Okay, we're going to go ahead and get started. Good afternoon, everyone, and, welcome again to the William Blair Growth Stock Conference. I'm Brian Drab, the industrial technology analyst covering nVent. You're, of course, at the nVent presentation, and before we do get started, I have to mention that you can find a full list of research disclosures on our website, williamblair.com. Today, we're very happy to have with us CEO, Beth Wozniak, and Head of Investor Relations, Tony Riter. I'll just say a couple words on the company and then turn it right over to Beth. I covered Pentair for years, so I'm familiar with, some of the businesses that are within nVent, you know, going back a long ways. I also cover a company called Thermon, who's been the biggest competitor to their thermal, division.
And at some point, I decided that the electrical businesses weren't as exciting as I wished they were. Just to be honest, bear with me, Beth, here for a second. This is leading somewhere good, I hope. And the thermal business I always found very interesting, you know, great margins, and it's an oligopoly, nVent and Thermon are, you know, kind of dominate the heat tracing world in the industrial world globally. Now, I came back to the company, you know, and picked up coverage last year because I realized these electrical businesses, some of which were kind of 3%, growth businesses, have been energized, and pun intended, by the electrification theme.
So, you know, these businesses that were, you know, slower growth are now, over the last few years, even with the big dip down during the pandemic, have been growing, like, 6% organically. The company overall, kind of 6% organic revenue growth over the last few years, and, the electrification theme is obviously much more interesting and top of mind than it has been in the past. On top of that, there's great data center exposure here. I think we could run some sort of correlation between how, you know, full rooms are and companies with, data center and AI exposure. This is a great play on, on that theme as well. So I'm going to stop talking 'cause I realize I just went two minutes, and I didn't intend to. Beth, please take over. Thank you very much for being here.
Right. Well, good afternoon, everyone. So that's the introduction to nVent. We came up with the name because we were a SpinCo six years ago, and we recognized what we did was a lot around electrical connection, protection, and we invented things. You have to buy the URL, and you have to make up names, and that's how we got to nVent, but it turned out to be a pretty cool name. So of course, our forward-looking statements, I wanted to go here because I think one of the things as we became our own stand-up company is we recognized that our role in this world of electrification is to build a more sustainable and electrified world, and that's a lot what unifies us and our purpose and mission. Today, we are a $3.3 billion company.
We have really nice margins. Our return on sales is about 22.1%. Our EPS grew 28% last year, and our free cash flow, very strong. We have great cash flow generation. And I might add, you know, we grew 12% last year. That was a reported number. The year before that, our organic growth was around 20%, and the year before that, 18%. We set a goal of coming out of the pandemic to emerge stronger. So yes, it's great to be an electrical business, but I also think it's our strategy that's helped us to really accelerate our growth. We have three segments, our largest being our enclosure segment, but I want to share something with you. It's really more about system protection, and I think that's the direction we're going to go with the name change here.
Then we have our electrical and fastening solutions business and thermal management. One of the interesting things about our portfolio is we've really focused on diversifying it, and in particular, around infrastructure. So you can see here that infrastructure represents around 25% of our sales. That used to be low teens, and that just points to data centers, utilities, renewables, all of those areas growing.
I'm so sorry. One second.
All right.
We're going to make sure the mic in for the web-
All right.
Okay, well, I, I'm not going to repeat all that. I'm going to keep going, assume you're with me. So, you know, here's what I would say about nVent. We have, the last three years, very strong growth, very strong earnings per share growth, and great cash flow generation that allows us to do a lot with our capital allocation strategy. We always talk about globalizing our business, but we've done six deals, and they're predominantly always in the U.S., so it keeps contributing to North America, but it is a great place to grow with electrification. I often get asked about: What are the value propositions? Because when you look at some of our products, they look very simplistic. But what I always share is when you look at our enclosures or you look at our fastening solutions, we have mission-critical applications.
Think about this: everything that is in a enclosure is electronics that's driving an automation system or a data center. That protection that we provide is really critical, and we meet all kinds of specifications. When it comes to resiliency and safety, of course, in an electrification world, that's really paramount, but we provide solutions that take labor off the job site. We provide solutions that make things easier to install or more resilient connections. Lastly, we contribute to our customers' productivity. A unique thing for us is we're a low cost in the bill of materials, so we create outsized value with the savings that we provide to our customers, whether it's taking time off the job site or energy efficiency. There are some examples there of some of the things that we do.
If I go back to our spin out of another public company, at that time, we were $2.2 billion. We grew over a billion to now be $3.3 billion as of last year. I think maybe more impressive is the growth in our market cap that went from just under $4 billion to last week it was around $13.8 billion. So we've had some nice value creation. And what got us there was: how do we scale our businesses? We started as a collection of acquisitions, so we've really started focusing on our growth through distribution, having the story around sustainability and electrification. I like to share that we're a top 10 supplier in the electrical industry in North America, top 15-20 when it comes to rest of the world.
So at our size, in a very large space, we are one of the leaders. It just goes to show how fragmented that space is. Our strategy was to focus in these areas of high growth, like data centers, like utilities, driving new products, and I'll share a terrific story about innovation and what we've done there. And then, of course, doing acquisitions and a digital transformation. And so when you look at some factors there, our new product vitality, which is a measure of our revenue generated from our new products over a five-year period, now sits at 22%. It was in the low teens.
When you look at infrastructure, I made this point, maybe you didn't hear it because I was, my mic wasn't working, but 25% of our sales are into infrastructure, and we've done over $500 million in acquisitions over the last several years. So I think it's been a nice transformation, and our journey's... You know, we're a lot, a lot of growth potential and value creation as this journey continues. When we look at our business and how it's positioned, we're focused on building out our portfolio to maximize the revenue generation given these trends. So the first is sustainability, and whether that's more renewable energy or the energy transition, 50% of global electricity will be from renewables by 2050.
So we do everything from enclosures and fastening solutions and our thermal management business, which is focused on the energy transition around carbon capture, hydrogen, clean fuels, for example. We look at the electrification of everything, so this goes into areas around transmission, distribution. It goes into just electric vehicles, energy storage, all of those areas. Digitalization, AI. We've been doing liquid cooling, and I'll share a story about that, as an industrial company for over a decade. We talked all the time to our investors about liquid cooling, and everyone was like: "Well, that's interesting." But when ChatGPT and NVIDIA and everyone started talking about these chips that needed liquid cooling, we had a lot more interest, and we're really well-positioned there, and I'll talk more about that. And lastly, we benefit from these infrastructure investments. The great thing about nVent is our products are essential.
You cannot build any electrical infrastructure without grounding, bonding, power connections, enclosures. They are required to build out that electrical infrastructure, and we benefit from all of these trends. So we like to say we're connecting and protecting, 'cause that's what we do with our portfolio, around the electrification of everything, and we're in some of these infrastructure areas here and beyond. Our strategy, which has largely been in place since we were a new company, has been very consistent, but we keep executing on the elements. And One nVent speaks to how do we drive digital capabilities and data across the company, to how do we go to market through these big channel partners and have a strategic partnership? And that's been a core differentiator for us and a moat. High-growth verticals, focused on infrastructure, focused on those industries that are going to grow faster.
I spoke to new products. We're, we're expanding globally, and we've done six deals, and that's been very... They've been very successful for us, and I'll characterize how we think about M&A. And then lastly, you know, like everyone, we're continuing to drive digital capabilities, which is essential. You know, as we see consolidation in the electrical industry of distributors, suppliers are consolidating as well because small players do not have the capability to serve customers in a digital manner, and that's really key as we go forward. And working capital, an area we're always working on to improve. I mentioned our cash flow generation is very strong, but we have opportunity here on inventory and other areas.
Lastly, we always think about productivity and velocity, and velocity in how we serve customers, but velocity in how we launch new products and how we drive our performance as a company. I mentioned one of those core blocks is new products, and here's the journey. When we first started, I would tell you it took us, like, 2-3 years to launch a new product. That's now down to one year. Last year, we had a record number of new products released at 95, and they contributed 2-3 points to growth. One of the ways that we outperform and stay ahead is coming up with new products that create value for our customers.
Whether it's the technology around liquid cooling or whether that's around electrical connections, around our thermal cables, around our software capabilities, there's a lot of software that we wrap around our solutions to help in configuration, the selection of our products, as well as to help in the manufacturing capability. This is a great story, and we're on a journey to get to 25% vitality, and I think we're clearly headed in the right direction. When it comes to high-growth verticals, we were always asked this question around: What % of the nVent portfolio is tied to secular trends versus cyclical?
Last year at our Investor Day in March, we did some work to look at what are these trends, and we found about 60% of our portfolio is tied to these secular trends, and we're continuing to work it to be a greater percentage. When you look at industrial, and the numbers across the top is our revenue percentage, it's things like industrial automation. It's reshoring. It's, like, the investments that are going into the CHIPS Act, for example, that are building out battery plants, where we see a lot of industrial opportunities. When it comes to commercial and resi, and as we've said for this year, this is a softer area. It's not as large of a piece of our portfolio anymore. But every building you go into is having more density of power and data, and we have labor shortages.
Our one brand, nVent CADDY, is a beloved brand by electrical contractors because it saves time on the job. And then infrastructure, now 25% of our portfolio, of course, a lot of our growth in data solutions, but it's also utilities, renewables, energy storage, e-mobility, and we keep strengthening what we do here. And lastly, around energy, our focus has been around the energy transition, and that's carbon capture. It's clean fuels. It's hydrogen. These are areas where we believe there's investment and significant runway for growth. I wanted to speak about data centers as an example of a high-growth vertical, and this is a chart that we used in one of our latest earnings calls. When we spun as a new company, only $100 million of our revenue was in data centers. This year, we will cross the half-billion-dollar mark.
Now, what is driving that growth? You can see we have a lot of different products here. We've got cable management and enclosures, racks, cabinets, liquid cooling, leak detection, power distribution units. I would say liquid cooling is the key driver of the growth that we're seeing here, although I would say some of the portfolio is growing at that same rate. We believe that data centers today are only 5% liquid-cooled, and we believe over five years, that will be 28%, or 25%, rather, by 2028. And what's driving that are some of the chip densities and heat, that they require liquid cooling. And the story I want to share here is that in our industrial applications, you know, heat is the enemy of electronics, and when you enclose an automation system in an enclosure, it gets hot.
And so we've been doing air conditioning and cooling and enclosures for many, many years, and we got into liquid cooling well over 10-15 years ago. A hyperscaler, prior to when we spun, found one of our customers and said, "Who is doing this solution for you?" And they said, "That's nVent." And we began to work with them 7-8 years ago to develop liquid, liquid cooling systems in a true partnership. Since then, we developed some more standardized offerings, some cooling distribution units. We do everything from partnering, whether it's a cold plate or an immersion unit. We do all the manifolds and the connection systems, the power distribution, through to a cooling distribution unit, known as a CDU. We also do things like liquid-to-air rear door heat exchangers.
We have a lot of capability working from hyperscalers to the server providers to enterprise colo, even taking some of our products through distribution, which is the play where we want to get to. This is an area that has had rapid growth and expansion. A year ago, we had doubled our capacity by expanding some of our footprint, and when things got hot around AI, our customers asked us to accelerate. In fact, we didn't think that we could build a new plant fast enough, so we found a distribution center and moved more manufacturing off-site, distribution off-site, so we could increase our capacity by 4x. We're building out our lab capability. We're building out more capability to really scale.
We feel we have a leadership position because we've been doing this for a while now and because we have manufacturing expertise, and we know that because we've built up a supply chain who can work with us to scale rapidly. So we're investing more here. It's growing significantly, and it's a very exciting future here with expanding this portfolio. I wanted to talk about acquisitions 'cause this also has had huge value creation for us. We've done six deals since we've spun, not in our first year, 'cause we were standing up as a new public company, not during the pandemic, 'cause those were very challenging times.
But I want to make a point: When we do acquisitions, we believe that where we play in the electrical industry, it's a $90 billion space, and we always look for great products that are focused in those high-growth vertical... that we can scale and grow. And I'll give a few examples here. Our Eldon portfolio was an enclosures portfolio in Europe. They didn't have access to those distribution channels. We were able to take that product portfolio, bring it into Europe, bring it into Asia, scale it, and it has grown significantly. Wire basket tray, that's what WBT stands for, is an attachment into that data center space, and our wire basket tray cable management has been growing at the same rate as our liquid cooling....
Fast-forward to, you know, our largest deal ever, ECM Industries, got us power connections that we'll globalize and bring through our channels. And lastly, the small one that we did in Europe, TEXA, provides us more industrial cooling capability. We believe liquid cooling is not just going to play in data centers. In fact, we believe there's areas like battery energy storage. Just as you go into a data center and see a lot of cabinets, and it gets very hot with those servers, a lot of batteries in an e-house get very hot as well, and so we're making some plays into liquid cooling for energy storage. So it's just an example of the acquisitions that we're doing. We have the ability to take some great portfolios and scale them into high-growth verticals.
I wanted to share this, a chart here, and it's something that we are very proud of, as a company, the recognition that we've received. So not only did we start, you know, and have a strategy to grow and take advantage of macro trends, but, you know, you only can do that if you have a great culture and great people. And along the way, we also said, "If we're going to drive sustainability and electrification, then we need to be ensuring that we're a company that is doing the right things." So we've had three pillars to our sustainability report: people, products, and planet. And a lot that we're doing around our culture, being a best place to work, increasing women in management, safety performance. Our products, it goes without saying, they're driving energy efficiency. They're driving resiliency and safety.
We're trying to use less materials, more green products. And planet, there's things that we're doing to reduce our emissions, our water usage, and we set some new goals this year around eliminating single-use plastics in our packaging for products and reducing our water consumption. So I think we've got a really great trajectory and story here, and I think this is one of those things that drives purpose for us in what we do and how we operate, and lots of great awards that we've received as a company, especially for our size. So I want to close with this. I always like to tell our organization that our future is bright. You know, we are well positioned to grow with the electrification of everything and sustainability. We believe we've got demonstrated performance and value creation, and we're not done.
There is more potential, and as we look at 2024 and beyond, we've got strong sales, strong profit growth potential, and robust free cash flow, and that's going to continue. So hopefully that gave you a sense of nVent and what we do and the journey that we're on, and the excitement that we share for this future of electrification and sustainability. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Beth. We have eight minutes for some Q&A. Maybe I'll ask the first question. Is her mic working now, by the way?
I can stand, I can stand here.
Oh.
That's fine.
Um...
That works.
We're good?
Yeah.
Yeah. That's good. All right. Thanks again. I'll ask the first question. Maybe if, if you don't mind, can we talk about just some of the near-term trends, and, you know, want to focus on the big picture, and there's obviously great long-term secular trends, but, you know, second quarter, the guidance was for 3%-5% organic revenue growth. Can you talk about, you know, what... How that varies across maybe the different segments, and
Sure.
You know, what some of the current situations are?
So we had 5% in our first quarter, and we said as we look to the second quarter, we thought that we would see continued strong growth in data centers. Our enclosures segment, which is most of where data centers play, had grown at 11%. We said it's probably high single digits as we look forward. As we looked at our EFS segment, we said that's probably similar to what we did in Q1, and our thermal management business is growing because of the energy transition. So I think generally speaking, data centers, AI, digitalization, liquid cooling, that is all strong demand.
We're seeing some rebalancing of inventories in the channel, even though the macro trends are very solid, that we've come off a couple of years where there was constrained supply chains or long lead times, and so our big distribution partners have done some adjustments of those inventories, and we think that plays through a little bit in the second quarter. I would say this, you know, commercial resi are softer. But then what we also see is there's good trends in industrial, especially with some of these mega projects and reshoring and some of the automation build-out.
Maybe I'll just ask one more, and then we can open it up if anyone has a question. You mentioned in the presentation, when you were talking about cooling and data center cooling, the opportunity to go through distribution, and can you talk about your initiatives to standardize some of that product line and then leverage distribution to, you know, grow even faster there?
Yeah.
Thanks.
I mean, as a company, you know, our solutions are very ubiquitous, and they go, you know. We have products that go through different verticals. There may be some different specs, but we drive to modular solutions. And so, while we've been working a lot with hyperscalers, we've created some modularity in our offerings. And as you can envision, the traction around AI and getting to see some of these high-performance chips being used in other applications requires there to be solutions that are available to everyone. And so our strategy there is to create some standard units, and we have some today. We have cooling distribution units, which are really the controls, and they're really providing the sensing technology and the controls capability for the system.
We have rear door heat exchangers, which could be liquid to air or air to liquid, that you can roll right up to a data center, to a rack if you have a hot spot, and some of the other products obviously that we do: power distribution units, cable management, basic networking and cabling. But we believe that as we develop some liquid cooling standard offerings that can be used by system integrators, enterprise colo, to be sold through distribution, is the way that we start to see this scale. And it's always been how we, as a company, have pursued our strategy, is to proliferate some of these product offerings through those channels to reach as many customers as possible. So we've started that journey, and, but I believe we're many years into developing full suites of products that can be used across various applications.
Great, thanks. Are there any questions from the audience, and how do we handle that? If there's, can we get a mic to people in the audience? This is it. I got it. I will. I can move around. All right.
Excellent. Thanks very much. I mean, so we all know kind of the case for AI and data center, CapEx spending. I would say, you know, as you sit here today, what would be the most likely, drivers or variables that could cause the growth to, come in less than maybe what you're expecting? Not, not maybe down or stop, but, coming a little bit slower and thinking specifically on data center equipment CapEx.
Well, I think right now it seems like our view, and we work with all the hyperscalers, is there's a race, right, to build out all that infrastructure, and some of it may be their own timing of deployment. What could slow that down is, I think, as all these data centers come online, they consume a lot of power. And so, you know, you can see the studies are out there about how much data centers are going to utilize of the grid capacity, and I believe at some point that's gonna become a challenge. And you already see there are some states that don't want any more data centers to be built. So I think that's one thing. The other is, I just think it takes timing for some of these deployments, especially as new customers try to figure out how to use liquid cooling.
So I believe, you know, the view is this is the direction that we're going. There's huge energy efficiency benefits to liquid cooling as well. You know, we know that liquid cooling can actually reduce the energy usage in a data center by about 50%. So, that's not why we're using it today. It's really for performance requirements. So I think this is the direction that we're heading, but, you know, that, that trajectory may have some puts and takes to it, just as there's constraints on labor or constraints on power availability.
Thank you.
Look, I think anybody who's in the data center space, right, is looking to get into liquid cooling. And so if you were traditionally in air cooling, I think the view is you wanna get into liquid cooling. So I think there's many startups, and there's other players who've been in data centers who are developing their capability to get there.
I'll maybe broaden that question because this is one that I get a lot from investors is, I mean, clearly, you have a long history of cooling technologies and data center technologies, but can you just elaborate in the last minute here, you know, what differentiates you from some of the competitors in that data center space?
So I think the fact is we've been doing liquid cooling and with some hyperscaler partners for over... longer than we've been a company, seven, eight years. And we've developed solutions that we have a lot of learning in terms of capability. We meet all the performance specifications on specs. We know there's others that advertise specs that maybe they haven't tested to. We have that full capability. In some cases, working with a new customer to come up with a new solution has taken a couple of years between them and ourselves. So I think we've got a lot of experience in application, and I can't not emphasize the manufacturing capability. I think a lot of startups who have decided to contract that out, that is tougher. You're not in control of your supply chain. We are a manufacturer.
We build millions of products every year, and so our ability to manage the entire supply chain. So when we talk about increasing our capacity by 4x, it's not just within our four walls, it's also the capacity of our suppliers to do that. I think that's a big differentiator because, knowing how to manage that, we know from, you know, the last couple of years how challenging supply chains can be.
With that, we'll wrap up. Thanks very much, Beth. My mic's off now. Thank you very much.
All right. Thank you.