Thanks everybody. Up next is Dover. We have CFO at the front, Brad Cerepak, and CEO Rich Tobin. These guys last week did a site visit and a 65 slide, you know, Investor Day. All that stuff's online, we're gonna jump right into the Q and A. Rich, thanks for thanks for joining us here. Appreciate it.
Great to be here, Steve.
Let's just start with what you're seeing broadly quarter to date, as far as the, you know, the macro is concerned, with a follow-up on orders on that.
Sure. It's pretty much as we described it at the end of January. We thought that the year was gonna start off a little bit slow just because there were so many capital projects that were hung up from 2022. I mean, we talked to our clients, the amount of CapEx to be deployed in 2023 is actually a robust amount, so the intent is there. I would also tell you anecdotally, when we talk to our clients that most, if not all of their projects were late or over budget just because of labor availability and inflation on inputs. You've got this situation right now where everybody's in a position of trying to complete what was in process of 2022.
I think that there's some overall caution because of the macro. Everybody's playing the net working capital game a little bit on the inventory side. Having said that, the first quarter is tracking kind of the way that we described it at the end of January, kind of that kind of scenario. You know, up until yesterday, like I said, capital plans were still robust for the year. We'll see how that plays out. Right now, we don't see any indicators that say that that's not gonna happen the way that we've accommodated in our full year forecast.
When it comes to orders, how do you expect those trends to play out as we go through over the course of the year? You've mentioned the backlog, getting back to, you know, a normal place. You know, what does that imply here? What would be on track from an orders perspective, organic year-over-year in the first quarter? How does that, you know, play through when you think about the comps for this year?
Yeah. I mean, we spent the last two years talking about backlog and orders, I don't wanna revisit those conversations. By and large, we were saying that backlogs were inflated because of supply chain constraints and a variety of the reasons coming out of the pandemic, that we would expect, as logistics constraints and supply chains normalize, that backlogs would deflate. You would have orders to come down first, which we saw in the back half of last year, you see backlog come down. Our expectation is backlog will slowly come down, but then orders will inflect back up and will go higher than one in terms of book-to-bill.
Are you seeing that here in the first quarter? I think your fourth quarter comp was, you know, pretty tough, down solidly, kinda double digits. You know, if the first quarter plays out in line with what you're seeing so far.
Yeah.
Is that orders comp worse or better than some in the fourth quarter?
No, I think the optics of the first quarter should be fine for those of you that pick out on whether it's book-to-bill or backlog or whatever the, w e give out all three, and I think that puts us in the minority. Yeah, it's we're beginning to see orders inflect up while backlog is down, but not severely down.
Right. The orders comps should get better.
Yes.
As you go through the year from the fourth quarter. The fourth quarter would be the bottom in the orders comp, is what you're saying?
That's the way we would expect it to proceed for the balance of the year. Yes.
Okay. Got it. I know it's just optics, but like-
Yeah, no, I know.
That's what we do. A big degree of what we do is optics.
That's why I'm here, to clarify it.
Okay. Thanks for that. Had to kind of pull it out of you, but I appreciate that. Sticking with kind of the growth algorithm. You know, 4-6%, I think, you know, people view as relatively strong. What is kind of the price and volume difference there? How confident are you in the, you know, and how smooth that can be over the next couple of years?
Okay. In general, normal inflationary times, we usually do 1% to 2% of price. Clearly, we're coming out of a cycle where it was a lot more robust for the reasons everybody understands. If we're modeling in a relatively benign inflationary environment for the 2023-2025 period, one would expect that out of that growth, 1% or 2% would be price. The balance of it would be a combination of volume and mix. Like, our track record speaks for ourselves. You know, we just averaged 5% CAGR over the previous five years, and that's during a period where we were running into headwinds of refrigeration at the early portion of that time period being negative the first couple of years. We ran into the roll-off of EMV.
Despite the hand-wringing about individual pieces of the portfolio, the total portfolio kind of cruised through. I would argue that the portfolio is better than it was over the past five years because of all the changes we've made to it and the investments that we've made. Clearly what we're modeling in is what we've just done over the previous five years, so we've got a track record of delivering it, and I would argue that our portfolio is better and probably has got exposures to kind of growth vectors that we did not have earlier in the cycle.
I think people are comfortable with a couple of the assets, whether it's obviously the product ID business is pretty easy to pitch as world-class. The, you know, the biopharma side of pumps and process. Even the non-biopharma side of pumps and process, I think people don't quite appreciate how good of a business that is as well. I think on the retail fueling side, perhaps some of the food equipment stuff, there's not as much visibility into, you know, why those things should grow at above market rates. Maybe on food equipment, talk about the two different drivers of the refrigeration side, what's driving growth there, and how sustainable that is, and then, you know, the.
Sure.
The can equipment.
Mm-hmm.
The Belvac business.
Just to be clear, we sold our food equipment business, so it's...
Sorry, the climate and sustainability-
Thank you.
Technology, software, whatever you wanna call it
Right.
Business.
Look, I don't wanna keep repeating myself about this presentation that we made last week, but the refrigeration business, that gets a lot of attention, rightfully so, because of its dilutive nature on the portfolio. We've actually brought up the margins of that particular business to the target margins that we laid out back in 2019. From a EBITDA perspective, in total, it is a funding engine for the rest of our portfolio that we deploy capital to, number one. Everybody understands that business of being the refrigeration case. Everybody goes to the supermarket, I get it. That is not the portion of the business that's actually growing. The portion of the business that's actually growing is the CO2 systems business, where we're the co-leader in Europe.
We've got a significantly large installed base, and we're bringing that technology and IP to the United States, where presently it's being driven by legislation. It started in the state of California on new builds for supermarkets have to use CO2 technology. It's gone to Washington. We expect it to go to Massachusetts. It's gonna look like, if I can compare it to something, it's like CARB with automotive, right? It starts in California, then it finds its way under a variety of different regimes. We think that this has got significant potential, such so that we are retrofitting a plant in Conyers, Georgia, to accommodate the growth that we have there. On the can side of the business, everybody understands ESG, and the recycle amount of aluminum versus PET plastic.
PET plastic is a problem for big bottlers that is probably going to take years to resolve. The growth of kind of the capacity expansion that you see in a lot of, like, energy drinks and some of those vodka coolers and everything that my kids drink all the time, you notice those are all in aluminum cans. They're not being put in plastic. There's a growth there. That business likely does not have a every year equipment trajectory because it's gonna be cyclical. I mean, we don't argue that.
The way that business works is when there is capacity build-outs in aluminum cans, you win market share, you've got the installed base, and then you sell spare parts into that installed base, and the spare parts business is highly accretive to the margin of the equipment itself. We're probably, during this next three-year cycle, going to make that transition between whole goods into a higher proportion of spare parts. Right now, I think that we're 80/20, so 80% capital equipment and 20% parts. We'd expect over the next three years, depending on the cycle, get 60/40, maybe 50/50. In that scenario, you could see revenue come down but margin inflect up meaningfully.
On that business, is it a $350-ish million business for you guys?
About that.
The backlog that you have there.
Mm-hmm.
Do you have visibility through this year? Next year is kind of a, you know, meaningful decline, but the margins don't, you know, don't go down as much.
I didn't say meaningful decline. I don't know. We have a backlog that gives us visibility for this year. By midyear this year, we'll have an idea of what's setting up for next year. All I'm saying is that we're cognizant of the fact that it is tied to CapEx, and it is a little bit cyclical, and it's tied to the profitability of the can makers at the end of the day. The third business that we have in there is heat exchangers, through a company called SWEP. We're one of really three independent producers worldwide of brazed plate heat exchanger technology, so we're a co-leader in Europe. We've done very well over the past 24 months on the adoption of heat pump technology, which is legislatively driven in Europe.
We believe that that technology is going to be adopted worldwide. As such, we are deploying $70 million of capital to double capacity in that business, which will progressively come online. I think we probably finish up in mid-2024 by getting the capacity installed.
That business is roughly the same size as Belvac?
Roughly.
You could see a scenario over the next couple of years where Belvac goes down, the margin looks better. SWEP is gonna grow from my perspective. That's one of the best growth stories you guys have, the heat exchanger side, the CO2 carries the load. Maybe this one is, over the next couple of years, at the low end of the 4%-6%, much better incrementals.
I think you're overcooking this Belvac story, that no one ever cared about Belvac and still, until we started making money in it, and now we're going to concoct this notion that Belvac's gonna go down, and we're not gonna be able to mop it up. The heat exchanger business and the CO2 business are going to outgrow the decline of Belvac, and it's margin accretive.
My associate and I, Pat, cared a lot about Belvac like 10 years ago. You can ask your predecessor.
I'm speaking to the group, not to you specifically, Steve.
I've-.
Just for clarity's sake.
I've always cared about Belvac. Ticking down the list of the other, y ou know, I like that chart you guys put out with the, you know, the exposure to components, software, and services, and then the capital equipment side, and I think the capital equipment side is, you know, rightfully so in this environment, the focus.
Mm-hmm.
I think just ticking down that list, talk a little bit about MAAG and how we should view that business 'cause I, again, I'm trying to get at, you know, the four to six is the debate that's come away from your Investor Day.
Mm-hmm.
I think that capital equipment piece is where people will get most focused on, you know, poking holes in the four to six.
Sure.
What about MAAG?
MAAG is 50% capital equipment and 50% spare parts as we sit here today. Back to this issue about the installed base and then harvesting the installed base. We're one of two to three, if we're kind, of market participants that makes downstream forming and cutting and drying technology for polymer for plastics in total, which is a growth industry. If you go take a look at CapEx that's deployed into expanding capacity in plastic production, look, you know, China's gone through a pretty nice cycle. The Middle East is about to go onto a cycle to supply India. You know, like I said, we're one of a couple players in that marketplace. We don't see a change in terms of the dynamic. We think we've got the most wholesome technology offering.
We've actually been a buyer in this space consistently over the past four or six years or so. We think it's a defensible growth platform just on capacity expansion alone and the fact that there's a very lucrative stream of consumable wear parts on the installed base.
That business is a few hundred million dollars?
More than that.
More than that. $500 million?
Sort of.
Okay. Well, we'll go with $400. This is all, $450. This is one.
We're getting hand signals from the floor.
So this is one, again, that you seem, y ou know, it's a piece of capital equipment, but it seems like you've got some visibility on, you know, some secular growth drivers here in the next few years.
If we thought that it was cycling down in a meaningful way, we would have not done it, or we would have bought it on the cheap. I think we paid a fair price for it at the end of the day. You know, it's something that we believe that we'll continue to invest behind 'cause there's a whole recycling play where I think, I don't wanna get the number wrong, it's probably 15% of our revenue right now in recycling. We think that there is ample opportunity for a variety of reasons. We own the space to get bigger in there. We've actually been looking quite actively in terms of expanding our offering you know, away from the production side and into the recycling side.
Right. I think the commonality here is really the, you know, these are pretty high quality, high share niche businesses in niche markets.
That's why everybody.
Like, this is differentiated technology versus, you know, that's specialized versus something that's more commoditized.
Yeah. It's highly engineered and highly concentrated.
Right. Lastly, just on the environmental services group.
Mm-hmm
The garbage trucks.
Mm-hmm.
You talked about some drivers there. I mean, how do we view this cycle for the next, you know, few years?
Well.
What you're doing, you know, to blunt the impact of whatever may come there.
Sure. Our business has actually been shrinking since 2019 in the truck bodies. The reason for that is we couldn't the industry couldn't get chassis because the big truck OEMs, because of the chip issues that they had, diverted their chip production to Class 8 over-the-road because that's where all the margin is in OEM trucks. I know from troubling experience. We've been at the short end of the tail on kind of specialty truck production, we've actually been at a deficit. You know, everybody looks at that business and says, "Well, okay, you build the truck body that goes on the back of the truck," that's what we do. We don't actually buy or sell the truck. Our customer does, right?
They deliver the truck to us, and then we body build it, and it goes out the door. The fleet has aged quite a bit over the last three or four years. That part of it has been negative volume. We would expect there should be a refurbishment if you believe that the chips are gonna become more available. If you look at the way the Class Eight demand is, they're projecting a cycle down now, and that means that the big OEMs will basically divert more of their component capacity to specialty trucks. We would expect volume over the next couple of years to go back up.
We know this because we're a material contributor to spare parts consumption of the vehicles that are out there. As they age, they consume more spare parts, and at a certain point, they get more expensive in the fleet than having a new truck, right? New truck, most expensive, then it goes down as you depreciate the new truck, and then it inflects up when they start consuming spare parts in a meaningful way. That's if we look at our own spare parts volume right now, we're on the up cycle now because the fleet's getting quite old. We would expect, and we talk to our customers like Republic and Waste Management, they're getting ready to kind of intervene on the fleets themselves.
Despite the fact that our bodies have been down, our revenue is actually up. That is two reasons because of e-commerce platforms that we've implemented. Our capture rate on spare parts is quite high or higher than it was back in 2018. We've made some acquisitions on the software side that have been very successful in terms of safety and compliance, route mapping on the truck, and dynamic billing. Meaning I pull up to a container, I can take a picture of it. If it's overflowed, I can bill you for that overflow, which just the OEMs weren't capable of in the past. We've had, from an attachment rate point of view, it's been very, very successful.
Lastly, just on the retail fueling side, how do we think about the profile of that one for the next, you know, couple of years now that EMV is, you know, moving to the past?
I mean, there's a couple pieces here. It's not retail fueling anymore, I think that we were not trying to play games in terms of what we called the segments. There is a retail fueling piece of that business. We discussed EMV around here forever. We're beyond EMV now. We've harvested all the profits out of EMV. We've redeployed those profits into our investments into clean energy, we can kind of pivot back to that in a moment. The core retail fueling base, in total, we're the market leader because we've got a meaningful above ground and below ground position. I'd say, completed the synergy extraction of bringing Wayne and Tokheim together. We're on one platform now, as opposed to running basically two different companies with two different industrial footprints with two of everything.
We're down to one now. It's taken us three years to get that done. We believe that we can run that retail fueling business, very, very efficiently. Nobody's getting in that business. The installed base is global, and it's massive, and it's highly regulatory driven. We believe that we can extract profits out of it for 15-20 years. At the same time, as I said before, we recognize this EMV transition. We harvested the profits out of the retail fueling business, and we spent $900 million doubling down into, our components business, especially the entry into cryogenic valves, through a couple acquisitions, that we're quite pleased about because it's a business that we know how to run and the CapEx that is going into kind of global gas.
When I say gas, to everything from propane to hydrogen. We think that that infrastructure is going to be the winner in North America at the least. We're a meaningful player, and again, it's regulatory driven. You know, what everybody thinks about is ICE exposure and EVs are taking over the world. I think that our total revenue of petroleum dispensing technology is less than 30% of the revenue of that segment, which was not the case back in 2018, not even close.
Right. I mean, to me, a lot of these capital equipment businesses, are, you know, there's not an imminent sort of cyclical element. I mean, they are cyclical, but there's a lot more going on from a secular perspective in these niche markets than I think people appreciate.
True. We could be here all day. I mean, I think I would call your attention again to the presentation. If you just sit back and say, "Well, that's capital goods," and, you know, the comps for that are X, go look what we did with the garbage truck body business, right? It should, for all intents and purposes, cycle down. It didn't because it is a niche of a very concentrated customer base. You know, part of what we're paid for is to find revenue streams that are ancillary to that base of business that you have, not just sit there and say, "Oh, it's cyclical, and it's gonna go up and down," right? Quite frankly, if that was anything in our portfolio that was absolutely cyclical, that did not have avenues for profit extraction, we'd sell it.
On the margin side, you guys gave the 25%-35% incrementals.
Mm-hmm.
You kind of spoke to the high end of that range. Maybe talk about the differences between the low and the high and your confidence on that.
Well, I've.
You delivered the high.
Yeah, we delivered the high. We delivered the high. Look, we have to accommodate some macro, right? I don't want to come out in year one and oh, you know, gotcha, you missed. We have to accommodate some of that. Clearly, there is a mix of margin that we have in our portfolio. We don't manage the business by saying, "Oh, you got to stop growing because it's dilutive," right? If we're getting good returns out of the business, we're not gonna stop the business from growing despite the fact that it's diluted to the consolidated margin at the end of the day. I've got to accommodate. You know, we're not. I wish we could forecast our revenues of 18. It's not even 18 different businesses, probably a lot more than that when you think about the subsectors.
We're not gonna get it right in terms of the growth. We are clearly targeting the high end of the range. Our portfolio, we just did higher than the higher end of our range. But the reason that there's a range there is because of the macro, accommodating the macro and accommodating we're not gonna get it right in terms of which pieces the portfolio is gonna grow or not. I'll give you an example. If we have a significant inflection back up in biopharma, we're not gonna have a problem with the high end of the range.
You're seeing on that business, you talked about that business kind of bottoming out here and looking better.
Yeah. I mean, all the we know that the inventory that was in the channel is depleting, as much as we can see. The order rates, we're getting some orders now. We went through a period where we were, you know, our order intake was pretty low because everything came to a little bit of a halt. I mean, I'm not gonna apologize for the fact that when the demand was there, that we had the capacity first. We won significant market share. What you have to understand about this business is it's not a commoditized product, it's a spec'd-in product. To the extent that you had it available, you got spec'd in, into the system itself. You know, despite the profit volatility or the, my favorite term, over-earning, you know, it's gonna inflect back up at some point.
Is it gonna go right back to COVID size? Probably not. The core business is growing above 20%, sooner or later, it should get there.
On the margin front, should most of these gains be reflected in gross margin, or is there, you know, kind of split between SG&A and gross?
Depends on the business, right? We've been taking restructuring charges in retail fueling that we discussed about because we're now pivoting that business to kind of be more in a profit maximization mode because, you know, it's probably not going to grow that much over time, but we think that we can inflect the margins up significantly. You would expect that we can run it more efficiently on the SG&A side. A big part of our presentation is what we're doing in terms of back office and the total productivity that we're taking across the portfolio, which should have a positive effect on SG&A. Even if we took a more conservative stance and said that all that work just offset inflation, whether that if it's labor inflation through SG&A, that would be good enough to a certain extent.
Most of what we concentrate is on gross margin, and that's factory floor productivity, and that's our pivot to positive mix.
Mid-40s% plus kind of gross margins over the long term. I mean, is that something that you guys could ultimately achieve someday?
Yeah. I think we'd have to do some portfolio pruning to get there, but yeah, for sure.
On free cash flow.
Mm-hmm.
How do we think about a normalized level of working capital as a percentage of sales?
It's been kind of volatile between COVID and supply chain and flopping back and forth. I mean, we've got a very robust target this year, only because we're gonna have to deplete the working capital build that we went through during this run-up to seize opportunity and buying. I mean, we were buying all the copper sheet we could get our hands on, but for the heat exchange business, just to give you an example. Our target this year is we're going to liquidate a portion of our balance sheet, which is the inventory, and bring it down. I think our target is, like, 16% of revenue. 16%-17% of revenue. Normal, I think our peak year before that was 13.
Between margin expansion and continuous improvement on just grinding out working capital from a productivity point of view, we would expect that we can just edge that up over time. 13 being the floor. 16, 17 this year, 13, 14 being normal, and then we grind up from there.
Got it. On that, on the margin side of that, just taking a bit of a step back, can you just remind us of what your, you know, price assumption is this year, and then what are you seeing on the inflationary side? On the flip side of that.
I don't remember if we disclosed pricing as part of our revenue guidance. It's a piece of it, so I don't wanna get sideways here. We're price cost positive, I guess is the way I can answer that question. That's our assumption for 2023. What we're seeing on input costs, logistics costs are back to, like, acceptable, I guess. Is that the way I should describe it? It's come down quite a bit from peak. You know, we don't see a lot going on in terms of energy pricing because that's really what's gonna flex it from here. The days of ships being lightering out in L.A., that's all over.
If you look at what's going on at container rates and kind of LTL over the roads, it's kind of back in, you know, an acceptable range that we can deal with it. Steel pricing is a little bit of odd one because it's coming back up. I'm not entirely sure whether that's in preparation for this deployment of infrastructure spending or not, or is somebody trying to front run something that might have to go on with tariffs. It's not problematic, but, you know, we went through, it was quite high, which everybody priced for, then it came down, and now it's edging up a little bit. We'll see how durable that's gonna be. It's not problematic to our forecast at this point.
It sounds like the inflation side is, you know, generally in line, maybe a little bit of opportunity on freight.
We had to do so much post-COVID at the direct labor side of it that our increases this year relative to 2022 are relatively small. I mean, they went up quite a bit for all the reasons we can understand. That was actually baked into our results pretty much last year. There's not a bunch of inflationary headwind from 2022 to 2023 on the labor side.
As far as the inventory and kind of efficiency dynamics, a lot of companies are liquidating inventories. You would think that would be a bit of a headwind on the margin. As you were kind of managing that whole process of building the inventories, there was all sorts of inefficiency that was going on. I mean, is that the right way to think about that trade-off, kind of on a year-over-year basis?
I think if you go look at our trailing results, you can see the mismatch between pricing and input costs and the timing of the inventory turn. You can go back and look at our results over the last six quarters where we were saying, "Well, these are high for these reasons, but these are low now. Don't worry because the price is gonna catch up." You saw like on the capital goods portion of the portfolio, year-over-year, we're up 400+ basis points in margin. That is that price inventory roll. Right? You know, make no mistake, over, you know, a 24-month period, 18-month period, you're neutral to slightly positive price cost. You're just depending on the amount of inventory and how long the supply chain was. You know, different businesses are either more volatile or less volatile.
Where we are today, all of that dynamic is out. The reason that we called Q1 to be slow is because, make no mistake, because of the uncertainty of the macro, everybody's being careful, working capital less included. We need to accommodate that in terms of our own forecast.
Last one on capital deployment. What's kind of next for Dover portfolio-wise? You know, what do you wanna be, a couple of years from now, three years from now? You have some opportunity to deploy. You've said $5.5 billion of capital, if all goes according to plan. It's a pretty big percentage of your market cap.
Mm-hmm.
You know, if you don't find anything every year, you're buying back stock like you did this year, or what's kind of the headset on capital deployment?
Well, I mean, we go back and look over the past four years, we got stopped out on a variety of different, very interesting assets because of valuation, right? If there's any good news of coming out of the free money time, is that valuations, unfortunately, are corrected. We don't buy public companies, right? We went through a period where public valuations came down as interest rates went up. I'm not telling you guys something you don't know. We buy private companies, generally, and private companies, there's usually a lag effect. We'd like to call it seller's remorse, right? They, you know, the salad days of paying 18 times EBITDA for medium growth industrial companies are probably over, and we're seeing that now in terms of what's coming to market now in terms of valuation.
PE is a little bit on the sidelines right now because a lot of what we compete, you know, the size of the companies that we buy, we compete with PE. Funding right now to PE is a little bit tight, to say the least. We'd like to be on the front foot at the end of the day. You know, I think back to the question you asked about growth, it's not the same portfolio. If you looked where we deployed the capital, by and large, where we've deployed capital grows faster than the core portfolio and is at higher margins. If we continue to do that's a good thing.
To the extent that we continue to scale, that gives us optionality to consider what we'll do with portions of the core portfolio that possibly we can monetize.
Yeah. A portfolio mix shift, higher quality stuff.
That's the intent.
In a mild recession.
Mm-hmm
5% revenue decline, low end of the incremental margin, decremental of 25-ish. Is that kind of the high level mindset for what you guys would look to do?
I would, well, you know...
Run the algorithm in a mild recession?
Yeah. I mean, we'll use the same playbook that, and we don't want to get it back out again, but we'll use the same playbook that we used in 2020, where we protected margins. These are smaller industrial companies. There's not a lot of fixed costs there. You know, it's not like running an auto company where, you know, revenue goes down by 10% and you go negative fixed cost absorption, and the S hits the fan here, right? These are, you know, the beauty of the business model, I would argue, is because we're not overexposed to any different particular end market, and the companies are small and flexible that we can flex up and flex down. No one likes to do it, but we can do it.
I think we pretty much proved it in 2020, where we flexed down, protected margins, then flexed up, and then gained market share. That would be, you know, we got to call the market for a lot of different companies, but I can tell you that it's just a lot easier to do than, you know, a big vertically integrated capital goods manufacturer. That's tough. I mean, our supply chains are generally short, and our fixed costs, in the grand scheme of things, are not burdensome.
Any questions out there? Brendan?
Question on the availability of craft and trade labor.
Um-
Question is in the availability of craft labor and which ones are getting impacted by shortages.
One of the reasons we've been deploying a bunch of capital, I mean, this versus historically, I think that since I've been here, we've been deploying more capital than Dover, CapEx, than Dover has in the past, is that we've upgraded our industrial footprint and the capability of the footprint. Part of doing that, if you modernize that capital equipment, you can run more machines with less labor, which allows you to pay your skilled labor more. That's been part of the business model that we've been using now for four or five years. If you think about some of the companies that we have, like, Precision Components, which are heavy machining, a lot of the work we've done there is we've actually increased output and reduced headcount. That is through capital deployment.
One more here.
Thanks. You mentioned propane and hydrogen earlier. Could you give us an idea how Dover will participate and any kind of timeline?
We're meaningfully participating right now. We are a material player in the propane space in regulator valves. We are a material player in cryogenic valves for CO2 and vacuum-jacketed piping, which is actually a pretty small industry today, but you're basically taking cryogenic technology that's been developed for LNG and CNG, like colder gases. We've been doing that portion of it inorganically. On the compressor component side, we are material participant in the conversion of natural gas pipe compressor technology to accommodate CO2, to the extent that we just built a purpose lab out in Houston for the big OEMs to go and test the technology on it.
Timeline for.
We'll invest behind this probably for the next 10 years. It's not a small portion of our revenue of that particular segment. I mean, we spent $900 million in M&A at the end of 2021 on it.
Great. Rich, Brad, thanks a lot.
Steve.