Please welcome to the stage Vice President Investor Relations, Shelly Hubbard.
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Pentair's Investor Day 2026. Thank you for joining us today. I'm Shelly Hubbard, Vice President and Head of Investor Relations at Pentair. Before we begin, I'd like to note that today's discussions will include forward-looking statements and references to certain non-GAAP financial measures. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Please refer to the disclosure statements included in today's presentation materials and our SEC filings for additional information. 2 years ago, at our last Investor Day, we outlined a series of commitments to drive shareholder value. Since then, we've made significant progress executing against those priorities, strengthening the quality of our portfolio, improving operational performance, and enhancing our results.
Today is an opportunity to share with you what we have delivered along the way and discuss how these efforts position Pentair for its next phase of value creation. I'm excited to have members of our executive leadership team with us today to walk you through that progress and discuss where we are headed next. You will hear from our President and CEO, John Stauch, our Chief Strategy, Innovation, and Digital Officer, Adrian Chiu, our President of Flow and Water Solutions, De'Mon Wiggins, our CEO of Pentair Pool, Jerome Pedretti, the President and Chief Revenue Officer of Pentair Pool, Greg Claffey, and our Chief Financial Officer, Nick Brazis. We plan to take a 15-minute break around 10:25 A.M. following De'Mon's presentation. We expect to reconvene around 10:40 A.M. with Jerome's, Greg's, and Nick's presentations, followed by Q&A. We will conclude at 12:00 P.M. Eastern.
For those attending the event with us today, we invite you to join us for a management lunch and to peruse the new product innovation we have displayed out in the foyer. Thanks again for joining us. I will now hand it over to John Stauch, President and CEO.
Please welcome to the stage Pentair President and Chief Executive Officer, John Stauch.
I want to hear it twice, you know. Thanks for joining us today. I'm really excited to share with you an update. I want you to view today's presentation as an update against what we told you in 2024. Not a lot of what we're gonna share with you is new, but I think what's exciting is we're entering a new phase where I think we're gonna be able to give you both organic growth and productivity, continue to drive margins and drive organic growth in a way that starts to accelerate profitability. I, our key messages today would be that, you know, we have a balanced water portfolio that has delivered superior value.
One of the things I wanna talk to you about today, you should hear throughout the presentation, is that we're structurally better today than we were 2 years ago when we shared with you our investor outlook. I believe we've improved margins through the down cycle. We've improved the overall company profitability profile, and we're poised to return to leveraging that opportunity and dropping through a lot of organic growth at higher profit margins because of the work we've done over the last couple years. Innovation and elite customer experience are expected to accelerate growth. Because of some of the challenges we've experienced and the headwinds on the North American residential market, which I'll share with you today, you haven't seen all this evidence.
All we need is a flattening of that growth profile, which we think we'll see in 26. You'll start to see the Quad 1 efforts of 80/20 readout. You'll also see the benefits from innovation and the hard work we've done to make sure that our dealers get the type of service and elite treatment that they deserve. Profitable growth and operational efficiencies, we want both. We've spent arguably a little bit more time on the transformational part while we cleaned up a little bit of the portfolio. As I mentioned earlier, you're gonna see throughout the presentation day those pockets of where we're getting both and the value that it's bringing to shareowners.
The 1 thing I think we're extremely undervalued with as a company is the amount of cash flow we generate, and that cash flow being put to good uses, both in organic investments, but also smart, disciplined capital allocation. We plan to deliver a lot more cash flow over this profile, and we'll share with you what we plan to do with that and how it can add value. I'm grateful to lead this company. We're in our 60th year. Imagine 60 years ago, 5 people getting together and deciding they were gonna do air research balloons and turn that into a public company. T hat was their vision.
We're a lot different company today, and when you add the nVent spin, which happened roughly 8 years ago, to that, I think we delivered a ton of value for our shareowners, which was their ultimate goal is how do we put companies together? How do we run them more effectively? How do we continue to deliver for shareowners? You can see I'm also proud in the middle there of our mid-teens ROIC and our industry-leading profitability in ROS. Now I gotta hold the microphone for online. We also are seeing 50 years of dividend raises. I've only been here about 20 years of that 50, but I'm proud that I didn't screw that history up. This marks our 50th straight year and puts us in Dividend King status.
I think you as a shareowner should take a look at that and really reflect on the fact that we are committed to shareowner value. We've always been investment grade. We like the flexibility that provides, and it gives us the ability to do either buyback or to make good bolt-on strategic acquisitions if we find that they'll create longer term value as well. Our balance sheet is stronger than when we talked to you 2 years ago, and we're well-positioned to give ourselves the flexibility to compound what we think we can do in the base case and create that shareowner value creation method. I wanna talk a moment about a slide I spent a lot of time internally on, which I think also reflects externally where we are. First of all, we're really sure and confident that our purpose defines us.
Nowadays, with all the VUCA in the world, you know, all the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, your people get up every day and they have to feel committed to what they're trying to accomplish. We're committed to our purpose. We believe that we need an organization that guides us. We'll talk a little bit about the tweaks we made in the organization. It was really about combining the channel opportunities of 2 residential businesses that needed to be where the growth is going to be versus where it was in the past. Our productivity propels us, not just because it provides shareowner value, but it also enriches our opportunity to invest wisely in strategic growth inside of our businesses. Finally, we believe our culture can distinguish us.
Our culture of always putting shareowners first, delivering for customers, creating value for shareowners, but also being more obsessed with how we can please and delight our customers so that we can have sustained predictable growth in the future. Here's the team. It is a new, lean, high-energy, focused team. The thing I'm most proud about this team is it's mostly internally promoted. Even Lance only left for a year and then came back to be our new GC. I think when you build a team internally, you're building a shared understanding and culture, and it allows you to work more effectively with the organization to drive value. We all believe in the Pentair Business System, and we all believe in delivering value for our customers and our shareowners. We still operate in 3 segments. That has not changed.
We've changed a little bit of what the segment alignment is, and we'll take you a click deeper with that today so you can have the understanding of how to adjust your models and why we did that. We're in great spaces. You know, when I joined the company back in 2007, I was wondering if water was a hobby or a business model. Most of the projects that we were working on were in Africa, Honduras. We weren't getting paid for it, and we were demonstrating the types of value that we could add through the systems and technologies we had. Today, water and energy are at the nexus of everything we do. With the data center drivers and communities, water becomes a very big part of that.
They're consumers of water, but they're also consumers of energy, and we have to be able to produce water in energy-efficient ways. We've got a lot of discussions going on in our business about how do we add value in the future, and we're really excited about those solutions we can bring to customers that. These are big growing markets. You know, we play in a part of these markets, and we have the opportunity to really make sure that our products and technologies stand out against competition. I wanna take a moment and just talk about our key industry, which is U.S. residential. We call it North America, but let's be honest, most of this is in the U.S. You can see on the far left side of the slide, we've mapped out housing starts in the U.S. and also pool builds in the U.S.
What I want you to take away from this particular chart is this concept that while we talk about cyclicality of industries, I want you to think about how we're making our businesses structurally better, but we're also making them durable. If we can produce the types of margins that we have at the bottom of the cycle, think about what we can do if these markets just flatten, which is our expectation for 2026, or if they recover, which is what we think will happen in the strategic horizon that we're talking to you about. I wanna talk briefly about what our focus strategy has been. It's been about focusing on the core. Think about our Quad 1 revenue. We're an 80/20 company. Our Quad 1 is why most people did business with us in the first place.
Underlying is that, you know, in most of our businesses, we're getting double-digit growth in that Quad 1 as we're exiting the Quad 4 complexity in our organizations. We're pursuing a few targeted initiatives. I'll talk to you about a couple of them. Towards the end of my presentation, Adrian will reintroduce them, and De'Mon and Jerome will talk about how they fit our business models. Ultimately, that investment has been focused. It's been based upon large strategic discussions we've had with our board and ourselves, in some cases, about changing the dynamics of how we go to market and how do we make sure that we keep the profitability of the channels to market aligned with the value that we wanna bring. We're executing transformation. I told you earlier that I wished I had started with 80/20 1st and transformation 2nd.
I said that in 2024. I'm not gonna walk back from that statement, but I'm gonna tell you, because we had transformation laid out and the clear definition of the playbooks we had, 80/20's moved quickly from acknowledging the reality of what we need to do to using the transformation playbook to drive value. That's evidenced by both our margins that we've delivered and the future profitability that we're confident that we can continue to deliver on. Our balance sheet is strong. We don't use a lot of capital. We generate a lot of cash. We're not optimizing where we are in cash flow yet. We're still holding on to a little bit more inventory than I would like.
Most of that inventory is because we've been dealing with tariffs or supply chain disruptions caused by tariffs, and we ultimately are still spending money to drive transformation. When those 2 headwinds are gone, you're gonna see even a greater earning power in our cash flow as we move forward. Here's how we've done since 2017. Really, 2018 was the 1st year that we became a water company. We put up some pretty good numbers over that horizon. I say we've done that despite the fact of having peak markets or what felt like peak markets in 2021, and now where we sit in 2026 against those deliverables. I wouldn't listen to what we said we're gonna do over the next 3 years if we didn't tell you how we did against the last couple years.
I'm proud to announce that against our metrics of 2024, and I'm sure you guys have all done the math and the checks on the data that we've shared with you today, we've achieved most of those milestones. We have come short on our revenue forecast, which we'll share with you the dimensions of why, and we'll try to share with you why we have confidence that we can accelerate performance from here. Here's how we win across the 3 segments. The 1 takeaway that I want you to really focus on is that our business model for 75% of what we do is we sell into channel partners, distributors, who then sell into professional dealers who align with brands, and then ultimately they go to consumers and serve their particular needs.
Where we don't do that, we work with specifiers that need the power of those brands to work with industries on proven technologies and solutions for what they do. Our brands matter, our promises behind those brands matter, and how we stand behind our individual business people matters. That's ultimately how we continue to create that elite level of service to those dealers, and they trust us every single day. They put their business models on the line between our products, brands, and our technologies. I wanted to show you intentionally the businesses below the businesses today. Hopefully you use that in a positive conversation with me as we spend more time together and you don't beat me up with it.
My goal there was to show you that separate from Pool, which is on the left, that goes to market as a 1-scale business with all their products going through the same similar channel. In the rest of our businesses, we have key brands and key revenue streams that have to win at that point in the market where they serve their customer. That brand matters. That general manager who leads those businesses needs quality salespeople, quality technology leaders, quality marketing leaders, and in some cases, even drive operations. This has become important as we try to empower our businesses and realize that not all the businesses are at the same journey and transformation, and that standard work doesn't necessarily apply anymore to building out these business models to accelerate growth. I'm not gonna go through these businesses.
Jerome and De'Mon will capture that later in the presentation. I did wanna set them up for you. We've stacked the revenue. Now, I'm aware that you could take a ruler and probably get the precision around that. You'll probably do that when you leave this room. Some of you on the call might have already done that. It's okay. It's directionally what I want you to take away. We wanted you to see the margin profiles of these businesses, show you the value that we think has been created since we stood here in 2019, and 2019 is the last period that you can point to before COVID and before some of this challenges that we've had. We think it's a good marking point.
We've set the charts up to why we win, why we think we have the right technologies to participate. The key industry terrain is the aligned deliverables that we think we need to absolutely work with our customers and dealers to win, to be able to grow the TAMs in these businesses, and then ultimately take share. You'll see the key growth actions talked about later today. We have that for all 4 of the businesses, and as I said, Jerome and De'Mon will spend a little bit more time on those slides later. Here's what I think the growth priorities are that I want you to take away. First and foremost, our biggest business inside of Pentair, still in the leading position despite what some of you guys hear from rumors, is our Pool business.
Where we think the long-term growth is gonna come from is our ability to flip the 5.4 million in-ground pools that are mostly non-automated into an automated feature set. Don't think of automation as control. Think of automation as being able to run your pool, optimizing energy usage, optimizing water usage, and also having it at your desired specifications for water quality. The ability to automate those pools eases the way that service works. It also eases the work that a installer needs to and also provides peace of mind to the end consumer. We believe by focusing on filtration, ice expansion, and expanding, you saw some of our dispense units out there today.
Ultimately in the residential utility room, North American plumber, that's the combination of RWT coming together for water solutions with R&I and having a more scaled line card offering to the North American plumber. We need to be where the market is today, not where it was 10, 15 years ago when it was more of a specialty business. Ultimately making sure we bring more content and specify ourselves into the buildings to benefit from the specified aspect of the products that we serve. PBS is working. Hopefully, you're getting a sense that it isn't just the margin expansions, but it's the processes and the sustainability of how we can use those tools in tariff applications, in the unique supply chain, in sourcing challenges. We are using these tools to better Pentair and deliver for shareowners despite the volatility that we're dealing with.
Our productivity is propelling us, as I said. We're delivering to our expectations. We're driving sustained value, and I wanna hit this head-on in my section right now. We are a long way from finished. We have 2 businesses that are best in class, which is Pool and CWS, which are gonna continue to expand margins as they grow. Ultimately, we have 2 businesses that still have a lot of complexity inside of Pentair, and we need to continue to drive that complexity out to fund growth elsewhere, but also to make sure that we continue to deliver for shareowners that margin expansion. I wanna talk to you about a little bit about cultural guiding principles. You know, we are a public company. Everybody assumes that everything gets done on January 1st. That's generally how budgets are built.
We've had to spend a lot of time talking about the word sequencing, right? Even within a year, you might start something at Q1. We need you to finish it before you start something else later in the year. That concept of sequencing is a big part of 80/20. Maybe it's really important, what is the 1 thing you're gonna do today that's gonna make the biggest impact? We'll get to the next thing that you want to accomplish and do. Ultimately, we need engaged employees. We do engagement surveys. Quite frankly, the last organizational tweak we made was based upon listening to our employees. Our employees did not feel they had the speed or agility to get certain things done. Combining businesses together, removing barriers of execution, removing management layers provides the speed that our customers need.
It's all part of empowerment. I want to spend just a minute on this slide because I think this is a tool that has served us well and will continue to serve us well. Tanya Hooper, my CHRO, recommended that we as a leadership team 2 years ago go to the Thayer Institute at West Point. I thought, okay, it's just another training exercise. It'll be interesting. It was fundamentally game-changing in the way we lead as an organization. Leaders like me should spend times on whys and whats, not hows. We were a standard work company built from lean. Lean still works really effectively in a factory, but not all our business is at the same stage of the transformation journey.
What we have the ability to do with this tool is to empower people to serve customers and deliver value by using the tools at different stages of where they are in their journey, also by reacting quickly to optionality that we might have not thought about ourselves. Huge impact on the way we've handled tariffs, the way we've handled COVID as a company, big piece of how we deliver transformation, more importantly, the big piece of how we're gonna drive organic growth over the period that we're talking to you about. You'll see the technology that cuts across our portfolio, bigger themes than I think you knew, we're starting to really get excited about how we're sharing that technology and how we're bringing that technology into future innovations. Adrian will spend more time on this chart.
I think if you were looking at 1 chart of my presentation, I saw a few of you looking at it. This is the algorithm that we think will drive future value. You can see how by business we're looking at the growth rates and the top-line growth rates. You'll also see how we think the margin expansion continues to unfold between now and 2028. The main point I want you to take away from this is that ultimately we're not counting on market recovery. I didn't have a crystal ball to figure out how to put it back. Quite frankly, when it comes, I don't think it's gonna come in 1- or 2-point increments. I think it's gonna come roaring back sometime in 2027, 2028, or 2029 time period.
I didn't have the ability to capture that, and it doesn't yet include capital allocation, and Nick will spend more time with you in his section. Here are the takeaways I want you to take away from my presentation. More balanced contribution of growth plus productivity, the ability to still create shareholder value through transformation, all of it focused in 2 businesses, or primarily most of it focused in 2 businesses, and that it doesn't yet assume U.S. residential recovery and the use of capital allocation or those 4 large innovation projects that I showed you. Thank you.
Please welcome to the stage EVP and Chief Strategy, Innovation, and Digital Officer, Adrian Chiu.
All right. Good morning. My name is Adrian Chiu. I'm Pentair's Chief Strategy, Innovation and Digital Officer. Today I'm gonna be talking to you about 4 main themes. 1st, the world's water challenges are evolving. The water needs of today require new solutions that add to our growing industry and expand the total addressable market. Second, Pentair's broad and deep portfolio of businesses make us uniquely well-positioned to address those challenges, creating opportunities for long-term organic growth and shareholder value creation. Third, we're elevating our capabilities across the company to deliver value through strategic clarity, innovation, and digital. Finally, we have an exciting pipeline of innovation projects underway that will create new revenue streams and allow us to lead for our customers and shareholders. I'm excited to step into this new role at Pentair, which brings strategy, innovation, and digital under 1 roof.
We recognize that change is happening fast, and that's why we believe an integrated and aligned view of our growth priorities, innovation, and customer-first digital solutions provide a strong framework for future value creation. I bring the experience that I've gained from corporate leadership roles at Pentair and my time as one of the segment presidents in our businesses to this position, emphasizing a P&L mindset and a customer-first approach. I also look forward to working closely with my friends Jerome and De'Mon in helping their businesses grow and create value. How does this come together? Our strategy teams focus on defining clear growth priorities and M&A funnels that create long-term value. Our innovation teams act as technology and business incubators that unlock new revenue streams. Finally, we're taking a customer-first approach to digital and AI to differentiate our products and business models.
At Pentair, we recognize that water is life's most essential resource, more and more, we also recognize we need to protect this precious commodity differently. Water covers 71% of the planet, yet very little of it is accessible, the water that is accessible requires care. What's in our water has changed. What used to be concerns about contaminants that are organic content is now concerns of man-made content, which is even harder to treat. For example, 45% of U.S. tap water is at risk of containing PFAS. Our water infrastructure is also aging, which means that we're losing significant amounts of water every single day, the water that's treated centrally is not the same as the water that arrives in our homes and businesses.
As John talked about, our need for water continues to increase, so we must use this water responsibly. Modern water problems require modern solutions. This is why I'm so proud to be a part of Pentair. With 12 businesses across the segments, we have one of the broadest and deepest portfolios of water businesses in the world that solve residential, commercial, and industrial water needs. Our technologies, our experience, and our people make us uniquely advantaged to win. These capabilities are why I'm so confident that not only we be able to lead in our industries, but we also are well-positioned to deliver above-market growth. I'm gonna walk you through 4 areas on exactly what we're doing to drive that growth. first, pool. Pool is an amazing business, industry trends provide us even with more opportunity ahead.
We expect that lifestyle trends and outdoor and wellness will continue. There are 5.4 million pools in the US, much of that aging. That gives us enormous opportunities to upgrade and replace equipment. As residential recovers, we have even more upside. We've been a leader for pool for a long time. Pentair has the largest dealer network in the industry. We have an incredibly large installed base, and we maintain leadership and innovation and new products introduced every year. Our focus to grow mid-single digits is to provide the best premium pool experience possible. That gives us further opportunity to expand the value of the pool and grow the TAM. We're changing the perception of the pool pad from individual pool equipment to an integrated, connected pool experience.
This elevates the value of the pool for the homeowner, for our servicers and builders, and for Pentair. In Commercial Water Solutions, we have 2 incredibly well-known brands through Manitowoc Ice and Everpure. These brands have been industry leaders for a long time and are both well known for innovation and quality. The Manitowoc acquisition in 2022 changed our footprint in food service. As De'Mon will talk about later, we've been incredibly happy with the integration and the synergies that we've captured. Ice and high-quality water are critical for restaurant owners. Coffee and beverages continue to drive high-margin sales and profitability for businesses. We continue to be confident about the upside in commercial water because commercial operators need our equipment to be successful.
We have even more places to grow in the industry and more products and innovation that gives us confidence in mid-single-digit growth over the long term. In commercial buildings, we've also been in the industry for a long time. We provide water where we need it and when we need it. There are nearly 6 million commercial buildings in the U.S. that use nearly 11 million gallons of water a day. As water challenges continue to evolve, water systems and buildings will require more decentralized technologies, more automation, and better energy-efficient products. Our capabilities, relationships, growth priorities, they're expected to deliver mid-single-digit growth in the long term, and we have further opportunities to expand our offerings through portfolio adds and connected automated technologies.
As John talked about, we just recently brought together 2 of our businesses in residential, water supply and disposal pumps and water treatment and filtration. The reason why we did this is we believe that there's opportunity here. There are roughly 23 million private wells in the U.S. Studies have shown that 1 in 5 contain contaminants above benchmark levels, which means we have an opportunity to help support our channels. Our strategy in the residential space is to drive synergies in the residential professional trade channel, giving them products and solutions that homeowners need and want. We'll be growing our filtration business in these channels and expanding our capabilities to provide full suite of water management solutions for the home. What gives me confidence in our ability to grow is our global scale and the investments that we've made in technology.
Our innovation centers, R&D labs, certified water labs, and even our customer-first experience centers create a unique advantage in developing new solutions. This is why I'm so proud of the hundreds of employees around the world that go to work every single day to define the future of water. As John talked about, we have 12 businesses and 3 reporting segments. You also see common technology platforms. We've got $1.5 billion in pumps, $1.3 billion in filtration and separation, $800 million in heating and cooling. While the end application may be different, these shared technologies uniquely differentiate us by allowing us to come up with new breakthrough innovation ideas. I'll give you a couple of these examples later on. We brought real focus on sustainability in 2021 when we came out with some pretty meaningful targets.
We were happy to have achieved those in 2024. Last year, we extended them even further. Our focus really is about taking what we've learned internally and then helping our customers achieve their sustainability goals through energy, water, material efficiency. Let me give you a few examples on what we're doing in innovation. First, we'll begin with the eccentric impeller. This showcase and demonstrates how we can innovate in a 200-year-old brand. We first highlighted this product in 2024. We've been proud of the progress we've made. It's a breakthrough, revolutionary, award-winning design change that changes the game for wastewater pumps. This allows more solids to pass through, results in less operational challenges, has improved energy efficiency. This pump decreases the total cost of ownership for customers while also being more sustainable.
Since our initial launch in Europe, we've been really happy with the positive sales results. We look forward to seeing this in the U.S. later on this year. This is a great example of leveraging technology across the company to create innovative solutions in pool. Pool filtration is one of the last pieces of the pool pad to be truly connected. Here we are leveraging our membrane technologies in flow and our experience with IoT sensors to create a breakthrough product. This reimagines how water quality can be addressed in the pool because pool owners will get unmatched clarity that not only elevates how a pool looks and feels, also addresses water quality challenges like bacteria and viruses. We're capturing growth in the high-end luxury market. This product will expand the value of the pool, enable aftermarket and recurring sales through ongoing pool filtration maintenance.
Again, sharing different parts of our business to create value. Okay, for my next innovation initiative, I'd like to play a short video on what we're doing differently to transform water in our homes. All right. Introducing Naia by Everpure Home, a brand new all-in-1 water appliance from Pentair. We debuted this product for the very first time just a few weeks ago at the International Builders' Show in Orlando, and we'll be shipping and installing this product later this year. I need to tell you, the response has been incredible. Builders are telling us that they've never seen anything like this before. Naia by Everpure Home redefines how water is experienced in the home by leveraging the best of Pentair technologies.
The system is built with proprietary filtration from our commercial water business, leverages our membrane experience out of our Flow business, utilizes pumps and controls out of our water quality management business. Because innovation isn't just about technology, it's also about application. Our vision for Everpure for Home is simple. We believe that water is life's most essential resource, and that every home should be built with the best water system possible. Our goal is to turn water from an afterthought into an integrated part of the home. The system is smart. It removes hardness without the use of salt-based water systems. It's connected, it has leak detection, and it gives high-quality balanced pH water out of every tap. We're also innovating in our path to market, starting with luxury homes.
This gives us an ability to sell a product that's 3 to 5 times X the high-end water systems that already exist today. We intend to expand the total addressable market for residential water and create new recurring revenue streams for Pentair and servicers. I really couldn't be more proud of this launch. Congratulations to the entire Everpure for Home team. My next case study shows that how innovation can be also about business model innovation and the power of partnerships in creating new markets. We were first introduced to HOPE Hydration, a startup out of Miami, just a couple of years ago. Their vision was clear. How do you make free quality water accessible by turning water access from a cost into a revenue driver? They're doing just that by intersecting 2 previously disconnected business models: water dispense and advertising.
We were inspired by their innovative thinking, their product design, their startup entrepreneur mindsets. To that end, we invested in their startup, and we helped them get placed at the Minneapolis-Saint Paul Airport, resulting in national awards for both the airport and Hope. The reason why we're excited about our relationship with Hope is for a few reasons. 1, they are using the best filtration in the market, Everpure. Second, this opens up new opportunities for Pentair. This opens up new revenue opportunities for us in dispense. By having the cost be turned into a revenue stream, it ensures that we've got high-quality filtration and public water access and brings up more opportunities, whether that's through manufacturing or Pentair, to enter new markets and institutions. My last topic is digital and AI.
There's no question that technology is advancing at a high speed. That's why we are focused on elevating our digital and AI capabilities. We already have a strong foundation. We've got experience in automated connected pools. We recently launched a Bluetooth-connected ice machine. We've been utilizing connected solutions in our beer membranes business for years. We are adopting AI at a rapid pace with AI tools being used by thousands of employees on a daily basis. We're leveraging AI and machine learning tools to improve our speed to market through engineering, coding, and product design. We're excited to implement additional AI technologies to improve factory efficiency, enable demand, and also increase our focus on turning data into value. Here's an example of the opportunity. Like I said, Pentair is a leader in pool automation.
Hundreds of thousands of pool owners utilize our app every single day. Our vision is to provide the best integrated pool experience possible, enabled by connected equipment and optimized through AI. That provides tremendous value for our customers and our channel. Our homeowners get reduced downtime. Service and dealers can optimize their routes. We can help homeowners solve problems before they even occur. As a result, Pentair gets deeper insight into our channel. We can drive stickiness in the pool pad, and we can have deeper, more measurable relations with all aspects of the channel. Yes, we are proud of our 60-year history as a company, but I'm even more excited about the opportunities ahead.
We are focused on driving shareholder value through clear strategies, breakthrough innovation, and customer-first digital strategies. Water challenges are evolving and our opportunities are enormous. This gives me confidence in our ability to deliver long-term value for our customers, our employees, and our shareholders. Thank you.
Please welcome to the stage EVP and President, Pentair Flow and Pentair Water Solutions, De'Mon Wiggins.
Good morning. Every time I see a video like that, it gives me such energy because I get to see the impact that Pentair makes on the community, the world, and how we protect the planet. I also get to reflect on our employees and our teams and the great work that they do each and every day to ensure the same thing happens, that they protect the community, world, and our property for our planet. I'm De'Mon Wiggins, the leader of the Flow and Water Solutions segment. Today I'm gonna talk to you about the business itself and the businesses that report into it. There are a few key messages I want you to remember first. Our brands. Our brands are important to our customers. They're essential to their delivery each and every day, and we're in key water secular trends.
The Pentair Business System is truly in effect, it's how we have driven value in the past and how we will actually drive additional value in the future. Customer intimacy is so important. It allows us to be more elite to our customers, identifying areas for aftermarket and recurring revenue opportunities. That same intimacy is actually how we decide where their needs, where they have unmet needs, and where we have opportunities for new innovations and new acquisition opportunities to allow us to provide more value to those customers. Let's talk about the Flow business unit. That business unit is known for protecting people and property, also turning waste into value. The other part is this business is very much a global business with footprint in Europe and North America. It's a $1 billion business with sales in commercial, infrastructure, and light industrial.
We go to market in 5 distinct different businesses. You can see the performance of those businesses since 2019. Profitability has really improved. We delivered $225 million of income in full year 2025, improving the ROS profile of that business significantly. You have to ask yourself why? What changed? That business really started to understand that what we do matters. The impact we make to customers is extremely important. We started to lead more with our brands. We enhanced our partnerships. John mentioned that we started to spend more time with specifiers. How do you ensure that you're locking in on the potential that you bring to them and that now you're specified on future job opportunities with those particular customers?
The technology we bring to the table is significant, and it's something that we've used in our key terrain that we focus on in our commercial, light industrial, and infrastructure businesses. This has led to growth aspirations in this business because we have leading innovation. We are now in a profile where we not only look at projects, but the projects lead to reoccurring revenue. Reoccurring revenue in aftermarket sales, service level agreements, and other mutual value that we can create. This also is enhanced by that elite customer experience that we're bringing to the table each and every day. We actually truly understand and have a clear formula on how we focus on growth. The first is innovation. We have new pump technology we're bringing to the table. Our next-gen submersible pump is 1.
We have new hydraulics and fire suppression pumps, and we also have the eccentric impeller that Adrian talked about. That state-of-the-art pump that allows the waste to pass through all the way to the waste treatment plant, that allows that to be the location where the waste is collected. Also, there's less maintenance, better energy efficiency, and allows more uptime for the party and also for the product itself. That has also allowed us to move to more of a durable, reoccurring revenue model that's driven by our revenue operations team. We now understand the full install base, where the opportunities are for the cycle of replacements, connecting with those customers, and clearly engaging with them before a stoppage occurs.
This allows us to create a more elite customer experience because now we're talking to them in an IoT fashion, predicting the models of failure before they actually happen. This is the additional value we're bringing in the Flow business. This is just a snapshot, as Adrian mentioned, of 200 years of products and really goes to the install base that we have today, significant and large. The next 3 slides I'm gonna talk about are our growth platforms, and I'll talk to you about how we're actually using these platforms to drive future value creation for the organization. The first one, commercial building water systems. This is an area where we've been a lead in fire suppression pumps, as I mentioned. Actually, this building is actually protected by a fire suppression pump.
We've improved that with things like our Red Hot program, where we've reduced lead times. We're actually closer to the customer, and their aftermarket sales are increasing because we have speedier solutions to get to them in a faster rate. That also allows us to move the friction of their journey. They have the opportunity to order online, and we're quicker to the solutions that they need. Because of that has opened up opportunities for more of our portfolio. For example, our water transport pumps, which there are numerous more of those types of pumps in a commercial building than a fire suppression pumps. Because of our expertise and our speed and lead times in this area on the fire suppression pumps, that has opened the opportunity for growth in this space, and our customers are really taking advantage of that.
That continues to build that confidence that this is a space that Pentair can continue to succeed in. The next growth platform, municipalities infrastructure. This space, as we know, is that our aging infrastructure is happening every day. We have an opportunity to be a solutions provider in this space. Every 2 minutes, a water main fails. I wanna call your attention to the Hydra-Stop business that we acquired in 2025. That business allows for us to use insertion valves to ensure that even though there's a water main that may break, we keep the businesses like hospitals, educational buildings, those mission-critical applications still up and running. The insertion valve is able to quarantine where the upset happened, but under pressure, but still allow those buildings to remain and keep water into their needs.
That's what this technology does, and this is what we continue to focus on as we drive more value in the ecosystem in this particular space. The next platform I wanna talk to you about is our sustainable gas systems. This is actually where we do CO2 recovery, specifically in areas in food and beverage. Example would be a beer manufacturing or carbonated soft drinks, where we are capturing that CO2 and putting it back into the stream of processing or taking that opportunity to sell it out for revenue for our customers. This business was very much a engineer-to-order business. It's about $150 million in revenue for Pentair, very much focused on kind of engineer-to-order applications, but was very unprofitable.
We took an opportunity to use our principles, the Thayer principles or Pentair principles, and took a tactical pause to ensure that we can rightsize the business and ensure that we could drive more profitable revenue moving forward. We were able to do is utilize the same system, connect with our customers, understand where the opportunities were to standardize these systems, use them as more Lego brick applications that fit their needs, and that has allowed us to ensure that we're getting more revenue and more of a profitable measurement. That is driving a growth in the business. You see orders increasing from 2024 to 2025 because we've allowed that they've earned the right to grow.
The key to that is that is additional aftermarket and reoccurring revenue opportunities that have happened as we've added not only the standardization of projects, but we have service level agreements and opportunities that we're driving mutual value creation in this business. That business has moved from negative profitability to 18% return on sales in the business. Overall in Flow, you saw the performance since 2019. You have to ask, yes, you've mentioned business model portfolio optimization, but a lot of what we've done was around 80/20. We really focus on SKU reduction, standardization, and then understanding where we provide more value to our customers.
You see a significant cost reduction that we've taken place, and this has allowed us to focus on our top customers and create more strategic conversations, moving from tactical, where are my orders, to strategic, what new innovations can we bring forward? What new ideas can we do and work together? It has become much more of a partnership inside the Flow business and is driving towards more revenue growth opportunities. Transformation. The 4 pillars are still here: pricing, sourcing, operations, organization. The focus for this business is really in that operations and organization. If you look at our labor and overhead and our G&A costs, they are above the Pentair averages. This is an area that we will continue to focus on, and what that means to us is that transformation in this business, margin improvement is still available.
Our commitment as we move forward in Pentair Flow is to continue to deliver mid-single-digit growth. Continue to expand robust ROS expansion and margin expansion in this business. What I would like to do before I start into Pentair Water Solutions is play a video and allow you to see what we do in that space. Pentair Water Solutions. This business, I always like to say we're touching you all day and every day. You see us in all aspects of Pentair throughout the day in this opportunity. You know, this business is comprised of 2 business units, Water Quality Management and Commercial Water Solutions. I will break it down into 2 businesses. First, we'll talk about Water Quality Management. This business is focused on 4 different categories. Spray and Specialty, which is in our agricultural space.
The Water Disposal International business, which is out of Germany, more of a service pump business on the disposal side. We have the Water Supply and Disposal, and the Residential Water Treatment business, which we feel coming together will give us opportunities that I'll talk about in a second inside the home. This business has been about right-sizing and optimizing the portfolio since 2019, we feel we've done that. You see the profitability has continued to improve, we continue to win with our recognized leadership brands. We've enhanced our channel partnerships, we continue to drive a portfolio that our dealers want. The key terrain is focusing on the pro channel and also our plumbing trade. We see the opportunities in elite customer experience and also accelerating new channels, the next piece is around the synergies that we're gonna create.
By bringing the Residential Water Treatment and also the Supply Disposal business together, it gives us an opportunity to put those portfolios together and allow us to meet the needs of homeowners in a more larger capacity with a larger portfolio. Why are we doing that today? Our channel is asking for it. They're looking for those opportunities to walk into that homeowner's home and see, here's the value that we can bring for your water treatment and your water management inside the home. That allows us to play a more active role in the customer experience by our tools, training, and enhancing our reward system for those particular dealers and customers. This is a pictorial. Just look at all the areas where Pentair can help with water movement. This is part of that consolidation of bringing the brands together. It drives more synergies.
We become more relevant in the discussion. We now partner more with those channel partners, the plumbers, the water treatment dealers, to understand now what is the unmet need inside the home? How can we bring new innovations, or how can we add acquisitions to actually build out that portfolio that enhances the value for this business? I also have to focus on 80/20 here. 80/20 was a focus of moving a lot of our business from retail, really focusing on our professional channel, and that's been our commitment. We did eliminate SKUs. We got out of those particular channels. Focusing on our pro channel has allowed us to really drive additional growth and see where fruits of that labor is actually coming to fruition as we work with those particular top customers. Again, more strategic discussions, not tactical discussions around just ordering and tactical issues.
Water Quality Management, much like Flow, we have the opportunity to still focus in the operational and organizational side of things. Still significant footprint opportunities and DNA that we will be looking at as we drive continued performance in this business. That performance looks like this. Over the next 3-year vision is low single-digit sales growth and robust ROS expansion. The next business, Commercial Water Solutions. We go to market in 2 different businesses. That's Manitowoc Ice and our Everpure Filtration. These are strong brands, well-known brands, and a strong portfolio that we work with our water professionals and a really strong team of industry experts inside of Pentair that we go to market with. The key terrain in this business is around our food service, hospitality, and then our expansion into really getting into convenience stores.
Growth is gonna be about innovation, account management, and smart connected solutions of the future. That's where we'll be moving. It really comes to filtration innovation. There are significant water needs that we will definitely take advantage of and help bring our technology to solve those problems. Ice innovation, how we will continue to innovate to be more relevant to our customers, and then the smart systems to be able to understand how we provide uptime and transformation inside their business to drive productivity with our customers. Manitowoc is fully integrated into Pentair. We have identified significant growth levers that we will drive as we move forward.
Cost synergy, we have used 80/20 in this business. The NPI roadmap is poised for growth, and we're moving to some vertical markets adjacent to where we played in the past that will open up the aperture for growth in this business. One of those areas is convenience stores. Convenience stores are growing, and they're becoming more of a destination location where people are traveling, and it's more than just picking up snacks. There's opportunity for carbonated beverages and other hot coffee and other types of beverages that we can support through filtration and ice applications. This is a significant opportunity that we see playing forward in the future where we can drive growth in this business. This is an example of innovation, our NeoRefresh.
It has given us a competitive advantage where we're actually integrating our filtration product with our ice machines, creating a better ice experience, better taste, better quality, better clarity. It also has a sustainability aspect, decreases the energy use of this machine compared to many of the competitors, and it's also easy for the operator to access. We won several awards around this particular product and excited about what that's gonna do as we move forward in the future in this business with this new innovation. Couple growth priorities in this business. Number 1, innovation, and it has to be cutting edge. We will expand our presence specifically in areas with new customers, new OEMs, and new opportunities, as I mentioned, in the convenience store space.
Connected systems and solutions, those are gonna be key to understand where the needs of the customers are and how we can connect with them to be an easier provider and more seamless situation and solution. This business in the 3-year vision, mid-single-digit sales growth, we will have ongoing ROS expansion in this business to deliver growth. Key takeaways today. We have the right portfolio that we're operating inside of Pentair. We're evolving the business in our distribution, also being more of a specified business. We're becoming much more relevant where we play in recurring revenue, aftermarket work streams, and opportunities to drive growth. Our teams are curious into how they look for those new opportunities of growth through innovation. Then our PBS is foundational to what you're gonna see for growth and transformation and margin expansion inside of Pentair.
Most importantly, I'm excited about the journey that we have in front of us, and we're gonna do some great things moving forward. Thank you.
We will now be taking a break. Please be back in 15 minutes. Please return to your seat. The program is about to resume. Chief Executive Officer, Pentair Pool, Jerome Pedretti.
Good morning. Inspiring video that tells us, you know, why we exist and how we support our customers. I'm Jerome Pedretti, CEO of Pentair Pool, and I'll kick it off and then I'll pass it on to Greg Claffey, our Chief Revenue Officer. Greg spends most of his time in the field. I think he was best positioned to explain how the, you know, our growth opportunities really impact and impact positively our customers. What we'll do, we'll have a quick look back, you know, how Pentair Pool and the successes of Pentair Pool and how we manage through our leadership, through our moat to create value.
Then spend most of our time, of course, on the future and how our growth opportunities are gonna help us to accelerate growth, to gain share, and to continue to expand margin, then continue to create value for a time for future. Let me step back and let me step back and tell you how proud I am of the Pentair Pool team. Pentair Pool team delivered over the past 6 years, 8% annual growth, 600 basis point of margin expansion, and that has created $4 billion of value. We've been doing that consistently throughout the years, even when the cycle of the industry was not in our favor, like lately. Very, very proud of the Pool team, and we have a great business.
A business which is durable, a business which is sustainable, which is resilient. We do that because we have a great brand. We have a great brand, like Adrian said, fantastic innovation that we have in the past. We have also some great deep dealer relationship with our, with our customers, and we have a great install base. Our customers are gonna need us going forward. They're gonna need innovation, and we can help there. They're gonna need to improve the customer experience through digital, and I think we can help there, like Adrian said also earlier. We can solve some of their issues. The issues they have now is about skill labor shortage. We have solution, and that's why our growth opportunity of automation, innovation, and customer experience is gonna help us grow, accelerate growth, and take share.
Take share in an industry that, yes, has some headwinds over short term. We have a lot of upside over the long term. We have a lot of upside because we are resilient industry. 80% of our revenue comes from existing pool. When you have a pool, you need to maintain it. Really, an industry which is mainly non-discretionary. We also are at a low point. If you look at existing new pool, it's about 60,000 new pools now in the U.S. Just before the pandemic, it was about 80,000. There's some growth opportunities there. When we look at the 5.4 million pool that exists in the U.S., the average age is 20 years, 23 years exactly. When you have a pool which is that old, you need to remodel it.
We have this. We have also great consumer trends, secular trends. People continue to migrate to the south. There's about 3,000 people every single day that still migrate to the South, and that's where we are the strongest. 75% of our revenue comes from the Sun Belt. Like we said before, a lot of opportunity with connected pools. 70% of new pools are connected today, should be 100%. Of existing pools, 2 out of 3 pools are not connected today. It's a huge growth opportunity, a growth opportunity where we are well positioned to really benefit from. I think we have competitive advantages that differentiate us, differentiates from our competitors, from large or small competitors, from established or new competitors. Those competitive advantages are, first of all, our brand. We are recognized for our quality.
We are recognized for our performance. We are recognized for our sustainability. We also have the largest dealer network. We have the most connected pool in North America, and we have also the largest install base, and those really represent our growth opportunities. For our dealers, yes, we go to market through distribution. We have great relationship with our distributors. We work well together to drive growth. At the same time, we have the largest team in the field as well supporting dealers. Supporting the pool builders, supporting the pool servicers, so that they can serve their customers even better. What is important for them? It's about quality, it's about supporting the field, it's about innovation, and it's about providing them programs, loyalty programs, training programs. We score very, very well on all those 5 elements.
That's why we have great retention, and we have great loyalty from our customers. If we look about innovation, Pentair has a history of game-changing innovation. Game-changing innovation that has increased the TAM, enabled us to drive and gain share, but also change regulations for the good. The poster child is the IntelliFlo. The IntelliFlo was launched in 2005, and I remember because that's why I joined Pentair, and I was responsible to grow and to scale up the IntelliFlo. While it was difficult to explain to a dealer that a pump, you had to pay 3x the price of an existing pump, the value prop was so compelling. Compelling for the homeowner, energy savings, lower noise, longer longevity of a pump, but very compelling also for the dealer. The dealer could do an upsell.
He also had 1 SKU, and a pump he could dial up or dial down so that the pool looked amazing, so that the water features looked amazing. We have that ability to change the industry. What is coming next, it's really about connectivity. Connectivity is gonna be so important because it's gonna change the customer experience of all the different customers. That's where the opportunity is. It's gonna simplify water quality, which is a little bit of an enigma right now for the homeowner and difficult for the dealer to manage. It's gonna help the dealer be more productive and solve those key labor challenges that that he has. Think about preventive maintenance that they can do. Then it's gonna help those dealers install, maintain, and repair those about equipment in an easier way. Think about remote troubleshooting, self-heating.
This is why it's a huge growth opportunity that we have in front of us. This is why we need to change from being a manufacturers of premium equipment to really being a provider of premium experiences for all our customers. That's a game-changing opportunity that we have in front of us. That's what Adrian talked about before. I think that's huge, and I think we can really benefit from this. With this, I'll pass it on to Greg Claffey, our Chief Revenue Officer. Greg.
Thank you. Thanks, Jerome. I feel a little left out not having the voice of God introduce me, but that was a good introduction, Jerome. I'm Greg Claffey. I am the chief revenue officer of Pentair Pool, and I'm honored to hold that position for such a great company in a great industry. My responsibilities span from marketing, sales, customer service, product management, strategy, and also technology, which includes digital. I'm also proud to lead, you know, a great field of people with that spend time with our customers each and every day. As Jerome mentioned, I spend a predominant amount of my time in the field, somewhere between 36, 44 weeks a year, interacting with our customer base. Also interacting with our channels, our channel partners, and our customers and dealers.
I'm also honored to serve as a board member on the PHTA, the Pool and Hot Tub Association, where I'm honored and humbled that I've been selected to be the next chairman of that board going into next year. All those things and the interactions I have in the field have given me great feedback of why we are the industry leader. We do a lot of things great in the field. Our sales team is a sustainable competitive advantage, but they're not just salespeople. They're technical industry experts that spend time in the field with our dealers, sitting on upside-down buckets at the pad, solving challenges in the field each and every day. I'm proud to work alongside them. Additionally, we have great channel partners.
These are partners that are invested in our business, invested in our brand, and want to grow this industry responsibly, and we're happy to call them partners. Last but not least, our dealers themselves. These are industry professionals that are significantly passionate about our brand in Pentair. They have high expectations of us, so we should have high expectations of ourselves. We will look at our future. We're building on our 3 key terrain that we have done so well over the last number of years as Pentair Pool, and we're gonna continue to build on those and enhance them. What's changing is how we do those things. For us, it's about automation and delivering quality product and a quality experience. It's continuing to drive industry innovation that advances the industry and increases the TAM.
Last but not least, like I said it before, our sustainable competitive advantage is the customer experience we provide when we bring all those 3 things together with the great people that we have, with channel partners, our dealers, and our teams in the field. As Jerome mentioned, connectivity is our future. When you look at the equipment that's on the pad, the value used to be created in the individual pieces of the equipment. We feel like the long-term value then is created by how all those pieces of equipment interact with each other. I'll give you an example of that in the field. In certain regions, we saw some challenges with our heating technology, depending on where you were regionally.
Initially, you would say, "Oh, there must be some challenges with the heating technology." What we found is as the technology advanced with our variable speed technology and our salt generated areas, the salt would continue to generate constant concentrations, but the flow would fluctuate up and down. During low flow events, we started having heater challenges. Those are things we didn't know or find out until we were in the field. By having the entire pad connect together, we're gonna be able to see those things happen in real time and prevent them from happening altogether, ultimately providing a better experience for our consumers, right? We're preventing the downtime when those birthday parties happen on the weekends before they happen.
Additionally, we're creating more value for our servicers and our builders, so they can bring that value through service and availability and having available technology and analytics to see those things happen in real time, and ultimately providing better experience for our channel partners where they can have the right piece of equipment in the right location at the right time. As we continue to pull those things together in that flywheel that you see here above, how we create value creation is ultimately, again, bringing those digital platforms, enabling our technology to provide a technology-enabled customer experience. As we continue to work ourselves around that flywheel, we will again enhance the experience with our channel partners. Again, allowing them to be more efficient, to have the right product in the right location.
Training our dealers and having them having the ability to be able to see things in real time and prevent truck rolls from happening, non-revenue site visits, and again, providing a better consumer experience ultimately so that we can provide increase to the TAM and expand the market. I'd like to take a victory lap again, our IntelliFlo technology. Jerome mentioned about the history of us providing disruptive technology to the industry that provides long-term value. We are now in our 3rd iteration of this fantastic technology. It's an award-winning pump. It's received its ENERGY STAR award again, and it continues to build upon itself each and every year. The great thing about the IF3 technology is that it's the 1st pump that actually had smart technology built into it.
We're able to have an entry-level automation piece of equipment that was tied directly into the pump. We can control 2 different features, whether it be heater and lights, and again, it starts to expand and expose people to what automation can do for you long term. In addition to that, it continues to provide value with variable speed technology, lower energy cost of ownership for the owner, and again, ultimately providing long-term value through reliability. The best part about this technology is that as we continue to iterate, because it's smart, we have the ability to provide firmware updates remotely instead of having to provide new technology on the pad. That again, provides speed of innovation and provide value in real time to our consumer base. We're not done.
We're already thinking about what we could do with a 4th iteration of this pump. I'd also like to say I'm very proud of our teams and what we've done to continue to drive industry-level automation to the field. We talked about the IF3 IntelliFlo. We continue to add value through our IntelliCenter platform, providing easy provisioning for startups for our dealers. We also launched 2 great technologies in 2025. 1 is our IntelliVibe lights. It provides an infinite level of colors to our consumer base, so they can enjoy their pools and aesthetically, but ultimately, it provides a differentiator for our dealers to have them to be able to sell versus their competitors in their field. The last 1 was our IntelliChlor Plus, our salt cell that we launched in 2025.
This was actually innovation from getting feedback from our dealers and spending time in the field. This wasn't something that we thought of ourselves. It was listening to our customers and the challenges that they were having in the field. We were seeing our customers actually spending a lot of time maintaining the salt cells. What we found is when there was an issue, they would actually have to rip the salt cell out completely, throw it away, and install a new one. A lot of the challenges were in the electrical display. What we decided to do was make that modular. Now our dealers can actually service the equipment in line, and if there's a problem with the electricals, they can remove the electricals off the top. It's modular, and replace the electricals on top, not having to replumb.
Again, sustainable, easy maintenance, and again, providing value long term for our dealers. We're not done there. As Adrian mentioned earlier, we're continuing to push the limits of what industry disruption can be from a technology perspective, and we're super excited about our hybrid purifier. The filtration aspect of the pad has been an area that has not been automated and/or innovated in a really long time. We're excited about what we're able to provide here. We're actually using technology from inside Pentair that's got IP, and we're going to take those things and combine them with Watercare and our IoT technologies to provide an up-level experience for our consumers.
Again, looking at this thing regionally, we can provide a green to clean pool when you're opening and closing the pools in the Northeast in just 24 hours. If you're living in Arizona and you have hard water, we're actually gonna provide a much more enjoyable experience for our consumers in that space with this technology. It provides an opportunity for us to increase the TAM long term. It also provides a additional revenue stream through recurring revenue potentially in the future. We're super excited about this technology. It's again going to revolutionize the pool space, and again, continuing to put ourselves on the map as the industry leader in the pool industry. Okay, all that being said, with technology, it does not get done without the people in the field. As technology advances, we have to do things differently.
We have to sell differently. We have to service differently. We took our 80/20 approach, we looked at kind of our go-to-market strategy and what we need to do to continue to enhance the customer experience. This is what you're seeing here. Continuing to stay focused on growth, what we can do to support our customers better, how we can educate and train our customers and our teams, again, providing that service locally where they need it, when they need it, for what they need. We're continuing to do that each and every day. This is another example of that. We've been in the field training and educating our customers for a number of years. We currently have 8 customer service locations, located where we actually do this locally.
I want to take a step back and recognize what we do for the industry overall. We actually train 6,000 to 7,000 dealers each and every year through our Pentair University. It's a tremendous value we provide. It helps them serve their customers better. It helps them understand our technology, ultimately it's gonna grow the business overall. We also have expanded that into our learning management system, where we're actually starting to touch up to 15,000 and more digitally. We're trying to figure out ways where we can expand the TAM and train the labor in the field to be more efficient and also educate them on the technologies that are coming out so they can actually do things to grow their business and create long-term value for their customers.
We're gonna continue to enhance that and grow on that model, 'cause again, it's a sustainable competitive advantage for us at Pentair. Lastly, I just wanna leave with you that it's a fantastic business. It's a fantastic industry. I'm proud of the people I get to work with alongside. We've got tremendous growth opportunities out in front of us, both inorganically and organically, we're excited about the future at Pentair Pool. Thanks for your time, I'll pass it back to Jerome.
Thank you, Greg. Super exciting to see those growth opportunities, which are really differentiating us. That's not the only thing we've done. We've also, you know, used the Pentair, you know, business system that John has talked about before and 80/20 to simplify our business so we can reinvest into growth. We can reinvest with our top customers. We can reinvest on our flagship products. We've reduced 6,500 SKUs. We've taken 750 of our smaller customers and redirected them through distribution to be able to reinvest in growth and accelerate. By doing that, we also accelerate the transformation.
We accelerate the transformation with our customers, improving the quality, providing better experiences for them, doing the sales excellence that Greg has just talked about, but also accelerating the transformation on the sourcing side in order to expand margin. That's why I have a ton of confidence, but not just me, the entire pool team, we have a ton of confidence to be able to continue to grow mid-single digit and expand margin, and that's gonna create value. There is 1 thing I want to leave you with, is that we as a pool team, we are committed. We are committed to continue to lead the pool industry. Continue to lead the pool industry with both differentiated and lead customer experiences, which are gonna be more and more digital.
That's gonna enable us to accelerate growth, gain share, and expand margin, and that's gonna create a ton of value, a value for our customers, like Greg has talked about, but for our shareholders as well. Thank you.
Please welcome to the stage Chief Financial Officer, Nick Brazis.
Good morning, everyone. My name is Nick Brazis. I've been with Pentair since 2023, working closely with John and this executive team during the last several years. I'm excited to talk to you today and get into it here. As you've already seen today, Pentair is fundamentally a stronger company than we were just a few years ago. We're more focused with structurally higher margins, improved free cash flow conversion, and with a business system that drives results. We have a stronger balance sheet than we did just a few years ago. It provides us with optionality to continue to drive incremental shareholder value. These results reflect disciplined portfolio actions, the development and the deployment of our Pentair Business System, our operational rigor and discipline, and a commitment to return value to shareholders. We are executing with discipline. We expect that to continue.
Looking at the last several years, we've delivered margin expansion despite volume pressure, demonstrating structural cost reset, not cyclical leverage. Incremental margins have exceeded historical averages. This is a testimony to our operating discipline. Return on invested capital remains high teens, even in a slower growth environment, reflecting our relatively low capital intensity business model and our operating discipline. Free cash flow conversion remains about 100% of net income, reinforcing our confidence in normalized earnings growth. We believe that we have built a track record of delivering on our commitments and delivering value to shareholders. When you look at our revenue profile from the last few years, we have actively managed our portfolio for quality revenue, not just volume. We've exited lower return, higher volatility revenue streams and improved our mix quality. Portfolio simplification has reduced lower margin and more volatile holdings.
Revenue today carries higher margin and stronger incremental flow through. We believe this positions us for outsized earnings leverage when volumes do recover and as our organic growth initiatives read out. As we have developed and deployed the tools of transformation, we have evolved our Pentair Business System and updated our 80/20 processes with discipline and rigor. Our structural cost actions have permanently lowered our fixed overhead. Incremental margins are now sustainably higher than historically through the cycles. Our Pentair Business System is fundamentally not a cost out program. This is an operating system. That operating system, as we have developed it and deployed it, is taking our return on sales from about 19% just a few years ago in 2022 to an expected 28% in 2028 through mix improvement, structural cost, and productivity.
Our business system is becoming our operating system, and our tools are being embedded into our enterprise. I'll highlight just a few of our Pentair Business System tools and how we expect them to drive shareholder value creation over the next several years. You've heard us regularly talk about 80/20. 80/20 has become a way of life at Pentair. SKU rationalization and 80/20 focus have reduced complexity and freed up some of our capacity to prioritize for our Quad 1 customers, our priority customers. We've executed with discipline and focus to complete our Quad 4 exits, and our 80/20 journey is continuing with our key ratio guiding our focus. Commercial, water, and pool are focused on Quad 1 growth and margin expansion through that growth.
Our flow and Water Quality Management businesses are also focused on Quad 1 growth. They also have robust operational and functional op cost opportunities, which I'll talk more about here in a few minutes. We're taking our Quad 1 customers with initial focus on Commercial, Water, and Pool and advancing the tools of sales, inventory, and operational planning. These efforts are going to provide an enhanced customer experience for our Quad 1 customers while also increasing our forecast accuracy, reducing future excess and obsolescent inventory, improving inventory turns, and ultimately improving our free cash flow from operations. We've also embarked on a comprehensive make buy program. Across our global and integrated supply chain, we've initiated this program.
This initiative and the tools within our Pentair Business System are aimed at further improving our fixed cost structure, lowering landed product cost, lowering our inventory levels required to satisfy our customers, continue to enhance operating margins, enhance our return on assets, and ultimately also enhance our free cash flow from operations. As John mentioned, we have an intentional portfolio view of our businesses. Going forward, each segment within our business has a defined path to grow and expand margin. Accountability sits at the business unit level and is supported by disciplined capital allocation strategies by our executive team. Mid-single-digit organic growth plus approximately 100 basis points of annual margin expansion, we believe drives durable earnings per share compounding. Incremental margins in flow and water quality are expected to exceed portfolio averages.
Our capital deployment is aligned to higher return platforms within these businesses with strict hurdle rates. Our baseline growth that you see today does not require disproportionate capital investment, and we expect to remain an asset-light business model. The model that we've talked to you about today is intentional. We're being transparent to give you clarity into how we're thinking about the businesses and how we're thinking about driving shareholder value over the next several years. As stated, we expect to see mid-single-digit revenue growth, high single-digit adjusted operating income growth, and low double-digit earnings per share growth through 2028. We expect to have return on invested capital remain above our cost of capital through the cycles.
Looking at our revenue expectations through 2028, we expect revenue to be diversified across residential, commercial, and infrastructure businesses. That alignment of our portfolio with long-term water sustainability trends supports sustained growth and margin expansion. We also expect our commercial execution and innovation to support share gains. Our expected balanced growth reduces dependency on any single end market or cycle. For clarity, our breakthrough innovations we've talked about today and a normalized residential recovery support incremental revenue beyond the 4.8 shown to you today. Those innovations and that North America recovery have been backed out of this plan through contingency. When we think about our return on sales expansion, these gains reflect permanent and structurally embedded productivity gains through our operating system, through the Pentair Business System. Again, these are not temporary cost out actions. These are structural modifications to our business.
Incremental margins now exceed historical benchmarks, again, through our mix, cost structure, and portfolio actions. We believe we have robust G&A and manufacturing efficiency opportunities that are going to drive incremental margin expansion within our flow and water quality management businesses. Both of these business units have margin expansion opportunity to be harvested through our Pentair Business System operational excellence tools. They both have fixed cost opportunities and working capital opportunities. Our structural cost efforts are being prioritized via our 80/20 key ratio and harvested through our SIOP tools, our make buy tools, and our other operational excellence tools. We expect these exercises to improve the quality of our earnings and to reduce earnings volatility through the cycles. Our adjusted operating income growth is expected to be balanced across our portfolio and not reliant on a single rebound or a single end market.
Margin expansion reflects operating leverage within our commercial water and pool businesses and structurally lower cost basis throughout the portfolio. We'll also see benefit from our portfolio mix improvements and our already executed 80/20 exits. Our path to approximately $1.4 billion of adjusted operating income again does not include these breakthrough innovations or volume normalization through residential recovery. These have been contingency out of our plan to $1.4 billion of adjusted operating income. I'd like to call your attention to the middle of this slide. We're targeting low double-digit earnings per share growth as our base case scenario. This base scenario expects mid-single digit revenue growth, high single digit adjusted income growth with about 1 turn of net leverage. This base scenario provides strong balance sheet optionality going forward.
With our free cash flow conversion at approximately 100% of net income, we expect to have strong capital deployment flexibility. Our balance sheet strength, we believe, reduces downside risk while again preserving capital allocation optionality. This base plan is intentional. It's reflective of our Pentair Business System operating discipline and rigor and our history of strong execution. Our team has a high sense of accountability to generate compelling value through this base case plan. We believe that we have upside opportunity from volume normalization in the residential sector and with attractive incremental margins. This volume normalization with modest balance utilization would create a mid-teens EPS compounding opportunity while maintaining our high ROIC above our cost of capital. This plan would deliver approximately $2.7 billion of cash over this time horizon.
We'll use this strong cash flow to drive organic investment first to create the highest return growth opportunities focused on higher margin and higher 80/20 key ratio businesses within our portfolio. Our M&A opportunities must be accretive to return on invested capital and earnings within our disciplined framework and timelines. Our dividend growth reflects 5 decades of disciplined capital return, prioritizing shareholder value creation. We will strategically and opportunistically participate in share buybacks, and our investment-grade balance sheet will remain a non-negotiable constraint as we deploy capital. We expect our capital allocation to be balanced with flexibility over this plan and timeline. We expect that balance to be preserved while pursuing higher return opportunities.
Our base case drives sustained revenue growth with continued margin expansion and compounding earnings per share, achieving low double-digit EPS growth. Our strong and cumulative multi-year cash flow supports disciplined reinvestment and investment and strong capital allocation opportunity and optionality. High teens return on invested capital remains a guardrail for our capital deployment, and our entire exec team is incentivized and compensated based on achieving those ROIC targets. Our earnings durability and capital efficiency underpins a long-term value creation opportunity for our Pentair shareholders. In closing, through our Pentair Business System, our growth algorithm supports revenue growth, strong margin expansion, low double digit and consistent earnings growth, and free cash flow generation and capital deployment optionality.
Our downside risk, we believe, is significantly mitigated by the structural cost improvements and business model improvements we've already made and embedded into our business, with additional opportunities to be harvested within our water quality and flow businesses. Residential recovery, breakthrough innovation, and disciplined capital allocation, we believe, provide additional value creation upside to this base plan. To reiterate, our capital allocation priorities are, 1st, organic growth, 2nd, returning capital to shareholders in the form of dividends, and then finally, pursuing strategic and opportunistic M&A and share buybacks. Pentair today is a stronger, more focused company with a clear line of sight to sustained value creation. We have structurally improved our margin profile, strengthened our returns, and increased the predictability of our cash flow. Just as importantly, we have done this while improving our balance sheet and our financial flexibility.
As we execute with discipline, our expected outcomes will be consistent earnings per share growth, strong free cash flow, and returns on capital that remain solidly above our weighted average cost of capital. We believe we are well-positioned to compound value for our shareholders as we execute for our customers and our Pentair employees. We thank you for your continued support, and again, thank you for being here this morning. John, back to you.
Please welcome back to the stage John Stauch.
Do any better than Nick, so we'll just call it a mic drop, and we'll get on with Q&A. I do wanna let you know Nick and I will be up here to answer any questions, but my entire executive team is available for any questions you have. I'll just emcee it and generally facilitate those questions. We have mics in the room, and we'll get going with Q&A. Oh, there's no questions. We can move on to lunch.
Hi, everyone. Thanks. Mike Allen with Baird. 2 questions here. First, you know, you talk about the 2 different cases here, base case and then the potential upside case. Maybe talk about the incremental margins in the base case, and then the upside case assumes some level of volume recovery, gets rid of the contingency. With all the work you've done and with volumes coming back, what does that mean for the incremental margins and the extra pull-through you could probably get from that?
Yeah.
What's the spread? What's the difference?
We'd expect incremental margins within our pool business to probably be a little bit north of 40%, and that's net of investments, incremental investments into the business. Our commercial water business would be north of 30% drop-through.
Do those increase then when you get the volume, or is that going to be regardless of the case, A or B?
N o, they increase as you get the volume to a, to a certain point. Over the next few years, we would think that those would be north of 40% though for pool and north of 30% for commercial water.
With investment.
That's right.
With investment.
Net of investment.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Right. 2nd question, you know, when you laid out your growth opportunities, maybe just give some more color on the pharma and the data center opportunity, where you guys play specifically and what kind of investments you're making to make yourself more relevant in those spaces as we move forward?
De'Mon?
I would say, am I on live? Thank you. You know, for the data center opportunity, you know, from the initial build, that has not been our focus. It's about the continued chip and water cooling that we would play from a standpoint of our pump initiation. That's where the focus would be in that business. We're tapping into that today, understanding where those opportunities are, and that's where their growth potential would be in that business.
As I said earlier, Mike, I think there's a growing issue with the data centers consuming both tremendous amounts of water and also energy, which puts a huge constraint on the overall subdivisions and the communities that those data centers are involved in. Several of our discussions are how can we help with our ability to manage both the energy and water aspects of that? Obviously, anytime you move water, you consume energy, so you're looking for energy efficiency there. Ultimately, I think we're gonna see emerging opportunities over this timeframe that engages Pentair with those solutions.
S pecifically with our blue pumps and our red pumps, right? Blue for water supply, providing supply into a data center, into a hospital, a university, or into our big pharma complex. Our red pumps supplying the fire suppression technology for any of those businesses. Those technologies can be applied across those industries. Thanks, Mike.
Good morning. Scott Graham from Seaport.
Yeah.
2 questions for you. I'm assuming that the revenue targets are organic. Within those organic estimates, can you give us what your pricing assumptions are by segment? As a follow-up question, I'm not looking to have you go through the deck, but there's a chart that shows 80/20 growth versus optimization, and it looks like it's about 50/50 . What does it take to get to the optimization boxes to get it to growth? Thanks.
On pricing, I would say generally we expect pricing to offset inflation and maybe a little bit more than that over this plan horizon. As far as the 80/20 optimize, we use our key ratio, which is net material margin over cost of labor, to drive our decisions on whether those businesses are focused on growth or more focused on optimizing that key ratio before we try to drive incremental growth. We look across the portfolio at that key ratio within the sub-businesses to determine if that key ratio is healthy and whether or not that business needs to be prioritized to continue to grow top line and volume, or if we need to do additional work before they're allowed to grow incrementally.
I'd say on top of that, Scott, we got a gift when the tariffs and the supply chain challenges came. If you didn't really have pricing power or the ability to price the tariffs, it was kind of a strong signal that you were probably not properly placed in the industry. Therefore, that's what led to some of the rationalization we did in the portfolio, because I don't think if we were me too, or we were a commodity, it was gonna be really hard to go through all the supply chain rework and the manufacturing work, and then we still might have only just been competitive, if that makes sense. That's what you saw in the waterfall when we talked about the portfolio exits or some of the rationalization.
Yeah.
Thanks.
I guess my 1st question on the Water Solutions business, it's the one that, I mean, it had declining revenue over the last few years. I think we know what some of the reasons for that were, and it wasn't all of the businesses within there. Can you talk about what's been done to those businesses? Then I guess the crux of the question is how you manage that transition of those businesses going from optimize, get out, simplify, you know, really focused on shrinking and cost reductions to moving into a growth mode.
I'll start with, you're right. Everpure and Manitowoc are phenomenal businesses and really good brands. I do wanna share that we would never use as an excuse or whine about it, they're also global businesses. While we've had steady, consistent growth, even in the down cycle of restaurants in North America, you know, we have a different output with competitive price pressure in China and how we can compete for business in China, both on those product lines. What you're seeing in that business is a netted result of where we are. I think when you look forward, we feel like we're really strongly positioned on that side, and we are really committing to mid-single digit growth again, which is where that business has historically delivered, going forward.
The water quality management is, as you showed, 4 different businesses with all 4 different end cycles. The complexity has to be reduced as we have, but we also have to go where the market is, and it can't be more clear that we were in the specialty filtration side of the business, and most of the filtration needs, I'm talking water softeners in the United States, is being held through that large distribution channel, which is the plumber channel, big name starts with an F, and ultimately works its way into the plumber channel, and you're seeing a lot more solutions being solved through that aspect, which is where this repositioning needs to occur, and we need to go with a stronger line card and really have a long-term focused outcome. We're confident in that.
I mean, by the early innings of where we are in that process, we think that growth profile looks a lot better as we go forward.
I didn't go through the deck and add up all of the incremental growth opportunities in there, but it seemed like a lot relative to what's in the breakthrough innovation bar in the walk there. Are they included in the base mid-single digit growth, or they're all in the breakthrough innovation growth? I guess kind of how have you weighted the probability of getting to each of those in the walks, I guess? Thanks.
Our NPI, our ongoing new product development and organic revenue enhancers are in our base case scenario. What's not in the base case scenario are those incremental breakthrough innovations that you saw Adrian talking about. Those would be upside to the base case.
If you're getting a point to a price, those still seem like, you know, there's a fair amount there that probably would push you past mid-single digit growth. Are you handicapping some of those things?
Well, we're, you know, we're hopeful on just flat markets for the core market this year. I mean, if you go back, we've had volume declines because that market, as I shared with you, it's hard to outrace a market decline. We're encouraged that we have new product introductions, we have innovation, we have the growth actions that you saw in flow, and we do think we're gonna get growth going forward, Nathan. It is hedged a little, as you saw in the charts.
Andy Kaplowitz at Citigroup. Thanks for the presentation. Nick, we probably should just ask you any updates on the quarter. My real question is, like, just sort of double-clicking on pricing and pool. I think, John, you talked last quarter about, you know, having to bring value to customers, right? You just put a lot of price through. How do you sort of balance that with the elevated inflation that's out there? I think the message today, right, is focus more on Quad 1 customers even more and propel innovation. Maybe any thoughts on if you're able to do that moving forward.
Let me take the first one, then I'll kick it to you, Jerome Pedretti. I mean, I have been very clear-eyed and very, you know, transparent. I'm not worried about pricing on a high-end IntelliCenter set of, you know, pool aspects. That is a wealthy individual buying a multi-body pool. They generally understand the tariffs, the needs, and the passthroughs, and the value is there. At some point, the cost of those tariffs and inflation are asking you in an older pool that might be used a couple times a year to have a repair cost that might be outside the parameter of where you're at. You're also then in your mind saying, "Okay, do I need all these features? Do I need all the bells and whistles?" By driving that cost-plus mentality, we're opening up this opportunity for lower-end replacements.
Most of that share that we talked about in the installed pool is ours. I mean, we were the leading pool provider for a long period of time. We want to have a like-for-like replacement, and we want to get you back up and running. I'm just being honest, I think that's where the pricing pressure is going to be. Now, I don't think you're going to see it overall in the whole scheme of our growth elements going forward, but we can't continue to just build product for the high end. We also have to go back and say, "How do we make sure we're competitive enough on your good enough product for that solution that I'm just talking about?" I don't think that's a lower margin. I mean, we have most of that product developed today.
We just need to be there offering you the features that you want at the right competitive price point. I don't know if you want to add anything?
No. The thing I would say was on the 2nd part of your question, you know, it's about Quad 1, and I think we work really well with our top customers. I think we work really well with, you know, distribution in order to drive sell-through, to drive share gain, and that's really the long-term objective that we have. We also work really well with our top dealers in order to continue, you know, to help them, to help in their day-to-day, to support them in what they need and provide them innovation so that they can grow and be more productive themselves. I think it's really about the focus, where the growth is gonna come and where the share is gonna come.
I would just finalize. Our growth algorithm in a normalized period is a couple points of price in pool. We generally, we get 2-3 points of market growth from aftermarket and new pools. Then we would have something that we've done to create TAM, or total available market, which would be incremental innovation for the whole entire industry. Then since we've invented it, we would get an incremental portion of that. That was the high single digits performance that we've had for a long period of time. What we think we pitched to you today is a path to get back there.
Yeah.
I, and I think that's the type of potential we have in pool.
Nick, no big changes to the quarter?
No Wait.
No big.
No big changes to the quarter, reiterating the quarter?
Oh, I think this morning.
No, we confirmed it. Yes.
O kay.
That would be no big changes.
Okay.
Confirmation.
Just, like, De'Mon kinda came out with the 5 subsegments. It's, you know, something sort of clicked, I guess, in the H2 of 2025. Like, where has the growth been the strongest, if I look at the 5 subsegments and, you know, the durability of that growth?
In those areas, the strongest growth was in our industrial space, specifically the food and beverage, the CO2 capture. We also saw strong growth in our commercial building, as I shared before, really driving that move to the fire suppression, water transport opportunities. That's where we're seeing most of the growth. The working with our end users, our distributors, and specifiers. Now, that also has turned from just project-oriented, but that recurring revenue, we're starting to see that read out at a much higher level.
Thank you.
Yep.
Thanks, Andy. I've got to give De'Mon a commercial here. I mean, you know, it seemed like every investor call we're asking why we're keeping flow, right? You know, we always knew that we had this potential to create real tremendous value, and we thought we could do both. We could grow it and optimize it, and I think the team, you know, Jerome had led a lot of that effort, and then De'Mon picked it up and took it to the next level. I think demonstrating that growth and getting to the market and serving the market the way that it needs, I think it opens up the aperture for M&A.
Yeah.
That's what you want. We did have the 1 business in there, which was the sustainable gas.
Yeah.
That was the business that was causing us the most pain because it was growing and losing money. Now we're growing, you know, mid-teens, and we're producing high-teens ROS. It's a great business.
Yeah.
Congratulations to the team for all of that.
Hi, it's Deane Dray.
With RBC. I just struck off the question about are you gonna divest Flow, 'cause that was a pretty convincing-
Thank you, Deane.
All right.
Thank you, Deane.
Appreciate that. I just wanna make sure I'm clear on the contingency assumption. First of all, I love seeing that. You know, one of the companies in the industrial space, United Technologies, always had a contingency in every plan because stuff happens. Just the idea here is, are you backing out upside in a resi recovery from all of the businesses? Is there anything else that you're baking or could have some contingency baked in? I would say it this way, Deane. We haven't put a residential recovery into our base case scenario
That base case does not assume that we see resi recovery. Then the incremental breakthrough innovations and residential recovery would lead to that higher than mid-single digit growth. We have backed both of those out of that incremental plan.
If we stood up here in a couple of years and did the update, we would compare ourselves to the base plan. We'd expect to have beat it handsomely. That would be our expectation.
Great. Just as a follow-up, and maybe it's also a follow-up to John, your comment about M&A. When you look at the upside case, you're baking in a potential increase of 1 turn of leverage. Is that a assumed M&A optionality, if you will? Or is it buybacks? Maybe just kinda address the, you know, it's not a big spike in leverage, but it looks like that could be one of the levers that you could pull. Anything about the funnel at this point.
When we build that longer-term view internally, we generally use buyback as the metric that an M&A would need to exceed. Obviously, buyback has a shorter-term benefit. Good M&A would have the best long-term benefit. If you're not comparing it to what buyback would have got you, I don't think you're starting out with M&A being the fair, you know, the fair metric is the buyback value, investing in yourself. I think, you know, all of our incentive plans are based upon organic revenue growth, we're not incentivized to do the M&A. The ROIC is a check and balance against, you know, an M&A that would destroy the ROIC. We're not gonna get paid on it. Ultimately, we're trying to build long-term sustained cash flows and EPS.
The only thing I would add to that is, I mentioned earlier that our investment grade target is a non-negotiable for us. We're gonna remain investment grade, and so we would put that cap of approximately 2.5 turns on our deal flow. Thanks, Deane.
Hey, thanks. It's Joe Giordano from TD. Just wanted to make sure I understand how you're, like, differentiating between what's kind of like a core growth and what's in, and what's in these opportunities that are on all these slides. Like I look at pool, for example, right? I think it said $400 million to $500 million of cumulative opportunity over the next couple of years. The midpoint of that is 9% or so for growth over the next couple of years. We're guiding mid-single. Like, which stuff is in that and, like, and how are we kind of bridging?
I think those are opportunities. I appreciate that. We're not gonna capture all that opportunity.
Okay.
Think about, you know, that being mid-single digit in the core, in the base. I'm not trying to confuse you on the residential. I don't think the residential recovery is gonna come in a sustained 1 or 2 extra points per year. I think that we're gonna see it the way we saw it last time, where it's gonna just start roaring. I think if you're gonna we feel like we need to hold ourselves accountable to the drop-throughs on that incremental value that would come from it. I think that that's the way I'm sharing it. I don't know if it's gonna come in 2020, the tail end of 2026, 2027, or 2028.
I do believe there's a higher degree of probability it happens sometime in this longer range look, and I think we're gonna capture our fair share of that, and I think that's the opportunity to get to the high side of the delivery.
2nd question. When you think about new targets, new products that you're putting into the resi channel, and I think in pool, you've had good success there. In that in-home stuff outside of pool, I think it's been a challenge historically in terms of-
Yeah
things that seem like a good idea at the time, then the market doesn't develop. Like, what have you learned over that period to give you confidence that the stuff that you're launching over this next 2, 3 years, like, is more viable?
Greg and Jerome will let you know. Pool, our dealers in pool love innovation. They love expensive innovation because they make substantial margin on the install. Substantial margin on the install. You know, they don't worry as much about the warranty and the callback rates because we stand behind those products, we provide the field service, and we support them over the, you know, the first 5-ish years of that installation. They're, they're geared up and ready to sell the innovation. What they need us to do in the channel is to pull it, create the demand, and help homeowners understand what that is. I don't think that's the same in our residential water solutions aspect. The advanced water appliance that you saw, Adrian talk about, we've got a different channel to market there.
You know, I don't wanna give too much details on it because Adrian's having great success in the channel. You know, think about a high-end pool builder getting paid on content, right? Because they make their margin on the content pull-through. That's where your high-end appliances come in, your high-end countertops, your high-end windows. We believe that that channel is looking for a solution for water and a luxury water that feels good everywhere in the house. We're talking about great drinking water, we're talking about no spots on your showers, we're talking about clean dishes and the luxury feel of the water, and we think it's willing to pay a very high price point for it. It's not something we think our traditional channel could actually take to market in a productive way. Does that answer your question?
Thanks, John.
Yeah.
Hi. Andrew Krill from Deutsche Bank. 1st question, big picture on 80/20. I think you're in year 3 or so with, you know, the marquee 80/20 consulting firm. Can you just give us some more color on what inning you believe you're in in this process? Maybe comment on the revenue drag you had and when that could start to become a tailwind.
Sure. I would say giving you an inning is difficult because it's in particular businesses, right? We're using the key ratio to guide our decisions on growth versus optimize and how we're thinking about enhancing that key ratio before we go and grow. That chart that I showed, if you think about commercial, water, and pool, those businesses are at a place where their key ratio is strong, and we wanna see the 80/20 become a revenue driver through the Quad 1 focus, whereas other pockets have that Quad 1 opportunity still through the 80/20 exits that have been completed, but we still have work to do on the key ratio and optimizing that business before we feel as good about the revenue drivers.
I say we're in a 3rd inning of an intense playoff game that might go into extra innings. I say it because I think, you know, 2 of our 4 business leaders, you know, they wake up every day breathing it. It's theirs. They're driving it. We're not consultant-based anymore, we transfer that internally. We're not everywhere doing it every single day the way that we should be making every decision, we haven't yet got it deep into the functions, which I think is where the biggest opportunity is. What do we wanna stop doing in HR? What do we wanna stop doing in finance? What do we wanna stop doing in IT? How do we wanna replace it with lesser cost solutions? That's why I think we're in the 3rd inning.
Great. Then for the unchanged overall single-digit sales target, can you array maybe, you know, which segments are a little faster or slower within that, if at all? Did you intentionally remove the + sign from pool? You know, that was there last time we were here. Thanks.
I think what we did was we instead of putting the + sign in the base case, just to let you know, I mean, obviously a big piece of the, you know, the extra value we can create would come when the market comes back in pool, then you'd see them in the +. You might even see low double digit. That's, that's in what I would say the higher end case is where that + sign is this time. Then you wanna talk about the fastest.
I would say that the plan is really balanced across the entire portfolio, and we're not expecting any 1 business unit or segment to drive more opportunity from a % of increase perspective than any of the others. We're looking to have balanced growth across those business units and then the ROS expansion as we talked about, modest within pool, but again driven by the volume, Commercial Water driven by the volume, and then Water Quality Management and Flow, that ROS expansion and that incremental income through the optimized functional and operational excellence tools within our Pentair Business System toolkit.
The reason we lowered the WQM is we have just exited most retail and most direct to consumer, and I don't wanna go back there. There's a ton of growth in the lower end spaces around filtration and consumer-based solutions. We wanna stay professional channel, and we wanna continue to stay at the higher end premium solution part of the market. Thanks for your question.
It's Andrew Buscaglia with BNP Paribas. You know, as a much higher margin, you know, high return company, I'm wondering what your philosophy from here is going forward on M&A in that probably, I would, I would guess deals might be more dilutive to that margin going forward. In the, in that upside case, how much are you assuming in terms of that, assuming if there is M&A coming before 2028 and that 28% margin?
Let me start, you go there. I don't think I look at the margin as a deterrent. You know, I think for the right M&A property, we'd come to you, we'd demonstrate where it is against our expectations, and I think we've built a lot of confidence in what 80/20 can do and ultimately what the transformation toolkit could bring to improve its margins. I think we're looking for assets that have a good growth profile, and we're looking for them to create incremental shareowner value. Right now, some of the assets on the market, they'll have like $1 million of data center exposure, and they're looking for data center-like multiples, and you'd ask yourself why aren't they keeping it then, right?
Right now we're in the early stages of emerging properties, and I think we need realistic selling multiples, and I think we really feel confident that between 80/20 and transformation, we can bring a lot of value to these assets around the core spaces that we feel we wanna be in longer term to create long-term shareowner value.
That's right. When we look at a target, if you look at the last 2 deals we've done, high single digit growth, great margins, great capability enhancers for our portfolio. We've used the tools of 80/20 and our Pentair Business System during the diligence process to screen where we think we can add value to those businesses and whether or not they're a fit for us to be the right owner for them. We'll be using that filter of ROIC accretion over the right timeline, how is it adding growth capabilities to our businesses, can we use 80/20 in our Pentair Business System tools to enhance the business we're buying?
Okay, makes sense. I just wanna switch to the pool market and the pool outlook. You know, you're not baking in much at all of a recovery in resi, which is great. I wonder, you know, when you think about a recovery in pool and it sounds like you think that the upcycle could be pretty strong when it comes. What would you say to someone who thinks that maybe, you know, the cost of a pool is so much significantly more than it was in the past trough? Inflation's high, you have cost of labor high, you have the prices of your products are a lot higher than they were in the past trough.
You know, w hen you're talking with your customers and, you know, put together these slides with your outlook, how do you think about the context of maybe a more dampened recovery?
I acknowledge that there's probably the, you know, a lower end buyer to a mid-market buyer of a home who could be priced out from a potential pool. I think that's gonna be thwarted, and I don't mean this as flippant as it's gonna sound. Tell a rich person they can't have something, and wait till they find a way to buy it, right? That becomes such a part of your landscape in the areas in the South where we build the pools and the backyards and the water features and the hot tub and all those other aspects. I said this last time, it's true. The hot tub is for you and the pool's for the grandchildren. There is still a tremendous market.
We're probably being held back more by permitting and zoning than we are from consumers' ability to pay, right? The rebuild programs in Arizona are slower, you know. There's no more real gated communities being built around golf courses, so you're just seeing the substantial remodeling that's occurring, and that is a part of the opportunity for us. If you take a look at the L.A. market where those homes were lost, which are all subject to pools, they're still not out of the permitting processes of what that new development is gonna look like from fireproofing, you know, hurricane. I don't think that it's really gonna come down to a desire. I think we're gonna see a recovery, and as soon as the market opens up, I think the pools are gonna follow because it's just part of what is required.
It'd be like not having air conditioning in a lot of the places they're at.
Maybe I would just add that the pool equipment is actually a relatively small piece of the total cost of building a pool. we've been in this business for a long time, as Jerome was talking, and Jerome were talking, our relationships with our channel, our distributors, and our dealers is extremely strong. as we continue, only about was it 50% of North America pool pads have any form of automation, and that adoption rate is increasing. we think that through our adoption, or excuse me, through our automation platforms, you're gonna see even stickier, comprehensive Pentair pool pads in the market in that luxury top end. again, it's only a small percentage of the total cost of building a pool. Jerome, did you wanna add something?
What I would add is that, you know, 80% of our revenue is with existing pools, not just new pools, right? We have technology that can really improve the customer experience for all those 5.4 million pools that exist. If you add, you know, connectivity, you're gonna improve the experience. With that experience, there's gonna be even more technology. People are looking for solutions, people who have pools today, and that's the vast majority of our revenue.
I've said it's the best business I've ever been exposed to in my career. I sit here today and tell you it's the best business I think I'll ever be exposed to in my career. I know people are worried about where we are in this inflection point. We've been here before. We've had to create that incremental TAM, the total available market. That's up to us as the leader, and we have to make it almost non-negotiable for somebody to want a pool. We need to make it easier to use, and I think we've got all the capability to do that.
Thanks for your question.
David Tarantino, KeyBanc, here for Jeff Hammond. Just following up on the more balanced gross assumptions versus the last targets. Can you talk about why that's the right way to think about it, particularly with a lot of the businesses in Flow and Water Solutions still in the optimization stage and maybe earning the right to grow still?
I can take that. This plan is through 2028. When we think about those growth targets that we provided you for those businesses, don't assume that they stay in optimize through 2028, right? As this team has demonstrated, they know how to get after the cost structure. They know how to get after improvement of that key ratio. As that is completed, you start to see the focus on Quad 1, and then the incremental growth that comes with it. They'll be pivoting over this plan horizon from optimize to growth.
We've been getting growth from growth actions, but it's been offset by volume declines. 2026, we've got volume basically a net neutral.
Yeah
... as we think about going forward. There is gonna be some contribution in 2027, 2028 from the volume side, and it's generally gonna come from growth actions. Then we think we can leverage that volume up and also still get the cost, and it feels more balanced to us.
Thanks, David.
Hi, good morning. This is Pat Baumann for Stephen Tusa at JP Morgan. A quick question on the multi-year margin expansion that you have planned is, do you see that as kind of evenly weighted annually, or is there like a, you know, a transformation benefit from what you're doing with the non-Pool segments that unlocks more of that earlier or later? Just wanted to get your color on that.
Thanks for your question. It's about 100 basis points a year, approximately, uniformly distributed through 2028.
Evenly weighted.
Yeah.
Evenly weighted. Okay, thank you.
Best back to your closing comments.
I'm sorry?
Best back to your closing comments.
Closing comments.
Oh, I'm sorry. Thank you, everybody, for coming. I am excited about what we shared with you today. Hopefully, you are as well. I'm excited to talk to you about it further. We think we're gonna sit here on the verge of creating tremendous value. As I said, we take a commitment seriously. We're compensated those commitments, and we would like anything and everything to be that when we talk to you at our next Investor Day, we beat that base target, and we did it by making sure that we hit it the way we are attempting to hit it. What I mean by that is we would expect that if we use more leverage than what we did in the base case, there should be upside value created from it. I just wanna make sure that's clear.
Also, hopefully, you appreciate the transparency, like I said, and you don't beat me up with it or beat Nick up with it. Thank you for coming. Thank you for listening. Have a great day.