And that’s why today we have the three global divisions and the 13 groups. And that has included as well our acquisition program. Because if you go back in time and look back, we always used to talk about M&A representing roughly a third of our growth over the long-term. And we would always get questions, well, as you grow, that means you either have to do more acquisitions or bigger acquisitions. And I think I’ve consistently said, well, that’s right, arithmetically, and we will do and we have done both of those things, both more deals and bigger ones. And we’ve acquired 26 companies so far since the beginning of 2019. That has included our first ever public company that has now — we have now announced the signing of our second public company.
RFS is one that maybe requires a little more, but you go back even 10 years when we acquired the sensor company from GE, which has been a fabulously successful acquisition and will celebrate just in a couple of months here, the 10th anniversary of that acquisition. We acquired, you’ll recall, FCI, which requires, a little bit more work to align FCI into the Amphenol approach of entrepreneurial general managers. So I tell you that our muscle has grown commensurate with the scale of the company and our ability to do acquisitions, large, small, private, public, whatever you may say, all of that ability has remained very strong. And then the last thing I’ll say is if you look at our balance sheet, I mean, we came out of this quarter with leverage of only .8 times.
We have enormous availability of capital. We have cash flow that is really at, close to historical levels. I mean, free cash flow that is 17% of our sales in the quarter. And all of the financial means of doing the acquisitions together with the organizational means are all there. But I’ll say one thing, we will always stay disciplined. We are a company that is always true to our principles. We’re not just going to become a little private equity company. We’re not going to be a holding company. We’re not going to go out and buy bad companies, run by bad people. We’re always going to look for the same criteria for acquisitions that I’ve talked about for many years. Number one, we want great people. Number two, we want great product technology.
And number three, an outstanding market position. We got all three of those with the acquisitions of Conner, Q Microwave, and XMA. And I’m sure we’ll do the same with PCTEL. And we’ll continue to be very disciplined as we go forward at the same time as we have a real larger aperture of capabilities to continue to do M&A at the levels that we’d like to.
Operator: Thank you. The next question is from Andrew Buscaglia with BNP Paribas. You may go ahead.
Andrew Buscaglia: Hey, guys. Nice to meet you and thanks for taking my question.
Adam Norwitt: Yes. Nice to meet you too, Andrew.
Andrew Buscaglia: So, yes, So, I want to start off with the automotive market, just given the size of it, you definitely some skittishness with investors heading into the quarter into year-end. On two areas, within North America, you got the worker strike, what’s the ripple effect on that? And then, just weakness in China, China auto too. But you guys continue to outperform. So, I’m just — my question is, when peaking around the corner, do you have concerns that you guys can maintain, your out-performance relative to the overall market? And can you kind of dig into some of the details around what you’re hearing from customers in each of the markets?
Adam Norwitt: Yes. Well, Andrew, thanks again and welcome to the, welcome to the call here. Not so often we get a new analyst. So, it’s a pleasure to have you here. Look, the automotive market is a really exciting one for the company. I’m just so proud of our team working in the automotive market, results that they’ve driven in what has not been an easy environment, quite the contrary. Growing last quarter by 12% organically, I mean, you will recall that last year we grew by 29% organically in a market that was essentially flat to down in units. And if you look at the long-term performance of our automotive company over the nearly 15 years that I’ve been CEO, I still remember very well, my first quarter is CEO. And, by the way, this is my 60th of these earnings calls as CEO.
In my first one of those, we had an automotive business that was 5% and our overall sales were $660 million that quarter. So, that’s $33 million, $35 million, and here we are this quarter at close to $3.2 billion in our automotive market, 23% of sales. And I think we’ve just done a fabulous job over those years, not of taking market share out of the hands of incumbents, but of enabling new electronic systems as they were adopted in cars over that decade and a half. And I think you’ve just seen a collection of revolutions in the automotive industry, the most prominent and most recent of which being the electrification of vehicles. But that’s not the only thing. I mean, there’s so many new systems being put into these cars. And each time there’s an opportunity for us to intersect those with high technology interconnect sensors and antennas.
And I think our team’s done a great job of that. How is that going to go into 2024? Again, I think I said this already on the call, nine days from now we’ll try to give everybody a decent sense of where we think at least the beginning of 2024 is headed. But I say no reason to say that we will not continue to maintain our outperformance that we have been so consistently delivering really over a decade and a half during this time period. I’m just really proud of our team working on automotive and I’m really pleased with the broad array of technologies for all these exciting new applications in the car.
Operator: Thank you. The next question is from Wamsi Mohan with Bank of America. You may go ahead.
Wamsi Mohan: Yes. Thank you so much. Adam or Craig, I was wondering if you could talk about some of the puts and takes on operating margins as we look out over the next quarter. At the midpoint of the revenue guide, you would be absorbing almost $24 million of decremental margins of operating profit and you’re also absorbing impact of M&A from three new deals and three prior deals. So when we look at your guide, it’s clearly reflecting a much better outlook than that. So A, is the assumption around decremental margins, still the same as historical or have you made changes in the business that’s creating less lower decremental margins? And B, as we think about sort of that operating guide, which is so resilient, what are some of the other drivers that are enabling you to do that? Thank you.
Craig Lampo: Thanks, Wamsi. I appreciate the question. I think if you look at our profitability in 2023 and certainly here in the third quarter and I’ll talk about the fourth quarter in a minute or two. I wouldn’t say there’s certainly no changes in regards to how we think about decremental margins in the long-term, but 2023, a few things have happened and certainly we’ve done a great job of. Number one, we’re benefiting a bit from pricing and no particular order here, but we’re certainly benefiting a bit from pricing that we did last year in 2022 and we did a call, we talked a bit about the work we did last year, the catch up with the inflationary environment that kind of by the third quarter into the fourth quarter of last year, the majority of the work we were pretty much back to kind of where we wanted to be and expected to be from a balance between price and cost perspective.
So, we’re certainly still benefiting on a year-over-year basis from that. In addition, I think we’ve just executed very well, certainly some of the markets that we’ve seen a reduction from and certainly communications markets, ID datacom being the biggest of them. We certainly have done a really great job of kind of offsetting some of those declines just from just great execution. And if you actually look at the over year-over-year margins and you take out some of the acquisitions impacts, we actually are well under those decremental margins that we typically would target. But I’d say, those are one of the two kind of bigger things that really are impacting it. I mean, 20.8% here in the third quarter is not quite a record, but certainly given the market mix in terms of the challenges that we’ve had from the ups and downs of a growth price perspective, not mix of margin from a market, because we don’t have a significant margin range from a market, but just the mix of the growth that we’ve had, the ups and downs, it really has — really been a, I think, great execution on the team’s part to be able to manage that.
So, as we look forward into the fourth quarter, I think our implied guidance would be that we continue to have these strong margins into the fourth quarter and that are offsetting some of the acquisitions that do clearly have lower than average margin levels and that we’re working to get up to the company average over time, but no doubt we’re really proud of it. I think the longer term kind of decremental margins haven’t changed from this 30%, but I think this year, given a few of the factors I mentioned, I think has really benefited us and certainly we’re proud of it. And these are the margins we should be at these revenue levels and we’re going to continue to strive to do better.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question is from Samik Chatterjee with JPMorgan. You may go ahead.
Samik Chatterjee: Hi. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. I guess on a more broader level, Adam, you have a fairly diversified business and there are many puts and takes in terms of where the different markets are. Some are recovering, some are still at a lower level, but you’ve managed to grow orders year-over-year, as you pointed out, despite that dynamic here. I’m just wondering like how should we translate that into thinking about the order growth translating into revenue growth in the near term. More curious, because your revenue numbers for the last couple of quarters have been above the order number, but the guide seems to be more in line with what you reported for orders. So, how should we think about the opportunity to return to revenue growth since orders are already higher year-over-year? Thank you.
