Okay, good. We're officially starting the Citi 2024 Industrials Conference, so thank you everyone for coming. Starting bright and early here with the team from Donaldson. So Sarika, well, from the company, Sarika Dhadwal, who heads IR, Scott Robinson, CFO, and then Tod Carpenter, Chairman and CEO, here with us this morning, which we're thrilled about. So with that, turn it over to you guys and we'll go from there.
Great. Just before we get started, I just wanted to say that we will be reporting our Q2 fiscal 2024 results on February 28th. Anything we talk about today during the presentation or the Q&A will be backdated in terms of data to late November when we reported our Q1 results.
So with that, let me get started. So good morning and thank you for your interest in our company. I just have a couple of quick slides to go through. First, I want to note that today's conversation will be including forward-looking statements, and so our Safe Harbor statement is included in the deck. So with that, key investment points. What I really want to leave you with as you go out of our conference today is five main points about our company. First, we are a leader in filtration. We have deep customer relationships and we are global. We are everywhere the customer wants us to be in the world. Second, strategically, we are a best-in-class technology filtration company. We choose to be a technology-led filtration company. That is our most important drive going forward.
Third, our solutions solve the most complex customers' problems, enabling them to meet their sustainability targets in support of a more greener, modern economy. Fourth, we have a strategic, well-balanced growth strategy, both expanding in underrepresented portions of our markets and organically and putting capital to work inorganically or through M&As. Fifth, we are standing up a life sciences segment, our third reporting segment within the company, and we are continuing our progress along those lines in order to be a market leader in support of bioprocessing primarily as our focus area within the life sciences segment. So if you take a look at our company standing back, we are a 108-year-old filtration company with roughly 14,000 employees. If you look in the bottom right portion of the chart, you'll see we are $3.4 billion and our EPS was over $3 last year. These are last fiscal year numbers.
Everything you see on the right there are record numbers for the corporation. Importantly, we are one quarter now. We'll report, as Sarika said, a week from tomorrow. So the end of this month, we'll report on the half year for our company. Our guidance out there continues the record pace of the corporation. We have in the lower left, I want to point out that our strategy is we have proprietary-based technology to drive replacement parts. And you can see we are 35% razors, 65% razor blades. That's basically who we are and allows us to really drive forward. Also, very importantly, being a technology-led filtration company, it's important to note that we have over 2,700 active patents in the corporation.
Between our two investors' days, which was roughly about four years when we had our investors' day last April, between those two points, Donaldson Company, showing you our commitment to our technology leadership, we released a patent somewhere in the world on average every day. As we look at our competitive advantages, first, we have a long history of filtration technology leadership. Second, we have very deep customer relationships across all the end markets that we serve. As I said, we enable the greener, more modern, and more efficient sustainable economy. We have a diversified set of businesses across our mobile solutions, industrial, and now life sciences business set, high aftermarket retention, and world-class operations. We have three reporting segments: mobile solutions, industrial solutions, and now life sciences. Mobile solutions is our longest-standing segment.
It is where our company began in medium-heavy-duty diesel engines, which means long-haul trucks, construction, agriculture, and mining. So the on-road and off-road applications everywhere in the world. It has excellent opportunities for growth. We are working with all alternative fuel-based customers, if you will. So whatever they are trying to invent, we are there right beside them and teaming with them in order to bring their solutions forward. In the industrial space, we have a very diverse set of businesses and we are connecting those industrial-based solutions to make it easier for our customers to have a more energy-efficient solution. And so if you think about your dust collector, for example, you'll get an alert as a maintenance person out in the field to tell you how your dust collector is working. We continue to connect those type of solutions all around the world.
We are now in Asia and down in Latin America connecting products. That strategy is continuing to help us drive the growth that we expect over time within the Industrial Solutions. It's also helping to drive deeper customer relationships and really have a solid replacement part business and now opening up service-based opportunities. In the Life Sciences segment, we covet our bioprocessing opportunities. So upstream and downstream. So the making of cells, we want to help our customers make them more efficiently with media-based solutions or reagents. And you'll see that within the acquisitions that we made within the last year where we have made four. But we also look to go downstream of that in order to, again, help efficiency and be disruptive to the market within the bioprocessing activities. Those are our three reporting segments. That is, in summary, a very quick summary of Donaldson Company.
Now we can turn it over to Tim and answer questions.
Yeah, that's great, Tod. Thank you. Just going through that and looking at the exposures, obviously you touch a lot of different markets, geographies. And I think you have as good of a lens into kind of the industrial markets as anyone, just given your breadth. What are you hearing from customers? Maybe just from kind of a high-level perspective, just what's the state of the market out there?
Yeah. So if you take the mobile solutions segment, we would say to you that just generally over the last several quarters, nothing has really changed. We would tell you geographically the U.S. is blocked out over here. That the U.S. is really leading more positive, bouncing along comfortably. Latin America continues to be okay as well. Europe is just a little bit more guarded. Europe in the last recession never went more than, say, plus or minus one or two. Feels a bit like that now, just a little bit more cautious. We would say Asia is also cautious with the obvious exception that everybody reads about within China. And China is really, really tough. Not really green shoots in China as of yet. And so China is the headwind. And that geographic summary is really true across all the markets: construction, agriculture, mining, long-haul trucks.
It's really the same. It's also the truth. It describes our industrial-based businesses. It's really more of a macroeconomic story. It's really been more of the same. The growth you see at Donaldson Company is clearly a share gain.
Yeah. So just thinking what the messaging that we're going to hear from companies over the next couple of days, I would imagine if there was one word or consistent theme across everyone, it's going to be this notion of supply chains have kind of lagged. Now they ramped up. Companies, customers had too much of stuff. Now we're in this notion of destocking. Where does that fall across Donaldson in terms of what you've it's been going on for some time. Any update there in terms of?
Yeah. So the story within our mobile solutions portion, we have been talking about destocking primarily across the OE side in our mobile solutions aftermarket. As a reminder, our mobile solutions aftermarket is 60% independent channel, 40% OE channel. And so we have had our OE channel really face headwinds through multiple quarters. However, our independent channel, which never really was able to catch up with the demand, so it really didn't hit the high stock levels that the OE channel did, continues to bounce along and in fact has grown throughout that cycle. So net-net, it looks like we would be down, but that's because of the destocking on the OE portion, that 40%. That's been multiple quarters while the independent channel continues to pick up. And so we think we're, as we talked about when we reported last quarter, we think we're largely through that.
And it is settling down now. On the industrial space, we don't really see on the replacement parts that industrial destocking. It was more business as usual, more of the macro description that I gave earlier from a regional standpoint of view. It's kind of bouncing along fine. We continue to grow within the industrial spaces due to excellent execution within our strategy, primarily within our aftermarket, and therefore the connected solutions driving the aftermarket and pushing the growth forward. That's kind of the summary I think I would have.
From a margin perspective, I think last quarter, if it wasn't the record high in terms of gross margins for the company, it was darn near it. It seems like the messaging has been, as we've come through this period again of market tightness, that there's kind of been this renewed focus within the company around pricing. Maybe talk through that in terms of has that been pushed down through the organization? Obviously, there are other factors contributing to that really strong margin performance. Maybe just update us in terms of the strategy around how you're attacking pricing.
Yeah. I would tell you the acuteness, if you just kind of look back and kind of really look at the scorecard of what took place and all that, the acuteness of the way things happen and the supply chain disruptions across the world really pressure a company like us who takes our customer relationships very seriously. So consequently, what happened is we put customer relationships and taking care of our customer forefront. We did things like add $100 million worth of inventory so that we can make sure that when finally that last part came in, we can build it and take care of our customer. That pressured margins down. You saw us go all the way down to 33.1% on our gross margin level. That's very low for us.
And so then over time, as we then readjusted, we took a serious look at pricing because it's time to get paid for all of that. Culturally, we've had a nice shift across the organization where we say, look, we do need to get paid for our technology. We had a great opportunity because now the COVID allowed us to reset some of the OE-based contracts that were longer term. Now there's a more fairness to it. We're not trying to maximize our margins. We're trying to optimize them so that we can continue to execute our strategy, take care of our customers, and grow the company. That's really important. We feel as though there's a fairness now to it. We have done very significant process change across the company.
We've done also some benefits changes, really focusing on overall profitability within the vertical segments and the pieces of those. And so now we just feel as though we've made the necessary changes to press us forward and support our investor day targets, which you see operating margin expanding all the way to 16%.
Coming back to the aftermarket piece, obviously such an important and critical asset of Donaldson. Can you talk through kind of the geographic footprint of that business? I would imagine that the relationships probably presumably strongest in North America. What are the opportunities to kind of broaden that, especially in markets that maybe have less sophisticated or less rigor around kind of IP protection in some of the emerging markets? How do you attack that?
Yeah. When you look overall at our mobile solutions base, if we want to play with that one first, that's about a $12-14 billion market. We're $2 billion in that space. So obviously, we have a lot of opportunity for growth. There are many underrepresented geographies in the world where we have opportunity within our aftermarket to be able to grow. Clearly, we lead in the United States within aftermarket. And Latin America, we're strong as well. But Europe and across the rest of the globe, we have tremendous opportunity for growth and we're continuing to press on those. When you look at our industrial-based replacement parts, it's even probably more vast, the opportunity. And as we continue to connect up those products, we see that. We see that more direct from our customer base where we're just making it easy to do business with us.
You can now, off of your telephone, order all of the parts for your dust collector, from filters to all of the other piece parts I'd name that would bore you. When you really look at the strategy and the way that we're executing, geographically, we have a lot of runway across all of our verticals.
Is there a, from the standpoint of the, so you sell the razor and then the blades get replaced over some period. What does that, I'm sure it varies and every instance is different, I'm sure, even how the machines are used. But what's a rule of thumb in terms of you sell the upfront razor and then how frequently do those blades get replaced?
The replacement cycle for that?
Yeah.
Yeah. It's very, very different, right? If you're a long-haul truck, for example, a Class 8 truck in the United States, you might replace that air filter once a year. If you're in a mining site, you'll replace it about every 2-3 weeks. Maybe you'll go as long as a month. If you are in an industrial-based application, it depends on what you're producing. You can do fine particulate dust and you'll have to replace those filters every month. If you're more coarse and like Lexan windows, for example, you might take 5-6 months. So it's very application-dependent and use-dependent upon the replacement cycles. Liquid will be a little longer, more consistent on the mobile solution side, probably a year. Fuel will be, yeah, the lubrication fuel. The lubrication is about a year. When you get into fuel, it's really about utilization of the truck.
It's not a time element. It's more of a mile zone.
Going back to the over-the-road truck as an example, when you get in, does Donaldson share very much in terms of the first owner versus the second, third owner of the truck or the mining equipment or what have you? Is it, as you move into that second, third owner?
Yeah. So remember that we're a technology-led filtration company. And so when we have proprietary-based solutions solving those difficult customer problems, for example, Class 8 trucks, when you look at a Class 8 truck, you'll see still Class 8 trucks out there with 2 stainless steel canisters on the cab as it's coming down at you. We make those in Tennessee. But what's far more important is, as everyone wanted to chase miles per gallon and they made the cab more aerodynamically supportive of that, they needed to take those air cleaners off and put them under the hood. Our technology reduces the size of that solution by 60%-70%, allowing them to put it under the hood. And therefore, we have a large replacement parts business. And that's just one obvious example of how our technology works.
That means in that type of an application, we usually retain greater than 95%, maybe even a lot of times greater than 99% within those type of applications. And it's the same on industrial. And so when we look at our patent portfolio, we have a good strong moat around those applications because of our manufacturing capabilities as well as our inventive capabilities and how it goes into the application and solve that complex problem for the customers and therefore driving that replacement cycle as high as 65% for the company. But if we have to reacquire, so someone else's first fit and now we're playing in the aftermarket, we try to introduce our technology where possible so that we can improve the overall performance of whatever application that would be. And that is largely within our independent channel. That's the portion in mobile solutions, for example.
That's about 60% versus the OE side, which is a lot of that is proprietary-based solutions. But the margins are on the aftermarket side, it's comparable.
You mentioned share gains earlier. Maybe touch on that. I think one of the retailers you announced a partnership with within the last six or so months. Maybe presumably that's one of the points you were highlighting. Maybe just share any comments in terms of what's driving those share gains.
Yeah. So we announced a customer relationship with NAPA a couple of quarters ago, I guess, and maybe three. But it's important to understand if you back away, why were we able to win NAPA? Several years ago, while many companies were kind of folding in tent and COVID was happening, we were expanding our production capabilities. We had opened new plants down in Mexico. We had added production lines across the company because we wanted to continue driving growth. And so that, where we stand now, allows us, as supply chain kind of recorrects, if you will, allows us the opportunity to win. If you can supply the customer and take care of the customer, and we take great pride at taking care of the customer, it allows you to win. And you see that within NAPA. We're proud to be partnered with NAPA.
We look to take care of them. We will not take the relationship for granted. We did announce the NAPA relationship because it was material in its growth, opportunity for the company. And you're seeing that in the company now.
Going back to the industrial business, you outlined a margin target a year and a half, whatever it was, two years ago, and you kind of shot above that. Is there something within that you say, well, there's some investment we need to make or something that kind of that we should be wary of that, or is these, hey, maybe we just underappreciated the strength of that market? What would you say on that?
So specifically within the industrial side of things?
Yeah. You outlined a margin target of X, I forget, in your 100 or so basis points ahead of that.
I think what's the underappreciated portion of the story is the connected portion of that and the fact that we're doing that now globally. We have taken that forward. You can think of it, people struggle a little bit as a dust collector goes out to understand what that is. Now we're shipping products kind of like you would have OnStar in your car. Literally, when you plug in the dust collector, you're going to be connected to Donaldson Company. And that's what we're doing. And so we're firing it right up. And we have our engineers really taking a look at the performance of your dust collector, making sure it's fine-tuned so you're getting the best possible energy efficiency out of it. We have people calling our customers and saying, hey, look, we understand we're looking at your dust collector.
If you just go turn these knobs, you're going to get less energy usage. It's just getting a tremendous positive reception about that, driving those deeper customer relationships. I think it's kind of underappreciated that we're having terrific success at that. That opens up an opportunity across our company to get deeper into the service cycles as well. You'll see us talk a little bit more about the service aspects because a lot of the customers, they want to make widgets, right? They don't want to take care of their dust collector. Dust collector just helps them make widgets. So we want to take care of the dust collector for them, which opens up that service-based opportunity. Eventually, we get a deep enough relationship with them, they just say, well, just make it work, right?
Then they go and they make whatever it is their production is. I think that's part of our story strategically and what we're focused on now and what's not fully appreciated yet. Fortunately for us, there's a lot of runway in that yet. We would say it's still early innings on that. I'm sure we have hundreds of dust collectors connected across the world. We literally can click on any one of them in the world and see how it's operating. It's a terrific opportunity for us looking forward.
Underneath that, though, there's a lot of buzz around just some of these tailwinds pointing to some kind of a reindustrialization in North America. Are you seeing some of the benefits of that, or is this just, no, this is all kind of Donaldson-specific initiatives that are driving that growth?
Yeah. I think we'd probably tell you that the reshoring of the United States is a bit overblown. It's not really happening as aggressively as people may suggest. We would tell you more that industrial production continues to bounce along real well. Sure, in the semiconductors, it's a whole different story. Yes, they are reshoring. We all understand that. But if you look at the generalized industrial production across the United States, I'd say we're doing quite well. But the reason for our growth is we're gaining market share specifically. It's not so much of a macro lift due to reshoring or any of the other political explanations that people would like to give you.
You mentioned earlier in the mobile business that just now China continues to be a really tough market. It's interesting. We look at a lot of the messaging and the targets from the domestic OEMs. They're all talking about, hey, yeah, our home market's tough, but we're really focused on attacking the export channel. What is that? How does that benefit a company like Donaldson? Presumably that there's a little bit, you have tougher emission regulations, et cetera, as they move outside that home market. What are the benefits to a company like Donaldson?
Yeah. So clearly, if you just step back, look at China, we've been saying for several quarters, actually for years now, we have been winning vehicle platforms in China across agriculture, mining, and trucks and construction. And we've been winning it with the Chinese national-based companies. And we've been doing that with proprietary technology. Why haven't we seen the growth overall in the company is just simply because their economy is, as you would expect, it's tough out there. Now, when China then starts to export, should they decide to export, that's when you would see really it leverage the Donaldson Company because we do have this new technology with all the makers, Lonking, Shaanxi, all the rest of them, all the Chinese national companies. And we already have the relationships with the multinational U.S.-based companies as well as Japanese companies right on through the cycle.
So, as China should China open up their economy and it really start to go forward, we'll get some lift there. If China starts to produce and export because they need to meet Western-based standards with the winds that we have that have not started to produce at this point, when they do start to produce supporting exports, we would see good tailwinds across Donaldson Company for that as well. So overall, we believe we've lapped the tough news in China. And we're waiting for China to really open up and press forward. And when that happens, that should be a nice tailwind for us.
Before we shift to life sciences, I'll see if there's any questions from the audience. Yeah. Go ahead. I can repeat it.
Yeah. I guess sticking on the China piece, would you say that a Chinese recovery is a key to getting that inflection on the top line in the bioprocessing business?
If you look at bioprocessing and what we're doing within life sciences, China doesn't have anything to do with it. China is specific to primarily mobile solutions would be the larger tailwind we would expect and a little bit of lift on the industrial side because industrial production, when they start to really crank up all the factories over there, we'll get some lift there as well. Our life sciences and specifically bioprocessing-based focus is more of a U.S. and Europe focus, if you will. Yes, we'll get some revenue out of China on bioprocessing, but that's not the larger portion of the story. That's more topping off the story, if you will.
From a market within life sciences, I think that the market size that you outlined was over $20 billion, if I remember. Presumably, there's pieces of that that maybe are where you are attacking more aggressively. How would you kind of frame the markets within that that you're really going after?
Sure. If you just look at what we're focused on, on our Life Sciences segment, we are looking to bring media-based solutions, which we are excellent at within that technology, across disruptive opportunities within bioprocessing. And so that's the upstream portion. So think of that as growing cells. We made an acquisition called Univercells Technologies. Univercells Technologies allows higher yields of cell growth within that type of an application through a media-based solution within a small bioreactor. With what that does is really aligned quite well where Donaldson's expertise is. We had people working on a solution similar to that. And Univercells Technologies was really ahead of Donaldson Company. And so we reached out and we have acquired that. So that is how we look at those opportunities.
But we also look at opportunities within the cycles there where we can be disruptive with the strengths of Donaldson Company. We have a number of people across our laboratories inventing cool things every day. They are looking specifically at bioprocessing processes that can help our customers really improve yields. We enjoy and take great pride in taking care of the customers. It's no different in life sciences for us. So our focus today is bioprocessing. You will see us likely take opportunity where a technology then connects, say, perhaps over into the lab space just because it's so positive in its use and disruptive. We would do that. But right now, today, we're primarily focused on the bioprocessing opportunities.
Got it. But the existing business, the disk drives being in food and beverage being the lion's share of the?
Yeah. So probably the largest question I get is, why is disk drive into the life sciences segment? And the answer is polytetrafluoroethylene. And we are fantastic at it. And we are one of the world's leaders in it. And it goes across multiple medical devices. It is a polymer that is so special that when you are excellent in it, you can apply it into the life sciences segment. And it happens to be building or have built a wonderful disk drive business for us. The technologies that are necessary to protect the disk drive and all of your data across the world, believe it or not, how you create the porosities of PTFE, looking forward and applying those into the life sciences segment has tremendous crossover.
Our expertise that we have learned over the decades in the Disk Drive business now are being applied across the life sciences space. That's why it's there. When you look at our Disk Drive business and our food and beverage business, that's roughly 55%-60% or so, is that right, of our current life sciences reporting segment.
Just thinking about from a competitive standpoint, I mean, the companies competing in that space quite a bit different. You also have some much larger in size and scale. Does that make it tougher from an acquisition standpoint just given that you're competing against much larger and better capitalized competitors within life sciences?
It doesn't make it tougher, actually. It makes it a little easier. We're finding it to be more opportunistic because we're finding people who are founders of smaller corporations that have really cool technology that want to disrupt this space. And people like us are more willing to disrupt than the larger established players. And so consequently, we've been able to find a more favorable response to the companies that we've been trying to acquire, which has allowed us to actually acquire 4, 2 of them pre-revenue that have tremendous opportunities in Isolere Bio and also within our Purilogics. Purilogics is an interesting one because it's a membrane-based cassette that allows you to polish and capture more cell structures than you want. Or then, I mean, the current, never more than you want.
But more than the current technology, the current technology is essentially resin beads that absorbs, whereas Purilogics will give you 10 times the output. And so we're getting a very, very positive response across the marketplace within that. But Donaldson was working on that. Just happened to be Purilogics had a better solution. And so when you look to combine, they chose us because they felt as though we would help them bring it to market and be disruptive. And frankly, it's a lot of fun.
Maybe an opportunity for Scott to weigh in. Just from the balance sheet, I think it looks like you'll end the year roughly a half a turn of leverage. What are the opportunities there in terms of what is the right capital structure for the company and how you're thinking about managing these potential life sciences opportunities versus?
Yeah. So we're blessed to have very, very strong cash flows. And in the last few years, we've been kind of in the 0.7, 0.8, 0.9. When you look at the ratio of net debt to EBITDA in our investor day targets, we said we generally want to stay around 1. So we've been generating cash. We've been doing some acquisitions. We continue to look for acquisitions to deploy that capital. Our strategy has been consistent for quite a while. It's, number one, invest in the company either organically or inorganically is a key component of our capital deployment strategy. Number two is pay dividends. We've been paying dividends for over 60 years straight. We've been increasing our dividend for over 25 years straight. So those are some pretty impressive records. We a while back added to the S&P High Yield Dividend Aristocrats Index.
That's a track record that we're pretty proud of and we want to maintain. Number three is to buy back our shares, obviously. That's the most variable component of our strategy. The last several years, we've been able to buy back 2% of our shares outstanding, which gives us about a net reduction of about 1% after consideration of share-based compensation programs. We've been slowly walking down the share count through returns of capital. But we want to deploy capital into the company to facilitate future growth. Certainly, we have the cash flows to do that. We continue to look for acquisitions. We have a good pipeline. I expect we'll continue to execute over the next years. We'll have to manage that because we will continue to generate strong cash flows.
Maybe we can close with this one. Just as you meet with investors and talk with folks, what do you think people don't appreciate well enough? What's kind of the most underappreciated aspect or element of the Donaldson story?
Well, I think first is that in all three segments, we have an opportunity to grow. I think people, the investor company, the investors out there believe that Life Sciences are only growth opportunity. Nothing is further from the truth. Mobile Solutions can grow. Industrial can grow. We're proving that every day in both of those segments. We have terrific addressable market opportunities there. And at no time are we even in the 20% in any of those three segments of the current share globally. And so consequently, we have good runway. And we're going to continue to be a technology-led filtration company, execute our strategy, really press forward in all of those markets. And as Scott says, organically as well as inorganically.
The other portion of the story that we're executing better, I believe, now than in our history is we have always said that inorganic growth or acquisitions was an important part of our strategy. We just weren't really pursuing that with vigor. Today, we are. You see that through the execution of multiple acquisitions. I want to emphasize, we remain a selective buyer, a strategic buyer, a consumer of capital. We will buy companies that fit our strategy to press the company forward. We have a team that gets up every single day now to do just that for the benefit of executing that portion of our strategy. Those are maybe the highlights that I would really put forth for all of you.
Excellent. Well, Sarika, Tod, Scott, thank you very much. Thanks for the good presentation.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks for your interest.