Joining me on stage here is Scott Rowe, but we have Amy Schwetz and Tarek in the, in the crowd here as well. We're just gonna do some prepared remarks, so Scott's just gonna give a quick overview, talk about the Analyst Day and some of the really good things they put out there. And then we're gonna have a lively Q&A session. So if you have any questions, please reach out, raise your hand, send an email to the session, and we'll make sure we incorporate all your questions into the Q&A session. So please, with that, Scott, floor is yours.
Yeah. First, I'll just say thank you, Mike. Your conference is always fantastic. It's one of the best ones of the year, and so we appreciate.
Thank you.
You having us, and thank you everyone for joining us today. I'll just start with a few prepared remarks on Flowserve and where we're at. As a reminder, we just did a big Investor Day in New York City last month, and so if you haven't seen those slides, I encourage you to go and look at the content in there. But I'll give you kind of the takeaway, and then I know Mike's gonna to drill in, and we'll hit all kinds of topics here. But just in short summary, I've been the CEO now for six years, going on seven. We've made a lot of progress in many areas, but we've also gone through a lot in terms of industrial recession, COVID, supply chain crisis, and all that.
What I would say is today, I feel better than ever about our positioning as a company when we look internally and externally. On the internal side, we did something called Flowserve 2.0 back in 2017, 2018, and 2019 to drive process and consistency across the organization, and now that's embedded in, and we're starting to see the operational results from that. Additionally, we did a big reorganization at the beginning of this year to realign our business to support our strategy, and I'll come to the strategy in a second. And now we're seeing the fruits of that labor, and we've seen consistent results throughout this year, every quarter going up and driving positive momentum from an execution side and an operational side, translating into much better financials than we've seen in the last couple years.
Then on the 3D strategy, we launched that at the beginning of last year. It's to diversify, decarbonize, and digitize our business. We've made good progress on that. We're seeing outsized bookings with our diversify and decarbonize. Again, Mike, I know we'll hit some questions, so I don't wanna.
Mm-hmm.
Go into too much detail there. And then finally, we launched long-term targets, and so we set long-term targets for Flowserve. On the organic side, we said we could grow at 5% a year from this point forward into 2027, equating to a $5 billion revenue business in 2027. We also said we see a substantial step-up in our operating income margin percentage, going from where we are today at roughly 10% to something closer to 14%-16% range, and we've got good visibility on how to get there. And again, we'll hit that in the Q&A. And then finally, that translates to doubling our EPS from this year to 2027 and generating $4 a share.
And so that's what we laid out, and again, if you haven't seen the slides and the content, I'd encourage you to take a look at that, and it's all in the investor relations site within our website.
Great. Thanks, Scott. Again, if you have questions, let me know. We're gonna go pretty linearly here, talk about some of the transition, go through the demand outlook, cadencing, margins, et cetera. So we'll hit it pretty linearly, linearly for everybody. Let's start, though, with the journey a little bit, because it, it took some time to get to this point, and.
Yes, it has.
We could feel the confidence building. There were some fits and starts last year. This year, it's been very consistent. As you said, the Analyst Day targets were pretty attractive, particularly from a profitability perspective. So maybe put in context why you're that much more comfortable today. What had to come together? Is it some of it is just, you know what? The demand outlook now is good enough that it's allowing some of the things you've done to pull through and really be able to see it? Is it the operational changes coming together? Maybe just give a little context.
Sure.
To the confluence of forces.
Let me start with internal, and then I'll go to external.
Mm-hmm.
But they, they definitely go hand in hand, and we feel confident on, on both sides of that. On the internal side, again, we started this Flowserve 2.0 journey to really go from an incredibly decentralized business to something that we can leverage the scale that we have. And just as perspective, we operate in over 50 countries. We have a massive manufacturing footprint, and we've got lots of products and SKUs on the pump side, the valve side, and even in the mechanical seal side. And so there's just a lot to work with, and when I got here, there was definitely need for a cleanup.
Mm.
In driving process adherence, defining process, kind of setting a structure that we knew we could grow and scale on, and we made tremendous progress on this in 2017, 2018, and into 2019. I would say the maturity level wasn't where it needed to be to work through the dynamics of COVID and then the supply chain crisis at the end of 2021 and into 2022. Quite frankly, it caused some problems for us, and.
Mm.
W e had to work through that, and I'd say, you know, had we made more progress faster on the Flowserve 2.0, we would've been able to work through some of these dynamic down and up in 2020 and in 2022 . But we're in a good place now, and we've done the restructure, where we've created seven business units more aligned to the end markets and our channel to market. We've redone how we go to, how do we support these business units at the corporate structure? We've doubled down on operational excellence, which is showing tremendous progress, and again, we've now had four quarters in a row of continued growth and strong operational progress. And then we've made some changes in some of the people and the capabilities.
So internally, I'm far more confident than ever before on our ability to execute and drive results than I've seen at Flowserve in my seven years. Then if we go to the external view, it's a similar story. We do what we call a market model, and again, this is in the slides for the Investor Day. In our traditional markets, our market model is showing 3.3% growth. While that doesn't sound super exciting, if you look at that against the last six years, that would be the second highest growth rate that we've seen, and it's 100 basis points higher than what we had last year. These would be our traditional markets. So in oil and gas, it's the refining side. We've got chemical in there, we've got power, we've got general industry.
It's all stuff that I'd say would be legacy industry in typical CapEx and OpEx. We do our market model with a collection of input from third-party sources, and then we also add a proprietary lens of, like, what do we think and who we're talking to, to get those, to get what we think. Then you take our strategy, the 3D strategy, and add particularly the diversify and decarbonize. So on the diversify, what we're trying to do is get into markets that have more sustainable growth, less cyclicality, and so think about, like, our vacuum technology that goes into very specific manufacturing of special industries. Think about water, think about our seal business getting migrated into specialty chemicals and things like that, and we're seeing outsized growth in diversify, and so we feel like that's an adder to this 3.3%.
And then secondly, is the decarbonization lane. And so within decarbonization, we're seeing energy security and decarbonize drive a lot of activities into nuclear, LNG, hydrogen, carbon capture, recyclable plastics. I mean, I can go on and on, but we think our strategy delivers at least 10%+ growth. We've seen that now over the last two years, and so we think that that trajectory stays as we go forward. And so the combination of the market model at 3.3, plus this 10% with our strategy, we feel really good about 5% growth. And so back to kind of, you know, confidence, the internal side is taken care of. We're making good progress, we've got good people, we've got good process.
We're building on our culture, which we believe is excellent, and now we're layering in strategy and market growth, and we just feel good about where we're at today.
So a lot to unpack there. Why don't we start with where you ended, on the 3 D strategy and pieces of it? You know, the decarbonization piece, I'm sure you get this, but traditional energy companies, when they start bringing up decarbonization concept, a lot of people's original thought is: "Okay, but you're.
Yeah.
A traditional energy company. What, I don't see how you can really help with this process." But you're very confident that you've got the right, toolkit and the right product category and the right to play in that space. So maybe you can, you can talk about what products you're offering, why you are in the space, what you offer, and why the customer base keeps coming to you for help with the transition.
Yeah. And I won't give customer names, but we'll talk in generalities.
Exactly. Exactly.
One of our biggest customers, so large, integrated oil and gas operator around the world, they have upstream assets, they have downstream assets. We'll just use their example. So when they have a complex of downstream assets, there's typically a refinery and a petrochemical plant in near proximity. All of their assets, their commitment is: how do we do something on the front end to make it a cleaner operation than it is today? And so in the chemical side, they're recycling plastics to put into feedstock, into that plant. On the refining side, they may be converting parts of that business to a biodiesel or a bi, you know, sustainable aviation fuel or something like that. All of those process require flow control equipment changes.
Mm.
To make that work, and so there's nothing new from our side. It's our traditional pumps, traditional valves, the same type of seals. We're already there in the installed base. They're typically coming to us first, and if we're able to work with them, we get that work straight away. So that would be on the front side. Then, when we think about the asset itself, the, just like everybody else, right? They've signed up for ESG commitments.
Yeah.
They've got government regulation issues. They have to drive their energy consumption down, and they've got to drive their CO2 emissions reductions down. We come into play in several places there. One is we have a consultative offering called Energy Advantage, where we come in, and we look at the critical service pumps, we look at the control valves, we look at isolation valves, we look at the flow loop in its entirety, and we talk to them about: how do we drive more efficiency within that flow loop? We're the only operator that has the energy input, which is pumps, and the ability to control the flow loop with our valve offering, and so we can come in and help them diagnose things.
What we've found is in a traditional flow loop, in an existing asset, like a refinery or chemical plant, we're seeing opportunities to reduce the energy consumption by 20%-30% every time we do it. We now have 50 studies ongoing with our customers, and we're working through those. Then what happens in practice is, once we commit the study, we demonstrate the savings, then we come in, we typically retool our pumps. So we'll take them out, we'll do a revamp or a recertification on that pump, changing out impellers and vanes and making them more efficient. Then, we change out the trim of the control valve, and sometimes we're adding different flow control elements in there. So these are good contracts for us.
We get the aftermarket, we get parts, and then we'll typically get some sort of recurring revenue as we're monitoring that asset going forward. So that would be one with Energy Advantage, and then secondly, on the back end, we have technology, and again, it's nothing new, it's things that we've been doing for a long time, to start to capture carbon at their flare gas or their flue gas emissions. And so we've got the technology with the liquid ring compressor and the module that we construct to help them capture that and either reinject back into process or move that offsite and inject underground. And again, so we can help capture, we can transport carbon, and we've got the pumps for injection as well.
And so on decarbonization, we play front end, we play the asset itself, and we play on the back end with carbon capture. And so incredibly well-positioned with competency, the installed base, and the domain expertise, and then the products that they've seen before and used before to solve some of their biggest challenges on the decarbonization side.
Yeah, I mean, to your point, I mean, a lot of this is just the market coming to you.
Yeah, exactly.
As opposed to something drastically different that Flowserve's had to do to serve.
Right.
That emerging trend.
Precisely.
Right. So on the diversification side of things, how do you think about what the process is internally to identify the attractive areas to diversify into, how to leverage the existing base? And also, how does that inform what the innovation cycle looks like as you start looking at some of the tangential opportunities you wanna play in?
Sure. Yeah, so diversify is a big lane for us, and essentially what we're trying to do is get further away from kind of the cyclicality of the upstream oil and gas business. And so everything that we're trying to do is shorter cycle, faster, more resiliency from a market standpoint. And exactly what you said, Mike, what we've done is said, we've canvassed the different markets that have flow control, we've looked at the total available market, the market attractiveness, the growth rates in the future, and we've selected just a handful that we're absolutely focused on in putting product development money to it, R&D money, and then hopefully, acquisition money to do inorganic growth. And so the lanes that we talk about publicly and that we're super excited about is vacuum technology.
Mm-hmm.
Which works in industrial manufacturing, so think, like, solar power, so thin film in the solar power application. They can do chip manufacturing as well, and other very special manufacturing. And so as countries are looking to reposition this supply chain and bring that technology closer, primarily into Europe and the United States, there's a lot of build-out in this type of stuff. And so we've doubled down on our vacuum technology and our products, and we're opening the aperture to make sure that it's positioned well.
Is that SIHI, or is that something.
Yeah, SIHI.
SIHI?
Yeah, exactly. So we go to market with a brand called SIHI. They work out of Germany. It is an incredibly high quality and highly engineered. The SIHI Dry components are, you know, recognized as a market leader. What we haven't done is get it positioned into some of the growth markets, like the.
Mm.
Semiconductor industry. So now we've done some new product development to do that. We announced a great win in the third quarter, getting one of the first big semiconductor facilities here in the United States with our equipment embedded in the process. And so that's one. We like the water markets, but the water market is very, very broad, and so.
Broad.
There are parts of water that we really, really like, and there's parts of water that we won't participate in. But we continue to move the valve portfolio primarily on actuation and our pump portfolio into the more attractive parts of water. And then last that we talk about pretty regularly is the seals business, and the mechanical seal is just a barrier between the pump and the motor. It's an important component, though. It's what wears out the fastest with the run rate, and it's an environmental protection issue. And so we've done really, really well in the traditional markets, and what we're trying to do now is make sure that that's diversified into some of the new things. We really like the minerals and mining market with seals.
Mm-hmm.
And we like the specialty chemical aspect of seals as well, and so we're repositioning and making sure that we can participate in that attractive market. So those would be kinda three examples where we're doing some good things. We've done new product development, but probably more important is opening up the channel to market with our sales force and our distribution partners to make sure that we can participate.
So, a question from the audience that relates to the water commentary you made. Can you just comment on the opportunities you see at the intersection of water and resource security, as you outlined in your Investor Day?
Yeah.
How much focus do you place on growing these when compared to some of your other segments?
Yeah, again, we like water. We know it's growing. I would say water is a, it's a challenging application to make good money on, and so we've gotta be really careful on where we put water. We like wastewater a lot. We like industrial recycling of water. We like flood control.
Yeah.
We sometimes like desalination. We think that, we think the desalination market's gonna take off. I'll tell you, it's very difficult to make money in desalination right now, and so we're being cautious about what we do and how we move into desalination. But it's an area we can't ignore, and we continue to move the right products in there to take advantage of the growth rate. Some of the places that we don't like, like in the municipal water, has a lot of competition, and if you're not bringing more of a systems and a package approach to it, it's really, really difficult.
Yeah.
And so the other aspect of water for us, especially in industrial and waste, is adding Red Raven to our products to make sure that we've got more of a digital overlay, and we can provide more than just a pump or valve. We can help them at a systems level, reducing waste or reducing their waste where they've got water leakage or driving productivity in their flow loop itself.
You actually jumped where I wanted to go next. Maybe talk about what the adoption curve has been like for your digital product, RedRaven.
Yeah.
Are you seeing people pull it? Or is this still something you're pushing to the market? And talk about it in terms of return savings.
Yeah.
What that benefit for the customer base is.
Sure. Yeah, I'll start just overview. Red Raven's our IoT offering. We can instrument our pumps and valves, we can collect data, and the whole concept here is prevent unplanned downtime, so helping our customers with reliability, monitoring their assets on a continuous basis, and then ultimately moving more to flow loop optimization, so helping to drive productivity. The adoption, I say this publicly many times, it's much slower than I would like. The industry is moving slower than I think anyone would like. But the more assets that we have instrumented, we see this, the momentum building. And so the flywheel is turning. We're getting a lot of repeat orders. So back to the push or pull, originally, I think I've sold, like, three or four of our early systems because it took an incredible top-level sell to get this in. That's starting to change.
Where we've been embedded in assets before, we're now seeing a ridiculously high return, you know, adding different assets to existing sites. And so the return bookings are really, really high.
Mm.
And we're expanding that. And so we are getting pulled in to sites that we've worked with in the past because they like the technology. And then what do they get out of this? They get continuous monitoring that's very different than what they would have with their control system, and then they get prediction with our algorithms and our AI, helps them to predict unplanned downtime, primarily on the pump side. And then, again, what we're trying to get to, though, when we instrument a control valve and a pump, now we've got to look at the whole flow loop, and what we're seeing is the ability to drive optimization. And kind of similar to the Energy Advantage, when we do this, even with Red Raven, almost inevitably, we see somewhere in that range of 20%-30% efficiency savings.
Mm.
By just doing something differently or changing out the impeller of a pump or changing out the trim within that control valve.
Then maybe let's talk more cycle dynamics, and not short term, but you're very excited about what the cycle can bring on an upcoming basis. You know, part of it is level of underinvestment, part of it is some of the thematics you already talked about.
Yeah.
Maybe talk about the level of excitement you have and why you think that there's more sustainable legs to this cycle for your businesses, even if there is a broader slowdown from an economy perspective?
Yeah. I'll start first by saying with diversify and decarbonize, we are trying to get the business less cyclical.
Yeah.
And so, so those are two areas that would help us on the cyclicality of the business. The other one is the aftermarket, and so the more aftermarket we can get and the bigger mix of the business, the more consistent we will and the, and the less sensitive to, to up and down cycles we'll be at. With that said, we also believe we're at the very beginning of a substantial kind of original equipment or new CapEx build-out cycle. And back to energy security, decarbonization, and underinvestment over the last three years, we see right now our internal funnel of projects is substantially strong. It's grown pretty healthily throughout this year. It's higher than what it was last year, and we see tremendous activity. And so parts of the, we'll go regional first, and then, then kind of what, what industries this is.
But the Middle East is, y ou know, I've been working in the Middle East since 1994. This is by far the single biggest kind of investment boom I've ever experienced. And so you have countries like Saudi, the UAE, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait, all now taking a lot of money that they've earned with their commodities and plowing that back into infrastructure to diversify what they're doing. And so we're participating in Saudi in hydrogen projects, in chemical projects, in refining projects, and not just that traditional upstream oil or natural gas production. And then we're seeing, you know, significant build-out of infrastructure like water and chemicals and other stuff throughout the whole region. But again, this is the single biggest build-out I've seen.
They've made, all of the countries have made substantial commitments to economic growth and to, you know, how do they support that through capital investment? And so we think that outlook is tremendous, and everything that they're doing has a flow control element to it. So Middle East, by far, the single fastest-growing and biggest market for us. Asia- Pacific continues to build out in lots of different ways. I would say from a new build perspective in Europe and in the United States, we see it on the energy transition, and so think about, like, hydrogen, carbon, recyclable plastics, not so much in refinery or new chemical plants, although the U.S. has just built out, you know, pretty substantial capacity in chemicals over the last two years. So, and then the other ones is the emerging markets in Latin America.
So again, substantial underspend over the last three years. Their economies are starting to get a little bit healthier than what they did through COVID, and we're now seeing a lot of discussion and, you know, kind of uplift in the bookings out of those countries. And then from an industry perspective, I'd say, you know, I'll just kind of go, you know, across, you know, where we participate. Downstream oil and gas, the refining side, you know, no greenfield operations in the U.S. and Europe. Greenfield expansion in Asia- Pacific, in the Middle East, for sure. Chemicals, a similar story.
Yeah.
Build-out in the Middle East is massive. You know, further build-out in Asia- Pacific, maybe, you know, nothing new in Europe, nothing new in the U.S. at this point. There is some stuff in the U.S., but more, you know, a little bit gradualer. But there is definitely specialty chemical applications all over the world-
Mm-
That we feel pretty excited about. So smaller in scale, maybe a little bit smaller in our bookings, but definitely growth there. On the power side, we are very excited about nuclear. We've got a tremendous portfolio that supports nuclear. It's a big part of our business today, and we see, you know, two things: One, we see life extensions of existing assets in North America and in Europe, and anytime they do a life extension, we get a substantial uplift to our installed base, where we're essentially either putting new products in or we're re-rating the existing products. We see that in Europe as well, but then we're seeing new build-out in France, in Eastern Europe, some of the Scandinavian countries. India's got plans for massive nuclear growth, and we've got the technology to support that. And then we see continued investment in Asia- Pacific on the nuclear side.
And so we like power, you know, and then there's other sides of power. We booked coal-fired power plants in Germany, which I wouldn't have expected this year.
Mm-hmm.
And so that was a little bit of a surprise. We see Concentrated Solar Power, small modular reactors moving forward, so lots of opportunity there on power. And then on general industries, we feel reasonably well positioned to see continued growth 2024 and beyond with the portfolio, and that goes a little bit back to that diversification play that I talked about earlier.
I mean, so commentary was backlogs in a tremendous spot. Frontlog, you feel very good about the opportunity set as you see it today. I mean, you would say the Frontlog's as high as it's ever been right now, right?
Exactly. Yep.
Right. So let's use that as a segue point then to how to think about the margin profile on a forward basis. First, how do you feel about the margins in your backlog relative to what you're putting up today? Is that part of the reason why you see a pretty healthy progression from here?
Yeah. So in the Analyst Day, we committed to, you know, basically a soft guidance for 2024 of 100 basis point improvement, and then we showed the 14%-16%, which is a substantial uplift from where we are today. And you said it, right? We have confidence in 2024 because of the margins and backlog that we have right now, and so that, if we think about that year-over-year, it's up healthily. And, you know, we feel good that, you know, as we can execute and deliver the margins that are, you know, in that bid process or in the backlog itself. And then on the forward look, beyond that, there's kind of three levers that drive margin expansion.
The first one is just with the revenue growth comes scale opportunities and the ability to leverage not only our fixed assets on the manufacturing side, but then leveraging the SG&A as well, and so we get some healthy and significant leverage. You can look historically, when Flowserve grows, our incremental margins are always.
Yeah.
Historically very healthy, and so we feel confident in our ability to deliver that. And then in the Investor Day, we talked about two specific areas. One was operational excellence, delivering 100-200 basis point improvement. While we've made great progress on process and discipline on operational excellence, there is still significant room to run here, and we've got roofline consolidation opportunities still. We've got productivity opportunities still. So there's still more meat on the bone in terms of operational excellence. And then the second one, or the third one, sorry, is product management and product portfolio. And I would say, of all the good work that we've done over the last five years, we haven't really attacked this as well as I would like, and so we doubled down on this in the new organization. And now we've got a very disciplined product management process.
We've got a dedicated organization. We've elevated that organization in terms of visibility within the organization, and we've set up structure and control on product management. And so we believe there's another 100 or 200 basis points by just doing the right things. I'll give you an example. We just announced, well, I don't think we announced it, but it's out there publicly, that we're divesting an asset. We're selling it. It's something that we shouldn't be involved in. It's not material on a revenue basis. The margins aren't accretive. Took us a little while to get it out of the portfolio, but it's now out, and so that's gonna be a nice uplift in the valve portfolio, and we've got more of those opportunities just on general cleanup.
And then when we think about the products or the services that we really like, it's like: Okay, these are the good ones. These are the winners. How do we double down and invest in those and change that growth trajectory? So we've got a far more formalized approach on product management, and we feel really good about that delivering kind of the 100-200 basis points.
You know, the flip side of the, you're shedding assets that don't fit. Obviously, the Velan deal did not work out, which is a shame across the board, but the free cash flow characteristics are improving.
Yep.
Balance sheet's still in a very good spot. How do you look at the target environment for you right now to be able to bring in some of these assets that fit where you want to bring the portfolio as it sits here today, and what's the actionability level?
Sure, yeah. So we really like programmatic M&A as a, as an opportunity level for us to grow and a way to redeploy our capital, and so that's the focus. I think, kind of $100 million-$300 million, maybe $400 million, in that range. Velan was a great one. We announced it earlier this year. It didn't get through the French regulatory approval because of the nuclear technology, which is very sad to me and disappointing. However, the funnel on M&A for programmatic M&A is large.
Yeah.
There's a lot of things out there, and so it's a relatively fragmented space within flow control. We've got a healthy kind of, you know, opportunity set that we're progressing through our funnel, and I'll just say, I'd be disappointed if we can't demonstrate something in 2024. So we've got confidence in, you know, our ability to integrate now. The balance sheet's in a better position. The org design and the operational excellence are improving every quarter, and so now is the time to really kind of lean in. And, you know, we like the environment. It'll support our 3D strategy, whatever we do, and, you know, we believe we've got the team and the process now to start doing this on a regular basis.
Yeah, and I think that's the key, right? All the work you did over the last chunk of years here positions you, both from a free cash flow working capital perspective, but also from an organizational perspective, to bring these assets.
Right.
In and more efficiently leverage them.
Yep.
Last question, pricing dynamics, do you feel pretty good about the industry pricing.
Yeah, look, it's.
All else equal?
Yeah, I mean, much better than last year, better than it was three months ago. We've just announced our price increase for 2024. You know, we, we, we went out with 3%-5%. That'll kick off January first, and so we think we'll probably be net positive for price cost in.
Yeah.
In 2024. Some of the big attractive projects still get undisciplined players out there, and so I don't love that, but overall, substantially better than what we've seen in the past. We're being more selective, given the backlog in our outlook, to make sure whatever we put in the backlog has the margins that we deserve.
Well, great. Please join me in thanking Scott and Flowserve team for their time today.
Yeah, great. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, everybody.
Management will be available just upstairs, the Chestnut Room, 13th floor, for a Q&A session. Thanks again to everybody for your time.