Good morning. Good morning to everyone in the room and on the webcast. Thank you for joining us today. Before we turn to our Q&A session, I'd like to provide a brief update on Mettler- Toledo, our business, our strategy, touch a few key themes we see unfolding in our industry today, but also share with you why we are so optimistic about our long, our long-term growth opportunities we see for our business. Before we get started, please note our disclosure regarding forward-looking statements in the slides. For those of you who know, who know us well, you've probably seen this slide before. It is one that our company is very proud of. We have a long-term track record of strong financial performance, and we are looking forward to continuing to build on this track record. This performance has been built with several important differentiators for our business.
First, we are primarily focused on driving organic growth across the many highly fragmented markets we participate in. Second, to drive this growth, we have internally developed many important strategic growth programs that we continuously improve. These programs are well ingrained in the organization and also help us focus on the most attractive opportunities in the market. T hen finally, we have a unique culture at Mettler- Toledo that is squarely focused on our customers, on innovation, collaboration, continuous improvement, and agility. This enables us to support our customers to make new developments, enhance productivity, and improve quality. We lead the industry in innovation, and by leveraging our unique growth strategies and culture of execution, we have consistently driven incremental market share gains and robust earnings growth.
Now, let me share some details about our product offering, and I will start with our laboratory products, which represent approximately 57% of our total sales. We provide scientists and engineers with the most frequently used instruments found in a variety of laboratory environments. This slide highlights our laboratory offering that helps customers accelerate their R&D efforts. These customers require a high degree of precision and flexibility, which we support with our high-end balances, analytical instruments, pipettes, and automated chemistry solutions. We are well known for our innovation, quality, and deep application know-how. R&D customers also increasingly seek productivity and automated workflows, which we facilitate with our LabX instrument control and data management software, as well as automation solutions to increase throughput and simplify workflows. LabX provides full data integrity and compliance and is unique in the marketplace.
Our laboratory instruments are also very important in QA and QC labs. These instruments include balances and a wide range of analytical instruments. Our strong presence in the lab is evident in that we can provide approximately 40% of the bench instruments typically used in an analytical quality control lab and can connect them also with our LabX software. The final piece of our lab business is Process Analytics, which is focused on continuous inline measurement of various parameters in process control, including TOC, conductivity, pH, oxygen, CO2, and pressure sensors that are connected with our transmitters. Biopharma is an important market for this business, as well as chemical industry and the fast-growing segments like semiconductor manufacturing. This business features our intelligent sensor management technology, which are intelligent digital analytical sensors that bring predictive diagnostics and other valuable features for reliable, consistent process control.
This next slide is an overview of our Industrial products, which represent approximately 40% of our total sales. The largest portion of our Industrial is Core Industrial business, which represents approximately 25% of our total sales. Here, we provide solutions that facilitate process control for many of the same customers as our lab products: life sciences, food, chemical, and many others, but in their production environment. Our product offering includes scales, terminals, software, weigh modules, and logistics solutions, and our business mix has shifted over the years to support our customers' desire for automation and seamless integration into factory information systems. We also provide unique solutions for high-speed precision weighing or applications in hazardous and hygienic areas. The other portion of our Industrial business is Product Inspection, which represents about 15% of our total sales.
In this business, we sell a variety of instruments, primarily to packaged food manufacturers, but also to customers in the pharma and cosmetic industry, to help them detect physical contaminants or prevent over- and under-filling of their products. This is a critical end-of-line process that ensures brand protection, high quality, and increased productivity. In addition to our inspection instruments, we also offer our ProdX software, which is a complete quality inspection data management system that delivers full digital management of product inspection equipment for real-time monitoring and food safety compliance. Lastly, we also provide a broad range of services that are very important to our customers to maintain reliable readings for our instruments and uptime in the production environment. Our global service network of over 3,000 is an important competitive advantage.
We have seen steady increases in customer satisfaction over the years and have earned exceptionally high Net Promoter Scores from our customers. Service remains a very important strategic growth opportunity for our company due to the opportunities to penetrate our installed base, our expanded solutions offering, and our other competitive advantages. Our robust portfolio of innovative products and service solution has helped us build a very strong brand and several important competitive advantages. First, we are the market leader in a significant majority of our businesses, with a market share of, on average, 25%-30%, and the highly fragmented nature of these markets provides significant room for additional market share expansion. Secondly, to identify and capture the market opportunities in these fragmented markets, we have built a sales team of about 3,000 specialists with deep application know-how.
Our Spinnaker sales and marketing program is a very unique and allows us to identify and direct our sales specialists to the best growth opportunities. Third, we have an installed base of instruments of over $16 billion worldwide. We support this installed base with the largest global service organization of our direct competitors, and this installed base is also an important source of customer upgrades and replacement demand. L astly, we have a global supply chain and manufacturing footprint that enhances our cost leadership. We serve very attractive markets and estimate that over 70% of our sales are to life sciences, food manufacturers, and chemical companies. Over the years, this mix has grown as our Spinnaker sales and marketing program has become increasingly sophisticated in guiding our sales team to the most attractive market opportunities.
The outlook for these markets remain very attractive over the long term as they seek solutions to help improve productivity in both the laboratory environment and also in the production environment. Additionally, customers are increasingly looking for solutions that help them with regulatory compliance and data integrity, as well as higher levels of accuracy and reusability. The breadth of our laboratory products offering means that we can also provide seamless workflows with audit-proof data integrity with our LabX software offering. Now, I'd like to shift to our growth strategies and how we leverage our strong competitive advantages and favorable market trends to capture market share and drive growth. First, diversity of our business and fragmented customers means we need a set of sophisticated tools and analytics to identify the most attractive and profitable growth opportunities for our field sales team to target.
Spinnaker is a collection of sales, service, and marketing initiatives and processes we use to drive sales growth and improve profitability. As mentioned, we have a tremendous opportunity to gain market share in our highly fragmented markets. A key element of Spinnaker is to ensure we effectively optimize our field sales team, so they are focused on capturing the most attractive growth opportunities and selling to new customers and cross-selling with existing accounts. In addition to generating leads through our various marketing activities, our Top K program provides our field teams with tailored and actionable investment alerts about specific sales opportunities that are generated by proprietary data analytics and deep learning software solutions, leveraging external databases and our own internal databases. These alerts are qualified and prioritized, so our teams are guided to the most attractive opportunities in under-penetrated or hot segments in the market.
We have further improved these alerts over the past year, providing instant alerts to teams and dynamic qualification and feedback loops, helping them to effectively increase our time with accounts that are not yet our customers. Spinnaker also supports our cross-selling activities across divisions, utilizing insights from service technicians and other sources to feed our sales engine. As part of our continuous improvement process, we periodically launch a new wave of Spinnaker that builds on previous waves and initiatives. We are currently launching our sixth wave, which will fully enhance customers' experience and leverage new possibilities offered by the digitalization of processes. Another important growth opportunity is our service business, which represents more than 20% of our sales.
Our global service footprint is the largest of our direct competitors, and we have an important opportunity to further expand the proportion of our installed base that we service today. We estimate the service revenue opportunity of our installed base of instruments, approximately $3 billion, and we are highly focused on further penetrating this opportunity. Selling services at the point of new product sales is an important growth opportunity for us, and through improved training and optimization and auto-attaching service quotes to the new product quotes, we have seen increased uptakes, uptake rates for service contracts. We are also focused on penetrating our installed base through sophisticated data analytics and continue to see opportunities to further optimize our service processes, to enhance customer experience, increase productivity, and improve our people development. Our technology leadership is another important growth driver for our business.
We lead our industry in innovation, and this helps accelerate replacement cycles, support market share gains, and maintain our price premium in the marketplace. On this slide, you will see two examples of recent innovations for our lab customers. On the left, you see our next generation of digital Process Analytics sensors we released last year. Our Intelligent Sensor Management, ISM technology, has been a key differentiator for Process Analytics over the past decade, and we have recently upgraded our entire ISM portfolio to provide full audit trail readiness, which is critical for pharma compliance, as well as significantly enhanced sensor diagnostics and increased temperature range for broad coverage in demanding chemical applications. On the right, we feature our new DSC 5+ Thermal Analysis instrument.
That is the first instrument that is capable of switching between two different measurement modes. It also features a high-capacity robot that allows our customers to perform more experiments in a shorter time with fewer resources. It is a great addition to our portfolio and helps us to win with customers like those in the lithium-ion battery segment. On this slide, we highlight two other examples of recent industrial product launches. Our PFD smart floor scales, our new series, our new series of hygienic scales for customers in the pharma and food markets. It is an ultra-low profile scale that has a smart digital load cell, and is easy to clean and move and provides industry-leading digital capabilities.
On the right, you can see our new X2 series of X-ray inspection machines for small packaged food and pharmaceutical customers that detect hard-to-find physical contaminants, such as glass and bone fragments, and helps us cover a wider range of the market at many different price points. O verall, our R&D investments continue to provide a product portfolio that is stronger than ever and supports our growth and margin expansion initiatives, and we have accelerated certain innovation investments to capture growth opportunities. We continue to see increased demand for automation, digitalization, and compliance, and we have several important new lab and industrial product launches later this year that directly address our customer needs in these areas.
While no one product launch is material to our results, overall, given the significant diversity of our business, combined, they are a powerful contributor to our market share and margin expansion strategy. I'd now like to share with you an update on our margin expansion initiatives. We have an excellent track record of expanding our margins, and we remain confident in our ability to, to continue to expand our margins in the future. The largest driver to margin expansion comes from our organic sales growth. Additionally, our business mix has improved over time, as our fastest-growing products are also our highest-margin products. We also aim to expand our sales of services and consumables, which are also higher margin. We continue to be successful with our global pricing program, which helps us to capture value in the marketplace from our innovations.
Our SternDrive program is another important driver to margin expansions and helps us reduce our material costs and increase our manufacturing and back-office productivity through the diligent execution of hundreds of small improvement projects at any one time. We launched our third wave of SternDrive at the end of last year, and this wave was on top of our cost reduction programs and has a focus on smart automation in our facilities. Most of our manufacturing facilities have a product offering that is rather lower volume with high mix, which in the past did not lend itself to automation. T oday, low-cost cobots and robots that are easy to program and install are making their way into our production facilities, providing productivity gains with the fast payback periods.
Finally, while we are fundamentally focused on organic sales growth, we will also continue to look to expand our product offering through small to medium-sized bolt-on acquisitions that can help expand our technology leadership, product offering, and channel reach. We are typically looking to acquire businesses and technologies that are good, that are a good complement to our existing product offering and can leverage our global manufacturing and direct sales footprint. Now, let me share a few thoughts on the business environment. 2023 was a particularly challenging year after exceptional growth over the past few years. Market demand declined in our core segments of life sciences, food manufacturing, and chemicals, which combined represent more than 70% of our revenues. Life sciences was particularly down after very strong growth during the pandemic.
Additionally, China comprises about 20% of our sales and had a strong start to the year after emerging from their prolonged COVID lockdowns. However, this momentum was short-lived, and reduced market demand and the deteriorating economic environment led to an unprecedented decline in the second half of 2023. I'd like to also share with you additional details about our fourth quarter results that we disclosed late last week. As you have read, our fourth quarter sales and EPS will be below our previously issued guidance due to the unexpected issues with a new third-party logistics provider in Europe. As a backdrop, we have initiated a staggered process of transitioning to a new operator for our logistics hub in Europe in 2022.
After extensive tests in the first quarter of 2023, we started to gradually transition to the new distribution center, and by the end of the third quarter, had transitioned approximately 70% of our products. During the fourth quarter, we transitioned our remaining products to the new provider, but they were not able to handle this increased volume as anticipated, due to process flow initiatives, inefficiencies that resulted in shipping delays. Now, while we are extremely disappointed with this development, we are working very closely with our new provider, including their executive team. Our backlog in Q4 was higher than expected by a similar amount of our Q4 sales decline or shortfall, by a similar amount of our Q4 sales shortfall, and anticipate to have largely recovered these sales in Q1.
Relatively to our fourth quarter results, the disruption disproportionately impacted our laboratory results and our results in Europe. China, China came in in line with our expectations, while Europe was significantly worse and the Americas was also lower than expected. We were pleased with the continued momentum of our service business, which came in as expected. Industrial came in as expected, while laboratory and retail were below our expectations. We currently expect adjusted EPS to decline approximately 23% year- over- year in Q4, which is below our prior guidance of a 12%-13% decline. While we expect to benefit from the delayed sales in the first quarter of 2024, please keep in mind we continue to face challenging year-over-year growth comparisons.
We have not yet provided any updates to our 2024 guidance and will provide further detail in early February when we report our fourth quarter results. Now, while market conditions are currently softer, we remain focused on the factors we can control. We are confident that our business will emerge stronger from the current downturns due to important investments in growth that I just shared with you. Additionally, we see several important growth opportunities across the markets we serve, driven by reshoring and the needs for automation and digitalization. We also see opportunities with new pharmaceutical modalities, as well as investments in alternative energy and e-mobility, semiconductors, and sustainable materials. Our ability to demonstrate resilience and agility during challenging times is an important element of our DNA. We also continue to implement strategies with a good balance of initiatives focused on growth and operational excellence.
We will continue to increase our focus on productivity and cost savings until we return to normalized growth. L et me summarize the key points from my presentation today. First, we have significant competitive advantages, including a strong product portfolio, highly sophisticated go-to-market strategies, a great service organization, and a highly collaborative global team. Our culture of innovation, collaboration, agility, and continuous improvement makes tremendous difference and is a key competitive differentiator. Additionally, we remain focused on delivering outstanding customer experience. For example, we are strengthening our organization where we see more demand, such as within the service organization. We also continue to invest strongly into next-generation products and solutions, as well as enhancing our best-in-class corporate programs like Spinnaker, to drive growth and capture, capture market share, and SternDrive, to manage our cost effectively.
This will help us to not only increase our competitiveness during our difficult market situation, but also puts us in an even more favorable position once the markets pick up again. L astly, our growth strategies and culture of continuous improvement are important drivers of continued margin expansion over the medium term, which provides significant free cash flow that we return to shareholders through our share repurchase program. Now, that concludes my comments, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today.
Perfect. Awesome. Thank you, Patrick. F irst up, I just wanted to dig into the 4Q pre-announcement and some of the logistics issues. You kind of walked through some of the high level, but can you dig a little bit deeper? Number one, how did this just come up so late in the quarter, I guess? At what point did you start to really realize this was a more bigger issue than you initially thought? T hen, alongside of that, can you just talk about you mentioned the backlog still being intact. Can you just point out, would you have hit the 4Q number if it wasn't for this logistics issue? What is your confidence level in that as well?
Good, very good question. A s I said in my presentation, we had a very diligent process in place as we moved from our prior logistics provider to the new one. We started a process already in 2022, and in Q1, we started transitioning the IT system, did very thorough testing, and then, starting Q2, we also started transferring the product portfolio from the former logistics provider to the new logistics provider. That went very well until end of Q3, when we had transferred about 70% of the portfolio, and but as we transitioned the remaining product portfolio up to 100% in Q4, where they had been faced with process inefficiency, that then led actually to this buildup of backlog. Initially, we thought that they can get over this very quickly.
We had constant calls with them, but it turned out that they really couldn't break it down in Q4. Regarding, we're working very closely with them on resolving these issues as quickly as possible. We have our best logistics experts on site with them as well, to make sure that we really can work this down during Q1. As we said, this is from our perspective really a transitional situation that we most of that we can resolve in Q1. Regarding your question regarding the backlog size, and as I said, the backlogs increase is probably proportional to a decline in sales that we have seen in Q4, right? T hat's, I would say if you calculate out that increased backlog, our sales would have been within the range that we have guided.
Great. T hen, just alongside that 4 Q update, you mentioned in the presentation that China was in line with your prior guidance, Europe was significantly impacted, Americas was lower. Could you just clarify that for us? Was that a comment just solely regarding this logistics issue? Or in terms of the Europe and the U.S. performance, was that in addition to the logistics-
Yeah
-performance relative to your expectations?
Well, I'll let Shawn give you more details on the numbers, though.
Perfect.
Yeah. Okay, thanks, Rachel. Hey, maybe I'll give you a little bit of color by region, excluding the impact of the shipping delays. A s we said in the prepared remarks, China came in as expected. This is a global issue, so there was actually a little impact in China. I f you exclude the shipping delays in China, China would have come in actually slightly better. That's kind of the same for the Americas. The Americas would have come in slightly better, a little bit more impacted than China from the shipping delays. T hen if we look at Europe, Europe was the most impacted out of the three regions, and it would have also been lower than expected.
We did see some softness in food manufacturing in the quarter in Europe, as well as I think Germany came in a little bit lighter. Of course, we're still analyzing the results, and we'll provide more color when we update you in February. T hen from a divisional perspective, I'd say the lab business, as we said in the prepared remarks, was the most impacted. If you exclude the shipping delays, it was generally in line with what we would have guided, you know, maybe like a point worse kind of thing. You know, industrial was in line overall. If you exclude the shipping delays, it was actually a little bit better than expected.
We were very pleased with the results of the Core Industrial business in the quarter, while PI was a little bit worse than expected. Then, retail was also very much impacted by the shipping delays, and if we exclude those effects, it would have been slightly lower than expected than our guidance.
Got it. Okay, that's helpful. T hen, I just wanted to talk about your conviction level and being able to catch up some of these slipped revenues in 1Q. First, could you just clarify for us, have you resolved this issue fully, or like, what stage in the process are you kind of remediating some of this? T hen, how does that give you conviction in being able to catch up this in 1Q or maybe early 2Q?
Yeah. A s I said, we are on up to Q3, and up to the moment we have, we have moved 70% of the portfolio, the operation was running fine. A s we moved the remaining part of the portfolio, which also had a bit more comprehensive manifest processes in there, the new provider ran into issues, and we quickly went there to understand what the issues are, trained their people on the manifest process, made sure that they understand what they need to do to complete shipments, et cetera. And as of today, we are, as I said, we are working very closely with our best logistics experts up there on site to help to really optimize the process flow.
My conviction that we can get this resolved to in, through Q1 is very high. These are, again, we see this as transitional issues. It's a new setup. It's actually a, a complete new hub that they have built up with a lot of new automation capabilities. T hey have demonstrated throughout the quarter on several days that they can manage the volume, but then they had process issues on other days. They also faced some issues with the Dutch customs system, which had been down a couple of days during the quarter, and that all piled up to, to this incremental backlog. A s I said, my, our team is there. I'm in regular phone calls with their executive team, including their CEO, to make sure that they have all hands on deck to get this resolved.
Great, helpful. T hen, I appreciate you said that you are not gonna touch the 2024 guidance right now, and kind of pointed us towards that 4Q earnings call. I guess, how should we think about how you're going to be approaching that guidance? Obviously, you had roughly $60 million of revenue slip from 4Q to 1Q. You just mentioned your high conviction in being able to hit that. S hould we read that as, oh, it just helps you hit that, that 2024 guidance, or is there something underneath in terms of demand or any incremental weakness that would lead you to not ultimately let that guide?
Yeah. Hey, we appreciate the question. Of course, you know, we're still analyzing the numbers. You know, to kind of put a number on it, it's probably in, you know, probably is in the $55 million range or so. You know, it could be in the higher 50s. We'll, we'll, we'll see. I n terms of, in terms of 2024, it, you know, we do fully expect this to be a benefit. Y ou know, in terms of providing more insights on the market and guidance for 2024, you know, we need to kind of continue to analyze the quarter and go through our normal process, and be very happy to update you in February.
Understood, had to try. Maybe just while we're kind of touching on 4Q here, budget flush has been a topic that's been coming up a lot this week. Just given the results that you just walked us through, you hadn't really been expecting much of a normal budget flush. You've mentioned that as of November, you hadn't seen it yet. W hat's the latest update? Did you see any catch-up in spend during 4Q in those numbers?
In terms of budget flush, I think the quarter pretty much came in as it, you know, generally as we expected, excluding this one issue. T hat kind of includes, you know, really not much of a budget flush at all. Yes.
Okay, helpful. T hen I wanted to touch on the topic of long-term guidance. That's another area that's come up a lot in most of these conversations with tools companies. Mettler's guiding to at or above 6%, local currency growth over that medium term. J ust given the downturn that we're seeing right now, whether that's from macro or- some of these cyclical issues, can you talk about your conviction level in hitting those long-term targets still?
Yeah, sure. Look, we as a company, we have been around 5% growth company for a decade on average, and there have been ups and downs during this timeframe as well. I f you look at the shift in our product mix that we have today, we have actually a broader expansion now in the lab business. We have broader footprint in the life science business, and if you look at the growth, mid- to long-term growth opportunities in these underlying market segments, we see actually that we're very well positioned to capture market share gains and small gains as we did in the past, on top of the underlying market gains. We see a clear need for digitalization and automation in the industrial markets, which we are fully focused on delivering that to our customers.
If you take all of that together, I think we are very well positioned to get to the 6% on the medium to long term. Of course, if the market will be suppressed for a very long time, saying no growth in the market, we also will not achieve the 6%. I f the market gets back to, let's say, 4%-5% growth, in with our incremental market share gains, we are very confident that we can get to the 6% +.
Okay, that's helpful. Then I wanted to shift over to China. Y ou mentioned that China, ex some of these logistics issues, actually would have performed better than your expectations. One of the key questions we've been getting from investors this week and having companies try to answer is just: What sense of stabilization are you seeing in the region? Are you actually just seeing this be steady relative to 3Q, or have you seen any type of inflection really in China?
Yeah, I mean, we said, we said in our remarks that we expected Q4 similar to Q3. Q3 was down - 25%. As we also said, Q4 came in in line with our expectations. I would not say we see a big inflection forward, but it at least didn't get worse.W e also said already in our Q3 call that we expect the first half of 2024 in China to be down before we then get also to easier comparison in the second half of the year, and then get to, I would say, more normalized conditions.
Okay. Maybe digging into that a little bit deeper, can you just spend a minute more talking about that pace of recovery? What do we need to see before it sees that inflection? How much of that is just driven by comp dynamics or increased spending in the region?
Well, I think that you see several factors right now in China that really, I would say, hold the economy back. One is the lack of stimulus by the government post-COVID. It's really a big factor that many of our customers are waiting for and saying, "Give us more confidence that we can continue to invest in this area." Once that's happening, I think you will see also the investment of the local companies to continue to increase. T hat stability is important. Then there's also uncertainty we have right now about the whole home shoring or reshoring efforts of some multinational companies. We are not that much exposed because our customer base of multinationals in China is only about 15%, but it's still having some impact on the overall economy.
If these factors will normalize moving forward, I think the long-term commitment of the Chinese government in, you know, improving healthcare, in increasing R&D, research and development in China, in providing safer food, et cetera, all of the commitment is clear, is very strong from the Chinese government in their five-year plan, and when they will get back to these investments. W hat we're seeing right now is that our sales team is actually still very engaged with our customers. It's just the customers don't release the budget. T here's still a lot of activity. We see a lot of interest from our customers in our products. We don't have any indications at the moment that we would lose market share in this situation.
To the contrary, I think we are competing very effectively in China. A gain, once this, the stimulus comes back, once this confidence comes back in the market, I think you will see, again, strong growth. O ur long-term view on China is that for us, it will be a high single-digit growth over long term.
Got it. Okay, that's helpful. Then I kind of wanted to dig into some of the segments here quickly. Just in terms of the lab segment, you talked about how you expect improvement in the back half of 2024. You should face some easier comps, but also some of a market rebound. C an you kind of walk us through what trends are you seeing from different customers versus different application types across large and small molecule, for example, within the lab segment?
Do you want to cover that?
Yeah, sure. I f we kind of like, look at the year, and this is, you know, we'll provide updated guidance of course, here in February. I f we kind of look at, you know, what we saw a little bit in 4Q, but also what, how we guided in Q3, we do see maybe more softness on, still on the, on the bioprocessing side of the business. Like, if we, if we get into, you know, Process Analytics as a, as an example, we've highlighted, you know, single-use technology as an area where there, you know, has been a, a destocking issue in the market. We still continue to see that playing out, so we expect maybe softer results, more in that kind of a business as we start the year.
We also are very optimistic, kind of, you know, as we kind of go into the second half of the year, just, you know, based on customer interactions, et cetera. You know, as we kind of like, look at the rest of the portfolio, you know, hey, we'll see how it plays out. Again, we'll give more color as we kind of, like, update everybody in February. A s you mentioned, we do have much easier comps in the second half of the year, including a lack of budget flush in 2023, which I think should help as well, too.
Perfect. Helpful. T hen I wanted to briefly ask on Core Industrial, so that represents roughly a fourth of your revenues. You've highlighted that the Spinnaker program has enabled that Core Industrial business to shift away from more of those cynical-
Cyclical.
-cyclical, excuse me, cyclical sub-segments. T hat said, can you kind of walk us through how much of that remaining business for Core Industrial is truly exposed to those cyclical markets? T hen kind of where do we go from here?
Well, I wouldn't break it down in terms of cyclical market, but I would look at the portfolio about what we are really delivering to our customers. I f you think about industrial for Mettler-Toledo , think about industrial automation. This is really what we are driving our customers. There's a strong need for our customers to drive automation and digitalization. They are all under pressure to reduce cost, drive up productivity, shrinking workforce, et cetera. T hey're looking to us to help them to expand our portfolio, to help them to drive further automation. This is what we're doing with our solutions, and we have significantly shifted our portfolio to more automation capabilities, very strong software capabilities around our portfolio, making sure we have all the right up-to-date interfaces into the factory information systems.
I think that drives a lot of the growth that we're seeing right now in industrial business, and also takes out that cyclical data that you speak about.
Helpful. Then maybe in the last minute or so here, Patrick, I just wanted to ask you, what do you think is the most underappreciated aspect of the Mettler- Toledo story?
I think what's most underappreciated about Mettler-Toledo is really our strength as a company to go after market segments with our very unique tools that we have in terms of the spending on our marketing program. I talked a bit about Top K. It's really an in-house developed solution that we leverage to find these investments and drive the sales force to these accounts. We are super competitive in that area. That, combined with a really updated portfolio and much higher investment in R&D that we have done over the last two years, will position us extremely well to capture the growth when the market picks up again.
Perfect. With that, we are out of time. Thank you so much.
Great
For joining us today, everyone.
Thank you.
Thank you. Great.