Ecolab Inc. (ECL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Greetings, and welcome to the Ecolab Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Release Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Andy Hedberg, Vice President, Investor Relations for Ecolab. Thank you. Mr. Hedberg, you may begin.

Thank you, and hello, everyone. Welcome to Ecolab's second quarter conference call. With me today are Christophe Beck, Ecolab's Chairman and CEO; and Scott Kirkland, our CFO. A discussion of our results, along with our earnings release and the slides referencing the quarter results are available on Ecolab's website at ecolab.com/investor. Please take a moment to read the cautionary statements in these materials, which state that this teleconference and the associated supplemental materials include estimates of future performance. These are forward-looking statements, and actual results could differ materially from those projected. Factors that could cause actual results to differ are described in the Risk Factors section in our most recent Form 10-K and in our posted materials. We also refer you to the supplemental diluted earnings per share information in the release. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Christophe Beck for his comments.

Thank you so much, Andy, and welcome to everyone joining us today. Well, we delivered another strong quarter with accelerating performance across our business. Adjusted EPS grew 11% driven by accelerating organic sales growth of 5%, stable organic gross margin and continued strong productivity. This performance reflects the strength of our growth model and, most importantly, the power of our global team to deliver for our customers every day in any environment. Last quarter, we talked about the second quarter being a short transition period. We entered the quarter with [ commodity ] costs increasing and the expectation that they would remain high through the year. We started the quarter with very little surcharge pricing, but expected benefit from the surcharge would progressively build through the quarter. That's exactly what happened. We moved quickly to implement the global energy surcharge backed by incremental customer value, as we always do. As a result, pricing strengthened to 4% in the second quarter, and we expect the second half to be in our targeted 5% to 6% range. This is allowing us to offset the impact of rising commodity costs on our margins and EPS this year. Our global team executed extremely well through this transition period. In just 1 quarter, we absorbed increasing commodity costs, continued to win new business, grew volumes, stabilized organic gross margin and delivered double-digit EPS growth. Importantly, momentum continued to strengthen across the portfolio. Volumes grew 1% despite a nearly 1% headwind from customer operations disrupted by conflict in the Middle East. Excluding this, underlying volume growth accelerated from the first quarter. Growth in our core businesses strengthened with Food & Beverage accelerating to 7% growth, Institutional & Specialty growing 4% and growth in Light Water improving, also buoyed by strong new business from our One Ecolab growth initiative. At the same time, performance in Heavy Water and Paper improved. Our growth [indiscernible] continued to show strong momentum, delivering strong double-digit growth. Life Sciences accelerated to 15% growth, driven by very strong share gains in bioprocessing and pharma and personal care and improved performance in purification. We have been investing in [ Thailand ] capabilities, capacity and breakthrough innovation for years in this high-growth business, and those investments now are clearly paying off. In value processing, we continue to take market share with the innovative resin technologies we've launched over the last few years. As a result, our business continues to rapidly scale as customers move their drugs into commercial manufacturing. Life Sciences margin performance was exceptional this quarter, delivering a mid-20% operating income margin, giving a strong indication of the high-margin profile this business has. During the quarter, we benefited from very strong sales growth and a spike in bioprocessing. While underlying operating income margin is expected to remain in the mid-20s, reported margin in the third quarter is expected to be in the high teens as we continue to invest in this high-growth, high-margin business. Ecolab Digital grew 27%, reflecting strong adoption of software and connected solutions that help customers optimize performance in real time. Recent launches of solutions like DishIQ, AquaIQ, KitchenIQ and CIP IQ are performing very well and are expected to continue to help drive long-term growth of more than 20% for Eco Digital. Pest Elimination also delivered a strong quarter with 7% growth, driven by share gain from our One Ecolab growth initiative and continued expansion of our test intelligence platform. We've deployed nearly 800,000 connected devices at customer sites and continue to expect to reach 1 million connected devices by year-end. With the unique insights from Pest Intelligence, we aim to deliver nearly 99% pest-free environments for customers on the platform. And growth in Global High-Tech accelerated to 29%, reflecting very strong demand across both microelectronics and data centers driven by the rapid build-out of AI infrastructure. We further strengthened our position in this market with the acquisition of CoolIT Systems which closed on July 2. CoolIT is off to a very strong start with year-to-date sales growth prior to acquisition of more than 100%. With this addition, Global High-Tech is now approaching $1.5 billion in sales, annualized sales, up from approximately $150 million in 2021. This reflects the strength of our strategy and sustained investments to capture the long-term opportunity in advanced computing. At the heart of AI is water. Water is required to produce, to power and to cool chips. We are now the only company with integrated solutions across that value chain. And with all the talks around data centers and AI infrastructure, the world truly needs companies that can help build data centers the right way. We're one of them, and we're committed to lead that journey. Together with Ovivo and CoolIT, our Global High-Tech platform is expected to grow more than 25% annually, reaching $4 billion in sales by 2030 with an operating income margin of 25%. These targets represent an increase from our previous expectations of more than 20% growth and 20% OI margin, reflecting the acceleration we're seeing in this business. Global High-Tech is now our largest growth engine. On a pro forma basis, including Ovivo and CoolIT, our sales growth would have been approximately 7% in the second quarter, demonstrating already the 2 points of incremental growth these businesses will add to the overall company. The rapid growth of Global High-Tech and our other growth engines continues to shift Ecolab's portfolio to higher growth, higher-margin businesses. In 2025, our core businesses represented about 70% of our sales, growing low single digits with OI margins just above 20%. Our growth engines were approximately 15% of sales, growing low double digits with OI margins of nearly 20%. And our underperforming businesses represented about 15% of sales with low single-digit sales declines NOI margins in the mid-teens. In 2026, performance has strengthened across all 3 groups. Our core businesses are now growing mid-single digits with OI margins getting further above 20%. Our growth engines are growing in the low teens, with OI margin up nearly 20% as we continue to invest heavily behind these attractive high-growth opportunities. At the same time, our underperforming businesses have stabilized while maintaining operating income margins in the mid-teens. What is the more encouraging is that all parts of the portfolio are moving in the right direction. Our core is performing well, our growth engines are scaling faster and our underperforming businesses are improving. As a result, the mix of our business continues to shift towards faster-growing, higher-margin markets. Looking ahead to 2027, we expect this trend to accelerate further. Our core businesses should continue to deliver strong performance, while our growth engines, which are expected to approach 25% of Ecolab sales, continue to compound at double-digit rates and play an increasingly important role in driving growth and margin expansion for Ecolab. That future is already taking shape today. We're preparing to introduce a breakthrough innovation at SuperCompute, a new integrated end-to-end cooling platform combining CoolIT's liquid cooling technologies with Ecolab's 3D TRASAR digital capabilities to optimize water, power and compute performance at scale. We will be hosting an Investor Day at SuperCompute in Chicago on November 17, where we will share more about the growth opportunities ahead and how they will strengthen our long-term performance. As we move into the second half, we expect continued momentum. Pricing is anticipated to strengthen to the 5% to 6% range as energy surcharge benefits are fully realized. Volumes are expected to continue to grow as strong new business wins more than offset ongoing disruption in the Middle East. As a result, we expect organic sales growth of 6% to 7%, helping drive an adjusted operating income margin of 19% in the second half, keeping us on track to deliver our 20% OI margin next year. With this momentum, we're increasing our outlook for 2026, where we now expect EPS in the range of to $8.05 to $8.25, rising 7% to 10% versus last year. This range reflects strong underlying performance and a short-term impact from noncash amortization and financing costs from the CoolIT acquisition. Beyond this year, we continue to expect adjusted EPS growth, including CoolIT, to accelerate to a strong 12% to 15% growth trajectory. In closing, our business continues to strengthen with the core improving and growth engine scaling. With this, our portfolio is shifting faster toward higher growth, higher-margin end markets. Just as importantly, our team continues to execute at a very high level to deliver for our customers every single day. We've never been better positioned to deliver long-term organic sales growth of 5% to 7%, expand operating income margins well beyond 20% and continue strengthening our EPS growth algorithm. So thank you for your continued trust and investment in Ecolab. I'll now turn it back to Andy for Q&A.

Thanks, Christophe. That wraps up our promo remarks. Operator, would you please begin the question-and-answer period? .

[Operator Instructions] Our first question will come from the line of Tim Mulrooney with William Blair.

And thank you for, Christophe, for reaffirming the 20% operating margin target that you have for 2027. I was there in my model, but then when you acquired CoolIT, there's so much extra amortization there that I actually came off that margin target. But now, you reaffirmed it today. So can you just help bridge that gap for us? Because there's a lot of extra incremental amortization coming through on the CoolIT side. So I just want to make sure I heard you right. You are reaffirming the 20% operating margin target for 2027? And can you help us understand how you plan to offset those incremental expenses flowing through?

Yes, Tim. You understood that right. So we've been very consistent, by the way, on making sure that we stay on our commitment of delivering 20% operating income in 2027. So that remains unchanged. I'll ask as well, Scott, to add some color to it in a second. But before we get there, our expectation, and everything that we do, is ultimately to drive our commitment of 5% to 7% organic sales growth to 20% OI margin and a strong 12% to 15% earnings per share growth. And ultimately, our job is to make sure that everything we're doing, well, not only leads us to that, but leads us to beyond that. And that's especially true for the 20% OI in 2027. And I spent, together with the team, a lot of time as well to think how do we get beyond the 20% after 2027. And the vast majority of our businesses today are already either close to 20% or beyond 20%. So we know well how to do that. The second half of this year, the adjusted OI margins will be at 19% as well. So all leading nicely towards the 2027 story. It's going to be important to keep in mind that the first half and second half of '27 will be a tale of 2 stories because of the lapping, obviously, of the CoolIT acquisition that closed early July or 12 months, mid next year and then the second half of '27. In other words, the second half of '27, we'll be even stronger. But as mentioned before, my objective is really to not only deliver on those commitments beyond '26, but really making sure that we get beyond the 20%, that we can strengthen this 5% to 7% on the organic and also on the earnings per share to 12% to 15%, well, I guess that's going to get stronger as well over time. But Scott, do you want to add any color to that?

Yes. The only thing, Tim, that I would add is that next year, as you might remember, the Nalco amortization falls off. And so that's also as part of, when you said how do you reconcile that, that we do get the benefit of annualizing the CoolIT amortization, but offset by the Nalco amortization.

Our next question comes from the line of Manav Patnaik with Barclays.

Christophe, I was just hoping within High-Tech, could you just help us with the current mix of the business between data centers and microelectronics or however you want to break it out? And kind of just some more color on your confidence in getting to that $4 billion target, I guess?

Yes, Manav. So high level, obviously, since we don't go much in details for the size of the business right now, but it's roughly $1.5 billion annualized sales. Obviously, so right now, when you have our legacy business, microelectronics and data centers within legacy, and then CoolIT, and then Ovivo, which is in microelectronics. And each of them is roughly $0.5 billion today of annualized sales. That's how you get to the $1.5 billion. And for perspective, we were $150 million just a few years back. So this is a platform that we've built over the last few years extremely rapidly. And the very good news is that all 3 elements are growing very nicely. You've heard about the legacy business growing 29%. Ovivo expected to deliver mid-teens for this year, and CoolIT being north of 100%. So you add it all up, so you get to a very good place. So our trajectory of 25% growth for the next few years leads you to the $4 billion by 2030 and feel quite confident that that's very realistic.

Our next question comes from the line of Ashish Sabadra with RBC Capital Markets.

Just wanted to follow up on the Global High-Tech. So you mentioned the integrated end-to-end cooling platform that you plan to launch at the SuperCompute. I was just wondering if you could help or discuss how that can help drive more cross-selling opportunity across all the different Global High-Tech offerings that you have.

Well, generally, as we mentioned, when we did the acquisition of CoolIT, adding CoolIT to the data center multiplies between 3x and 5x the sales opportunity that we have compared to legacy Ecolab in the data center. So much bigger, obviously, than what we had before. So that's the penetration of solutions opportunity. But the most interesting part is when you put all the pieces together, from a CDU integrating, 3D TRASAR control technology to 3D TRASAR coolant to cold plates that are integrated in that system, and ultimately, an end-to-end optimization system to reduce the power used to cool while using 0 net incremental water, because everything is within the system, is the biggest upside obviously so for our customers. And with everything that's happening right now in the AI infrastructure and data center pushback in the communities, well, as mentioned, the world needs a company can help this industry scale part while doing it the right way both in terms of cost performance and in terms of impact on communities and natural resources. So I think that we're very uniquely placed here to do that. And it took us just 2 weeks basically to get the 3D TRASAR technology embedded in the next generation of the CDU for CoolIT. It's a good example of how the 2 teams have come together. So it's going to be really good to share with all of you and with customers obviously at SuperCompute how everything comes together. And last thing I'd say, we really look at it from an ecosystem perspective. We will not be owning everything. We don't want to get into a lot of hardware, obviously, out there. But we want to be the platform that ultimately all the other elements come around in order to truly maximize cooling, minimize the water and energy usage and maximize ultimately the uptime and performance of the data center as well. So a typical Ecolab story where the outcome of the operations is the main objective we have.

Our next question comes from the line of John McNulty with BMO Capital Markets.

Congrats on some really solid results. Just wanted to ask or dig a little bit deeper on the Life Sciences side of the business. And clearly, there's a lot of interest on the bioprocessing side. We've seen a number of drugs kind of hitting the market or starting to hit the market. At the same time, like you've outpaced kind of the other major competitor in the space by a decent amount. So I guess, can you help us to think about how much of it is just the end market growth, how much of it is share gain, and how much of it may be just some of the capacity unlock that you've been working on well?

John, I'm very pleased with the Life Sciences team. It's been a few years in the making. As you know, we started that business in 2017, it was less than $100 million. And today, it's close to $1 billion, so 10x the size of where it was back then. We made the acquisition of Purolite in 2021. And the COVID implications on the market have been a little bit difficult to manage, for all industry, by the way. But when I look back and think about what the team has done in how to build capacity, capabilities, relationship with customers, trust, that we can really be the best partner in the future, well, I'm super pleased with what the team has done. We were not on the trajectory we had initially planned, as you know, since the acquisition of Purolite, but we have always been growing when the rest of the industry was not. So not in line with what we had expected, but better at competition. The very good news right now, John, is that, well, we're not only our forming the market and competition, but we're backing on with our return expectations that we had set early in that process. So really happy with the trajectory, the returns, the work that's been done by the team. And ultimately, the most important element is to listen to our customers, that are really pleased with the agility of the team, the innovation strength of this team, being very entrepreneurial, need to be as close to them what they need short term in order to deliver the life-saving drugs that they're trying to bring to the market. We knew we would not become in the short or medium term the largest life science player in the industry. But our objective is to be the best-performing and the best partner of our customers, I guess that we're pretty close to the ambition right now. So early, but good news for the future.

Our next question comes from the line of David Begleiter with Deutsche Bank.

Christophe, on CoolIT, when the business was acquired, you mentioned perhaps a 30% type annual growth rate to model going forward. Given the 100% plus growth rate in the first half of the year, should we update our models to a higher growth rate over the next few years here for CoolIT?

So really like this acquisition. That's one of those -- one of many where obviously before you embark on such a journey, I had my set of sleepless nights. And when I look back, well, I'm really saying, I'm glad we did it. Because this is the best technology in the market. It's the best performing business as well, so in direct shipping liquid cooling technology. And I've been so impressed with the team that I've met at CoolIT and how these 2 teams are coming together. Maybe it's been 2 or 3 weeks that we're together. It's very early. And we're getting to know each other, starting to work together with customers. So it's so early, that we're not in a position to change anything. But if I look at the trajectories, well, they're better than what we had told. That's the good news. But when we did our plans for the next 4, 5, 10 years, a lot can happen, and that's why we've picked a trajectory of 30%, which I think is the right one. True that the first half of this year for CoolIT has been way better than that. The acceptance by customers of the latest technologies of CoolIT is extremely good, and even better when we come together with Ecolab. So that's an even better sign. And that's the reason why we'd like to be together with you in November at SuperCompute, is basically we will have sort of 4, 5 months of working together with CoolIT, we better understand how it works, what's to like, what we need to work on, what's the new type of trajectory. So too early to change right now, but give us the time in the next few months to really get the teams together, making it really well work together with the customers. And in November, we will sit together to share with you how do we see '27 and the years beyond.

Our next question comes from the line of Chris Parkinson with Wolfe Research.

Chris, I wanted to just circle back to Life Sciences just given the trajectory there and all the work you've been doing with your team in King of Prussia. And just a few things that I'd like to break down. First of all, just kind of how you see the trajectory of some of the biopharma applications versus some of the purification and resins, how much this is attributable to basically the beginning of the ramps in both King of Prussia and Wales? And then also correct me if I'm wrong, but a lot of that business initially started off in a larger scale in Europe, and it seems like you've been making a lot of investments [ and leeway ] with partners in the United States. So I'd love to kind of just drill down to just anything that you can do to basically increase the probability of the Street sustaining this type of growth in trajectory, especially relative to the '27 margin targets?

So it's been a few quarters now that Life Science has been on the high end of the expected performance, which is a very good sign, and I've been very open with you at the early years of that journey where we're growing, growing faster than the industry, but we were not growing as fast as we were expecting or ours expecting. But that's time behind us, and it gave us the opportunity to build those capabilities and these capacities that we needed around the world. We just opened our latest, one of the biggest plants in China a few weeks ago. That's going to give us a big footprint in a market that's going really well for life science, the industry and for us. By the way, expanding as well around Asia. In Europe, the core of Purolite came from Europe as well, both Eastern Europe and Wales, as you mentioned, for bioprocessing, and capacity as well in North America that we've kept building and that we will keep building. It's always been part of our strategy to be in each of the 3 continents: North America, Europe and Asia. And we're almost there. And it's never going to be enough because it's growing fast. That's a good problem to have as well. We have great teams as well that we had to build bioprocessing, is the fastest-growing one, it is a very interesting, very technology-leading type of business that we will keep the anchor in the biotechnology industry. But I'd like to add as well our whole pharma and personal care business that's focused on contamination control, basically making sure that the environment where the drugs are being produced is as healthy as it can be. This business is doing extremely well as well at the same time. And the purification business that's kind of lower grades on the type of products, but still on the same platform, we were capped by capacity constraints. As you know, that's changing with the opening of the plant in China. So that's going to help us as well as sustain the growth trajectory of that business going forward. So we're in a place where we have very good momentum. Our long-term target was 10% to 12%, by the way. So we are ahead of that range right now on margin. So to get towards the 30% OI target, we will get there. We see the line of sight to get there. But I want to make absolutely sure that we keep investing in capacity and capabilities in the meantime in order to get the business that has not only a critical mass, but the right momentum to keep winning in the future. So kind of a little bit of an overview of what we're trying to build here, all driven by research, by innovation, by science, which is ultimately what's most important for our customers, and it's working really well.

Our next question comes from the line of Seth Weber with BNP Paribas.

I wanted to ask a little bit about your -- some of your old economy stuff. I was struck by your comment that you think paper could see some modest growth here in the third quarter. I mean do you feel like we're past the bottom in some of these categories? Or is it just maybe less bad and pricing is helping? Or can you just help us frame what's going on in some of your older economy stuff?

I'm not sure I would call that old economy, but it's more traditional businesses. So for sure, we know that those businesses are not going to grow as the growth engines do. That's why we have the differentiation, by the way, between growth engines, double-digit type of business, our core business, which is the key of our company kind of in this mid-single, and then you have the lower-growth businesses. But I've called, with some affection, underperforming because they were underperforming for a while. And to your point on paper, well, the good news is that it was barely positive in Q2, which is a big deal. Obviously, it's for the business after more than a year being in negative territory, impacted by the industry that was not doing great, and then an industry that was consolidating because of that. So we lost a lot of paper mills as well. And when we lose a paper mill, that has a big impact on our sales because they use a lot of our solutions. And we can see that the last 6 months, that consolidation stopped, paused and that things are getting slightly better. And here as well, we are a bit better than the industry, so we're gaining share, which is a good thing as well. So barely positive in Q2 for the paper team. But I feel really confident, with the great leadership that we have there, to get even more positive in Q3 and beyond. So I'm cautiously optimistic with that business. Observing good margins, by the way, important to keep that in mind. But yes, they're improving and they are in positive territories or they're generating value for shareholders, which is the first step towards greatness.

Our next question comes from the line of Laurence Alexander with Jefferies.

I'd like to revisit the Life Sciences. Can you just dig in a little bit on bioprocessing? Are you mostly winning share in the early-stage preclinical or are you also getting the equivalent share gains in the later-stage commercial? And really, I'm trying to dig into your CapEx. You're talking about big CapEx, I think, was the word you used. Are you trying to get your CapEx additions ahead of your growth rates so you can go into adjacencies? Or should we be thinking about this CapEx cycle as this is kind of the run rate that you'll be continuing into the 2030s because it's just how fast the end market is growing?

So a few things here, Laurence. First, bear with me, I'll have to be careful into how much details I'm going on the sensitivity of the competitive situation. There's very few players in that industry. We know each other very well. We all understand that what we do well is sustaining lives around the world. So I'm very careful, so I'm going to talk about that. But generally, we have a very good position now across the whole spectrum between early innovations, clinical trials of various stages and commercial drugs, that the team has done very well in terms of jumping ahead of the queue in some cases to make sure that we were covering the whole chain. And as you know, it's a funnel type of approach, you need to have a lot early in order to get a few big ones later. So that's the rule of the game, obviously, so in Life Science. And now we are ideally positioned as the team has done in order to make sure that we can sustain and accelerate the growth in the future. The question on investments, we've clearly been investing ahead of the growth in that business. That's why we were talking about reported growth in the mid-teens and underlying growth in the mid-20s. Well, those 10 points were investments ahead of the growth as we want to see that business driving 30%-ish type of margin at cruising speed. But I don't want to get too quickly ahead of that. This is an industry of perfection. The quality of the products, of the team of the delivery of the innovation, it takes time, it takes steps, it takes passion and commitment to getting done. But as you can see now, so the underlying margins are getting closer to the reported margins, which is a good thing. Q2 was a little bit of an extreme because we had a spike in bioprocessing. It's not every quarter created the same. But generally, the trajectory is still good. So I like our competitive situation. And as mentioned before, we don't have the ambition to become the biggest, we want to become the best life sciences business in the industry.

Our next question comes from the line of Vincent Andrews with Morgan Stanley.

To go back to CapEx, Christophe, when you acquired CoolIT, my recollection is you said that they had enough capacity on their own to supply a doubling of their sales, which seems like a pace that they're very much on. And I think you separately said that the plan was to go sort of asset-light, sort of similar to how you do it in your dishwashing business where you design and have the IP and then somebody else does the manufacturing. So just wondering if you can tell us where you are in that journey given it sounds like the growth rate of CoolIT is really moving maybe faster than originally thought.

Yes. So generally, directionally, absolutely no change, what you've said is still valid, with one small exception, which is a good one, is that the growth seems to be faster than what we had expected. For all the reasons I mentioned before: the leading-edge technologies that CoolIT is having, the combination of Ecolab and CoolIT coming together providing the market with something that no one else can provide in terms of higher performance, no water and less energy to do the same job as well. So generally, for the company, I don't see big changes, but for our High-Tech business, we might have to go faster, which is exactly what we'd like to see and you'd like to see, I guess, as well. But let me ask maybe, Scott, if you'd like to add any perspective on CapEx in general.

Yes. Just more broadly, as Christophe talked about, we will invest ahead of growth in the growth engines, but expect that the CapEx as a company to remain similar to where we're at now for the next couple of years. And we've talked about this for a little while, likely remaining around the 7% in the next couple of years because we are investing ahead for the Global High-Tech business and Life Science. But then as we scale these growth engines, we'll continue to evaluate it. But we're always going to take advantage of these attractive returns.

Our next question comes from the line of Patrick Cunningham with Citi.

Maybe just on Food & Beverage, pretty strong 7% sales growth there. Pretty good execution against a flat broader industry. I guess can you share details on what is contributing to the increased traction there? And how much acceleration do you expect to see within this business over the coming quarters?

So Food & Beverage, which is one of those core businesses that we have that I think it's one of the best global businesses we have, is one of the best teams around the world, serving a very sophisticated industry of consumer goods companies with big brands everywhere around the world. So it's a business I love. And I love it even more looking at the performance that this business is driving. You mentioned 7%. If you remember, so our long-term target for this business is 5% to 7%. So they are at the higher end of that range. And why that? I'll give you the simple answer here. It's the One Ecolab approach where the team has brought together our food safety capabilities with our water capabilities as one integrated organization. So it's not just 2 teams playing nice together to serve the customer. It's an integrated team with experts in food safety and experts in water working on the same team, for the same customers, anywhere around the world. We're not done yet. We've done the work in North America where the teams came together and, ultimately, well, I can position it as a strategic idea of producing safe food while using less water and energy, but there is a much more mundane driver of the growth, is the cross-selling. So how do we sell food safety solutions into water customers and water solutions into food safety customers? That's the sales execution play with a good strategic intent. So that's being the main driver. The execution has worked really well. We're expanding what we've done in North America now around the world. That will take some time, but it's also driving some good runway of momentum, so for the years to come. And last but not least is what you're hearing as well on the market, producing safe food, well, is something that is pretty top of mind for everyone right now, being in restaurants, being in retail. And what we're doing is even more in demand than what it was in the past.