Trimble growing ahead of expectations

A quick update on Trimble, which reported Q4 and fiscal 2011 on February 2, 2012. The company had expected revenue growth of about 20% for 2011, but wound up acquiring at a rapid clip that lead it to report FY 2011 revenue of $1.64 billion, up about 27% over FY 2010. For Q4, Trimble had revenue of $435 million, up approximately 35% over the prior year. For 2012, Trimble forecasts revenue growing at about 20%, in part because it will see a full year of revenue from the acquisitions made during 2011. Summing up 2011, CEO Steve Berglund said that Trimble “expanded [its] international reach, moved away from sensors and to industry-specific higher value content [that] leads to higher margins, and broadened & deepened [its] technology offerings.” Tekla, acquired in mid-2011, didn’t factor all that heavily into the reported results. When it was mentioned, it was usually pointed to as having potential, once the building sector returns to growth. In January Mr. Berglund told investors that Tekla “fits into this concept of BIM-to-field, on the front end we build scanners and we can walk into a building, such as an existing building that’s going to go through renovation. We can do accurate scans of everything, feed that into a three-dimensional database, and from there into whole set of intelligent tools that will access that database. Our point of differentiation is this BIM-to-field that make this useful in the field to the contractor.” During the February earnings call, Mr. Berglund continued on this theme: “We have, in the last 12 months, combined with what we had done previously, built out a relatively full set of capabilities in BIM covering mechanical, electrical, plumbing, as well as the structural steel aspects… I think that the financial impact will truly come when we see any life at all in commercial and large scale residential [building sectors]. The market is still very quiet in Europe and in the US. What we will see, I think, when we see any kind of recovery, and it doesn’t have to be a large recovery, is a significant step up in performance of E&C [Trimble’s Engineering and Construction division].” Tekla had reported revenue of €17 million for Q4 2010 and €58 million for all of fiscal 2010, so is likely an insignificant contributor to Trimble’s overall revenue at this point. But we’ll check the annual report when it’s filed to see if it has more details. Mr. Berglund said that “Q4 [2011] capped a strong year that exceeded our original expectations. We carry this momentum into 2012 which, subject to worldwide economic conditions, is expected to be another strong year.” For the first quarter of 2012 Trimble expects revenue between $477 million and $482 million, well over the $450 million analysts had been expecting.