Mettler-Toledo International Inc. (NYSE:MTD) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Shawn Vadala: Yeah. Hey, maybe I’ll take that one, Vijay. So, I mean, we don’t typically — as you know, we typically don’t go into too much detail on individual months, but absolutely, we — I kind of alluded to it before. We — what we experienced and as we’ve seen July kind of start certainly heavily influenced how we’re looking at the quarter and the rest of year for China. And so yeah, very much we’re looking at down mid-teens and then, especially weighted in our Laboratory business. If you look at our Laboratory business, as I mentioned before, we’re lapping some pretty big comparisons there, but we’re expecting the Lab business to be down even more significantly there. If we kind of like look at the rest of the portfolio, it’s kind of similar to how I answered Derik, I’d say, on the full year results.

I mean, we’re looking at low single digit growth in the Americas. There, it’s very much the same topic about core end markets. It’s this delay in pharma, biopharma that Patrick talked about. Of course, we also — within that, we talked about pipettes, but of course, we also have a smaller exposure within single-use bioprocessing that we talked about last quarter, like with PendoTECH as well. And then similar to the prior answer, I mean, we’re also looking at a decline in product inspection in the Americas in the third quarter as well with the pressure that we’re seeing from food manufacturing companies. And then, Europe, we’re still expecting Europe to be more low single digit in the third quarter, but acknowledging that we have different uncertainties that we talked about before.

If we kind of like look at the business in terms of overall by business, for the third quarter, we’re looking — well, actually, I already mentioned it, so I don’t need to mention it again. But in terms of the different areas, I mean, Lab being down more so than the other areas in terms of the guidance for Q3.

Vijay Kumar: Understood. And then one maybe on the stimulus that you mentioned. If — what specifically have you heard about from Lynx [ph] about a stimulus? And if there is a stimulus, how long does it take for it to flow through to customers placing orders in purchasing? And on the cost actions here, what is the pacing of cost actions? Is — what kind benefits are you expecting? It looks like — I mean, EPS is down more than revenue, maybe perhaps not much benefit in 3Q, but what’s the magnitude of the cost actions — the benefit from cost actions you’ve taken in Q4?

Shawn Vadala: Yeah. Hey, so a lot there. So, the first thing you were talking about was the stimulus. So, in terms of the stimulus, like we don’t have any — probably more insights than anybody else. I mean there were some comments coming out of the government, I think, in the last week with an intention to stimulate. I don’t think any specific details have been provided. So, it’s hard to kind of comment on that at this point in time. And so, I think we’ll have to see how that plays out and how long that takes to really — how directly that affects our end markets and how long it takes to get into the economy. But like I said, right now, we haven’t built anything in for our forecast for the second half of the year. So, we’ll kind of see how it plays out.

In terms of EPS, I mean, we do have unfavorable EPS in — I mean, I’m sorry — foreign currency. We do have unfavorable foreign currency that’s been hurting us throughout this year. And as we kind of mentioned in the opening remarks, it’s also kind of impacted us much more significantly than our last time we provided guidance. So, I think we were initially looking at a 2% headwind last quarter. And now we’re looking at something more in the 3% to 4% range. And I think if we go back to our original guidance for the year, I don’t think we were expecting very much headwind at all from foreign currency. So that’s certainly something that’s affecting us. So, I think it’s important to kind of also consider that as you kind of look at the EPS growth for the second half of the year.

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