Ingersoll Rand Inc. (IR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hi, everyone. My name is Debbie Jones, I'm the Head of ESG for company research at Deutsche Bank. You have joined our session with Ingersoll Rand. We have Vicente Reynal, Chairman, President and CEO of Ingersoll Rand today. Just to give you a little bit of background, although I think some of you probably already know, he served as CEO of Gardner Denver, responsible for driving growth and profitability, leading to the IPO, Gardner Denver in 2017, and subsequently in early 2020, acquiring Ingersoll Rand in the Industrial segment -- Industrial segment. Before joining Gardner Denver, he spent 11 years of Danaher Corp. where he had several leadership roles, he's also on the Board of Directors at American Airlines. Thank you for coming back this year and having this conversation with us, really appreciate it. Your company is a leading global manufacturer with a range of innovative mission-critical air fluid, energy and medical technologies providing services and solutions to increase industrial productivity and efficiency. I'm sorry for reading that, but I just wanted to make sure I said it all, and we will expand a little bit about this in our conversation. There's a lot to talk about here. But again, thank you so much for coming.

Thank you for the invitation. It's a pleasure and great. Thank you. Thank you, Debbie.

I want to start and just kind of setting the stage here, you've really ramped up your sustainability focus probably since you got here. But really over the last -- got to Ingersoll over the last 3 years, any possible merge two businesses together. From a sustainability standpoint, what were the key challenges for doing this and putting all of this together?

Yes. I mean, I think if you think about it, as you said, in 2020, it was February 2020 when Gardner Denver and Ingersoll Rand, the Industrial segment kind of came together. And a week later, pandemic hits. So we had to clearly integrate these kind of mega merger all kind of remotely and be able to still deliver the commitments that we made to Wall Street in terms of synergy savings and growth and things like that. So kind of highly complicated to be able to achieve that. But needless to say, we're very excited because we have come out super strong out of the integration and overdeliver to a lot of the commitments that we made. One of the commitments that we had is also how can we be recognized as a leader in ESG and sustainability, and it really started by creating a very ambitious target on our own and having a very clear glide path on how we're going to be able to achieve that. And ultimately, we leverage our own processes, the process that we call IRX to be able to drive performance across the multiple different initiatives and ESG and sustainability being one of those. So it speaks to the power of IRX that we have that capability inside Ingersoll Rand today that we can take a process like that and really leverage it not only for execution of financial performance, but also execution of other things such as sustainability and some of the bold ambitious targets that we set out to be.

And let's just take a step back here and say, okay, when we talk about sustainability, what is that mean for Ingersoll Rand, if you give us a couple of the pillars that you focus on...

Yes, so we see sustainability not just at the right thing to do for our planet and the community, but also, we view it as a tremendous tailwind for growth. And if you look at our company, we have five strategic imperatives. And one of those is, we say, lead sustainably strategy, which is kind of twofold. One is grow sustainably and two is operate sustainably. And operate sustainably is that how we, as a company, will achieve our 2030 and 2050 greenhouse gas emission targets, and we set out to be, again, pretty aggressive targets that we say net zero by 2050, 60% of the way by 2030. And then growing sustainability, which is how do we ensure that all of our products and services are around high levels of efficiency, circularity, circular economy and making sure that we help our customers enable that ability to be able to achieve their Scope 1 and Scope 2 targets that they see.

So you are a global company, which I think can make it a little bit more challenging to make sure the message gets to everyone. This is your focus, and this is what you're trying to do. Could you give us and understanding of how do you push that message down, especially for things like emissions reduction, how do you make sure that everyone is kind of on board for this process that you're trying to push?

Yes. So -- and to answer that question, Debbie, you mean internally in the organization. How do we execute that?

Yes.

Yes. So we leverage that the IRX. And IRX today, there's something that we call impact daily management, and we have roughly 300 of those events that are happening every single week across our company. And that's how we take our targets and our bold ambitions and deploy that into very actionable activities that we can actually then drive to ensure that we achieve our target. So for example, we have five sustainability IDMs in place. We have one around Scope 3, we have one around health and safety, we have one around product sustainability, we have another one around operational sustainability. And then we have the last one, the fifth IDM that we drive is around rating agencies and sustainability report. So we, as a company, we take our ESG targets that we put out, the 2030, 2050, and then start deploying that. What does it mean, what do we have to accomplish this year and then what we have to accomplish every quarter and what we have to accomplish every month and every week and every day? And then we break it into various small chunks that our teams across the entire company can really start executing on that and be able to report the news pretty quickly up and down in terms of what's working, what's not, what help do they need, and that's what we do to really leverage that as a total company to accelerate the improvements in sustainability, which ultimately is a great reflection on how we're performing in an external environment, but also inside the company, leveraging our processes.

But I do want to get in a little bit to the more sustainable products that you have. I think that's a big part of the story. But just right before I do that, can we just discuss the inflation Reduction Act in general? And how -- well, kind of your thoughts on how that changes things for you, if it does and just kind of what areas that might be more impactful for you?

Yes. So we were -- and as we all know, the inflation reduction is kind of coming through fruition. So a lot of the funds perhaps may start come [indiscernible] here come through this year, '24 and '25. But we're already seeing a lot of good movement. And give you one great example, renewable natural gas, RNG. This is an area that we have a pretty unique technology around gas compression and which is basically utilizing some of our unique technology on compressors to really compress the gas. And it is one of the best market acceptance products that we have in the U.S. here, and it is really accelerating the growth around RNG. And as we see that IRA is expanding whether the tax credits or even the funds to ensure that mid-level farmers or small farming solutions can actually obtain technology like this, we're seeing an acceleration of growth on that. Clearly, hydrogen is another one with these hydrogen pubs. It's another vector of growth for us, and we have spoken in the past how we can -- how we definitely continue to see good momentum on hydrogen. And the third big area is around carbon capture solutions. And you saw on the earnings call, we spoke about how we, as a company, we were selected as a kind of a core technology with [indiscernible] blower technology to be able to kind of be at the core of that process of being able to capture carbon and sequester, the carbon capture and store it for ultimately have a better safe environment. So I think we -- those are kind of three key areas that even though it's early stages, we're already seeing good tailwinds and good momentum that we think this is the early innings of the game and expect that momentum to continue as we move forward.

Can we talk about just digging a little bit more on the growth outlook for some of those products and what you're excited about when you're having discussions with your customers on the hydrogen compression? I realize that the carbon capture might be a separate conversation, but I just would like to get your sense of where you are with customers around these.

Yes. So I think, Debbie, this is where we think the intersection of the technology that we have with how we execute commercially around we've spoken a lot about demand generation and how demand generation is our own internal marketing automation engine that help us generate roughly 5,000 qualified leads per week. So every single week, we're reaching out to great amounts of customers to proactively educate them on our technologies and our products, and that delivers to us that level of marketing qualified leads and then we translate into revenue, obviously. So I think that's a great way on how we're taking the technologies that we have, which are applicable into a multitude of processes or being able to educate customers on how they can take our technologies and utilize that for their own end use. And so I would say that, that has been what we call the self-help on the commercial side that has allowed us to be front and center into the customer as they're trying to come up with new ways of solutions on how they can actually accomplish, some of the targets that they're putting out in their market. So Debbie, I think this is one of the reasons why we're excited with when there's good market changes and good market conditions, we can leverage our engine of demand generation to be able to accelerate our growth. So that is what is really driving this good momentum. So I mentioned before, give you an example, the renewable natural gas. This is coming through my company that we have in our portfolio with a brand called LeROI. LeROI was an acquisition that we made back in late 2017, early 2018, and at the time we purchased the company for roughly $30 million. And today, we're probably generating equal amount of EBITDA as to what the purchase that we made that company. So that tells you the amount of growth that we have seen on that type of technology, which obviously, a lot of that has been around renewable natural gas and other processes around natural gas compression allowing customers to be able to work more sustainable in their applications.

So for -- I guess, there are a lot of companies right now, you've got this -- for the world, you have this post-COVID backdrop changing kind of geopolitical environment over the last year, hyperinflation, I can say that. And you have a discussion about the idea that maybe CapEx you shouldn't be spending as much on more sustainable investment or activities. From what you're saying, it sounds like your conversations with your customers are still pretty healthy on demand for those types of products. But I'm curious, when is that true? And then two, what are your thoughts on that kind of idea around like in the current environment, do we still think about sustainability the same?

Yes. Debbie, I'll say today, we have not seen any type of deprioritization of ESG in conversations that we have with our customers. I think on the contrary, I think what happened is that for example, the energy crisis in Europe that really was a bit of a wake-up call to a lot of our customers to realize how energy dependency or how energy can really affect their operations. So they're now realizing that there's actually better ways on how they can actually drive their operations and create acceleration of energy efficiency. And even though the energy cost in Europe has still come down, still the level of conversations with our customers in Europe, in particular, is pretty high around how can we, as Ingersoll Rand, help them achieve energy efficiency because they realize that air compressors and air treatment systems in any type of process of a manufacturing facility consumed roughly 30% to 40% of the energy that is produced for specific manufacturing side, and this is a manufacturing location. When you go to a wastewater treatment facility, and roughly 50%, 60% of the energy consumed in that wastewater facility is because of the blowers that generate the aeration in the initial stages of a wastewater treatment facility. So they're realizing what we've been trying to say for so many years is that, hey, let us come in and show you and tell you how we can actually optimize that energy efficiency by connecting that compressor or that blower in a remotely passion and be able to provide you a better -- a much higher return on that investment, not only by connecting it, but also by bringing new technology because technology has advanced dramatically in terms of how we make compressors, blowers and vacuums. So I will say that even though, as you said, maybe conversations around deprioritization, we have not seen that. And we think that what just happened here over the past 12 to 18 months on energy, supply chain, logistics, everything else has just really accelerated customers to have that deeper conversation with us on how can we help them do an air audit and also optimize their energy consumption in their facilities.

Okay. Thank you for that. And that whole combination like very important, very interesting. But I'm going to move to something that everyone cares about as much, but I think it is still important from an investment perspective. Investors do look at third-party rating agencies. Last year, I think when we talked -- you even just got an upgrade from MSCI or you did right shortly after. And you [scored] quite well there, so trying to point that out. But at the same time, they've highlighted your lack of clean tech opportunities relative to peers and R&D spend is relative to peers. And I just wanted to give you the opportunity to discuss and address that if you agree with that context.

Yes. So I'll say that to your point, yes, I mean, we've seen acceleration MSCI, AA, and we were just incorporating to the Down Jones Sustainability Index and not only incorporated, but now we're #1 in North America in our category, and #2 across the world. So we're making great strides and improvements. Specifically to the MSCI, even though we kind of got to the AA, our current score is based on our 2020 sustainability report, which is now more than 2 years old, and our 2021 sustainability report contained roughly 10 pages on [cleantech] opportunities, including product highlights, [cleantech] markets and products and circularity around what we do in terms of remanufacture of products and kind of put them back into service. So I think that as now MSCI gets a chance to rereview our scores, this is what we're excited. So far, that was not very well understood because we did not incorporate that level of detail on our 2020 -- or 2021 report included a lot of good details and obviously available to everyone. So I think it's just that we have -- opportunities in [cleantech] are abundant from compressors, banking systems for carbon capture, the hydrogen refueling stations that we just talked to hydrogen -- but also hydrogen refueling stations. So I think the opportunity for us to continue to accelerate and improve our scores is exciting. So hopefully, we will continue to see that we can demonstrate, that we can continue to be upgraded in our ratings.

Okay. And thank you for pointing that out because I'll take a question, look at that. So maybe next time they [indiscernible], they'll incorporate that information. I have one more question on kind of product benefits and then we'll switch to some human capital priorities. But you do mention in your sustainability deck, you talk about circularity benefits of your products. Can you just give us a little bit more color on that angle and how you really help your customers with that?

Yes. So I'll probably give you two examples. One, with our compressor, which is obviously one of our largest product lines that we have. We can take what's inside the compressor, what we call the heart of the compressor, which is the [airgens] and we can take it back into our facilities, and we can remanufacture the [airgen] and then put it back into service. And what that it does is that really extends the life of the compressor. Not every customer is opting to do that, but there's so many customers that really prefer to go through that process, and then that's one of the things that we offer. On our other product line we call Nash, which is our liquid ring vacuum solution, heavily used in pulp and paper, but many other kind of harsh environments in petrochemical facilities or chemical facilities as well. And on that one, we have a very rigorous process on how we can really remanufacture and recondition those liquid ring Nash pumps back into the market multiple times. So we have Nash branded vacuum blowers out in the market, in some cases for 40, 50 years because, again, the castings and what's on the outside is very robust and all you have to do is just kind of continue to service and remanufacturing the internal guts of the machinery. So I think those are things that we definitely do for our customers as a way to create that circularity environment where we can continue to reduce a lot of the metal and the product that we have in the market.

Thank you for walking me through that. Shifting to human capital priorities, and I'd like to start with D&I. I believe you have a target of 25% [indiscernible]. Can you just once make sure -- clarify if I have the nuances on that, correct? And where are you today? And how do you plan to get to where you'd like to be?

Yes. I would say on that -- human capital is definitely one of our kind of core things that we believe that we're very unique -- and I'll talk about the NI or DNI and here in a second, but also highlight our ownership mindset that we drive with our employee base, where all 16,000 employees in the company have ownership in Ingersoll Rand. And you have seen our story how 2017 when we became public at [indiscernible] November, we gave about $100 million of equity to all employees. This is the nonmanagement equity participants. In 2020, when we combined the companies, we did it again with $150 million of equity at that time to all 16,000 employees. And now every year at the 1-year anniversary, for those companies that we acquire or new employees that we bring, we award them with, again, some level of equity in the company. So they have that skin in the game and continuing with us on this long-term journey that we have ahead of us. In terms of D&I, we're proud with a lot of accomplishments that we have done. And for us, it really starts at the board level. And when you look at our Board, our Board is roughly 60% diverse already from gender and ethnicity. We're probably one of the only companies that have two Hispanics, two [females], an African American on Board. And we did it in a way that it was not only that level of diversity on gender and ethnicity, but also diversity in the way of experiences and thinking process, that is very well aligned with our strategic priorities. So taken from the Board level, and it just kind of trickles down. So in our treaty in the past 3 years, we have now created seven inclusion groups. We have drove incredible improvement in engagement and retention, and we're focusing on our process to develop and promote internally. Additionally, we have made a very strong external partnership to attract talent. Actually, I was just last week at Georgia Tech, one of the universities here close by to us to recruit diverse engineering candidates. So I think it's really kind of core to our strategy. Me as being Hispanic, and one of the -- maybe I don't know, maybe half a dozen Hispanic CEOs in public companies today, proud of what we can do and what we can accomplish around this effort. So it is very conscious for us, something that we're driving consistently that we can continue to improve and accelerate. And as you very well said, we have some pretty aggressive targets that we want to continue to execute towards to.

Thank you for walking us through that. I think last year, you were also just coming back from recruiting as well. So it sounds like that. Okay, I just want to shift gears a little bit and let's talk a little bit about water scarcity and for those of you that don't know, we had COP15 this past December, a lot of discussion around commitment to preserving 30% of the water in the world. I think we've now had some actually pretty big commitments globally come out recently. You have made efforts to help companies with this and on this effort. And I think the business is going to become an even bigger and more growing topic than it already is. Can you walk us through that and how Ingersoll Rand can help?

Yes, me, this is -- it's a -- we talk a lot about energy efficiency, but it's never less. I mean, let's not forget about the water conservation and efficiency. And it's also an area that we pay particular close attention. And so I give you an example here where we have a technology that we acquired around circa roughly late '18 -- 2018, a company in Finland called Runtech. And Runtech has a very unique technology around blower technology, particularly applicable to the pulp and paper industry. And we acquired this business because of the potential. At the time, it was roughly a technology. And now we have continued to develop and penetrate that full compare market very extensively. So if you think about it, if today, a piece of paper consumes, I think it like 20 liters of water to be able to be made. So that tells you the perspective, just 1 A4 paper, how much water consumes. And it has to do -- when you go to a pulp and paper facility is just the way you transport the pulp, the way you kind of decompose the pulp, the way you put the chemicals and you fix it. So our technology actually saves 90% of the water consumed freshwater consumption at a pulp and paper facility. So very dramatic improvement. So if you think about it, and we take our technology which is penetrating pretty quickly and growing very rapidly because of that. And you apply to all pulp and paper facilities across the world, the larger ones, you can actually save over 50 billion gallons of water per year. So it is a lot of water that could be saved. So I think this is -- customer adoption is starting. We're seeing some good, phenomenal growth that we're actually having great conversations with customers around how this technology can help them on the water, but then also on the energy savings. So it's actually a dual savings for customers where paybacks are, call it, a year or less in today's monetary situation. So I think it's just one of those that we expect will continue to accelerate as we go forward in terms of helping our customers be able to conserve this very scarce resource that we have with freshwater.

And then internally as well, I think you're making some commitments to reduce your own water to imagine is a nice thing to be able to talk to your customers about as well. Can you talk a bit...

Yes. So let me -- so to meet our 2030 goal, 17% reduction in absolute water, we're very focused on. We have one facility out of [indiscernible] Wisconsin that where we actually have our own die casting facility. And now we have upgraded and run a pilot, where we are using a closed loop water for cooling down the die casting process and has dramatically reduced already close to 25% water reduction in this facility alone. So I think it's just one of those and now as we continue to expand to the other machines, we expect that we should be able to get to that 2030 target without any issue whatsoever. So again, it's just something that internally, we're putting a lot of attention to as well on how can we drive technologies to be able to achieve that water conservation, which is a great example, Debbie, in terms of, hey, we're doing a lot of our own work internally and a lot of our customers are doing it. So that's why going back to the prior conversation around capital investments and how customers think about whether [de]-prioritizing. We don't see that because, I mean, it's the right thing to do, and customers are viewing it as a way, hey, it's not only the right thing to do for the planet, but it's a great return on that investment that they're making. In our case, the same thing is reducing the water, but it's just reducing the cost dramatically as well.

Let's shift and move on to another target you have, which you're zero -- you're now at zero target, can you talk about a little bit about your road map to that? I mean, I think someone else at this conference said technology to get to net zero probably hasn't even been invented yet, right? So we're still moving forward to try to figure out how we can get there with what we have today. What are your plans there?

Yes. I will tell you that for our Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions where we got a very clear line of sight to our 2030 and 2050. That's clearly not an issue there. Scope 3, which is the impact of our products, it is obviously the most difficult scope to kind of calculate and analyze. The good news is that we have a great way on how we're calculating that. It has been audited. And now we're going into the execution mode. But I have no doubt that based on how we're leveraging our IRX and processes on execution once we know the target and when we know where we are, we know where we need to be, we're just going to go into that execution mode to be able to achieve our Scope 3, 2 as well. So again, Scope 1 and Scope 2, clear line of sight, Scope 3, we now have a baseline. And now we're going into execution mode.

Okay. And so I imagine you're going to have to really be engaging with your suppliers too on all of that, not just on emissions. But can you talk about how you do have those conversations with them? What is the ask of [them]? What is the expectation?

Yes. So great point, Debbie. So I'd say three critical priorities that we have. One is consolidating the supply base. So we can generate synergies while we're maintaining and improving the quality of the lead time. If you think about it, we're still early stages on that because over the past couple of years with the supply chain disruption that happened globally, it was something that we just could not do. But as we continue to see better stability and moving forward, continues to be a very core strategy for us to be able to achieve that. The second step is 95% of the critical Tier 1 suppliers that we call, and this is by spend in order spend. We're creating a newly established preferred supplier program. And this supplier preferred program goes into our third strategy, which is that we have standardized systems, reporting metrics that create an ongoing and comprehensive view of the sustainability across these Tier 1 suppliers, which are kind of the majority of our spend. But -- and I think that's going to give us to better connection with our supply chain. We also created an independent third-party partnership with Integrity Next. And I think this is going to give us great ability to understand potential risks in environmental protection, human rights, labor, anti-bribery, anti-corruption. So just go beyond what the supply chain and the suppliers are doing, we go deeper into this and be able to make sure that we have a very clear 4-step process today to engage with Integrity Next, where we can quickly identify and request corrective actions as needed for sustainability risks. So I think it's something that we're launching here in 2023. But we have, again, a very good kind of clear line of sight of 3 steps and also partnering with a third-party company that can help us accelerate this auditing process and have a very clear line of sight to key metrics that we can drive with our suppliers. As it relates to the sustainability risk.

I'd like to ask you how that's going next year. It sounds like a good effort that you're putting together to drive that engagement. I also noticed that you guys recently completed a life cycle assessment, and I see other companies do this. And I'm just curious, what did you learn? Are there any surprises for you when you went through? I mean, usually, it's a pretty cumbersome process to understand and you tend to learn maybe a little bit more about things you don't know. But...

Yes, it was a pretty exhaustive process, as you said it. We completed the baseline in 2020. And we also had that review by a third-party to make sure that as a way on how we can create that baseline and start measuring from here. And through the process, we were able to determine that the total greenhouse gas emissions and water impact for the lifetime of our products in their use and in their phase. So that gave us a very good perspective on how we can then from here on move and improve. So we launched something that we call design for sustainability standard work. This is embedded within our new product development process. And it basically prompts our engineers and product managers to think about sustainable product options, efficiency, [circularity], safety. And as they are developing new solutions for customers, there's actually standard work around these design sustainability that allows them to think differently and if nothing else, just ask a question as to, hey, have you thought about doing ABC? Or what is the process for ensuring that you're achieving this safety or energy efficiency standards? So I think it's changing the way we continue to design new innovation product solutions and it has been deployed across our global engineering team. So again, it's one of those that we expect to see continued improvement moving forward. So we'll continue the life cycle assessment process for 2021 and 2022, which will be published in our 2022 sustainability report at the end of June. So you'll be able to get a chance to read more of that as we publish our next sustainability report here.

Okay. And we do have one question from the audience. And it's about aligning your incentives with -- your management incentives with ESG goals and what are your thought processes around that?

Yes. So very recent with our committee. I mean, we are definitely engaging in that conversation. We have actually something that we are driving today mostly for our long-term incentive program. It is in -- what I call a test mode period here in 2023. And by 2024, you will see that we will be launching something more formalized. But yes, it's top of mind to all of us and one that we're doing a bit of metric tracking internally in 2023 and clearly something that we continue to report to our Board on an ongoing basis. But as specifically tying that to our compensation, the compensation of the senior management team we expect that something will come out here in 2024.

And you mentioned your Board. You've had a handful of board changes incredibly recently, but recently. What -- can you talk about what type of -- talk about those changes and what type of perspective do you think that these newer people are [bringing] to the board?

Yes, Debbie. So we have been very thoughtful in terms of the domain expertise that we bring into our Board. And if you go back, when we move from being a private equity company, we went to public, and we start changing our board composition, we wanted to do something that is very well aligned with our core strategy. So we started looking for -- we're big in the combination of organic and inorganic growth as a way to be a compounder of long-term industrial premier compounder value. So from an organic perspective, we went on and kind of hired on only from Mettler Toledo. Mettler is a company that has seen phenomenal organic growth for 25 years organically and has compounded their value tremendously for inorganic country from Roper, which obviously Roper transform itself by being an inorganic compounder. Most recently, we brought Mark Stevenson to our Board, who comes in from ThermoFisher, who was you very well know, ThermoFisher has completely dramatically changed themselves over the past 20 years by a combination of organic and inorganic and being very well aligned to high growth, sustainable growth markets, which is also something that we aspire to actually continue to align ourselves to these high-growth sustainable end markets. And then we brought in also Michael Stubblefield from Avantor, which, again, very good organic, inorganic and high-growth alignment into those markets. Then Jennifer Hastings from Cargill. She comes in with a technology background, technology mind. And as you think about our IoT and how we connect a lot of our compressors and machines and devices we just need to ensure that we're protecting our company from an ERP perspective, but also from a technology of data transmission. Then you got Mark Jones that came in from Silicon Valley, where he runs a company that translate that data transmission into revenue models and revenue streams, which again, this is exactly what we want to be able to accomplish, and so on and so on. So that has been the transformation of our Board. It's been very specific on domain expertise that we need in our company in order to ensure that we continue to compound our value and for them to bring just this dramatic kind of great amount of knowledge, but at the same time, being a great group of diverse way of thinking, backgrounds, ethnicity and gender.

Two more questions for you, and I'll start by saying. I find the companies that attend this conference are usually pretty comfortable with their sustainability story and they're usually making a very good effort along the important metrics that they need to focus on in product development. That said, what do you think or do you think investors fully appreciate this? And if not, what do you think that you're not having conversations with investors about that you think they're basically paying attention to on this topic?

Yes. I think we have -- over the past maybe 2.5, 3 years, we have radically transformed this company. We divested assets that were cyclical in nature with -- that we no longer have in our business. But we're not that very well aligned with sustainability and now we're taking the core of our technologies, which is mission-critical flow creation technologies. And these are technologies that are so diverse in application that we can be very specific and very targeted where we want to play in which end market and where we don't want to play and still achieve the growth that we have been able to achieve, double-digit growth for the past probably 7 to 8 quarters. So I think it's just still investors trying to understand our transformational journey and -- but also to think that we believe that we're still in the early innings of the game because there are just a lot of tailwinds. And the tailwinds of ESG is real. We see it. The tailwind of onshoring is real. I mean, we, as a company, we are doing ourselves, meaning whether expanding footprint in India, Europe, the U.S., reopening facilities. So we're doing it, and we see our customers doing it, and we can play with that. So that's a great tailwind. And the tailwind of this IoT and how we connect our devices and increase our recurring revenue, that's still to come. So I think it's just investors trying to understand how a lot of these kind of tailwinds can help achieve an overgrowth in our business. And it just takes time to understand, trying to see it and -- but we just continue to execute and leverage a lot of the sustainability topics as a way for us to be very focused and clear some good growth vectors that we know can help us overgrow our market.

I think some of those themes came up during our conversation today. So that -- the last question I have for you, and you can -- broader view or you can apply it to Ingersoll Rand and you can choose. But I would like to know what are you from a sustainability perspective? What are you most optimistic about as we sit here today with maybe some pessimism to be fair, in the environment, what are you most optimistic about?

You know what I'm very optimistic is that I do -- I and as a company, we do think that sustainability is real. Companies are just not talking about it. They're doing it. It is amazing how now the conversation in my opinion, has gone from having to talk to the plant manager, let's say, in a customer base, when we talk to our customers, sometimes we knock on the door and we talk to the plant manager. Now the conversations are happening at the C-suite level. And at the C-suite level, whether global operation leaders for very large companies having conversations with me and my team or what we can do to help them with energy efficiency and sustainability. So I think this is now -- the conversations have been risen to go from the plant level to that global corporate level, which obviously, I think is just going to drive that level of higher accountability and acceleration of potential investments around sustainability. So I do feel that companies are finding that core and customers -- our customers and we are too, finding that core that sustainability, as I said at the beginning when I opened the call, it's great for the planet, but it's also great for companies because they can achieve great return on that investment and they can achieve actually growth. It's also important to recruit talent. I mentioned going to Georgia Tech, I mean it is top of mind to the younger generation of engineers and students on what companies are doing to help the planet. It is top of mind. It's probably one of the #1 questions we get. So if someone is just kind of faking it and just talking about sustainability, but not doing it, they're going to have trouble hiring great talent. They're going to have trouble getting into new end markets and they're going to have trouble getting that performance that they need to achieve. So I think the difference now and the optimistic view from my view and for us is that it is real, we see it. We live it every day, so we're doing it. We're acting on them. And at least the customers are working aligned to, it's real for them as well.

And the younger generation can make you optimistic as well. So...

Absolutely.

Thank you very much. Always nice to speak to -- all of these issues and topics with you and hope that we get to do this again next year. Thank you all for participating and listening and see you next time. Bye.

Thank you, Debbie. Bye-bye.