nVent Electric plc (NYSE:NVT) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Deane Dray: I’d like to stick with the liquid cooling if we could. We did a deep dive report this quarter on the whole market. And what I find fascinating is that nVent has such a first-mover advantage in direct-to-ship cooling. And remarkably, most of your competition are start-ups. So what’s your expectation competitively with so many other start-ups in the space? Do you expect to see consolidation? I like seeing you’re adding capacity in this. Do you need to add any new technologies in this side? From our perspective, immersion and rear-door heat exchanges are probably less efficient. So I would rather see you in direct-to-ship. But just how do you see the industry playing out in terms of consolidation and where and how do you need to add either capacity or technologies in the space?

Beth Wozniak: Well, Deane, thank you for the question. And so we are very excited about liquid cooling. And as you know, we have been doing liquid cooling even before we spun in some industrial applications. And over the years have developed great relationships with data center providers. And I would say it takes time. The test cycle and scaling manufacturing and the quality and the requirements that you have, it takes time to build that out. And we feel that we have done that for several years now and in fact, are in test with many new customers as well as seeing accelerating order growth. One of the things that I would say is in addition to our manufacturing expertise is we understand that cooling loop. And so there’s various different technologies, whether you are retrofitting or greenfield and also depending on who the provider is, sometimes, they want to have some of those technologies themselves.

I think the good news is that we have partnerships across various — of those areas as well as a strong product portfolio ourselves. As I mentioned, data centers are only roughly cooled by liquid cooling 5%. That’s kind of where we’re at today. So I think there’s plenty of room for growth. And I think you’re going to see us continue to strengthen and build out our product portfolio, including a standard set of offerings so we can have more broader adoption as well as many more partnerships and end customers. So I think there’s plenty of opportunity for growth. And it may take a while before we see some consolidation because there’s various cooling technologies and they all have a role right now.

Deane Dray: That’s really helpful. And just as a follow-up, 1 of the data points you provided this morning on Power Utilities being up more than 40%. Could you just share with us what was going on there? Is that a comp issue? I note that that’s also 1 of the areas that could benefit and should benefit from liquid cooling along with edge computing and energy storage and so forth. So what’s going on in Power Utilities?

Beth Wozniak: Well, I think in Power Utilities, it really is just the strength of the infrastructure build-out in our portfolio. And so we — not a comp issue. We had strong growth there last year. We continue to add new products into that area. And as we go forward, we think about how liquid cooling, especially around energy storage or battery management, has a role to play there. And I think those are solutions that will come into play in the future. But overall, we just see that’s part of the strength in the infrastructure build-out and in part to the execution by our team with our supply chains.

Operator: The next question will come from Jeff Hammond with KeyBanc Capital Markets.

Jeff Hammond: So I really wanted to just cover kind of the margin sustainability in Enclosures and EFS into the second half. It looks like by our math, margin stepped down a point. Maybe you can speak to how ECM plays into that? It just seems like the margin step down maybe more than we would have thought. And particularly given Thermal kind of seasonally steps up.