Ram Krishnan: The second part of the question, yes, I think it’s not all in Q4. So you’ll see evenly distributed in Q3 and Q4, it will step up from the $350 million. So we feel pretty good about the $0.40 to $0.45 as we sit here.
Steve Tusa: Right. And just one last one, just on the discrete. You guys have been a little more steady on that discrete performance. So you’re — relative to some of your peers who had a very strong backlog liquidation in the second half of last year, you guys kind of started to see some of that weakness. So the comps start getting easier in the fourth quarter, correct, the year-over-year comps?
Ram Krishnan: Yes, actually, in the third quarter from — and third and fourth quarter should be good quarters for us from a discrete perspective, correct.
Mike Baughman: And orders.
Ram Krishnan: And orders. And then sales will turn positive in Q4.
Steve Tusa: Right. On an easier comp.
Ram Krishnan: Correct.
Steve Tusa: Yes. Okay, great. Thanks a lot. Appreciated.
Operator: The next question comes from Jeff Sprague of Vertical Research. Please go ahead.
Jeff Sprague: Hello. Good morning, everyone. Lal, two for me. First one, just on LNG. Obviously, it’s a global business, and you talked about the Middle East. But just give us your perspective on what the administration has done on approvals in the U.S. and how that might impact your business, the funnels and anything related on your mind.
Lal Karsanbhai: Yes. No, certainly, we’re disappointed with the administration’s decision to hold permitting — export permitting regarding LNG, not just from an Emerson perspective, from an overall — as an American, to be very honest. But it is a global business. We have significant activity ongoing in Qatar, of course, in Mozambique and in Guyana, which will provide ample activity and gives us confidence in the forecast that we have in the funnel movement. In terms of the projects we’re executing in North America, we don’t see any meaningful impact to 2024 at this point in time. The projects that we have won have the approvals required, not just for construction, transportation, but ultimately for exports. And our partners, Bechtel and others that we’ve discussed on these calls, have given us the confidence, Jeff, that we are — that 2024 is relatively solid.
Then as we go forward, we’ll see. We continue to see accelerated strength in the East Coast of Africa and in the Middle East, and there’s some activity up in Canada as well. So we’ll see where that goes related to the U.S. decision.
Jeff Sprague: And then just to be totally clear, Lal, the project funnel that you illustrate for us quarterly, does some of the non — I guess, pending approval U.S. projects, are they in that funnel?
Lal Karsanbhai: Yes, they’re in the funnel. Depending on the year that we had, expectation of funnel looks at about a three-year lens of activity. So they are in the funnel there. And as you know, in the construction of a liquefaction — excuse me, Jeff liquefaction plant is a 4- to 5-year event. So certain decisions will continue to be made based on assumptions of export licenses being awarded down the stretch, Jeff.
Jeff Sprague: Right. And then just shifting on NATI real quick. Certainly suspect that your synergies initially laid out were somewhat conservative. But I wonder if you could address the 3-year versus the 5-year. So kind of the underlying cost synergies, I’m not surprised they’re going up. I think part of the reason that you talked about 5 years was really treading carefully on salesforce, R&D organization and that sort of thing. So just give us your thoughts on where that is and maybe the cultural side of the integration, I guess, is the heart of the question.
Lal Karsanbhai: Well, I will start with this, Jeff. We have a phenomenal management team by Ritu Fabre and a great integration team here at Emerson that works very closely with the business. The team spent a significant amount of time between signing and close to do the work so that we could hit the ground running. But of course, as you can imagine, this is a very large transaction. We bought this company because we believe it can grow and it can run better. And we wanted to have a degree of caution in how fast we could go, what we could accomplish. And to many degrees, we’ve been pleased with the degree of execution, the speed at which it’s been done and the energy that the team has had around the effort, which then gave us confidence, not just to increase the number but to increase the time of execution — to decrease the time of execution to 3 years. Ram, any color on that?
Ram Krishnan: Yes, you said it. I think the team, as we both reviewed the plans, felt very, very good in the quality of the opportunities that we had identified, and there is a shared vision around, trying to get this done faster and moving the business along. And that’s where we’ve been very pleasantly surprised, the cultural similarity between how we both think, the customer-centricity and how we apply the rules to do the synergy actions. I think there — we feel very confident that we could move faster. And that’s the reason we raised it, and we also believe we can get it done by the end of year 3.
Jeff Sprague: Great, good luck. Thanks.
Operator: The next question comes from Nigel Coe of Wolfe Research. Please go ahead.
Nigel Coe: Thanks. Good morning, everyone. So obviously, a lot of questions on NATI so far, National Instruments, I guess. You’ve obviously accelerated the time line for the synergies. As Jeff mentioned, you raised it by $20 million. But you kept the 31% margin targets. Just wondering if there’s anything kind of offsetting the upside to cost synergies we should consider there?
