Mettler-Toledo International Inc. (MTD) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. I think we can look to get started here. So thanks, everyone, for joining us. I'm Patrick Donnelly, the tools and diagnostics analyst here at Citi. Happy to have Shawn Vadala with us from Mettler-Toledo. Shawn, thanks for coming down.

Maybe we start with a little bit of end markets, and then we can kind of run through some different trends. Obviously, you guys already got the '26 guide out of the way, which was appreciated. Maybe we start on the industrial piece. That actually held in quite well in 3Q. Obviously, you guys have a few different layers of pieces inside the industrial side. Maybe we start there, what you guys are seeing on the industrial side and then the expectations as we go forward to 4Q and '26 there.

Yes, sure. So hey, good to be here, Patrick. Good to see you. We were extremely pleased with our third quarter results, particularly our industrial business. If you think about it, like there's always a lot of questions around industrial when the economy is softer. And over the years, we've done a really nice job of increasing the mix of this business towards the more attractive segments. So if you think about industrial, there's 2 parts, right? There's the core industrial part and then there's the product inspection part. So 60% is core, 40% is product inspection. And then core industrial is 25% of our global business. Product inspection is about 15% of our global business. And then on the core industrial side, if you think about it, like 60% of that business is sold into our core end markets like pharma, food manufacturing, chemical, which happens to be more specialty chemical. And the other thing with that business is that we've done a nice job of like enhancing our solutions through automation and digitalization, like as we kind of like help customers automate their processes or we help customers with their own digitalization initiatives, that's the strength of our portfolio. And then when we look at the third quarter, right, much better than we expected. Like we expected it to be a strong quarter. We -- I think we had guided core industrial to be up high single digit, and we ended up doing 10% organically. So a lot of things just kind of came together in the quarter better than what we expected. And I think some of it was really good execution, but I think some of it was just some favorable timing. Now whether that was some pent-up topics from the first half of the year with all the uncertainty, whether that was maybe things closing in Q3 that we otherwise would have closed in Q4, probably a little bit of both. But what kind of stood out was that we did have some strength throughout the world. We had very strong double-digit growth in the Americas. We had double-digit growth in Europe. And then we grew a little bit in China. And that's -- for us, that was favorable because that was the first time we had growth in the industrial business in China in 2 years. So that was like a nice data point. So overall, good execution, feeling well. And with like those core end markets, we felt like pharma was certainly doing a little bit better in the quarter there versus some of the other end markets like chemicals, maybe a more softer end market. On the product inspection side, product inspection's had a very good year. I feel like we've strung together a lot of good quarters now in a row. The outlook there still is also favorable. About 70% of that business is sold to food manufacturing companies. And then the other 30% is sold to a combination of like pharma and cosmetics and some other industries. So we tend to think about food manufacturing when we think about product inspection. So when you think about food manufacturing, it's a softer end market, right? Those customers are under a lot of challenges over the last few years with inflation and other challenges. But we're competing really well. And it's a good example of an area where we've benefited from some innovation. We've come out with some new products over the last few years. They're very well received in the marketplace. We're competing really well. Some of the products are also specifically targeting segments of the market that we weren't necessarily participating in, in the past. So for parts of product inspection, historically, we were very much focused on the high end in the market, but there's a very strong mid-market segment there, too. And as you can imagine, as customers are under more pressure, maybe they're moving to mid-market solutions or we're just hitting a bigger market there as well, too. And so by doing that, I think we've been able to like capture some share that we weren't capturing before. And so yes, so very, very pleased with those results as well.

Yes. And maybe the core industrial, we can pick up. I mean that's an area I think people always historically have viewed you as a little more cyclical. You guys have obviously moved away from that for the most part, particularly in China, right? That's been a nice evolution on the industrial side, to your point, that core piece was a little bit pressured, finally turned positive this quarter. I guess what have you seen on the China industrial side? And maybe break down that exposure a little bit because, again, I do think there's maybe a little bit of misunderstanding of what you guys do there relative to what you did 10, 15 years ago?

Yes, sure. So like 10 or 15 years ago, you might remember, we had a lot of heavy industrial applications when China went through kind of a softer time frame there like 2013, '14, '15, we exited some of those businesses that would have been more like correlated to steel and things like that. In today's world, we have a much more attractive business, much more -- looks more similar to the global mix in terms of like exposure to pharmaceutical, food manufacturing, chemical and again, chemicals, more specialty chem. We do have exposure to some infrastructure projects there, but it's maybe less than it was 15 years ago. And so I think that's a really good one for us. And I think the other thing is like the world has just evolved a lot, right? Like so if you look at the needs of our Chinese customers, they're very similar to the needs of our Western customers. And in fact, China is very proactively and aggressively pursuing their own digitalization journey. Like we were just there in September. And honestly, you feel a lot of energy when you're there in terms of like how they embrace digital technologies. And so our customers are doing that as well. And so our products really facilitate that. It's a strength of our products, the way that we can connect to our customer systems, the way that we can have structured data that can flow into their system, the way that our products are cybersecure, like all these things are -- resonate -- or features that resonate with our customers. So in China, like it's no different. And then -- and like I said, I think the life sciences and industries like that will be favorable over the medium to long term there. So like both our lab and our industrial businesses will benefit from it. Now of course, there's other industries there as well, too, like when you start thinking about like the battery segment, like that was a hot segment a few years back. That was kind of cooled off with some capacity issues over the last few years. And so -- but as segments become hot or not, those are the types of things that we do in Spinnaker. We can pivot into them and lean into them when they're hot, and then we can pivot away when they're not. And so that's an example.

Yes. No, that's helpful. And then I guess, as you think about the industrial piece going into '26, I guess, what's the visibility look like? And then how are you thinking about the potential growth there? And again, if you could break out product inspection versus core even better?

Yes. So for next year, I mean, we typically sit on only like 1.5 months' worth of backlog. So always a little bit challenging to provide guidance at the beginning of November for the following year. But we always feel like that's a good practice, right? Like we feel like it's appropriate to share what we're thinking, what we're seeing at that point in time, but acknowledging that we don't have the perfect crystal ball for the future. For next year, if I look at both of those businesses, we're -- overall, we're still -- we're kind of like prudently, cautiously positioned for next year. Like we're -- if you look at how we're thinking about those businesses, we're low to mid-single-digit growth for both of them for next year. But acknowledging there's a little bit of acquisition benefit in both of them from some of these acquisitions we just did. So excluding that, maybe it's closer to low single digit organically. So what does that imply? That implies that we're basically saying next year, and this is going to be a comment for the whole business, is that we're just not assuming things get back to normal next year quite yet. Now maybe it does, maybe that's a nice upside scenario for us. But we think that things will gradually improve throughout the year. But just given the year we've come off with just all the volatility, we just think at this point, it's better to plan a little bit more cautiously.

Yes, that's fair. And you mentioned the acquisitions maybe a good time to cover those. I mean you guys are not the most acquisitive. You obviously -- you buy back a lot of stock, very formulaic on that piece. It kind of popped up this quarter. You had, I think, 100 bps of acquisition in there. And I guess it will be 50 bps next year, if I have the numbers right, I guess, half the year, 100 bps or so. Maybe just talk about the acquisitions, what they -- what attracted you and again, the impact as we work our way into next year.

Yes, it's funny because we're always looking at bolt-ons, right? And then all of a sudden, we have a handful of them all happening at the same time. And we were just kind of talking about it a few minutes ago offline about like, hey, some of these had started discussions a year ago. And -- but they all just kind of came together at the same point. But they're all -- we never do anything that we don't think is going to strengthen the franchise and that's strategic, but we also tend to do things that are smaller, right? And so they're all kind of small individually, but we like them all individually, too. They're all like really nice additions to the team. So some of them are indirect distribution partners, right? And so these are partners we've known for many years, great partners, know our business well, really part of the family, and they'll fit in extremely well. But by acquiring them, we're in a position now where we also have more direct access to the market. We have that -- so all the advantages we have with Spinnaker, right, it now gets a little -- goes to another level. We can do a lot more once we have that direct access. It also increases our service business. So now we get the service business as well. With one of the acquisitions, they actually have a whole new line of services that we haven't historically provided in the area of product inspection. So that's kind of exciting, very interesting to us during the due diligence phase, and we've already had some large customers here in the United States asking us about that. We're already quoting on some work. So like -- so the team is very excited to already see some of their -- upside to their synergy case. And then there's one acquisition that is an expansion of our life science equipment portfolio. So we -- so under our Ohaus brand, right, we go through indirect distribution. And over the years, we've kind of had this initiative where we are building out a life science equipment portfolio. So think about like we have a centrifuge there. So then -- so this would be the Genie vortex mixer, which is kind of like an iconic brand out in the market. And so it's a great home for that brand. It fits in very well, and it just kind of enhances that offering that fits nicely into that indirect distribution model.

Okay. And is that the right number to think about 100 bps a quarter? Obviously, I think it was 100 bps in 3Q, same in 4Q, 1Q and 2Q, and then it will kind of wear off.

Exactly.

And is it spread -- it seems like heavier on the industrial side? Is it -- maybe just kind of lay out where we should think about it?

Yes, it's going to be -- there's very little on the -- there's a little bit like with this Vortex mixer on the lab side, but it's -- especially given labs such a much bigger business, it's going to be minimal to the numbers, but it's -- think about it as more on the industrial side.

Okay. Yes. And then maybe we can flip to the lab piece. You guys, I think, put up 4% growth in 3Q. A lot goes into that, right? I mean, process analytics, instruments, liquid handling, -- maybe just talk through the different segments, what you saw in the quarter? And then again, we can kind of flow that into the '26 commentary as well.

Yes. So also happy with the lab results, but a little bit more of a mixed picture. So like one of the strengths of our company, I think, is that we have a lot of diversity, right? And part of that diversity is we sell all the way through the value chain, like right from research all the way through logistics and everything in between. And with Spinnaker, you -- again, we can kind of pivot in and out of like what areas are hot. And with lab, we could very much see like the areas that we're doing better from a market condition perspective and those that are softer. So on the better side, bioproduction, bioprocessing did very well. And so it's -- we've been seeing now a trend here with our process analytics business, where we're competing really well and just the market conditions are very favorable. And we're seeing it kind of throughout the portfolio, like the reusable sensors, single use, single-use doing particularly well, upstream applications, but also downstream applications, which downstream also did particularly well. So very nice to see that strength in that end market, probably not a big surprise as we've been also reading about others. And so it's a nice -- I think, a nice trend kind of going into next year. Our process analytics business also benefits from other industries. It's predominantly bioprocessing, but if you think about like semiconductor, right, we have a pure water business that is -- ultrapure water is very important for the semiconductor industry, and we're definitely seeing good activity in that business as well. And then they also sell into the power industry, too. And so now you think about AI and data centers. So we'll have opportunities there in the future as those data centers are built. But right now, we see a lot more spending in the power generation for those data centers. So we're also getting some opportunities there also. So it's a very attractive business at the moment for a lot of different reasons. Kind of the other extreme is now let's go to research. And so under a lot of pressure. Biotech funding is still a topic, academia being soft this year, even more recently, the government shutdown. So academia and government are relatively small part of our global business. But when you start talking about research and you start talking about liquid handling, it's going to be a bigger part of that business. And so we definitely are feeling that in the pipette business. We saw softer results throughout the year and also into the quarter. We did have some growth on the consumable side, but on the instrument side, we're still down a bit. And then kind of in between, I'd say, LabX continues to be the headline. Like we -- LabX has been and continues to be a real competitive advantage for us. It really helps our customers address their data integrity needs. It helps them as they think about automating their workflows. And it's -- and when you can sell up to 40% of the instruments on a typical lab QA/QC bench and you can connect a lot of them with one software solution that handles both of those things, it's a really nice value proposition. So we feel really good about the portfolio. We've come up with a lot of stuff in the last few years as well.

Yes. And you mentioned the pipettes that we saw -- obviously, the stocking piece was a while ago at this point, a little bit of noise now to your point. Can you remind us, is it 10% of the business or so on the pipette side? Is that about right? And I guess, what is the right way to think about that as we work our way into next year? And obviously, we can talk to the labs business overall, too.

We don't give specific guidance on each product category, but the expectation right now is that, that's going to be below corporate average. So I see these trends kind of continuing into next year. We're going to be above average on the process analytics side. We'll be below average on the liquid handling pipette side.

Yes. And altogether, labs are somewhere in that low to mid-single as well. Is that the right way to think about '26 for that business?

Yes, yes. Yes.

Okay. Perfect. And then maybe the service side, that's been an emerging story for you guys for a long time, continue to become a bigger piece. I think that was a high single-digit grower recently. Can you just talk, I guess, what the service offering is, where you guys are in this evolution? I know there's always a big push to drive the attach rate higher and get service to be a bigger piece of the pie. So where are we there? And again, it's been a pretty good story in terms of the growth.

Yes. I mean, hey, this has been a good one, right? Like we've always had it on our radar as an area of focus. I've kind of shared in the past when Patrick became -- our Patrick became CEO, he had this clear message to the organization of like, hey, I really just want to double down on the strategy. He was very bought in. I think that was very important to our Board as well. But there was a couple of areas that he did challenge us and thought, hey, I think we can do a little bit better. And one of them was service. And so when you look at our installed base of services, and when I say do better, just grow more. It wasn't like we're doing bad. But I think with more focus and maybe a little more investment, we could do more. And so when you look at our opportunity, if you look at our installed base and you said, okay, if we service everything, what would that equate to in service dollars? That number would be about $3 billion. If you look at our service business in terms of sales and revenue, it's about $1 billion. And so we don't expect to service everything, but you can see there's opportunity to do a little bit more. And so what we've been doing is we've kind of like been working with our -- so we have a global service team. They have a lot of analytical capabilities, very sophisticated, and they've really tried to analyze every geography around the world and by product category and try to identify where do we think we have the best penetration opportunities. And through that process, we've launched an incremental initiative where we're investing a little bit more into that business, trying to lean into that and kind of going after that installed base. As you said, we're also trying to like just focus on service at the point-of-sale attachment rate stuff, too, but we're doing both. And I think kind of going forward, we do expect to see services growing higher than the corporate average. I think there's still an opportunity here for a while. And when you think about it, we're typically competing against in-house maintenance, right? And so we just need that opportunity to talk to a customer and explain the value of our services. It's not just a break fix, right? There's a lot of value that comes with making sure you're getting the most out of your equipment. We can do some very advanced things, too, like certifying your application and your process as well, too. And so there's a lot of things we can do in addition to ensuring uptime, if you think about in a production environment, how important that is. So there's a lot that we can do in terms of providing value to customers. And when we get that opportunity, we have pretty good conversion rates.

Yes. And it sounds like one of the acquisitions, I guess, tilted a little more on the service side. Is that right?

Yes. I mean all the indirect acquisitions, indirect distribution partners like we'll get service with that. And then like I mentioned, one of them even had a new line of services in the product inspection area that will expand our offering and something that will be interesting to see how that develops.

Yes. Great. Okay. I would love to talk through the end markets and maybe we can get to '26 in a little more detail. But I guess when you think about the biopharma market overall, what are you guys seeing there? I know we've talked a little bit about reshoring. Has the tone changed there from your guys' perspective over the past couple of months? It feels like this policy overhang has been removed to a degree, maybe the tone is a little improved. What are the conversations like with that end market for you guys? Are you expecting improvement? And then, yes, maybe we can flow that into some of the reshoring discussion.

Yes. I mean, hey, the headlines certainly have been better. For me, it's always hard to measure the degree of uncertainty out there, right? It's been, I think, a challenging year. Our feeling is that our largest end customer in the world is only 1 percentage point of our sales, right? And so clearly, within that portfolio, you're going to have some customers that have a lot more clarity right now. And I think they're going to be off and running with their investment commitments. But there's going to be other customers where they quite don't know what MFN means for them. And so maybe they're optimistic, but they're still a little bit more in a wait-and-see mode. And so when we look at the whole thing, we're optimistic, but we're kind of cautious with how we're guiding. In the short term, we had a very strong budget flush last year. So we have this dynamic of Q4 versus Q4. We were much more cautious about how we see this budget flush evolving for this year's cycle given the strength that we saw last year. If you think about it, Europe was particularly strong last year. So we're -- and I think Europe is a spot in the world where there's probably a little bit more uncertainty. I mean it's been an economy where it's been faced with a lot of more difficult economic conditions. But at the same time, we've been performing really well in Europe. But I think in the short term, we're, I think, flattish with our guidance there for Q4 overall for Europe. And I think part of it is maybe just a little bit of this uncertainty. But as we kind of go into next year, we're really well positioned for these onshoring trends. I mean, about 2/3 of our exposure to pharma, biopharma is manufacturing and QA/QC labs together, right? And so both of those should really benefit here from the onshoring. And so whatever the number is, we've seen the numbers, whatever is incremental, it's more than we had in the past. Like if you go pre-COVID, we were a business that is pretty much a replacement business. 80% to 90% of our business in the Western markets was replacement. So we're happy with anything we get, and we're optimistic. It's kind of intuitive as well, like regardless of the trade disputes and all the policies over the last year, I think companies also were just looking at their supply chains coming out of COVID. How do I have more resiliency? How do I have more flexibility? And I think this trend towards region for region was already in motion. I think that things have just accelerated a lot more given the political environment. And so that's, in the short term, are going to be a favorable opportunity for us. So like when you think about these trade disputes, I always say that there's kind of 3 chapters to it, right? Chapter 1 is what does it mean to your business in terms of the direct cost and how do you mitigate that? Chapter 2 is the short-term uncertainty, what does it mean to your customers' purchasing timing. But then Chapter 3 is the onshoring. And I think we're definitely optimistic about that. When we look at ourselves, we feel well positioned as a global company. A lot of these companies want their global partner to move with them around the world. And then when you think about their needs when they move, they want to have more automated processes because they just spend a lot of money and they need to optimize. They want to rethink their own digitalization strategies and making sure they're getting the latest technologies to get all the information and insights out of their experiments or their manufacturing processes, and we're just really well suited for all that with our portfolio.

Sure. And I guess on the budget flush point, to your point, you guys saw some last year with Europe. Is there a view that now that there's this level of certainty and visibility on the pharma side, do they loosen up into year-end? Is that a conversation you guys are having? What's the view in terms of how the budget flush could develop this year?

Yes, we'll see. We're not the best company to read into that. We're a pretty low price point company. Our average price point is less than $10,000. Sometimes the stuff comes in pretty late in the quarter for us if it happens. So like I said, we're pretty cautious with our guidance for the quarter. And at this point, we'll kind of see how it plays out. And I don't know for our business if it's going to be so digital. I don't think it's -- I think it might take a little time for this uncertainty cloud to kind of be fully lifted.

Yes. And then the reshoring piece, to your point, maybe it helps you guys a little bit in '26. What's the view in terms of the timing? I think a lot of people have very differing views as to when this could show up how big it is, to your point, some people have thrown numbers out, we'll see how accurate they are. But what's your view in terms of when you guys could start to see the benefit? Is there anything in the '26 guide for this? Would it be upside? How do you frame it?

It's primarily upside to our guide. Again, we're kind of like cautiously positioned for next year. We very much believe in the trend. And hopefully, we start to see more developing in the second half of next year. But keep in mind, a lot of this will be -- if you look at our portfolio, yes, maybe some of the stuff happens earlier, but probably most of it is going to happen towards the end of these projects. So for the stuff that's greenfield, they're going to have to build it first. And then they're going to like equip their lines and then they're going to equip their QA/QC labs. And so -- and those types of things, we might be having conversations over the next year on some of those things, but the actual purchasing might not happen for a couple of years.

Sure. And then maybe academic government, you guys aren't the biggest proxy there, obviously, but you mentioned parts of the business have some exposure there. It sounds like relatively cautious on that market into next year. It's been a journey, right, between the NIH cuts that were proposed, where we landed or where we think we landed, the shutdown. I guess take that all together, how are you feeling about that market? And what's the view of the go forward in that piece?

Yes. Like you said, specifically to the United States, I mean, academia and government together are like low single-digit percentage of our global total business. So like you said, probably not the best read for that. But our view is we're still kind of -- we still expect conditions to be soft going into next year, but also benefiting from a much easier comparison this year. So I certainly wouldn't expect the negative results that we saw over the past year.

Yes. Okay. And then maybe we can talk a little bit on some of the guide. I mean 4Q, I think maybe we can start on the margins. I think you guys are talking about margins down. I think gross margins down a couple of hundred bps, op margins down maybe 130 bps. I assume a lot of that's tariffs. So maybe you can give us a little bit of a bridge in terms of how to think about the 4Q setup. And then we can -- maybe we can talk tariffs a little bit in terms of the impact. And obviously, Switzerland matters for you guys. So -- but maybe we can start with the margins, just how you're thinking about the 4Q setup and work our way into '26.

Yes, sure. So I mean, if you look at our gross margin and our operating margin for the fourth quarter, we have like a gross headwind of about 200 basis points due to tariffs. So it's been a pretty significant topic for us, right? The other thing that kind of started in the second half of this year is the currencies. So -- and this one is kind of an interesting one because if you think about it, the euro has strengthened, right? And so we have more sales. So that's a good thing. But the Swiss franc has also strengthened where we have costs, and that's kind of offset the benefit from the sales in terms of operating profit. So in terms of dollars, let's just assume for the sake of the discussion, it's neutral on operating profit, but we have higher sales. So then that profit as a percentage of sales is dilutive. And so currencies are now about a 70 basis point headwind in Q4 to operating margin, and it was also in Q3. And that will kind of continue into the first half of next year. So when you think about -- if I pivot a little bit to next year's margin, the operating margin on a reported level might be up 30 bps, 20 bps. But then when you look at it on a currency-neutral basis, now we're up 50, 60 bps. So start to look a little bit more Mettler-ish, a little bit more in the range. Probably what's keeping us from getting to 100 bps is really that volume, getting that volume back. But when I kind of step back from it, I mean, I'm very proud of our organization. I just think like there's a lot of great work that's gone into offsetting these tariffs. The teamwork, the culture, the agility, it's really been phenomenal. The systems that we have that allows us to like really see data and diagnose issues and then react has been tremendous. We've kind of seen this throughout COVID, and this past year was just another year of that required a lot of agility. And so I always like feel good about those things. I often say I feel like our culture shines the brightest in challenging times. And I think we kind of saw that over the past year. Now maybe the numbers don't always look like it shows it, but behind the scenes, the fact that we could like mitigate these tariffs as quickly as we did, I think, was a very positive attribute of our organization going into next year.

Yes. Now speaking of agility, I mean, the Swiss tariffs, I think the announcement came out a quarter ago, after you guys put out the press release before your call, that was a late night for you and Adam. But you guys came out and gave an impact the next morning. Where are we on that front? There's discussions of rolling back Swiss tariffs. Can you just talk through that piece, what it means to you guys, what the right way to think about the tariff situation is?

Yes. So really pleased with our team's response on that evening, but also more -- probably even more pleased with the organizational response. We had a lot of things in motion that could give us the confidence to make the statements that we did the next morning. And so we were already looking at ways to mitigate our -- and reduce our exposure to some of these tariffs, and we were able to then accelerate a lot of those topics here over the second half of the year. And so it put us in a position where we could say like, hey, we're going to mitigate these tariffs. in 2026, the incremental tariffs specifically to Switzerland. So we feel very good about that. Now like you said, the rate looks like it's going to come down to 15% at some point this month. So that's certainly still favorable. In terms of now what does it mean to next year's guidance, I mean, we'll update things more precisely on our next earnings call because there's a lot of other moving parts with it, too, because like with the Swiss discussion, you also have -- you have the currencies too, like you have the Swiss franc being actually pretty volatile in the last few weeks since these announcements against the euro and others. And so we'll see kind of where that plays out as well. But just looking specifically at the benefit of the tariffs, we'd say that it's -- there's going to be a benefit, but it's probably going to be a more modest benefit just given the nature of a lot of the mitigation actions that we've already put in place. So to kind of maybe put like a box around it, it would probably be something less than 1% of EPS.

Okay. Okay. That's helpful. And then maybe staying on '26. You mentioned still expecting a muted environment. Maybe we can talk a little bit about the volume versus price. I mean price is always a great lever for you guys, whether it's tariffs, inflation, whatever it may be. So the guide, 4% for next year, let's call it, 50 bps of acquisitions, so 3.5% kind of core. How do you think about price versus volume in there? Is it still very little volume, mostly price? And what could get the volume going in terms of picking up a little bit?

Yes. So the 4% includes 2.5% of price realization. It's a little bit higher than like the normal quote because we have 0.5 point that we're assuming from our midyear pricing actions this year that we kind of benefit from into next year. We'll get a little bit of benefit from some of these acquisitions. So like I think we said earlier, it will be about a 1% benefit in the first half of the year. So call it, 0.5 point for the full year. And then that would put like organic volume at like 1 point. So certainly lower than what we would expect in a normalized environment, reflects a little bit of this caution that we've talked about. We haven't built in anything particular for reshoring. We haven't built in anything particular for the replacement cycle starting to really come back. And it's a bit of a reflection of the year that we've been through, and we'll kind of -- we kind of feel like we'll see how this uncertainty cloud kind of lifts over the next couple of quarters. We expect conditions to gradually improve as we kind of go through the year. But there's a lot of opportunity for upside here, right? I mean pharmaceutical biopharma is about 40% of our business. If that really starts to come back with more clarity, that could be a really good catalyst for us. The China, right? China is always a swing factor, right? 15% of our business. We were there. I think there's a lot of good things going on in the country. I think we're really well positioned in China. Like not everyone is going to have the same China experience. But we've been there a long time. You know we have a strong team there. We -- but we also are -- most of our sales are produced in China. And if they're not, they're coming from Switzerland. So -- and -- but most of them are made in China. We're largely selling to Chinese private companies. We sell probably more than 60% of our sales to private companies, less than 15% to multinationals with the residual being state-owned companies and the government. And I just think from a sustainability perspective, that's a category that's going to be probably the most attractive out of the 3 from a longer-term sustainable. And then we talked about like the trends in the country, right, like life sciences, the government's commitment to that as well as technology, clean energy, I think we can really support them on a lot of these. And then you think about like hot topics like GLP-1s, right? And China has a tremendous opportunity. We were looking at numbers earlier this year, and our read was that half the companies in the world developing GLP-1s are based in China. And so when you think about the generic market starting to open up soon, you start to think about the whole ecosystem with CDMOs, tremendous opportunity there. So hopefully, at some point, we'll start to see that one as an upside factor as well. And then you kind of touched upon some of the other things out there about if onshoring comes earlier or replacement cycle kicks in a little bit earlier, these could also be some upsides to the guide.

Yes. And then China, I mean, it sounds like a little bit of optimism. I think the guidance is for low single in China next year. I know you guys, to your point, you're kind of there somewhat recently. Is that conservative in your view? And again, what should we be looking for to kind of feel better about China picking up a little bit for you guys? I mean it sounds like the tone overall across Life Sciences in China is a little bit better, but what's your guys' perspective?

I think low single digits is an appropriate guide at this point in time. Of course, we're going to try to do a little bit better than that. But there's still a lot of uncertainty there, right? It's a challenging market. It's a challenging economy. It's a country that's going through a lot of change right now. And so we'll see how it plays out. But I do think that there's an upside case here as well, too. And we compete well there. And I just think we have a strong team in place, and I think that's part of the winning formula.

Yes. And Shawn, I know you went on this. I know you guys do your annual budget tour and kind of see all the different spots. I mean the emerging markets are now a bigger piece of the pie for you guys. I guess as you did that a couple of months ago, any interesting findings, any regions that kind of popped out that you feel a little better about? Any areas of caution? What did you guys see in here as you go along...?

Yes, it's a great question because it was clearly one of those things that excited Patrick and I on the budget tour. I mean we kind of saw it in the year before, but you continue to see the momentum like countries like India, Southeast Asia, even Eastern Europe with a lot of the near-shoring activities and opportunities with Europe. But then you have the whole Central South America opportunity as well, too. And so we kind of walked away from the budget tour and like immediately approved some incremental investments into some of these territories. We have very strong direct market organizations there that we can invest in and kind of continue to capture some of these opportunities. And when you look at these emerging markets outside of China, they now are total about 17% of our sales. So they're now slightly larger than China is. And so that's -- I think as we think about China in the future, this is another lever that we're going to have for growth into the future.

Yes. And to your point, in terms of the expense side, I know you guys have Blue Ocean and Spinnaker and these initiatives where you can be quite nimble. It sounds like currently feeling a little bit better about allowing some of those investments to go out versus tightening up and protecting the margins. Is that just the top line feels a little bit better, the backdrop is healthy. What's the right perspective in terms of how you guys are managing...?

No, we always try to have a balanced approach. Like we were very conscious about continuing to invest in the business over the last 3 years. On the R&D innovation side, we actually introduced a couple of new programs to accelerate R&D, but also on the growth side. But we do that with a balance, right? Like so we're still driving productivity. We're still driving cost savings. We're reallocating resources to the best opportunities. And so it's a very balanced approach in terms of how we think about things. And so -- and that's -- that was also a big theme of the budget tour, right? And how do we -- we literally launched a couple of initiatives. One of them is called wind what about like when you have a lot of wind in your face, right, like how do you optimize that wind to your advantage. So -- and a lot of it has to do with tactics and how do you shift resources.

Yes. Okay. I think we're out of time, Shawn. Thank you so much. Take care.

Yes. Thank you, Patrick.