Ecolab Inc. (ECL) Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Greetings, and welcome to the Ecolab's second quarter 2026 earnings release conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. The question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Andy Hedberg, Vice President, Investor Relations for Ecolab. Thank you, Mr. Hedberg. You may begin.

Thank you, and hello, everyone. Welcome to Ecolab's second quarter conference call. With me today are Christoph Beck, Ecolab's chairman and CEO, and Scott Berklin, our CFO. A discussion of our results, along with our earnings release and the slides referencing the quarter results, are available on Ecolab's website at ecolab.com slash investor. Please take a moment to read the cautionary statements in these materials, which state that this teleconference and the associated supplemental materials include estimates of future performance. These are forward-looking statements, and actual results could differ materially from those projected. Factors that could cause actual results to differ are described under the risk factor section in our most recent Form 10K and in our posted materials. We also refer you to supplemental diluted earnings per share information and release. With that, I'd like to turn the call for Christophe Beck.

Thank you so much, Andy, and welcome to everyone joining us today. While we delivered another strong quarter with accelerating performance across our business, adjusted eps group 11 driven by accelerating organic sales growth of five percent stable organic gross margin and continued strong productivity this performance reflects the strength of our growth model and most importantly the power of our global team to deliver for our customers every day in any environment last quarter talked about the second quarter being a short transition period we entered the quarter with commodity costs increasing and the expectation that they would remain high through the year. We started the quarter with very little surcharge pricing, but expected benefits from the surcharge would progressively build through the quarter. That's exactly what happened. We moved quickly to implement the global energy surcharge backed by incremental customer value, as we always do. As a result, pricing strengthened to 4% in the second quarter, and we expect the second half to be in our targeted 5% to 6% range. It is allowing us to offset the impact of rising commodity costs on our margins and EPS this year. Our global team executed extremely well through this transition period. In just one quarter, we absorbed increasing commodity costs, continued to win new business, grew volumes, stabilized organic gross margin, and delivered double-digit EPS growth. Importantly, momentum continues to strengthen across the portfolio. Volumes grew 1%, despite a nearly 1% headwind from customer operations disrupted by the conflict in the Middle East. Excluding this, underlying volume growth accelerated from the first quarter. Growth in our core business is strengthened, with food and beverage accelerating to 7% growth, institutional and specialty growing 4%, and growth in light water improving. all supported by strong new business from our One Ecolab Growth Initiative. At the same time, performance in heavy water and paper improved. Our growth continues to show strong momentum, delivering strong double-digit growth. Life sciences accelerated to 15% growth, driven by very strong share gains in bioprocessing and pharma and personal care, and improved performance in purification. We have been investing in talent, capabilities, capacity, and breakthrough innovation for years in this high-growth business, and those investments now are clearly paying off. In bioprocessing, we continue to take market share with the innovative resin technologies we've launched over the last few years. As a result, our business continues to rapidly scale as customers move their drugs into commercial manufacturing. Life Sciences' margin performance was exceptional this quarter, delivering a mid-20% operating income margin, giving a strong indication of the high margin profile this business has. During the quarter, we benefited from very strong sales growth and a spike in bioprocessing. While underlying operating income margin is expected to remain in the mid-20s, reported margin in the third quarter is expected to be in the high teens, as we continue to invest in these high-gross, high-margin business. Ecolab Digital grew 27%, reflecting strong adoption of software and connected solutions that help customers optimize performance in real time. Recent launches of solutions like TishIQ, AquaIQ, KitchenIQ, and CIPIQ are performing very well and are expected to continue to help drive long-term growth of more than 20% for Ecolab Digital. Pest Elimination also delivered a strong quarter with 7% growth, driven by share gain from our OneEcolab Growth Initiative and continued expansion of our pest intelligence platform. We've deployed nearly 800,000 connected devices at customer sites and continue to expect to reach 1 million connected devices by your end. With the unique insights from pest intelligence, we aim to deliver nearly 99% pest-free environments for customers on the platform. And growth in global high-tech accelerated to 29 percent, reflecting very strong demand across both microelectronics and data centers, driven by the rapid build-out of AI infrastructure. We further strengthened our position in this market with the acquisition of Coolite systems, which closed on July 2nd. Coolite is off to a very strong start, with year-to-date sales growth prior to acquisition of more than 100 percent. With this addition, Global Hitech is now approaching $1.5 billion in sales, annualized sales, up from approximately $150 million in 2021. This reflects the strength of our strategy and sustained investments to capture the long-term opportunity in advanced computing. At the heart of AI is water. Water is required to produce, to power, and to cool chips. We are now the only company with integrated solutions across that value chain. And with all the talks around data centers and AI infrastructure, the world truly needs companies that can help build data centers the right way. We're one of them and we're committed to lead that journey. Together with Avivo and Cool IT, our global high-tech platform is expected to grow more than 25% annually, reaching $4 billion in sales by 2030 with an operating income margin of 25%. These targets represent an increase from our previous expectations of more than 20% growth and 20% high margin, reflecting the acceleration we're seeing in this business. Global high tech is now our largest growth engine. On a pro forma basis, including Avivo and CoolIT, our sales growth would have been approximately 7% in the second quarter, demonstrating already the two points of incremental growth these businesses will add to the overall company. The rapid growth of global high-tech and our other growth engines continues to shift Ecolab's portfolio to higher growth, higher margin businesses. In 2025, our core businesses represented about 70% of our sales, growing low single digits with OI margins just above 20%. Our growth engines were approximately 15% of sales, growing low double digits with OI margins of nearly 20%. And our underperforming businesses represented about 15% of sales with low single-digit sales declines and OI margins in the mid-teens. In 2026, performance has strengthened across all three groups. Our core businesses are now growing mid-single digits, with OI margins getting further above 20%. Our growth engines are growing in the low teens, with OI margin of nearly 20% as we continue to invest heavily behind these attractive high-growth opportunities. At the same time, our underperforming businesses are stabilized while maintaining operating income margins in the mid-teens. What is the most encouraging is that all parts of the portfolio are moving in the right direction. Our core is performing well, our growth engines are scaling faster, and our underperforming businesses are improving. As a result, the mix of our business continues to shift toward faster growing, higher margin markets. Looking ahead to 2027, we expect this trend to accelerate further. Our core businesses should continue to deliver strong performance while our growth engines, which are expected to approach 25 percent of Ecolab sales continue to compound at double-digit rates and play an increasingly important role in driving growth and margin expansion for Ecolab. The future is already taking shape today. We're preparing to introduce a breakthrough innovation at Supercompute, a new integrated end-to-end cooling platform combining CoolIT's liquid cooling technologies with Ecolab's 3D Tracer digital digital capabilities to optimize water, power, and compute performance at scale. We will be hosting an Invest Today at Supercompute in Chicago on November 17th, where we will share more about the growth opportunities ahead and how they will strengthen our long-term performance. As we move into the second half, we expect continued momentum. Pricing is anticipated to strengthen to the 5% to 6% range as energy surcharge benefits are fully realized. Volumes are expected to continue to grow as strong new business wins, more than offset ongoing disruption in the Middle East. As a result, we expect organic sales growth of 6 to 7 percent, helping drive an adjusted operating income margin of 19 percent in the second half, keeping us on track to deliver our 20 percent high margin next year. With this momentum, we're increasing our outlook for 2026, where we now expect EPS in the range of 8.05 to 8.25, rising 7% to 10% versus last year. This range reflects strong underlying performance and a short-term impact from non-cash amortization and financing costs from the CoolIT acquisition. Beyond this year, we continue to expect adjusted EPS growth, including CoolIT, to accelerate our strong 12% to 15% growth trajectory. In closing, our business continues to strengthen with the core improving and growth engine scaling. With this, our portfolio is shifting faster toward higher growth, higher margin, and markets. Just as importantly, our team continues to execute at a very high level to deliver for our customers every single day. We've never been better positioned to deliver long-term organic sales growth of 5 to 7 percent expand operating income margins well beyond 20 percent and continue strengthening our eps growth algorithm so thank you for your continued trust and investment in ecolab i'll now turn it back to nd for q a thanks for that wraps up our formal remarks operator would you please begin the question and answer period thank you we will now be conducting a question and answer session we ask that you please limit yourself to one question so that others will have chance to participate if you have additional questions please rejoin the question and answer queue if you would like to ask a question please press star one on your telephone keypad a

confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue you may press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue for participants using speaker equipment it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys our first question will come from the line of tim morooney with william blair please proceed with your question yes good Good afternoon.

Thanks for taking my question. And thank you, Christophe, for reaffirming the 20% operating margin target that you have for 2027. I was there in my model, but then when you acquired Cool IT, you know, there's so much extra amortization there that I actually came off that margin target, but now you reaffirmed it today. so can you just help bridge that gap for us? Because there's a lot of extra incremental amortization coming through on the cool IT side. So just want to make sure I heard you right. You are reaffirming the 20% operating margin target for 2027, and can you help, you know, help us understand how you plan to offset those incremental expenses flowing through? Thank you.

Yes, Tim. You understood that right. We've been very consistent, by the way, on making sure that we stay on our commitment of delivering 20% operating income in 2027. So that remains unchanged. I'll ask as well, Scott, to add some color to it in a second. But before we get there, Our expectation and everything that we're doing is ultimately to drive our commitment of 5% to 7% organic sales growth, the 20% OI margin, and the strong 12% to 15% earnings per share growth. And ultimately, our job is to make sure that everything we're doing, well, not only leads us to that, but leads us to beyond that. And that's especially true for the 20% OI in 2027. And I spent together with the team a lot of time as well to think, how do we get beyond the 20% after 2027? And the vast majority of our businesses today are already either close to 20% or beyond 20%. So we know well how to do that. the second half of this year. The adjusted OI margin will be at 19% as well, so all leading nicely towards the 2027. It's going to be important to keep in mind that the first half and second half of 27 will be a tale of two stories because of the lapping, obviously, of the Cool IT acquisition that closed early July, so the 12 months, mid next year, and then the second half of 27. In other words, so the second half of 27, so will be even stronger. But as mentioned before, so my objective is really to not only deliver on those commitments beyond 26, but really making sure that we get beyond the 20%, that we can strengthen these 5 to 7 on the organic and also on the earnings per share, the 12 to 15, well, I guess that's going to get stronger as well over time. But Scott, do you want to add any color to that?

Yeah, the only thing, Tim, that I would add is that next year, as you might remember, the Nalco amortization falls off. And so that's also as part of when you said how do you reconcile that, that we do get the benefit of annualizing the cool IT amortization, but offset by the Nalco organization.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Manav Patelayek with Barclays. Please proceed with your questions.

Thank you. Good afternoon. Christophe, I was just hoping within high tech, could you just help us with the current mix of the business between data centers and microelectronics or however you want to break it out and kind of, you know, just some more color on, you know, your confidence in getting to that four billion target, I guess.

Yeah, hi, Manon. So high-level, obviously, since we don't go much in detail for the size of the business right now, but it's roughly one and a half billion annualized sales. are busy. So right now, when you have our legacy business, microelectronics, and data centers within legacy, and then Cool IT, and then Avivo, which is in microelectronics. And each of them is roughly half a billion today of annualized sales. That's how you get to the one and a half billion. And for perspective we were 150 million just a few years back so this is a platform that we've built over the last few years extremely rapidly and the very good news is that all three elements are growing so very nicely you've heard about the legacy business growing 29 percent Ovivo expected to deliver some meetings for this year, and Cool IT being north of 100%. So if you add it all up, so you get to a very good place, our trajectory of 25% growth for the next few years leads you to the $4 billion by 2030, and I feel quite confident that that's very realistic.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ashish Sapodra with RBC Capital Markets. please proceed with your question.

Thanks for taking my question. Just wanted to follow up on the global high-tech. So you mentioned the integrated end-to-end cooling platform that you plan to launch at the supercomputer. I was just wondering if you could help or discuss how that can help drive more cross-selling opportunity across all the different global high-tech offerings that you have.

Thanks. Thank you, Rasheesh. Well, generally, as we mentioned, when we did the acquisition of CoolIT. Adding CoolIT to the data center multiplies between three and five times the sales opportunity that we have compared to legacy ecolab in a data center. So much bigger, obviously, than what we had before. So that's the penetration of solutions opportunity. But But the most interesting part is when you put all the pieces together from a CDU integrating 3D Tracer control technology to a 3D Tracer coolant to cold plates that are integrated in that system and ultimately an end-to-end optimization system to reduce the power used uh to cool while using zero net incremental water because everything is within the system is the biggest uh upside obviously so for our customers and with everything that's happening right now in the ai infrastructure and data center pushback in the communities well as mentioned the world needs a company um that can help this industry scale fast while doing it the right way both in terms of cost performance and in terms of impact on communities and natural resources. So I think that we're very uniquely placed here to do that. And it took us just two weeks, basically, to get the 3D Tracer technology embedded in the next generation of the CDU for Cool IT. It's a good example of how the two teams have come together. So it's going to be really good to uh share with all of you and with customers um obviously at super compute how everything comes together and last thing i'd say uh we really look at it from an ecosystem perspective we would not be owning everything we don't want to get into a lot of hardware obviously out there but we want to be the platform that ultimately all the other elements have come around in order to truly maximize cooling, minimize the water and energy usage, and maximize ultimately the uptime and performance of the data center as well. So a typical Ecolab story where the outcome of the operations is the main objective we have.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of John McNulty with BMO Capital Markets. Please proceed with your question.

Yeah, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question, and congrats on some really solid results. Just wanted to ask or dig a little bit deeper on the life sciences side of the business. Clearly, there's a lot of interest on the bioprocessing side. We've seen a number of drugs kind of hitting the market or starting to hit the market. At the same time, you've outpaced kind of the other major competitor in the space by a decent amount.

So I guess, can you help us to think about how much of it is just the end market growth, how much of it is share gain and how much of it may maybe just some of the capacity unlocked that you uh that you've been working on as well thank you john uh very pleased uh with the life sciences team uh it's been a few years um in the making uh as you know we started that business in 2017 uh it was less than 100 million and today it's close to a billion so 10 times the size of where it was back then. We made the acquisition of Pure Light in 2021, and the COVID implications on the market have been a little bit difficult to manage for the whole industry, by the way. But when I look back and think about what the team has done in how to build capacity, capabilities, relationship with customers, trust that we can really be the best partner in the future well i'm super pleased um with what the team uh has done we were not on the trajectory we had initially planned um as you know since the acquisition uh of pure light but we have always been growing when the rest of the industry was not um so not in line with what we had expected but better at competition. The very good news right now, John, is that we're not only outperforming the market and competition, but we're back in line with our returns, expectations that we had set early in that process. So really happy with the trajectory, the returns, the work that's been done by the team. And ultimately, the most important element is to listen to our customers that are really pleased with the agility of the team, the innovation strengths of this team, being very entrepreneurial, need to be as close to them what they need short term in order to deliver the life savings drugs that they're trying to bring into the market. We knew we would not become, in the short or medium term, the largest life science player in the industry. But our objective to be the best performing and the best partner of our customers, I guess that we're pretty close to that ambition right now. So early, but good news for the future.

Our next question comes from the line of David Begleiter with Deutsche Bank. Please proceed with your question.

Thank you. Good afternoon. Christoph, on CoolIT, when the business was acquired, you mentioned perhaps a 30% type annual growth rate to the model going forward. Given the 100% plus growth rate in the first half of the year, should we update our models to a higher growth rate over the next few years here for cool IT?

I really like this acquisition. That's one of those. One of many where I've usually said before you embark on such a journey. I had my set of sleepless nights. And when I look back, well, I'm really saying I'm glad we did it. um because this is the best uh technology in the market it's the best performing business as well so in direct-to-ship liquid cooling technology um and i've been so impressed um with the team that i've met um at cool it and how these two teams uh are coming together now david um it's been two or three weeks um that we together it's very early um and we're getting to know each other, starting to work together with customers. So it's so early that we're not in a position to change anything. But if I look at the trajectories, well, they're better than what we had told. That's the good news. But when we did our plans, you know, for the next four, five, 10 years, a lot can happen. And that's why we've picked a trajectory of 30%, which I think is the right one. True, that the first half of this year for Cool IT has been way better than that. Acceptance by customers of the latest technologies of Cool IT is extremely good and even better when we come together with Ecolab. So that's an even better sign. And that's the reason why we'd like to be together with you in November at SuperCompute It's basically we will have four or five months of working together with Cool IT. We better understand how it works, what's to like, what we need to work on, what's the new type of trajectory. So too early to change right now, but give us the time the next few months to really get the teams together, making it really well work together with the customers. And in November, we will suit together to share with you how do we see 27 and the years beyond.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Chris Parkinson with Wolf Research. Please proceed with your question.

Christoph, I'd love to just circle back to life sciences, just given the trajectory there and all the work you've been doing with your team in King of Prussia. And just a few things that I'd like to break down, first of all, just kind of how you see the trajectory of some of the biopharm applications versus some of the purification and resins, you know, how much this is attributable to basically the beginning of the ramps in both King of Prussia and Wales. And then also, correct me if I'm wrong, but a lot of that business initially started off in larger scale in Europe, and it seems like you've been making a lot of investments and leeway with partners in the United States.

So I'd love to kind of just drill down to just anything that you can do to basically increase the probability of the street sustaining this type of growth and trajectory especially relative to the you know 27 margin targets thank you so it's been a few quarters now um that uh life science uh has been um on the high end uh of the expected uh performance which is a very good sign and i've been very open so with you um that the early years of that journey, we were growing, growing faster than the industry, but we were not growing as fast as we were expecting for hours, time behind us. And it gave us the opportunity to build those capabilities and these capacities that we needed around the world. We just opened our latest, one of the biggest plants in China a few weeks ago. That's going to give us a big footprint in a market that's going really well for life science, the industry, and for us. By the way, expanding as well around Asia. In Europe, the core of Pure Light came from Europe as well, both Eastern Europe and Wales, as you mentioned, for bioprocessing and capacity as well in North America that we've kept building and that we will keep building. building. It's always been part of our strategies to be on each of the three continents, North America, Europe, and Asia. And we're almost there. And it's never going to be enough because it's growing fast. That's a good problem to have as well. We have great teams as well that we had to build. Bioprocessing is the fastest growing one. It is a very interesting, very technology leading type of business that we will keep as the anchor in the biotechnology industry. But I'd like to add as well our whole pharma and personal care business that's focused on contamination control, basically making sure that the environment where the drugs are being produced is as healthy as it can be this business is doing extremely well as well at the same time and the purification in business that's kind of lower grades in type of products but still on the same platform we were capped by capacity constraints as you know that's changing with the opening of the plant in China. So that's going to help us as well sustain the growth trajectory of that business going forward. So we're in a place where we have very good momentum. Our long-term target was 10 to 12 percent, by the way, so we are ahead of that range right now margin. So to get towards the 30% OI target, we will get there. We see the line of sight to get there. But I want to make absolutely sure that we keep investing in capacity and capabilities in the meantime, in order to get the business that has not only the critical mass, but the right momentum to keep winning in the future. So kind of a little bit of an overview of what we're trying to build here, all driven by research, by innovation, by science, which is ultimately what's most important for our customers, and it's working really well.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Seth Weber with BNP Paribas. Please proceed with your question.

Hey, guys. Good afternoon. I wanted to ask a little bit about some of your old economy stuff. I was struck by your comment that you think paper could see some modest growth here in the third quarter um i mean do you feel like we're past the bottom in some of these categories or is it just maybe less bad and pricing is helping or can you just help us frame what's going on in some of your older economy stuff thank you i'm not sure i would call that bold economy um but it's more for traditional uh businesses so for sure uh we know that those businesses are not going to grow as the growth engines do.

That's why we have that differentiation, by the way, between growth engines, double-digit type of business. Our core business, which is the key of our company, kind of in this mid-single, and then you have the lower growth businesses that I've called with some affection underperforming because they were underperforming for a while and to your point on paper well the good news is that it was fairly positive in Q2 which is a big deal obviously for that business after more than a year being in negative territory impacted by the industry that was not doing great and then an industry that was consolidated because of that. So we lost a lot of paper mills as well. And when we lose a paper mill that has a big impact on our sales because they use a lot of our solutions. And we can see that the last six months that consolidation has stopped, paused, and that things are getting slightly better. And here as well, we are a bit better than the industry. So we're gaining share, which is a good thing as well. So very positive in Q2 for the paper team. But I feel really confident with the great leadership that we have there to get even more positive in Q3 and beyond. So I'm cautiously optimistic with that business. but saving good margins, by the way, important to keep that in mind. But, yeah, they're improving and they're in positive territory, so they're generating value for shareholders, which is the first step towards greatness.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Lawrence Alexander with Jefferies. Please proceed with your question.

I'd like to revisit the life sciences. Can you just dig in a little bit on bioprocessing? are you mostly winning share in the early stage preclinical, or are you also getting the equivalent share gains in the later stage commercial? And really, I'm trying to dig into your capex. You're talking about big capex, I think was the word you used. Are you trying to get your capex additions ahead of your growth rate so you can go into adjacencies?

Or should we be thinking about this capex cycle as this is kind of the run rate that you'll be continuing into the 2030s because that's just how fast the end market is growing so a few things uh kia lawrence uh first uh bear with me i'll have to be careful uh into how much details i'm going um on the sensitivity of the competitive situation uh there's very few players um in that industry we know each other very well we all understand that what we do well is sustaining lives around the world so I'm very careful so I'm going to talk about that but generally we have a very good position now across the whole spectrum between early innovations clinical trials of various stages, and commercial drugs that the team has done very well in terms of jumping ahead the queue in some cases to make sure that we were covering the whole And as you know, it's another type of approach you need to have a lot early in order to get a few big ones later. So that's the rule of the game, obviously, in life science. And now we are ideally positioned, as the team has done, in order to make sure that we can sustain and accelerate the growth in the future. The question on our investments, we've clearly been investing ahead of the growth in that business. That's why we were talking about reporting growth in the mid-teens and underlying growth in the mid-20s. Well, those 10 points were investments ahead, as we want to see that business driving 30%-ish type of margin at cruising speed. But I don't want to get too quickly ahead of that. this is an industry of perfection. The quality of the products, of the team, of the delivery, of the innovation, it takes time, it takes depth, it takes passion and commitment to get it done. But as you can see now, so the underlying margins are getting so closer to the reported margins, which is a good thing. Q2 was a little bit of an extreme because we had a spike in bioprocessing.

It's not every quarter created the same but generally so i like our competitive situation and as mentioned before we don't have the ambition to become the biggest we want to become the best life sciences business thank you our next question comes from the line of vincent andrews with morgan stanley please proceed with your question uh thank you very much um to go back to capex christoph you know when you acquired cool it my recollection is you said that they had enough capacity on their own to supply a doubling of their sales, which seems like a pace that they're very much on. And I think you separately said that the plan was to go sort of asset light, sort of similar to how you do it in your dishwashing business, where you design and have the IP and then somebody else does the manufacturing. So just wondering if you can tell us where you are in that journey, given it sounds like the growth rate of cool IT is really moving maybe faster than originally thought.

Yeah, so generally, directionally, absolutely no change. What you've said is still valid with one small exception, which is a good one, is that the growth seems to be faster than what we had expected for all the reasons I mentioned before. The leading edge technologies that Cool IT is having, the combination of Ecolab and Cool IT coming together, providing the market with something that no one else can provide in terms of higher performance, no water, and less energy to do the same job as well. So generally for the company, I don't see big changes, but for our high-tech business, we might have to go faster, which is exactly what we'd like to see and you'd like to see, I guess, as well. But let me ask, maybe, Scott, if you'd like to add any perspective on CapEx in general.

Yeah, just more broadly, as Christophe talked about, you know, we will invest ahead of growth in the growth engines, but expect that the CapEx as a company to remain similar to where we're at now for the next couple of years. And we've talked about this for a little while, likely remaining around the 7% the next couple of years, because we are investing ahead for the global high-tech business and life science. But then as we scale these growth engines, we'll continue to evaluate it. But we're always going to take advantage of these tractors.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Patrick Cunningham with Citi. Please proceed with your question.

Hi, good afternoon. Maybe just on food and beverage, pretty strong 7% sales growth there, a pretty good execution against a flat, broader industry. I guess, can you share details on what is contributing to the increased traction there and how much acceleration do you expect to see within this business over the coming quarters?

So Food & Beverage, which is one of those core businesses that we have, that I think is one of the best global businesses we have, is one of the best teams around the world, serving a very sophisticated industry of consumer goods companies with big brands everywhere around the world. So it's a business I love. And I love it even more looking at the performance that this business is driving. You mentioned 7%. If you remember, so our long-term target for this business is 5% to 7%. So they are at the higher end of that range. And why that? I'll give you the simple answer here. It's the One Ecolab approach where the team has brought together our food safety capabilities with our water capabilities as one integrated organization. So it's not just two teams playing nice together to serve the customer. It's an integrated team with experts in food safety and experts in water working on the same team for the same customers anywhere around the world. We're not done yet. We've done the work in North America where the teams came together and ultimately, well, I can position it as a strategic idea of producing safe food while using less water and energy. But there is a much more mundane driver of the growth is the cross-selling. So how do we sell food safety solutions into water customers and water solutions into food safety customers? That's a sales execution play with a good strategic intent. So that's been the main driver. The execution has worked really well. We're expanding what we've done in North America now around the world that will take some time, but it's also driving some good runway of momentum for the years to come. And last, but not least, is what you're hearing as well on the market, producing safe food, well, is something that is pretty top of mind for everyone right now, being in restaurants, being in retail. And what we're doing is even more in demand than what it was in the past.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Eric Boyes with Evercore SI. Please proceed with your question.

Thanks and good afternoon. I think Ecolab Digital is nearly at a 500 million annual run rate and growing 20 to 30 percent, smaller than global high tech, but pretty attractive incremental margin. So I was wondering if there's anything you can share on the trajectory for digital into 2027, maybe talk to the margin contribution, then why not push through a faster transition to the subscription model given the value proposition of the offerings? Thank you.

Thank you, Eric. So what you said is absolutely true as well. On what you said, pushing for more faster, we're speaking the same language here. There's a lot of execution that needs to happen, obviously in between. But I'm very pleased with the progress that we've made over the last couple of years. As you know, it's a pretty new business as a business, not as an activity because we've been on digital since we invented 3D Tracer and just for memory it was invented in 1991 so it's been a long time that we've been in connected devices but they were obviously not connected to the cloud to mainframes and all the complicated technology that we had. So today, that's the good news. Well, we have hundreds of thousands of connected devices and thousands of customer locations around the world. So we have a great install base with a good critical mass that only a few companies have out there. But we know that for almost 30 years of that journey, we were doing that for free without going for subscriptions and making sure that we were remunerated for the value and the offering that we are providing for our customers. So we changed that two years ago. That was a change for customers, not a change for the industry, because that's what tech companies are doing for a living, as well as making sure our teams know how to do that customers realize that yes they pay for something that is something that we're used to it's new but it's driving as well incremental value and that's why we've introduced internally that playbook which we call the 100 100 100 model Eric which is basically to say we want to connect 100 percent of the customer locations hundred percent of the applications within those customer location and that hundred percent of them generate revenue if you add all that it drives a potential value of three billion so three billion is the revenue we could generate doing exactly that within our current customers. We have 500 today and that's why growing towards the 3 billion is the job number one. We all like that we'd like to grow even faster and I guess we will get there at some point. And what's even better is that the 3 billion opens 10 incremental billion to it for applications that we haven't sold yet or customers that we haven't sold yet. So early on that journey but on a very good trajectory so far.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Shloma Rosenbaum with Steeble. Please proceed with your questions.

Hi, thank you very much for taking my question. Christoph, could you talk a little bit about the volume trajectory? It looks like it picked up. And the implication is if you would not have had that impact from the Mideast War, you would have picked up to like 2% volume growth. Can you talk about where you're seeing the volume increases, um you know where where you're you might not be seeing them and uh geographically uh maybe by you know from from a high level which areas the business and and really what should we be thinking about that you know we've seen we've been accustomed to seeing some of the growth in terms of the pricing uh but it's been a while since we've seen volume pick up to to this level on what i would say a sustainable rate and can you give us your thoughts on that yeah thank you it seems like for the short term for the next few quarters that the 1% run rate seems to be the right one as you said we were closer to two without the

impact of the Middle East but okay we live in an imperfect world and there will always be something somewhere obviously happening we were all hoping that the Middle East will solve itself much earlier. It doesn't seem to be exactly the case right now, so we're living with it. And that's why I'm saying, okay, the 1% trajectory is a healthy trajectory that I really like. But this 1% is obviously the company average. So you have the ones that are way ahead of that, and those are the growth engines in high tech, in life science in past, but also food and beverage has had some very good track records in volume. And then you have the other extreme of the paper and heavier industries that were in the negative territory. So that's the beauty of the Ecolab portfolio that ultimately whatever happens in one business or one region in the world we can keep a steady momentum which i believe the one percent for the next few quarters seems to be the right assumption to make and things improve out there okay it's going to be better but directionally i think it's going to be one one plus trending in the right direction and the Aviva and Cool IT by the way which are not in those numbers because they're not organic by definition well they add almost two percentage points new to it as well

so you have this one plus the two plus or minus the Middle East that talked about you get to some very healthy type of volume growth which is exactly the place we want it to be thank you our next question comes from the line of scotch neighbor with oppenheimer please proceed with your question uh thanks very much uh similar question to schlomo's but on the pricing side just curious how the the energy uh surcharge is progressing you've spoken about hey it's ramping up in second quarters um likely going to be more solidly in place in in the back half so just thoughts on that and then the second part of the question is how is uh how is structural pricing progressing

in and thoughts in second half here thanks we've always been pretty good at pricing I think that we've become really good at value pricing because of all the practice that we were given to the last few years to manage through that let's not forget stepping back as well as that Ecolab for a very long time had an approach of getting so the incremental cost back in dollars year one and the margin year two so a two-year cycle and now in Q2 we managed to do both within three months which is really a major change of the model and that's mostly driven by this value pricing approach driven by these total value delivered that we're providing to customers, that customers are seeing that, yes, they pay more, but they're getting more as well. And net-net, they are in a better place financially, which is where we laser focus to deliver to them. It takes some time to get it done the right way. But the fact that our retention of customers has remained super stable during all those years, well, is a good indication that the approach is the right one. It's good for customers, it's good for Ecolab, it's good for shareholders as well at the same time. So to your question on energy surcharge versus pricing, it's always an imperfect science because some of the businesses go straight into structural price, others go in energy surcharge and move then afterwards in structural price. Honestly I don't really care how the whole thing is happening as long as we get to the right place for us and for the customer as well. And we accepted the Q2 with 5% of pricing. So when we're talking about 5% to 6% in the second half, well, it's the exit trajectory of the second quarter. So it's pretty solid to say the least, which is why I feel quite good that we can get this positive gross margin, organic gross margin in the second half because the team is really good at it. We have all the systems, the processes, the customers understand that. And we can manage almost any situation that's happening in the world that we cannot predict. But we've demonstrated not only we can do it, but we can get it done in pretty short-term timing as well.

Our next question comes from the line of John Roberts with Mizuho. Please proceed with your question.

Thank you. PEST Elimination has been delivering high single-digit revenue growth pretty consistently for at least a year now, and the operating margins are up around 20%. Does it accelerate to low-mid-teens growth as you deploy digital and eugenic AI, And do you spend the margin improvement or do margins go up as you deploy digital and Agenic AI?

Well, John, it's going to be a sequential work here, first on the top line. So our targeted trajectory is 6% to 8%. So with the 7%, we kind of hike in the middle of the targeted range, which is always an important first step to me delivering on our promise first and then improving from it the ambition of the team which is an exceptional team by the way that we have Invest Elimination they're great at transforming the business great innovation working with the largest customers in the world in a difficult environment the transformation they're doing is remarkable I'm so impressed with everything that you're doing. So it's going to drive top line ultimately even stronger. That's going to be the other good place. But back to the question on margin, it's a bit like the life science question. When we get into new technologies, new innovation, there is some need to create the right foundations first before we really get the benefits of it. So yes, in the margin of pest elimination and in the operating income growth you have investments behind so pest intelligence that are going to continue as I've said so 800,000 connected devices will be north of 1 million by the end of the year no other company is there around the world well that requires efforts and investments but ultimately we know it's going to pay off both on top line and on bottom line in one of the businesses with the highest margins and the highest return as well at the same time. So early investments and ultimately better returns.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Jeff Sakakis with JP Morgan. Please proceed with your question.

Thanks very much. Two-part question. And the first is that you've acquired to accelerate your growth. Do you have goals for either return on capital or return on assets or return on equity or goals that situate those metrics relative to where Ecolab was before the acquisitions were made. And secondly, in the global institutional and specialty business, the organic growth was about 4%. And I would expect pricing in that segment to be higher than 4%. So was volume growth negative by 1% or 2%? And I guess that may have had to do with the institutional business. Can you talk about what's going on in that area?

Yeah, thank you, Jeff. So two very different questions. Here, let me start with the second and then I'll go to the first one and then I'll ask Scott as well to add to the return question. So on institutional, really pleased with the steadiness, the 4% in institutional on specialties you know the restaurants hotels and specialty uh retail uh and quick serve well allows us to capture consumers going to whatever segment cheaper or more premium depending on the economic uh state of the of the country wherever um our customers so operate so in a place where wherever people are going, we capture that growth. So the 4%, I think, is a pretty good, steady type of performance for that business, keeping in mind that food traffic in the US in restaurants is down 5% year over year right now. So the growth of the 4% versus the minus life in the restaurants is quite remarkable. So it's not growth of life science, of digital, or of GHT, but for such a traditional industry, we're clearly gaining share and we're gaining margin as well at the same time because that business is in the low 20s to mid-20s type of operating margins are a very strong, solid business with a franchise that's unmatched as well around the world. So INS, I'd love them to grow even faster, but honestly, I think that they are in a darn good place where they are now. And second or first, you question when you talk about organic versus non-organic. Well, the results of growth that we had in the second quarter, especially if you're just for the Middle East, well, that growth of volume was not acquired. That was organic. Yes, now Cool IT and Avivo, which have been acquired, are going to add a couple of points to the overall company. It's always been a kind of a combination of two-thirds or 80% core growth and 20% M&A. We're going to keep on that path as well, Jeff, and it's working quite well. I like as well the return profile of it, but I'd like.

Yeah, Jeff, as we talked about, obviously, the specific of the cool IT, but with all deals that We look at the specific investment or asset returns, and as we've talked about with CoolIT, the returns on this are well above our cost of capital. And then more specifically, as we think about just the company as a whole, we've talked about ROIC for a long time. Obviously, ROIC is sort of a point-in-time measure, and when you have a significant acquisition like this, it will have a dilutive impact in the short term. But we still have a very focused on ROIC and growing ROIC, organic ROIC, as we define it, by at least 100 basis points a year. And feel very good about that as we think about the impact of cool IT that will take a year and a half or so to annualize because of the denominator, but expect to get back to pre-acquisition levels on organic ROIC by 2028.

I'd like to make a comment on life science as well. So I'll just unline what I said before. uh jeff i we're set what's the return um expectation that we have so for that business um early on we were not on track um for uh two three years um as as we now and that was the absolute focus for the team to get back um on the early promised return of that business and that business is back on that tribe. So we take it super seriously.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Matthew DiYo with Bank of America. Please proceed with your question.

Thank you for squeezing me in. So 5%, 6% price, I don't know, $450 plus million of just EBIT tailwind year over year for the back half. If I just give you a 100% margin, which I don't know, maybe it's too much, but that's implying like raw material inflation that's candidly feels way too high. And if I'm thinking about just operating leverage through the business covering normal course inflation, which maybe isn't the case, long story with this is just why isn't margin expanding more materially in the back half? And does the guidance for raw material inflation that you're baking in reflective of the basket in March, April, or is it reflective of the current situation, you know, as I think about things like propylene baskets kind of coming under pressure?

I mean, obviously, who knows, right, with the straight close, but I'm just trying to understand why the operating leverage isn't significantly higher with mid-single-digit price. so a few comments here uh and i'll pass it to scott uh as well a bit more so first uh it's always with the latest information that we update you uh we don't stay stuck so to assumptions that were made in march the world has changed quite a bit um obviously so in the in the meantime so it's fresh information um when we talk together uh second um i don't need to explain to you so it works to get margins in positive territory since we have roughly 50 percent gross margin well you need double the price versus the cost that you're getting and when you need to do that in three months not in a chemical business but in a service technology expertise type of business this is a remarkable accomplishment and especially when you need to do it over and over again while keeping building more growth with more customers without losing any as well at the same time. So that's the simple math of the protecting gross margin. And as I said before, it took us two years to do the same work as we do in three months today, a few years back. And last point, I'd say we do it in ways that are always constructive for our customers, which means that they get the savings in their operations higher than the incremental price that we are asking from them as a share of the benefits that they're getting. So it's going to lead, ultimately, that's the good news. Once the delivered product cost is going to stabilize, well, then you get a much better gross margin because we never give the pricing back in our model, not because we just stay stuck on it, but because the value we're generating to our customers will remain within the customer operations. So that's why every time that there is an economic cycle going up in inflation, not only we manage it well, but second, it leads to a net incremental margin on our trajectory, which is why, if you look at the last 10 years, our gross margin has kept going up.

Yeah, I'll just add a couple things to that, Christophe. As you talked about, it's difficult to make these firm assumptions as a dynamic environment, but as we see it here today, we're expecting these high single-digit commodity prices for the balance of the year, right? So if you look at that, and then also the other thing I would say, and we talked about this earlier, if you look at the gross margin, you also have the impact of Avivo. So we had a reported gross margin. We have organic gross margin. And in Ovevo, as we talked about in Q2, excluding Ovevo on an organic basis, our gross margins are stable. So there's that called 60 basis point drag just for Ovevo, and you'll see that same type of sort of difference in the second half. So that may be part of the math.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Josh Spector with UBS. Please proceed with your question.

Hey, good afternoon, guys. Thanks for squeezing me in. I wanted to go back to the high-tech piece. And really what I want to ask about is that a few weeks ago when you closed Cool IT, you know, you took up your plan to 2030, you took up your margins, obviously a high degree of I thought you'd come on this call and be able to give an update on Cool IT expectations for 27, 28, and maybe if that accretion math is pulled forward, you know, based on your comments earlier to David, it seems like you want to talk about that maybe in a few months. So I'm just really curious, like, what gave you the confidence then at the start of July to raise your 2030 expectations there so much? Was it OVIVO or something else organic? Or is it that you saw the backlog on Cool IT? Just help me understand that, please.

So a few things here. First, when we share some new targets with you, we want to be sure, or as sure as it can be, of what we're sharing, obviously, so with you. And we're together, so with Cool IT, since the first week of July. So that's been just a few weeks. And you can't do much before you close, as you know, as well. So we're getting to know much more when we look at the trajectory of both businesses, Cool IT and Ovevo, and our core business, by the way, which has been doing really well for quite a long time now, especially in the second quarter well we ended up in a position where we can say the minimum has to be risen and we don't need to go much into math and to say okay we can move up the floor which means that the middle of the range is going up as well at the same time but this is also the reason why we want to have an investor day at Supercompute in November because we firmly believe with not only where the market is going but most importantly how our businesses are leading those technologies that we will be better than what we had initially planned which is a good problem to have So if anything, it's going to be better than what we just communicated, but we want to do the right work. We're talking about the next three, four, five years to come, and that requires some in-depth work on all those businesses. But generally, the direction of travel for all of those, well, is quite a bit better than what we had expected. So expect good news in November.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Mike Harrison with Seaport Research Partners.

Hi, good afternoon. Christoph, you kind of referenced the increased attention that's happening around food safety recently, and I'm just curious if you can comment at all on what kind of impact this cyclospora outbreak has had on consumer behavior and maybe impacting your restaurant customers in terms of foot traffic, and then I guess on your customers and them coming to you for food safety solutions or with greater attention on that, and maybe also tie in, it seems like the FDA has taken a little bit of a step back in terms of what

they're monitoring, and just curious if you view that as something that is helpful to your business or harmful to your business so mike uh i would not call that helpful or harmful um we're talking a little bit um or a lot about people um being uh impacted by by what's happening again here um we're experiencing uh those situations uh too often um in our country and and around the world and that's why we exist actually it's to uh reduce and remove um that risk as much as it's possible for every one of us eating food or infection prevention in general. So we feel for everyone that's been impacted by what's happening in our country right now. So the few key questions that you had impact and demand on our business now, no change of consumption at all and in F&B you've seen as well so no change either what's true however is every time that something like that happens customers come to us spend a lot of time with our research and development team with our scientists to really understand what is it how does it work how does it impact us how can we solve it there is no one in the world that has more knowledge and expertise in infection prevention than Ecolab so customers are clearly coming to us which is a good sign so and in the case of the end users the restaurants in that case I think that they've done a very good job and in the specific case that we're talking about um they've been exemplary um how they've taken care of their guests of their employees of their processes we've been very close to them as we always do but we stay behind the scene we're there to help them we're not there obviously so uh to get ahead of them uh in terms of news we've worked with a lot of producers um as well out there to make sure um that they were learning from it that we could make sure that the risk was going down for all the other ones as well and the one that's being talked about in the media right now um is not one of our partners or customers or comment um on them but i think ultimately that uh the next phase and that's a big business opportunity so for us is to connect the producers with the end users being restaurants or which is something that hasn't been done much so far and we're uniquely placed because we protect a third of the world food production and we serve even more of the end users retail and restaurants and hotels. So, connecting the two in the future will be a new business opportunity for us.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Jason Haas with Wells Fargo. Please proceed with your question.

Hey, good afternoon, and thank you for taking my question. I'm curious if you could comment on what the customer and industry reaction has been to the 50-kilowatt cold plate that was announced by Cool IT. Just curious what sort of reception there is, and And maybe it's going to take some time, but curious, you know, just timeline for when that could start to benefit you guys.

It's been very well received, actually. It's the first time in my business history I have to admit that I see and hear customers not only wanting to be in the queue, but to be ahead of the queue because there's limited capacity, as we know, out there. Well, that's the situation of Cool IT, of EVOL 2, by the way, in a different part of that industry. It's a very unique place to be. And that technology that you're talking about on the gold plate is one of the elements, but there's many more in terms of CDU, in terms of 3D Tracer, in terms of coolants as well that we've developed and will be developing as well. Everybody is looking for the latest and to have that as soon as they can. So a very new experience for us where you need to manage supply more than demand, but I guess that's a good problem to have.

Thank you. Our final question will come from the line of Kevin McCarthy with Vertical Research Partners. Please proceed with your question.

Yes. Good afternoon, and thank you for squeezing me in. Christoph, I want to follow up on a few prior questions regarding Cool IT. Is there a way to characterize or quantify the visibility that Cool IT has or you now have into the order backlog or pipeline? It's your way to measure it in terms of months or quarters or years. Maybe you can talk a little bit about how they go to market. What are the standard contract terms? And over the next little while here, perhaps we'll learn more in November, certainly. But is that triple-digit growth rate stable, do you think, between now and the end of the year? Or maybe you could just elaborate on that visibility question there.

So a few questions into that. So the visibility so far, the foreseeable futures over 26 at the end of the year, as you're calling it, is pretty clear. So yes, we feel good about the trajectory so far for the year, which is a very good way to start. obviously saw an integration and for the years to come as mentioned before we've considered in all our math and projections of 30 percent our growth rate for the next 10 years so we'll do the work to really understand what's the right number for it and we'll share that with you when we get together at Supercompute in November but generally that sounds like a good news. Your second question on the go-to market, it's mostly two different drivers. The first one are the cheap designers and cheap manufacturers, because the coal plates and technology of cooling for each individual chip, well, is cheap-related, and that needs to be developed together with the cheap designers and or manufacturers, depending on who that is out there. So they're very close to them, and this is a huge strength of that business. At the same time, they're very close to the hyperscalers as well that are interested in optimizing the overall cooling performance of the data center that goes beyond, obviously, individual chips when you put all of them together in one rank, and then afterwards in one data center, the physics look very different. And that's the relationship with the hyperscalers. So it's to be very close to those two constituents, and CoolIT and E.C.O.L.A., by the way. So that's the way the model works. It's developing together with the hyperscalers and the chip industry. And that's going very fast. As you know, every week there's something new that's happening, very different than many of our businesses. And the last question on the backlog and pipeline, we're learning as we're working closer together with them. They have very good sales metrics. We have, on the more traditional Ecolab side, similar but a little bit different sales metrics. So we're going to try to learn from each other. And that's also something that we'd like to share with you in November. We've been three weeks, so more is going to come. So since it's the last question, I just wanted to recap the team that's been able to protect gross margin in three months versus two years in the past while accelerating the organic growth. second the second half for the company especially as a trajectory so for 27 and the years to come as well where I believe that we are really being in ambitions our margin ambitions and earnings cross ambition and ultimately where we need to focus over time is how do we improve from there even if I spend my time but the team is aligning around and I think that we know very good place as a future because we have the best team in the industry so thank you again for all your time. All the best. Talk to you soon.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation. This does conclude today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Enjoy the rest of your day.