Motorola Is a Growing Wide-Moat Player in the Public Safety Industry

Strategist

Eric Compton

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Motorola Solutions offers one of the most comprehensive solution sets for public safety, a sticky business where Motorola is a major player. We expect continued growth and margin expansion, with potential upside if the firm can complete additional accretive acquisitions.

Motorola’s business strategy revolves around providing mission-critical communication and technology solutions to public safety agencies and commercial enterprises worldwide. Motorola does this through three businesses: land mobile radio, video security, and command center software. We see the LMR business as extremely sticky and stable, and it funds growth in command center and video, where Motorola is building on its existing strengths in serving the public safety sector. With Motorola, we see a company with a core profitable business, LMR, that is funding long-term growth in expansion markets and increasing the percentage of recurring, software revenue over time.

Motorola’s primary client base is governments and municipalities, roughly three quarters of revenue, with the rest of its revenue coming from enterprises that also have communication and security needs.

LMR is the core of Motorola’s business and involves the networks and communication equipment used primarily by public safety employees (police, firefighters, medical, national security). Motorola is the largest player in North America in this space, and this business generates stable cash flows, albeit the industry is mature and growth is primarily limited to increases in prices. Even so, there is close to zero client turnover, making this an attractive business.

Motorola has built out its other two business units, video security and command center, over the last several years. Video security involves video equipment and video management software, or VMS. Command center involves software used by 911 dispatch centers for their different workflows (call intake and routing, dispatch, recordkeeping). We like Motorola's strategy here, and believe these units should provide higher growth and margin profiles compared with LMR, and we see Motorola building out increased market share in these markets over the next decade or more.

Business Strategy & Outlook

We assign Motorola Solutions a wide moat based on switching costs and intangible assets. For switching costs, we highlight the essentially unreplaceable nature of the company’s core LMR business, along with the switching costs of Motorola’s burgeoning video and command center software businesses. For intangible assets, we think the company’s unique relationships with various government entities via the sales team are a unique advantage.

We believe the land mobile radio, or LMR, business possesses a wide moat, largely the result of switching costs. The LMR business, which is composed of the networks and communication equipment used primarily by public safety employees, represents roughly three quarters of Motorola’s revenue base. Police, firefighters, medical workers, national security, public services, and critical infrastructure largely utilize this equipment, although some commercial enterprises also employ LMR networks—manufacturing, stadiums, and utilities, for example. The classic example is a walkie-talkie.

The way LMR works is that a customer (usually a municipality) will pay Motorola to build and run an LMR network. The network is the combination of items, such as radio signal towers, repeaters (combination of a radio receiver and a radio transmitter), base stations, and handheld radios, which transfer radio signals. A radio, such as a walkie-talkie, sends communication signals via this network. Each municipality will have its own private network. This is quite different from, for example, a nationwide LTE network like that provided by the major telecom companies AT&T or Verizon, where a single network is built, and anyone can pay for access to it. 

Municipalities highly value private LMR networks. Municipalities own their own networks, meaning, they never have to worry about capacity constraints or signal interference, and they fully control the specifications of the network. LMR is also the most consistent communication network available. It has the most uptime, is less prone to network disruptions, and has the most redundancies built in. This is particularly important for emergency services because they cannot afford to have a network go down in the middle of an emergency. A classic example of this would be during a major hurricane, which can knock out cellphone service in the affected area. Having an LMR network allows emergency services to still communicate, even in this environment. As a result, essentially all municipalities across the US have their own private LMR networks.

We think the LMR business is very sticky. Once a municipality pays for one of these networks, the network and equipment provider rarely ever changes. Initial service contracts are typically for 10 or more years, and even if there is renegotiation every decade or so around service contracts, the actual network infrastructure remains under the same provider because it would involve large sunk costs to rip out the network and replace it with another provider. As a result, the switching costs are extremely high. Motorola has installed and services the most LMR networks across the country, making Motorola the most dominant player in the space. Motorola generates equipment sales (like the handheld radios) and service fees (general maintenance, monitoring, upgrading of existing networks) on top of this installed base of networks. This generates an extremely stable, predictable, and profitable, albeit not fast growing, core business. 

One caveat that is typically brought up with regards to the LMR business is the risk of disruption, for example by public safety LTE networks (such as FirstNet) or even private LTE network builds. While LTE networks offer some advantages over LMR networks, such as the ability to transmit larger amounts of data (think images or videos), they are fundamentally more expensive to build and are more prone to going offline in crucial emergencies. As such, we see LMR and LTE networks as complementary, not mutually exclusive, and in fact this is what we have observed as municipalities equip emergency personnel with devices that can access both types of networks. For us to truly worry about technological disruption of LMR networks, we believe we would need to see something closer to a regime change in the technology itself, moving on from spectrum-based ground networks to something completely different. We do not see this happening anytime soon, and if it did start to happen, it would be a slow refresh process and therefore we would see it developing if it was already underway.

We believe the command center business also possesses a Wide moat, driven by a combination of switching costs and intangible assets. Command center is a software platform used by 911 dispatchers. This is a niche business. There are three main tasks a dispatcher must do: properly intake and route calls, properly coordinate the response of emergency personnel, and take care of any postincident items such as recordkeeping and evidence management. The command center software suite accomplishes all these tasks. This industry is highly fragmented, the product offerings have historically been siloed (solving one of those three key workflows), and the product offerings have historically been on the premises and are usually quite old. 

There are approximately 6,000 public safety answer points (911 dispatch centers) in the US, and Motorola already has an established base of at least one software workflow at roughly 60% of these, with the opportunity to expand with additional offerings. Given the stickiness of these software offerings, with upgrade cycles often not occurring for a decade, we see high switching costs once a software provider has landed one of these government customers. Further, given the transition from on-premises to cloud-based software, we would not be surprised to see customer relationships last even longer than the typical refresh cycle as the need for a refresh cycle is avoided given software-as-a-service-based software is continuously updated and improved. We also expect that, as Motorola expands its customer base by getting its existing base to sign up for multiple products, the switching costs will only increase. 

The 911 dispatch software space is fragmented and there are other competitors; however, we estimate Motorola already has one of the largest market shares and is well positioned to continue gaining share. 

We also see the command center business benefiting from intangible assets. We believe Motorola has an advantage over other potential competitors because of its large existing salesforce with its granular government relationships. We view these relationships as an intangible asset. Selling into the government is not easy and requires specialized knowledge of the unique processes and an ability "to get in the door." These are granular, municipality-specific sales relationships, built on years of efforts and Motorola’s reputation in the space. This is not easy to replicate, and it allows Motorola to have a better chance of closing each sale. 

We believe the video business has a narrow moat, driven by a combination of switching costs and intangible assets. We could see this segment developing a wide moat over time as well. The reason we lean narrow is due to the heavier competition in the physical camera space, where customers can make decisions to purchase cameras based on price, independent of a software purchase. While we think Motorola’s physical cameras are solid entries in the space, we think it would be more difficult to earn a moat based on physical cameras alone. However, Motorola’s salesforce advantage and the integration benefits with its software suite make us comfortable with a narrow moat rating. We could even see a wide moat develop over time, depending on how the software suite develops and how large the government business becomes.

For its video business, Motorola sells physical cameras (body cameras and fixed security cameras) along with its video management software. Under Motorola’s Avigilon brand, a complete end-to-end platform of cameras plus software is sold; however, Motorola also sells individual cameras, such as its Pelco brand.

Similar to other successful software offerings, we see switching costs at play. Once a government entity or a commercial enterprise purchases an end-to-end video and access control solution, there are actual costs to switching to a different solution. This includes reintegrating the software and cameras if one or the other is changed out and relearning a new platform if the software is ever changed. We also see integration benefits between Motorola’s other existing businesses, for example being able to integrate the cameras with the software, and then integrate that with other alerts and communications via the LMR business. Overall, we see good switching costs, particularly once Motorola has sold one of their end-to-end platform solutions in this space.

The intangible assets for this segment are like what we see for the command center segment, a large salesforce with existing relationships with municipalities across the country. To get a tangible feel for the value of this asset, look no further than Motorola’s acquisition of Avigilon. Avigilon had very little government business prior to the acquisition, and now generates a half-billion dollars in government sales, a figure that is only set to grow.

The video market remains fragmented, and competition is high, but we see Motorola as well positioned to continue to take share by differentiating itself with its end-to-end platform solution and, and we expect success in its bread-and-butter government sales strategy.

Wide

Economic Moat

Motorola Solutions

Motorola Solutions, Inc. is engaged in the provision of communication infrastructure, devices, accessories, software, and services. It operates through the following segments: Products & Systems Integration and Software & Services. The Products & Systems Integration segment offers an extensive portfolio of infrastructure, devices, accessories, video security devices and infrastructure, and the implementation and integration of such systems, devices, and applications. The Software & Services segment is involved in providing a range of solution offerings for government, public safety and commercial customers, which includes public safety and enterprise Command Center Software, unified communications applications, and video software solutions, delivered both on-premises and as a service. The company was founded on September 25, 1928, and is headquartered in Chicago, IL.

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Motorola Solutions, Inc. engages in the provision of communication infrastructure, devices, accessories, software, and services. It operates through the following segments: Products and Systems Integration, and Software and Services. The Products and Systems Integration segment includes a portfolio of infrastructure, devices, accessories, and video security devices, and the implementation and integration of such systems, devices, and applications. The Software and Services segment includes the provision of public safety and enterprise Command Center Software, unified communications applications, and video software solutions. The company was founded on September 25, 1928 and is headquartered in Chicago, IL.

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