Joe Giordano: At what point — just extension of that, just given like the nature of that business and the fact that you’re running kind of book-to-bill sub-1 there still. So like at what point, can you — there’s like an organic decline in HST kind of be like baked in for 2024? Like when do orders need to start to improve for that to be a positive number theoretically?
Eric Ashleman: Look, I think we’d have to monitor this pretty — we obviously will through the balance of the fourth quarter. As always, everybody kind of does the same planning cycles at the same time. So that’s the best opportunity for us to get in front of customers, talk about programs, things that they’re launching, their confidence in them. I think we want to watch it quarter by quarter and stay super close to it. These are the most dynamic markets that we have in the whole place. I just — I come back to kind of the comments I made. I think when Mike asked the question, he did such a good job summarizing it in the beginning. We’re basically saying that we’ve taken all of the inventory-related noise out of this, and that’s essentially the echo of the past.
I will say, to the extent the industry heads in different directions here, we are in sync with it. We’re a critical component supplier for folks that are making very sophisticated instruments and things for a variety of different markets and geographies. And we are somewhat dependent on — we are completely dependent on their success, their call, the way that they’re seeing that those markets are going to traverse. What we can do from our side is to provide, I think, a timely and relevant diagnostic. Mainly, because of the fact we’re so short cycle. And we’re going to feel and see those inflections sooner than almost anybody. And so with that in mind, we need to stay close to them. We’ll understand all of those things. Again, it’s four buckets of business for us, occasionally move at slightly different rates, and we can move resources around.
So we’ll see how it plays out as we go through ’24.
Joe Giordano: That’s fair. And just last, with the accelerated kind of backlog burn that you had this quarter, are there targeted opportunities to do that again in the fourth quarter in parts of your business?
Eric Ashleman: We still have a couple of businesses that have longer backlogs. I mean they’re still working through generally because lingering issues in supply chains and elsewhere. We spoke of one in energy, where we talked about is pretty strong in the third quarter. A lot of that was us getting some more of that backlog out related to some consolidation stuff that we’ve done about a year ago. It’s not many of them, but we do have a couple of other pockets in here that we’re trying to get back down to kind of all IDEX level.
Operator: We have reached the end of the question-and-answer session. I’d now like to turn the call back over to Eric Ashleman for closing comments.
Eric Ashleman: Okay. Well, thanks for everybody for joining our call. And as I always do, I want to thank the members of the IDEX team that are on for really, really strong execution and performance in the quarter. I just — a few comments here. I think there’s certainly — look, there’s a lot of uncertainty out there in the environment. I think it’s going to require a certain amount of patience. But as I think about IDEX and the things that we can control, here’s what I know. I know our portfolio is in great shape. It’s growing through M&A. It’s well positioned, certainly to support long-term growth outperformance. I really think our flat and decentralized structure keeps us agile and nimble. We can move things around and resource things probably faster than anybody, and we do that each and every day.
And our teams and leaders are outstanding and frankly, they’re going to be outstanding plus one as Abhi joins us here in November. So with that, when things break, we’ll be all set up here, I think, to really support a nice extended run for IDEX as the world starts to dial in, and respond to, frankly, the trends that we know are all coming. So with that, thanks for your support, and have a great day.
Operator: This concludes today’s conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and we thank you for your participation.
