Good morning, everyone. Let's see. Am I on? On. Yes. Good? Good. All right. Good morning, everyone. Again, this is Andy Kaplowitz. Welcome to day two of the Citi Industrial Tech and Mobility Conference. We're very excited to have you guys. We're very excited to have Dover Corporation with us.
We've got Richard J. Tobin, who is the President CEO, became CEO in May 2018. I know Brad Cerepak is in the audience. Brad has been CFO since 2009. Rich, I'm gonna walk over here and, you know, maybe ask you a couple short-term questions, which I know you love, and then we'll get into some, you know, bigger picture things.
The first thing I just wanted to ask you is, you know, even as early as, call it, middle of last year, I think you were a little concerned about the macro, you know, what we might see into 2023. You also noted 4-Q earnings that you have a constructive stance on 2023. Now, you know, we're two months into the year, would you say you're more constructive or less constructive on the macro? Are there any markets holding up better than you thought or worse than you thought?
Well, I mean, I think you can see from the guidance that we put out, it's relatively aggressive, when you're comped against our peer group. The bottom line, I don't think we're out of the woods yet, right? You can see the volatility in the equity markets, and we're, you know, in unprecedented territory with the drawdown of liquidity, and the availability of liquidity. We think that we can navigate the environment, but the bottom line is.
You know, I get some stick from time to time, of not sitting here and saying, "Well, volume's going up forever and pricing is gonna stick forever." That's, you know, I'm paid to be a risk manager at the end of the day. Right now, we have no reason to back off of our forecast for the year. Our stance is to be either opportunistic if we're wrong to the downside or have plans to deal with any headwinds that we see in the back half of the year.
It's very helpful. Then, you know, you talked about how you expect sort of North America to develop over the year. You know, you're watching to see how it developed. Anything change or is your expectations there? Then I would ask you, I mean Europe has seemed pretty strong for you guys, you know, up high teens in Q4. China was down, but maybe you can talk about sort of Europe's resilience. Are you seeing anything after Chinese New Year? What are you seeing?
Well, let's start with Europe. I mean, we were positively surprised. Back to your original question, with all the gloom and doom about the economy in Europe and what's going on with the energy crisis, one would have said, "Uh-oh, it's time to be very cautious in terms of the demand in Europe." But we sailed right through. I think we posted 10% growth in the Q4 , if memory serves me.
So it's been more resilient than what we would have planned for. But back to your other question, I don't think that we hunkered down, that we weren't able to seize what opportunity was there. That's kind of the same posture that we're taking around the world. Our China business in total is, I think, a little bit less than 10% of our total revenue now. It was down for all the reasons we understand. I don't see it really inflecting meaningfully yet, but then again, it's not overly material to us.
Got it. Maybe just one more question on orders, and I'm going to try to get this right, Rich, 'cause there was a lot of, you know, questions. We're just going to ask one. Basically what you said on the call is, you know, if you think at the end of the year your backlog could normalize more or less back to sort of 2019 levels. If that happens, I think the right math is that orders would be, call it $7 billion-$8 billion versus $8.3 billion in 2022. Is that correct? I know it's only been a short time since you reported, but are you continuing to see normalization orders? Like how do we think about supply chain normalization?
Aggregate backlog and number of orders in a diversified portfolio that someone thinks they can put into a spreadsheet and come out with an equation that solves for. We have all the internal information, and we can't do it, right, because of mix and a variety of other things. I would just have you go back and take a look at a chart that we put in our Q3 deck, which was a reflection of by segment of what lead times were, right? What we've been saying, I think over the last, it feels like forever, let's just call it 18 months to 24 months, that we thought as supply chain repaired, that backlogs would come down because there was no need to order so far in advance.
Rather than trying to get aggregate total backlog and extrapolating that into forward revenue, it's the same calculation that would you have seen two years ago. If you'd taken our backlog and extrapolated into revenue, we would have done $10 billion in revenue in 2021. I think everybody needs to have a little bit caution about the dueling mathematics about orders and backlog. Having said that, and what we've seen is that backlog is coming down mostly because of that lead times are coming down because supply chains have been repaired. What we expect is that lead times will slowly shrink down to what they have been historically, just in terms of lead times, but I'd be careful about extrapolating that into forward revenue.
Got it. Ultimately, this is more about supply chain normalization than you're seeing some big drop off in orders?
Ultimately, yes.
You mentioned in the beginning, Rich, because you brought up the topic of pricing, right, when I asked you about the macro. Let's just talk about that for a second. Like, you know, versus kind of when you first talked about it, like what we've seen as commodities kind of come off the bottom a little bit and stuff to come up. You know, I hate to say it like this, but does that give industrial companies more of an excuse to sort of keep pricing higher? Like, how do you think about price versus cost now versus kind of when you first started talking about worrying about price?
Price is more a function of demand rather than cost, right? There's always a push and pull between supplier and customer in terms of the determination of cost relative to pricing actions that are taking place. You know, fundamentally, the bigger driver is demand. If demand begins to slip, right, unless capacity is cut commensurate with that demand, then it's going to ultimately put pressure on pricing.
Right now, I think we've got pretty robust expectation in terms of pricing as the component of our revenue growth for 2023, but I don't think that we're not naive to dynamics. You know, I just have trouble standing up and saying, "You know what? Volume, price is never going to come down." I think that again, you know, like I said, I'm paid to be a risk manager. You know, I think if we say publicly almost what we say internally to our operating companies, then you have to be on the alert to try to manage this.
Rich, I know you have positive price versus cost dialed in for this year. Are you sort of more or less constructive on that as we sit here in mid-February?
Well, look, at the end of the day, you know, what drove a significant portion of the inflation early on in the process was raw material costs and logistics costs, right? Those led labor. Labor trailed those two. What's come down since then is raw materials from their peaks and logistics. Logistics have come down significantly. Labor, which trailed, is not going away. Fundamentally, I've been doing this a long time. Once labor rates reset, they don't come down again. We can talk about what to do about that, and ultimately that's you're gonna have to grind that out with productivity at the end of the day. Commodity prices have come up a little bit on demand, but nowhere near where they were in their peak.
Quite frankly, if you look at the price cost dynamic, we never priced for peak raw materials and logistics costs. We actually that was reflected in our margin performance until it rolled over. I'm not particularly concerned. Like I said, the concern would be if we're wrong about the macro and demand begins to slip, then that's when, you know, there's a lot of heavy lifting, and then we have to take more drastic cost actions to buffer that impact.
To be clear, Rich, you've been working in industrial companies for a very long time, right? Labor, at least at Dover, is a smaller percentage of costs versus raw materials. Other stuff, right? Like, generally, cost bucket is coming down if you look at backlog conversion and stuff.
Well, I think that from a portfolio point of view. We have investing and growing businesses that have less a percentage of labor as a percent of cost.
Right.
Right? We still have some, what we would refer to as assembly-related businesses. In those particular businesses, we're spending quite a bit of money on CapEx to reduce the labor content as a percent of COGS.
Got it. Maybe shifting gears, you know, a couple of weeks from your investor day. I know you don't want to tell us everything about your investor day today, although you can if you'd like. You know, maybe a sneak peek in terms of like, I think you mentioned on the earnings call, you know, that we're gonna be surprised by sort of your changing mix and how it could lead to higher growth. I just wanted to ask you a little bit more about what you mean by that.
Do you mean sort of because you've been investing in sort of these higher growth businesses, we're gonna go to the Colder facility, you know, Biopharma Connectors, CO2 systems you talk about all the time, SWEP heat exchangers, like, is that really what you're talking about? Is that since you've started over the last five years, you've just been investing in these higher growth businesses, and that's gonna lead to really a change in dynamics.
I guess the answer to that question is yes. There's been a variety of different things that we said that we were gonna do. Basically, we're gonna give you a report card and said, "This is what we said back in 2018, 2019. Here's where we are closing 2022, and this is what we think is possible to 2025."
You and I have discussed this many times before. I mean, one of the banging on the drum issues that we have at Dover is the complexity of portfolio makes it very hard for investors to understand what kind of the growth rates are of the individual companies and how that translates into the aggregate. Overall, what we tend to see is when we give out annual guidance, let's use 2023, for example, then estimates for 2024 will hover around what our guidance is for revenue, but invariably for 2024 will be bottom quartile.
Which based on our track record makes no sense because we've actually been better than average, significantly better than average in terms of revenue growth. I think that what we're gonna do is try to unpack why we're capable of doing that and give, you know, everybody a closer look of what's possible in these companies. Sometimes it's just pure capacity investment, sometimes it's the success of R&D spent in previous periods. We've talked a lot about e-commerce. We've talked a lot about reoccurring revenue on spare parts and what we've done there. All these things don't apply to every company. But we'll give you some use cases of what's driving the margin, at least by segment.
I think, Rich, even since you started, right? Growth rate generally has been in the mid-single digits. I mean, given the new mix, you know, we should think about that kind of growth or better, you know.
Look, I think that where our CAGR since 2018 has been 5%. Like right on the money, 5%. That's not a realistic objective going forward. An unrealistic objective to go forward from here.
Very fair. Just following up on that, like maybe just again, you're approaching five years as CEO, right? It goes by fast. you know, how you think about the underlying cyclicality of the portfolio. Like it's something that, you know, I think you came in and you sort of talked about, you know, simplifying, you know, embracing, you know, the higher growth You know, how would you think about, you know, Dover's still fairly diversified. Is it less cyclical since you got here?
There are pieces of our businesses that are cyclical industrials. I mean, if we wanted to kind of group them. The fact of the matter is we've gone through different cycles in this business. We've had the EMV roll-off that everybody was throwing themselves on their swords about and a variety of different individual businesses that becomes a theme of, well, that's negative to growth and that's a problem. Without looking at the balancing effect of the rest of the portfolio, and in aggregate, we still have a CAGR of 5%. I mean, I think that the narrative sometime gets dominated on, I'm going to pick something that's going down without recognizing a lot of the work of what's going up.
I think our investment strategy, both organically and inorganically, has been heavily weighted towards the higher growth, higher margins portion of our portfolio, and that's what's driven that rolling effect on the revenue growth and the margin expansion. It's a lot of different pieces. You know, we're not running away from the fact that we've got some businesses that go through cycles. We just don't think that they're proportionally large enough in the portfolio where the tail's gonna wag the dog. I think that that was taken care of back in the Apergy days, and I think we still kind of drag around that reputation unfairly.
To that point, you know, like, you know, I get a lot of questions still on retail fueling, as I know you do. You know, you've invested in several acquisitions, even just sort of around that. Maybe talk to the fact that like, I mean, you know, people kinda, you know, when you change the name to Clean Energy, people sort of look at that, but at the same time, the business is quite different now, right? US dispensers are a pretty small part of the company.
Yeah, look, if we step back for a moment, I'm a big devotee of Schumpeter, right? Of creative destruction. All of our businesses are at risk for technology change, customer trend changes, a variety of different things. You know, we're naive. We knew when we were basically harvesting profits out of that business during the EMV days, which by the way, we took that business, I think from 8% margin to 18% margin within a 24-month period.
We knew, just like everybody else knew, just after the thousands of questions about it, that one day that would roll off and that we needed to deploy capital to deal with that. At the end of 2021, we deployed a significant amount of capital into that segment, into kind of away from ICE-related fueling into gas-related fueling, and it's been very successful. We didn't shrink in that segment last year because of that, of that investment. I think we went through a little bit of a transition phase because of EMV roll-off on the margin side, but we expect over the next 24 months to inflect positive again based on what we've invested behind.
Just since we're there, the outlook for those gas businesses and, you know.
We, you know, we think gas is a winner. Not to say that we're, you know, we don't have a presence in EV. We do. We've actually just launched a charger on our own for our customers. We think that gas, whether that be LNG, propane, CNG, hydrogen, are going to be long-term winners, and we're investing quite heavily in a variety of different businesses behind that.
It's very helpful. Just shift to the margins. You know, again, you'll give us new targets in a couple of weeks, you know, do you think 25%-30% incrementals are still sort of the underlying profile of the portfolio? Could you get, you know, more out of the businesses? I mean, obviously, you've been very focused on SKU rationalization. I know we'll talk about digital here, and maybe you can update us on that. You know, are there additional levers for margin improvement?
I think on average, over the last five years, we're better than 35%, so we beat the target that we put out there. We think the mix is moving in the right direction, but we don't manage the portfolio strictly on margin. Meaning that let's take a business that's lower margin, like refrigeration, for example.
We're not gonna beg, you know, we're gonna size that to maximize profitability, but we're not going to basically forcefully cut down on the revenue opportunity that's there to manage the incremental margin opportunity. The margin I would expect the incremental margin targets that we'll put out there for 2023 through 2025 will be as robust as they were in the past. It just becomes a question of what we give you in terms of what we believe is the inherent growth rate by the segment, and then you can do the math because you can see what the gross margins are by segment.
Can we just talk about sort of your digitization, where you are in the process?
Sure. I think we were slightly under $3 billion in revenue. Starting back in 2019-2020 of being close to 0. $3 billion, $2 billion?
Three.
All right, we made it to $3 billion.
$2 billion.
Oh, $2 billion. Yeah. Our target is $3 billion. We got $2 billion moving towards $3 billion.
Yeah.
100% of the portfolio is not going to be on e-commerce because of a variety. We have a lot of engineer to order businesses that it doesn't apply. I would say that we're 30%-40% penetrated, we've got a lot of runway.
Just, you know, I think I've asked you on this stage over the last few years about, you know, fixed overhead rationalization. Like, you kinda put it off as maybe too strong a word, but maybe that is kind of what happened given sort of the pandemic and such. What does that look like going forward? Can that contribute to the incremental margin?
It's part of the playbook. It goes back to your question about the life cycle of individual businesses, right? When they're using up the capacity, it's two-pronged, right? It's the life cycle of the business. If the business begins to cycle down, then it's up to us to reduce the fixed costs of that individual business to protect the margins.
Then it's a function of capital deployment, where we take a, you know, a factory, and through automation or a variety of other ways, we increase the capacity. We can draw down the amount of fixed costs that we have by, in theory, two factories into one. We do a little bit of both of that. I think part and parcel to some of the restructuring that you saw in the back half of last year was us taking action on the footprint side . Of the businesses that were cycling down somewhat. That will continue, I'm sure, over the next three years.
To your point, Rich, there just as an aside, like you've gotten the company sort of ready, in quotes, if, you know, the world slows down a little bit. That's what you've been doing, right, in some of the-
Right. Yeah.
Right. You are pretty lean now, would you say, from a manufacturing or inventory standpoint?
No, no. We actually are. It's going to take us the first six months of this year to draw down all of back to this whole backlog logistics issue to draw, you know. We're not happy about our cash flow last year.
Yeah.
At the end of the day, it was a trade-off between having the inventory to fulfill the orders or, and keeping the factories running on a sustained basis. The last thing you want, and we saw that back in the back half of 2021, is start up and shut down of factories because of lack of components.
I mean, you want to really smash your margins. That's the best way to do it. We carried extra inventory basically for the last two years almost, and now we're in the process because of supply chain and logistics repairing themselves that we expect to draw down our inventory meaningfully through the first six months, maybe three quarters this year. That's why you see our cash flow target for 2023 is quite robust. All that is what got hung up in inventory in 2022 is gonna liquidate in 2023.
I should ask you about that, Rich. Like, so again, one of the key sort of metrics you focused on when you came in is getting that free cash flow margins % of sales up. How would you assess, you know, that obviously 2022 was difficult from, as you just said, you know. What are you doing to ensure sort of that you're back up into that mid-teens%, you know, that you're actually guiding to for 2022?
The vast majority in the improvement has been margin-driven. We're doing work in working capital in a variety of different things out there. I would say 70% of the cash flow improvement, this is before CapEx. Let's eliminate CapEx, just like operating cash flow before CapEx. The vast majority of that is through margin expansion. You know, taking down carrying amount of inventories and improving cash flow is a year-over-year grind. I think that we've been doing a terrific job in the centralization of accounts payable and accounts receivable. You know, that takes years to grind down, and it's part and parcel. The real driver is margin and mix in terms of cash flow.
I want to talk about, you know, capital deployment in a second, but let me just back up for a second because I think people have asked you occasionally about shoring or on shoring, you know, given sort of your US focus. Maybe just what do you hear? Because I think you've benefited from it. Like, what are you hearing from your customers respect to it? Do you think we're, you know, early in the cycle of shoring, if you may, and maybe that's helping the industrial cycle, or is that just kind of hogwash?
Overall, I think that we were the beneficiary, this goes back over the, let's call it the last cycle from 18 to 22, because reshoring was actually started up before the pandemic and everything else. That cycle actually predates that because of labor arbitrage in China went away ten years ago, but there was so much investment in fixed costs there that no one wanted to admit it, and all it took was logistic costs to go up, and then everybody woke up one morning. Now you overlay a little bit of geopolitical issues on top of that.
It's been coming. By and large, we are a make in region and ship in region company with a few exceptions. Competitively, I think that we were the beneficiary of that trend over the last couple of years. Going forward from here, you know, all the talk about ships and big strategic investments, that is coming. You know, those are three, five, ten-year investments. It's not as if there's going to be I don't expect a massive inflection towards reshoring, but a gradual one, which is great, because at the end of the day, that means CapEx
Yeah.
Going forward from here.
Do you see it in something like Biopharma Connectors or, you know, because people talk about in life sciences, at least some of your peers, that you've seen more. Do you see that helping that kind of business, or is that a stretch?
The regulatory-driven businesses, which, by the way, is one of our one of the screens that we have of businesses when we look to go make moves inorganically. We like regulatory-driven businesses because of the stickiness of kind of winning the spec. In the biopharma business, because of regulatory issues, it's not as if you can have very, very wide supply chains there anyway, right? Because of the complexity of dealing with that regulatory authority. You know, overall, if there's regulations behind it, generally speaking, we like the business 'cause it inherently makes switching costs more difficult.
Speaking of that, like, when you, when you talk about capital deployment, you know, you made five acquisitions last year for $325 million. You know, you still have significant firepower. You talked about that, but you kinda suggested it's hard to get a large deal done. Will you expect to be active again in 2023? Is it easier in 2023 than 2022? Same? Harder? Like, what do you think?
One would hope.
Yeah.
I think that 2022 is difficult. We're not out there buying public companies. We buy private enterprises. Generally speaking, that private valuation trails public valuation because of missed opportunity costs, so to speak. Despite the fact the equity markets in 2022 being difficult, private valuations kinda hung in there because everybody was holding out hope for 2019 and 2020 to come back again.
I think now the realization of higher for longer in interest rates is starting to set in. We're seeing a, you know, we're seeing a realization that multiples paid during the free credit era are now beginning to come down. We're in a pro-proactive stance there. I think the harder part is now what is the demand function gonna be, going back to your first question, right?
We went from multiples being very aggressive because the cost of capital being so low now to multiples coming down, but uncertainty in terms of demand. That's kind of a push and pull that's going out there. My expectation is barring a significant slowdown in the back half of the year, that, you know, we should be on the front foot for M&A in 23 relative to 22, which is kinda quiet.
Rich, just when you came in, you said you kinda had to get the company ready for M&A, right? You had to sort of focus internally, then you got it ready for M&A, then you started to do it. How do you assess performance of what you've done so far on the M&A side?
I haven't done it, everybody that works at Dover, I mean, the way we do acquisitions 99% of the time is not Brad and I sitting with investment bankers and chatting about economic theory. It's more bubbles up from our operating companies because generally speaking, we, you know, our businesses are in large TAMS, which is with very few competitors, and largely speaking, those competitors are not public companies 70% of the time, let's say.
Our opportunities come bubbling up from our operating companies because they're the ones that understand market structure far better than we'll ever understand. We look, at the end of the day, you know, we're responsible at the Center for Capital Deployment, but how we get our opportunities is, comes up from the bottom. That's a good thing because we don't tend to participate in a lot of auctions or public bids or anything else where sometimes valuation gets a little bit out of control.
maybe, you know, related to that, you know, you've talked about, you know, always having portfolio optionality. Obviously, you've taken some of these businesses that people have talked about and improved the margins pretty dramatically. How do you and the board sort of think about it now? How do you evaluate it? you know, is it a better market to sell? Like, how do you think about that?
We have a very, very robust process internally about agnostic strategic participation and valuation, where we go through every year, we look at our participation in the end market, what we believe the end market is doing, what we think the competitive base is doing. That so we're not, you know, we're not eating our own cooking to a certain extent. That analysis we do on a three-year rolling basis every year.
If I can go back to that, what I said about Schumpeter before, right? We go back and say, sometimes, you know what, we're doing really great in this market, but this market's about to hit the wall. Maybe in those cases, do we monetize today because the value, we can't come up with a reason to preserve value over time. We do that, every year, and I share that with the board and I think it's a lively and honest discussion.
Got it. Would you expect activity on that front over the next six to 12 months?
No. Well, I think what you're alluding to is what I said maybe at the end of the tail end of last year. When I came here in 2018, it was right at the time that we spun off Apergy. I show up and, you know, the first question I get is, "What are you gonna do about the portfolio?" Because I get it, like, the new CEO, you're gonna go throw something out with the, you know, throw the baby out with the bathwater because you got to do something the first you stepped in. We had a discussion about we thought that there was value creation opportunity within the portfolio, that we were gonna go through a period where we're gonna concentrate on margin expansion of the tools that we had.
I think that when you see our presentation on the eighth, I think that we've delivered upon that. I also said at the time that one has to be careful about your question about fixed cost. You know, it's very nice to say, "Well, we'll shrink, and then your margin will go up and your multiple will go up." I mean, that, you know, it's a very nice investment banker conversation, except for the fact the reality of it is that there is a corporate fixed cost, and you need to be cognizant not to under-absorb there also.
Right? What I said in 2018 was two-pronged. A, we thought there was a lot of value to be created in the portfolio that we started with, and B, that we needed to rescale the size of the business, that if we wanted to preserve optionality on the portfolio, that we wouldn't run into that under-absorption problem. We're now larger today than we were in 2018, so at least that option is on the table. I'm not promising anything.
We've taken care of basically both those headwinds, meaning selling at the bottom and not preserving shareholder value, right? Because I think for the most part, we've expanded the margins in even some of the businesses that everybody was all worried about back then, and we've rescaled that we're actually larger than we were when we had Apergy. I want to open up to the audience in a second. Let me ask you 1 other question, then I'll do so. I think in the last year, we've talked about maybe 2 out of your 17 businesses being sort of weaker. You know, we already talked about US
dispensers. You know, Biopharma Connectors is the other one, obviously, and some people ask me about Belvac. You know, maybe you could just sort of talk about. We already talked about retail fueling. We don't need to talk about that.
Yeah.
Like, do you think Biopharma Connectors have turned the corner? You kind of suggested that, you know, last quarter with orders sequentially improving. You know, how are you feeling about Belvac?
Yeah. I'm not worried about Biopharma Connectors, and I'm not gonna apologize for taking the opportunity that was there. I mean, we made a bloody fortune during COVID. You know, this notion of overearning and that's a bad thing. I find a curious discussion at the end of the day. If we strip out all the COVID-related revenue, the core business is still growing in excess of 20%.
You know what? We'll take the cash when we can get it, we continue to invest behind the business, we think that, you know, that's an area that we're very attracted to. As I mentioned at the last call, that order rates are starting to inflect. I think that's a precursor of, you know, we're probably bottoming right now in terms of demand because the inventory, the COVID inventory has worked its way through the system then will slowly just kind of inflect the other way. Belvac. Everybody's worried about Belvac. I'm sure everybody's been buying Dover stock what they thought that Belvac was gonna do. Look, I'm not running from the fact that we do have some cyclical businesses. Belvac, again.
had a really good run. You know, we're really proud of the guys. They did a fantastic job. You know, I think in our forward-year forecast from here, we don't have Belvac getting any larger. I can tell you if it was to get smaller, that is not a headwind that we can't deal with the balance of the portfolio again. Hopefully we're not gonna hang our hat on Belvac demand for the next three years. I think it's, I think it's entirely manageable.
thanks for that, Rich. Questions from the audience. Any questions? Questions? All right. I will keep going. Let me ask you about CapEx, Rich.
Uh-huh.
Like, you know, as you noted, 2022 was a record CapEx year. You know, where are you now in terms of capacity? Do you have any more sort of bigger projects that you wanna do? How do you look at CapEx normalization?
Sitting here today, I would expect CapEx to be lower in 2023 than 2022. We're gonna go through this on the 8th, but we made some significant investments in productivity over the last 18 months, particularly in our capital goods portion of the portfolio, right? Back to this notion of automation and labor as a percentage of COGS. You know, we're cognizant of that, we were on the front foot investing in that even before labor costs became the headwind that it is. That's a one-time investment, then we're done, right? We expanded, we shut down, well, largely curtailed production in China in a business for ESG that was back shipping into the US . We've basically taken care of that. We've invested in our Madison, Indiana, plant.
Reshore, if you will. That's largely done, and we made meaningful investments in ESG. Largely around paint systems and kind of total productivity. On the other side, we invested meaningfully in businesses that we think have secular growth opportunities. We expanded globally in production of brazed plate heat exchangers for heat pumps, which we'll take you through on the eighth.
We invested in what is our biopharma business, but really no one knows about it. Actually is a connector business at the end of the day, that we're doing a lot of connectors for EV chargers and data centers and a variety of other things, we've built a new plant for that. You know, a little bit of split. That's one-time investments. We don't have to do that again for, you know, a period of time. You know, hopefully, CapEx will inflect up because CapEx inflects up when we believe that we're investing behind strength and investing behind demand. Sitting here today, I would expect year-over-year for it to come down.
We have a question from the audience.
Hi. Thanks for taking my question. Looking out long-term, five years, seven years, you know, how do you see your... Like, what do you look like, in terms of your portfolio and your general thoughts, like longer term? You know, I've seen your portfolio, you know, transform a fair bit since the last ten years. In that same thought, you know.
The way I would answer it is if you take a look at where we've been investing inorganically, I would expect that to continue. If you look at the segments that we've been spending the money and what we've been investing behind. I mean, you know, you didn't ask the, you know, the mega trends is a new thing.
I will ask.
I knew it. I knew it was coming.
Yeah.
I knew.
Coming.
That's the new thing to talk about, mega trends.
Yeah.
When we renamed the segments, we were trying to signal what we were investing behind. When we changed fueling into Clean Energy, that was part and parcel to us doubling down into the investments that we made into hydrogen components and gas components and the like. Then when we renamed refrigeration into Climate and Sustainability, that was a precursor of this is what we think we're investing behind, and we've invested quite heavily behind heat exchangers and CO2 systems.
Basically, what we believe transforming both of those segments, which are meaningful segments of the company, into what we think are, you know, longer-term systematic growth areas there. You know, where we're deploying the at least the inorganic portion of the capital, the lion's share of the inorganic portion of the capital, I think that you would expect that those segments would be progressively getting larger over the next three to five years.
I have to ask this question. I got 20 seconds, so you can give a very quick answer.
Okay. Hurry up.
What are the top two or three innovations, mega trends or structural changes affecting your company over the next five years? Are there any emerging industry trends that are perhaps being overlooked in the current?
I think I just answered the question at the end of the day, right? I mean, you know, at, you know, we don't do things just to do things or to. Clearly, we're not marketers, since I'm known as the, you know, the wet blanket in terms of a variety of different things. You know, I think that we put our money where our mouth is, and the reason that we changed the name of those segments is we believe that those two particular areas have significant growth potential, and we have either the market presence or the IP that we can extract significant value creation out of it.
Awesome, Rich. Thank you for your time. Appreciate it.
Great. Thanks, Andy.
Cool.