IDEX Corporation (IEX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us. I'm Vlad Bystricky. I cover multis and E&Cs here at Citigroup with Team Kaplowitz. We're very excited to have IDEX joining us today, Eric Ashleman, CEO; and Sean Gillen, CFO. Eric has been CEO since December 2020 after becoming President and -- after becoming COO in 2015. And Sean recently joined IDEX as CFO just in January, coming over from serving 7 years as CFO at AAR Corp. So thanks very much, gentlemen, for being with us. We appreciate it.

Maybe I'll just start, Eric, you've talked over the past few quarters about IDEX' evolution through several phases over time and now being in Phase 3 of its evolution. So for those who are less familiar with IDEX, can you talk about what's changing at IDEX in Phase 3 and what inning of Phase 3 you think you're in?

Sure. So look, it's a wonderful public company story. We're not yet 40 years old. The first phase was kind of a loose holding company, so I don't spend as much time there. The second phase was when I started, was kind of 2010 to '20. So that decade, it's where we started to really drill down on 8020 more than anything else and really release the full potential of these great fundamental IDEX businesses. And so you saw a ton of margin expansion there. You saw some leaders developed. That's kind of where I rose up through the ranks and some people that are still working with us today. The third phase, super important, that began about the same time I took the helm in this role in 2020. And really, what we're trying to do is we went through a pretty burst acquisitive phase where we had done a lot of research around some technologies and market intersections that we thought would get IDEX really, really well positioned for 21st century problem solving, very similar to what we had in our more industrial fluidics franchises. So we bought a number of businesses, put a lot of them in the HST segment. And now that some of the pandemic dust is settled, if you will, you can really start to see the momentum. So over the last 1.5 years, kind of every quarter has been a little better than the one before it in HST. And really, really happy in Q4, we saw 34% organic order growth. We've got a nice year positioned for that segment in '26. And you're starting to see a lot of these solutions come together in ways that we anticipated. I would say from an innings call, we're probably about halfway through it. I do think life for us kind of moves in 10-year increments, and we're probably about the midpoint. And we've got some other things we want to do to kind of perfect the source code, if you will, and further exploit some of the markets where we've got some good positioning now. And we'll continue -- we'll be doing some M&A along the way to flesh it out.

Great. That's helpful. Lots to dig into there, which I'm sure we'll touch on. I guess, Sean, since you recently joined IDEX, can you talk about what made IDEX a compelling opportunity for you and some of your key priorities early in your tenure?

Yes. I think the thing that made it most interesting was you got this really good business, which I would define as multiple businesses with leading positions across everything IDEX does, incredibly strong EBITDA margins and really strong cash flow, right? So you got this great foundation that Eric talked about the couple of phases. And then the ability for when I joined to come in midway through Phase 3 and help partner with Eric and the leadership team to continue to implement that strategy. And then kind of what I think I can bring some of my background is a bit more around capital deployment to help execute against Phase 3, and that's capital deployment to drive growth in some of these platform markets and some advantaged areas as well as potentially kind of M&A, given my background, both from where I started my career on the banking side and then 7 years at AAR, pretty active on the acquisition, a little bit of divestiture along the way. So I think bringing that skill set to the leadership team and working with Eric to continue to execute Phase 3.

Got it. That's helpful. And then maybe just digging in on capital deployment since you mentioned it. It seems like capital deployment in the near term has been a little different than the higher M&A rate you had before. So you stepped up share repurchases in the second half of '25. And I think you said you expect to continue buying back about $75 million a quarter this year. So can you just talk about how you're thinking about capital deployment, long-term M&A versus share repurchases? And should we think of repurchases maybe continuing beyond '26 as a near-term focus?

Yes. So I think first, kind of in the near term here, it will probably look pretty similar to last year where there'll be some bolt-on M&A. And last year, the company acquired Micro-LAM, which is a pretty good proxy, plus or minus for bolt-on M&A. And as you mentioned, stepped up the share repurchase activity, because to your point, if you go back the past few years, some pretty significant capital deployment across a few acquisitions to help build these platforms and scale them. And last year and near term will be kind of execution, integration on those, some bolt-on M&A and then the increase in share repurchase activity. Longer term, we're not here to just be a share repurchase machine. We do generate a lot of cash flow, but I think that will more naturally go towards M&A, bolt-on in nature, maybe a little bit bigger. And I do think that the repo, they'll probably -- most likely be a consistent level that occurs, maybe not at the level that happens in this fiscal year. But that's kind of the lever depending on what M&A materializes, given the cash flow generation and the leverage position of the company, we can dial the repo up or down, as maybe bigger M&A once you get through this year starts to come in focus.

Got it. And then I guess, Eric, just stepping back, the world has been undergoing rapid change, really since the post-COVID era. But can you just talk about how changes in the global trade environment have impacted how you're thinking about global expansion in your manufacturing footprint? And then just given we know you've been investing in India, I know it's early, but any initial thoughts on the recent India trading agreement?

Certainly, that the trade and geopolitical side of things is one of the variables. There's a lot that are moving around at present. I mean our model generally is pretty localized in nature. So when we do business, we are typically from original ideation to sourcing to production to selling, it's often within a specific geography. So even when we talk about India or China or things that we're doing on the other side of the world, that's the model there as well. So everything we make in India is largely for that market or something very, very nearby. Very little of it, if any, comes back our way. So I start with that. But where this has become very important for us is we -- frankly, as we've scaled up a bit and built these platforms and we're chasing some markets that are global in nature with some customers that have global reach, having footprint where we do, it's really, really convenient. So if a company is trying to get more access to emerging markets, and we'll use India here as the example you talked about. We can put the footprint there. We have tons of capabilities. We actually do it with an incubation campus. We have 2 sites in India. If you were to go in any one of them, there's a series of IDEX product lines, all of which have been localized that are selling into those markets, but they're sharing back office, they're sharing talent and leadership and development. So we have a couple of things that we draw on there, sourcing. We're doing a lot of sourcing kind of centralized around those campuses. So a couple of examples, dispensing early on, we do architectural coatings and coloring. The #1 market for growth in that area is India. And so we honestly transferred a lot of the core tech, came out with some solutions years ago that are super, super appropriate for that region. Just made our, I think, 250,000 unit after a decade, very, very localized. Again, you don't see it elsewhere. Now with some of the work going on in businesses like data centers for us, we're actually doing some production in India because the customer that we're working with has got some global reach and needs some things to be done. So just having those capabilities, I mean, one of our big advantages when we're working with an OEM is that we do have -- while we have kind of a small company feel with a lot of our brands and individual businesses. We've got this capability when we need it to flex globally. And then use either shared infrastructure or our own topography to go chase markets around the globe.

That's helpful. And then one of the other things you've talked about in the past is about how IDEX is increasingly adopting digital tools across the portfolio. So can you just give us an update on your digitization efforts and some examples of how you're deploying digital?

So this is a big deal. So we're doing a lot of this focus work now in the FMT kind of more industrial businesses, largely become -- there's been a couple of sea change events there that are having a big impact. So these are very, very mature spaces. They're extremely fragmented, and we often serve in a co-participated way with distribution. And what's happened is you've got a shift, 2 shifts simultaneously they're intersecting. One is just a demographic shift where a lot of people that were in this industry forever are retiring and they're being replaced by, frankly, new people. And essentially, you're moving from kind of a relationship people-dependent model to one that's very much digital first because honestly, young people, that's generally how they were raised and how they think. So what used to be folks that would say, well, we're going to take you to lunch and explain everything that we do or IDEX does is now self-service queries and searches and AI streams and things like that. So we've had to rally and respond in a big way to make sure that the tool sets that we have can catch those signals and those questions coming at us. And then as they do, we can see who's doing it, what they need and then intersect it, and very often have a great direct conversation that maybe we wouldn't have had before. So that phenomenon, we've seen it coming for a while. It was kicked into high gear through COVID because obviously, everybody had to kind of go virtual, that accelerated some of the demographic shifts, too. And so we're just putting a lot of things in place. And we're doing it -- this is an IDEX initiative because kind of in a decentralized way, no single IDEX business by itself is going to do a great job at the rate that we need. So we've actually come together here, and we're doing some very focused work, a lot of it in this FMT area, most of it around customer access, acquisition and that engagement experience digitally that used to be people dependent.

Got it. And then just following up on that, can you talk about what role you see AI playing for IDEX in the coming quarters and years?

Yes. So that's an interesting question. We're probably like a lot of companies testing it. We're testing it in kind of 4 different areas. And so we're using it on one side, 2 of the applications are in areas that I would put in more analytical pursuits. So some are outside our four walls. So if we're studying a market or studying competitors or investment alternatives, probably like a lot of you, we're doing the same thing saying, well, that used to be people-based. What can we get this machine based and driven by AI. So we're doing a bunch of loops there and trying to learn from it. The more interesting piece, at least for us now is we're doing a lot of the same analysis inside the company. So again, if you think of kind of our assets and think of digital assets, we've got these unique franchises that have been very decentralized for a long time that have not just a little bit of experience with end users. I mean we're talking decades. We have a couple of franchises that are over 100 years old. And so a lot of that information about solutions and what's worked and where we've sold it, we have it, but it's often in these kind of disparate databases and things that are independent to the businesses, because we never really went through the effort of trying to streamline it around a central ERP system. And so we always saw that as kind of the hill that we knew we would love to get over someday, but it was always going to take maximum effort. Well, as you now know, with AI and some of the intelligence there, you don't have to have as rational data as you're used to. And so we're trying to see at what level this can work, and we can have intelligence kind of go through our own data and start to parse out solution sets and intersections and things that are very commercially or technically interesting. So that's half of it. The other half we're doing is around product development and iteration, things that we're experimenting with our engineering. We don't do a lot of software in IDEX. So it's not the typical coding things you hear a lot about, but things around structural analysis or flow dynamics. We're able to actually accelerate and simulate things that maybe before we would have done trial and error. And then I guess the last category is more around quality assurance. And so we're doing some loops here around intelligent machine vision, how do you understand that things have been done correctly, validation. So we've got some people that are in charge of different efforts within those 4 pillars, and then we meet centrally to kind of learn together. And then when we see something that works, we figure out how do we export it.

It will be interesting to see how it develops over the coming years. So I just wanted to drill into the segments a bit. And starting with HST, in particular, your highest growth business. You gave a lot of detail at 4Q around the tailwinds you're seeing in markets like data centers, space, defense, semicon, and you had very strong orders. So could you just talk about how you'd characterize visibility to your growth outlook this year in '26 versus maybe a year ago at this point?

Well, I mean, I just start with the numbers. I mean, so coming into this year, we have over $100 million more backlog than we had at the same point a year ago. We built that through the year. We had a really, really nice number in Q4, a lot of it in the data center area that kind of came in, in a chunk. But what I really like about is it's pretty balanced. It's in all the areas that you talked about. So there is a data center portion that we have a number of little semicon-related applications that are doing well. Mott is in there. That was a big acquisition. The last one we did is a strong contributor. We see it in their semicon applications as well as some space and defense. Space and Defense generally. We have a bunch in optics. That's actually a strong market, very good for us. And then some pharma applications, both within our traditional life science businesses as well as we have an HST business that does material processing kind of in a CapEx way. So it's broad-based. About half of it is data center driven, but the other half comes from kind of the gamut of things in HST.

Got it. And then one question that I've heard from investors since 4Q is just trying to better understand within HST, the strength in orders you had in 4Q, plus 34% versus your guidance for mid-single-digit growth for the year. So can you help walk us through some of the puts and takes?

Yes. And as you mentioned, so 5% for the segment, but with some really nice momentum coming into the fiscal year. I think there's 2 things there. One that Eric called out, just visibility into the year is higher than in previous years given the order activity to last year. But I wouldn't say there's a disconnect, but it's more around there was a lot of orders in Q4 and some of them were covering multiple quarters, particularly around kind of the data center exposure we have. We saw some orders come in that cover kind of not only the first half of the year, but getting into Q3. And part is that they're ramping their production. They need better visibility than usual to their supplier network. So we got a greater volume of orders than we normally would in Q4. So when you think about kind of hey, really strong order growth with 5% for the year, how do those square up? That's probably the biggest piece that helps explain that. And we do expect that we'll see -- continue to see some order momentum this year. It's not like that's going to go away. We're going to eat into it too much. But that's what lined up to that 5% outlook for the year.

Yes. So timing?

Exactly.

And then just sticking within HST, you'd mentioned life sciences, Eric. Can you talk about -- I think at 4Q, you mentioned life sciences vertical is stable, but we've also seen some pretty positive commentary from others exposed to pharma production and around biopharma. So can you just talk about what are some of the indicators that you're watching for your life sciences business and how you're thinking about potentially inflecting growth there?

Yes. So look, it's -- after a very volatile early in the pandemic period, I mean, it's stabilized and it's returned to kind of low single-digit growth. It's been stable around that area. On the positive side, pharma in general is absolutely driving it. So we do a lot of work in the component level for analytical instrumentation, diagnostic gear. It's used both in drug discovery. Think of it as like an analysis tool in a technician's toolbox, and then it's used in the QC labs in production as well. So you sort of get it on both sides from initial discovery and development to then full production. So health in that whole sphere, some of the reshoring that's going on there is all positive for that side. And I would argue it's driving probably a disproportionate part of that growth. The 2 offsets that we've continued to see, one, and it's -- this is more of an end customer thing, but then it reads through to us. The international piece, pre-pandemic, there was a lot of buoyancy and growth in China for that sector that really didn't return after things opened up. And it's -- I mean, it's stable, but certainly not contributing from a growth perspective. So that's been sort of an industry secular headwind. I'd say the other one more near term, particularly in the U.S., is on the kind of institutional funding or the NIH funding assurance or the lack thereof in some cases, as well as some of the pressure in the university markets. So that side of it, not quite where it was before. The biopharma, a lot of that -- I mean, healthy, it depends kind of where you play there. A lot of the same instruments I described in the beginning actually do the same work in that space as well. But we're probably disproportionately skewed there. We don't have like a bunch of bespoke product for that particular sector. So we're not quite exposed in the same way that maybe some others there. But -- so what would have to change? I think some unlock on the more traditional U.S.-based systems around indirect funding sources would be good. And then ultimately, I think a lot of the end customers are trying to figure out, does China return? If it doesn't, there's still a bunch of developing economies, where do they need to be positioned to go after them. That's actually -- those are the kind of conversations we have with them and kind of circles back to your original question around global support. We can support that from a variety of different geographies.

That makes sense. And then maybe just one more on HST. You talked at 4Q about deploying that 8020 playbook at HST to support simplification and help boost margins. So can you talk about some of the simplification or margin improvement opportunities that you see at HST, and how you're thinking about path back to 30% plus EBITDA margins there?

So I mean 8020 is a big part of everything we do. It's been the sort of one of the central pillars of value drivers for IDEX. So when we acquired a lot of these businesses, we're careful of how we used it. We knew that ultimately, we want to get the top line moving in some of these businesses. We want to put some technologies together. We wanted to get some momentum, and now you're seeing evidence of that happening. Now if you think about it, we've got -- we can take the benefits of a flywheel effect. We can take some of the growth and use it to kind of stand in as we make some harder calls on some of the acquired businesses. So the second loop is referring to that. We've done some of it already. So last year, we -- on the third quarter call, we walked people through some example of the MSS or Material Science Solutions platform that we created. We talked a lot about Muon, which was our second biggest acquisition. And we walked people through how sort of initially, we had a piece of semicon business in there. There were some trade disruption and gave us some headwinds from a mix perspective. And we're able to take that same technology, same resource base and shift it, frankly, over into the data center world. As we did it, we got the full-on read-through benefits of a lot of the simplification that we've done that frankly takes headcount out of the equation as we made the call on some dilutive business, because a lot of it was in Europe, it took a little while to read through. But by the time we got halfway through the year, you could see the additive effects of both. And so we had the top line moving again, largely because of 8020 focused in a different area with portable technology. And we had the cost base in a different position. And finally, the costs were frankly extracted. So we brought the margin rate of that platform back to IDEX level, and now it's moving past it. And so that's sort of the engine. We've still got work to do in Mott, which was our last acquisition and the largest. And Mott today still is not at the margin position of kind of overall HST, and it's a decent sized business. So that's an area of opportunity. We're doing some of the same work. The only piece I wanted people to kind of understand here is that having the momentum of growth here really does allow us to do it in ways where it's frankly more transparent on the outside. It's not as disruptive here because we're able to fund the top line and you'll see the margin additive benefits on the bottom line.

That makes sense. Before I forget, any questions from the audience? Usually not, but we give them the opportunity. I'll carry on. Oh, do we have one? Perfect.

I just wanted to -- obviously, a question on HST. We've been touching on that. So last year, you grew organically mid-singles in the segment. This year, you said you're going to do the same thing. But as you mentioned, orders much stronger, especially in the back half of the year. You have end markets that are accelerating, life science, semi, data center is very strong, other areas of HST are still strong. So why are we not expecting that to be maybe a little bit stronger than last year?

Well, it's on the way. I'd say the 2 pieces that are still headwinds, our life science business, which is a decent portion of HST is still down around low single digits. And we still have about 20% of the segment that is very industrial in nature. That's down, I mean years -- a few years ago, that was half of the segment. It's becoming a smaller piece of it. And that industrial piece looks an awful lot like the rest of our industrial markets. It's still kind of flattish. And so you've got 2 pieces that are pressuring the pieces that, frankly, are kind of what we designed them to be. They're north of mid-single digits. That's where we want to take the whole segment. So getting a little bit of industrial support as that becomes a smaller part overall because it will. We're obviously not emphasizing more industrial applications in there over time. And then life sciences. I think life sciences is still a fairly big lever that we would like to see move up slightly when it does, then we can take the whole fleet average probably to the level that you're thinking about, and that's definitely what we're targeting. We want HST to lead the way for growth for IDEX. We want it to be high single digits as a segment.

So that's actually a good transition. Obviously, you just reported earnings not that long ago, but I'll still ask if you can give us an update on demand trends you're seeing in the shorter cycle sort of day rate businesses that you talk about? And any follow-through? I know 1 month doesn't make a trend, but any follow-through you're seeing from this update in PMI?

So again, so everybody understands on the industrial side because we have this kind of rapid fulfillment engine, we have a few businesses that we call canaries in the coal mine because they're very predictive. They predict inflection early -- either way, plus or negative. And you think of it as like we'll get an order on a Monday, we'll build it Wednesday, it's in service on a Friday, that kind of business. So what we do is we watch them together. And they almost at any point in history, they bob around different rates. When they start to move the same way, it tells you something because it's so broad-based. So that's the collection that we're -- we get asked about a lot, and we're watching. Now we've had some decent headlines out there. There's -- the PMI number was over 50 for like the first time in a long time. I think there's a sense, and I would agree that it's been a long time of a kind of a contracted environment. It seems like it should be moving by now. And if you look in history, you don't see many periods of time where it's 3, 4 years in duration. That's atypical. Inflation is lower. Policy seems like it's at least bouncing between 2 more reasonable bands now. So a lot of the ingredients are there. We're watching it. To be candid, we haven't seen it yet. This first quarter, I think March is a pretty important month. January, people are kind of still frozen in half of the country, they're trying to get to work. February has President's Day and vacations. But kind of this point on usually tells us something about the year. So if there is an inflection point, we're really well positioned. We will not miss it, and we'd be more than happy to pass it along. But I still -- when I hear -- when we talk to small business owners, distributors, you still see -- they're still talking about economics and economic forces is a bit of an abstraction. It's like they'll go describe all the things that I've just described. And then when you say, well, what do you -- okay, but let's get down to business. It's still very much the present sort of steady-state reality. They haven't clicked together yet. And I still think the #1 thing there is people are just looking for variables because there's a lot of variables I've just walked through. To frankly, settle down, I don't know that they even need to move in massively positive directions, but get to a place where they're somewhat predictable and you can just say, well, there's the playing field. I think we understand it, let's get to work. We're closer to that, I think, than we have been, but not yet.

Have you heard in those conversations -- have you heard anything from your customers about potential impacts from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the changes in CapEx expensing and so on?

I mean it's -- I get what the heading is, but I think most of them are -- that's somebody else's decision. And I mean, we're dealing with a lot of people that are taking components into projects that somebody else is thinking about. So again, it's in that mix of things described in an abstract way. In terms of individual owners, are they changing a lot of the things that they're doing without those catalysts in our world? Not necessarily.

Okay. Makes sense. And then just digging in on the segments, we spent a lot of time on HST, but maybe we could dig into FMT a bit. Can you just talk about some of the cross currents there across your end market exposures? I think you talked about strength in mining and water, softness in oil and gas and chemicals. So can you just talk about how those are translating to your '26?

Yes, yes. So there is always a little bit of a tendency to paint everything with a broad stroke. But I mean, we actually -- as you just said, we have individual points of exposure, and they're not all moving the same way. The most advantaged places for us in FMT, absolutely water is at the head of the list. Again, remember, the job that we're doing here is infrastructure analysis. So we have robot crawlers that go down with data acquisition or cameras. We have flow monitoring that does the same thing. This is the one place of IDEX that has a decent amount of software, all of which we wrote that takes those inputs and then interprets them and we provide the answers to a municipality. That's essentially what we do. I think the reason, one, the sector is in generally better shape, as you probably know. We do well because we're essentially helping people solve massive problems, and it's always water side of the house. And so if you think about it, everything related to overflows and we've got kind of the perfect ingredients. We've got climate change and thunderstorms. We have bad infrastructure and social media. You put the 3 things together and you get pictures of cars floating by windows and people who want to fix it. And so our products and services help do that, and then we contract with cities. So it's been strong. It was a double-digit grower in Q4, that piece of business, and we've got a high single digit going forward. We have a companion piece whenever we describe water that is semi-related water. It's high purity. That's -- for a while, that's been an offset. So we've had to sort of explain one and then the other. The order rate flipped over to positive, in line with the rest of the semi cycle, and they'll be both contributory going forward next year. So water, very good. Mining, it's one single business, but it's the biggest pumps we make. They chase precious metals and they do really well. And so you can imagine that's doing well, why it is and it is. Down on the -- I'll skip a bunch, go down to the bottom. Ag is pressured. I think everybody knows farm income, it's tricky. Trade policy hasn't made it better. It's always been kind of a cyclical business. We have 2 franchises there. Chemicals, chemical exposure is also tricky right now. Ours is a little bit more European slanted as well. So we're trying to offset that with some growth in India. That's actually doing very well for us as chemicals kind of move around the globe. And then last, I would say, energy. And energy is super specific. We're not a wellhead energy business. We do custody transfer far downstream. But it does tend to move in concert with health of industry. And so that's been a little depressed with oil somewhere around $60. In the middle is the general industrial things that most closely align with PMI because they're so fragmented and fits so many functions. And they're kind of exactly where that reading is sort of right in the middle.

Got it. And then I guess maybe, Sean, just given the context of those sort of moving or cross currents within FMT, how are you thinking about margin potential in the business this year? And do you see potential for any incremental cost-out actions in some of the softer portions of the business?

Yes. Good question. The guidance that we gave contemplates the top line that Eric talked about there, which is essentially kind of flat with volume being slightly down and price getting you to close to flat in the FMT business. And then on the margin side, that really leads to kind of flat margins as well. There's some pressure because of the volume decrementals. We'll seek to offset that with price as well as just productivity gains. In terms of bigger cost out, I don't think we're there because probably if you see that inflection up in these businesses, you kind of want to have the position in place to capture it, which I think we're in a good position to do. And the company has obviously been pretty disciplined on cost for a period of time here. So I don't see that as a lever in the status quo, of course, if things change, that could be revisited. And to the extent that we do see that order activity increase in the more kind of truly industrial-facing businesses, we're well positioned to capture that. And on the flip side, we don't need to add any cost to capture that volume.

That's helpful. And then -- just shifting to FSDP. I guess a similar question. You've called out, I think, some pressures in international Fire & Safety and maybe a subdued capital cycle in dispensing. So can you talk about, I guess, one, just the relative size of the international Fire & Safety business versus the U.S. for you and sort of the dynamics you're seeing in those global regions that are impacting demand?

Yes. I mean, Q3 of last year, we had a couple of regions move down on the Fire & Rescue piece, which is by far now the biggest part of that segment. It's an integrated platform. China for a while, we've had some decoupling effects over there. That was a great business, but there's a lot of driven interest to have more local offerings and things. So we're kind of picking our battles with that business. So I think that's a longer trend. Europe, which has always been very stable for us, kind of went negative in Q3. A lot of it, I think, was related to some shifts in discretionary spend moving over into more of like our equivalent would have been FEMA. So think of it as like disaster preparedness or field things that maybe there hadn't been a lot of spend, and there's some different dynamics to how defense is being thought of generally over there. But to be honest, that kind of flipped back in Q4. So I think that was a shorter-term phenomenon. It's never been a massive grower for us, but it's a good stable business. You asked about the ratio. It's by far a North American-centric business, and that's where most of the growth is coming from. So when we kind of line up segments in terms of growth expectations, obviously, HST now firmly out in front. But we actually have FSDP second, growing a little healthier than the assumption set that Sean just went through on FMT. Dispensing. Dispensing has always had a little bit of a cyclical rhythm to it because there's some big retail chunks in North America where kind of the fleets get replenished about every 7 years or so. We know where those are in the cycle. We're between those mountain tops. We've flattened it out with a bunch of emerging markets growth. I talked through some of it earlier, but we did a massive program in '24. And so we're kind of comping against some of that. Some of it went into '25. So I don't know if it's so much subdued. It's just there's been some -- there was a big international boom and there's one ready to come eventually here in the North American side. Otherwise, stable business. So -- that's kind of the puts and takes. BAND-IT, which is the third piece there, operates a lot like a general FMT, more industrial kind of business. So kind of as goes PMI rates and those things tends to go to that business.

Got it. And then you mentioned kind of a 7-year capital cycle in dispensing. Is that North America specific or do you think international?

No, it's because of the retail concentration. You don't -- it just doesn't line up that way anywhere else. There's a lot more players everywhere else.

All right. That's helpful. And then -- the follow-up question, Sean, is just given how we're thinking about volume in FSDP in the near term, how are you thinking about margin progression this year?

A bit similar to FMT, slightly better given that the top line is a little bit better. So there'll be some marginally better flow-through on profitability. So we expect some kind of slight margin expansion, a little bit of a mix dynamic that Eric talked about with the dispensing business continuing to see that kind of cycle come down, and then BAND-IT being pretty steady and growing. So some slight margin expansion, a little bit better than the FMT story.

Got it. And then I guess stepping back, just not to beat a dead horse. But on the orders, so we talked about orders versus organic growth at HST. But for the company overall, can you talk about sort of the mid-teens orders growth you saw in 4Q versus the 1% to 2% organic that you're guiding for the year? Is that mainly driven by HST? Or is there something else that we need to think about there?

That's pretty much the HST story because HST is what drove those orders growth. And then you got the 5% organic growth. We kind of covered what drives that. The other 2 segments are much more of a rapid fulfillment business. And one quarter can be a little misleading, but if you look at the trend line on orders over a couple of quarters, it will track pretty closely to revenue growth. So that's why you see FMT and FSDP in kind of that flat to slightly up over this year.

Great. And then -- just going back to some of the comments you made earlier around capital deployment and potential to sort of reaccelerate the M&A flywheel over time beyond '26. Can you just talk about sort of what are some of the areas you'd be looking at for incremental capital deployment key priorities?

So we've talked about kind of a return to bolt-ons, tuck-ins and things, certainly here in the near term. But to be honest, much of IDEX was built with what looks often like a bolt-on and a tuck-in. So we've got these franchises that are out there and right next to them are near adjacent things that when they attach the 2, the synergy is really, really good. So what we have built now, especially around the HST side in this area of material science concentration has an awful lot of touch points. So Micro-LAM was last year's example of something that sort of seamlessly fit. And we have a number of things that we're thinking about that kind of go around. We have it drawn -- it was in our slide deck as sort of a triangle around 3 dimensions. Any one of those has plenty of landing spots. And so that's an area of a lot of focus and intensity. And trying to get a sense of like how far can material specialization go, what other materials might be there could potentially be other chapters. That's kind of how we got to nanofiltration with Mott. That's how we got there with Ceramics. So we did the homework and understood where certain parts of the duty cycle, you move from metal to ceramics or where you move from liquid handling to something where you need to filter it. That's why we bought those companies. So I think a lot around that area. We love what's going on in the kind of the water that we play in. And so we're always looking for things over on that side. to be frank, good industrial tech. There's a few gaps that we'd be interested to fill over there as well. And I'd say there's an effort to think bigger at some level of down the road, where do we think we would -- ultimately, if this source code starts to really, really fire, well, where does it lead? Where does it take us into -- and what could potentially be some interesting bigger chunks. So -- but ultimately, the company was built that way. We'll continue to build it that way.

Makes sense. And then just in the last couple of minutes that we have, Eric, I'll ask you this question that I think I've asked you every year and that we're asking all our companies, which is -- what are the top 2 or 3 innovations and structural changes impacting IDEX over the next 5 years? And are there any emerging trends that maybe are being overlooked in the current environment?

Well, I wouldn't say they're being overlooked. We're living them, but I am really excited about the pace of technology and how it's moving. So markets -- and I suspect there are themes all over this conference, I know they are, where you see industries that didn't exist before. We're participating them in a lot of ways. So we talked about data center exposure, low-orbit communications, things that weren't even a thing a little while ago. I think the thing as you leave here to think about us, though, I mean, we're looking for ways to make that system work better or fix stuff in it that doesn't work. So I'll use data center as an example, and it's a good one. So there's not a single technology that we have that was originally developed, designed or sold as a data center part, not one. What we are doing is we're doing the jobs we've long done, but we're finding applications for them in the data center infrastructure that was set up that now is mature enough to not work right. That's a great job to do. And so we're coming in and we're taking heat out of places or we're helping with connectivity, with optical connectivity in an area that used to be mechanical relays or we're coming in, in different spaces with a valve that suddenly was purposed in there quickly, but now they're leaking. And so we're using some IP-driven medical ball stuff that we have. And that's much more of a typical way that we've often kind of run our business. It's why the attributes, the financial attributes that Sean was talking about are so good. And why I think the continuity and staying power of it is very durable in an environment that changes a lot. So we're not necessarily looking for the kind of boom entry and the potential bust on the back end of it. We're looking for places that are durable and say, look, when this system is here, whether it's this big, this big or this big, it has to run right. It has to be optimized and people are really going to care about it. So that's kind of the work that we're doing. So the pace of the disruption is exciting because it just creates problems like this to think about and go solve. So I put that down as number one. I'd say number two, I'd actually go back to the digital stuff that we were talking about earlier. I think so much of our world had been driven by people-dependent relationship kind of commercial sales and interfaces and seeing this move over and start to morph into a digital realm and that -- how quickly that kind of moved from initially thinking of it defensively as a threat to wait a second, this is actually a way to go solve even more problems faster than ever before. So I put those two at the head of the list.

Great. Well, I appreciate all the time today, as always. Thanks, guys.

Thank you.

Thank you. Good to see you.