Ready? Okay. Wow, that's loud. Welcome, everyone, and I have the pleasure of having a little conversation here with Andrew, CEO of ATS. It's my distinct pleasure to have him here at our Citi Global Industrial Tech and Mobility Conference on day three. Andrew, I know you've had a good week here, a good couple of days with some investors. I thought what would be useful for everyone is to maybe just, you know, reflect upon. You've been in the role now for a number of years. As you look at the company, it's transitioned itself, it's transformed. Share price appreciation has been really pretty impressive. Growth has been good. What, you know, maybe just step back as you came into the role to today, what have you seen? What has changed? Maybe give investors a little bit of a perspective.
Absolutely. Thanks again for being here, Francis. Good to catch you up. You know, when I joined ATS about six years ago, and boy, time flies, you know, I came into a business that we were focused on good end markets. We had good liquidity in the organization, and we really saw a lot of opportunity for growth. You know, some of the first things we did early on was we decided we're gonna be decentralized, and we really pushed that across the organization. Number two, we aligned around what we call our ABM, our ATS Business Model. It's, you know, in its most simple form, it's aligned around continuous improvement, about measuring what matters most and then going back and hammering it and hammering it again.
You can really align around always looking to make tomorrow better than today. The team took that on. We had a very engaged culture. We had a team that wanted to embrace this, and we started aligning the measurements and the metrics, and we call those our value drivers. You know, you look at the organization. We had our playbook, we had the people aligned around it, and then we did our deep strategic review. I will often talk about that, where we looked at markets that we view are more resilient. When I talk about that, and I talk about the growth trajectory, it was because we aligned around markets that we identified are markets that are long-term trends. Life sciences, regulated food, the shift to e-mobility and what that means.
We also exited markets that we viewed really are medium to high risk and low margin. You know, you fast-forward to today, the ABM is now the way we operate. It's our DNA. Our engagement scores have continued to grow. The leadership team, it's about people then process and performance, and they align around that. Our business has grown at a little over 16% within organics, organically over 8%, and our margins have, you know, our EBITDA margins have grown 25%+. While the team has certainly repositioned, we feel good about the progress, but we're early in our journey. That's the exciting thing about ATS.
You know, it sounds like it's tremendous progress. As you look through your business system, are there any kind of anecdotal stories you can share with people on breakthroughs? I know you just had a recent CEO Kaizen event, which is so critical to business systems. Are there one or two stories of sort of, "Hey, this is what we found and this is kind of where we took it," that excited, you know, excited you personally and your employees?
You know, having done this, and I've run, you know, seven companies now, Year one is usually the easiest year 'cause everybody pushes a little harder. It's year two that you really find out who's driving process. It took us that full two years to really allow our leadership team to embrace what we do. I'll just say one of the, my favorite stories is I was with a leader, he was with ATS for 30 years, Tom. Tom and I are walking through with tears in his eyes, he was talking about the Kaizen event he just participated in and how it's gonna set up his area to really drive performance and help out the future leaders of tomorrow. He was about to retire.
Mm.
For him, it was about what he was able to drive and enable. You know, took me aside and said, "Andrew, I've been telling these guys for the last 10 years if we just did this different, it would have great impact." It has really become our DNA. You mentioned the CEO, the president's Kaizen, that's our fifth year of doing this.
Wow.
It's to set that tone that nobody's above continuous improvement. I shut my phone down. Ryan McLeod is in the audience here. He's our CFO. He shuts his phone down, we focus on continuous improvement. We focus on truly making tomorrow better than today. It's just that constant evolution, that journey, we will use phrases like, "Don't let great get in the way of better." That measurement tool around how do you ensure that you're making an impact for your employees, your shareholders, and your customers.
That's really impressive. Andrew, you know, staying on the whole Business System philosophy, you've done a number of acquisitions. You've been very acquisitive. Also, I would almost say a compounder type of a company that I think a lot of investors don't know about. How is the Business System helpful as you integrate, and how quickly can you get these acquired companies on the System and, you know, humming together?
You know, we will talk in our business, we'll talk people and culture. We're constantly focused on getting that right. When we acquire a company. There's four things we look at. There's the market that they serve. Is it an area, you know, like SP being one of them. They're a leader in lyophilization, which is really turning a liquid to a solid, and it's really helpful in extending a drug life. If you're gonna ship a product around the world, it's very helpful in that process. We then look at the strategic rationale. We look at people, and we look at, you know, the leadership team, how we're gonna operate it. Lastly, we look at the financial return. And we take this into a playbook.
When we identify a business that is an attractive addition, we'll walk through what that means to us. We don't get everything right. You walk in day 1, I would say rough numbers, 75% you kind of nailed. We knew the business, we knew the supply chain, we knew the services opportunity. The other piece we do very early on is the ABM, and it's our culture, it's our DNA. What I've found, though, it's fascinating to me that the businesses that are new to the ATS journey, they take to it so quickly because they want to align around a continuous improvement. They want to understand the parameters of how we operate. You know, SP being a prime example, most recently, we have a boot camp that our leaders go through.
They were the majority of that boot camp, we actually had to limit them because they wanted to be a part of it. Our playbook has continued to evolve on small, medium, and large. One of the fundamentals that we drive early on is that adoption in the ABM and really making that clear around how we utilize it to constantly make tomorrow better than today.
That's very, very thoughtful. As you know, stepping back, I mean, you are at the center of automation. That's what you do. There's been so much talk over the past three or four years about automation. Where is it going? How is it changing? There are a lot of large companies that participate in Honeywell, Rockwell Automation, Siemens. Maybe for the investor, give us a sense of where you are in that ecosystem, 'cause you're sort of a little bit between a solutions provider. You're a little bit, you know, are you a product provider? Are you a software provider? I mean, how do we think about ATS in the ecosystem? It doesn't have to be across all verticals, but just help us think through that, because I think that's an important aspect.
Yeah. It's one that we, you know, you know, Francis, you know our story, but to walk through the business I took over, we're close to 80% integration. I'm gonna use this example, and I'm gonna say, this is Francis Inc. This is an injectable device, and this treats diabetes. It treats something. You, you've just got FDA approval. In this, it's 70% gross margin. It's an injectable device. The business actually owns a liability if they get it wrong. They have to ensure that the quality at the level, it's high margin, and your demand is through the roof 'cause you just got FDA approval. You come to ATS, and we build the entire production line around making this product go from 1,000 prototypes to 1,000 a minute.
Along the way, we've acquired companies that are part of that value chain. The filling aspect of this, the movement. We have SuperTrak, the inspection of this solution. All the way through, we serve and support. We have service and support for the life of the equipment to get this product to market. When you look at the markets we've identified, life sciences, key area of focus for us over a long period of time, usually more resilient in the space that it serves. Also, the dynamics of the global market with high turnover, high labor inflation. Areas like, when we talk about supply chain de-risking or building demand or building capacity where we have demand, we enable that. Our integration is now 40% of our business.
We have standard machines and products as 40%. We have services is about 20%. Services includes both break, fix, spare parts as well as digital. We do predictive maintenance, we do digital twin, all those areas offer a high value for our customers. When they come to ATS, they look at us from a footprint standpoint, from a technology standpoint, also a whole capability. It really goes to, it's kind of interesting, Francis, you mentioned M&A, and it's been certainly a part of our growth story. When we acquire a company, immediately customers will reach out to us because we have services. We've got capability already offered at many of the sites to bring in and talk about the solution. It's been a very good synergy story as well.
I think from, at least from my perspective, really interesting part of what you just said is there are so few companies that do both metrology and the systems. I don't think a lot. I think as we see automation become more prevalent, especially as people have moved away from Asia, supply chains have moved more local. You've had to have more complexity in terms of the product output. It's the cycle times. You talked about pharma, life sciences. They're getting much shorter. You know, the FDA approval process is. All this stuff means you need to be quicker.
I see, listening to what you say, it's a lot of what you do, where I think, you know, I guess where I was going with the question is do you see the nimble-nimbleness of your organization, this pure focus, maniacal focus as a real competitive advantage versus others, speed to market?
Absolutely. you know, to think about it, in this world, 70% gross margin, your patents will run out. Time to market is so critical for you. You nailed it. It's they come to ATS because we have strong experience, we've got strong technology, we've got a strong brand, and COVID has caused this whole other dynamic, which is services has gone from a nice-to-have to mission-critical. You're gonna not only build this in the U.S., you're gonna build it in Europe, you're gonna build it in Asia, you're gonna build it around the world. You want a company like ATS that can enable you globally. We have built that infrastructure.
When we acquire new technology, day two, we can offer services in Europe, we can offer services in Asia, we can offer services in North America that really allows them to elevate their capability and bring that solution set and really enable our customers. We do view strategically as integration being an enabler. While we add in new technologies, new products, it's gonna build that reoccurring revenue and strong tie to technology development.
Yeah. We talked a little bit about life sciences, maybe we just shift gears a little bit, talk a little bit more. You mentioned food, beverage. How do you see that market today? 'Cause for a while, obviously, there was a little bit of CapEx slowdown associated with COVID. What are these large companies looking to do? How do you think that you can take advantage of that trend, of where it's going, and how do you see the growth rate of that whole market developing?
When we, and, you know, just to kinda headline, life sciences and regulated food generally over a long period of time has the best dynamics in an increase and a decrease, usually they're the most resilient markets. We talked about regulated food. You know, headline for us, our backlog in our food division is the best it's ever been. One of the things that's driving that is we are. You know, to think about its simplistic form, when you go grab tomato paste or anything around tomatoes, we are a leader in that space. One of the things we do really well is the energy management. We are more effective on energy management, and the cost of energy being higher allows the ROI to work out better for our customers.
When you have labor shortages, they look to automation for that. These dynamics have really helped us through. While we've got a heavy footprint in Europe, it's a global business, and we're constantly aligning around making sure that the technology is really enabling the customer. One of our businesses, RayTech, it does high-speed scanning. It does high speed, looking for any type of defect or any type of product variation to kick it out. When you grab something, you know it's safe, and the regulation around that is continuing to increase.
Very interesting. Maybe just to cover the other end market you talked about with EV, how do you see that developing? Obviously, we went through a period of time where the amount of capital associated with these companies was almost unlimited. That's changed. What do you see as the changing dynamics in that market as it sort of shakes out, Andrew, and how does ATS play in that part?
You know, Francis, when we went through this, we largely exited ICE, and we did that pretty early on. You know, headline our current backlog is 90%- for automotive, it's 90% EV, 10% really strategic ICE, which is more around body in white. It actually covers both areas. We looked at this market we got a lot of stuff right, we got a lot of stuff wrong too. The growth profile we certainly laid out, and we thought it was gonna be a growth profile that was gonna be a strong growth profile, double digits. It has certainly continued to outpace that, the shift, the evolution. The other one that we really, you know, missed on was the battery technology.
What I mean by that, what we do is, if you're gonna be an OEM and you're gonna launch an EV vehicle, you're gonna shift your thinking around how to move that vehicle. One of the things you have to get right is what they call battery pack assembly. In the frame of the vehicle, they're gonna have what they call the battery pack assembly. It often looks like a bunch of D batteries lined up. To give you a perspective, there's 10,000 welds in there. 10,000. You get one wrong, it's potentially a 2% inefficiency hit. Instead of the vehicle going 100 miles, it goes 98. You get two welds wrong, 96. It's critical to that customer.
Hmm.
That's been our drive, our experience and our technology. We shifted our focus to that, won a lot of work in Europe, started winning a lot more work in North America. One of the areas we're seeing is technology of batteries is shifting so fast that instead of a seven-year window, it's more like three to four. These customers that we originally engaged on for the full production line are now starting to come back and saying, "Now we need to retool the system.
Hmm.
The growth profile has certainly been a significant growth profile. We've been announcing a lot of wins in this space, but if you step back and look, it's still early in its penetration. You know, you can read the amount that it's needed for the demand, just to meet demand. There's a significant amount of investment for the next foreseeable future, three, five, up to 10 years. As battery technologies change, you'll often go back to your initial OEM or your initial provider to modify your line so you can use that new technology.
Really? No, I mean, it's interesting 'cause I think, you know, it's interesting 'cause we come through a period of time now where probably, I think my guess is three to four years into this whole ESG investment thesis, which as we all know, some of us might have different views on it, but as I reflect upon where you are in that cycle, you've got a couple of markets that are long, really long-term growth. We just talked about battery technology probably being at the forefront of a, of a multi-year trend. Let's talk about one other. How do you see nuclear? How do you see this whole movement towards SMRs? How do you see that playing into what you're doing?
'Cause I think for the non-knowledgeable investor, there's a really interesting idea here where you've got multiple vectors of which you're playing against, you know, ESG-oriented growth thesis with real dollars being spent, not theory.
You know, green technology is real. We're in the EV shift. We're in, you know, nuclear and we're not here to debate it. It's greener. You're actually utilizing that. As energy needs continue, nuclear is an option that people are really looking to. We also actually offer other solutions that allow our customers to understand their carbon footprint and know when they make an investment that they're seeing that reduced. We're starting to really build out that green technology piece. For nuclear, we've been more a niche player in CANDU reactors, it's refurbishment. Long story short, a CANDU reactor is multiple tubes. Over time, the nuclear core will degrade and go down.
To extend the life, you have to remove, pull the tube out, pulverize it, and put a new tube in. That extends the life by about 30-40 years. We have worked with Bruce Power on this and others to help them along. Through that, we also got into decommissioning space, and we've been engaged in this small modular reactor. We now have two customers in that space. The interesting piece is CANDU reactors are continuing. Attractive area we're offering not only the solution set of the tools, but we're serving and supporting them through this. We're providing solutions like digital twins, solutions like predictive maintenance, all these things to help these customers. Decommissioning has started.
The small modular reactor has been ongoing for close to a decade, yet it's starting to really move fast because it's becoming a very relevant option. I was pressed on the last earnings call around the size of market. I'm very careful on characterizing this because it can be very big. The technology is shifting such that when this is proven out, there is a lot of opportunity for growth. We've been helping a couple of key customers through that and helping them in their fuel process to enable them to really utilize this.
Maybe shifting a little bit here, how are you managing the growth? I mean, there's a lot of growth at ATS. You've got a relatively small, nimble organization. How do you manage it? How do you know, generate the cash, put the cash flow up as you guys have been put up? You've, as I said, you've been acquisitive. Your balance sheet has been used. You, you know, how do you do it?
You know, we don't like secret reporter ranks.
I was wondering if there's one 'cause I could be.
You know, we have eight value drivers. It's bookings, revenue, margin, and working cap. We'll walk through every business, and we know what your annual target is. We know where you are by month and oftentimes by day. We can go very deep very quickly, and then we know if there's an issue. You're red or green, not pink, not purple, red or green. Then the other, you know, we have two around customer, which is quality on time delivery, and we have two around people, turnover and internal fill rate. What that allows us to effectively do is take the standard view and know where you have to go deep.
If we show up to a site, and Francis, you're welcome to come and tour. We go to a site in Germany or we go to a site in Canada or here in the U.S., they're all gonna start with their eight value drivers, and we're gonna know immediately what's going on in the business. Then we go into the KPIs, and then we understand what are you doing to drive improvement? What are you doing to do a short-term and long-term fix? 'Cause if your arm's chopped off, fix the bleeding...
Right.
Figure out how to not let that happen again. Probably a pretty bad example, but you get the point.
I got it. I like the simplicity in a complex organization.
Yes.
That's what I'm hearing.
That's exactly it.
If we think about that, Andrew, I mean, you've done a really impressive... We talked early on about the growth, and the growth has been, you know, eight plus A is pretty impressive. How about the margins? How did you move the margins, and where could they go? I mean, as we look at ATS, you're obviously not an integrator. We talked about that. At the same time, you're not, you know, you're not gonna be a 30% OP margin, you know, aftermarket-oriented company. Where should an investor think if you look at a five-year stack? I'm not asking you to put a model out there, but, you know, there's gotta still be significant ramp. How do you, how do you get at it?
When I first joined, we were about 9.6, and we laid out and started to really look at what the business could be. Part of that was the shift, part of that was our supply chain opportunity, part of that was leveraging our cost structure, utilizing standard operating, so standard machines, standard products, part of it was services and ABM. We looked at all this, and we built it out and said, "Look, here's what we can get to on the base business." We set up 500 basis point improvement, so 9.6 to 15. Math wasn't that good. It was overdriven, but we got there. Through that, we also acquired a couple dilutive companies.
One of them we knew it was CFT because we knew we had to invest time, but we wanted to be in that space. When we step back and look at the business and where we are today, we've made nice progress. The team is executing. They're looking at the areas we need to drive. Supply chain has been a key focus for us. If you don't, you know, you know the business, we have a global buy. We've actually built out systems, so we know exactly where we spend our money. If we buy 1 million of these a year, we know the discount rates, we bring that across. We've seen a little bit of challenge recently because of the whole supply chain issues, and we've been minimizing that, but we've continued to make progress.
You know, what we've stated is we wanna get the full business to 15% EBIT. We haven't put the timeline on it. We want the supply chain to get more normalized, and then we're gonna set a target for getting to that level and then continuing. The other interesting piece is, as we move up into the right and we continue to build out our capability and do more acquisitions around building that out, we also look at businesses that maybe we're not investing as much time, money or effort into and say, "Are they a fit?" Right before COVID hit, we actually sold a company to another division that was gonna be core to its focus. We will shift our mix.
Because we're decentralized, it allows us to look at that and say, "How do we have really the greatest impact for the business, as well as where do we wanna focus our impact?
Very, very interesting. I like that. I like the concept of continuously evaluating the business and not just on the what do you grow, but what do you get rid of in order to keep the focus. What about the aftermarket? I mean, you alluded to a little bit on spare parts, service. I assume software, there's gotta be some kind of maintenance software or maybe some preventive monitoring. How is that how are you focusing your organization on driving that in order to improve stickiness?
This has been a strategic focus for us for a while. you know, it was part of when I joined, it was part of our focus. I'll tell you, oftentimes we like to say that it's, you know, very strategic. There were some simple things that we just needed to get done. One of them, we had engineers that were working on both the services opportunities as well as new CapEx. We basically said, "If you've got a $10 million opportunity or a $100,000 opportunity, where are you gonna spend your time?" We separated that. Then we had a sales team that would sell both, and we separated that. There was some real tactical things we need to put in place.
There was strategic around having a system that our customers could have easy process in ordering, having our digital capability of predictive maintenance align with the ability to order spare parts and manage our service teams. All that to be said of the target was 20%. We're running right around that level, but we have more opportunity to go. You know, I would say we've got businesses in the 40% range, and we have businesses that are under 20. This is going to be a shift. As we see customers look at this strategically, digital is gonna continue to be right in our focus area. The services aspect enables that 70% gross margin to continue. We have really aligned around enabling that and bringing that value to our customers.
That's really good. Maybe let's pause here. I don't know if anyone in the audience has any questions, or I could keep going. Any questions? Okay, well, you get me to ask my question. I alluded to this earlier. Very simplistically, what do you think are the three or four real competitive strengths? I have my own ideas, but maybe in your mind, what are those three things or four things that you bring?
Yeah, you know, so from a customer perspective, brand experience, you know, brand and experience. What do I mean by that? Customers are gonna look because they've got a high view of quality and getting to market on time and being able to meet their demand is absolutely critical to them. We're not often. We don't play on price. We're often a price leader. Brand capability and experience is going to be number one. Number two, location. Location of services, location of capability. They're gonna oftentimes do a production facility in North America, then they wanna move to Europe, then they wanna move to Asia. They wanna ensure that wherever they go, we can enable their ability to execute.
Three is, you know, technology and how do we enable them to maximize that process and really bring that product to market. The last piece and, you know, we will often talk about this, but customers have shifted their thinking on what they view as a system initial versus the services aspect. What do I mean by that? When a customer first launches, they need the process to be very simple in its ability to build the product, but they need our services team to be able to enable on an ongoing basis. I use the U.K. as an example. When COVID hit, the U.K. shut down the borders and they didn't allow people in and out. I was on with customers that said, "Look, we need you to continue to support us.
We need you to continue to enable our solution. We could do it 'cause we built the capability within our services teams. Because of our footprint there, it really truly drives an enabling solution. It drives a strategic advantage. It's shifted in the customer's priority list, where now it's a key area versus it used to be a nice to have.
Yeah, that's really interesting. It's interesting 'cause, one of the things I didn't hear you say that I've observed is just that maniacal focus on helping solve a problem. I think at least, again, you've walked a lot more shop floors than I have. I don't think a lot of times a customer knows exactly what they... They just need, as you said, they need their 70% gross margin, you know, thing done, and these or these solutions have become more complex, but yet they become lower price at the same time. They're become more enabling.
I guess where I was gonna go with that is, as you look out, I, you know, I talk to a lot of people sit there and say the capital spending has not yet been deployed in the size in which it's going to be in North America, predominantly because people are still trying to figure out automation, how to play it. I mean, is that a fair statement or am I a little bit overly optimistic on that?
If, you know, if you step back, we just had our best bookings quarter in corporation history. Our backlog is the best it's ever been. I use that as a headline because we do view that there's a lot of opportunity and you're kinda touching on it, which it's interesting that operators today are different than what the operators were 10, 20, even five years ago, where swiping and knowing the machine inside and out is way different at the level. They'll look to us to help them in that journey, to simplify the solution, but yet still make a complex product. I... You know, this turnover, this shift of movement, what, you know, the aging demographics of the population. We have one customer, there's 66,000 people.
They're planning for a third of their workforce to retire over the next five years. A third.
It's unbelievable.
Unbelievable.
To what you just said, you're taking people who knew how to operate machines, and like, I always call it this black science, and now all of a sudden you've got 20-year-olds who, you know, want their iPhone. They're like, "How do I do this?" I mean, so you have to. That's a lot to grapple with.
It's a lot. You know, and you touched upon around identifying solutions and really. We do that. I would kinda lump that in with innovation. It's who we are. It's that focus on constantly trying to make the solution set a viable, simple solution, but for a complex challenge for our customers.
I mean, because as I think through it, again, maybe I'm being a little bit too, I don't know, simple, but the amount of technology risk inherent to your business model is a lot lower than other people playing in automation. Why I say that is that you're just deriving a solution from best product, best possibilities out there. Whereas someone who is sitting there making a universal robot is gonna compete against five other people. I think that's, you know, they may see the growth, but you're able to, you know, sit there, as you said earlier, pull stuff together, some of which is your own, some of which is probably third party, and tie it all together and make them talk. I've got one, another interesting question.
Sam, I'm gonna let you keep going, friend.
Well, I,
I like it.
What I was gonna say is, you know, again, I'm gonna ask a question I have no idea what the answer is, so it could be really bad. Is there a move to trying to tie the software on the manufacturing side, not just into the QA, but back into the MRP? I mean, how do you see that? Is that gonna ever happen, Andrew?
Look, there's debates on this whole piece. You know, our view, and we have a business called PA Solutions. By the way, PA, we really didn't understand the strategic direction of this business. We brought a new leader in and he really worked with the team around identifying their sweet spot. The interesting thing about that business and the journey of our customers is those conversations are really easy or easier on a green site, on a new site. All the machines talk, you've got capability across. The real challenge is brownfield sites.
Mm.
If you talk to customers, they're gonna tell you, "The majority of my sites are brownfield sites." While it's great to have this identified digital solution, digital capability, software algorithm that works across, the majority of my facilities don't have that. When you talk to me about it, the biggest opportunity is in those brownfield sites, and we are able to pull and extract the information off, so you can utilize it in the process. All that to be said of, we think there's opportunity there. A lot of people are trying to go in that direction. For us, we do view that there's a win either way because we can truly help getting the information off the system and into whatever you're gonna use from a software, and we own the software on our equipment.
We have the capability to really navigate that either way it goes.
That's really interesting. As you think through, I mean, what are the three or four things that keep you up at night as you look at your business? I mean, what do you worry about? We talked about the advantages. Let's talk about, let's sort of, hey, this is sort of like I'm concerned and not, you know, big picture stuff.
Yeah. You know, I know it's a very simplistic answer, but I'm gonna give it. The number one is people. You know, with the model we have being decentralized, it really is aligned around leaders making the right decision in the right context to enable the team. Look, again, I've run seven companies. When I get the leadership right and they're empowered, they have autonomy, they have accountability, the team does well. They outpace their competition. They really feel aligned with what the business can perform to. So I'll spend the majority of my time around that people aspect. When we talk about the ABM, it's people, then process, then performance. The other piece is with M&A, one of the things we look at is how we're gonna operate.
When we think about leaders, if we're not building up our own internal leadership capability, then we have to pay up for management teams, and we don't want to have to pay up for management teams. We do things like we just launched an EDP program, executive development program, where we're training our leaders to take on the challenges of today and tomorrow, to understand the playbook and know that it can work in multiple areas. There's waste in every process. There's ways to engage leaders and build out capability. It's getting the best. We call it retain, attract, and develop. Retain the best, attract the best, and develop the best, and constantly focus on people. If you ask me what keeps me up at night, it's that.
Right. Well, you've been fortunate that you've had a very good team that I would argue is capable of running a bigger and bigger enterprise. That's, you've done a good job.
Well, thank you.
Maybe last question, and I think I'm gonna try and remember what Andy says he's asking everyone, so I'm gonna try and do it, which is. I think I'm gonna get this right. Which is, what are the three or four trends that you see out there that equity investors should be cognizant that you in your corporation can take advantage of? What are one or two that are sort of a little bit, you know, off the rails that worry you? I think we've talked a lot about this, so yeah, I'm sure you could, you know, answer it pretty simplistically.
Yeah. Let's start with markets, right? You know, I look at this in kind of a simple form, but first markets. We've identified in targeted markets that we view are more resilient, long-term more attractive, and we look over a 30-year period to really understand them. You know, life sciences, regulated food, the EV shift, nuclear make up the bulk. We have a consumer products piece that we watch, and we ensure that we understand the layout there. We've really aligned around good long-term markets. Number two, the tails that are happening right now. Higher labor inflation, turnover, the lack of labor. If you're gonna move to North America to build, just talk to other CEOs how fast they can get people to join the team. It's a real challenge.
Automation helps that. It helps our customers. I will often use an example of if you're gonna do this injectable device, do you want the person that doing it with a file that's made five, or do you want a machine that's built 1 trillion of these? I know what I want.
I know what I want too. Yeah, with the file.
He wants the craftsmanship. Those are real. An example we use is a business that spoke at our investor day that they moved from China to Boston before COVID, before all this happened, and they improved their gross margin from 45%- 65% because they reduced the number of hands and people on that production line. It enabled them to bring it to North America, to bring their capability where they had engineering. You've got the markets, you've got the tailwinds, and lastly, it's the people and drive. We will talk about our people and our culture as absolutely critical.
When you look at businesses that perform over long periods of time, our view, it's really the people that constantly challenge, that constantly set the target to be better tomorrow, always focus on how to improve.
I think that's a great way to end it, Andrew.
Thank you so much.
Thank you very much for your time.
Appreciate it.