Q4 2023 Belden Inc Earnings Call

Presentation

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, welcome to this morning's Belden Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2023 Results Call. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. (Operator Instructions) I would now like to turn the call over to Aaron Wellington. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for Belden's Fourth Quarter 2023 earnings conference call. With me today are Belden's President and CEO, Ashish Chand and Senior Vice President and CFO, Jeremy parks. Ashish will provide a strategic overview of our business, and then Jeremy will provide a detailed review of our financial and operating results followed by Q&A.
We issued our earnings release earlier this morning and have prepared a slide presentation that we will reference on this call, press release presentation and transcript of these prepared remarks are currently available online at investor.belden.com.
Turning to Slide 2 in the presentation. During this call, management will make certain forward-looking statements in reliance upon the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. For more information, please review today's press release in our most recent annual report on Form 10-K.
Additionally, during today's call, management will reference adjusted or non-GAAP financial information in accordance with Regulation G, the appendix to our presentation and the Investor Relations section of our website contains a reconciliation of the most closely associated GAAP financial information to the non-GAAP financial information we communicate.
I will now turn the call over to our President and CEO, Ashish Chand.

Thank you, Aaron, and good morning, everyone. We really appreciate you joining us today as we host this morning's call, I'm days away from my first anniversary as President and CEO of Belden also has been accomplished this past year, and I'm excited about the opportunity we have going forward to transform Belden and increase shareholder value.
Let's turn to slide 4 for a summary of the major accomplishments we achieved in the fourth quarter and full year 2023. As a reminder, I will be referring to adjusted results today first, let me take a moment and Patent Development team for the excellent performance wrapping up a successful quarter and there.
For the fourth quarter, our revenue and EPS both exceeded the high-end of our guidance as our solutions transformation continues to drive incremental demand and margin expansion. Revenue for the quarter totaled $551 million and EPS came in at $1.46.
For the fourth quarter, orders increased sequentially by 4%, indicating stability in our end markets. Importantly, we experienced single-digit sequential order growth and both segments, Industrial Automation Solutions and Enterprise Solutions.
Entering the quarter, our markets were experiencing many headwinds. I'm encouraged to see relative stability in the fourth quarter that produced results exceeding our expectations. Second, as we wrapped up another transformational year, our business performed well and we were able to achieve record full year earnings per share of $6.83, up 7% year-over-year.
I would like to point out that after achieving record earnings per share in 2023, this marks two consecutive years of record EPS performance despite demand and destocking challenges in the second half of 2023, our revenue was only down 4% for the full year and through successful execution, we were able to expand our margins.
Gross margins for a robust 38.5%, up 270 basis points, and EBITDA margins ended at 17.4%, up 40 basis points year-over-year. Third, our business is generating meaningful cash flow, and we are deploying capital consistent with our capital allocation priorities.
Free cash flow for the year was strong at $217 million roughly flat with the prior total. With ample free cash flow, our team took steps to reinvest in high-return opportunities, although we invested nearly $110 million in strategic M&A designed to strengthen our solutions and enhance growth.
Further, we returned over $200 million to shareholders, mostly through share repurchases. Over the last year, we purchased 2.3 million shares or approximately 5% of the total shares outstanding.
Since 2022, our share repurchase program has returned approximately $350 million to shareholders resulting in the purchase of 4.9 million shares, reducing total shares outstanding by more than 10%.
After deploying over $300 million in 2023 in M&A and share repurchases, our leverage remains low at 1.4 times. This leaves us with significant financial flexibility to execute upon our strategic plans while staying around our targeted net leverage ratio of 1.5 times.
Please turn to slide 5, before we dig deeper into our results for the quarter. Now I wanted to pause momentarily and reflect on the progress Belden has made during our solutions transformation. For those new to Belden, we began a transformation in early 2020 in our industrial business.
Our main objectives were to bring together disparate Belden products, focus on data needs and ultimately engage with customers in a different way to solve problems. Since then, we've been working feverishly behind the scenes to break down barriers, add new solutions skills internally and invest heavily in our customer innovation centers or CICs, of which we just opened the fifth in India recently.
Our focus has been centered around key verticals with complex challenges with our enhanced solutions strategy, we work to simplify otherwise complex solutions and deepen our relationship with customers. Over the past few years, we have grown our solutions business meaningfully and see a runway for much more growth and opportunity. By focusing on customer problems and working to provide high-quality products and solutions. We are winning in the marketplace.
Over the past market cycles our business has performed admirably with a 6% revenue CAGR meaningful improvements in gross margins, which led to a 140 basis point expansion in our EBITDA margins. Improved growth combined with margin expansion has led to impressive improvements in our earnings per share. This resulted in a 15% CAGR since starting our transformation.
We have reconfigured our business to improve organic growth and prioritize higher value added products and solutions. And the results have been meaningful and impressive. If you look at Belden today compared to where we were four years ago, you will see massive changes underway, and I'm pleased to see these changes impact our financials so vividly.
We ended 2023 with a new record for EPS and expect our business to perform similarly over the next cycle with increased revenue and record earnings.
Finally, please turn to slide 6 for a review of our capital allocation priorities and action during the past cycle. From a capital allocation perspective, much has been accomplished during our transition. First, we divested from two businesses that were underperforming and no longer aligned with our solution strategy. As a result of both sales, combined with our impressive free cash flow, we generated approximately $1.3 billion of capital.
On the right-hand side of the page, you can see where those funds are invested. First, over the last five years, we returned approximately $500 million to shareholders through share repurchases and dividends and buybacks have accelerated this past two years as we purchased approximately $350 million in stock and reduced our shares outstanding by over 10%.
Second, our M&A activity has been steady with a total of 10 acquisitions deploying approximately $400 million in capital. And finally, the bulk of the past had too much leverage. As part of our new strategy, we sought to reduce our leverage to a more reasonable 1.5 times target, which we achieved these past two years.
Our low leverage provides us with more flexibility during times like these to continue to invest in our business, seek out attractive acquisition targets and return capital to shareholders. This slide is a perfect illustration of our capital allocation priorities and action and how you can expect to see us operate in the future.
So please turn to slide 7 for a quick summary of a few noteworthy customer wins during the quarter. These wins help highlight how our go-to-market strategy is evolving and showcased real-world examples of our solutions in the marketplace.
First, on the industrial automation side, our team succeeded in winning a project with one of the largest public transportation networks in Germany, a customer who's having issues with passenger experience, real-time position, tracking of assets and predictive maintenance.
Working with Belden, we have developed a comprehensive solution to improve the network and solve critical pain points in passenger experience. I'm pleased to report that we won a $6 million agreement with a major health care customer as an end-to-end solutions provider. This specific customers looking to solve key data and network issues and brought the team to our CIC in Chicago for a demo.
They were very impressed with the consultants and solutions and ultimately awarded Belden the contract on top of eliminating multiple previous product suppliers and awarding us that business as well. This win highlights the power of our CICs and how the strategy not only showcases our solutions, but also helps us gain share in the marketplace.
Finally, as we have discussed previously, we are working hard to streamline our Enterprise Solutions segment and move it down the solutions part in the same way we did for Industrial Automation a few years prior. I'm proud to share that our team is gaining traction in the marketplace by selling enterprise and broadband products across key distribution partners.
In the past, Belden operated with walls between markets and products that limited our opportunity by breaking down these walls and silos. Operationally, we can bring our products to market in a more comprehensive way, which lays the foundation for true solution sales. This work is important as we continue down our solutions path, and these wins are examples of how things are changing.
I will now request Jeremy Parks to provide additional insight into our fourth quarter and full year 2023 financial performance.

Thank you, Ashish. I will start my comments with results for the fourth quarter and the full year 2023, followed by a review of our segment results, a discussion of the balance sheet and cash flow performance, and finally, our outlook. As a reminder, I will be referencing adjusted results today.
Now please turn to Slide 8. In our presentation for a review of our fourth quarter results. Fourth quarter revenue decreased 16% year-over-year and was down 18% organically to $551 million, exceeding the high end of our guidance of $530 million.
As expected, we experienced softness in industrial automation with revenues decreasing 17% organically and Enterprise Solutions revenue decreasing 19% organically. Orders for the fourth quarter were up 4% sequentially, with slight upticks in both segments.
We ended the quarter with a book to bill of [0.96], reflecting a more stable order environment. Gross profit margins were 38.2%, expanding 40 basis points compared to the prior year. EBITDA came in at $88 million, with EBITDA margins down 140 basis points to 16%.
Decremental margins for the second half performed as expected, down 20%, in line with our targets. Net income in the quarter was $61 million from $76 million in the prior year period. EPS was $1.46 above the high end of our guidance range of $1.20.
Please note that relative to prior guidance, we experienced a favorable tax rate that resulted in a $0.15 benefit for the quarter. The benefit was the result of our continual tax planning efforts and certain discrete tax items.
Now please turn to slide 9 in our presentation for a review of our full year 2023 results. Full year revenue decreased 4% year over year and was down 4% organically to $2.5 billion. By segment, Industrial Automation experienced a 1% decline in revenue organically and Enterprise Solutions experienced an 8% decline in revenue organically.
Gross profit margins were 38.5%, expanding 270 basis points compared to the prior year. Our business is benefiting from favorable product mix as we continue to deliver solutions that typically consist of more higher margin active components.
EBITDA was down 1% year over year to $438 million, with EBITDA margins up 40 basis points to 17.4%. Net income for the year was $293 million, up 3% from $285 million in the prior year. And finally, EPS increased 7% to a record $6.83, up from $6.41 in the prior year.
Turning now to Slide 10 in the presentation for a review of our business segment results for the quarter. For the quarter, performance by segment was aligned with our expectations. Orders were soft as our markets experienced continued slowness, combined with the lingering impact of destocking.
For the fourth quarter, revenue in our Industrial Automation Solutions segment was down 16% compared to the prior year, and EBITDA was down 18%. Orders in Industrial Solutions were up 7% sequentially and down 19% year over year. For the quarter we experienced particular weakness in our discrete end markets, which continued to exhibit customer destocking.
For the fourth quarter, revenue in our Enterprise Solutions segment was down 17% compared to the prior year and EBITDA was down 29%. Orders in Enterprise Solutions were up 1% sequentially and down 2% year over year. As expected, we continue to see customer destocking in both the smart buildings and broadband markets. Longer-term, we anticipate meaningful growth in broadband as the investment cycle ramps up.
Now onto slide 11 for a review of our segment results. For the full year for the full year 2023 in the Industrial Automation Solutions segment, revenue decreased by 1% year over year. For the full year, revenue was off in discrete manufacturing, partially offset by growth in other markets, including process, mass transit and energy.
Industrial Automation segment EBITDA increased year over year to $287 million and EBITDA margins were 20.7% for the year, with margins expanding by 100 basis points.
Turning now to our enterprise segment, for the full year 2023, in the Enterprise Solutions segment, revenue decreased by 6% year over year. We saw a moderate decrease in most of our end markets as customers continued to work through inventory and Enterprise Solutions segment EBITDA margins were 13.3% for the year compared to 13.5% in the prior year, down 20 basis points due to lower volume leverage.
Next, please turn to Slide 12 for our balance sheet and cash flow highlights. Our cash and cash equivalents balance at the end of the fourth quarter was $597 million compared to $688 million in the fourth quarter of 2022. Our financial leverage was 1.4 times net debt to EBITDA at the end of the fourth quarter.
As we communicated before, we intend to maintain net leverage of approximately 1.5 times going forward. We have a reasonable level of debt, much lower than in the past with no maturities until 2027. In addition, all of our debt is fixed with an average interest rate of approximately 3.5% for the fourth quarter.
For the foutth quarter, our trailing 12 month free cash flow was $217 million, just slightly below prior year levels. We continue to have ample liquidity to deploy towards high return opportunities even as we manage through a dynamic environment. In 2023, we invested nearly $110 million in new and complementary businesses and returned over $200 million to shareholders.
Please turn to Slide 13 for our updated outlook. First, we have decided to provide guidance one quarter at a time aligned with the short-cycle nature of our business during these challenging times, our focus will remain on execution for the first quarter.
We anticipate challenges from the prior year to continue, including customer destocking and other temporary headwinds. Relative to the fourth quarter, we expect end demand to be stable with revenue down slightly in line with normal seasonal pattern.
If you recall, the first quarter is typically our weakest quarter seasonally, and we would expect that trend to continue for 2024. For the first quarter, assuming current market conditions do not deteriorate further, we expect sales in the range of $505 million to $520 million and adjusted EPS in the range of $1 to $1.10.
That concludes my prepared remarks, I would like to turn the call back to Ashish.

Thank you, gentlemen. Stepping back, the fourth quarter was challenging with many uncertainties to navigate the view, the current softness is temporary, but demand reacting to the economic environment and customers continuing to destock.
Over the short-term, we see stability in our business, and I'm hopeful that we will see an uptick in the back half there, the long-term secular drivers and investment cycles that remain. And after we get on the other side of this weakness, we expect to see higher revenue and EPS through the next cycle over the next few quarters, what can you expect from us?
First, you can expect us to continue to focus on execution and managing our margins to enhance shareholder value. We will have a balanced focus on continuing to invest in our solutions transformation, whilst at the same time working to achieve incremental and decremental margins as we have in the past.
Second, you can expect us to continue to drive solution sales with an enhanced focus on breaking down the barriers in our Enterprise Solutions segment and leveraging our world-class products across a broader customer base.
Our CICs are now in full swing, and we expect to gain leverage on our investments in the quarters and years to come. And finally, you can expect us to continue with a capital allocation framework and invest a healthy free cash flow into high-return opportunities. That means first and foremost, investing in organic growth. Over the past cycle, we delivered a 6% revenue CAGR with 4% of that from organic growth.
So this will continue to be our primary focus. After that, we will continue to seek out bolt-on acquisitions that enhance our solutions offering. And finally, we will look to return capital to shareholders primarily through share repurchases.
Looking forward, our portfolio is well positioned, and our balance sheet is strong. We will continue to execute operationally through these challenges and look for opportunities to seize the moment and gain share where possible.
To close, I would like to take a moment and recognize the contributions of our associates this past quarter. And now I appreciate your efforts and would like to thank you for your support as we continue to transform Belden for a challenging environment. Thank you for your hard work.
That concludes our prepared remarks. Operator, please open the call to questions.

Question and Answer Session

Operator

Thank you. (Operator Instructions)
William Stein, Truist Securities.

Great. Thanks for taking my question. And let me offer my congratulations on the surprisingly good results and outlook today. Your guidance as you highlighted aligns with normal seasonality and yet you're still talking about customer destocking and, you know, weak demand levels.
It does to feel a little bit at odds to me and I'm trying to understand if you believe that the weakness that we saw in Q3 and Q4 is essentially behind us now, or are we still going through it and done any details or nuances that would help me understand, cyclical positioning would really help. Thank you.

So first of all, thank you, Ron, for your kind words. So we saw Q4 as a stable period, right. So we saw orders sequentially growing slightly across the businesses. We think Q1 will follow a similar pattern essentially, and I'll fear with the sequential adjustment typically we go about 7%, 8% down from Q4 to Q1 just with normal seasonality.
So it's nothing different in terms of that extended period of stability. Now if you remember, we previously guided that the first half of '24 is the period when we would see this destocking phenomenon and it's at its peak. And then in the back half we would see normalization. So for now, we I don't actually think it's different from what we previously expected.
And I don't think we can say that the destocking period is behind us, but I think we can say that we are going through the stable process of destocking as expected. And you know, based on all the other indicators we have at the macro level, including PMIs now, we are heading in the right direction.

Okay. That's helpful. Thank you. And one follow-up, if I may. I'm hoping you can talk a bit about at the CICs, the pacing of investment there. You noted that you opened your [51] recently. Are we should we expect more of these going forward? And whether the CICs have changed your relationship with the channel at all in your anticipated revenue through the channel relative to direct like it?

Yes. And also I think in fact that you have actually visited bump of the CICs of so you've seen it for ourselves. We had announced initially that we will build five of Big CICs across of all we just finished that process of we are planning to roll out something some smaller format versions, call mini CICs in more locations that will get connected to these big five hubs.
Now what we've noticed is, as you know, we've seen this with our associates in Stuttgart type of first 12 months or so, It's a lot about customers getting familiar with our technology and then it moves to the second phase where people invest in time and validation testing and large solution design.
And then it gets really interesting, and we see it massive elevation in success or in win rates with customers wants to get to that stage. For most of our channel partners, io including those that do value add for our customers. They did not have those kinds of investments. They didn't have the infrastructure where they could demonstrate to a customer a complex solution.
So the CSC has actually become really a positive element in that partnership because now they can bring the customers over and they can show how all those different products work together, which previously they would have to just talk about. So yes, I think the CICs turned out to be great investments.
We just talked about earlier on the call about an example where a customer came in for a regular technology update visit. And then we ended up with a big contract. So and then of this customer was actually brought in by a partner. So that dynamic is very positive.

Thank you.

Operator

Chris Dankert, Loop Capital.

Hi, good morning. I guess first off, as we're looking at the first quarter guidance here. I assume guidance is calling for both segments to be down a similar amount on a year-over-year basis. Can you just confirm that that? would be helpful Yes.

Yes, that's right, Chris.

Okay, perfect. And I guess what bigger picture perspective, I am still thinking [EPS of $8] target in the back of the slide deck here. Maybe just kind of talk through the rationale on keeping that target unchanged, thinking about getting from here to there, perhaps?

Yes. So the [$8] EPS in 2025 is still our target, and it's driven by our belief in the longer-term fundamentals in the business. It's also supported by the investments we've continue to make through the cycle. We just talked about the CICs in the prior question, and it's not just the CICs. It's the overall, product, R&D, known solution selling capabilities.
Chris, we feel at this point that out, we were actually slightly ahead when we had articulated the target previously in '22, we said EPS would grow at about 12%. We have multiple levers to get there, including organic growth, of course, the bolt-on M&A, share buybacks, et cetera.
And then we were ahead in the first half of '23 of that 12% CAGR. And with our current guidance, we need to kind of be in that 8% CAGR to in '24 and '25. We still have two years to go and we feel that the investments we've made will pay off handsomely once we get to the other side of this cycle of this destocking phenomenon.
So it may not be linear. So I can't articulate a simple linear formula here, but it's just based on the fundamentals in the market, our investments and the fact that we were slightly had previously, we still believe we'll get there.

Yeah, I appreciate the color and then glad to hear that there's still a lot of competence and necessitate that hitting that goal. Excuse me, if I could sneak one last one. And maybe just a quick comment on what you're seeing in data center. I know there's a couple of different indicators in terms of how healthy that market is, but any comments on what you're seeing in data center would be great?

Yes, so that that business has continued to do well for us for two reasons. First, as you remember, probably from previous discussions, we were not overly focused on the hyperscale market. We were focused more on helping customers in specialized areas like health care, hospitality, Finance of federal, those kinds of markets to build out data centers.
And they see that as part of the overall solutions approach that that we bring to that market. Obviously, with the advent of more machine learning and AI, the need for data has multiplied even in those markets. So we continue to see data centers as a fairly attractive. And though it's obviously had some ups and downs more recently just given the inventory dynamics, but at a base level, if you look at our pipeline, we have more and more customers coming to us right now asking us to design solutions that include data centers.

Understood. Well, thanks so much for the color and best of luck in '24 here.

Thanks, Chris.

Operator

Mark Delaney, Goldman Sachs.

Yes, good morning and thanks very much for taking my questions. First question around inventory levels, how much inventory do you think was reduced at distributors in the fourth quarter? And if you have visibility into it to attract customers as well.
And where do you think inventory levels in distribution and direct customers will be at the end of the first quarter compared to normal levels?

Yes, I'll take that one, Mark. So inventory in the fourth quarter was down pretty significantly. In the fourth quarter I think this is a multi-quarter process as we as inventory comes down at distribution, I think there's really two elements here you have to keep in mind, which is the reduction at distribution and then the reduction at end customers.
So machine builders, OEM.s or other end users. And so I think that's a little bit more difficult to quantify in the fourth quarter. It's hard to give you an exact number, but a significant amount of the reduction that we saw in Q4 was it's related to inventory.

Thanks, Jeremy. And a second question, you're just trying to better understand how you're looking at margins and operating expense levels in 1Q? I think implied EBIT margins are about 12.5% to 12.6% at the midpoint. So I think that would suggest gross margins are holding up at pretty healthy levels. OpEx dollars seem to be staying at a lower absolute level, but any more specifics you can provide on how to think about gross margins and OpEx in 1Q? And if there's anything temporary in there, one-time reductions in OpEx that that may not repeat throughout the balance of the year would be helpful to better understand.

So gross margins, I think, will continue to be pretty strong. You may see a little bit of a tick down in gross margins from Q4 to Q1 just because volume is lower. So there will be a bit of an impact from just lower volume leverage.
On the OpEx side, we're going to continue to manage OpEx pretty closely to hit the decremental targets that we've given. And so we'll manage that tight. We don't have plans to do additional some headcount reductions in the first half of the year. Remember, we took a productivity action in the fourth quarter, so we'll manage OpEx and I wouldn't expect OpEx to be going up in Q1 versus where we were in Q4.

Thank you.

Sure.

Operator

(Operator Instructions)
Reuben Garner, The Benchmark Company.

Good morning, everyone.

Good morning.

Can we I think last quarter you noted an expectation that broadband would probably recover the earliest. It sounds like you're sort of seeing similar sequential movements in both enterprise and industrial automation. Do you still have an internal expectation that you'll see and a broadband snapback first and maybe industrial automation and smart buildings sort of later in the fiscal year?

So we're going to be remember, we've talked more about the kind of macro view at that point that broadband demand. It was so robust. It had support from Federal spending. And in general, all the large MSOs we partner with, they had no noticeable change in their posture towards capital expenditure and adding subscribers, right? That hasn't changed.
So we if anything we are encouraged with it. You know, the reports you've seen now we've had a chance to kind of delve deeper into the customer plans. The one thing I will say is that these are your own complex supply chains that depend on a number of products coming together of which we supply a portion and sometimes because of the complex procurement process, even though the end demand is fine, you may see some timing.
So at this point, we don't see anything different to what we had previously guided in terms of strength in the broadband end markets. We've seen a little bit of timing in broadband, but nothing that takes us away from expectations. It's within a few percentage points here or there.
So, you know, to give a simple answer to your question, we still expect broadband and demand come back first, and we feel that, you know, given some minor changes in timing, et cetera. We'll see our broadband business follow that.

Yes. Maybe the only thing I'll add here, Ruben, for your benefit is that keep in mind that the broadband seasonality in Q1 is a little bit more significant because those products are going in the network. So typically Q1 is not a particularly strong quarter in broadband. Once we hit the spring. Usually we see volumes increase in that business.

Okay, great. And then we sort of touched on this, but I just wanted to kind of hopefully give maybe a bridge on a year-over-year basis, Jeremy, if possible, the gross margin performance in the quarter was really strong considering the top line environment. Can you kind of walk us through how how you are able to sustain those kind of gross margin levels in the face of volume down as much as it was?

Yes. I mean, you've got for sure, we've got pressure coming from some from the negative leverage and the volumes coming down. So you've got to absorb those fixed costs on a smaller amount of volume, but the offset is that is positive mix. So I think where we've been strong is in our highest margin products.
So some of the actives and switches and other things that we're selling as part of our solutions. The reality is if you look at the products that are really held in inventory at customers and at distributors, it's probably disproportionately things like cable and some lower margin products.
So the bulk of the impact that we've seen volume-wise has been in some lower margin products. I think you've got negative leverage, but then that's offset by by positive mix. And so that's how we've been able to hold margins and up to the past 12 months.

Understood. Thanks for taking the questions and good luck.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Operator

Rob Jamieson, UBS.

Good morning and congrats on the results and solid guidance today, mature. Appreciate all the detail that you've provided this morning. I guess for me, just within Industrial Automation Solutions, can you maybe provide us a little color on what you saw on in the fourth quarter, maybe even full year just across the different end markets like between discrete Process and Energy and mass transit?

Yeah. So you know, obviously, discrete has been less robust than the second half of '23, and that was driven largely by the destocking phenomenon and maybe to some extent by the interest rate environment where people slowed down some of the projects.
We even noted, as we've mentioned previously, that some of the reshoring projects industry, it slowed down because there was a shortage of labor. They don't have enough people to either build or operate those plants.
So in Q3, we saw that come down. If you remember, orders were down almost just over 20% actually sequentially and POS was down at that point, about 8%. Now in Q4, we saw that holding stabilize. Orders are up about 7% sequentially versus a flattish and we've seen other indicators leading indicators, including PMI that show that it's heading in the right direction.
So discrete is still an area where we expect of some weakness and then it will come back once this inventory cycle is we get to the other side. But meanwhile, we did see a significant growth in our process markets and in mass transit. In mass and especially because of our high focus on providing this full mission critical solution, we have a number of engagements.
These tend to be more long term. They don't get impacted, Rob, so much by inventory changes, et cetera, and we have a fairly robust pipeline there. But yes, so to answer your question, it was more a discrete more linked to the inventory phenomenon, and I think it's stable now.

Perfect. That helps. Thank you very much. And then I guess just like last one, a higher level. You talked a lot about the CIC and the success there. I guess, maybe two things, an update on kind of conversions with customers that have come through the door.
And then maybe just some high-level thoughts on outside of just the solution and attacking the right KPIs for your customers. Maybe can you talk a little bit about other investments that you've made in software or middleware solutions like on like Horizon?

Yes. So there are a few things happening. So first of all, on the CICs, you know, typically when we engage with customers in the long term for a data or network solution, our success would be about [a third] of the customers would convert eventually, which is fairly healthy.
We've seen that once we get a customer to invest in a validation test at CIC, that rate might actually go up [2 to 3 times], that's fairly significant change that we see in that in that customer engagement. And we've seen more and more instances now where customers come to us typically with a complex kind of idea in their heads. And then we walk them back a little bit talk about the KPIs I want to address.
So for example, we previously mentioned we worked with this utility company in Spain and their KPI was the average time it took to find a fault in the network, and they were experiencing a 140 minutes on average. And we were able to take that down about 35 minutes. And they saved obviously a lot of money through a better revenue than saving on fines. So it's interesting.
Each customer typically comes initially with a and my network design, we walk them back to KPIs. We design a better workflow and data flow. And then we get another part of this, obviously is how we bring different sources and destinations of data together and Belden Horizon has turned out to be a really a phenomenal our experience for most of our customers because it's very neutral. It doesn't.
It's not application software. It's not designed to do anything with the data other than cleanse it sorted and connected to different Connect, different sources to different destinations.
One interesting thing that's happening by the way with Horizon as we are now testing more and more offering data and service, although we're not we haven't yet commercialized that. And now we've had requests now to incorporate more machine learning and AI into Horizon, which we have been doing. And the example I like two quarters.
So imagine a factory which has cobots and a worker may be walking into the off of a robotic arm and with machine learning on our edge devices and some form of an LLM in Horizon, we can actually stop that robotic arm without anything going to the cloud because otherwise, there's too much latency and somebody might get injured, right?
So those kinds of applications, they're not always the ones that get a lot of attention in the media as AI applications for the save lives and save time and the increased productivity. And that's where we are going with that whole software layer, which has turned out to be an exciting journey, even for us in terms of London.
So again, a lot of interesting things happening, but I think you are thinking about it the right way, a customer KPI is getting impacted and the software really making a big difference in that.

Awesome. Thanks so much.

Operator

There are no further questions at this time, I would like to turn the call back over to Aaron Remington for any closing remarks.

Thank you, operator, and thank you, and thank you, everyone, for joining today's call. If you have any questions, please contact the IR team here at Belden or e-mail address is investor.relations@belden.com. Thank you.

Operator

This does conclude today's conference call you may now disconnect.