Great. So we're going to get restarted with nVent hitting the home stretch here on the conference. This is the afternoon of day three. We've got four more presentations. As I mentioned, we're going to kind of keep the best for the last presentations. nVent certainly is one I've been looking forward to, just given all the transformation of the portfolio and what I think will be accelerated growth. With me on stage is Beth Wozniak, Chairman and CEO of nVent, and Gary Corona, I think it's better to say the new CFO of nVent. Beth, I know you've got some slides, so please kick off and we'll get into Q&A.
All right, thank you. Just a couple of slides. I'm going to start right here. Last year, you know, it was the start of our transformation, and we ended the year about $3 billion in sales, good return on sales in terms of our margins. As you know, we're always a great generator of free cash flow. I think what's interesting, as I flip a couple of charts forward, is just the trajectory of where we're headed as an electrical company, pure play around protection and connection. One of the things about our strategy, and you may have seen this slide before because we're very consistent, but you know, for us, growth is focused on high growth verticals, new products. M&A is a big piece of it and growing globally.
We're really focusing as a company about transforming our customer, our supplier, and our employee experience. That's something new you haven't seen. I think this is what is going to allow us to really scale what we do. We continue to execute there. The last slide, I think this is the most important one. When you think about the journey we've been on, we just closed on our eighth deal since we spun as a company. What happened in the course of the last year is we sold our thermal management business, we acquired TRACHTE and Avail EPG, and our portfolio is now 40% in what we call electrical infrastructure, which is where we see higher growth. 20% of our portfolio is in data solutions and another 20% in power utilities.
From transforming our overall portfolio and the places that we play, it's not only the high growth verticals, but we've also balanced more long cycle business with short cycle. That really is, you know, what has happened over the last year in terms of the movements that we've made with capital allocation. Very excited for our future and very excited as the electrical industry continues to grow and expand with all the developments across infrastructure. As we always like to say, you know, the trends of digitalization, sustainability, electrification, our transformation is on track, and we think it's going to be a strong year for us. We always say our future is bright. All right.
We won't go into this one.
We won't go into that.
Okay, thanks, Beth. Clearly, I think the slide towards the end where you laid out the 2025, this one here, the new portfolio, I think that's, maybe I'm wrong, but that might be the first time I've seen that slide where you lay out the pro forma new portfolio. I was surprised that utility is now 20% of sales. That's really important. So 20% data center, 20% utility. Maybe just given the rapid expansion of the utility segment, subsegment, I should say, maybe just talk about where you play and, you know, how nVent, the revenue model right now for nVent and utility.
We've always played in utilities, but it was to a much smaller scale. I would say what's got us to 20% are the two acquisitions of TRACHTE and Avail, which are focused on engineered building solutions. As we looked at our portfolio, it's really a larger enclosure with, you know, stronger integration capability. It tends to be longer cycle business. We see significant growth there because it's expanding in utilities, renewables, and data centers or battery energy storage. With TRACHTE and Avail, those two combined really give us a leadership position in this category.
Right. And the TRACHTE and Avail, do they play more in the substation area? Is it more transmission distribution?
Yeah, more transmission distribution and substation.
Yeah. Just to be clear, these are longer cycle backlog businesses.
They are.
Okay. Taking this a bit further, what kind of visibility do you have? Do you have visibility into, you know, into 2026 at this point?
We do. Yeah. Some of this backlog that we have goes into 2026. So we've got longer visibility.
Okay. And then the 40% data solutions and utility, how does the margin profile for these two portions of your portfolio compare to the average?
When we think about our data solutions business, we've always said it's, you know, a combination of products that fit in the system protection portfolio and electrical connections. The product portfolios largely reflect those two segments. In line with what we have expectations around those segments. I would say this, that for these newly acquired businesses, they've tended to come in at a lower margin, but we have so much opportunity from driving synergy savings, whether it's our professional sourcing, whether it's just on lean manufacturing, that we see a runway for margin improvement in these businesses over time. In the TRACHTE acquisition, there's one of the sites there that we've been able to more than double the output with the same number of people just by applying lean.
All of that productivity, I think, is still in front of us, and we expect to see that driven through Avail as well.
Yeah. If we assume that these, again, sticking with data solutions and utilities, if these grow at, say, 10%-20%, which feels like that's the right level, would they increment at about 35% incremental margins? Is there any reason why they wouldn't be higher than that?
Our model is to grow at, you know, a 30% incremental, and it's not to say that they can't do better than that. And certainly, you know, as we see synergy savings, we'll get those margins up. So even with, you know, Avail, if they're in the mid-teens, we will get them up over time.
Yeah. Okay. Nigel, what I would say is, you know, in the first quarter, as you saw, we overdelivered on TRACHTE on the top line. It also exceeded our expectations on the bottom line as well, which was nice to see, moving up that margin profile from where it came in.
Okay. Thanks, Gary. Maybe take a step back. You know, there's been a lot of, you know, management changes announced in the last two months, Gary being one of them, Sara leading up the, you know, segment leading now. Maybe just, is this just a change in the guard, but essentially nothing's changing internally, or are there things you want to achieve internally with this new leadership team?
Yeah, I think it's fair to say, you know, Sara was running two businesses, you know, two roles for a while. And so we brought in Gary as our new CFO. So we've had a great handoff and transition between Sara and Gary. Sara certainly knows the business. And when you think about both these power utilities and data solutions, those initiatives largely fall under her segment. So she really understands the drivers and how to execute. We brought in a new president to help us grow the electrical connections business. And Robert van der Kolk, who was leading that business, he is based over in Europe. And as our businesses with these acquisitions become more North American, it just does, we felt that we needed to have one of our leaders focused on growing Europe and Asia.
Robert being based in Europe, we thought that that would allow us to put focus there because, again, just the weight of what we do in North America and these acquisitions was just taking the leadership's focus and keeping it here, whereas we know there's growth potential outside of North America, and we wanted to have Robert as our senior leader focused on it. If anything, these are really additions to our team and strengthening our team is the way I think about it and align to where the, you know, align to where we're headed as a company.
Yeah. A lot of U.S. companies, a lot of U.S. electricals find it hard to grow outside of North America because you've got such dominant players like Siemens, Schneider in Europe. How do you manage to achieve that objective?
I think it's a couple of things. One, you need to make sure you've got the right product portfolio. You know, I look at the acquisitions that we have done in Europe, and it started with an enclosure portfolio that we have more than doubled in Europe because we were able to have the right product portfolio and expand it through channels. For us, it's continuing that playbook of looking at high growth verticals. We see data centers as a big growth opportunity over in Europe. We have been very focused with our portfolio and liquid cooling in North America, but we see that opportunity and investment to come in Europe. It's really about choosing the right verticals to focus on, having great product portfolios, and expanding through our channel relationships.
Okay. Thank you very much. We'll come back to data solutions, and that's going to surprise you, but we will come back to that. I just want to maybe touch on what you see in intra quarter, during the second quarter. You're forecasting 46% organic growth, a nice acceleration from the low single digit you saw in 1Q. Maybe just touch on what's driving that acceleration, your confidence in seeing that acceleration.
As we said, you know, our guidance, we raised our guidance really because of our backlog and our strong orders, particularly when it comes to data solutions and power utilities. If you also think about our TRACHTE acquisition, which we acquired in July last year, turns into organic growth. You saw that outperform in the first quarter. Those were really the key drivers for us and the confidence that we had to raise our guidance.
You know, in addition to the strength that we're seeing in the market, as you look at last year, recall first half, second half, our comps are much stronger in the first half. Last year, mid-single digits, and we were flattish in the back half. As Beth talked about, the TRACHTE acquisition is also giving us confidence in that acceleration. We'll see acceleration in Q2, and then the back half will accelerate from there.
Yeah.
Easier comps definitely a factor
in that as well.
I'm asking this to all my companies, just given the, quite frankly, the volatility of news flow, et cetera, but is there anything strange going on in terms of tariff behavior with customers, channel partners, et cetera? Anything you've seen out there?
We have not seen anything strange. Of course, it's an inflationary environment. And, you know, we, but we haven't seen any, you know, changes in terms of that demand because our sell-through from our distribution partners has been positive as well.
Yeah. Maybe just touching quickly on tariffs. You mentioned the inflationary environment. Your tariff exposure is more Mexico, Section 232. Maybe just talk about what you're seeing from that. Maybe just remind us on the pricing and offset strategies for that.
Yeah, I can take that. In our Q2, in our Q1 call, we talked about $120 million worth of tariff headwinds in FY 2025. You mentioned that the number one headwind is 232 steel. We do have some headwinds from China as well and other markets. We'll offset that with a combination of price, productivity, as well as some supply chain moves. In Q2, we'll see a bit of a mismatch on price cost, but as we get into the second half, we expect our base business to fully offset that and actually see some margin accretion in, you know, to offset that. Obviously, it's a very dynamic environment.
Our business teams are building in flexibility. We're not looking to, you know, generate profit off of the tariff environment. We want to keep that, we want to offset it. We have plans in place to be agile and offset those tariffs.
I'm guessing that the China import exposure is too small to have been affected too much by the pullback in, or rather the pause in the recent tariffs.
Yeah, I mean, we don't have a crystal ball, right? We know there's a 90-day pause, but it will help us a bit. Again, we'll thread the needle on pricing to ensure that we remain competitive.
Yeah. Okay. On margins, obviously margins were down a little bit in Q1. Tough comps, obviously. I think we're still going to be sort of underwater year over year in Q2 and Q3, maybe Q4, starting to get back on.
Yeah, I wouldn't, I don't want to guide on Q3 and Q4, but what I would say is in the second half, prior to Avail, we'll see margin accretion as the price cost gets aligned. You know, we've only owned Avail for a couple of weeks now, Avail EPG, but they'll come in a bit below on margin until we can get our productivity model really humming on Avail like we have for TRACHTE. So what's important is that the business model be healthy in the second half as we exit the year.
Yeah. Okay. I do want to come back to TRACHTE and EPG in a moment, just in terms of that integration and how they track into plan. Sounds like they're humming, by the way, but in terms of that, you know, the margin sequentially, just from one Q, is one Q still the low watermark for margin?
Yeah, we'll be up sequentially too.
Yeah. Okay, great. And then maybe one more, just on the framework, the pricing, just remind us in terms of, you know, what contribution we've seen from pricing as we go through the year.
Yeah, I would say broadly, as we, our construct this year was going to be more volume-driven from a growth perspective versus price. Obviously, the world's changed a lot in 90 days, as we shared in our Q1 call. Now we'll see more price than volume. That price will help us offset the inflation as well as the tariff headwind.
Okay, great. Beth, we've covered the utility portion of your business, I think, in some depth now. Maybe we can just go back to data solutions. A lot of investors are very interested in where you play in data centers.
Maybe just, you know, as the business has evolved through acquisitions, maybe just remind us, you know, the big buckets of exposure you have in data center and how you see that evolving.
Last year, you know, we said our data solutions business was about $600 million, and over 50% of that was tied to liquid cooling and power. Those are certainly areas that are growing significantly, although I would say there are other parts of that portfolio, just like our cable management, wire basket tray, that are growing just as fast. I will point out that with the new acquisitions, they also have some capability, and this is where it is very synergistic to what we do and our customer relationships, where we are expanding in data centers because of some of the gray space and providing more control houses and pods for data center opportunities as well.
Generally, you know, we see the trends, liquid cooling, but certainly the investment that is going into the overall infrastructure for AI driving demand for our products.
Okay. The control houses in the data center environment seem quite important because it frees up some, you know, the more switchgear you can put outside the building, the more you have for racks inside, which is obviously the revenue driver. That seems to be a real opportunity.
Absolutely. You're trying to maximize that space for the IT side. Anything you can put outside. As well, we're also seeing some interesting applications where you're almost looking at, are there more things from just like a modular data center that you could put into a control building as well? I, you know, we're seeing a lot of interesting opportunities.
Our relationships that we have had, I think, are additive to what was more of a utility-based business in both TRACHTE and Avail.
Thanks, Beth. So $3 million rack cooling, rack power. Have you broken out the liquid cooling portion of that?
We have not. Okay. Both have been growing very well for us. We see them also being very synergistic.
A lot of the companies that we track are talking about 20%+ data center growth, certainly for this year and medium term as well. Any reason why you would not be at that level or above?
I think it is what we see as the trend as well. We certainly have been accelerating in our growth.
You know, we can look at our backlog and our orders, and both are very strong. You know, I think we're going to see continued momentum here.
Yeah. I think it'd be reasonable to assume that just given that liquid cooling penetration is today still very low, I think maybe 5%-6% of total installations. I think most industry experts would say that goes to 30% or so in the next three, five years. You're going to be a genius to figure out that that probably grows faster than the industry in terms of, I mean, that's a fair assumption.
Yes, it is. You know, we've always said that as you start to see these chips that are having higher heat densities and performance requirements, that they need to have liquid cooling. You know, that will just proliferate.
You know, there is an energy efficiency play to this as well, because power is one of the constraints on building new data centers. Liquid cooling can provide energy efficiency up to 50%. The main driver right now has been the performance of the chip. I just think that penetration is going to increase over time. Sometimes we are seeing it is not pure liquid- to- liquid. It could be liquid- to- air cooling. There are solutions that we have that can retrofit data centers as well as for Greenfield.
How is the competitive environment changing within liquid cooling? We have got, you know, Schneider has bought Motivair, Carrier launching their CDU, et cetera. Are you seeing a meaningful pickup in terms of competitive environment there?
We have certainly seen a lot more entrance into, you know, having CDUs.
I think one of the important things is over the course of this year, there's going to be some specification requirements and standards through ASHRAE and others, which we think is really important because as we've been in this a long time, we have tested a lot of our products and shown the performance characteristics. Others may claim they meet certain specs, but they've not fully tested. We think for the industry as a whole, having specs, which we do across the rest of the electrical industry, is really important. We do think that not all will meet those specs. I think everyone's rushing to say they're in liquid cooling and, you know, maybe they have a prototype. It really comes down to ability to innovate, the ability to have that application and full system loop capability, and then managing your supply chain.
Really, as we're trying to scale quickly, you have to have a very resilient supply chain to be able to meet all the demands. Again, we've been at this for over a decade, and I think are continuing to prove that capability and expand upon it.
We had a great tour of your booth at ST24 last year. It seems like you're comfortably number one in this market right now. Is that fair?
We certainly think we're one of the leaders. I'm really excited for the Supercompute show this year because this will be a record year for us in terms of our new product launches.
I think you've seen that, you know, we've got a good partnership with NVIDIA, and we're one of their partners, and we're expanding that portfolio offering as liquid cooling and the different power requirements and CDUs that you're going to see a lot of new products at our booth this year.
Those new product launches, would they be tied to the new generation of chips being launched by?
Yes, some of them are going to be tied to that because they have to meet higher power and heat requirements. In other cases, we're just trying to broaden our offering into more standard and modularized solutions that we can to meet other customer needs beyond hyperscalers and colos, multi-tenant, enterprise, and through distribution.
Our strategy is always to expand to meet the needs of large hyperscalers through to customers who really may not know a lot about liquid cooling and need to be served through distribution to have a standard solution. We are really thinking about that longevity and that, you know, the future where liquid cooling is more prolific across various applications.
How interesting.
When we think about distribution, we think of the West Coast, the world. I am guessing these would be going through more kind of niche channels. Is that?
Yeah, I mean, those distributors that are in that IT space. So yes.
Yeah. Okay. Great. You talked about increasing capacity in liquid cooling by 4x, you know, going back to late, I think, 2023 or the next couple of years.
I think you raised your CapEx forecast for this year, and I think $10 million of that's going into additional liquid cooling. What is the message from that? Are we starting to run out of capacity at this point, or, I mean?
Yeah, we did take up our CapEx guidance last quarter, and really it is driven by that big backlog and the orders that we have on the books. I will say, while data solutions drove the majority of that increase, we also took our CapEx up for Avail EPG, as well as some investment that we're making in supply chain resiliency. Obviously, the supply chain's being pressed here as we move things around and look to deliver, you know, strong revenue. The CapEx came up because of digital, for sure.
Yeah. Great.
We've got a relatively full room here, so I want to make sure any questions get addressed here. Any questions, please raise your hand. Doesn't look like it, so let's continue. Before we touch on Avail and TRACHTE, I just want to go back to the investor day that I think the last investor day was early 2023, Tony, if I'm not mistaken. You put out a 4%-6% kind of cross-cycle growth rate for nVent. That feels horribly out of date because the portfolio has changed. I'm just wondering if we were to mark to market today and just think about, okay, this is what we said then, this is what we might say now. I mean, what does that 4%-6% do? It seems like it should be higher, but you tell me otherwise.
Yeah, as you know, after we announced the sale of our thermal business, we said this will position us as a higher growth pure play electrical company. By saying that, the implication is, yes, those targets will be higher than when we set them out a couple of years ago with thermal as part of our portfolio.
Yeah,
and I think, you know, you see that as, you know, we show on this chart that's still up here that with that focus on infrastructure, which is now 40% of our portfolio, it is higher growth.
Yeah,
and I think this transformation will result in us being, you know, upgrading, updating those midterm targets.
You see that in our guide for this year on the revenue line.
Yeah, and obviously, you had an investor day in the calendar for early March.
I think in light of the acquisition and the management changes, I think it's obvious why that didn't happen.
Yes, we had a lot going on.
You had a lot going on, a lot of balls in the air. Any dates yet for the next investor day?
Not quite, but sometime this year.
Oh, next year, okay. I managed to nail down Tony there, that's good news. Okay, we should look for that next year. That's good news. It sounds like 30% incremental margins are still sort of the framework that you'd be comfortable with. That's great. That really helps us out there. Obviously, early days on Avail, but maybe just talk about what you've seen so far. Any sort of comments you'd say in terms of expectations and what you're seeing out there?
I would say, you know, having owned TRACHTE in the portfolio and just seeing the growth potential, the productivity, new applications in data centers, we knew that Avail offered, you know, similar capability and expanded beyond that. I think we've continued to see their backlog increase. I think early days were very excited about the opportunity of combining these two businesses in, you know, because it creates a leadership position for us in the synergies that we saw on TRACHTE. We expect to see on Avail EPG. I do think by putting two portfolios together, it may accelerate some of our capabilities because we can align product technology roadmaps. We can, you know, we've got a lot of factories here, U.S.-based factories too, which we can optimize the footprint for capacity reasons. I think, you know, these businesses have been growing double digits.
You know, we expect as we own them that we're going to continue to have nice momentum.
Are you planning to run Avail and TRACHTE as separate businesses or integrate them?
We will eventually put them together as one business. While we're early days in the integration, it's only been a couple of weeks, we have to integrate a business into our HR systems and our digital systems and all of those things. We start early on looking at how do we align customers, how do we look at product technology roadmaps, how do we look at the footprint. I think as we, there's a period of time that we're integrating into nVent, but then we will start to bring these two businesses together.
Then, Beth, you meant, you know, obviously TRACHTE turns organic in June.
July, yeah.
July. Okay.
That's dang great. Okay. In July, so it's almost 10 months now. Maybe just talk about how is tracking versus plan and how the backlog has been evolving.
I would say cost synergies are tracking, sales synergies are above plan and our expectation, and growth has been higher. You know, we've seen the backlog grow sequentially.
Not bad. Sales synergies is something that obviously attracts a lot of attention. Where are you seeing the sales synergies between nVent and?
Yeah. As I mentioned, the TRACHTE business was predominantly focused in the utility space and some renewables and data centers.
Because of the relationships that we have with some of these hyperscale customers, as we're looking at gray space opportunities, we've been able to take some of our existing customers and show them the new capability that we have and win some new programs that are, you know, significant in size.
Okay. Is there a possibility or an opportunity to maybe integrate more content within the?
Absolutely. Yeah. You know, one of the things we always like to think about our businesses, any of our portfolios, that we really can be very horizontal across many applications and many different customers from through distribution. We serve customers direct, et cetera. As you look at the level of integration, we can provide a control house or we can integrate things into it.
You know, I've kind of made this very simplistic to say sometimes you see in these big control buildings, which are big enclosures, more enclosures inside. And there's other products in there that are nVent type products, whether it's wire basket tray or, and so where they're not specified by a customer, we have that opportunity to replace them with nVent products or eventually get those nVent products specified in there.
Okay. That sounds great. Maybe just finishing off on the surplus capital, you obviously still have a fair amount of cash and liquidity to deploy. Just wondering sort of the visibility you have in your pipeline, how that's been evolving. You know, we've seen obviously infrastructure as a vertical increasing. Do you think that will increase further as we do more M&A?
Yes.
I would say, you know, we have a, we always like to say that we are, where we play in connect and protect, we consider that about $100 billion space. And we are one of the larger players. It is very fragmented and our pipeline is healthy. I think you never can control the timing in M&A, but we have seen that there are lots of different opportunities. I think we have a very disciplined approach in terms of our financial modeling that makes these deals very, you know, they generate a lot of value because we want to cross the weighted average cost of capital in two to three years, right? Sales synergies are not in our model and they are on top of that.
Our flywheel that we've shown before is to have a great differentiated product portfolio that is in high growth verticals that we can then invest and scale. I think infrastructure is certainly a big focus for us.
I want to say you do most of your deals at about 12x EBITDA.
Yeah, 11x -1 2x.
Right. Then with synergies of maybe, I don't know, five points of sales, you're down below 10x .
Yes.
Not below 10x .
Yep.
Yep. The deals have been accretive to the top and bottom line fairly quickly, as you've seen. From a capacity perspective, we target between 2.5x . We've been able to quickly generate more capacity to do more. That's our expectation as we move throughout this fiscal year.
We're actually right at the 30-minute mark.
Why do we not draw a line there, Beth? Beth, any closing remarks?
Yeah, you know, I'm pretty excited for our future. You know, if you think about in the last year, we divested thermal, we acquired two businesses, we increased our dividend, we paid off some debt, and we still have capacity to do M&A and strengthen our leadership team. You know, now we see this and raised our guidance. I think it's pretty exciting about how the portfolio has transformed and where we're headed.
I agree. You've been very busy. Keep it up. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.