Krista: Good morning and welcome to Otis's second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. This call is being carried live on the internet and recorded for replay. Presentation materials are available for download from Otis's website at www.otis.com. I'll now turn it over to email the suit senior vice president treasurer and interim head of investor relations. Please go ahead.
Imelda: Thank you, Krista. Welcome to Otis' second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. On the call with me today are Judy Marks, Chair, CEO, and President, and Cristina Mendez, Executive Vice President and CFO. Please note, except where otherwise noted, the company will speak to results from continuing operations, excluding restructuring and significant non-recurring items. A reconciliation of these measures can be found in the appendix of the webcast. We also remind listeners that the presentation contains forward-looking statements which are subject to risks and uncertainties. OTIS's SEC filings, including our forms 10-K and 10-Q, provide details and important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially. I'd like to turn the call over to Judy.
Judy Marks: Thank you, Imelda. Good morning, afternoon, and evening, everyone. Thank you for joining us. We hope everyone listening is safe and well. Starting on slide three, We achieved significant top line growth as we delivered a solid quarter with a significant step up in organic sales growth driven by accelerating service growth and improving trends in new equipment along with strong cash generation. Service remains the key growth engine of the business with 9% organic sales growth supported by 24% modernization growth, double digit repair growth, and accelerating maintenance trends. Modernization orders were up 9% to end the quarter with a backlog up 26% at constant currency. We strongly believe that the investments we are making in capacity, quality, pricing, and commercial execution are enhancing our competitive position and yielding continued growth in our service business. In new equipment, we're encouraged by the sequential improvement in sales and the stabilization in margins. While orders were down 5% in the quarter, backlog increased 4% at constant currency and the business is showing greater stability supported by a sales turnaround in the Americas at a robust 10% growth. We delivered another quarter of strong cash generation with adjusted free cash flow of $290 million, up 19% year over year. The strength of our cash flow reflects the resilience of our business model. Importantly, this allows us to continue investing in growth and strategic investments, including the acquisition of a majority stake in WeMaintain, while also returning a significant portion of free cash flow to shareholders through share repurchases and dividends. In the first half of 2026, we bought back approximately $800 million of shares and raised our dividend 5%, returning over $1.1 billion to our shareholders. These results reflect our progress in executing our strategy and investing and strengthening our service business. Service margins declined year over year as labor and material cost increases have added pressure on margins as we ramp up our operations to execute on our strong repair and modernization backlog. With continued service revenue growth, we expect a sustained recovery in margins in the next quarters. With that, Let me turn to our second quarter financial results on slide four. Otis delivered net sales of $3.9 billion with organic sales up 6%. Adjusted operating profit, excluding a $7 million foreign exchange tailwind, decreased by $32 million in the quarter as higher volume and price were offset by inflation, mix, and productivity impacts. Adjusted operating profit margin declined 100% and 80 basis points to 15.2%. Adjusted EPS declined 4% or 4 cents in the quarter due to operational performance, partially offset by favorable foreign exchange rates. I want to take a step back and look at the significant transformation journey we've been on as shown on slide five. From 2020 to 2025, we drove growth through a focus on boosting the size of our portfolio, Introducing innovative products like Gen 3 and Gen 360, connecting 1.1 million units on Otis 1, and industrializing our modernization business. With keen operational focus, we optimized and developed resiliency in our supply chain and executed on uplift and China transformation programs. These programs yielded sustained operational performance improvement over the past five years. Starting this year, we added four operational initiatives. First, we drove value-driven AI micro pricing across maintenance and repair. Second, we shifted our portfolio mix focus toward high-value service segments and geographies. Third, we took a proactive approach in our repair offering to drive customer uptime and service growth. And fourth, we made a strategic decision to invest in service quality through our Service Excellence Initiative to sustain portfolio growth in our key markets in the Americas and EMEA. We are seeing early signs of progress in this area and an opportunity to build a stronger operating foundation. The investment in service quality impacted margins in the short term, but we see it as necessary to fuel our growth. Service quality leads to customer satisfaction and retention, which feeds our flywheel for service volume growth across maintenance, Repair, and Modernization. Today, we're sharing our plan to work structurally on our service operating model, which will drive frontline excellence. It's a program to unlock the full value of our operating potential at the local level, where our 45,000 field colleagues serve our customers every day. This will be a natural extension of the transformation we started with Uplift, which freed the frontline from transactional activities to become more customer-centric. We will standardize our core field and sales processes and drive operational excellence across our frontline. Our service operating model will leverage the learnings from the tactical investments we're undertaking in service excellence, which, as I said, are delivering promising results. We have exceptional operating territories across our network that consistently deliver robust growth, excellent customer service, and strong operational performance. Our objective is to systematically use standardized systems and tools to consistently bring every operating territory to this level of excellence. Our focus on the front line is the logical next step in our journey since SPIN to build a more consistent, high-performance company. But we still have work to do to get there. Slide 6 summarizes our progress in service margins, which improved sequentially in Q2, but we are still seeing pressure largely from productivity and cost headwinds and the timing of our micro pricing actions. In Q1, we communicated a plan to invest $50 million in service excellence and pricing with the goal to drive retention improvement and pricing upsides in maintenance and repair. We have invested $15 million in the quarter on track with the plan and we're encouraged to see a step change improvement in our service quality metrics. Our Service Quality Index has improved seven points in the operating territories targeted in the investment plan. In a good portion of these operating territories, we have also seen retention improvement, but the recovery timing varies. Although our overall retention rate ex-China was down this quarter, we believe this will improve as we continue to provide high quality service to customers. On cost and pricing, we were able to broadly offset the impact of the Middle East conflict with pricing actions and saw a strong ramp up of our micro pricing initiatives in the repair business. Productivity and cost headwinds were higher than we anticipated this quarter. This has been driven by three main factors. First, our ongoing strategic investments in service excellence impacted productivity and together with inflationary increases, led to higher than expected labor and material costs. Second, as we ramped up resources to execute a strong repair and mod backlog, workforce onboarding took longer than expected for newly hired mechanics to reach full effectiveness, especially for highly skilled activities in repair and modernization. Third, the acceleration of mod and repair execution required higher labor rates to make resources available where and when needed. We believe a large part of these headwinds are temporary while we adjust our operations through our service operating model to deliver on our growing backlog. With that, I'll turn it over to Cristina to walk through our segment results in more detail.
Cristina Mendez: Thank you, Judy. Starting with service on slide seven. Service organic sales grew 9% with growth across all lines of business and regions. Maintenance and repair organic sales increased 6% representing a meaningful sequential acceleration. Maintenance organic sales grew 3%, supported by 3% portfolio growth and 3% pricing, partially offset by mix and churn. Repair sales continued to gain momentum, growing 12% and delivering the strongest performance in the past 10 quarters. Modernization remained a standout, with organic sales increasing 24%, marking the highest growth rate since the spin. Growth was supported by a strong customer demand and execution against a robust backlog, which continues to be driven by ongoing orders growth. Modernization orders increased 9% in the quarter, driven by a strong order growth in China, up significantly. EMEA and APAC both up low single digits, partially offset by America's down mid-single digits, due to a tough compare year-over-year. Modernization backlog remains very strong, up 26% year-over-year at constant currency. We remain confident in the long-term repair and modernization opportunity, supported by an aging install base that continues to drive customer demand and create attractive growth opportunities over the long term. The growth-based growth across our service business reflects the progress we are making in executing our strategy and demonstrates that our focus on driving growth is delivering tangible results. Service operating profit of $599 million increased $16 million at cost and currency. At higher volume and favorable pricing, more than offset higher labor costs, including the impact of ongoing strategic investments, and Productivity Material Cost Headwings and Unfavorable Mix. Service operating margin was 23.2%, down 170 basis points versus the prior year. Margin performance is impacted by mix with higher modernization growth, cost and productivity headwings, and reflects deliberate investments to support service quality initiatives and capacity to execute on service growth. Turning now to new equipment on slide 8. New equipment organic cells declined 1% in the quarter. While market conditions remain challenging, this represents the lowest rate of decline in the past nine quarters. Growing in America and Asia Pacific was more than offset by lower sales in China and EMEA. America's sales increased 10%, supported by a strong backlog conversion and a healthy backlog Bill Swarder's growth in prior periods. Asia-Pacific sales grew low single digits, driven by strength in Japan and India, partially offset by lower sales in Korea. EMEA sales declined 4%, primarily due to weakness in the Middle East and Southern Europe. In China, new equipment sales declined high teens in the quarter, consistent with the backlog decline, but reflecting a slight sequential improvement. New equipment orders declined 5% year-over-year as a double-digit growth in the Americas and low single-digit growth in the EMEA were more than offset by declines in APAC due to tough compares and in China. New equipment backlog increased 4% year-over-year at constant currency, 9% excluding China, providing good visibility into future sales and supporting our confidence in new equipment stability over the coming quarters. New equipment operating profit of $40 million declined $30 million at constant currency. And operating margin declined 220 basis points to 3.1%, in line with our expectations. The operating profit decline was driven by lower volume and favorable price unmixed. Looking ahead, we remain focused on executing our priorities, managing price, Thank you, Cristina. Turning to slide nine, our sales outlook and market expectations remain unchanged.
Judy Marks: We continue to expect the global new equipment market to stabilize with growth in all regions except China. Our global outlook for modernization remains robust with double digit growth across all regions. We're watching the Middle East conflict but do not expect a significant impact to our outlook. We expect net sales of 15.1 to 15.3 billion dollars with organic sales growth of low to mid single digits. The quarter reinforced our confidence in the sales growth trajectory of the business. We continue to see strong top-line momentum, particularly across our service segment, while we take actions to strengthen service quality, backlog execution, and customer retention to sustain growth. While our revenue outlook remains unchanged, our focus remains on executing the investments in service quality, balancing productivity and cost management, and converting strong demand into sustainable earnings growth over time. With that, let me turn to slide 10 and discuss the key areas of focus and the progress we're seeing. As we have discussed earlier this year, our priorities have been clear. Ramp up top line growth by converting the robust modernization backlog coupled with our strong growth momentum in repair, capture the flow through of our micro pricing initiatives, improve service quality to strengthen retention, and execute cost reductions in non-frontline related activities. We are seeing progress in the acceleration of modern repair sales and in micro-pricing initiatives in the repair business. However, we have not yet seen a significant improvement in retention. It is taking longer than expected and because of that, we're tempering our AI micro-pricing implementation and maintenance to balance this. We expect this headwind to have about $20 million impact versus our prior outlook for the full year. In addition, while we've executed on our cost reduction program and expect to realize savings for the balance of the year consistent with our prior outlook, we have experienced productivity and cost impacts as discussed previously. We estimate this headwind to have a $50 million incremental impact versus our prior full year outlook. While productivity remains below our original expectations, we continue to believe that the majority of these pressures are temporary and the actions we're taking today, together with our service operating model program, will support stronger sustained performance over time. In summary, there are three takeaways. Revenue growth remains strong, our service quality metrics are improving, and our operational initiatives are progressing. While the timing of retention benefits has shifted, and we have observed headwinds in productivity and costs, we are as confident as ever in our strategy and our service flywheel. With that, let me turn it over to Cristina to summarize our financial outlook.
Cristina Mendez: Thank you, Judith. Turning to our financial outlook on slide 11, we now expect adjusted operating profit to be in the range of down $30 million to flat on an actual currency basis. and in the range of down $45 million to $15 million at constant currency. The revision reflects the retention and tempered maintenance micro-pricing impacts as well as the productivity and cost headwinds mentioned earlier. Our adjusted free cash flow is now expected to be between $1.5 to $1.55 billion in line with the operating profit outlook change. Moving to the 2026 EPS bridge on slide 12. The reduced operating profit outlook will result in an adjusted EPS range of $4.01 to $4.05. The change versus the previous outlook reflects the adjustment from retention, pricing, productivity, and cost, as well as a negative impact of $0.04 due to foreign exchange. Providing some color on the third quarter. We expect service organic sales to remain as strong at mid single digit growth, mainly driven by repair and modernization that will continue to grow on the back of the strong orders momentum. New equipment organic sales trend versus prior year is expected to continue to improve sequentially. Total adjusted operating profit is expected to be flattish in the third quarter, but with the impact of tax rate calendarization, we anticipate that it will result in an adjusted EPS decline at a level similar to the first half of the year. For the balance of the year, we expect momentum to build in the second half as the operational actions you outlined continue to take hold. Service profit should improve sequentially as productivity increases and the benefits of our initiatives begin to materialize. Together with recovering new equipment volumes, these positions ask for profit growth in the fourth quarter. Stepping back, we recognize in the last quarters we have faced challenges in service, which we are actively working to address. Execution of uplift while setting the foundation of a stronger and more efficient operating model did cause some disruption in service execution in 2025. In addition, Portfolio Mix has been a headwind driven by Geographic Mix and a recent increase in cancellations. Uplift has been completed and our new operating model is working and running stable. We have taken the decision to reinvest in the core of the business and we recognize 2026 is a year of investment. This requires a cultural shift into service quality and customer centricity, impacting certain results. However, we strongly believe The investments we are making today in service excellence are creating a strong foundation for the future. And as a next step, we plan to systematically drive excellence across our 1,400 operating territories through our service operating model. In addition to the maintenance strategy, we are excited about the sustained growth in repair and modernization that is expected to continue This and the new equipment business being back to growth in the second half with a growing backlog gives us confidence that we are well positioned to sustain our industry-leading margins and capture growth for years to come. With that, I will kindly ask Krista to open the line for questions. Thank you.
Krista: Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad to raise your hand and join the queue. And if you'd like to withdraw that question, again, press star 1. We do ask that you limit yourself to one question in one follow-up. For any additional questions, please re-queue. And your first question comes from Nigel Koh with Wolf Research. Please go ahead.
Nigel Koh: Thanks. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for the details on the guide. I think you kind of made it clear that you've dialed back on the micro-pricing. But I wonder if you maybe just talk about some of the productivity headwinds that you're seeing. That wasn't clear. And then maybe, Cristina, could you just maybe just lay out kind of how you see the service margin progression through the balance of the year?
Judy Marks: Yeah, thanks, Nigel. So, listen, we... Let me be clear what we're doing with the AI micropricing. First of all, we've seen tremendous success with it in our repair business. We see it, we see it flow through, and we see it flow through rather quickly because from the time we take an order, we typically execute that repair backlog in a period of short, low single-digit months, one or two months, and then we see it flow through. So we're very pleased with the ability to get price there. On the maintenance side, there's really two factors going on. One, which we've always known is most of our maintenance contracts come up every few years. So we don't have the opportunity to reprice them on an annual basis. So when they come up, we're trying to drive for that. But trying to balance retention rates with additional micro-pricing is where we're trying to find that balance, Nigel, that says in the maintenance contract, Let's see what's appropriate. We understand where our costs are and the micro pricing is giving us that detail by segmentation. But we also don't want to drive additional potential customers who are on the fence because of our former service quality challenges that we're now investing in. We don't want that to be the tipping point for them. So it's an account by account balance when we say we're kind of rebalancing that more so than a wholesale change or a pullback.
Cristina Mendez: Nigel, I'm complimenting to your two other questions about what happened with productivity and our expectation of service margin ramp up in the second half. So first, stepping back, we are very pleased with the service revenue take up in the second quarter. This is in line or even above expectations. And also the investments we portrayed in the last quarter, we said 50 million this year, they are progressing exactly on plan. What we have observed in the second quarter Thank you very much. Increasing the number of mechanics that we are allocating into highly skilled activities, repair and modernization, and the onboarding time is longer because of the preparation required for those activities. And second is we have significantly accelerated execution of mods, 24% in the quarter, in order to deliver our customer commitments. And this creates some headwinds in rate in order to have the resources available when and where needed. Now, looking into the second half of the year, we are very positive about revenue growth. This is going to continue. We are expecting in service approximately 6% revenue growth in the second half of the year. The reason from 9% to 6% in the second half is because modernization will normalize to a low-teens level. Then, on the new equipment side, we are also going to continue growing. In fact, we expect positive growth in Q3, and the margins have stabilized. Looking at the margins in surveys, when you compare first half that are around 23.1% to the second half expected around mid-24%, this is a 150 basis point margin expansion in the second half. Based on 80 basis points from repair price, this is happening. We see that coming in the backlog. 50 basis points coming from modernization and repair volume. also happening. We have the orders in place and we have the resources to execute. 30 basis points is the SENA allocation into service. You may remember that we communicated 10 million restructuring in non-frontline related activities last quarter. This has been executed in the last two months and we are now going to capture the benefit in the P&L. And we have a little bit of headwinds from FX because of the mix of where the FX moves are coming from. This is assuming the productivity headwinds we have seen in Q2 will continue in the second half, which is an opportunity for us to address and to do better.
Nigel Koh: Okay, I realize I asked a multiple question there, but maybe if I could just follow on. Before I do that, Cristina, I just want to say congratulations on the World Cup. Huge for Spain, obviously. Thank you, Nigel. Very important, obviously, to mention that. And then just on the retention, Judy, I think you mentioned retention is taking longer to improve and taking longer to achieve. So just maybe just kind of put a bow on that point. Why is it taking longer? And are you still confident by year end you're going to make progress?
Judy Marks: Yeah, we're absolutely going to make progress and continue. Nigel, you've always heard me say orders can be lumpy. Retention varies by quarter, which is why we try not to report it quarter over quarter, but we certainly watch it more frequently than that. And what we're seeing is just some, we had some retention challenges, primarily in our portfolio in the Americas, was down, not significantly, but down a little, and that's why we are investing in service excellence, and we're continuing to do that throughout 2026. because where we see we've made the investments, we're seeing as the service quality improved. That hasn't instantaneously changed the retention rate. You're talking about a portfolio of 2.5 million units with the average customer having four units across the globe. So we have a lot of customers and we really need to drive the service operating model combined with service excellence and customer centricity and all of that we really are convinced will show improved retention at year end. We understand how important that is and we did see portfolio gains in EMEA. We did see significant portfolio gains in China in high single digits and we did see it in Asia Pacific as well. So we're comfortable that we have the trajectory to get there. We're also comfortable we've got the initiatives and the focus to get there. I can tell you if you stop any Otis colleague who I really need to thank Okay, thanks, Judy.
Krista: Your next question comes from the line of Jeff Sprague with Vertical Research. Please go ahead.
Jeff Sprague: Hey, thanks. Good morning, everyone. Judith, I just wanted to come back to retention for a follow-up. Maybe just kind of get to the root cause. You know, sort of the nature of my question is, right, we kind of had the retention disruption with you know kind of the uplift program there was some customer connectivity that wasn't clear until the program was executed and it caused some disruption. I sort of thought that was behind us. So is it really you're seeing just more elasticity to price now as you know as you're moving through this? I guess you know I'm not surprised retention is not going up quickly but I'm a bit surprised that it's gone in reverse in at least a couple places.
Judy Marks: Yeah, listen, Jeff, it's gone in reverse in a couple places, but only by, you know, if you look at the first half of the year, I'm not going to give you a number, but it's a small number of basis points. But you know us to be transparent. We're always going to tell you whether it's up or down and share good news and bad news, but make sure we act on it. It's not pricing elasticity. It's not ISPs gaining share. It really is, if you think about a four-year contract in North America where We still have some residual flow through regardless of the service excellence we're doing with some customers who are choosing to change based on multiple years. We are focused on addressing that through service excellence. I think the service operating model will address that in total across the enterprise. And so these lighthouse operating territories where we've done the service excellence, you've seen the 7% gain and the majority of those, the clear majority of those have much higher retention rates that track with those service quality metrics. But it's not what people naturally go to on price or on a different service offering from an ISP.
Jeff Sprague: Understood. And then just the comment, I think it was Cristina, I think she said kind of the shift to quality has negatively impacted productivity. Is that... Thank you for joining us.
Judy Marks: but with that comes some more complex maintenance that has to happen on our comprehensive contracts. And so as we see that unfold, that's not so much, there's some labor involved in that and we discussed that, but there's even more material involved for some of these contracts where we offer comprehensive service and we have seen inflation in repair parts, we've seen inflation in raw materials, but especially in repair and spare parts for the non-erdist equipment, we've seen pretty significant inflation and we have our maintenance contracts for four years. So that's what we need to offset and we've seen that because of the quality focus. So that's what we need to offset with productivity and eventually with price when that comes up for renewal.
Jeff Sprague: Understood. Thank you very much. You bet.
Krista: Your next question comes from the line of Alexander Virgo with Evercore ISI. Please go ahead.
Alexander Virgo: Yeah, thanks very much. Good morning, ladies. I wondered if you could just expand a little bit on this tempering of micro pricing point. I think Jeff was talking or alluding to the fact that maybe you've got a bit of price sensitivity and it sounds like you've still got a bit of a hangover from this sort of legacy customer quality issues. I'm just wondering how much of this is a sort of a, Thank you for all of the detail on that. That's super helpful. I just wanted to clarify, ultimately, you talked about productivity headwinds remaining in the second half, despite all of the other things you talked about as a tailwind. So as we roll into 2027, what should we be thinking about in terms of these productivity headwinds, the $50 million as we look to 2027? Thank you.
Cristina Mendez: Alex, thanks for the two questions. Let me address first the pricing question. So first clarifying that we are executing... Our usual price increase in maintenance is stable, as we have done before. This year, our goal was, on top of the usual price increase, we wanted to add micro-pricing that we knew in maintenance was going to take longer because of the time of the negotiation of the price adjustment and the time to penetrate the base. Repair is working exactly as we expected. You may remember we said we're going to have 50 million incremental price impact this year. Thank you very much. We are not pushing those initiatives on top of the incremental price increase that we always have because of inflation. So it's just the upside from micro-pricing that is coming later because we are prioritizing retention. Now moving to the service margin question and what it means for 2027. I want to reinforce the point that we are still very, very confident that our investment thesis on the fly will remain unchanged. We are a strong generator of profit and cash flow. and we are very encouraged by the revenue take up. And that's going to continue over time because we see an ongoing orders intake in repair and modernization of around loads to mid-teens in the case of more higher than repair. While we have those orders, we are also building up the operational machine. We are ramping up resources in order to execute sustainably this ongoing growth in sales. While we ramp up those resources and we also invest in the core of the maintenance business, we are seeing some certain headwinds in our results because of the cost to ramp up. But we are confident that we can address them because we have a great track record of addressing efficiency, productivity on the field. And that's what we are going to do going forward. So now looking into 27, you can expect an ongoing revenue growth. New equipment is going to grow because we have a growing backlog and we will see the growth happening in the second half of the year. We'll see service ongoing growth. On the profit side, new equipment margins should gradually get better. And on the service side, you are going to see the ramp up in the second half of the year. Service margins are going to expand. We will come back to you on due time and precise guidance for 2027.
Judy Marks: Alex, let me add just some color here and some commentary. As we were preparing for this, and Cristina said, and you think about the five years since SPIN, we do know how to manage productivity, operational effectiveness. We've shown that within multiple headwind scenarios, whether it was COVID or something else or supply chain challenges. We know how to do that. I hope you all realize we recognized that we were going to see an increased demand signal in our markets in the elevator and escalator markets that's a little unprecedented for at least the past, let's just say decade. We saw that the service business was going to ramp up due to the aging of equipment and we knew we needed to prepare for that. That's a different type of muscle and culture and process to be able to simultaneously globally handle the ramp up of a service business, whether it's through our workforce, whether it's through tools and technologies. But we started investing by hiring mechanics well over a few years ago. We brought on about a thousand each year. We're continuing to do that. We've put training programs in place. The investments we've made in service excellence are for preparing for the future, but also reacting to our retention that went down at the end of 24. And I just want you to understand the ramp we're on and why we're investing this year and actually why we took the outlook down. I think it's important for everyone. As we look at 2025 in service on the top line, our maintenance for the year was up 2.5%, repair was up 5.3%, and mod was up 9.3%. This quarter alone, maintenance was up 3%, repair was up 12%, and standout on mod on 24%. I don't believe it'll stay at that level. I think it'll come back, normalize a little into the teens. But that was the ramp we knew was coming, and it's not a short-term ramp. It's not a few-quarter ramp. This is a multi-year into the 2030s ramp as we see all this equipment aging. So this was our time to prepare. and this is what we're doing with the service operating model. This is how we're getting ready, like many other industries are getting ready for technology change and everything else. This is our industry's time and this is how Otis decided to invest and to lead. We understand that bringing the outlook down is not ideal and while we're making these investments, we have seen increased costs in material, in labor, and we haven't been able to recover that fully in pricing. We understand that. But these investments will prepare us not just for 26 but for 27 through 2030 and beyond because the demand signal is there. I couldn't be more pleased with the top line and what we've been able to show. We have not had results like this previously. That is going to continue, plus or minus a point or two, that is going to continue as we go through the year and through the out years. And again, we'll share more outlook in 27.
Louis Merrick: Very helpful. Thank you very much.
Krista: Your next question comes from the line of Varun Govindaraj with Berenstein. Please go ahead.
Varun Govindaraj: Thank you. Morning, Judy, Cristina, Imelda. Quick question, just touching on the EPS number again. When we look at that 20 cents that you sort of cut for the back half of the year, Obviously, you've talked a bit about that being the mix. Are there any investments sort of baked into that as well? I'm just trying to get a sense of how much of this is structural versus how much of this is temporary. And I know we talked about it a little bit, but any clarity you can share on the numbers would be super helpful.
Cristina Mendez: So, Varun, on the investments, we communicated in Q1 50 million investments by fall. This is included in the outlook and it's progressing as we said. Out of the 50... We have invested 15 each quarter in Q1, Q2, so 30 million in the first half of the year, and we expect another 20 million in the second half of the year. Now, moving into the productivity headwinds, and we are now anticipating another 50, 5-0 incremental to the previous outlook, 30 out of that is temporary because it relates to the ramp-up of resources and the higher rate in order to accelerate execution. 20 relates to what Judy mentioned before about inflation material that we are investing in order to drive quality up in our service excellence program. And we are going to address this productivity and incremental material cost with our service operating model program.
Varun Govindaraj: Got it. Super helpful. And then quick follow-up in terms of hiring. How is that looking for the back half of the year? Do you sort of have the headcount that you're looking for? Are you still trying to pull talent? I know that this is a tough environment for technical talent more broadly, just given the amount of demand. But how are you sort of thinking about that?
Judy Marks: Yeah, the way we're thinking about it, so I always try to remind people that we have a professional skill tree. That is not something that moves to become electricians or welders or something. Our mechanics, they train, they are true professionals, and they stay in this industry for the majority of their careers. So we're not competing with the buildup of data centers that's grabbing a lot of other skilled trades. As a matter of fact, our data center business, especially in the Americas, has been up significantly recently. We're not competing with that, but we are competing with all of the other challenges with an aging population versus less availability of people who want to go into trades. We are focused on that. Our hiring is pretty geographically dispersed. It ranges from Asia Pacific markets to EMEA markets to the Americas. Obviously, China's at a stable point, and many of our China field teams actually support us in the rest of the globe as we go through surges. They become field traveling teams. So, you know, we're not concerned. We said we would think this year would end about where we've ended the last two years, around that plus 1,000. We're well on track for that. We're controlling voluntary attrition to the best of our ability with our mechanics because that's the best place is to retain mechanics. We obviously have mechanics who are retiring, but we have just as many mechanics in zero to five years with us as we do in 30 years plus. So we've got a nice distribution. We're not seeing a cliff with huge retirements, but we're balancing that in these 1400 operating territories on a real-time basis. And then obviously as we bring new mechanics on, some are skilled. They're coming from other competitors and other companies. Others are brand new into the industry. And that's the mix where we're trying to address the more complex repair and mod growth versus the skills required for maintenance.
Varun Govindaraj: Appreciate the call. Thank you so much.
Judy Marks: Thanks, Rune.
Krista: Your next question comes from the line of Nicole DeBlaze with Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead. Yeah, thanks. Good morning. Morning. Just on the...
Nicole DeBlaze: kind of bridge to get to what you guys had talked about for 3Q and 4Q. Cristina, is it possible to give some color around the exit rate on service margins? My math is kind of telling me that you have to exit around mid-20s to get back to profit growth in the fourth quarter. But if you could confirm that. And then I guess if we could talk through some of the major bridging items that drive the improvement in service margins from 2Q to 4Q.
Cristina Mendez: Sure, Nicole. So first, some color on Q3 and Q4. On Q3, we expect service revenues to grow around 6%, which would be maintenance and repair around 5%, and low teens in modernization. We expect margin rates to gradually ramp up. In Q3, it will be around mid-24%. And on the new equipment side, we will move into growth, and it will be around low single-digit growth in the quarter, and growth will be in line with the second quarter. So overall, as I said before in the script, it's operating profit flat, although EPS will be down because of the calendarization of the tax initiatives in the year that are very back-loaded into Q4. Now, your maths were correct. In Q4, we expect operating profit growth on the back of ongoing growth in the equipment with more or less stable margins, ongoing growth in service revenues, also around 6%, but with another ramp-up in service costs. The ramp-up is essentially coming from repair price that is in the backlog. So we see it's just a matter of executing this backlog. It's about the acceleration of modernization and repair volumes also in the backlog. SDNA will be reduced, so the growth we have seen in the first half will be lower in the second half because we will see the flow-through of the restructuring actions activated in the last two months. and we have some headwinds on FX compared to the first half. So that will end in the around 25% margin by Q4 and will be for the full year a touch below 24% for service roles. Okay, understood.
Nicole DeBlaze: That makes sense. Thanks, Cristina. And I guess just kind of back on the price-cost point, steel costs have continued to go up alongside what's happening with your pricing and micro-pricing initiatives. How are you guys thinking about the impact of price costs in 2027? Is that when we start to see the impact of this steel inflation come through based on the timing of your steel purchases? And how confident are you that you can pass that through via price? Or is it possible that price costs could be a challenge in 2027?
Judy Marks: Listen, we're not going to give you a guide to 2027, but I think it's important to understand that From a commodities perspective, we have locked in the majority, almost 98% of our commodities globally for the rest of this year. And where that impacts is not just on new equipment, but on mod. So it's in both segments and or a subsegment, if I may. Listen, we have the ability to price and to have that flexibility as needed and have discussions with customers. We had that when the Middle East flared and we needed to raise prices besides the normal price adjustments we get on service. So 27, we will continue to monitor. We'll lock in early for 27 if it makes sense. We continuously review this and we do this local for local. Remember, we manufacture local for local and while we may have global purchasing agreements, they do get implemented on a local basis at our 16 manufacturing facilities. So we're going to continue to watch that. Our raw material costs typically are $600 million to $700 million a year. So it's not a huge number for us because so much of our revenue and our profit especially is in the service side. So we know we have this year covered, and we're preparing already and evaluating 27 with actions now. It's all about supply chain resilience. It's all about productivity and obviously getting material productivity from our suppliers. And we've shown we know how to do this in the past, and you're going to see that again in 27.
Nicole DeBlaze: Very clear. Thanks, Judy. I'll pass it on.
Judy Marks: Thanks, Nicole.
Krista: Your next question comes from the line of Louis Merrick with BNP Paribas. Please go ahead.
Louis Merrick: Yeah, good morning. Thank you for your questions. If we could just go back quickly to the Q3 operating profit. You said that in Q3 operating profit should be flat sequentially. Just want to confirm that.
Cristina Mendez: Yeah, I said, Luis, I said flat versus the prior year.
Louis Merrick: Oh, okay. And then on the new equipment, I mean, during the quarter, it looks like you maybe lost a bit of market share based on the old intake. When have you really drained that? Price and competition, one-off issue, or something else?
Judy Marks: Yeah, Louis, I don't think we lost market share in the quarter. Our backlog's actually up 4%. If you look at new equipment for us, standout performance in North America, yet again for the eighth straight quarter, where their orders were up 15% again, After a strong 24% in the first quarter, and I'm really thrilled to share that we are just honored. Most recently, we were announced in our partnership and collaboration with Silverstein Properties and Turner Construction, where we secured 60 elevators and escalators at two World Trade. China, new equipment is in line with us. As a matter of fact, everything China this quarter was as expected, whether it was the market or how Sally and the team performed. It was exactly as we expected in new equipment, and it's in line. And as you see with our new equipment service, our least down in nine quarters, we really are starting to see that pick up. In Asia Pacific, we had two major projects in India and in Singapore last year, so it's a compare issue there, which is why the new equipment orders look down. So I'm confident in new equipment. I don't believe it's, you know, we compete with ISPs. They're not taking our share anywhere we can see. And we're going to continue to, again, we always knew we would get to a place in new equipment. It's taken us a while. It's taken the market a while to where we can have that ability to finally grow again and not have the headwind of new equipment. That's what you're going to see in the second half of the year with a 10% up in the Americas in the second quarter and that continuing because we've had eight straight quarters of new equipment growth. Just one other comment on, and let me just correlate it to Maude in case you had the question there. You know, our backlog is up 26%, which is still a tremendous backlog and we need to execute it. We need to convert it. And we showed we could do that with 24% this quarter. But no one's taken share from us in mod right now. Our China mod orders were up over 100%. Some of that due to the bond stimulus, but also due to a tremendous project called Tenjin 117, where we're going to supply over 250 elevators and escalators to the tallest current construction or modernization site in China. So that's going to get converted as we go through the year. The compare is going to be tougher. on the mod stimulus because it was more second half loaded last year. But you're going to see strong mod performance through the back of the year. And mod wooders, we had a couple of tough compares. Second quarter last year had a great large commercial win in the U.S. and another large commercial win in Australia. And so it would have been double digits without it, but we don't report that way. I just want you to understand the bridge.
Louis Merrick: Yeah, that's excellent. Thank you very much. I'll pass it over.
Judy Marks: Thanks, Liz.
Krista: And that concludes our question and answer session. I will now turn the conference back over to Judy Marks for closing comments.
Judy Marks: Thank you, Krista. In 2026, we are investing in capabilities to accelerate our top-line growth and profitability. Together with fundamental tailwinds of the aging installed base, Otis is well-positioned to deliver attractive, sustainable, long-term shareholder value through our service business. Thank you all for joining us today. Please stay safe and well.
Krista: And ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's conference call. Thank you for your participation and you may now disconnect.
