nVent Electric plc (NYSE:NVT) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

David Silver: Yes. My question would be about your R&D spend, and maybe your think has — the thinking about that going forward. So, this was a record year for your R&D spend, up towards 25% or so. And I thought it was interesting that each quarter, the four quarters of 2022 had the highest — four highest quarterly spends on R&D. So, I don’t know. To me, it seems like, I am wondering if maybe there’s been an evolution and you’re thinking in some direction about the goals were the priorities within your R&D spend. And I’m wondering if maybe there’s an increasing, or if you could highlight the collaborative nature of your R&D spend currently? In other words, how many projects are done, let’s say, directly with particular customers in mind or in collaboration with those customers? Thank you.

Beth Wozniak: All right. Well, we’ve always stated that we were going — our intent was to always increase our R&D spend, because we thought as a percent of sales when we spot it was on the low end. And we have made those increases, but our top line has grown so well. And we’ve also had such impact, right, which has been terrific. So I think the major changes for us in how we’ve driven R&D to realize such great results is that it’s a very collaborative approach. It starts with us understanding the market needs. In some cases, it may be a specific customer, but we tried to think of a developing platform products that can serve multiple customers in a particular application. And then between our marketing and technology folks, and our supply chain folks, we work through the development process.

And we’ve really done a great job to reduce our cycle times every year by 20% to 30%. That’s velocity, right? It’s productivity. And then, we’ve also improved the launch process. So that when we launch a new product, we have way of getting it positioned more quickly through our distribution partners, we’ve got inventory, we’ve got digital collateral, right, you just can’t launch a product without having the digital product information available. And it’s all of those things that I believe have allowed us to have such a greater impact. And, we’ll continue to invest there as we see great returns.

David Silver: Okay. Thank you for that. Next question I had was maybe just about your projected capital spending for 2023. There is a little bit of a bump there. But I recall, Sara, at least a couple of points calling out constraints that needed to be addressed. And I’m just wondering if you wouldn’t mind qualitatively, maybe just calling out the top couple of areas where discretionary capital will be spent in 2023 to maybe alleviate some of those constraints or alternatively to exploit some opportunities that you see. What’s the highest priorities for you the discretionary portion of your capital spending? Thanks.

Beth Wozniak: Maybe I’ll start by saying, we’ve talked about our data center solutions and our liquid cooling is growing so significantly. So we need to make further investments to expand our manufacturing capability for that particular product line. And that also involves us having some expansion within Mexico, where we need to add an additional plant to our campus or extended campus to be able to have the capacity for some of these high growth areas and high growth verticals.

Sara Zawoyski: Yes. So maybe just a couple of things to add to that. I mean, our CapEx really is focused on new products, digital transformation, high growth verticals. So that’s consistent going into 2023 here. I think that uptick is really those things that just Beth just alluded to. We believe our supply chain is in a position of strength for us here in 2022, in terms of enabling us to deliver for our customers and do it very, very well. But we are capacity constrained in some areas. And so, some of this reflects building out existing capacity. But building that out in Mexico, particularly in our enclosures, addressing some of these bottlenecks that we’re seeing. It’s also increasing our investments in automation, as well as modernizing some of what we have in our factory to really allow for better output and frankly, more efficient output as well as we go forward.

David Silver: Okay. Thank you for that. And then just last question, about the new products. You started out a couple years ago, Beth, I think with a target of 50 new products. And I noticed the number in this year was 59. So, I can’t resist asking is going forward will 60 be the new 50 as far as the hurdle rate for new product introductions? Thank you.