction. With the transaction, we have created a business with elevated EBITDA and cash profile with low capital intensity and an attractive financial profile going forward.

Our 2025 revenue growth reflects our continued focus on execution and customer engagement. Strong customer demand is evidenced by solid order intake and a sustained high backlog. Profitability improved further with an EBITDA margin of 14.4%. And this performance enabled us to return approximately $70 million to shareholders.

For 2026, we intend to continue rewarding shareholders and propose an increased distribution of Swiss franc per share. In addition, we are progressing with our share buyback program to return the net proceeds from the EMEA divestment with approximately $140 million remaining.

Let's move to Slide 4 on order intake and backlog. The sustained strength of our pipeline, the strongest pipeline I've seen is clearly reflected in our order intake. We are pleased to report order intake of $1.1 billion in financial year 2025, highlighting the continued robustness of our pipeline.

In contrast to last year, order intake was broad-based rather than driven by a few large contracts and included a significant contribution from new logos. This resulted in a book-to-bill ratio of around 1, representing a solid performance.

In the fourth quarter, we maintained a book-to-bill ratio of approximately one in while delivering revenue growth of 25%. Our entry into the gas metering market with ultrasonic technology paired with expanding our gas endpoint offering is clearly gaining momentum as a strong pipeline is translating into order intake.

In Asia Pacific, our Grid Edge offering is seeing increasing adoption though from a smaller base, but with lots of runway left. Overall, we're seeing solid momentum across our global platforms.

We are particularly pleased with our order backlog, which remains stable at close to $4 billion. Approximately 43% of the backlog consists of software and software-enabled services typically recognized over a period of 8 to 10 years, providing a strong foundation and enhanced visibility for long-term growth.

And now I will give the floor to Davinder, our CFO, and he will run us through the financials in more detail.

Thank you, Peter. Good morning and good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Let me begin with our consolidated financial results on Slide 5. For the full year, net revenue was $1,166.2 million, representing 4.2% year-over-year growth primarily driven by strong performance in the Americas region and continued adoption of our [ Revelo ] platform.

Strong operating execution drove higher revenue and together with a deliberate mix shift towards software and software-enabled services supported expansion in both gross margin and adjusted EBITDA margin year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA margin for the year was 14.4%, coming in at the high end of our guidance range.

Turning to Slide 6. I'll walk through our fourth quarter results. New orders in the quarter kept pace for the revenue, resulting in a book-to-bill ratio of one, reflecting sustained demand for our products and services as well as continued discipline across the sales organization.

Fourth quarter net revenue was $352.4 million, representing approximately 25% year-over-year growth, driven primarily by increased adoption of the Revelo platform and a continued mix shift towards software and software-enabled services.

Gross margin expanded by 460 basis points year-over-year, reflecting the realization of operational efficiencies and the favorable impact from our evolving revenue mix. Moving to Slide 7, let's look at full year performance in the Americas. Revenue in the Americas increased nearly 8% year-over-year, supported by strong demand for our Revelo platform, which continues to gain traction with customers across the region.

We are also driving incremental growth through a strategic shift towards higher ASP software offerings, both gross margin and adjusted EBITDA margin expanded year-over-year, reflecting disciplined execution, a sharper focus on operating expense management.

On Slide 8, I'll cover fourth quarter results for the Americas. Strength in new orders resulted in a book-to-bill ratio of 1 for the region. Fourth quarter net revenue was $322.8 million, representing approximately 32% year-over-year growth, driven by continued adoption of the Revelo platform and increasing contribution from software and software-enabled services, gross margin expanded by 660 basis points versus the prior year reflecting operational discipline and the benefits of efficiency initiatives.

Next, turn to Slide 9, let's review our APAC results. APAC revenue declined 19% year-over-year primarily due to the completion of an AMI project in Hong Kong that contributed revenue in the prior year period. Adjusted EBITDA margin in APAC was impacted by lower operating leverage and mix when viewed on a normalized basis which excludes a onetime real estate gain recorded in the prior year.

Finally, on Slide 10, I'll review our liquidity position. As of the end of March 2026, net debt stood at $198.9 million, key movements from the prior year end included $98.3 million of operating cash flow, $69.8 million returned to shareholders, including $41.2 million in dividends and $28.6 million in share repurchases under our ongoing buyback program and $38.7 million in capital expenditures focused on growth and efficiency initiatives.

We closed the year with a net debt to adjusted EBITDA ratio of 0.9 and reflecting continued balance sheet strength while funding our capital allocation priorities. That concludes my prepared remarks. Thank you for joining us today, and thank you for your continued interest in Landis+Gyr. Now I'll turn the call back to Peter. Peter?

Thank you, Davinder. Let's discuss our guidance for financial year 2016 and our midterm guidance next. Let's move to Slide 11. Let me start with net revenue for financial year 2026. Revenue next year will be impacted by the transition between 2 large-scale contracts.

We have a category-defining Revelo contract which completes deployment in the course of first half of financial year 2016. On the other hand, we have a $0.7 billion contract awarded to us in financial year '24, which begins deployment and reaches scale in the fourth quarter of financial year '26.

The transition between these 2 large-scale deployments is expected to result in an estimated $60 million revenue gap between project roll off and new deployment ramp up. While our backlog remains exceptionally strong these transitions are not seamless and will become visible around the middle of financial year 2016.

We, therefore, expect net revenue in the range of $1.05 billion to $1.125 billion. We expect adjusted EBITDA margin in turn to further improve to a range of 14.5% to 15.5%. And continuing our trajectory of margin expansion despite slightly lower revenue.

For the first full year without EMEA, we further expect our cash flow to improve significantly. Let's have a look at our midterm expectations on Slide 12. Our previous guidance cycle concluded with the fiscal year '25 results.

With our new structure now in place, we believe it is appropriate to provide updated midterm guidance. For the next 3 years through fiscal year 2028, we expect organic revenue compound annual growth rates in the mid-single digits. This implies a return to meaningful growth in fiscal 2017 and fiscal 2018, supported by our strong backlog.

The previously referenced large contract is expected to be fully ramped by fourth quarter fiscal '26 and continues through fiscal '28 contributing approximately 5% to growth. In addition, a major grid etch deployment in Australia is expected to add an additional 2% growth contribution. As we continue to execute, we expect to benefit from operating leverage and higher margin software and software-enabled services, resulting in EBITDA expansion and growing at approximately twice the rate of revenue.

Let me close on Slide 13 with a preview on our next highlight, our Capital Markets Day in New York on June 1. The successful divestment of our EMEA business has created a more focused Landis+Gyr.

At our Capital Markets Day in New York, we will share an update on strategy, highlight our core markets and present our technology road map for grid edge intelligence. On the financials, we will detail our capital allocation priorities and financial framework and introduce a new business segmentation as we move from a regional to a product-focused structure.

I'd love to see you all there. And now we'll open the call for questions. Moderator, please.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question will come from Akash Gupta with JPMorgan.

The question I have is that, again, I mean, you're giving us some indication on '27, '28, but when we look at your backlog at the end of March, when we look at like how much typical revenues you get in those years, like what's the degree of confidence on this high growth that you are expecting in '27, '28 from existing backlog?

Or is it contingent to commercial activity in the next 12 months? And maybe you can also talk about the pipeline for projects and orders. And I hear you right, you said the pipeline is strongest that you have ever seen. And maybe if you can elaborate more on that.

Yes. Thank you, Akash. So a couple of things. Let's be clear. The growth we see in 27 and 28 is in our backlog today, and that's really what we tried to articulate. In '26 you see the transition from, I would say, a category defining contract with, I think, the customer up in the Northeast. We can talk about the name, National Grid. We put Grid Edge AMI 2.0 on the map with that contract. And successful winning the contract and now by the contract ramping down. It's another success story that the deployment was a success as well.

The contract that is coming right after is a contract that we have in the backlog that is ramping up. We always say in some of those large contracts, it takes somewhere around 15 to 18 months between the signing and really starting the contract.

And here, we're talking about ramping it up. Exit quarter, that contract we expect to operate and be delivering at full pace. That is a starting point into '27, '28 and actually beyond. And then the second element is there in Australia, that's a contract that we also -- we have announced. That's a great edge contract, putting us on the map in Australia with Great Edge, a new offering.

We have that on hand. We don't need to win that. We need to execute. That gives us confidence. And also, the strong win rate that we had and the wins we had in the final quarter of 25 million. Let's not forget we were growing our revenue by 25%.

And still in that quarter, delivered a book-to-bill to 1 that is helping us to deliver the 27% and 28% growth, also growth that is in the backlog as we speak of today. And then across the year, we see the overall trend, software, software-enabled services, grid intelligence as we will start to call it is really driven by the installed base of Revelo, and that is really increasing every day.

So the short answer is the growth is really in the backlog as we have it today, the close to $4 billion on hand. And it's just the revenue transition pattern that we have tried to lay out and give confidence that this backlog actually contains the growth for '27 and '28 today.

The pipeline overall in...

No, I was asking on pipeline and book-to-bill expectations. .

So pipeline, the next thing pipeline, probably the strongest pipeline if we're looking at the pipeline, the strongest pipeline certainly I have seen, in particular, obviously, in Americas, where we are focusing today. The more interesting and the more important part for this group is how is pipeline translating into order intake.

Q4 was a good indication for us that we are very successful in bringing the pipeline into order intake. And that is also the task for '26 and beyond any time outside a large contract, the task is the book-to-bill to be at around 1%.

And then with the large contracts that we are pursuing, the timing is always not certain quarter-by-quarter that will move us above 1. But strongest pipeline that I've seen, and we have seen tremendous success with our offering to move the pipeline to order intake and then put it in the backlog supporting the growth.

Our next question will come from Patrick Rafaisz with UBS.

Yes, Great. But I have 1 follow-up on the midterm and 2 other questions, starting with the midterm. A bit more clarity will be helpful here. So is these components that you outlined with the 5% plus 3 plus 2 per annum, that assumes that the base business is sort of flat over that period. Is that a correct assumption?

What I tried to understand is the upward or downward sensitivity of this CAGR.

So this -- on this page, we are articulating the growth in the year of '27 and '28 million which mathematically needs to be close to 10%. And what we try to articulate here that these growth rates are basically in our backlog as of today. And I would say that's -- that's the growth that business is part of the base. That's what we do.

We'll go to our next question.

Yes, sorry, can I ask -- the other 2 questions would be, first, on the shift towards higher ASP software that you alluded to for Americas. Can you add a bit more color what do you mean by that? And is it possible 2 segments maybe your current software exposure into these maybe lower and higher ASP parts and what those are exactly will be interesting. .

So I mentioned higher margin. And here, we're getting the territory that we want to cover in the Capital Markets Day. But it's fair to say what we call grid intelligence or software and software-enabled services already today has a gross margin level that is above the average margin level of the business.

And also, if we break it down and look at growth rates for that segment versus the device or platform part of our business has growth rates above and beyond what we see on the platform side.

So that mix shift has to element. Growth rate is a bit faster than we see above the average that we see for the business, the mid-single digits. It's growing much faster. And then the profitability is also nicer and higher, obviously, that stands for nicer.

And with that shift also helps us to move the profitability over that period up the more concrete breakout, we certainly want to take advantage of the Capital Markets Day to provide the detail that you're looking for you, but that's how we view that part of the business, and that's how we see it in the midterm.

Great. Super. Thanks, yes. So looking forward to those explanations. And then the last question maybe for Davinder. You talked about the cash flow, and you mentioned a significant improvement now with EMEA out. Can you maybe help us understand how you expect that to translate into free cash flow?

Is it possible to provide a bit more of a guidance around what you expect there?

Patrick, good to hear from you. Yes, absolutely. So with the new business profile, we are targeting around 80% of conversion of EBITDA to free cash flow, which is significantly better than we ever saw previously.

[Operator Instructions]

Our next question will come from Lewis Bellon with [indiscernible] Europe and ask your question. Lewis your line is muted, but we're not getting any audio. Okay. We'll come back to Lewis. We'll try Sean Milligan with Needham & Co.

Just curious 2 questions. One, in North America, you mentioned a really strong pipeline there. I'm curious if there's anything in the market, whether that's for regulatory policy or funding that might kind of cause fluctuations in being able to win awards like timing quarter-to-quarter earning pushouts?

And then the second question was a long Revelo. Just could you remind us where you are in terms of like Revelo penetration against the existing installed base of legacy products that you had?

Okay. The first one and thanks Lewis. When we talk about Revelo and grid intelligence on the installed base, I think in -- when we talk about North America, where we're further advanced in the penetration compared to Australia, where I would say, I would say, mid-single digits of the full available base, which is 160, 165 endpoints. So still a substantial amount of runway left for that transition to Revelo grid edge technology.

On the regulatory front, also, it's important to understand that it's not the same in every state. And we don't -- certainly, affordability is a theme in the industry and then sometimes that spills into the regulatory process with PUCs as well.

But overall, we don't see a dramatic change from where we've seen before. And it's also fair to say that a lot of the discussion for the approval of the capital projects that we provide to our utilities when utilities have good relationships with the PUC, that's really not an issue that lands with the PSC.

So we have a good mixture I would still say it's unchanged from the complexity dealing with PUCs that has been part of the industry for an extended period of time. So a long-winded way of saying not really any substantial change.

We'll go back to Lewis Billon, see if you can unmute your line.

Can you hear me?

Yes. .

Yes. My question is concerning the EUR 0.7 billion contract. How confident are you with calendar? And what are the reasons that could delay this -- the ramp-up beyond the one quarter to another. So that's my first question.

So to be clear, that contract is in our backlog that moved to our backlog in fiscal '24. And I would say that is 100% on the execution side, and that is, I would say, in our hands today, and we have the confidence that we'll deliver their developed products to that customer up in the eastern part of Canada.

Okay. That's very clear. And maybe another question on the has the Pacific region for full year 2026. What do you expect in terms of order intake?

We're not really guiding for order intake per se, and I continue to stay the same. Outside of those large contracts, like 1 we have just mentioned, the target is always be a book-to-bill of 1. And obviously, any contract of the magnitude of $0.7 billion will tilt the order intake and the book-to-bill substantially above 1. It's difficult to articulate it quarter-by-quarter, but that's the ambition that we continue to drive in that business.

[Operator Instructions] At the moment, we see no further hands, so I can pass back. We just had another follow-up from Akash Gupta from JPMorgan.

I have a follow-up on this revenue shortfall. The question, first one is that you're giving us impact on revenues, which is, I think, around $60-odd million. But can you quantify what will be the impact on margin? Like if we haven't had this revenue shortfall what would have been the margin guidance?

Because when I look at the drop-through of these revenues with 35% gross margin that -- or north of 35% gross margin that you make in North America, then it kind of indicates to me that if you haven't had this, then the margins could have been quite higher.

So first one on impact on margin from this revenue shortfall. And the second one is that you have this situation where you have a lowered load for a few months. How realistically it is possible that you can ask customers for this EUR 0.7 billion contract that -- how about starting ramp maybe a couple of months early because you have capacity? Like could this be a possibility? Or that is not really we should be looking for?

So let me I leave the gross margin to Davinder, let me tackle the timing. As I said, this is a contract that's been in our backlog for -- since the end of fiscal year '24. And those are fairly complex contracts as it relates to the deployment with the customer the rollout and embedding it in the business processes of the utility.

So we have taken advantage of substantial planning on our side and on our customer side. And I feel fairly comfortable that the exit quarter is the one quarter where we'll be ramping and deploying it at full scale. But where we stand on the planning today, there are too many dependables that I don't see that this is a plan that can be accelerated substantially just because we have capacity.

This is a firm front plan that requires so many elements so that what we have depicted here is a good depiction of our revenue profile in 2026 and on the margin profile, obviously, when you missed $60 million of revenue, it has an impact, but Davinder can describe that a bit better.

Akash, happy to take that one. So I think on the gross margin level, you can assume kind of a normal -- so if you take about 1/3 of that at $20 million. But that flows down, none of the OpEx would have really been affected by that. So what you would have seen at that point is a margin uplift on adjusted EBITDA that kind of moved pretty close to 15.5%, 16%. So that's where that really does hurt us. Thank you.

Well, that was our final question. So that does conclude the Q&A session. I'll now hand back to management for closing remarks.

Yes. Thank you for joining us today. Appreciate your time and interest in Landis+Gyr and I look forward to meeting all of you soon, either virtually or in person, in particular, during the Capital Markets Day. Have a great one, and goodbye.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Q3 Full Year (sic) [ Fiscal Year ] 2025 Trading Update Conference Call and Live Webcast. I am [ Mattilde, ] the Chorus Call operator. [Operator Instructions] The conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions]

At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Christian Waelti. Please go ahead.

Thank you, [ Mattilde, ] and good afternoon, good evening, everyone. I'm Christian Waelti, Head of Investor Relations. I'm joined today by Peter Mainz, our CEO; by Davinder Athwal, our CFO. As you know, earlier today, Landis+Gyr issued an ad hoc release and related presentation on the Q3 FY 2025 trading update, which are available on our website. This session will follow the structure of the presentation, so we encourage you to follow along.

We'll conclude with Q&A, where Mattilde will provide further instructions and where you will be able to ask questions. Please take a moment to review the usual disclaimer on Slide 2 of the presentation. After this short introduction, I'd like to hand the floor over to our CEO, Peter Mainz.

Thank you, Christian. Good afternoon, and good evening, everyone. I'm here at our U.S. headquarters in Alpharetta, just outside Atlanta, with Davinder, our Chief Financial Officer, and we are pleased to provide you with an update on our third quarter performance. With that said, let's now start with a review of the highlights of our performance in the third quarter and the first 9 months of our financial year 2025. Let's move to Slide 3. This is actually the first time Landis+Gyr is issuing a quarterly trading update, and we are publishing it after market close to accommodate both our European and North American investors.

We believe this provides investors with an additional data point and increased transparency, highlighting our quarterly performance and seasonality throughout our fiscal year. In the third quarter of financial year 2025, we continued the solid momentum from the first half year and delivered performance significantly ahead of the prior year quarter with both net revenue and adjusted gross profit expanding by double digits. We are also particularly happy with our order backlog, which has increased by almost 30% to about USD 3.9 billion in the past 9 months, reflecting the strength of our pipeline, driven by the increase in load growth combined with the enduring trust of our customers.

Importantly, book-to-bill in our largest segment, the Americas, remained at one. With disciplined execution and solid demand across our core markets, we are confident in a strong Q4 and therefore, reiterate our financial year 2025 guidance. At the same time, we are progressing well on our strategic priorities, including the EMEA divestment and preparations for a U.S. listing. On to Slide 4. Let's cover how we continue to execute on the strategic initiatives outlined in October 2024 in more detail.

Last September, we announced the divestment of EMEA. Our teams, together with the buyer, are currently working diligently to carve out the business. Earlier in January of this year, the transaction received regulatory approval from the European Commission under the EU merger regulation, and we aim to close the transaction, as mentioned before, in Q2 of calendar year 2026. What remains is a global business focused on North America and Asia Pacific. We are excited about the global appeal of the offering with a focus on advancing a high-quality global business built around grid edge intelligence solutions and delivering exceptional value to utilities worldwide.

The focus on this business will elevate both our EBITDA and cash profile with very low capital intensity, creating an exciting and very different financial profile for the business. And with that in mind, we keep on working towards a U.S. listing in the second half of 2026, aligning capital markets with the majority of our operational business activity. This includes a continued listing of the shares in Switzerland on the SIX Swiss Exchange to enable Swiss investors to participate in the value creation of Landis+Gyr's strategic plan.

A Capital Markets Day will take place in New York on June 1, 2026, to update the investment community on the company's profile following the EMEA divestment. And finally, we launched our buyback program last November and have so far bought back close to 1% of our outstanding shares from our strong balance sheet. And now I will give the floor to Davinder, our CFO, who will walk us through the key financials.

Thanks, Peter. Good afternoon, and good evening, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'll briefly walk you through our Q3 results, covering order intake and backlog, revenue and gross margin and then conclude with our full year guidance. Overall, we continue to see strong commercial momentum and remain confident in our outlook for fiscal year 2025. Let's begin with order intake and backlog on Slide 5. Order intake for the first 9 months of the fiscal year was $762 million, resulting in a book-to-bill ratio of around 0.9x, reflecting sustained customer demand across our core markets. As a result, our backlog increased by 26% to approximately $3.9 billion at the end of December. Importantly, around 40% of the backlog relates to software, supporting high visibility and strong margin quality through recurring revenues.

Geographically, backlog growth was driven primarily by the Americas with continued momentum in APAC. Pipeline activity remains strong, especially around our grid edge solutions, which we continue to see increasing customer investments. Our backlog position gives us solid visibility into the fourth quarter and beyond. For the full fiscal year, we expect a book-to-bill ratio of around 1x. Turning next to revenue and margins on Slide 6. Net revenue in Q3 increased by 39% year-on-year to $278.7 million, driven by higher volumes and strong execution. This performance was primarily due to a more than 50% year-on-year increase in Revelo shipments as supply conditions continue to normalize and customers accelerated deployments.

For the first 9 months of fiscal 2025, total net revenue amounted to $814.7 million, representing a slight decline compared to the prior year, driven by the earlier achievement of project milestones last year. Adjusted gross margin remained broadly stable on a like-for-like basis. Excluding a onetime gain on sale of real estate recorded in fiscal 2024, margins in fiscal 2025 are consistent with the prior year. During the third quarter, margins were impacted by less than $1 million of tariff-related costs, which we continue to actively mitigate through pricing actions, sourcing initiatives and operational measures. Overall, the underlying margin profile remains resilient, supported by volume leverage and the growing contribution from software.

And now turning to our fiscal 2025 guidance on Slide 7. Based on our year-to-date performance, backlog visibility and the momentum we saw entering into Q4, we are reiterating our guidance for fiscal 2025. We continue to expect net revenue growth of between 5% and 8% compared to fiscal 2024 when we reported net revenue of $1.123 billion. We also reaffirm our expectation for an adjusted EBITDA margin of between 13% and 14.5% of net revenue, including approximately $10 million to $15 million of temporary dis-synergies on an annualized basis. We anticipate a strong fourth quarter, driven by robust business momentum, shipment normalization and continued operational discipline.

In summary, demand remains strong, execution continues to improve and our financial performance is tracking in line with expectations. With that, I'll turn the call back to the operator to take your questions. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from the line of Gupta Akash from JPMorgan.

I have two questions to start with, and I'll ask one at a time. The first one is on -- commentary on order intake. I think, Davinder, you said you're expecting 1x book-to-bill for full year, which will imply a recovery in orders in Q4. Maybe can you talk about how much visibility do you have already as we are towards the end of the month? And then how does the pipeline for order intake look like beyond the current fiscal year? So that's the first one to start with.

Yes. Thank you, Akash. So was a bit difficult to hear, but if I want to reconfirm the question was around our order intake. And I want to focus on the order intake for the North Americas, where our largest segment, our most important segment. And for the first 9 months, we had a book-to-bill of 1. So we continue to have exceptional performance here on the order intake side. And as I've mentioned multiple times in our business, if we have one of those large wins as we had at the end of the second half of last fiscal year, that distorts the book-to-bill ratio, we are at 1.4, 1.5:1. And outside those, a book-to-bill of 1 is what we are aiming for, and we have achieved that over the first 9 months, and we continue to push for that over the remaining two months that we have now to end the year on that book-to-bill ratio as well.

Pipeline is supporting it and pipeline certainly in North America is very substantial exciting pipeline that we see, and we continue to not just see the pipeline activity, we also see pipeline transition into orders transition into the backlog. So we feel quite good with the momentum we have and the momentum we see in that area.

My second question is on margin. So if you look at your Q3 gross margin, it's up 20 basis points sequentially and 33% in H1 and 33.2% in Q3. And if you look at your full year guidance, which is on adjusted EBITDA, you guide for 13% to 14.5%, and you had 12.9% in H1. So I wanted to ask like are we now going to end towards, let's say, lower half of margin guidance? Or can you still do the midpoint of the guidance on full year margin?

We'll be within -- sorry, we'll be within the guidance and no indication to the low end of the guidance. We are within the guidance. And the gross margin profile is certainly driven by Revelo continuing to pick up and continue to outperform on the margin levels what we have seen a year ago when we were earlier on in the launch of that platform.

Maybe another way, if you look at gross margin for Q4, can you exceed Q3 when we look at your product pipeline? Or is it going to be more in line with what you have delivered in Q3?

Yes. I mean, I think Q4 is very much in line with the profile that we have seen in Q3 and also in the first half. Remember, Davinder mentioned that tariffs are abating in our profile. And then as you look at the calculation for the revenue in the fourth quarter, operating leverage is the second substantial driver for the gross margin continuously enhancing.

The next question comes from the line of Jeff Osborne from TD Cowen.

Just a couple of quick questions on my side. I was wondering, you highlighted the activity in the market is still strong, but are you seeing any delays in the regulatory environment as it relates to approving any of the projects that you've been technically awarded?

Not any different than what we've seen in the industry over the past decade. So I would not highlight any regulatory delays and the customer base that we have or in the market that we participate in. So nothing changed from what is typical for the industry. We continue to see accelerations and delays. It's just the nature of the industry. So nothing abnormal.

That's great to hear, Peter. I just also wanted to confirm, I think on the new Governor of New Jersey on the 20th of January signed an executive order around utility costs and future rate base increases. The contract that you folks won with [ PSE&G ] has already been fully rate base at this point. And so there's no delays or impact from that executive order that was signed last week. Is that correct?

That is absolutely correct, Jeff.

Okay. Just wanted to double check. And then the last one I had, a bit obscure, but there are some industries that have been highlighting in the earnings call cycle issues with memory availability and memory pricing. Just with the Revelo product cycle and being able to download apps, I wasn't sure what your exposure is. Are you having any challenges either on price and/or availability of memory for your product cycle that needs that?

We have certainly seen that the market a bit tighter than before. We're not anywhere close to what we've seen in the supply chain crisis, what is it, 4 years ago. So we're not anywhere close to that. So we saw a bit of tightening. We saw a bit of an increase in lead time, but nothing to date that doesn't allow us to manage it. But we certainly slightly noticed that.

We now have a question from the line of Christoph Grau from AWP.

I have two questions on your strategy. First of all, on the second listing in the U.S., why do you maintain your listing in Switzerland? You said something about participation of the older shareholders. And does this pay out for you the second listing? And my second question is, is the move of your headquarters to the U.S. an option for you in the long run maybe?

As I said -- thank you Christoph, sorry. As we said at the beginning of the call, we're actually taking this call from outside of Atlanta. So I would say, operationally, so we are already very much set here in the U.S. And if you go back a couple of the announcements that we made, I live in the U.S. and Davinder lives in the U.S. We have a Chairperson. She lives in the U.S. So we are focused for the operating -- operative support of the customer base that we have going forward that is more than 70% in North America. That's where we are set up. And we also continue to take advantage of the skill base that we have in our current headquarters in Switzerland and continue also to take advantage of that to support the business going forward.

The dual listing, we have been successfully listed in Switzerland for the past 8 years. So we have a shareholder base in Switzerland that we just want to take care of and we want to make sure as the strategy plays out and the value creation is realized that the shareholder base that stood with us over the past 8 years that we take them along for this very value creation that we're aiming for.

The next question comes from the line of [ Louis Billon ] from [ Baader Europe. ]

So my question is about the Asia Pacific region. So in the press release, you have mentioned that the large project delay was the reason for the decline this quarter in sales. Could you give us more detail for those delays? And I mean, what are the reasons? And should we expect a catch-up effect in the last quarter?

I'm sorry, Louis, I'm not quite sure I really got which project you're talking about.

Yes. In the Asia Pacific region, you mentioned that the decline of net revenue was largely reflecting project timing?

So that is a bit the same theme as I continue to mention in North America. We're also in that region, we have some large contracts and the transition from one large contract to the next large contract is not always seamless. In that area, we announced earlier this year that we have a substantial contract with PLUS ES in Australia, compensating the contract in Hong Kong that is nearing the end of its contract. And as I said before, especially on a quarterly basis, it's never seamless how the transition from one to the next. So that's also Asia Pacific is not different from what I continue to articulate that we see in North America as well.

We now have a question from the line of Mark Diethelm from Vontobel.

I have 2.5 questions. The first one is on the strong increase in backlog you showed. Can you elaborate how much of this backlog will actually convert to sales in the next 12 to 24 months? And the next -- the second half on top of it, you mentioned the Swiss listing will continue. Does that mean there is no delisting at all planned from the Swiss exchange? And then this whole question on top of that, does that change in kind of listing also affect capital allocation in the future, meaning that the dividend will get a greater focus again against buybacks?

Do you want to start with the backlog and I...

Yes, I can take that one. Mark, good to speak with you. This is Davinder. I can take the backlog question. So the way that I would guide you on that is to think about, as we disclosed, 40% of the backlog is software, and that typically comes in over about a 10-year period on average. So the balance of that, which would be the hardware or platform part of it or 60%, that you can think of coming in over 3 to 4 years on average.

We've not yet broken out the margin profile, but I think it's fair to say that our software margin is higher, as you would expect. And I kind of note it's about 1/3 higher than what we see on our hardware. But if you model it that way, that will give you a sense of kind of like what you might expect to see come out of backlog and into revenue over the next few years.

And then the second question, I want to make sure I understood it. So we -- as we said, in the second half of '26, we're working towards the listing here in the U.S. As we achieve that, we're going to maintain a dual listing in Switzerland as well. And as I said before, that listing exists to allow the Swiss shareholder base or broader European shareholder base to participate in the value creation. And I think that has been articulated to the financial community that way over the past couple of months already actually.

And a full answer to your half question, it doesn't affect our capital allocation strategy at all.

I forgot about that part. Yes.

[Operator Instructions] We have a follow-up question from the line of Jeff Osborne from TD Cowen.

I just also had a question on the 40% software. Just wanted to be a 2-part clarification. There's no recurring services or consulting or people items in that, that that's all true software and technology. Is that the right way to think about that, that services and labor are not typically part of the backlog?

Jeff, this is Davinder. I can take that one. There are some services in there, but I would kind of call out that these are not low-level installation type services. These are kind of really where we're delivering either software or some kind of high-level intelligence through a service. So there may be humans involved in the provision of those, but you can think of it essentially as software and intelligence. I would just kind of caution you not to think about it as kind of installation services that some software companies have.

Got it. And then is there a way -- sorry to interrupt here. No, that makes sense. And then another follow-up on the 40%. Is there a way to compartmentalize the TEPCO contract? My guess is that, that maybe is 1/3 most half of that number. And some of -- as investors benchmark yourselves versus peers, they don't have that sort of -- most of your peers don't have a $30 million endpoint contract that was deployed over 10 years ago that was recently renewed. So is there a way you could just compartmentalize that so people can see what the North American software exposure is?

I would still say that Japan is a smaller portion of the overall when we break it down on the -- say we had a $2 billion over 10 years or 8 to 10 years roughly. So that is about $200 million or $200 million plus that is in the backlog. So I think that is a smaller portion, but this is $30 million plus endpoints that we manage that is 5x more than the largest deployment here in the U.S. So it's a substantial achievement they have here in Japan managing TEPCO every day with -- but it's not the biggest portion on the $200 million plus annual recurring revenue that we have on our backlog.

Or said another way, that's kind of skewing the margin profile, I think, is the ultimate question.

Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Peter Mainz for any closing remarks.

Thank you again for joining us today. We appreciate your time and interest in Landis+Gyr, and I look forward to meeting all of you soon, some of you in DISTRIBUTECH or virtually and in person. Goodbye. Have a great day, and talk to you next time. Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now over. Thank you for choosing Chorus Call, and thank you for participating in the conference. You may now disconnect your lines. Goodbye.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Analyst and Investor Call Half Year 2025 Conference Call and Live Webcast. I am Sandra, the Chorus Call operator. [Operator Instructions] The conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast.

At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Christian Waelti. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Sandra, and good afternoon, good morning, everyone. As you know, earlier today, Landis+Gyr issued its results ad hoc release and related presentation for the first half year 2025, which are available on our website. This session will follow the structure of the earnings presentation, so we encourage you to follow along. We'll conclude with Q&A, where Sandra will provide further instructions and where you will be able to ask questions. Please take a moment to review the usual disclaimer on Slide 2 of the presentation.

A brief note on reporting before starting. The results of the EMEA operations are presented as discontinued operations for all periods. Unless stated otherwise, the figures we are sharing reflect Landis+Gyr's continuing operations only. After the short introduction, I'd like to hand the floor over to our CEO, Peter Mainz.

Thank you, Christian. Good morning and good afternoon, everyone. And thank you again, Christian, for reminding us to consider our financials from a new perspective. I'm here with Davinder, our Chief Financial Officer, and we are pleased to present our half year 2025 financial results. With that said, let's now start with a review of the highlights of our performance in the first half of 2025.

Let's move to Slide 3. The first half of our financial year 2025 was marked by solid commercial momentum, as you can see. We are pleased to report a strong order intake of $595 million, resulting in a book-to-bill of 1.1, driven by key grid edge tech wins in the Americas.

We're also particularly happy with the resulting order backlog that reached a new record for our company with close to $4 billion, building a very solid base and a clear outlook for long-term growth. Both our net revenue and EBITDA are noticeably improving compared to the second half of financial year 2024 when we started our strategic journey.

At the end of September, we announced the divestment of our EMEA business, concluding a process we talked about every time we stepped in front of you since late 2024, and that our outcome allows us to return the proceeds to our shareholders through a share buyback program.

Let's move to Slide 4. More information on this point specifically. We are very happy to have completed and fulfilled the commitment that we announced about 1 year ago. It was a very competitive process where the investment in preparation we made delivered a strong financial outcome. The 13.4x EBITDA multiple of 2024 actual adjusted EBITDA is a strong indicator in this regard.

But outside the numbers, it is also a great outcome for our customers as this makes us comfortable continuing to perform over the next period. And most important, it is a great outcome for our employees who were very positive and welcomed this decision.

Credit of this positive outcome goes to our EMEA team led by Rob Evans for their dedication and focus to deliver exceptional operational performance while in parallel dedicating time and energy to the sales process.

As previously indicated, this allows us to return the proceeds from the divestment to our shareholders with a share buyback program for which we have announced concrete parameters, namely $175 million on the first trading line. This program will start as of tomorrow.

Let's move to Slide 5. Last year, at the occasion of our half year results presentation, we announced 3 strategic initiatives. I'm pleased to report that we have now successfully executed 2 of them. And as we move forward, our focus on the Americas will remain a key priority.

As mentioned, the divestment of EMEA on which our teams together with the buyer are currently working hard to carve out the business with the aim to close the transaction in the second quarter of 2026. The current priority is and remains the Americas with a focus on advancing high-quality business built around grid edge intelligence solutions and delivering value to utilities across the globe. The focus on this business will elevate both our EBITDA and cash profile, with very low capital intensity, creating a very different financial profile of the business.

While we focus on the Americas, we remain a global business, and we're excited about the global appeal of the offering that we have. And with that in mind, we keep on working towards the U.S. listing in 2026, aligning capital markets with the majority of our business activity.

Moving on to Slide 6. We are focusing on the Americas as we believe there is a tailwind that is exceptionally strong with electricity demand growing again after 10 to 15 years of basically 0 growth. There is a real fundamental load growth, thanks to AI and data centers, manufacturing, reshoring and industrial hydrogen production. An assessment we can also see in the utilities capital expenditures going up substantially, which is validated in every single CEO conversation I'm having at the moment.

Peak demand growth leads to peak demand no longer supported by permanent energy resources, a secondary tailwind further driving the need for our technology. Let's move to Slide 7 and how this trend translates into business for us.

The strength that we continue to see in our pipeline translates into our order intake, and we're excited about that. In the first 6 months, we won close to $600 million of new business with a strong book-to-bill ratio of 1.1. Contrary to last year, when we won some very large orders, this time, we have received a multitude of orders, which speaks to the solid pipeline that we have.

Our backlog increased by 30% over the past 12 months and stands at a record $4 billion. We are very pleased about the fact that 43% of the backlog is recurring in nature for our software and services business.

In Asia Pacific, the backlog has nearly doubled over the past 12 months, leveraging the same technology platform as in the Americas and benefiting from the region's unique drivers. A recent example of this is the PLUS ES contract in Australia we have recently announced, introducing our grid edge platform on this continent as well.

And now I will give the floor to Davinder, our CFO, that will run us through the financials in more detail.

Thank you, Peter. Good morning and good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Let's begin with our consolidated key financial results on Slide 8. Our net revenue for the first half was $535.9 million, reflecting a year-over-year decline. This is primarily due to early milestone completions in the Americas and the wrap-up of a major APAC project in the prior year period. However, on a sequential semester basis, we saw solid growth momentum with meaningful improvements in both revenues and margin.

As anticipated, the lower sales volume impacted both gross margin and adjusted EBITDA on a year-over-year basis, driven by reduced operating leverage in the current half year and the absence of a onetime gain recorded on the sale of real estate in India in the prior year period. That said, both metrics improved by more than 200 basis points each compared to the second half of fiscal '24, thanks to disciplined execution and the realization of operational efficiencies.

Let's now turn to our regional performance, starting with the Americas on Slide 9. Revenue in the Americas declined by 16% year-over-year, largely due to the early completion of deliverables on a large software project in Japan last year as well as lower sales of certain legacy meters in the current period.

The lower software revenue in the current half year, in particular, caused a drop in both gross margin and profit. Despite these headwinds, adjusted EBITDA margin held strong at 17.5%, even after a temporary 100 basis point impact from tariffs in the half year-to-date. This margin resilience reflects our sharpened focus on operating expenses, which were reduced by nearly $14 million year-over-year.

Now let's move to APAC on Slide 10. APAC revenue declined by 17.4% year-over-year, largely because the prior year period saw a peak in sales related to an AMI project in Hong Kong that completed together with a delayed project rollout in Bangladesh in the current half year. We do, however, see improved momentum in Singapore and New Zealand as well as consistent performance in Australia. APAC's adjusted margin was impacted by lower operational leverage and mix when looking at a normalized view, excluding the one-off real estate gain in India.

Now let's review our liquidity position on Slide 11. We ended the half year with net debt balance of $209.3 million. Key movements since the prior year-end included $41.1 million in dividends paid in July, $37.7 million in cash generated from operations, $12.9 million in capital expenditures focused on growth and efficiency projects and $10.1 million in transformation expenses tied to our key strategic initiatives. We closed the year with a net debt to adjusted EBITDA leverage ratio of 1.4x, providing us with the balance sheet strength to fund future growth.

That concludes my prepared remarks. Thank you again for joining us today and for your continued interest in Landis+Gyr. I'll now hand it back to Peter to walk through our remaining fiscal '25 guidance. Peter?

Thank you, Davinder. Before addressing the guidance, let me close by commenting on the improved look of our high-quality global business and the new starting point we have created.

Let's move to Slide 12. On this slide, we have depicted the impact on both revenue and adjusted EBITDA from removing the EMEA business from full year 2024 financials. It invigorates that we are now paving the path towards a more focused and efficient operating model with a portfolio weighted towards higher-margin business as seen through the immediate 300 basis point improvement in adjusted EBITDA.

After selling the EMEA business, this marks a fresh start for our high-quality company with significant predictable recurring revenue and substantial improvements across every financial metric. This is reflected in the guidance discussed on our next slide.

So let's move to Slide 13. For net revenue, we confirm our 5% to 8% growth guidance we gave in May this year for the continuing Landis+Gyr business. We expect a strong top line performance in the second half, driven by the momentum built in the first half.

For the adjusted EBITDA margin, we increased our forecast from initially 10.5% to 12% to now 13% to 14.5% of revenue. This raise in margin is a result of the focused high-quality business we have created with the strategic transformation.

In fiscal year 2025, we will carry $10 million to $15 million of dis-synergies, mainly corporate costs that will go with EMEA after closing. For fiscal year 2025, we need to think about this on a pro forma basis, and it will elevate our profitability further in 2026 and beyond.

Let's move to Slide 14. Let me wrap up why we believe Landis+Gyr is exceptionally well positioned for the future. We are a trusted leader in energy technology with a platform deeply embedded in our customers' operations and a track record of being invited back again and again.

Across our core markets, we hold substantial share and benefit from a record $4 billion backlog, representing more than 3 years of revenue for the continuing business. This gives us strong visibility in an ever-growing base of recurring revenue.

Our financial profile has strengthened significantly. We have sharpened our focus, increased EBITDA and cash generation and lowered our capital intensity, in essence, improving every single financial metric. We are returning value to our shareholders with $175 million buyback and staying disciplined in our execution. With structural demand drivers across electrification, grid modernization and AI, Landis+Gyr is focused, aligned and ready to lead the next era of intelligent energy.

And now we'll open the call for questions. Sandra, please.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Akash Gupta from JPMorgan.

I have a few questions, and I'll ask one at a time. My first one is on North American growth. So if we look at your full year guidance and look at what you delivered in the first half, on my back-of-envelope calculation, it looks like you are guiding for mid- to high teens sequential growth in second half in North America. Maybe if you can start with what is driving it? How much visibility do you have? And what are the risks in delivering this strong growth that you're expecting in the second half?

Yes. Thank you, Akash. So obviously, what is driving it, it starts with the backlog that we have on hand. And if you look at the growth rate that you mentioned, that's also -- we saw a similar growth rate in the first half of this year compared to second half of last fiscal year. And part of the substantial growth we also see in the second half, the first couple of months of this first half was a bit impacted by the tariffs, and we had to shift our supply chain a bit, but it's really driven by the momentum that we have created and the momentum manifesting itself in the best way in the backlog that we have as we start the second half of this year.

And my second question is on tariffs. I mean you mentioned that you got hit by $5 million. Maybe if you can talk about, is this gross impact or net impact? And what sort of protection do you have in your contracts if something changes materially on tariff fronts in the future?

Okay. So the most important thing, if you recall, at the beginning of the year, we said tariffs will have a minimal impact on our financial performance throughout the fiscal year, and that is still true. And the number that you see, the net impact of about $5 million, that's really what we've seen in the first 2 months or so, I would say, of the year when we said we needed to make some sourcing changes to be compliant with USMCA. And as the rules of the game became a bit clear as we started the year, we needed a couple of weeks to clarify that. So we incurred costs in the first, I would say, 2 to 3 months. And we expect those costs to be in the rear mirror here.

And my last question is on more of the big picture question. When I look at your Slide #6, where you talk about U.S. power demand and growth. I think what I want to understand is that a substantial part of this growth is coming from data centers. And as we hear, there are -- most of the data centers may have their own power generation on top of grid connection. So the question is that how does this adoption of data centers, both directly and indirectly going to impact your business? Maybe you can give us some examples to better understand how do you expect the demand to change because of this data center growth in U.S. power market?

So it's still -- obviously, we'll see a mix how data centers will be powered. But when I speak with utility executives, data center and onshoring is still a substantial growth for the capital expenditures that they have to spend to bring those users of energy life on the grid. So it's driving them substantially, and we believe only a smaller portion will be powered independently. And even if they are powered independently, they need to be connected to the grid and require what we provide flexibility.

So we see it as a consistent driver in the capital expenditures and where we see it the most as utilities look at their increasing capital expenditures, they look at which capital expenditures make the most sense. If they are pushed by the utility commission to adjust their capital expenditures, then they go back, which are the expenditures with the highest return on capital and that's where investments in our technology come up being on top over and over again. So we see that as one driver.

And the second driver is also -- is the one as we see this peak demand growth and it's turning more into a peak plateau versus a peak. We also see that with some of the permanent energy resources are no longer sufficient to provide that. And again, that's the second driver providing substantial flexibility in the grid to provide the resilience to do that. So those are the 2 drivers that we see. And every time we engage with utilities, they bring that up over and over again. Resilience in light of the demand growth is a big driver. So that's the big driver we see.

[Operator Instructions] We have now a question from Jeffrey Osborne from TD Cowen.

Just a couple of questions on my side. I was wondering if you could split up the recurring revenue that you mentioned between services and software. What's the mix between the 2? I assume it's more weighted to services.

So we haven't broken that one out specifically. I don't think you're right with that statement, but we have not broken that one out specifically. So I couldn't provide you a percentage here on this call.

Got it. I'm just trying to think of the margin implications as we move forward as that revenue is recognized over the next 3 to 5 years. I assume that would have a pretty pronounced impact on EBITDA for the Americas segment. Is that true or no?

Yes. We don't have Microsoft margins on our software. We have industrial software margin, but they're definitely accretive to the overall margin that we see for the business in the Americas.

Got it. And then can you just update us -- I think on the last call, 6 months ago, there were a couple of customers that had transitioned from the legacy technology to the new and you had taken a $20 million inventory write-down. Have those customers started ramping up with the newer Revelo platform? Or is that still something to come here in the second half?

So when I look at the pipeline and I look at the order intake, that is more or less exclusively Revelo and grid edge technology today. When we look at the execution customers that signed contracts 3 years ago or so, they're still deploying the technology of that generation at that time. But we see a dramatic shift to grid edge to Revelo.

Got it. And just 2 quick last ones. What needs to go right to be at the high end of the guidance of 5% to 8% growth? If you could just respond to that? And then I didn't see any wins announced in the order, it sounded -- or in the quarter, the half. It sounded like you mentioned Australia, but is it the right way to think that you just had quite a few smaller wins and not any sort of marquee investor-owned utility wins in the quarter?

So as we said, like different from the last time, we didn't have the one big one in our order intake. We had a multitude of orders. I think the largest one was close to $200 million. That was the largest one. So I think we had a good plan and a good mix of order intake. And as I say, every time we are not landing one of those big ones, being close to one is an exceptional result. So I think it's -- the order intake is more a testimony to the strength of the pipeline as it came in than to a single order. So we quite like that one. And between you asked the 5% to 8%, what moves us to 8% versus the 5%, I think it's execution until the last day of March of our fiscal year.

But I assume you're not hoping for any type of regulatory decisions between now and March to go your way that everything would be in backlog and it's more around execution and timing of implementation? Or is there still wins that you need to get from a turns business?

No. I think anything you need regulatory approval today to wait for revenue. I think we're a bit too far advanced into the fiscal year for this to happen. So it's -- what we need to ship and execute is part of the $4 billion of backlog that we articulated today, and then you have a small portion of just business that comes in day in, day out from the existing customer base we have. So we feel quite good about the starting point.

We have a follow-up question from Akash Gupta from JPMorgan.

The first one is on the share buyback announcement that you plan to spend up to $175 million for share buyback. And the question I had was the consideration of share buyback over, let's say, bolt-on M&A. We often hear that some of your smaller competitors in North America, which are part of large organizations, they are kind of struggling in their smart meter business. And there is some speculation in the market that some of them might come in the market. So maybe can you talk about rationale of share buyback over bolt-on M&A? And if there will be any good interesting assets on the block, would you consider changing your capital allocation?

So we've been fairly consistent from the time we announced that we're looking for options for the EMEA business that with the proceeds, we want to return it to the shareholders. And if you look at the list of activities that we still have in front of us for the next, I would say, 6 to 12 months, we still need to close the EMEA business. We're looking at the listing at the U.S. that consumes a tremendous amount of resources. So for M&A throughout that period of time, there would just be exceptional risk, and that's really not at the forefront of capital allocation for us for that period of time. So I think that's really the answer for the next 12 months period.

And lastly, I think you announced in the release that you will be now providing quarterly trading update for third quarter in January. So I think that's a welcome step. But just wondering what sort of information shall we expect in the quarterly trading update?

Well, you're certainly going to see revenue and gross margin when it is customary for a trading update, I guess, order intake. I think those would be the key numbers that we'll provide -- to provide comfort that we are on track for the full year numbers.

[Operator Instructions] Gentlemen, so far, there are no further questions. Back over to you for any closing remarks.

Looks like with our presentation, we tackled most of the questions that everyone had. So thank you again for joining us today. I appreciate your time and interest in Landis+Gyr, and I look forward to meeting all of you soon, either virtually or in person. Goodbye. Have a great day.

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