Jeffrey Sprague: Great. Congrats and good luck with it.
Operator: Our next question comes from Scott Graham with Seaport Research Partners. Your line is open
Scott Graham: Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking minute here. Nice quarter.
Dave Zapico: Good morning, Scott. Thank you.
Scott Graham: You just — a couple ideas filled what was the working capital percent last year?
William Burke: Give me one second on that.
Scott Graham: Sure. Sure. I’ll just — I’ll ask another one.
William Burke: I got it. It was 18.4.
Scott Graham: 18.4. Okay. Thanks. And then the $1.5 billion of availability, just maybe walk us through there. That is net of Paragon, I assume? And is that like an assumption at about 2.5 times leverage?
William Burke: No, that’s the amount of cash and availability under our revolver post-Paragon. The leverage post-Paragon would only be about 1.5 times EBITDA at the gross level. So substantial …
Scott Graham: Okay.
WilliamBurke: –financial flexibility as well as we’re still well under-levered I would say. And as Dave has talked about, lots of other opportunities available to us as we look to continue the acquisition strategy. So again, it’s always finding the right businesses for the AMETEK portfolio. It is not capital constrained.
Scott Graham: Right. Right. Yes, that’s how you do that as well.
Dave Zapico: Other way to make that–
Scott Graham: I guess–
Dave Zapico: Other way to make that–
Scott Graham: Sure.
Dave Zapico: Other way to make that, as Bill said, post-Paragon, we have 1.5 leverage, we wanted to take at up to 2.5 leverage, which is we’ve been there before, and that’s not a high number for all. We can spend $2.6 billion on acquisitions, above and beyond Paragon. So we’re in the M&A game, and our pipeline looks really good. And we have the balance sheet to be able to execute on it and the capability to integrate these businesses.
Scott Graham: Thank you for that. I appreciate it. When you are looking at deals these days in this interest rate environment, you’re obviously funding them off of a lot of balance sheet liquidity and admittedly, maybe now higher rates off of the revolver. But are you impute an interest rate that is kind of more market-oriented when you make these decisions?
Dave Zapico: Yes. Our models use current borrowing rates as part of that decision-making process.
Scott Graham: Got it. Thank you. Last question is the typical one, Dave, would you mind kind of maybe unbundling on the four divisions?
Dave Zapico: Sure, Scott, I’ll walk around the business. I’ll start with our Process business. And — overall, sales for Process were up mid-single-digits, at low single-digit organic sales and the contribution from the acquisition of Navitar. And demand across our Process markets remains solid. Our products and technologies are well aligned with important secular growth trends like the energy transition and health care. Growth in the quarter was strongest across these end-markets, while our high-end optics business in Zygo continues to perform very well, with strong demand for our custom optical solutions. And for the full year, we continue to expect mid-single-digit organic sales growth for our Process businesses. Going to Aerospace & Defense Next.
Aerospace & Defense continues to perform well. Organic sales were up low-double digits in the quarter. Growth remains strong and broad-based across our A&D sub-segments. Our growth in the quarter was strongest in our defense businesses, while commercial OEM and aftermarket businesses also grew at healthy levels. Given this strong performance, we now expect sales for Aerospace & Defense to increase mid-teens, on a percentage basis for the full year. In Power & Industrial, those businesses delivered solid results in the third quarter, with overall sales up mid-teens. This growth was driven by a low single-digit organic sales growth and the contribution from the acquisition of RTDS technologies. We saw the strongest growth in the quarter across our renewable Energy and Power Simulation businesses, including RTDS.
Our Power businesses are well positioned to benefit from long-term investments required to modernize the electric power grid and build-out of the renewable energy infrastructure globally. And for all of 2023, we continue to expect mid-single-digit organic sales growth for our Power business. And finally, our Automation & Engineered Solutions business. Overall sales for AE&S, were down mid-single-digits in the quarter, with contributions from the acquisition of Bison Engineering, being more than offset by a low double-digit decrease in organic sales. As we expected, the impact from normalization of inventory levels, which we talked about earlier, across our OEM customer base, combined with the challenging prior year comparisons, created a short-term headwind for our OEM exposed businesses.
We believe underlying demand is solid. As we talked about earlier, and across our diverse Automation & Engineered Solutions markets, we remain constructive. But we do expect, as we said before, the inventory normalization is going to recur throughout the OEM customer base will continue through the end of the year. And now for the full year, we expect organic sales for our Automation & Engineered Solutions businesses to be down mid-single-digits versus the prior year. So that’s all for the subsegment commentary here, Scott.
Scott Graham: Thanks very much.
Dave Zapico: Thank you, Scott.
Operator: Our next question comes from Nigel Coe with Wolfe Research. Your line is open.
Nigel Coe: Thanks. Good morning and congrats on the deal, deals even. Okay. So good morning. Can you hear me?
Dave Zapico: Yes. We can hear you Nigel.
