Great. We're gonna get rolling again with nVent. Great pleasure to welcome back to the conference Gary Corona, CFO of nVent, and we also have Tony Riter, Head of IR, on stage as well. Gary, thank you very much for being here, and I'll hand over to you for some opening remarks.
Yeah. Thanks, Nigel. Thrilled to be here. Actually my second conference with you and the team. It's been an exciting year for nVent. tremendous growth acceleration that we've had as a company. Just for those of you who don't know nVent, we finished last year with a little over $4 billion in revenue.
Just under.
Thank you. really finished the year with great growth. Organic growth over 10% and both sales, EPS and cash flow at 30% or higher. We finished up a great Q1 with revenue over 40%, and organic over 30%, EPS at $0.60 and $1.00 of adjusted EPS for the quarter, which is the first time that we were able to do that. Our strategy has been very consistent, which is about gaining exposure to more high growth verticals, particularly the infrastructure vertical of data centers and power utilities. We finished Q1 with over 55% exposure to that vertical.
We've made a lot of progress reshaping the portfolio since our spin, where we were about $2 billion in revenue, and Industrial was by far our largest vertical, and actually infrastructure our smallest. That's completely flipped to where we were in the first quarter where we had infrastructure, like I said, over 55%. We had an Investor Day where we essentially doubled our targets from an intermediate growth perspective after doing a great job of over-delivering what we said we were gonna do in our last Capital Markets Day. Thrilled to be here, thrilled to have your interest in nVent, and I'll turn over to Nigel for the Q&A.
Thanks, Gary. I think you just joined nVent last, this time last year. You had just over a year in the job, not a bad year to be CFO at nVent. Quite a year.
Yeah, it's exciting and, you know, when I joined, the team had, you know, visibility to this significant acceleration that was about to occur, you know, in the infrastructure vertical and with our, you know, new exposure, you know, we had, you know, divested our Thermal Management business and then acquired Trachte and Avail EPG. It really reshaped the portfolio and got us more exposure to growth. You know, very exciting. You know, we continue to invest to support that growth, you know, not just for the short term, but also in the intermediate term. Thrilled to be part of the team and excited to have a chance to talk about it.
When you think about the sustainability of this extraordinary growth, I mean, 20%, more than 20% this year, you just put up a couple of 30% organic growth numbers. When you look at the pipelines or the negotiations or however you wanna frame it, I mean, what gives you confidence that this sustains not just for this year but beyond?
Yeah. You know, I'll start with the portfolio and the exposure. You know, exposure to the infrastructure vertical has given us more long cycle exposure. Now we're really balanced between the long and the short cycle, and we really like that. We finished the quarter with a $2.6 billion backlog, we have nice visibility to the next 12 months. And as I think about the long term, you know, we feel like, you know, a lot of these verticals have really nice long-term, you know, growth exposure. You know, starting with power utilities, which we really got into with Trachte and Avail EPG, you know, we see a multi-decade, you know, growth exposure there.
You know, in the data centers, you know, we just keep seeing upward revisions. It's also worth mentioning, you know, the mix that we have between the white space and the gray space in data centers where we really feel like that white space, which is approximately 80% of our portfolio, has a long-term growth as, you know, not only we build new data centers, but we turn over the tech inside them and, you know, that certainly leverages a lot of our portfolio. We supply both, you know, really feel good about that exposure.
You mentioned backlog's $2.6 billion. The Q says majority of that converts in the next 12 months. I mean, are we talking here about the vast majority of that?
Yeah
converts?
I would say the vast majority converts in the next 12 months, and that's You know, we have some that's north of, north of 12 months, primarily with our power utility customers.
Yeah.
Yeah, we're, we've got nice visibility to both the short and intermediate term. You know, it's worth mentioning, you know, both in power utilities and data centers, we have a nice, you know, nice discussions with all of our customers, you know, not just about what's on the books, but what's to come. You know, we talked at our, at the Supercomputing conference about our, you know, our liquid cooling technology being future-proofed out to 2030. We, you know, we have that really by working with our, you know, working closely with our customers and ensuring that we have, you know, good, you know, good visibility to those roadmaps.
When you think about the growth, obviously data solutions is driving the outsized growth. Power utilities is definitely part of that as well. If you then sort of double-click into data solutions, would you call out, I mean, liquid cooling or would you call out Avail as disproportionate drivers of that growth?
I would say, you know, in the quarter, as we said on the call, you know, really almost all of our businesses exceeded our expectations, so really nice, you know, really nice growth. Certainly, data centers leading the way and in both the gray space and the white space, and in the white space certainly anchored by liquid cooling, where we've seen, you know, tremendous performance.
Yeah. Okay. You mentioned future-proofing the business. I want to come back to it in a second. A couple of important things are happening this year. You've got the new facility in Blaine, you know, picking up. I think that went live, if I'm not mistaken, earlier this quarter. That seems to be releasing more capacity to sell. We've got the new lineup of products, the Modeler, you know, kind of launching real-time now. I'm just wondering, how should we think about the impact of those two items on order rates and maybe growth in the back half of this year?
You know, we're really excited about the new factory that we have up and running in Blaine. We cut the ribbon just a few weeks ago, but it's been producing product, you know, in the first quarter. That'll continue to ramp throughout the year, and what we've estimated is that'll, you know, double our capacity on liquid cooling. The team has done a great job, you know, going from, you know, signing the lease to getting up and running in around 100 days. Really a great effort there. From an innovation perspective, we showed a lot of new products at the Supercomputing show.
Those will really start to hit in the middle of this year, you know, as we ramp capacity. There's tremendous interest in those products.
Okay. would they be part of the order book for, 1 Q, or is that more?
No, it's more on the horizon.
On the horizon.
as we look to, Q2 and Q3.
Doubling your liquid cooling capacity, that's quite a big number. I mean, we'd estimate, I don't know, $3 million-$4 million of capacity. I don't know if you can confirm or deny that. Would you expect to be sold out on that capacity by year-end? I mean, are we gonna be in a situation where Blaine is sold out by year-end?
Yeah. What I can say is that, you know, we continue to have discussions with customers and they tell us that, you know, they would like more and they would like more faster. I'm sure you're hearing that pretty broadly. You know, as this builds out, you know, certainly, we are already looking at, you know, what comes next and, you know, when we're ready to make those decisions and, you know, we'll certainly, we'll let you know.
Okay. Coming back to the point about future-proofing through 2030. We're seeing obviously NVIDIA's the big, you know, gorilla in the market right now, you've got Google with its TPUs and others. I mean, how well-positioned is, you know, is nVent across the different chip manufacturers?
Yeah. I'll start, maybe I'll ask Tony to pick up. You know, we, you know, we work with all the chip manufacturers in a broad variety of customers and you know, many of them have, you know, very bespoke solutions and work with us very closely and we're, you know, pleased with our partnership and certainly work with them to develop those solutions.
Yeah, I mean, as you think about go back to Supercomputing, that portfolio, you even see how that kind of spreads across, whether it's hyperscalers or the chip suppliers, right? You think of those two large CDUs. There's the Project Deschutes 5.0, you know, CDU that's on the horizon. You saw that design at Supercomputing November, kind of that hallmark CDU that was next to it, part of that new portfolio. You know, that's designed to support, as Gary mentioned, you know, the additional chips, whether it's, you know, coming from NVIDIA, AMD out to 2030. Really kind of having that breadth of that portfolio both for the hyperscalers, also as you think of as it moves more and more into the neoclouds and the multi-tenants, you know, have a portfolio that supports them.
Okay. Okay. It feels to me like the 10%-13% organic growth you put out in March for the next three years already feels a bit stale. Is that fair? Maybe after another mess day get taken off this year.
Well, you know, what I would say is that we were really excited to set those targets, a significant increase in trajectory for us as a company. You know, we're thrilled with the start that we've gotten off to, both in the quarter as well as in 2026.
Yep. Yep.
not just ready to set new targets here.
No
as eight weeks in.
No, I was half joking. You know, the decision to disclose backlog on a quarterly basis, maybe just talk about that. Is that because the orders are so massive and are lumpy, is it that because you want to refocus investors on backlog as opposed to order growth?
Yeah. It really came two ways. One is the change in the portfolio and the change where we're much more long cycle than we were before. You know, our previous disclosure, we feel like wasn't giving, you know, a clear picture on what that looked like from a backlog perspective. That's what we, you know, that's what we decided is to give visibility to that and worked with the accounting experts, and that's where we landed.
Yep. No, I think that's a great great disclosure. First of all, any more questions on data solutions before we move on? Okay. You do have an industrial and commercial business. I, you know, I'd be remiss if I didn't touch on that. I think you're guiding for commercial up low singles, industrial up mid singles this year.
That's correct.
How is that looking right now? I mean, I ask it in the context of there's concerns that maybe some of the strength that we saw in 1 Q might have been pre-buy activity, et cetera, et cetera. Maybe just touch on that as well.
Yeah, sure. You know, I'll start by saying, you know, we came into the year with a guide of mid singles for industrial and low singles for commercial. We had a very good Q1. You know, we feel good about the performance of those businesses. You know, at the quarter, you know, while we had a good Q1, we kept our guidance in line. We feel really good about the performance of those businesses. They're not only, you know, I would say the execution on from these teams has been solid. We feel, you know, we feel like that Sell-in and sell-out was very much in line with expectations, so comfortable with that.
You know, feel like we're gonna have a good year in those businesses.
Yeah. No concerns that we're seeing a weakening there. In the Middle East, you know, we're getting the situation now where, you know, energy shortages are starting to become a bit more pronounced perhaps as a risk. Any concerns in, I don't know, Europe, Asia? I know those aren't big regions for you guys.
Yeah. They're not big regions for us. You know, in Europe, our business was up low single digits. You know, honestly, we have higher expectations for that region. Certainly it was impacted modestly by what was going on in the region. You know, certainly from a supply chain perspective globally, you know, our teams are working on a variety of challenges as they always are. You know, this is one of them that we feel like we can manage. You know, certainly it's not making any easier for us to operate. You know, I also talked a bit, you probably would get a go to inflation, but, you know, we did incorporate a higher expectation for fuel into our guidance.
You know, that combined with copper, you know, brought us up, you know, just under 1 point for inflation for the year. We're offsetting that with a bit of additional pricing.
Yep. I guess the other side of the growth ramp is that it does create some investment spending pressures, some margin pressures. Maybe just bring us up to speed in terms of where we are on overcoming the inflation, tariffs, and some of the investment spending.
As we came into the year, you know, what we talked about is, you know, the first half would, you know, continue to have a bit more from a headwind perspective, primarily from inflation and tariffs. The second half would be a little bit better. You know, we'll continue to invest pretty consistently across the year to support our growth. You know, the first half has our incrementals about 20%, the second half will be around mid-20s, very much in line with our intermediate term guidance. We feel good about the growth and the returns that we're delivering on the business.
How does Blaine filter into the SP margins? Does that cause a little bit of pressure as you ramp it up, and then you absorb some of that?
Yeah, exactly. That investment will pick up in the second quarter then, you know, start to really contribute to SP. You know, they had a great quarter in Q1 on margin. That helped us balance out the overall margin performance for the firm. Yeah, Blaine will, you know, continue to ramp. We'll continue to invest, not just behind, you know, capacity, but also capability as we look to support what is now a very sizable business for us.
Yeah. We get questions about the actual kind of the raw margins for the liquid cooling portfolio. You know, when we look at, say, I don't know, Boyd, you know, look at some of the other acquisitions we've seen out there, it seems that the margins are in the low to mid-twenties for some of those comparable companies. Is that where you see the margins for your liquid cooling portfolio?
I think what we've said, historically is that, you know, liquid cooling and our data center business is in line with segment.
Yeah
with segment averages for both segments.
Yeah. Yeah.
Liquid cooling would be similar to systems protection.
Yeah. Okay.
Including all the investments that we're making.
Okay. On EBITDA basis, that would be in line.
Yeah.
Okay. Got it. EC margins come under a bit of pressure, Gary, in 1Q.
Yeah.
Maybe just talk about that and the. You're guiding for a pretty sharp recovery. Just conference on that.
Yeah. You know, we saw the inflation really pick up in EC, you know, primarily driven by copper at the back half of the fourth quarter. You know, that ramped in the beginning of the first quarter. The team took action on price. That pricing began to roll in towards the end of the first quarter. We saw the margins really improve in EC as we got to the back half of the first quarter, and we expect those to bounce back to where EC has been traditionally in the high 20s in the balance of the year.
That's great. Price cost in 2Q fairly neutral at this point?
Yeah. We feel, you know, we feel good about price cost for Q2 through Q4. As I said, a bit behind in EC in Q1. You know, pricing in aggregate in Q1 was higher than it was in Q4. It continues to be at a healthy level.
Okay, great. M&A. You guys have done a good job of, you know, with Trachte, Avail, others as well. How does the pipeline look at this point for future deals? Are we still gonna be concentrated very much in that data solutions, power utility, infrastructure segments?
M&A is, you know, a big part of capital allocation. As we talked about our capital allocation strategy at our investor day, we made it very clear that the first priority is growth, organic growth, and you're seeing that on the CapEx side from us. As we, as we think about M&A, the team has done 8 deals, in addition, the spin-off of the sale of Thermal Management, and the team has been very disciplined in the acquisitions that we've made. The last two have been nice chunky deals that have contributed, you know, really well from an accretion perspective, both from the top line as well as EPS, and we're very pleased with Trachte and Avail EPG.
The initial strategy there was to get us more exposure into power utility, you know, a sub-vertical that we are really, you know, really excited about. Had some data center exposure that kinda top spin that growth and has helped us. You know, exceed expectations. You know, as we look forward, we've got a full pipeline. You know, we'll continue to be, you know, very disciplined on M&A. You know, certainly it's competitive, as you can see from what folks have announced. You know, we're pleased. We'll continue to be disciplined and, you know, we expect that infrastructure will continue to be a focus.
Have you been surprised by the extent of deal flow amongst your competitors in the thermal management space?
Yeah. You know, what I would say is as we think about these deals and fairly sizable deals in the space, you know, it gives us confidence because of what we've been able to do organically. You know, there's been a lot of interest in the space and a lot of, you know, very impressive companies and deep companies technologically, you know, that have decided to enter via M&A. You know, we're not surprised. It's a very attractive space, you know, one that we see, you know, multi years of growth. It doesn't surprise us that it's attractive.
You know, we feel really good about the business that we've built over the past decade plus, you know, behind great technology, quality, and our ability to scale.
The trend has been power companies buying thermal management companies. This consolidation across the, you know, sort of the whole kind of infrastructure spectrum within data center seems to be where the market's gravitating towards. Do you see that for nVent? Do you think there's logic to being a much bigger player, or can you pick your spots in the data center?
Yeah. I mean, I'll use your term. I haven't used it, but, you know, we like to focus on what we do best. Right now those are very, you know, discrete product lines that are, you know, differentiated technologically and, you know, that's been our, you know, that's been our focus. You know, we're not a big power company. That's not, that's not what nVent.
Yeah.
That's not what nVent does.
No ambitions to be a big power company.
That's not on the roadmap, certainly.
Okay. When we think about the contours of future M&A, would past be prologue?
Yeah, we like-
The last few deals.
We like chunky deals that are, you know, that are accretive, on the top and bottom line. Yeah, we like the last couple deals we've done. We like the size, and we like that vertical.
Yep. Free cash conversion, you're targeting 99.5% conversion this year, which given the growth rates would be pretty darn heroic, quite frankly. I mean, maybe talk about how you're managing working capital given the growth pressures.
Yeah, I mean, we delivered north of 100 last year, you know, with tremendous growth, especially in the, in the second half. You know, our CapEx will, you know, will be elevated. You know, we had cash flow was up, you know, certainly in the first quarter. You know, so we feel good about, cash and being efficient with our cash. It's a, it's a bit of a capital light business, you know, for us. You know, so we'll, the team has traditionally done a very nice job on cash conversion, and we're focused on revenue, earnings, and profit delivery as well as cash delivery.
Yep. CapEx has been stepping up progressively, I think by $130 million this year. Does that continue to step higher next year, or do you think we can maintain this kind of plateau?
Yeah, I mean, we've continued to ramp CapEx as we've needed capacity and, while I'm not ready to talk about, you know, 27 and 28 CapEx, we certainly will continue to invest to support growth. You know, and as a % of sales, again, it's pretty efficient capital structure from a CapEx investment perspective.
Yep. Yep. Got a full room here, so just wanna make sure there's no questions from the. There's one in the back here. Can we get a mic to the back, please?
Yeah. Hey, guys. I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit, I think on the Q1 call, you guys talked a little bit about European expansion potential as sort of data centers and things take off there. Maybe if you could just give a little more color around kind of the broad strokes of what you're thinking about Europe.
Yeah, sure. You know, the growth for us in data centers has been almost exclusively in North America, and there's been tremendous growth. You know, however, going forward, we do see nice growth opportunity in Europe. You know, we're investing, you know, behind capability as well as capacity, you know, as we think about that market. An attractive market that we expect to grow, but more in the future, you know, as North America has really driven, you know, our growth as a company here recently.
Good question. Anything else? One more perhaps? Nope. Okay. One question we get a lot, Gary, is, you know, there's a lot of, you know, new entrants in the CDU markets, you know, the HVAC companies, you know, integrating towards the rack, and there's some niche players there. Any concerns on competition, of capacity in that market?
As I said earlier, it's an attractive market, and you know, attractive markets attract competitive entrants. For us, having been in the business for a long time, you know, we feel good about our what we bring to the market from a capability perspective, quality, reliability as well as our scale. It doesn't surprise us, and you know, we're feeling pretty good about our position.
That's great. Well, Gary, I'll hand it back to you for closing remarks.
Yeah, no, thank you, Nigel, and thanks for all of, all of you in the room. We'll speak with many of you throughout the day. We have tremendous momentum at nVent and excited about delivering growth on the top line, on the bottom line, and through cash flow. Thanks for your interest. Look forward to talking more.
Thanks, Gary. Thanks, Tony. That was a great discussion. Thank you.
Thank you.