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Rockwell Automation, Inc. (ROK)

Q3 2025 Earnings Call· Wed, Aug 6, 2025

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Thank you for holding, and welcome to Rockwell Automation's quarterly conference call. I need to remind everybody that today's conference call is being recorded. [Operator Instructions]. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Aijana Zellner, Head of Investor Relations and Market Strategy. Ms. Zellner, please go ahead.

Aijana Zellner

Analyst · Wolfe Research

Thank you, Julianne. Good morning, and thank you for joining us for Rockwell Automation's Third Quarter Fiscal 2025 Earnings Release Conference Call. With me today is Blake Moret, our Chairman and CEO; and Christian Rothe, our CFO. Our results were released earlier this morning, and the press release and charts have been posted to our website. Both the press release and charts include and our call today will reference non-GAAP measures. Both the press release and charts include reconciliations of these non- GAAP measures. A webcast of this call will be available on our website for replay for the next 30 days. For your convenience, a transcript of our prepared remarks will also be available on our website at the conclusion of today's call. Before we get started, I need to remind you that our comments will include statements related to the expected future results of our company and are, therefore, forward-looking statements. Our actual results may differ materially from our projections due to a wide range of risks and uncertainties that are described in our earnings release and detailed in all our SEC filings. So with that, I'll hand it over to Blake.

Blake D. Moret

Analyst · Melius Research

Thanks, Aijana, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Before we turn to our third quarter results on Slide 3, I'll make a couple of initial comments. Rockwell had another good quarter as we returned to year-over-year sales growth. We had a diverse set of strategic wins in the quarter across discrete, hybrid and process industry segments. I'll highlight some of these in a few minutes. We're also making good progress on our journey to the segment margin goals we introduced at our November 2023 Investor Day. This is largely due to very good progress on our enterprise-wide productivity programs even as more of the year-over-year savings shifts from the initial SG&A reductions to direct material cost and indirect services cost savings and operational efficiencies. We have already achieved our full year goal of $250 million in year-over-year productivity, a quarter earlier than we anticipated, and I'm proud of how our organization has operationalized our ambitious productivity and continuous improvement targets. Price/cost also remains favorable, including the net impact from tariffs, which was minimal in the quarter. Importantly, we intend to take bold steps to continue our progress. Over the next 5 years, we will invest over $2 billion in plants, digital infrastructure and talent to grow share, build resilience and expand margins. The United States will be the largest beneficiary of these investments, which are primarily CapEx. These investments will complement our robust productivity programs to drive our global growth and margin expansion goals. We'll go into more detail on the scope and milestones tied to these investments in November, but it will include thoughtful implementation of automation to drive plant efficiency, talent to fuel our highest return offerings and an AI-first business system to provide unmatched employee partner and customer experiences. This is right in…

Christian E. Rothe

Analyst · Melius Research

Thank you, Blake, and good morning, everyone. I'll start on Slide 7, third quarter key financial information. Third quarter reported sales were up 5% versus prior year with minimal impact from currency. About 3 points of our organic growth came from price. While price/cost was favorable, about 1 point of our price realization was from tariff-based pricing, which was neutral to EPS. Benefits from cost reduction and margin expansion actions and price realization more than offset higher compensation. Adjusted EPS of $2.82 was above our expectations, primarily due to the beat on the sales line as well as segment operating margin. The adjusted effective tax rate for the third quarter was 15.2%, above the prior year rate of 13.3%, primarily due to lower discrete tax benefits. We continue to expect a 17% ETR for fiscal 2025. Free cash flow of $489 million was $251 million higher than the prior year. Free cash flow conversion was 153% in the third quarter. Slide 8 provides the sales and margin performance overview of our 3 operating segments. While sales in Lifecycle Services came in as expected, performance in Intelligent Devices and Software & Control exceeded expectations with product growth more than offsetting the decline in our configure-to-order businesses. All segments executed well on our cost reduction and margin expansion targets, helping absorb the year-over-year increase in compensation expense. As a reminder, we did not have any incentive compensation costs in the same quarter of last year. Intelligent Devices margin of 18.8% decreased by 140 basis points year-over-year against one of their most difficult comps of the prior year, primarily due to the higher compensation expense I just mentioned. Given the small year-over-year dollar change in sales in this segment, decrementals are not as meaningful this quarter. We continue to see good price realization…

Blake D. Moret

Analyst · Melius Research

Thanks, Christian. We're happy to see a return to year-over-year growth, including an improving outlook in some of our largest discrete and hybrid verticals. The leverage from this growth will complement our continued focus on cost discipline, execution and margin expansion. I'm excited to supercharge these efforts by further capturing the benefits of automation and digital transformation within our own operations. It's hard to believe, but this year's Automation Fair and Investor Day are only 3 months away. We returned to McCormick Place in Chicago, the week of November 17, with Investor Day activities on November 18 and 19. We're looking forward to showcasing the best solutions and partner network in the business, including software-defined automation and AI-enabled technology from sensor to software, integrated intelligent devices, robotics and digital services. You will hear from customers about our differentiated value and from management as we review progress on our goals, details of our internal investments and inorganic priorities. I'm looking forward to seeing you there. Aijana, we'll now begin the Q&A session.

Aijana Zellner

Analyst · Wolfe Research

Thanks, Blake. [Operator Instructions] Julianne, let's take our first question.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Scott Davis from Melius Research.

Scott Reed Davis

Analyst · Melius Research

It's been a long earnings period. Can we talk about the CapEx stuff because that's a big number for you guys. Historically, you haven't spent a lot of capital. What -- kind of why now? And you could -- one side of it might be, you could say, are you behind the investment curve and you have to catch up. The other is, are you playing offense? So how do you guys look at it?

Blake D. Moret

Analyst · Melius Research

Scott, let me start by saying this is solidly on offense. So we are very encouraged by the progress on our productivity programs over the last 1.5 years. And while we continue to be focused near term on getting to those margin goals for each business segment and overall for the company, you've asked us in the past, so what's next? What else can we do to continue to drive this? And we're taking decisive moves to be able to address just that in ways to, of course, address our ongoing capacity needs, but to continue that push to expand margins. And Christian has talked about the willingness to invest capital in the service of expanding margins, and that's really how you should think about this. And we've talked about our plants, our talent and our digital infrastructure. I want to also make it clear that we're not beginning from a standing start. We've already done this in a number of our operations, but this is accelerating that. And we're encouraged by what we've already seen in some of the places within our plants that we've done these things that we've digitized, we've added additional automation. We've used our own simulation tools to improve layout. And typically, we see the results show up in labor productivity, being able to do more with a finite amount of human resources. We see it in energy consumption. We see it in faster time to confidence. There's a number of benefits that we've seen in our plants. We certainly are talking about this every day with customers, and now we're doing it at scale. And I could go through the other benefits in each of these areas. We're going to spend some time on this in November at Investor Day. But now is the time because these things have a certain ramp time, and we want you to understand how, as you hear about individual investments, how they fit together as part of this cohesive program.

Christian E. Rothe

Analyst · Melius Research

Maybe a couple of items that I'll add to that. Not all of this $2 billion is incremental. That is -- a portion of that is what's already built in our run rate and our current spending levels that we have on CapEx, for example. And so don't look at it all as incremental. We're including some of the run rate in that. The second part is that these programs, as I mentioned, are all going to be ROI-based and that our hurdle rate for these programs is in the double digits. But obviously, those are risk-adjusted based on the program and the project. But for sure, we are looking for each of these to be giving us an ROI and hopefully, over time, also helping us to expand our margins. The last part actually is around the margins. And just to underscore what Blake said, we do see a path already to getting to the 23.5% target that we have in place from November 2023 at our Investor Day that we put in place and the corridors for each of the segments. This is really about that next horizon. It's about thinking about where can we go over the long term with the business of Rockwell. And as we think about when we're going to achieve that 23.5%, what's that next target going to look like? And we have to create some more runway, and this is a great opportunity for us to do that.

Blake D. Moret

Analyst · Melius Research

Yes. I think about this as the current programs that we talk about each call get us to that 23.5% operating margin. These are programs that get us through those margin corridors.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Andrew Obin from Bank of America.

Andrew Burris Obin

Analyst · Bank of America

I know that you're going to talk about at the Analyst Day, but you did sort of highlight some investment headwinds, some tax headwinds. How do you think about just generally about growth into next year? And this recovery basically and operating leverage trump this? Or does that mean structurally lower growth for the next couple of years?

Blake D. Moret

Analyst · Bank of America

Yes. Certainly, the top line growth that we'll be prepared to talk about in November is a really important piece of the equation. I'll say we're happy to have returned to year-over-year growth in Q3, and we intend to do everything that we can to continue that. We're encouraged as we talked about with some of the improvement in some of the key verticals within particularly discrete and hybrid, which are areas that are important to us. And we are committed to continuing to make progress towards those margin expansion targets regardless of what top line does, and we've certainly contemplated the potential for the tax headwind that Christian talked about as we say that. So we're continuing to forge through, and we feel like we're holding some good cards in terms of momentum that allow us to mitigate the impact of some of these other things.

Christian E. Rothe

Analyst · Bank of America

Yes. And just to build off that a little bit more, we do expect we're going to get price next year. The cost reduction and margin expansion programs that we've been working on, while they are going into our core as we operationalize them, we still continue to expect that those programs are going to be giving us a yield. Obviously, the comps get more and more difficult as we continue to build out these programs, and that's okay. But we are expecting that we're going to get margin expansion next year as well. And we'll give you more detail as we get into the next quarter on the earnings call.

Blake D. Moret

Analyst · Bank of America

Yes. And I guess just one last point on that, Andrew, is the tariffs that have been announced, including the more recent ones, we feel like we have strong mitigation plans as we did this year for those tariffs as we go into next year.

Andrew Burris Obin

Analyst · Bank of America

And just taking a step back and looking at your broader restructuring program, right? I think you sort of indicated that there is going to be a greater emphasis on continuous improvement versus larger restructuring programs, but we did finish quarter early. If you take a step back, how has the progress -- where did you find the progress the easiest if you look at direct material spend, sort of supply chain, SKU rationalization, rationalization of transport costs? And where do you feel you've sort of discovered you can push a lot harder? Once again, I appreciate that I was sort of asking you for an Analyst Day preview, but at the same time, you did end up sort of much more efficient on cost cuts than I think we expected.

Blake D. Moret

Analyst · Bank of America

Yes. I think part of it -- and I'm sure Christian will have some additional comment on this. I think part of the feature of the program that allowed us to get there even quicker than we expected was the breadth of the surface that we went after in terms of cost savings. We certainly had initial savings coming from largely SG&A cost reductions, but we moved pretty quickly into other structural savings. And I'm happy with the way that we saw reductions in what we paid for direct material. That will only improve as volume continues to amplify the per unit savings from that. Indirect services and manufacturing efficiencies, I would say, to your question, where do we think we can get more, manufacturing efficiencies are a big opportunity, and that's why it's an important feature of the program that we introduced today.

Christian E. Rothe

Analyst · Bank of America

Yes. And I think to answer the question in essentially just to build off of it. Headcount reductions are always -- frankly, they're hard choices to make, but those can happen faster. And so the point this program developed is not unlike what you would expect that, first of all, it started in SG&A with some headcount reductions and then it expanded into indirect spend, which takes a little bit longer to go after, but we went after that. Then you start going after things that take a little bit longer lead time and not too bad as far as things like the mode shift and thinking about how we're moving materials around. Then we get into product redesigns and working on sourcing. And then we've now transitioned into more operational excellence in the factories. We're doing a lot more around things like warehouse automation, things that again take a little bit longer lead time. And so all those are outstanding. And I think our experience is that, as Blake said, it's really about doing all of the things and continue to do them well. And importantly, in this program, as we operationalize it, I think we all are well aware that costs can creep into an organization if you are not vigilant. And so the team really needs to -- we all need to continue to make sure we're vigilant around making sure those costs don't creep back in, and we continue to make good progress.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Andy Kaplowitz from Citigroup.

Andrew Alec Kaplowitz

Analyst · Citigroup

Blake or Christian, you reported book-to-bill of 1x, which suggests you've continued to see slow sequential improvement in bookings as you guided earlier this year. But you did mention the 2% to 3% of pull-ins in Q3. So is the current environment still supportive of underlying bookings continue to slowly improve from here? And then you mentioned a little more greenfield activity, Blake, from your customers and Logic sales are obviously up a lot. So do you think that's evidence of more reshoring activity or maybe more CapEx-related activity despite delays? How would you -- any more color would be helpful.

Blake D. Moret

Analyst · Citigroup

Yes. Let me start by saying the projects that we're attracting, we're seeing delays, but not cancellations. People are still looking at these as opportunities to increase their resilience to make market share moves. In general, among our customers, they're just being subject to a higher level of scrutiny. People are looking again and again at the business case to make sure they have a good handle on their cost, what the demand picture is and so on. That being said, when projects do pass that hurdle rate, they are being green lit, and we've seen greenfields and brownfields. Overall, we expect to see a higher intake of orders related to new U.S. capacity in fiscal year '25, and we expect that number to go up again in fiscal year '26. We're tracking it. We're having a good success rate as we look at these and coordinate our coverage around the world. So I'm encouraged by that. And as I mentioned, we saw some nice development in, in particular, discrete and hybrid verticals, which, of course, is our strength. We've been in automotive for a long time, and we had some nice wins in both basic control as well as in software there. Food and beverage, our single biggest vertical, over half of that business is really concentrated through machine builders, especially packaging machine builders and some of our new products are helping us win new business there. So we saw some good results in the quarter. We didn't show it on the slide, but home and personal care, we're also seeing some spend there. So we think we're in a good spot, and we're looking forward to as hopefully, additional certainty frees up some of that CapEx spend, but we're not waiting. We're continuing to be on offense, both in terms of winning every order that is available out there as well as continuing to expand our margins.

Christian E. Rothe

Analyst · Citigroup

On the book-to-bill question, yes, we've been running around 1 in the last couple of quarters, which is what we were expecting it was going to do as we got into a more normalized environment. So you can read that to be that the backlog is generally flattish. And as we get into Q4, we do have a little bit more seasonal shipments that happen in our project business, especially in the life cycle. So we do give that visibility around book-to-bill and life cycle. It wouldn't be surprising if their book-to-bill went a little bit below 1. But generally, the demand environment and what we're seeing from orders is keeping on with that pace of what we're seeing on the shipment side.

Andrew Alec Kaplowitz

Analyst · Citigroup

Appreciate that. And then you sound arguably a little more positive about getting to your medium-term target of that 23% segment margin. But maybe if we could just focus on your largest segment for a second of Intelligent Devices. How do you think about the margin potential in Intelligent Devices? The segment is still in the high teens, but as you guys know, it's delivered low 20s on lower revenue in the past. So what would it take to improve the margin there? Is it kind of what you guys talked about, more factory work, SKU reduction? Christian, maybe any thoughts there? Can you turn the corner in that segment as early as FY '26 towards significantly higher margin?

Blake D. Moret

Analyst · Citigroup

Look, we are absolutely committed to the overall margin target as well as the 22% to 24% corridor that we've talked about specifically for Intelligent Devices. We're encouraged that the last couple of quarters have seen sequential improvement in margin percentage, but we certainly have lots more work there, and we've identified specific areas. I'll mention a few, and Christian will have some others. First of all, I mentioned that we saw overall good progress in reducing the cost of what we pay for direct material. And that's especially important for intelligent devices because it is a big business with by far the largest SKU count. So as we increase unit volume, it's amplified across a broad range of all of those products. The pricing on the long tail of SKUs that we've talked about over the last year is especially important for Intelligent Devices, again, because they have such a diversity of SKUs in that offering. Project recovery, so the configure-to-order business is particularly leveraged to any uptick in CapEx spend, and we'll see some improvement there. And then specifically, Clearpath. I mentioned it in my prepared remarks, we're seeing double-digit growth. We're making progress on profitability, but there's more work to be done there.

Christian E. Rothe

Analyst · Citigroup

Yes. I think, Blake, you covered really a lot of the same items I would have talked about. I mean, in the end, it's really -- it's about hitting the individual aspects of this business while at the same time, continue to do operational excellence really well. So there's definitely a pathway to it. We definitely have a longer-term plan that we've gone through with the team that shows that we do have the ability to continue to get leverage in this business.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Julian Mitchell from Barclays.

Julian C.H. Mitchell

Analyst · Barclays

Maybe I just wanted to start with the revenue. And sorry if it's a bit of a hodgepodge of a question, but I understand, Blake, you mentioned a 2% to 3% pull forward of sales into Q3, but you also referenced a handful of times project delays. And then if I look at Slide 13, you've got 9 markets laid out there, and I think the outlook is lower for 6 of them versus April. So I'm just sort of trying to understand how significant, let's say, were the pull forwards in Q3 versus the project delays effect? And again, the sort of weighting of the market updates on Slide 13 looks perhaps more negative than your overall tone.

Blake D. Moret

Analyst · Barclays

Right. So let me break that down just a little bit further. So the potential pull forwards that we highlighted are really in the product side. So if people are going to make a pull-forward purchase, they're going to do that in the product area. And we thought that, while, again, we have good processes to avoid taking orders that are obviously opportunistic, let's say, to avoid a price increase, we think it's prudent to give allowance for the possibility that we did see some pull forward in our product orders. The delays are more on the project side, and you see that primarily in the configure-to-order portion of intelligent devices as well as in life cycle services. So that would be the distribution. Now as you go through the different verticals. Automotive had a good Q3. We returned to good year-over-year growth. Again, I would look at that as a little bit of that prudence that we don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves and saying this is the beginning of a trend. But there was definitely some nice wins within Automotive. There's a huge installed base that has to be serviced to be able to continue to keep production running at a good rate. The other vertical that isn't shown in the exhibit is Home & Personal Care that had strong growth year-over-year in the quarter. So you look at that, and I'd say it's a largely balanced view. And as Christian said, we think that the demand picture hasn't changed too much, but that's somewhat constructive on the product side and again, with continued delays on the projects.

Julian C.H. Mitchell

Analyst · Barclays

That's very helpful. And then I just wanted to return to the topic of the operating margins. So I understand the confidence in the sort of 23.5% medium-term aspiration. But just trying to understand, say, the next 12 months or into next fiscal year, with the -- you got puts and takes. So the main tailwind might be aside from volumes, incentive comp, it looks like that's like $1.90 headwind to EPS this year, I think. Maybe just confirm that. And then perhaps there's a headwind to margins from some of these higher investments. So when we roll all that together, does that sort of 35% plus operating leverage placeholder, is that intact largely the next 12 months? Or does it get sort of pushed around by investments or incentive comp flipping around?

Christian E. Rothe

Analyst · Barclays

Yes. Maybe I'll start and then Blake can jump in to add any additional color. But we remain committed to the 35% incremental margin flow-through. We still believe that we can make these incremental investments if there are going to be anything that's going to show up incrementally, again, we still believe that we can do it within the context of the rubric of a 35% flow-through. When we talk about -- you brought up the incentive comp side, just know that bar chart in the way we reconcile it, that is total comp. So that includes merit as well as incentives. So the number that you're thinking about is probably a little bit high. I would say that generally, right now, where we are is a fairly normalized number. And so when we think about next year and if we're at a normalized number this year that we're not expecting that it's going to be too much of a delta for us to deal with as we go into our planning for '26.

Blake D. Moret

Analyst · Barclays

Yes. And I would say additionally, Julian, the project spend, CapEx and OpEx, we're in control of that. And so we have the ability to meet around what we're spending in CapEx and OpEx so that we make sure we don't get in the way of those previously announced targets, and we continue to make good progress towards that. I would also say that the majority of the incremental spend is in CapEx. So in OpEx, a lot of that is reprioritizing dollars that are already in run rate to the areas that we talked about.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Chris Snyder from Morgan Stanley.

Christopher M. Snyder

Analyst · Morgan Stanley

I wanted to follow up on the pull-forward commentary. It seems like from the opening remarks that this was more of a revenue pull forward and not an order pull forward. So if you could just speak to that. And then just any color you could share on the visibility or kind of methodology as to how you arrived at this? I think intuitively, it makes a lot of sense that customers would try to get ahead of price increases. But we really haven't heard this across the rest of our coverage.

Blake D. Moret

Analyst · Morgan Stanley

Yes, sure. Chris, we want to be prudent about this. And as we said, there aren't specific examples of orders that we could point to, to say that is a pull forward. As I mentioned, this is mainly in the product area. So with orders and shipments being pretty much on top of each other, book-to-bill across the company of about 1, they're close to the same. What we're not seeing is customers that have longer lead time projects already in-house in our backlog saying, "hey, we want it quicker or that we want to delay it." So I should make that distinction as well. And we talk about this because we're not seeing specific indicators. We look at our distributor inventories, and there's nothing unusual going on there. they're placing orders pretty close to a factor of 1 based on what their orders are that they're receiving and the orders they're placing on us, which is healthy. We continue to pull our machine builders, and we're not seeing any evidence that they're building up inventories of product. We look at our own behavior. So there's no specific indicators that there's significant pull forward. We just want to be prudent as we navigate through a volatile time.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Nigel Coe from Wolfe Research.

Nigel Edward Coe

Analyst · Wolfe Research

We've a couple of grounds. Just want to clarify, Christian, your comments about comp for next year because I think I've always thought about normal comp is like [ 1 75 ], and I think we're going to be at [ 2 60 ] this year. So it looks like there could be a nice tailwind for next year. I mean, just want to make sure that's the right thinking. But my real question is really around the $2 billion of investment. Number one, that's not incremental investment. That's total investments. I just want to clarify that. And it seems like probably 2/3 CapEx, 1/3 OpEx would be -- it seems like that's the right split. Just want to verify that. And maybe just touch on what it gives you -- it seems like it's more U.S. capacity, more capacity in general, but anything else that these investments will provide.

Christian E. Rothe

Analyst · Wolfe Research

Sure. I'll start with the comp one [indiscernible] around the OpEx, CapEx portion. So on the compensation side, Nigel, just to -- again, to underscore this, that compensation number that you see in there, and again, we gave a view for the full year at about $230 million. That full year view includes both merit and incentive comp. And so you gave a historical number that -- I think it's in the ballpark that might have been a little bit high on the number that you gave, but that would have been more purely incentive comp and not including the merit side. So again, if you just -- if you were to separate those out, we feel like the incentive portion is normalized at the moment.

Blake D. Moret

Analyst · Wolfe Research

Yes. And I would say, look, we are proud of having gone through a year with, let's say, flattish overall growth and have returned to a more normal overall spend on compensation. That was something that was important for us to get to this year. And I think it does set us up well as we go into next year. In terms of the $2 billion, yes, we're going to get into more detail, but I think directionally, you're in the ballpark of that split. And as I said, the majority of the incremental spend is going to be on that CapEx side in the service of margin expansion. To be sure, there is some additional capacity that this helps with. We do believe that we're able to do these things with a net number of rooftops staying relatively flat. I think that's an important concept that we're not going out and building a lot of incremental rooftops without retiring others. So we think we have lots of opportunity for additional efficiency in our existing facilities as well as some greenfield investment as well. But the majority of the OpEx spend in these areas is really more about reprioritizing to the areas of highest return.

Aijana Zellner

Analyst · Wolfe Research

Julianne, we'll take one more question.

Operator

Operator

Certainly. Our last question will come from Steve Tusa from JPMorgan.

Charles Stephen Tusa

Analyst · JPMorgan

It sounds like you guys are super busy, no vacation this summer. So you've earned the IC bump for sure. Lots going on and good execution. Just a quick question on kind of the updated pricing outlook for what you booked this quarter and then what you expect for the fourth quarter and how that will trend into next year?

Christian E. Rothe

Analyst · JPMorgan

Yes. So on the pricing side, we would have started the year, I think we did in the Q4, Q1 call, talking about we expected price realization to be around our historical number, about 1%. Obviously, the last couple of quarters, we've had price realization more in the 3% range. I think last quarter, I would have talked about a 1% to 2% for the full year. Now I think it's very comfortable saying that we're going to be at 2% plus for the full year this year, which would include a decent portion that happens in the fourth quarter. Keeping in mind that part of that bump is happening from tariff-based price realization, which is not really high-value price realization because it's simply there to offset some costs.

Charles Stephen Tusa

Analyst · JPMorgan

And then for next year?

Christian E. Rothe

Analyst · JPMorgan

For next year, I'm not ready to actually give a full update on that. I will tell you that I think the -- outside of the tariff-based price realization, which is going to be whatever it is, that generally, we're feeling pretty good about our ability to continue to realize price and that the organization is continuing to find areas and opportunities for us to continue to go after it, not necessarily just from list to list, but also finding other ways to enhance realization on prior pricing actions.

Charles Stephen Tusa

Analyst · JPMorgan

Okay. And then sorry, just one last one on this U.S. investments you were talking about? You said you booked a few of these in '25. You think they're going to -- there's a few in '26. How kind of close are we to some of these things shaking loose? Like is it as simple as just getting like the headlines more calm around tariffs? Or like you guys seem just a little bit more cautious around like the timing of some of this stuff hitting. I think every company is talking about these big pipelines and opportunities. Could this be a first half of next year thing? Or if it comes, it's really going to be more of a second half of next year thing from an orders perspective?

Blake D. Moret

Analyst · JPMorgan

We have a big funnel, and we think that the orders we receive will be significantly larger related to capacity next year than this year. we haven't calendarized first half versus second half. But in general, what people are doing is they're looking at getting to a certain level of cost certainty with respect to their inputs. And obviously, tariffs are a portion of that. So think about the automotives. They're thinking about what does their demand look like and think about, for instance, the chemical industry and oil and gas, more commodity-oriented, metals, what's their demand looking like. They're also looking at general risk. And so with machine builders wanting to go to their suppliers and get certainty on pricing as they themselves are putting out quotes that need to be firm to their end users for a period of time. So those are kind of one click below the general uncertainty that people are looking for getting additional confidence in. And we're seeing some of those projects coming out. We booked some big ones across multiple industries, and we talked about a few of them, and we expect that to continue in Q4 and into next year. And hopefully, things settle down with respect to tariffs. We've got a tax bill in place, and that helps. That's going to provide some benefits, particularly for small and medium-sized manufacturers as they see things like bonus depreciation helping them. But some of these other areas with tariffs, I think, will accelerate the release of some of these big capacity orders.

Charles Stephen Tusa

Analyst · JPMorgan

And that is just on a percentage of your business, correct? The new capacity percentage, it's like 15% to 20%. That's kind of how you describe that kind of size of that mix when you talk about big new capacity orders?

Blake D. Moret

Analyst · JPMorgan

Yes. I mean, we haven't talked about a specific percentage of capacity, but it's a little bit more than it would have been in the past. And some of that is with the new offerings that we have, things like production logistics and AMRs are largely tied to CapEx. So it's a little bit more than it was in the past, but we're still largely a flow company. And I guess the other thing I would say is that whereas a lot of the new capacity initially was in areas like semiconductor and data centers, now we're seeing many more of those orders across areas that Rockwell has higher share in. So think about life sciences and food and beverage and so on.

Aijana Zellner

Analyst · JPMorgan

Great. That concludes today's call. Thank you for joining.

Operator

Operator

At this time, you may disconnect. Thank you.