Zoom But For Construction:Trimble (TRMB)
The pandemic is forcing a major redesign of the American office. Will geospatial giant Trimble lead the coming workplace makeover?
It’s bittersweet fun watching The Office during the dead quiet COVID nights: Steve Carell’s glorious jerk-boss quip, “Why don’t you explain this to me like I’m five.” Or Dwight blasting “Everybody Hurts" from his Datsun 280Z. And of course, there’s Darryl’s farewell break dance. It’s enough to make you want to sneak back to work and experience the quirky energy that's made office life a great part of everyday life.
But of course, nothing like The Office will be happening anytime soon. Fallout from COVID-19 is keeping most workers home. And it is inspiring an economy-wide reconsideration of the American workplace.
The U.S. Department of Labor has begun issuing a vast array of new workplace layout guidelines. And states like Maine and New Hampshire are hustling to create similar mandatory checklists for various types of businesses both regulates.Representatives we spoke with from payment companies, advertising agencies, and pharmaceutical giants, to name just a few, all agreed that everything from bookstores to Fortune 100 behemoths are gearing up to occupy less commercial office space.
And the space that they choose to keep must be redesigned to account for the realities and regulations of The COVID Era.
All that remodeling will put a premium on the tools needed to retrofit the American office efficiently. And the sleeper of a company that is emerging to make the most of the coming office reboot, is Sunnyvale, Calif.-based geospatial services firm Trimble, Inc.
Getting Rich on “Where”
Trimble got its start all the way back in 1978, when Charlie Trimble teamed up with two of his Hewlett Packard buddies to chase their dream of precisely locating terrain, buildings, and objects. Trimble became the driving force behind emerging Global Positioning Systems that would map the earth to an accuracy never before seen. Early on, when GPS was complex and pricey, Trimble thrived. But by the mid-1990s, its core geo-positioning market was commoditized by personal computers and smartphones. So, in the new millennium, the operation migrated into the so-called positional services business. Trimble found the capital to gobble up competitors like Pocket Mobile, Apache Technologies, and ThingMagic.
But it was Trimble’s 2013 purchase of SketchUp that gave the company its unexpected power position in the coming COVID-19 office remodeling wave. SketchUp is a 3D modeling program initially written in 1999 by Boulder Colorado-based @Last Software. @Last created SketchUp to be the general purpose design and rendering tool that even a beginner could use. Growth flourished. There were SketchUp Web artist collaboratives and Facebook groups. There is even an online SketchUcation that can certify one’s knowledge of the code. Back in 2006, based on a slick plug-in @Last created for Google Earth, the code was purchased lock and stock and barrel, by no less than Google itself.
Though professional designers we spoke with detest SketchUp for its clumsy features and proprietary standards, the tool did emerge as the Twitter of the design world -- the fast and dirty socially-slick standard for sketching out and sharing ideas about three-dimensional spaces. And Trimble has been racing to retrofit this SketchUp community into its wider Building Information Modeling businesses ever since.
Recent acquisitions of Tekla, Vico Office, and Gehry Technology extended SketchUp’s reach into building design, project planning, and consulting. And in 2020, Trimble appointed its building construction expert Robert Painter as its new chief executive. Painter is supervising a major new product offering called XR10 that hopes to bring so-called mixed reality to the construction trades.
Similar to augmented reality products like Pokemon GO, XR10 uses simple plastic safety glasses to integrate synthetically rendered design images with what workers are seeing in a real world unfinished office space.
Actual benefits are too early to quantify. But appears reasonable to assume that XR10 will speed renovations: Workers can easily previsualize the exact details of any renovation.
Not a Flawless Position
Certainly, Trimble has never been an investor darling. Its core GPS and fleet logistics businesses still struggle. The company suspended earnings guidance in the face of the COVID crash. Product sales have been essentially flat since 2018. Its cost of sales and operating expenses keep sneaking up alarmingly. And then there’s the numbing fact that younger professional investors simply don’t know what Trimble is.
This company will never be a Zoom or Skype, in terms of brand power.
It will take some due diligence to confirm that Trimble can build a sensible position in a given investing strategy. But regardless, Trimble still controls enough core collaborative tools needed for the reboot of the American workplace. Trimble is a fascinating company to understand and potentially back.
Plus, it nevers hurts that the stock is pretty darn cheap right now.
