Next up, we have Flowserve. Based in Irving, Texas, Flowserve is a leading manufacturer and aftermarket supplier of comprehensive flow systems. The company operates in two segments: Flowserve Pump Division and Flow Control Division. Flowserve's portfolio of products consists of pumps, valves, seals, and automation that serves various end markets, including oil and gas, chemical, power, water management, as well as general industries. Today, it's a privilege to have Amy Schwetz, Flowserve's CFO, to represent the company. Amy has been with the company since 2020. Flowserve has 131 million shares, trades around $55 for a $7.3 billion market cap. There's about $830 million in net debt for total enterprise value of $8.1 billion. Amy, do you have any opening comments, or should we go straight into Q&A?
Sure. Maybe I'll just start. Thanks, Simon. Thanks for having us, and thanks for the continued support that we receive from Gabelli. It's great to be here. 2023 and 2024 have been really exciting years at Flowserve. I've been now with the company, just celebrated my five-year anniversary, and I would say we've had a nice mix of supportive end markets and self-help over the last couple of years. We really see that formula playing out again over 2025 with supportive end markets and the right focus internally to exercise self-help to continue to do the same things that we did in 2023 and 2024: grow revenue, expand margins, and generate a significant amount of cash flow to make the business stronger. So with that, maybe let's dive right into questions.
Great. Let's just start with your 2025 outlook. You're guiding for organic sales growth to 2%-5%, total sales growth of 5%-7%. Given a lot of uncertainties, economic uncertainties like trade tariffs, potential trade wars, and uncertain trade policies, you also got a book-to-bill over 1 to 1 for orders too. What gives you confidence in that outlook? And where are you seeing strength around the world?
Yeah. So I'll maybe start with our bookings in 2024. And so Flowserve, we have in this type of environment a luxury of having a really strong backlog of projects. So $2.8 billion in our backlog to start the year, somewhere around 83% of that we would expect to convert into revenue in 2025. And as we look at the way the business has performed over the last several quarters, really a strong backdrop for aftermarket bookings. So we're coming off of our third quarter in a row of aftermarket bookings over $600 million. So a strong annuity from our install base that we have in that mix. And then as we look at our original equipment opportunities and where those exist in 2025, we're actually very excited about it.
We've been talking to investors a lot over the last several months about our power business and nuclear in particular. We've had two quarters in a row now, the third quarter and the fourth quarter of 2024, of over $100 million of nuclear bookings. We're excited about that business. It's a strong margin business for us, and it's one with a strong aftermarket as well, which gives us some confidence. And also, as we look at things going on around the world, whether or not it's continued build-out in the Middle East, opportunities in Asia, decarbonization efforts really around the world that give us a lot of confidence that we've got room to grow again in 2025.
Oil and gas market represent 40% of your business. We're seeing in the Middle East, in particular, some reallocation of resources from oil to gas. There's been a project delay related to offshore. How's that impacting Flowserve?
Yeah. I think we see things the exact way you do. So we see the Middle East continue to try and work their way up the value chain from an oil and gas perspective. And frankly, we've benefited from that. And so if you look at the Jafurah project that we wrapped up in 2024, that was a $240 million booking that we received. And the continuation of the Jafurah build-out in KSA has been a great opportunity for Flowserve to not only generate business on the OE side, but position ourselves well for growth in the aftermarket going forward. We would say that that environment remains very constructive still. We're seeing less of the mega projects. So $240 million was a massive project, maybe the largest project in Flowserve history for us. We're seeing fewer of those mega projects, but still a number of really nice-sized projects in the Middle East, kind of in that $20 million-$40 million range, which is a nice area to be for us. It's one that the project management efforts are right in our wheelhouse and frankly tend to provide slightly higher margins than what we might see on those mega projects.
Great. You mentioned the power market. Seen a lot of activity recently. How big is that a business for you? And what do you do there?
Yeah. So power has been in our core business since Flowserve has really been around. So now almost 30 years as a public company and much longer than that as the various companies and brands that make up Flowserve today. And so it's been about 15% of our business. It continues to grow. I would say that is the piece of our project funnel that we've seen the highest rate of growth in over the last several quarters. And in that, in particular, is nuclear. And so I mentioned that's a business we like. It's one that there are some barriers to entry versus other areas of flow control. And we play in that in all of our products. And so we make valves for the nuclear industry. We make pumps for the nuclear industry. And we also make seals that go in our pumps in the nuclear industry.
And so we really see this as an opportunity to drive an install base that really has a very long useful life. I was at one of our facilities in France last year and saw a pump that was in for repair that was actually about 75 years old. And so you can kind of imagine that this is an annuity that we'd like to see play out over time. And so whether or not that is around life extensions or restarts in North America or new builds in Europe and Asia, we see that playing out very nicely for us over the next several years as, one, energy intensity in the developed world is set to increase based on what we're seeing from AI, but also as areas of the world are much more focused on energy security. And that plays out.
We're seeing it play out in a big way in nuclear, but also in traditional ways as well from combined cycle, even some coal-fired generation, and then even as we look at wind and solar build-outs, we have ways that we play in that space as well, whether or not that's valves for offshore wind or vacuum technology that's used to create solar panels. Growth in the power segment's a big deal for us.
Great. I'll stop here and see if anyone has questions from the audience.
For your oil and gas business, how leveraged should we think of your company as being to the commodity price itself? So obviously, you've got a lot independent from that, and you've got non-oil and gas. But just in terms of broadly speaking, I would assume oil going up is good for your business and going down less good. But just how do we think about that going forward?
It's a great question, and probably one that I would say is slightly misunderstood about the Flowserve name. So I think that we've got a big portion of our business that's tied to sort of recurring or ongoing revenue from oil and gas, and that's in the aftermarket, and it's in replacement parts. So less levered to what I would call CapEx in the oil and gas space and less upstream than more downstream kind of in refining efforts and some midstream in terms of LNG. So we are more tied to consumption, and so as we see asset utilization in refineries at relatively high levels, we're less concerned about margins at refineries or oil and gas prices as much as we are with them thinking about uptime and keeping those assets running. That's something that we're good at doing, that we help our customers do and will continue to do.
I think I saw another hand in the audience.
Thank you very much for your presentation. Very impressed with your CapEx growth. For your power business, which is your traditional business, what I'm seeing in the industry is this increased enhancement towards artificial intelligence, particularly artificial general intelligence, artificial cognitive intelligence. And now that you have a nuclear operations, what are you seeing in that area in terms of clients asking for that services? And also, we're seeing a lot of activity within the space investment realm. Could you speak a little bit more about those particular industries if they are your clients?
Yeah, so on the nuclear side, there's really two ways that we play in this space, and that's in a traditional way for assets that are in service today, keeping those assets running longer, which is being generated, I would say, in North America, so the U.S. and Canada, really this idea that energy intensity is increasing, and that's being driven by AI, not by traditional ways that we've thought about what drives power consumption, and so the outlook for some of these assets that were either set to retire or in some instances maybe even shuttered, we're seeing customers come back to us and look for ways to extend the life. Obviously, safety is paramount in the nuclear space, and so it's very important that the equipment is up to date, that it's ready to take on kind of the harsh conditions of the process.
And so we stand at the ready to help our customers with that. In the rest of the world, it's really a new build story. And so we're seeing that play out both in Western Europe and in Eastern Europe as they look to kind of move some of their dependency on gas assets and coal assets and move it to nuclear, which is obviously a greener form of electricity and also one that they have the assets to control as well. And we're seeing that same thing play out in Asia as well. So a little bit of a difference between new build and existing assets that we see play out. And your other question was around space. So that's one that it's kind of a niche product for us. We've played in that a couple of times out of our valve business, and we've been excited about it. It's pretty cool to see the names that you see on the news appear on our customer list. But at this point, it's a pretty small piece of our business.
Your debt even has about one time. And in the light of the M&A world, it's changing geographically, product-wise. And then along that line, there was a company in, I'm going to say, Montreal, that was on your radar screen called XYZ, Velan. And tell us why that's not.
XYZV.
What?
XYZV.
Yeah, I know. I don't know the symbol. So just what are you looking at next, either geographically or product lines that would fit in other than SMR-type valves?
Yeah. So obviously, you've seen kind of two public processes that we've been involved in with Velan. And the Velan play was really around nuclear. And then the transaction that we recently closed that we're excited about, MOGAS, which gives us more of an entrée into mining applications than we have at Flowserve on our own. And we think about our 3D strategy as we're looking at acquisitions. I will say of the 3Ds, which are diversification, decarbonization, and digitization, we like to use M&A or think about M&A more in the diversification space. The decarbonization space, we have a lot of the tools and we have a lot of the applications and the expertise internally to help our customers with that work. But diversification, M&A can really give us a turbo boost into end markets or applications that we might like. You mentioned our balance sheet.
Our balance sheet's important to us, and so as we look at M&A, we look to do so in a financially responsible way, in a way that doesn't bring on too much risk, gives us continued access to capital, and then obviously, the most important feature is, is it going to make our investors money? And so we're supremely focused on that in terms of making sure that we see that we're looking at acquisitions that give us those opportunities, so accretive to margins give us the opportunity for synergies, deliver returns over our weighted average cost of capital, and our accretive to EPS ultimately, so going through the filters that I think you would want us to see, but with that strategic lens.
We have two questions from the Zoom. Miles is going to read them.
Management indicated on the earnings call that 80/20 benefits should accelerate throughout the year and that the year-over-year margin expansion should be greater in fiscal year 2026 versus 2025. Can you just please unpack that?
Sure. So I mentioned from the outset that we think that we're doing the right things and have the right focus internally to continue to make ourselves more financially attractive. And 80/20 is part of that effort. In 80/20s, the process that we're using to really review our portfolio, it's an ongoing process. It never stops. But at this point in time, we have in our two segments, we have seven business units across those two segments, five of them which are product-based. And in 2024, we launched 80/20 in three of those BUs. We have two more that are launching over the course of 2025 at various stages of maturity with that process. And as we get all five of those business units actively engaged in managing their portfolio via 80/20, we think that we're going to see big dividends from this.
And so we've been very intentional about how we've gone about this. We've gone about it methodically using mostly internal resources with some limited help externally to make sure that we're building that muscle within our BUs to make this a sustainable process. Our two BUs that are business units that are far along in that process are anticipating that they'll see 100 basis points margin expansion in 2025 from the 80/20 efforts. And then we'll see some contributions from the other three over the course of 2024 or 2025. So what that gives you overall in the Flowserve portfolio is about 50 basis points of margin expansion in 2025. We think that that can ramp up in 2026. And I would say that these efforts are on top of what we're trying to do, what we've continued to do from an operational excellence perspective. So kind of embedded in our guidance is margin improvement of about 100 basis points year -over- year.
I just want to touch upon a comment you made earlier about MOGAS. That acquisition will add about $175 million in revenue to Flowserve this year. What attracted you to MOGAS, and what's the strategic fit there?
Yeah. So MOGAS, one, it's a premium product. It's recognized in the market as a brand that really sort of commands premium pricing. It's used in some very harsh conditions in mining and in oil and gas. And so we like the technology that was involved in MOGAS. The focus on the mining industry was something that we like. It's exposed to different cycle dynamics than what we see with some of our traditional business. And we saw this as an opportunity to really strengthen the FCD portfolio, both through exposure to markets and exposure to markets at relatively attractive margins as well. And so again, kind of looking at that, both the strategic fit of the industries that they serve, the type of product they hold, they have, and the financial returns.
The other thing that I would say about the markets that MOGAS serves that we think is an embedded opportunity is really around our aftermarket capabilities. And so the footprint, the geographic footprint for MOGAS from an aftermarket perspective, as you would expect as a smaller privately held company, is much smaller than ours. And so we've got the opportunity to really try and grow that aftermarket. And although we don't tend to base financial analysis in M&A on revenue synergies, it's something that we can see happen. And I'll use as an example our acquisition of NexGen this year, which we announced, which is cryogenic pump technology that has not yet been commercialized. But the fact that Flowserve is now involved in cryogenic pumps has already brought aftermarket opportunities into our bookings. Something that we see that when we have technology with our aftermarket footprint, we can take advantage of that on the revenue side.
3D strategy, you mentioned that as one area of focus for your M&A. Can you give us some insight into that strategy? What are some of the early successes you have there? And what are some of the hurdles?
Yeah, so as we thought about the 3D strategy has now kind of been talked about publicly, I think for about three and a half, four years. As we looked at one of the first things that was kind of going on at Flowserve when I joined, other than some time thinking through COVID during those years, was really what was going to happen with energy transition and thinking about the threat that energy transition perhaps presented to our base level business, and then there was sort of this realization that although it appears to be a threat, it was actually a great opportunity for us, and so we started to think about decarbonization, that all of our customers were in the same boat as Flowserve, trying to think about how they were going to be impacted by energy transition.
So we started to see refineries concerned about carbon intensity of their processes, thinking about electricity usage in a different way. And so the opportunities that that presented, both through selling more efficient pieces of equipment, thinking about carbon capture and storage, thinking about solutions that we can provide around looking at the flow control loop and providing monitoring in terms of emissions, electricity usage. It really has supercharged the services and the closeness, that intimacy that we have with our customers on the oil and gas side from where we were at five or six years ago.
And then I think from a diversification standpoint, what we've seen is real clarity in terms of where we want to go, both with our inorganic strategy, but also with our new product development and how we think about business development resources. And so I think sort of the rallying cry that this has provided internally, in addition to providing the market with real insight in terms of how we're thinking about our product portfolio, how we're thinking about opportunities for both inorganic and new product development, and the intensity that we're putting into efforts on the commercial side has been a real benefit.
Right. Well, touching on gross margin really quickly, it was particularly strong last quarter, up 200 basis points year- over- year. Seemed like the one that your division, FPD, is already within your targeted range of 16%-18%. Seemed like there may be upside to that target. And then as a follow-on to that, the Trump administration and tariffs, what's the impact? What's the potential impact on gross margin there?
So thanks for the shout-out there. We appreciate it. We're proud of what we're doing from the margin level, but I'd say we're not done. This is something that the goal is to kind of hit those targets and then reset. And so we're particularly proud with the work that's been done in FPD. I think it's an indication that we're focused on the right things. We haven't seen that step change yet within the Flow Control Division, but we think we're getting close. We think we've taken the right actions to get there. We said at our analyst day in 2023 that the goal was to hit those targets and then come back and talk about what the next steps are for Flowserve. And I think that that's exactly what we're trying to do.
We're trying to make it clear that the levers that we have out there, whether or not it's operational excellence or growth of the business or 80/20, that there's opportunities beyond what we have in those 2027 targets, but let's hit those targets and then talk about what's next. So more to come on that one. Stay tuned. And then I would say in terms of tariffs, we've been looking at this for the last several months, as most in the space have. And we feel pretty confident where we're at today that the impact of tariffs has been baked into our guidance, both from a potential impact to growth and also from a cost or margin expansion element. Things can change quickly, but that's where we're at today.
We spent a lot of time and effort during sort of 2020 to midway through 2022 trying to shore up our supply chain, get redundancy. And where we're most concerned is really in the area of castings and forgings. And so those efforts to move patterns, so we don't just have patterns in China, but we have patterns in China, in India, in Mexico. So we've got options to really play this out over time and utilize our suppliers who, frankly, we're using today. So this is not about finding new capacity. It's not about kind of racing down the street to try and find somebody who can make these complex castings for us. We feel like we've got that in place.
And then as we look at our footprint around the world, it's important to note that about 2/3 of our business is actually outside of the U.S. And so although there are times that we would have loved to have made more progress with respect to footprint and low-cost country manufacturing, that footprint today actually probably serves us pretty well in terms of managing through some uncertainty that's caused by potential tariffs.
As we're coming up on time, I just want to check in one more time to see if we have any more questions from the audience. If not.
Thank you. Just a quick question on the valve side and the nuclear reactor. Your presence is mostly in the reactor and the cooling system?
A little bit of both. The question was around where do we play? Are we in reactor? Are we in the cooling system? A little bit of both. We've got a variety, again, of kind of both pumps that play in the space, valves that play in the space, and seals. Our role may be different in build-out, but I would say that both kind of have the same scenario of requiring, in certain jurisdictions or in certain areas of the world, requiring certification. In the U.S., that's what's referred to as an N-Stamp to ensure that the appropriate safety protocols are being deployed with nuclear energy.
Great. Well, Amy, it's been a lot of fun today. I just have a lot of questions, but I mean, we'd love to have you back again next year.
Yeah, we'll look forward to it. Thank you, Simon.