I'm John, the Industrial Technology Analyst at William Blair. Before we get started, I have to let you know that you can find a full list of research disclosures on our website, williamblair.com. Today, we're very happy to have with us the team from nVent: CEO, Beth Wozniak, CFO, Gary Corona, and Head of Investor Relations, Tony Reynders. Thank you for being with us. Beth recently—can I say this?
Yes, you can.
Recently had knee surgery, so she may or may not stand. I'm telling her she should relax and stay in the chair, and she's debating that, I think, right now. We'll see what happens. I think you should sit and just relax.
I'm going to start. I'll be flexible.
You're the CEO and the boss. So nVent, I think, as most people in the room probably know, provides a wide range of electrical products, fastening solutions and systems supporting electrical infrastructure across a range of industries, including industrial, commercial, and data center. They have a data center business that is now, well, they call it data solutions, a little over 20% of revenue, growing very rapidly. There's also a utility business which is benefiting from exposure to the data center industry that's growing very rapidly as well. Some exciting growth at nVent. I will get out of the way and turn it over to Beth to tell us more.
Thank you. All right.
Take it easy.
Okay.
Thank you for being here.
Okay. Good morning, everyone. I think what I'm most excited to talk to you about today is just the portfolio transformation at nVent. Last year, we announced the sale of our thermal management business. The way the portfolio looked last year, we were a $3 billion electrical company around connect and protect, which we have very longstanding brands that have mission-critical applications, and yet we're a low cost on the bill of material. That's one way we like to describe ourselves. As the world is electrifying, we've been shaping this portfolio to focus more on electrical infrastructure. With the sale of thermal management, we now have two segments, and we renamed them because since our spin seven years ago, a lot has changed at nVent. Systems protection and electrical connections. You can see we have nice ROS, nice margins, good EPS growth.
One of the hallmarks for us is very strong cash flow conversion. I'm going to show you a chart later on, and I think this is important. When you look at our vertical focus here, and this is as of the end of last year, about 33% of what we were of vertical growth was in infrastructure. That has changed significantly with some additions to our portfolio. We tend to be mostly a North American business because we keep doing acquisitions that have us growing within North America. If we think about this as a portfolio as the end of last year and where we're headed, we've had this strategy around nVent for a long period of time. If you look back at any materials, you would see our strategy with a few tweaks to it.
It is really how do we scale and grow as an electrical company to provide value to our customers and to all stakeholders. That strategy of growth has always revolved around high growth verticals, of which we consider infrastructure, new products, and innovation. Through our history, we have continued to increase our new product vitality. Last year, new products contributed about two points to growth, as they have the last couple of years. That is really important. We want to grow globally. We have now done our eighth acquisition. We have demonstrated very strong performance in terms of our integration and execution capability. New for us is transforming our experiences from our employee to our supplier to our customer, which is really about how do we differentiate, how do we scale, and how do we make it easier to do business with nVent.
Of course, digital data, all of those things, velocity is really key to us, working capital, and those elements have remained consistent in our strategy. When we talk about new products, one of the beautiful things about nVent is that we have these core technology platforms that can serve multiple verticals. There are six here in terms of cable management. We are known for providing labor-saving solutions and innovating to make the job easier for the contractor. That could be in a data center, that could be at a utility, that could be in a commercial building. Our second platform is control buildings. This came to us through the Tracti acquisition, and we have strengthened it yet again with our most recent acquisition of AVAIL EPG.
Think of this as a larger enclosure where we started, but the capability to integrate switchgear, the capability to build skids for data solutions, it really builds on a lot of core competencies for us, primarily in that infrastructure space and growing double digits. Then we have equipment protection, which is enclosures, cooling, other capability, liquid cooling, for which we've been at this for over two decades and have a leadership position in data solutions, having an installed base of over 1 GW. We think that's the largest installed base, by the way. Power connections, this is everything we do around fastening solutions, grounding, bonding, surge protection, flexible bus bar, for which we have a lot of innovation, and then power management, like intelligent power distribution units. What's key here, as I said, is that these products are really platforms that we can sell into multiple verticals.
Now, this is an important chart because it shows our history of when we spun. Back when we spun in 2018, we were just over a $2 billion company. We've done eight acquisitions to date and the sale of our thermal management business. If you looked at our portfolio just before we spun, only 12% of our revenue was in infrastructure, which we think of as data centers, power utilities, renewables. If you look at where we think we are today, if we snap the line, you would see that over 40% of our revenue is now coming from infrastructure, and that is growing the fastest. Data solutions and power utilities both represent about 20% of the portfolio.
What we've also done in this transformation, and this has happened in the last couple of years where we sold Thermal and acquired Tracti and AVAIL, is that we now have a large backlog business. We talked on our earnings call about that backlog growing sequentially and that we see strong orders and visibility into 2026 and beyond. That balance, we think, is really important in the portfolio. I wanted to just talk about data centers and liquid cooling because it is always the topic of interest for everyone. We have a leading portfolio in liquid cooling. We start with, and we can work with a cold plate or immersion. We provide the manifolds. We can provide rack CDUs, row CDUs, cooling distribution units, rear door heat exchangers, liquid- to- air, et cetera.
When you think about our portfolio, we are scaling it to create more standardized offerings that we can sell not only to hyperscalers, which are a large part of our customer base, but beyond through distribution and colo, enterprise system integrators. That is really one of the ways that we will scale this business. This will be a record year for new products for us. We have added more capacity, over four times the capacity, and are continuing to invest because of the rapid acceleration of growth. We have relationships and work with NVIDIA and AMD, and all of that informs our roadmap. We are very excited about liquid cooling. Not only are we going to see liquid cooling applications in data centers, but we are going to see liquid cooling applications for battery energy storage and even in industrial applications, which is where we started.
Last year, it was $600 million of sales growing double digits, for which cooling and power represented over half of that portfolio. I would share we often talk about how fast liquid cooling is growing, but other aspects of this portfolio are growing just as fast. I wanted to almost close on this chart because we think at nVent, our mission is to connect and protect. We talk about building a more sustainable and electrified world. We talk about the trends of digitalization, electrification. I think when we think about, we want to have the very best workforce. Our retention rate is great. We have purpose to what we're doing. Our employees are engaged in providing innovative solutions for the future. We've done a lot around our products, helping our customers solve sustainability challenges, and we're operating in a more sustainable way.
This is really key in how we think about nVent and our purpose. To close, the world is electrifying. There are several studies out there that show that the demand on the electrical grid is going to double by 2050. It took us 100 years to build out the infrastructure to where we are today. In 25 years, we essentially have to do the same again. Our products are essential for electrical infrastructure buildout. Our transformation is on track, and we're very excited about where the portfolio is exposed and the growth potential and opportunity that we have. I think you can continue to see us execute on strong sales, EPS growth, and robust cash flow this year and beyond.
I might just go back and while we talk, close, have this chart up because I think it really speaks to where nVent is today and where we're headed.
Thank you, Beth. We do have plenty of time for a little fireside chat, I guess we'll call it, and Q&A. We can open it up to questions from the audience. Please think of questions or feel free to ask them. Raise your hand if you're interested in doing so. As long as we went back to this chart, it shows the significant transformation of the business over the years. Maybe I could just start by talking about a couple of these acquisitions in a little more detail or ask you to talk about them in more detail. Tracti, what is Tracti? How do you find, it was $250 million, I think, in revenue when you bought it. It's probably closer to $300 million now. How do you find a business like that? And what are they doing? Why was that attractive to you?
How are you growing it so rapidly?
When we think about our portfolio and we talk a lot about systems protection, and if you think of what Tracti is, are essentially engineered building solutions, they really are a larger, and I'm saying this very simplistically, enclosure. We do a lot of studying opportunities and growth and where we see there's potential adjacencies where we can expand and build off our core competencies. As we identified Tracti as a control building, what we saw was it as a large enclosure with more enclosures inside, but it had commonality in terms of just the type of manufacturing capability. We acquired Tracti last year in July, and we were very clear to say that it was a new growth platform for us. Since then, we acquired AVAIL EPG, which is another business like that, which gives us a leading position putting these two businesses together.
When we look at the opportunity here, what we see is that buildout of the grid that needs to have control buildings that integrate switchgear or relay panels, for example. We also see that there are skid solutions required for data centers that, as hyperscalers or colos are trying to maximize the IT white space, they're looking to move equipment into external buildings so that these control buildings come into play. In fact, our relationships with some of the hyperscalers have allowed us to expand and drive synergies here. As a category, we find that there is huge growth potential used for solar, wind, battery storage, anything like that. You're going to see these control buildings.
As we talked about on our earnings call, our Tracti business exceeded our expectations in terms of growth, and we're seeing significant synergies both on the cost and on the sales side. We're one month into the AVAIL EPG acquisition, and we just think that between the two of them, the backlog growth, the future there matches our core competency. It's a great extension of what we do.
How do you find a business like that? Can you tell us a little bit about the process of finding that? The following question is the pipeline of other similar businesses that you see now.
We have a really effective business development and strategy group. When we look at growth opportunities, we actually do a study to know, is this an area that we would like to enter? What are the growth prospects? What are the capabilities? We have great relationships with a lot of companies that we have dealt with over the decades. We work with PE firms. We work with banks to know the market is so fragmented. We always talk about where we play as being a $100 billion space, and we're just over a $3 billion company, and we're a larger player. You can just imagine how fragmented it is. In the case of Tracti, we had known about that asset for a while. That one, we engaged in an auction process.
In the case of AVAIL EPG, it was through our relationships with the PE firm that this was a bilateral deal. I think when we look at the returns that we're going to generate from the multiples we paid, we know that there's significant value creation to be had.
There still is significant ability at nVent to do acquisitions. You have to use some of the funds from the thermal sale to buy AVAIL, but what is your focus now for the next acquisition? Are you thinking more bolt-on or something similar in size to these companies, or how are you thinking about that?
When we think about, we have a really robust funnel and pipeline of opportunity. I think we've demonstrated with three of our last four acquisitions that they're more sizable in scale, that we have the ability to be effective in integrating larger-sized deals. We certainly like the infrastructure space. That is an area where we just see higher growth. I think as we executed on the thermal sale and used the proceeds to do various things there, growth is still our priority. We have the opportunity, I think, to do some more deals even through this year and, of course, into the next several years. We're always very thoughtful. It has to be at the right multiple. We have to see good line of sight to both growth and sales synergies. We want to make sure we can be effective at integrating these businesses.
We look at how our resources are deployed as well.
Our leverage ratio target is between 2 and 2.5. Coming out of the AVAIL transaction, we expect to be below that here in the second half. Certainly plenty of firepower if the right deal is there for us to execute on.
Gary, I was going to ask you, I know that you're doing a lot of conferences and talking to a lot of investors, but maybe given that you recently joined nVent, maybe new to some of our clients that are in the audience here, can you just give a quick snapshot of your background and your first impressions of nVent and maybe where you see the greatest opportunities?
Yeah, Brian, thanks. I appreciate it. Yeah, I'm a couple of months into my time at nVent and thrilled to be here. As far as my career, I spent 25 years in the consumer products industry, primarily in financial operations roles. So embedded in the business, partnering with general managers to drive top and bottom line, worked a bit in M&A and general management as well. Spent the last two years in MedTech working for Medtronic. I had the opportunity to actually be the interim CFO there, and that created an opportunity to join Beth at nVent. I'm thrilled to be here. It's really an impressive company and what they've done since spin at Pentair, looking at the portfolio transformation. Some of my early observations, really the discipline around capital allocation, the always-on M&A capability, and being very disciplined in the multiples that we pay.
From an operating perspective, also being very disciplined in uses of cash, generating cash both from a working capital management perspective as well as a very efficient use of CapEx. As Beth said, from a capital allocation perspective, our focus is growth. We have invested in M&A and CapEx, but also bought shares back in a very prudent way. The team has been very welcoming to me, and I'm really excited to continue to learn the operations and partner with Beth and the team to drive growth because that's what we're focused on.
Yeah, thank you. Can maybe both of you or maybe whoever would like to speak to this talk about the margin expansion potential in the business going forward? I get this question a lot. If you could, with whatever granularity you're able to in each segment, where is the opportunity now for margin expansion? Beth, you talked about in the data center business standardization and going through distribution. I know that's part of it. Maybe you could tie that in.
Yeah, why don't I start, and then Gary can jump in. Both of our segments have margin expansion opportunity in a couple of areas. Anytime that we launch new products, we always look to have them be at higher margins so that they become accretive to the overall portfolio. As you know, that's a key strategy for us. We have plenty of opportunity to continue to drive productivity and optimization, and especially of some of these acquisitions. When we look at many of the acquisitions, especially if they're smaller companies or if they're private equity held, they may not have driven productivity like lean. They may not have had professionalized sourcing or the capabilities that we have. That's a big opportunity for us as well.
We have certainly been investing on the data solution side, and it is really about expanding capacity and going as fast as we can. As we start to get more standardized modular solutions, I think that drives the capability to see margin expansion over time.
I don't know, Gary, if you wanted to add.
Yeah, the only thing I would add is we've said over time that 30+% incrementals is what we target. As Beth mentioned, the granularity of opportunities in margin expansion is really clear to the M&A. Geographically, there's opportunity as well. The one nVent approach drives scale, and what we're doing is driving transformation on our enterprise functions across finance being one of them. That's going to help us from a margin expansion perspective as well.
One question that really every company is getting is, what are you seeing in terms of related to tariffs and how that's affecting, first of all, maybe your customer base or your project pipeline or their project pipelines, things being pushed out because people do not know where to allocate capital or when to allocate capital now? Let's take it from that angle, first of all, how is that affecting your end markets?
Let me start by saying the way we're managing tariffs is between pricing, productivity, and supply chain actions. I think if we look at some of the infrastructure growth and backlog, we've not seen that have any impact whatsoever. What we did say on our last earnings call is that we thought that this could have an impact around the commercial resin market, and so therefore we were calling the year to be flat there versus what we expected to see some growth. I would say this, that generally, I think it does create some uncertainty. Having said that, we did raise our guidance for the year. I think we were prudent in how we thought the year might have more price and a little less on the volume side as a result of some of these impacts.
Yeah, and I would just say from a tariff perspective, we estimated about $120 million on our last earnings call. There have been puts and takes since then. Every day we have some new information. The teams are taking action. To offset that, we expect margins, excluding M&A, to be up in the back half. Primarily, we're impacted by steel. That's the lead impact. Our strategy is manufacturing in market for the market primarily. We do produce a bit in China, and that was significant, but it's not a significant part of our business at all. Obviously, we hope that that burden reduces.
Yeah, you talked about the $120 million impact on the last call, and so much has changed. I don't know, are you able to put a finer point on that?
Yeah, we're not commenting on kind of, but again, it changes every day. We have puts and takes, and the teams are taking action and have the agility. We've managed this in the past, both through price and cost savings measures to manage it.
Right. It's usually when the phrase "it changes every day" is used, it's usually exaggerating, but it really is. I think I heard the other day that it has changed over 50 times. Can you talk about, in a little more detail, the pricing actions that you're taking across the different parts of the business and how that is being received in the market?
A lot of our portfolio goes through distribution. Like other suppliers, we manage that through with list pricing. We've shown that we can do multiple rounds of pricing in other years, and certainly we do that to make adjustments. Where we have some more project or other OEM type of customers, we typically negotiate those price changes. They understand that everyone is being impacted by these things. This is why in our guidance, we expect that we're going to see more price this year as a result.
Can we zoom out for a second? Just think about the longer-term growth- rate potential for the business. I said this, I think, on a couple of earnings calls ago. Thinking about it from the perspective of utilities is now about 20%, data solutions about 20%. That is 40% of your business is growing very well.
Yes.
Right? Even if you've got 40% of your business that's growing even 10%, that's going to give you four points of organic revenue growth.
Yes.
With that as the backdrop, and assuming that everything else is growing over a cycle, how should we think about the long-term potential? This is better than a GDP growth business, and I just want you to.
Yeah, very so intentionally, yes, we've been changing the portfolio to be higher growth. Two years ago, we had an investor day, and at that time, the thermal management segment was a part of our business. We said we thought our growth was mid-single digits. After we executed on the sale of the thermal management business, we said we are now a higher growth electrical company. Implied there is that our growth- rate would be higher than that mid-single digit growth. Secondly, we also said at that time that we expected to have a point of growth from acquisitions. Clearly, the last couple of years, it's been high single digits or double digits growth from acquisitions. I think it's fair to say we've mixed the portfolio up to higher growth. Great macro trends there. We see long-term growth there.
Yes, our portfolio will be, you could expect it to be at a higher growth- rate both organically and inorganically.
You'll see that from us as we guide it through the progression throughout the year. We'll deliver high single digit revenue growth in the back half of this year as the business really starts to accelerate nicely.
Great, thanks. I'll leave that. We can dig into that maybe a little more in the breakout session, but we just have three minutes here. Please raise your hand if you have a question that you want to ask the team One of the questions I get all the time is around your competitive position in liquid cooling and data center in general. Can you just answer that for everyone? What gives you competitive advantage? I know it's a collection of things, really.
Yeah. I'll talk about it from a liquid cooling perspective. Remember that we've been in the liquid cooling space for about two decades in industrial type of applications. It's now been over a decade that we've been working liquid cooling. We've developed this capability organically and have a decade in the data center space. It's not just our understanding of the cooling architecture and being able to provide a complete closed loop system, but it's our manufacturing capability. Our systems do not leak, for example. It's the manufacturing techniques that we've developed. It is also how we have grown and managed our supply base because you have to rapidly scale. I think you see that we have multiple solutions. It doesn't matter whether we start from a cold plate or immersion. We understand the control loops. We can do liquid to air cooling.
We have a lot of simulation modeling, and we have tested all of our solutions to meet performance specifications under various conditions, not the most optimal. I just state that because I think as everyone is trying to expand there, they do not have the application expertise as well as the performance capability that we have. We are continuing to innovate. This year will be not only that capacity expansion, record year for new products, expansion of the customer base. I think we are just going to continue to see scale and growth here.
I think building on that, I mean, if you think about the whole data solutions or data center business, you have these relationships with going down to the chip.
Yeah, absolutely.
The chip design and the thermal requirements because of that, it starts there.
Starts with working with folks like NVIDIA, folks like AMD, understanding the technology roadmaps and designing our roadmaps to meet those needs because the heat loads are going to get higher and higher.
Maybe we'll dig into that also a little bit more in the breakout session. We have a breakout session in the mayor room here in 10 minutes if you'd like to join us for that discussion. Thank you very much, Beth, Gary, Tony for being here.
Thank you.