Zebra Technologies Q4 2025 Earnings Call - Confident it will offset a memory cost shock while doubling down on RFID, machine vision and frontline AI

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

Mike Steele, Vice President of Investor Relations, Zebra Technologies: Good morning, and welcome to Zebra’s fourth quarter earnings conference call. This presentation is being simulcast on our website at investors.zebra.com and will be archived there for at least one year. Our forward-looking statements are based on current expectations and assumptions and are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially, and we refer you to the factors discussed in our SEC filings. During this call, we will reference non-GAAP financial measures as we describe our business performance, with reconciliation shown at the end of this slide presentation and in our earnings press release. Throughout this presentation, unless otherwise indicated, our references to sales performance are year-over-year on a constant currency basis and exclude results from recently acquired businesses for 12 months. This presentation will include prepared remarks from Bill Burns, our Chief Executive Officer, and Nathan Winters, our Chief Financial Officer.

Bill will begin with a discussion of our fourth quarter and full year results. Nathan will then provide additional detail and discuss our outlook. Bill will conclude with progress on advancing our strategic priorities. Following the prepared remarks, Bill and Nathan will take your questions. Now, let’s turn to slide 4 as I hand it over to Bill.

Bill Burns, Chief Executive Officer, Zebra Technologies: Thank you, Mike. Good morning, and thank you for joining us. We delivered fourth quarter results above our outlook, driven by our team’s strong execution and positive demand trend. Before discussing the quarter, I’d like to briefly reflect on the progress we have made over the past year on our vision to advance intelligent operation. In 2025, we expanded our connected frontline portfolio and customer base through the Elo Touch acquisition and expanded our 3D machine vision capabilities with the Photoneo acquisition. We advanced our market leadership with the introduction of our AI solutions for the frontline, sharpened our focus on automation by exiting our robotics business to prioritize areas where we see better growth opportunities, including RFID, machine vision, and AI-powered solutions. Operationally, we delivered solid growth, generating strong free cash flow and deepened customer and partner relationships.

For the fourth quarter, we realized sales of nearly $1.5 billion, a 10.6% increase, or 2.5% on an organic basis from the prior year. An Adjusted EBITDA margin of 22.1% and non-GAAP diluted earnings per share of $4.33, which was 8% higher than the prior year. We drove strong results in our Asia-Pacific and Latin America regions, with EMEA returning to growth. Our healthcare, manufacturing, and retail and e-commerce end markets grew, while transportation and logistics cycled strong compares in North America. ELO performed well in the quarter, and we are pleased with the early progress on driving synergies. We realized solid earnings growth by fully mitigating existing tariffs and driving operating expense leverage through productivity initiatives, while continuing to invest in our market-leading solutions portfolio.

For the full year, we achieved greater than 6% sales growth, in line with our long-term expectations, and 17% non-GAAP diluted earnings per share growth. We also generated more than $800 million of free cash flow and closed on accretive acquisitions. Overall, our team executed well while navigating in a certain environment. Our strong financial position enabled us to return significant value to shareholders with more than $300 million of repurchases in Q4 and nearly $600 million for the full year. Given our progress, our board of directors has expanded our authorization by $1 billion. We will continue to execute on our disciplined and balanced capital allocation strategy, prioritizing investments in our business that elevate our portfolio of solutions while consistently returning capital to our shareholders.

We are well positioned as we enter 2026 and excited about the opportunities ahead. I will now turn the call over to Nathan to review our Q4 financial results and 2026 outlook.

Nathan Winters, Chief Financial Officer, Zebra Technologies: Thank you, Bill. Let’s start with the PNL on slide 6. In Q4, total company sales increased 10.6%, or 2.5% on an organic basis, with growth across most categories. Our connected frontline segment grew 3.6%, led by mobile computing, and our asset visibility and automation segment grew 1.3%, led by printing and supplies. We realized solid performance across our regions. Asia Pacific sales increased 13%, led by Japan and India. Sales increased 8% in Latin America, with double-digit growth in Mexico. In EMEA, sales increased 4%, with solid growth in Northern Europe and Germany. In North America, sales declined 1% as we cycled large order activity in the prior year, partly offset by solid run rate demand.

Adjusted gross margin declined 50 basis points to 48.2%, primarily due to lower services and software margins. We fully mitigated current tariffs earlier than expected, thanks to our team’s successful efforts, including supply chain moves, product portfolio rationalization, and price execution. Adjusted operating expense leverage improved by 60 basis points. This resulted in fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA margin of 22.1%.... Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share were $4.33, an 8% year-over-year increase, and above the high end of our outlook. In Q4, we recognized $76 million of restructuring charges relating to the exit of our robotics business and productivity initiatives. Turning now to the balance sheet and cash flow on slide 7. For the full year, we generated free cash flow of $831 million, or a conversion rate of 102%.

At year-end, we held $125 million of cash, with a modest debt leverage ratio of 2 and $1.2 billion of credit capacity. We’ve been deploying capital consistent with our allocation priorities. For the full year, we repurchased $587 million of stock and acquired Elo and Photoneo with cash on hand and our existing credit facility. We continue to maintain excellent financial flexibility for investment in the business and return of capital to shareholders. As Bill noted, our board authorized an additional $1 billion of share repurchase, providing a total of $1.1 billion after the $100 million repurchased through early February. This action underscores the confidence in Zebra’s prospects for continued growth and value creation. Let’s now turn to our outlook.

We entered 2026 with a solid backlog and pipeline that supports our first quarter sales growth guidance range of 11%-15%, including approximately 10 points of contribution from business acquisitions and favorable FX. Our first quarter Adjusted EBITDA margin is expected to be between 21%-22%. Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share are expected to be in the range of $4.05-$4.35. For the full year, we expect sales growth to be 9%-13%, which reflects a strong pipeline of opportunities, Machine Vision returning to growth, continued momentum in RFID, along with manufacturing, and a 7-point favorable impact from acquisitions and FX.

Our full year Adjusted EBITDA margin is expected to be approximately 22%, and non-GAAP diluted earnings per share are expected to be between $17.70 and $18.30. We are currently facing industry-wide price increases for memory components beginning in Q2. Our full year guide reflects us fully mitigating this approximately 2-point headwind and driving profitable growth in 2026 through multiple initiatives, including collaborating closely with our vendors to manage supply, targeted price increases, net savings from the robotics business exit, targeted actions to drive productivity, as well as FX favorability. Free cash flow for the year is expected to be at least $900 million, which reflects free cash flow conversion of approximately 100%. We are continuing to optimize our working capital levels, balanced with our supply chain resilience objectives. Please reference additional modeling assumptions on slide 8.

With that, I will turn the call back to Bill.

Bill Burns, Chief Executive Officer, Zebra Technologies: Thank you, Nathan. As I turn to slide 10, Zebra remains well positioned to benefit from secular trends to digitize and automate workflows with our innovative portfolio of solutions, including purpose-built hardware, software, and services. We deliver intelligent operations by digitally connecting people, assets, and data to assist our customers with business-critical decisions that drive meaningful outcomes. A $35 billion served market represents a significant growth opportunity. Zebra’s complementary and synergistic segments positions well to capitalize on this opportunity. The connected frontline provides the digital touchpoints necessary to improve efficiency, collaboration, and the customer experience. Our solutions include enterprise mobile computing, interactive displays, frontline software, and AI agents. Asset visibility and automation gives assets a digital voice to automate environments with technology that scale through printing solutions, advanced data capture, RFID, and machine vision. Turning to slide 11.

Zebra solutions enable our customers across a broad range of end markets to drive productivity and efficiency and improve the experience of their customers, shoppers, and patients. We are accelerating our investments in RFID, machine vision, and AI, further sharpening our strategic focus. Zebra is investing in RFID solutions that advance our leadership and support emerging use cases. Our next generation mobile computers embed RFID reading capabilities to prepare our customers for the increased penetration of RFID tags across the supply chain. A North American telecommunications company recently selected our new RFID-enabled mobile computers for their retail location, replacing consumer devices. Our solution enables this customer to improve inventory accuracy and reduce shrink, as well as lowering IT support costs over the product lifecycle. We’re excited about the momentum we are seeing in RFID adoption and our pipeline of opportunities.

We are driving new opportunities in machine vision by investing in go-to-market initiatives for deeper engagement with our customers. There are many mainstream workflows that benefit from the proven return on investment from our solutions. For example, a large European parcel delivery company has selected Zebra’s machine vision platform to drive productivity gains by identifying and sorting parcels, eliminating bottlenecks along conveyance systems. We have a strong pipeline of machine vision opportunities and expect to return to growth in 2026. Now turning to slide 12. At the National Retail Federation trade show in January, our team, along with valued customers and partners,... demonstrated how our innovative portfolio advances the AI-powered modern store through engaged associates, optimized inventory, and an elevated customer experience. These outcomes are achieved through improved real-time inventory management, omni-channel execution, and technology-empowered workers and shoppers.

The addition of the Elo Touch business enhances the modern store experience, as our combined capabilities, along with AI, enable us to offer additional ways to digitize operations across multiple touchpoints. Together with Elo, we will deliver higher customer satisfaction and complete solutions through the intersection of frontline mobility, self-service, and digital media. This value proposition extends well beyond retail, including quick-serve restaurants, hospitality, healthcare, and other industrial markets. For example, a high-growth, multinational fast food restaurant recently selected Elo’s self-serve kiosk at its U.S. location to increase order size, enable faster fulfillment, and improve order accuracy. Looking ahead, we have an opportunity to expand our business across their entire point-of-service platform and also supply their international locations. Turning to slide 13. Our industry leadership puts us in a unique position to be a supplier of choice of AI solutions for the frontline of business.

Our Connected Frontline and Asset Visibility and Automation segments play a critical role in enabling AI for business operations. As AI transforms the frontline of business, asset visibility becomes essential, providing a digital voice to physical assets to identify, locate, and understand condition. This real-time data provides critical insights, allowing AI models to better understand the physical world, which is fundamental to transforming frontline workflows across industries. Our Connected Frontline solutions unify a mobile workforce, which, combined with our SaaS offerings, deliver the output from AI models to frontline workers, providing the right information to the right person at the right time. Mobile solutions will be capable of seeing, hearing, and understanding the environment while interacting with frontline workers in a conversational or vision-based way. We continue to invest in our AI solutions with our recently launched Frontline AI Suite, comprised of three components.

AI enablers are foundational to our offering, consisting of tools and APIs that empower partners and customers to build enhanced applications for mobile devices. Our AI blueprints combine enablers into purpose-built templates that streamline multi-step workflows. These blueprints integrate computer vision, voice recognition, and sensor data to automate critical workflows such as proof of delivery, material receiving, and shelf merchandising. Zebra Companion includes agents we design and manage, addressing key responsibilities, including operating procedures, product knowledge, and sales enablement. Our Frontline AI Suite is a clear differentiator in the industry, enable us to meet a range of customer requirements. Our partners and customers can choose to build their own fully customized application using enablers, elect to adopt blueprints to more quickly address their evolving business needs, or deploy our fully functional Zebra Companion agent.

AI enablers are a value add to Zebra’s mobile computers, while AI blueprints and Zebra Companion are software and service offerings with paid pilots already underway and scaled deployments expected this year. We are pleased that two prominent retail customers demonstrated the value of our Frontline AI Suite at the NRF trade show, and we look forward to building on our momentum to further elevate Zebra as the leading solutions providers for the frontline of business. I’ll conclude on slide 14, which highlights end market trends driving our long-term growth opportunities across our end markets. These include several broad-based themes, including labor and resource constraints, track and trace requirements, increased consumer expectations, and advancements in artificial intelligence. Our customers rely on our solutions to advance their business-critical workflows, and we are uniquely positioned to address the need for intelligent operations with our market-leading portfolio.

I will now hand it back to Mike.

Mike Steele, Vice President of Investor Relations, Zebra Technologies: Thanks, Bill. We’ll now open the call to Q&A. We ask that you limit yourself to one question or one follow-up to give everyone a chance to participate.

Conference Operator: We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on a touchtone phone. If you’re using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Our first question today comes from Tommy Maul of Stephens. Please go ahead.

Bill Burns, Chief Executive Officer, Zebra Technologies2: Good morning, and thanks for taking my questions.

Bill Burns, Chief Executive Officer, Zebra Technologies: Morning, Tommy.

Mike Steele, Vice President of Investor Relations, Zebra Technologies: Morning, Tommy.

Bill Burns, Chief Executive Officer, Zebra Technologies2: First one for you on memory. Nathan, I think I heard you say that beginning in Q2, you anticipate a 2-point headwind that you can fully offset. So maybe we can just unpack that a little bit. Two point, I presume you’re just referencing a 2 percentage point hit to gross margin? And maybe you can give us some context how that progresses from Q2 and beyond, or maybe you can quantify for us some of the initiatives that you have in flight to try to offset that headwind. Thank you.

Nathan Winters, Chief Financial Officer, Zebra Technologies: ... Yeah, for sure. No, that’s correct. What we said in the statement, it’s about a 2-point gross margin headwind, on a gross basis. But obviously, the memory chip demand and price expectations have escalated quite a bit since the beginning of the year. But we are pursuing multiple mitigation strategies. It’s no different than what we’ve done before, whether this was with tariffs or semiconductors. So, we recently announced price increases globally over the past week. They’ll be effective in March. Practically working with our suppliers around spot buys, co-planning around the demand trends, as well as looking for alternative memory sources, and then a lot of work from our product teams on transitioning to some higher density memory. So again, quite a few active work streams in process.

And if you look at the impact for 2026, I mean, this is based on indicative pricing from our suppliers and where they see that going here over the next several quarters. The impact really begins in Q2, just based on the timing of those price increases, as well as, you know, what we have in inventory going into the year. But we fully expect to mitigate that within the year, and that’s embedded in our guidance. About a half of that, or a point, is offset with just with other offsets we have in the business, whether that’s the exit of the robotics business, some tailwinds from some of the lower tariff rates, as well as the actions the team has taken to mitigate the tariff exposure, as well as some of the favorability and effects.

And then the other half coming through with the, as we realize, the pricing benefits into Q2 and through the second half of the year, as well as all the other mitigating actions the teams are currently working. So again. And our teams have done a really great job at securing supply to meet the demand we have within the guidance. So, a lot of work. That’s obviously a dynamic, but I think, you know, again, we feel good about where we’re at with the work streams, and working closely with our supply base.

Bill Burns, Chief Executive Officer, Zebra Technologies2: Thank you, and I want to follow up on the repurchase update you provided today. Sounds like you’ve already done $100 million through the year-to-date period. And so my question is, with the new authorization, and assuming your stock is at similar levels, is there any reason why you wouldn’t, or excuse me, why you would slow down the recent level of repurchase?

Nathan Winters, Chief Financial Officer, Zebra Technologies: No, if you look, I mean, if you just take a step back, you know, ending the year, from a debt leverage around 2x, we feel great about the overall capital structure, strong cash position, balance sheet’s in good shape. So, you know, as we said, we’ve repurchased $300 million of share repurchases in the fourth quarter. We have repurchased $100 million year to date, leading into the call. So right now we’re targeting to do, share repurchase around 50% of our full year free cash flow of $900 million. That’ll be primarily here in the first half of the year.

So, again, we continue to plan to be aggressive in the market here over the next several months, and this still provides ample flexibility as we enter the second half of the year based on our cash profile, for the year.

Conference Operator: The next question comes from Guy Hardwick of Barclays.

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

Bill Burns, Chief Executive Officer, Zebra Technologies: Yeah, I’d say that the strong finish to the year certainly is playing into this as we exceeded our outlook. 2025, we drove solid growth, 6%, you know, growth and then 17% EPS growth, greater than $800 million of free cash flow in what was an uncertain environment through the year. Elo added 2 points of sales growth, so you know, to the year, leading to 8% growth for the full year. Really advancing, you know, our offerings in the Connected Frontline segment, and then also our capabilities across in, you know, engaging customers in a digital way, certainly in that segment. So enhanced our modern store offering as well. We see that, you know, as we enter 2026, that there’s momentum, right?

It’s that we see reacceleration of growth coming out of fourth quarter, led by manufacturing, our machine vision pipeline, momentum in, in RFID are all positives as we ended the year. We’re seeing our customers continue to talk about investments in technology as we’ve spent a lot of time with them, at the National Retail Show. Really, we’re focused, on higher growth opportunities across the portfolio and to drive, you know, productivity within the business, as Nate talked about, kind of offsetting memory. So I think overall, we feel that, you know, good as we enter the year and that the momentum’s there to, to drive profitable growth in 2026.

Nathan Winters, Chief Financial Officer, Zebra Technologies: Then, Guy, I think just if you look at the Q1 guidance, as you mentioned, in line or roughly flat from, from where we were in Q4, I think a couple of things in play. One, if you just look back over the last couple of years, you know, linearity has been anything but typical. So I think it’s, it’s hard to say what has been typical linearity if you look back just as happened over the past couple of years. But also we didn’t see, as we said in our, our guidance for the fourth quarter, kind of a surge in year-end spends. So we didn’t see the same type of cyclical improvement from Q3 to Q4. And then ELO plays a small part, you know, just not quite the same seasonality, more linear throughout the year.

So I think all three of those play a factor in why, along with just the demand environment, as Bill mentioned, all play a factor in why Q1’s in line with Q4 in the top line.

Bill Burns, Chief Executive Officer, Zebra Technologies1: So sorry, just on the memory issue, do you have much visibility to the back end of the year in terms of what could be the annualized impact as we kind of exit the year, based on your discussions with your suppliers?

Nathan Winters, Chief Financial Officer, Zebra Technologies: Yes, I mean, really, the pricing we’ve gotten now is, you know, mid, you know, through the middle of the year. So I think that’s, you know, and obviously that’s what we’ve incorporated into the guide, as well as some assumptions around just how that may play out in the back half. I think the way to think about it now would be, you take the two points really, you know, pull that over the back, you know, second, third, and fourth quarter, and then annualize that run rate on an annual basis. So it’s, you know, not that much different from what we’re seeing here in the for our 2026 guide.

Conference Operator: Our next question comes from Joe Giordano of TD Cowen. Please go ahead.

Joe Giordano, Analyst, TD Cowen: Hey, guys. Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions here.

Nathan Winters, Chief Financial Officer, Zebra Technologies: Morning, Joe.

Joe Giordano, Analyst, TD Cowen: Yeah. Can you talk about, like, I mean, it’s a, it’s a fairly wide-ish... It’s kind of a wide organic growth guide for the, for the year. So maybe you could talk through, like, scenarios and what your visibility looks like and how you’re, you know, what, what would be required from a, from, like, a market standpoint to get to that higher end, and, and, and how, like, you risk as the low end?

Nathan Winters, Chief Financial Officer, Zebra Technologies: Yeah, maybe just, you know, start with the full year guide, 11% at the midpoint, 22% EBITDA margin, and double-digit EPS growth. So again, I think we feel, you know, feel good about the overall profile for the year. And as Bill mentioned, I think the underlying theme of that is entering the year with a strong pipeline, the momentum across different parts of our business, whether that’s RFID, manufacturing, Machine Vision. And I think if you take a step back, we believe the guide provides a balanced view of the environment where we sit here today, including still some macro uncertainty out there, the memory component challenges, with the opportunities that we see in the market.

So if you look at the 11% midpoint, about 4 points of that is driven by underlying demands. Elo provides, you know, 5.5 points of the growth, and FX is, you know, 1.5 points in there. And I think visibility is pretty typical from what we see at this time of the year. So I think, like, the range is really bound around the midpoint, is more how we think about it in terms of circling around the midpoint. Obviously, the macro conditions, timing of deals, all play a factor in kind of the you know, the balance between the low and high end of the range. But I think we’re confident in the full year outlook based on everything we have today.

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

Bill Burns, Chief Executive Officer, Zebra Technologies: Yeah, Joe, I’d say that, you know, the things like tariffs and memory and others have, you know, allowed us to raise price, where, you know, along with our competitors as well. I think you’re just seeing this across the industry, that it’s not possible to absorb the cost of tariff or memory, and we’ve got to raise price. And I think that, look, our customers are price sensitive. We have competitors in the market. Our largest customers get our, you know, best pricing. That’s just the way it works, and we continue to work with them to make sure they’re seeing the value. We’re adding a lot of technology to our devices, not just, you know, we’re raising price because we have to on memory and tariff and others, but also they’re getting a lot of value, right?

We’ve added RFID to all our next-generation mobile devices. We’re increasing memory and processing speeds, working with, you know, our partners in Qualcomm and certainly Google on the OS to make sure that they can support AI models on the device. So they’re seeing value in things like mobile computing. We’re doing the same across the entire portfolio, adding AI capabilities to machine vision, continuing to enhance capabilities around scanning. You know, our print portfolio, we’re adding RFID printing to that portfolio. So there’s a lot of value as well that our customers are getting from our solution. Certainly, there’s price sensitivity and competition, and that all matters. But look, we don’t have a choice but to raise price when memory and tariffs and others are so significant. But I think our customers understand that.

They’re seeing that across not just our segment, but many others.

Nathan Winters, Chief Financial Officer, Zebra Technologies: Joe, I think if you just look back at last year, even with the price increase we did in April, it still represented, you know, a little over half a point of the full year organic growth. So still the vast majority of the growth last year was driven by underlying demand. So, it clearly plays a part, but that underlying demand is still what drives... what’s gonna ultimately drive the top line.

Conference Operator: The next question comes from Rob Mason of RW Baird. Please go ahead.

Bill Burns, Chief Executive Officer, Zebra Technologies1: Yes, good morning. Maybe just an extension off that last question. I mean, as you think about the way you’ve laid out the guidance for the first quarter and-

Speaker 6: ... how you’re thinking about the, the balance of the year and when pricing goes into effect. Yeah, are you giving any consideration to, you know, customers trying to get in front, you know, moving projects, pulling those forward, you know, trying to get ahead of some of the price increases or just, you know, uncertainty around, memory in general?

Nathan Winters, Chief Financial Officer, Zebra Technologies: Yeah, Rob, so I think two, two points. On the first quarter, we’re not expecting any type of pull-forward activity, or that’s not been incorporated into the guidance. I mean, we just announced the price increase this past week. So obviously, you know, what we were seeing in the pipeline of opportunities was unaffected by the price announcement here, just over the past week. And just how we implement that through our distribution channel, with our partners, in terms of honoring prior pricing that we have or updating the full backlog, or what’s sitting with our distributors.

As we’ve done these price increases in the past, we really haven’t seen a huge pull-in of demand, just based on how we administer that through our channel, as well as honoring some of the PC’s price concessions we have with certain customers on deals. And then I think the other one, just as you look at the incremental price increase were announced this week, that’s not been incorporated into the guide. Similar to how we thought about it last year, we want to monitor the impact. We just announced it, so obviously that’s being absorbed through the channel.

I think as, you know, as we sit here today, we thought it was the right move to say, "What’s really what we’re seeing from the underlying demand today?" and then we’ll update that as we go through the year in terms of how we see that as either incremental revenue or any type of trade-off with underlying demands.

Bill Burns, Chief Executive Officer, Zebra Technologies: Yeah, I’d say that, maybe just to add, Rob, that, you know, talking to our partners at our channel partner conferences, you know, we’ve been through North America and Asia Pacific already, and you know, the message they’re sending to customers is, you know, "Let’s talk about these major projects early. Let’s get those orders in." Not the idea to save on pricing or others, but more just to make sure we’ve got supply for them ultimately, and I think that’s the message they’re sending. So I don’t see people buying early because of it. I think it’s just a reality of what’s happening across memory.

But I think it allows our partners to have the conversation early, with early visibility to especially larger opportunities with our customers, to make sure that they understand that, you know, the more visibility we have the demand on the specific product they’re looking to utilize, that, you know, then we can go meet that demand with the memory we have.

Speaker 6: Makes sense. And then, Bill, you mentioned this, you know, return to growth in machine vision. I think, you know, historically, we’re aware of where you had some maybe over-indexing to certain verticals. Are those the verticals that you’re expecting to see recovery in, or do you have some new ones that, you know, you’re looking to drive that return to growth?

Bill Burns, Chief Executive Officer, Zebra Technologies: Yeah, we see that machine vision is really an integral part of the asset visibility and in automation segment for us. I think that when we look at machine vision, we saw sequential growth in fourth quarter, so we feel good about that. We’ve seen some new wins, both in, you know, as you know, the machine vision market, there’s two sides of that. One is TNL, so we’ve seen some large transportation logistics wins, and the other inside manufacturing. So we’ve seen at the high end of our portfolio some, you know, automobile manufacturing wins, so that coming back a bit. So I think manufacturing in general, on the machine vision side, recovering in addition to TNL is a good sign. We expect sequential growth to continue through first half, but solid growth for the full year.

I think the pipeline is, you know, we’ve been working hard to diversify the pipeline of customers, but everything across inspection, you know, doctor, pack bench, stand tunnel, optical character recognition, so a broad breadth of opportunities that the team’s working on. I would say, as we’re looking to diversify the business, as you said, into new vertical markets, I think our value proposition is strong. We’ve got, you know, we focus around ease of use, the unified software platform that we’ve brought across the portfolio. We’ve invested in go-to-market. We’ve changed out some leadership in the business, acquired Photoneo to have another offering at the high end of the market. So I think, you know, we feel good. The market’s recovering overall, as you know, in machine vision, as manufacturing recovers and TNL spends again in that environment.

So we see, you know, solid growth, quite honestly, into 2026. So, you know, overall, I’d say we feel good.

Conference Operator: Our next question comes from Keith Howsam of North Coast Research. Please go ahead.

Nathan Winters, Chief Financial Officer, Zebra Technologies: Good morning, guys. Appreciate the opportunity. Sorry to harp on the memory issue a little bit more, but, you know, I appreciate, Nathan, the visibility through the first half of the year, but you were hearing more and more concerns around the industry, the perhaps product shortages and limitations to sales in the second half of the year. Can you talk about any confidence you have that, you know, regardless of the price, that you’re going to have the availability there of the products?

Speaker 6: Yeah, of course. Look, I think the team, as I mentioned earlier, the team’s done a great job working with suppliers. Bill mentioned, I mean, part of this message through the channel with our partners is getting the visibility on those projects to what SKU, what product you want, and getting those visibility early allows us to then shape demand. So it’s really around, you know, a bit of can we get the product as much as get the right memory for the right product that we need, and making sure that that precious, you know, components are going to the right product families as we build out the pipeline.

Nathan Winters, Chief Financial Officer, Zebra Technologies: So that’s where the team is really focused on now, is I’d say, shaping demand, working with our customers around, you know, the particular SKUs they’re looking for around projects, maybe a bit earlier than normal, so that as we build the build plan, work back through our supply chain, we’re getting the right memory through the pipeline. And then the other thing the team is working actively is, moving to the higher density memory, which a lot of that capacity plans to come online, in the middle of the year. So part of that is also shifting to the newer memory, which, again, we expect for that supply to increase as we go to the back half of the year.

Bill Burns, Chief Executive Officer, Zebra Technologies: I think, Keith, maybe just I’ll add really quick, just strong supplier relationships is critical to this, and that we know coming out of COVID, that’s critical for our business. And we’ve worked really hard to make sure that we’ve got the right relationships in place with our suppliers, and they’re, quite honestly, guiding us through this. As Nate said, you know, we’ve you know, months ago, we had the conversation around moving to new memory that would be more readily available, and we’ve got early samples of that. We’re working with our other suppliers to go test that and make sure that we’re ready. So we’re doing everything our suppliers are asking us to go do to get the most access to memory we can, and those relationships really matter. And ultimately, we’re working closely with them.

And as Nate said, on the other side of it, on the part of our customer side, to say: Look, we don’t want to build product and put memory in it that we don’t need for customer demand. So we wanna make sure we got the right SKU, the right product, the right timing around it. And the analysis we’ve done so far is that we’re gonna mitigate the pricing, and we’re gonna have the supply we need. There’s always some risk in that, but we feel good about where we stand today. The team’s done a lot of work on this.

Keith Howsam, Analyst, North Coast Research: Okay, great. In terms of that memory, is it primarily the mobile computers are at risk here, or is it also point of sale with the Elo or the printers? Is that experiencing some of the same issues, or is it really concentrated on mobile devices?

Nathan Winters, Chief Financial Officer, Zebra Technologies: Concentrated in mobile devices, Elo and the POS and kiosk business has, you know, similar, but it’s predominantly in those two portfolios.

Bill Burns, Chief Executive Officer, Zebra Technologies: But again, the teams there are working closely together. Our supply chains are, you know, tied on exactly what we’re doing from a pricing perspective, but also a supply perspective and leveraging the strengths of both of our, you know, both Elo and, you know, core Zebra to make sure we’ve got supply across both.

Keith Howsam, Analyst, North Coast Research: The next question comes from Andrew Buscaglia, from BNP Paribas. Please go ahead.

Bill Burns, Chief Executive Officer, Zebra Technologies0: Hey, good morning, everyone.

Bill Burns, Chief Executive Officer, Zebra Technologies: Morning, Andrew.

Bill Burns, Chief Executive Officer, Zebra Technologies0: I just wanted to get a sense of these kind of customer conversations you’re having in terms of what they’re thinking for 2026. It sounds like... I mean, sounds like you have a healthy backlog, and your Q1 guidance implies some, you know, improving spending. But what are the customers saying in terms of the biggest, you know, impetus to spend here? Is it, like, in the past, you talked about clarity around tariffs. Are they taking advantage of accelerating depreciation? And is there an upgrade cycle? You know, maybe they just haven’t bought in so many years, and they gotta move forward this year.

Bill Burns, Chief Executive Officer, Zebra Technologies: I’d say that the, you know, customer conversations are really around the idea that they’re continuing to invest in their business, you know, and that’s across all verticals. We’ve spent, you know, even though it’s early in the year, a lot of time with customers, as I mentioned, the National Retail Show, but, you know, our largest TNL customers, because TNL is so critical to retail, also, were at that show. We’ve got, you know, our healthcare show coming up in HIMSS over the next, you know, X number of weeks. So, you know, we’re preparing for that. So across all verticals, our customers are really talking about continuing to invest in their business and technology. I would say that, you know, we enter the year with a solid backlog and really a pipeline.

We’ve got momentum, as Nate talked about, around, you know, our core business overall, you know, including scanning, printing, mobile computing, but also, you know, manufacturing, you know, seeing more strengths in that, which has been a focus area for us. EMEA returning to growth. I would say that the demand remains strong for Elo, so we’re certainly excited about that acquisition. You know, I think that the breadth and depth of our solutions portfolio, including the addition of Elo and the new opportunities around our AI suite and the idea that customers are thinking about how are they deploying AI at the frontline of business overall, those conversations continue. And I think that, you know, customers are really focused on how do they serve their customers better and get better experiences, whether that’s omni-channel or it’s self-service or point of sale.

They’re talking about driving efficiencies within their business. How do we use our solutions to go do that across RFID, machine vision, and others? I think it’s how do you increase inventory visibility, which is still challenging across our customer base, and that’s everything from, you know, printing to scanning to our mobile devices. I think that, you know, we’re confident in delivering, you know, solid growth in 2026, and our customers seem to be really focused on continuing to deploy technology across their business, and I would say, kind of playing their game, right? They’ve got a plan, they’re executing on it, and there’s been really no talk about kinda anyone holding back or others. It’s all been kind of positive about, you know, what are their plans for 2026, and what are the opportunities we have to work closely together?

Bill Burns, Chief Executive Officer, Zebra Technologies0: Yeah, you know, sort of on that note, you know, a lot of people looking at things like the AI effect, and certainly your customers are-

Nathan Winters, Chief Financial Officer, Zebra Technologies: ... trying to find ways to leverage it and, you know, reduce costs and, you know, improve productivity. I’m wondering, you know, years ago, you had this Windows-based devices shifting to Android, which prompted a big upgrade cycle. And I’m wondering, do you sense like these new AI products you’re talking about, you’ve been talking about them for a while, could have a similar effect in terms of prompting new spending or an upgrade cycle here?

Bill Burns, Chief Executive Officer, Zebra Technologies: Yeah, I would say that, you know, if you look at the portfolio overall in relation to AI, that, you know, we’re uniquely positioned to where, you know, Zebra can position itself really to be the leading AI solutions provider for the front line. I say that in a couple of ways. One is that the asset visibility and automation segment gives a digital voice to assets, to inventory that’s necessary to feed AI models if you’re going to leverage those at the front line of business. You have to give everything a digital voice and have visibility to be able to leverage the AI model. The second thing is you need something to... the output of the AI models, what needs to be done, you need to be able to connect that information to workers.

The way you do that is through mobile devices and our SaaS offerings, like communication, collaboration, task management, combined together, take the output of the model and allows a worker to drive a behavior or do something, put inventory on the shelf, move something from the back room to front of room, pick up a pallet and move it to the next location, that drives ultimately the outcome in your business that gets you to be more effective and more efficient. It plays a critical role across our whole portfolio. Specific to mobile computing, the idea of, you know, we’ve our latest mobile devices certainly will support memory, processing power, and others, and the software to support AI models on the device or in the cloud.

And we’re seeing, you know, customers move to those devices, as their next generation device, as they’re beginning to refresh. So, yes, we’re seeing that clearly AI will drive, you know, the upgrade of those devices, ultimately, you know, higher ASPs on those devices with higher memory, and also will have an opportunity for us across the idea of enablers and blueprints and companions we talked about, to be able to drive AI software revenue for ourselves as well.

Conference Operator: Our next question comes from Piyush Avasi of Citi. Please go ahead.

Piyush Avasi, Analyst, Citi: Good morning, guys, and thanks for taking my questions.

Bill Burns, Chief Executive Officer, Zebra Technologies: Morning.

Nathan Winters, Chief Financial Officer, Zebra Technologies: Morning.

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

Nathan Winters, Chief Financial Officer, Zebra Technologies: Yeah, for sure. I think if you look at it, the real driver within the service and software margin impact is primarily, and obviously, it represents the vast majority of the revenue, is in the service portfolio, and the just higher repair costs that we’ve seen over the past couple of quarters. Now that, you know, the good thing is the overall margin rate improved from, in the fourth quarter, improved from where we were in Q2 and Q3. But this is really due to the age of the install base, and we’re starting to see that play out in terms of driving the overall number of repairs.

We expect to see that level out here as we go through the year and see the overall margin for the services and software to be flat, kind of look at it year-on-year throughout 2026. Specific to software, you know, the two real things the teams are working on, one is a lot of energy and effort’s gone over the last couple of years, and so this is unifying the platform, bringing together kind of the, you know, the architecture to ultimately lower the overall support costs that’ll improve margins as we go really into the back half of this year and into next. As some of that effort’s starting to come to a closure in terms of transitioning customers to the unified platform.

Then, as like anything, then it’s about scaling on that in terms of as revenue grows, getting the scale, to drive gross margins further. So I think those are the two aspects. If you look at that line, it’s really driven by service, but within software, a lot of work over the past couple of years around, the platform and unifying the platform. And we’re getting close to the end of that activity, which then gives us some runway to improve margin as we move forward.

Piyush Avasi, Analyst, Citi: Gotcha. Helpful. Americas was soft in Q4, and I understand that there were some really tough comps, but can you elaborate on the underlying demand environment and trends you’re seeing in the region? And as you think of your 2026 guidance, like based on your conversation with your customers, how do you think America is contributing to your 2026 guidance?

Bill Burns, Chief Executive Officer, Zebra Technologies: Yeah, I think that I would say that overall, you know, we saw relative strength in, in, fourth quarter in North America around small and mid-sized business, but as we talked about, cycling larger, larger order activity in, in TNL and in retail in the fourth quarter. So I think we feel good about the pipeline of opportunities that, that is healthy in the business. I think it really is just cycling a, a compare. We didn’t see as, you know, large deals, very large deals in, in fourth quarter as, you know, that we’ve seen in past year. Nate talked about that a little bit in the seasonality idea. So that’s really what it’s about. We feel, we feel across North America that all vertical markets, all product areas, we see no, no real challenges there other than a tough compare in fourth quarter.

If you talk about the other regions, I would say return to growth in EMEA, really driven by strength in North and Central Europe. I’d say double-digit growth we saw, you know, so strong growth in mobile computing, print, RFID, so broad-based. We’re seeing opportunities in Europe around retail, with personal shopper refresh opportunities and new. So, you know, where the North America market is really more self-service checkout in kiosk, where, you know, Elo plays, the European market is a combination of that as well as self-scan, which is a large opportunity for us, both in new customers and refresh opportunities. So those continue to move forward in EMEA. Asia-Pac saw strong growth, thirteen percent across, you know, growth across most of the region. Japan and India certainly were bright spots.

Those areas are places where we’ve been investing. Certainly, the amount of manufacturer- Strong growth in Latin America, broad-based. I would say, you know, Brazil and Mexico, you know, outperformed with large retail deployments, but broad-based growth across Latin America. So we’re not concerned at all about North America, really is just truly cyclic compare. And we feel good about, you know, broad-based growth across the regions and, and product areas as we enter 2026.

Conference Operator: The next question comes from Jim Ricciuti of Needham and Company. Please go ahead.

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

Bill Burns, Chief Executive Officer, Zebra Technologies: I’d say that they... You know, given the install base, right, certainly Zebra’s install base overall, that, you know, these large, very large orders are really tied to, to refresh cycles and activity, you know, across our, our customer base. And that, you know, remains a, an attractive opportunity for us overall. We’re assuming the same, you know, a similar level of refresh activity in 2026 that we, you know, saw in 2025. And I, I’d say remember, the every customer’s refresh cycle is different, right? It’s really driven by things like supporting new applications, driving, you know, higher processing power or memory, or new features like we just talked around on AI or, or new features like, you know, RFID being embedded into the devices. It’s driven by, you know, obsolescence of OS or, you know, the security life cycle.

It’s driven by technology transitions, but everyone’s on a different cycle. I’d say that, you know, when customers refresh, the opportunity for us is not just the refresh cycle, but they typically buy more devices because they’re extending their use cases and putting devices more in the hands of more associates overall across all industries. When we look at things like retail, the refresh, you know, cycle is really normalized over the last several years, and we’re seeing some retailers spread, you know, their purchases over a longer time horizon. From a TNL customer perspective, I would say they refresh at a slower pace than retail, which is typically 4-5 years. Driven by really the fact that the devices have higher durability and are using fewer applications than we see in retail.

But as you said, those discussions are, you know, with large TNL customers, progressing. We’re talking to them earlier about these refreshes, and the pipeline continues to grow for multiyear deployments that, you know, likely begin in 2027. So in 2026, we’d see, you know, about the same level as we saw in 2025, but this is clearly an opportunity out there for us, and we would see that, you know, these, as these conversations continue to progress and progress earlier, with challenges of things like memory, we get more and more visibility to the timeframe from our customers.

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

Bill Burns, Chief Executive Officer, Zebra Technologies: Yeah, we’d see, you know, 26, high double-digit growth, continuing in RFID. We had a strong year in over the last several years, including 2025, and we see that continuing. The opportunities have really been broad-based, all the way across the supply chain, from retail to transportation, logistics to manufacturing. Now, opportunities in government. We’re seeing, you know, clearly the move from retail apparel. We saw it move to broader merchandise inside retail. You mentioned fresh food inside grocery is a new opportunity, and things like bakery and around the outside edge of the store, higher-margin, perishable items, we’re seeing the opportunity there. Parcel within TNL remains a large opportunity. Quick serve restaurants.

You know, we think of automation always as you know, but Quick Service restaurants are moving from pen and paper to RFID. You know, we’re seeing healthcare and just broader track and trace across the supply chain. So I think that we’re seeing broad-based growth. We have number one share in fixed and handheld readers. We continue to have strength in our, we’re the leaders in RFID printers. You know, across our labels business, we’re seeing strength. So I think it’s broad-based. I think we’re continuing to see the adoption. It’s why we’re adding RFID capabilities to the majority of our, you know, new mobile computing devices, is that customers continue to want to adopt RFID within their environment.

Really broad-based and not driven by just one industry or segment, but, you know, across all the vertical markets we serve.

Conference Operator: The next question comes from Brad Hewitt of Wolfe Research. Please go ahead.

Bill Burns, Chief Executive Officer, Zebra Technologies3: Good morning, guys. Thanks for fitting me in there.

Bill Burns, Chief Executive Officer, Zebra Technologies: Morning, Brad.

Bill Burns, Chief Executive Officer, Zebra Technologies3: Curious how you see channel inventories as they stand today, and does the guide embed any meaningful changes in channel inventory levels as you progress through the year?

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

Bill Burns, Chief Executive Officer, Zebra Technologies3: Okay, that’s helpful. Now that the tariff situation seems to have stabilized a little bit overall, have you guys seen any change in customer willingness to go ahead with projects versus three months ago? To what degree is any macro-driven change in customer sentiment baked into your 2026 outlook? Thank you.

Bill Burns, Chief Executive Officer, Zebra Technologies: I’d say that, you know, customers were on the retail side, you know, a bit concerned overall about, you know, just the secondary effect of tariffs as they’ve, you know, had to push that through, you know, on their inventory to their customers ultimately. But I think that we’re really beyond that. That’s all kind of flowed through their supply chains and they’ve had to raise price in the places that they have. So I’d say that, you know, again, these conversations with customers today, there hasn’t been concerns of tariff raised. There’s always, you know, challenges. There may be future challenges around trade, but we don’t see those as of today.

The bigger challenges we talked about multiple times in the call is probably memory that we’ve, you know, we’re gonna mitigate in the year. So I think that, you know, I think tariffs have not factored into a lot of conversations with customers at this point.

Conference Operator: This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Burns for any closing remarks.

Bill Burns, Chief Executive Officer, Zebra Technologies: I’d like to thank our employees and partners for delivering a solid 2025 results. We certainly, as we look ahead, we’re focused on advancing our portfolio of solutions and driving profitable growth across our business. Thank you, everyone.

Conference Operator: The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.