Mike Halloran here with Baird, and we are pleased to welcome Scott Rowe and the Flowserve team with us today. Got a couple of the stragglers in the audience as well. What we are going to do here is pretty standard format. Scott is going to give some prepared remarks, not very long, and we are going to do a pretty lengthy Q&A session. If you have any questions, please raise your hand, let me know. Send me an email. Happy to respond to the email on here and make sure we weave any of your questions into the conversation with that. Scott, thanks for coming. Floor is yours.
Yeah. First, Mike, thank you for having me. Thank you for Baird for setting the conference up. It is always one of the best conferences of the year, so we are happy to be here and tell the Flowserve story. Maybe I will just start as quick backdrop, and then we will jump into Q&A. Flowserve is always on a journey. We are always aspiring to do bigger and better things. I would say Q3, we did our earnings call two weeks ago, we had a very strong third quarter. The bookings were fantastic at about $1.3 billion, record backlog, record aftermarket, and so we feel like our end markets are moving in the right direction and providing support. The business from the operating system that Flowserve has, the business continues to perform. So we have seen continued margin expansion.
We are now at several years of margin expansion in the business, and both the pumps and the valves are making tremendous progress. So we put out long-term guidance and long-term targets at the end of the fourth quarter last year, mid-single- digit revenue growth into 2030, 20% operating income by 2030, and then double-digit EPS growth. I would just say right now, we still feel very good about our long-term targets. Everything is setting up structurally to continue to support that, and we look forward to working with their customers in the end markets that make sense to drive that growth and profitability.
Maybe we start at the high level before we dig into all the moving pieces going on right now, and for sure—
There's a lot of moving pieces, for sure.
—a lot of them, right?
I kept it very open at the intro.
You know what, it makes my job easier, right? Why don't we start with the margin journey, and then we'll talk about the confidence in the revenue framework, because I think we can then dovetail that into some of the shorter-term revenue dynamics from there. But this has been 100 basis points a year kind of margin story. It was a race to 16% kind of EBIT margins. You've surpassed that.
Yeah.
You are on a path for that 20%+ over this timeframe. What are the pieces we are working on today to get to that 20%? How much is volume dependent? More importantly, what are the structural pieces you are trying to drive to get to that level?
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, so the last four years, every year we have made tremendous progress here. This year is no different. We are moving in the right direction. We have got to get to 20%+ in 2030. That is our goal. The last five-year plan we had, we delivered that early, so we are always leaning in. We are always trying to do things as best we can as an organization. If we go back a little bit, then we will answer what we are doing today, the Flowserve Business System, we kicked that off about three years ago. So 2023, we launched that. It has a pillar of operational excellence, portfolio excellence. We have got commercial excellence, people excellence, and then innovation excellence. The first two are the ones that are driving margin, so operational excellence and portfolio excellence.
On the operational excellence side, it is really driving productivity at the manufacturing sites, so really focused on getting the variances down, reducing our cost per standard hour, doing all the right things within the manufacturing side. We have made great progress there. On the portfolio excellence, it is 80/20. The 80/20 journey has also helped us drive margins really nicely. By definition with 80/20, you are cutting out products that might be lower margin, or you are exiting customers that might not be supporting your business in the best way, and you are focusing your resources on your A products and your A customers. We are now in the third year of that, and we are seeing tremendous results. Those two things alone are really driving nice margin expansion.
Then the third pillar, while it is not necessarily in the business system, it is getting supported by the business system, is the aftermarket. We have seen tremendous aftermarket growth. Aftermarket for us has higher margin content than our OE, or original equipment work. What we are seeing is the ability to drive that at, historically now over three years, we are driving it kind of mid to high single digits, outpacing the revenue from our OE. So we are getting a nice help with the aftermarket margins. We will continue to do that. If we now say, we are about 16% here in Q3, as we look forward to 20%, we need to deliver another 100 basis points every year to get to the 2030 target. The actions in front of us, we have got to continue the operational excellence journey. I would say, modest improvement will continue there.
The 80/20 is still something that we believe will drive margin expansion. We kind of think of that framework about 100 basis points a year on the original equipment type margin. We've got a pricing initiative that we're kicking off or have kicked off already, and we believe that that'll start to drive margins. The other one is with the effectiveness of the operational excellence and the improvement in productivity and leaning out our manufacturing facilities, combined with the complexity reduction of 80/20, we're freeing up capacity within manufacturing. Now we're going to pick up something we've always done, kind of one or two facility consolidations a year. We're now starting to see more meaningful consolidations. When we do that, we see substantial margin increase as we eliminate that manufacturing overhead and really drive scale into our best manufacturing facilities.
We think that's a really nice lever for us as we go forward. I'd say, overall, we have confidence in our margin progression. We've demonstrated it now for four years in a row. We've got to keep going, but we've got plans that we're executing to across the business.
It certainly sounds like most of that's in your control versus—
Yeah, within our control.
—dependent on what the environment looks like.
Yeah, I think obviously revenue growth helps us there, right? But I think we've got, our plans are predicated on things that we can control and what we can deliver. Anything on the margin growth will drop through very nice incrementals and only help us on our journey.
The M&A piece seems to be margin accretive as well, based on what you've done so far.
Yeah. Recently, we closed the Trillium Valves acquisition. We closed that deal in the end of the second quarter. The margins right now are slightly below our blended margin, but with synergies and what we're going to do with 80/20, we have high degree of confidence in the ability to get the margins above, and really gives our FCD business more levers to pull in terms of what to do to drive margins and grow the business. We're pretty excited about what Trillium brings for us. It's highly oriented to the power markets, both traditional power and nuclear. We're excited about that growth space and the ability to drive synergies through the integration execution.
Why don't we pivot to the mid-single- digit growth framework, and I'll just open-ended question. Why are you confident that that's the right target over the next four years?
Yeah. I think, well, one, mid-single digits doesn't appear that aspirational, but it's something that we haven't demonstrated in a couple years now.
Yeah.
While we put that in the range of 4%-6%, we are gaining more and more confidence to deliver that. What we've seen this year is some downward pressure because of the 80/20 actions. As we're culling out that portfolio, cutting things off, by definition, those are out of the system now, and the revenue's come down a little bit. So, we've got a little bit of headwind that we've got to offset there. We'll see a lower headwind in Q4, less in 2027. That starts to abate as we turn the corner into 2027. With that, we're at record backlog right now in the third quarter, and so a substantial backlog for us, as we think about the forward look. Our end markets are really good right now.
If we kind of walk through the biggest end markets for us, we've got energy security is playing a big role in what we're trying to do, and we're seeing more and more bookings around the global energy space, kind of retooling as a result of the Middle East. But even some of this was happening before then, and so there's a lot of activity around new pipelines, where the refining network is, some of that midstream and downstream activity. Power's been a great tailwind, and it will continue to track for us, both on the traditional power side and the nuclear side. So, we feel really good about continuing to drive growth in the power sector. General industries has been good, right? If we think about water, we've got mining, we've got pharmaceutical in there.
There's a handful of others, but all of those sectors seem to be growing at a pretty nice pace. Then maybe last, we'll just say the aftermarket side, right? We've grown the aftermarket business at kind of this mid- to high-single digits . We're gaining market share with our installed base, or different way to say that is improving our capture rate. That's continued to go up. The teams are focused, and we feel good about our ability to continue to drive growth. I'd just say, the actions over the last couple years have been tremendous. The team's working really hard, and we're getting more and more confidence to drive growth over the long term at Flowserve.
If I broaden that out to a four-year view to get to that 2030 framework, I mean, it feels like there's a point or two of price embedded in that—
Yeah, for sure.
—based on the initiatives. You're going to have increasing contribution from the nuclear backlog and the power backlog that you've built.
Yeah.
It feels like you are not asking for a particularly large GDP base or end market base outside of that to get to that number from a volume perspective.
I agree.
Fair way to think about it?
Fair. Absolutely.
Yeah. All right. We talk a little bit then about what you are seeing from an order perspective. Obviously, this year has had some moving pieces associated with it on the geopolitical side in particular. Talk through how you have navigated through this and how the dynamic has changed for you in terms of what your project expectations were, what your turnaround expectations were, yet still putting up $1.3+ billion per quarter of orders, which is pretty dynamic, how those have all interrelated.
Yeah. This is a complicated answer, Mike, as you know. We will start in the Middle East, and then we will talk about some of the implications of the conflict in the Middle East and how it resonates around the world.
Perfect.
The Middle East for us, roughly 15% of our overall business. It is an important business for us. We do a lot of work there. It is highly aftermarket, so we win big projects, and we will talk about the projects in the Middle East. But where we make the most money is in the aftermarket, and we have got a tremendous installed base in most of the countries in the region. When the war kicked off, a lot of that normal run-rate MRO-type work has come down. We have publicly put that in the Q2 and Q3.
It is roughly $100 million of impact year to date, and that is now down, and at the current levels, it is staying down, and it is really a result of some of the conflict, the inability to get to the site, and then just general utilization levels being at kind of a lower number than what you would see on a normalized basis. Also, there was a project funnel at the beginning of the year in the Middle East that we were pretty optimistic about. We have seen roughly half of those projects move out and get pushed into 2027 and beyond. Then there is damage and reassessment.
I think, like, as we think forward about what can happen in the Middle East, you've got the ability to get utilization back up. That aftermarket starts to kick off and gets us back into where we were before. You've got some repair and rebuild work that's coming. We put a number out in Q3 that says more than $50 million of repair work that we have visibility to. We think it's higher than that, but we just can't get access.
Yeah.
We're not having. It's still a very dynamic environment right now to get a granular response there. The other factor would be some form of resiliency or redundancy in the network. Think about parallel pipelines or increased storage or different terminals or even—
Moving.
—new capacity in different parts of the region. We think that'll happen, that that's probably a 2027 or 2028 type of impact. So, I'd say overall, right now, Middle East is down. We can't predict the timing of when it comes back up, but I think stability or any kind of ceasefire in the Middle East, we start to see a very constructive environment for us in going forward. The Middle East, because you couldn't get product through the Strait of Hormuz and output is down across all the, whether it's crude or natural gas or LNG or whatever it is, the rest of the world has stepped up.
The dynamic that we've seen, particularly, and I'll stay in the U.S. and we'll stay refining, what we're seeing on the refining side is incredibly high utilization rates on the back of a lot of profitability with the crack spread. What's happening there is they're very busy. They're delaying. Some operators are delaying their spending. They're delaying their turnarounds. So, we believe that there's some pent-up demand around the maintenance side. With that said, our numbers in the U.S. have been reasonably good, or North America has been reasonably good. We're getting more replacement-type work, so pumps and valves that'll come in that they can change out quickly as a replacement. Our parts business is slightly down. The service business is slightly down, but we're also getting some emergency work as well.
But we believe that, given where the levels of maintenance and spending are, we think there's some tailwinds for us in 2027 because they can't go this long without doing the proper maintenance on those sites. And then maybe the other piece with energy security is everyone's kind of re-looking where they're getting energy from, and whether that's the crude oil, the refined product, or the natural gas. We're seeing different movement on, think about terminals in different areas or LNG liquefaction facilities, regasification facilities, different types of pipeline. And so we have seen an uptick in our energy business outside of the Middle East as a result of some of the conflict.
Yeah, it's been interesting to see how many of these moving pieces still floated your way, and despite this one—
Yeah, despite.
—pretty major challenge. And it's not like Europe is a particularly strong market at all, right?
Europe's been relatively stable for us. Not necessarily growing, but it certainly hasn't declined. Middle East is a big part of the business, and when that goes down, it's just been interesting to see the offset in other parts of the world, primarily North America. We've seen some in South America. We've seen some in Africa. We've seen a pick-up in Asia Pacific as well.
Then maybe talk about the funnel as we think about going into next year. Do the areas of the funnel shift particularly much? It feels like maybe there's a little bit more conversion opportunity in the Middle East. I don't think you have very different views on what's going to happen in Europe at this point. Maybe kind of talk about the composition of opportunity.
Yeah. Yeah, I think for us, Europe is roughly flat. There's a heavy chemical mix for us in Europe, and I just don't think there's not major investment in chemicals, certainly on the project side. It's very much an aftermarket business right now. I'd say that's relatively flat. Middle East, we've talked about. We do think there's upside. The timing to predict the timing is very difficult right now. But when things settle down, there'll be a lot of spending, significant investment. Our project funnel's actually increased. We just have to convert on those opportunities, and they have to move forward. North America funnel looks really good. I'd say it's a mix of we've got a lot of power projects in there.
You've got other general industries. Some of the refining stuff is now moving into project-type work, which I wouldn't have expected before. There's been a recent acquisition of one of the refinery players to buy a dormant refinery, and they're going to invest significant money to get that up and operational. There's a greenfield refinery on the books in the U.S. that, quite frankly, I didn't think was going to go forward, and now it looks like it'll probably go forward. There's nice project activity there. I would say, just overall, our funnel is elevated on a sequential basis, and so we feel pretty good about the visibility of big projects, certainly into 2027 and beyond that. It is the markets that we just talked about, right? Power is definitely the one leading it.
You've got some on the energy security side, and then we've got some general industry stuff that looks pretty good as well.
How do you think about the 2027 turnaround season? This year certainly had a lot of pushouts and delays. People are running their equipment hard because of where crack spreads have been at.
Yeah. I'd say still a little early to tell. They're still running flat out. We just had our team together. We talked about this yesterday. We really need to start to work and lean in on the planning side. I think the spring one might be kind of a little bit lighter than what I would say normally, but I think the fall one, they've got to do a lot of activity. We'll see how it plays out. I'd say under any scenario, though, we really believe that 2027 starts to walk up on the maintenance spending in the refining space.
Are you seeing a kind of an offset to the softer turnaround this year with higher maintenance and higher kind of emergency break-fix work?
Yeah, so the emergency and break-fix, and then the replacements now.
The replacements, obviously, yeah.
Replacements is what's kind of holding us at a level that we're down just a touch, but really kind of flat to what we expected.
So a high-level question on the power side. Just where do you and how do you participate in the power build-out that is obviously gaining a lot of traction?
Yeah, for sure. So we have product both in the traditional power, so coal-fired power that is going into China and India. We have combined-cycle natural gas power, where we have pumps and valves across the power complex, mostly in the steam systems. And on nuclear power, we are a tremendous player, and we have, of all the nuclear reactors in the world, we have installed base in 75% of all the reactors. And so anytime something is happening in power, whether it is a rerate, a life extension on the nuclear front, or expanding capacity with new power capacity, we are providing equipment or have the opportunity to provide equipment in there. And so we continue to see increased demand, and I do not see a scenario where that changes as we kind of go forward on a global basis.
Yeah. Maybe talk to how the nuclear deployment curve in your mind works, right? Because you have been doing over $100 million a quarter, plus or minus, for a bit now. But this is not really even 2027. Maybe a little help in 2027 on some percentage of completion, but it is really 2028, 2029, 2030. How does that work out? And then maybe what is your confidence in the ability to have sustainability or durability to that nuclear cycle?
Yeah. So we will kind of tie this to a framework we put out last year on nuclear. And so this is something we are incredibly excited about. We have the right to win. We have a lot of installed base. We have all the certifications around the world, and we have played with all of the major operators or participated with all of the major operators in the nuclear space. And so if something goes forward in Europe or India, then we are typically involved in all of this work. You said every quarter this year so far, we have booked about $100 million of business, a little bit more in the other quarters. But we continue to walk that up, and we feel really good about our ability to continue to grow. And we have kind of three lanes here. And so one is existing reactors.
The existing reactors, there's always a run rate aftermarket-type content to that. Then as they're doing a power rerate or a life extension, then they're coming in and doing work on the pumps and valves to do either some sort of change-out or just making sure that it can endure the next phase of that asset. That's good work for us.
Yeah.
We get really good aftermarket work when they do that. I'd say we're still in kind of the mid-innings in the U.S. If you kind of look at what reactors have done a life extension or where they need to be, there's still a significant opportunity over the next couple years there. It's similar in the rest of the world, but I'd say the bigger prize for us would be in the U.S. on that type of work. Then the other one is kind of greenfield traditional reactors. Our only greenfield award this year was in Asia, and so we got one reactor in Asia. Great award for us, but it was just one. There's been a lot of discussion about other greenfield reactors coming through the system. Maybe I'll go through kind of around the world in terms of geography.
We believe Eastern Europe should move forward relatively soon. Poland and Romania are on the books with AP1000 technology. I will not say it's a Q4 award or a Q1 award. Picking the timing is not a good game to be in. But we are confident that those projects do move forward. It's just a matter of when. Again, we've got really good content with the AP1000. India has several projects that they're in development, and I'd say a lot of confidence in our ability to, one, participate in the Indian market, and then two, that those projects go forward in a reasonable manner in a relatively short timeframe of a couple of quarters. The U.S. is a little bit of the wild card.
There's lots of concepts out there, like the 10-pack and the Department of Energy leaning in to support the utilities to make progress here. The biggest concern is the cost overrun of the construction itself, and so a lot of the utilities are very worried about bearing the risk of that cost overrun. We thought something may happen before the midterm elections. It didn't happen, and so I think there's going to be a little bit more time that transpires before they come to agreement about what's next. But I believe that there will be some unlock here at some point in 2027, where you get a couple of the reactors or one or two of the utilities that are willing to participate and actually move forward. Again, that's AP1000, it's Westinghouse, it's all stuff that we know and can participate in.
We feel strongly that that happens, it's just when and how many go forward. I think once the cost certainty starts to get in a much better window or framework, you're going to see other utilities move forward at a reasonable pace here.
SMRs are not part of that 2030 time horizon.
Yeah. No.
I know you're with a chunk of them.
Yeah.
But it is just not part of that time horizon.
Let me hit Canada, and I am going to come back to—
Oh, yeah. Sorry.
—so then Canada also has several proposals. I do not think those are 2027 awards for us, but I think 2028, 2029, the Canadian, they need power. They are leaning in on both CANDU technology, potentially the AP1000 technology. Again, we can participate in both of those, and so we feel we are well-positioned to support the Canadian market as well, and we have got existing customers and installed base there. And then the other leg is SMR. And so, we put out our work about a year ago about what that could look like. An SMR for us is roughly half the entitlement or bookings. And so what we say on a greenfield traditional reactor, it is about $100 million, $115 million when you add in the Trillium—
Trillium
—type component. So per traditional greenfield new reactor, an SMR is roughly half. It all depends, there are different sizes and shapes of these. What we have done is we have strategically worked with about 12 different SMR providers, where we are working to prototype and really help them with their flow control solutions with their reactor style. We feel very good with those 12 that we are going to get significant work in the event that they reach the technology hurdles and ultimately go to commercialization. We feel like we have picked the ones that should be winners, but we will see. There are a bunch of companies out there. I am more optimistic about the SMRs than ever before.
We are not going to get substantial bookings in 2027, maybe not 2028, but as they move toward commercialization, the modularization and everything that they are trying to do is definitely an unlock for customers on the power side. But we feel like we have done a really good job positioning ourselves there, and then ultimately, there will be a handful of companies that actually are very successful with this.
I think I have asked this question in some form for 17 straight years at this conference. Strong backlog, record backlog. How does that inform your vision for what 2027 can look like? Because backlog this year gives you a pretty fair amount of visibility into next year's—
Yeah, for sure.
revenue growth.
Yeah. We're not going to give guidance today, Mike. We'll do that at the end of the fourth quarter for 2027. We always give a nice framework at that time.
That's fair.
But what I would say is we're at record backlog right now, right? Our conversion rate, we publish that every year. It's kind of mid-70 percentile on backlog conversion. Next year may be slightly off to that, but it's in the ballpark.
Especially because of the nuclear orders keep pushing it.
Yeah, with the nuclear and then some of the Middle East stuff with delays, it's just really hard to pick timing, and some of the projects are on hold. They're not going to get canceled, but they're on hold because of what's happening there. I just say we need to see the fourth quarter. We need to see our bookings. We got to execute. Right now, we're very much focused on delivering November and December, and then we'll put out our framework. I'd say right now, we feel really good and constructive about 2027 as another stepping point or stepping stone to our 2030 targets.
You mentioned pricing initiatives. Maybe talk to what you're doing on the pricing initiative side. Any signs of fatigue from a market perspective, given all the inflation, and then where you stand on the price-cost curve?
Yeah. I think we've done a really good job with pricing and with supply chain, I'll say, and that's not historically been the case at Flowserve, but a lot of focus on supply chain to drive cost down. We know we're on the right side of the price-cost curve. We'll continue to pivot the supply chain and position it in the right areas to, one, make sure that we're minimizing our tariff impact, but two, getting to the best cost locations that provide the highest level of service. On the pricing side, we've just gotten more sophisticated, and the 80/20 framework has helped us with that. As we segment quads, there's some methodology on thinking about how do you price and where your price point should be depending on who the customer is and what quadrant your product is in.
We have done a lot of work there. We have done a lot of work on pricing to offset tariffs, and we have done a very good job with that. I would say there has been a lot of price in the system, but we still feel like there is opportunity here. As part of commercial excellence, we have got a pricing pillar. We literally just launched what we are calling a new pricing engine that really starts to look at the analytical data combined with the algorithm for success on pricing. We think there is an opportunity there. We are going to start with our aftermarket business, so think of like aftermarket mechanical seals, pump parts, valve parts, and we will start to turn that on for 2027.
I feel like we still, while we have had great success with pricing, we have been ahead, we have continued to expand margins, there is still a level on dynamic pricing and getting a lot smarter with our pricing ability.
Appreciate that. Maybe we talk about the capital side of things.
Sure.
Trillium, I think it is a really good fit for you guys.
Trillium's been great.
What's that pipeline look like? It's really nice to be in a position where, one, your working capital side is getting better consistently annually, and you're in a position to play some offense. What does offense look like for you, and how good is that pipeline right now?
Sure. Yeah, I think maybe two things. Margins are improving, working capital's coming down, it's generating nice cash flow, and so we feel really fortunate to be in a position to really think strategically about where do we redeploy our cash and how do we do that. On the M&A front, I'd say number one is we want to be investment grade. It's super important to us. We don't want to go backwards there, and so that's always something that we think about. It'll be a little bit of governor on type and structure of deal that we do and how much money we'll deploy. With that said, we want to position the portfolio into sectors and markets that grow. Trillium was a great one in the power sector. It's got nuclear and traditional power.
Think of that as a good size for us, roughly $400 million purchase price, $200 million-$300 million of revenue. Those are good targets for us, and we call that more of a programmatic funnel and very targeted markets. We'll continue on that. We've got a healthy funnel in front of us, always looking at different things. Obviously, you got to come to agreement in terms, and so, we'll work that and we'll do the right things and really focusing on value creation. Then additional to that, when we see a dislocation in our stock price, we're not afraid to redeploy capital into our stock price. We did that. We've done that all year. We bought back shares again in the third quarter.
I think we're at, I'm looking at Brian here, $75 million year to date on share repurchase. We've done that this year, and we had a pretty healthy number last year as well. I think we've got a nice framework. We're very methodical about it. Brian's doing a good job with the CFO to make sure we're balancing what that looks like, and the board's very supportive of making sure that we're making good decisions on capital allocation.
And you feel like that pipeline has enough, one, actionability, but two, actionability within the framework of what your criteria is to make an impact?
Yeah, for sure. I think we're still in a relatively fragmented space when we think about pumps and valves around the world. Again, finding the right ones in the right markets that we believe can drive growth, and when we put them in the Flowserve Business System, we want to be able to see a nice step change in terms of performance. That's kind of what we're looking at. Yeah, I think we've got a bunch of stuff in the funnel. It's always hard to predict timing on this, but we're always going to lean in here.
One minute left. I'll make it a relatively quick one. How are you using AI today relative to what you were doing last year? Any use cases, outcomes, examples that you could give?
Yeah. I'll be really fast here. We've got two things, right? Individual productivity, and we've taken an AI platform, dropped it into the Flowserve firewall. Everyone in our company's got access to it. Out of 18,000 associates around the world, we've got 11,000 people using AI, which is really cool. We can see that it's in our system, and that's just helping them on a daily basis, right? Just improving their life, being more productive, getting answers quickly, and it really sits within our firewall, so it's pulling data from our systems, and you can really get sophisticated on stuff within Flowserve. The other lane that we look at is what we call process optimization, and trying to fundamentally change business process where we see pools of data that are disconnected or waste in that process.
We've got some amazing wins in supply chain, some on finance, some of the other administrative tasks where we're really using AI to leapfrog our capabilities here. I'm excited about what that looks like. The future's still pretty bright in terms of the ability to leverage that technology, but we see it as a tool. We want to be able to be very proficient in that tool. We'll continue to drive opportunities with it.
Two things here. One, please join me in thanking Flowserve and Scott for their time today, and as a classier client than me, reminded me, wishing Scott in particular a happy Veterans Day.
Oh, thank you, buddy.
Thank you, everybody.