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

Jeff Sprague: I wonder if you could just elaborate a little bit on kind of what you are seeing in resi and commercial. And obviously, you’re really not that big in resi, right? But I guess the question is a little bit more commercial. Sounds like it’s primarily in the Thermal business. But maybe if you could again just drill down a little bit on what you’re seeing and kind of the top line trajectory in that part of the business.

Beth Wozniak: So our resi business is predominantly — is Thermal and we’ve seen that be softer, right and expect that to continue. On the commercial side, commercial is across all of our businesses, a little bit softer in Thermal. But I would say we were positive in our Enclosures. Overall as nVent, we were positive in commercial, particularly in EFS and Enclosures, for that matter. So as we go forward, we think where commercial is strongest in our EFS business because of our labor-saving solutions, because of the focus that we have around more power and data infrastructure, we expect that to trend positive for us. And again, it’s different applications. We look at industrial construction as an area that’s very strong, right which is driving demand for our EFS and our Enclosures products.

Jeff Sprague: And then just on the kind of the topic of volume, right? Because they’re not alone here, printing top lines that are mostly or even more than all price. I think the difference, though, as I look at it, you guys had very strong volume growth in ’21 and ’22 and many in my group didn’t. So the comps are different. But really, the essence of my question is, as we look forward into ’24 and ’25 and kind of assume the economy is clicking along here okay, how are you capacitized to be able to drive volume growth looking forward? Obviously, you talked about CapEx and data solutions. But I’m just wondering kind of the state of your capacity and the ability to kind of facilitate volume growth across the portfolio.

Beth Wozniak: Well, over the last couple of years, Jeff, we’ve continued to look at our supply chains to make them more resilient. And so we’ve done a couple of things. We’ve done some expansions with some new plants. And we’ve talked about that over the last couple of years. So Mexico is 1 of the latest areas but we also expanded in Thailand, for example. We have also invested in new automation and new CapEx for both our EFS business as well as Enclosures so that we could improve throughput. And so we feel we’re in a good position. I would say the biggest — I mean, we’re going to continue to invest in digitization and automation. That’s just an ongoing part of our strategy. But I think the real focus just because of the significance we’re going to see in liquid cooling is where a lot of our investment is going.

Sara Zawoyski: And maybe, Jeff, maybe just to add a point to that. And I think Beth talked about in her prepared remarks, kind of what we were lapping in terms of growth of a year ago being in that 21% range. 9 points of that was volume. And so maybe a couple of points there to add too is we did see volume in Enclosures on top of double-digit volume growth of a year ago in Q2. I think the other encouraging piece is we saw Thermal Management order growth in the quarter as well. And I think maybe one other thing to keep in mind, right, as we talk about kind of those inventory-level adjustments with — lead times, our lead times in improving along with just the backdrop of supply chain. Where that shows up and the top line is going to be on the volume side of the equation.

Operator: The next question will come from Nigel Coe with Wolfe Research.