Donaldson at Morgan Stanley Conference: Strategic Growth Insights

On Wednesday, 10 September 2025, Donaldson Company (NYSE:DCI) presented at Morgan Stanley’s 13th Annual Laguna Conference. The company showcased its robust financial performance and strategic initiatives, while also addressing challenges like the evolving clean energy landscape. Executives emphasized Donaldson’s strong aftermarket business and commitment to disciplined growth.

Key Takeaways

• Donaldson reported record financial performance and anticipates another strong year in fiscal 2026.
• The aftermarket business is a key growth driver, outperforming GDP growth.
• Focus on strategic M&A in life sciences and industrial sectors, maintaining a conservative balance sheet.
• Emphasis on adapting to clean energy trends and expanding in the mobile solutions and industrial sectors.
• Commitment to shareholder returns through dividends and share repurchases.

Financial Results

• Record top-line and bottom-line performance recently achieved.
• Fiscal 2026 is expected to be another record year, with profits growing faster than revenue.
• Reliable historical incrementals contribute to financial stability.

Operational Updates

• Aftermarket business sees low single-digit growth, driven by intellectual property and market share gains.
• Expansion in independent channels through partnerships with NAPA and global deals.
• Investments in demand planning and Oracle ERP to optimize inventory and meet customer needs.
• Mobile solutions business growth includes GDP growth for equipment and additional growth for aftermarket and market share gains.
• On-road market poised for high-single-digit growth; off-road market for mid-single-digit growth.

Future Outlook

• Anticipated growth in natural gas-powered demand for power generation due to data centers.
• Targeting a 30% increase in connected parts within the industrial business.
• Distribution business expected to grow at a low to mid-single-digit rate.
• Aiming for high-single-digit growth and operating profit margins in the 20s for life sciences.
• Priorities include internal investments, strategic M&A, dividends, and share repurchases.

Q&A Highlights

• Discussion on the impact of regional differences in clean energy transition on R&D and efficiency.
• Donaldson’s manufacturing flexibility allows easy shifts between on-road and off-road filter production.
• Focus on high-tech applications in China’s off-road and agricultural sectors due to global demand for automation.

Readers interested in more details can refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Morgan Stanley’s 13th Annual Laguna Conference:

Angel Castillo, U.S. machinery and construction analyst, Morgan Stanley: All right. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining me. For those that don’t know me, my name is Angel Castillo. I’m the U.S. machinery and construction analyst here at Morgan Stanley. Before we get started, I just want to read a quick disclaimer. For important disclosures, please see Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley representative. With that, it’s my pleasure to host here today. We have Richard Lewis, recently named Chief Operating Officer of Donaldson Company, as well as Brad Pogalz, Chief Financial Officer, and Sarika Dhadwal, Senior Director in Investor Relations and ESG as well. Thank you all for joining us today.

Maybe just a good place to start for those that may be not as familiar with the name, we could start hopefully with a little bit of kind of opening remarks and setting the stage. You just reported earnings recently and had record results, record sales despite a macro environment that’s pretty challenging. Just help us understand what makes Donaldson Company be able to deliver that in this backdrop.

Richard Lewis, Chief Operating Officer, Donaldson Company: Yep. Yeah, so maybe a little bit of information about Donaldson Company. We are a filtration company, 110 years old. We’re based out of Minnesota. Essentially, we’re a diverse group of products, applications, end markets, very global. We’re underpinned by a really strong R&D function. We have a very deep R&D bench. We release hundreds of patents every year, really trying to own the science of the materials itself and the conversion of those materials into an end product. As Angel mentioned, we just released our earnings. We had a record top line and bottom line year. We released guidance for fiscal year 2026, which started at the beginning of August. Again, expecting another record year. Part of why we’re sort of resilient through the cycles is we do have a large percentage of our revenue as replacement parts. We tend to do well through the cycles.

I think nine out of the last 10 years, we’ve grown the company. Generally, we grow profits faster than we do our top lines. Our incrementals have been historically very good and very reliable.

Angel Castillo, U.S. machinery and construction analyst, Morgan Stanley: Great. Maybe we can start there, actually. Just a reminder for the audience, if anyone has any questions, just raise your hand and we’ll get a mic to you. Maybe just on the aftermarket piece, because I think that’s a very core differentiator to Donaldson Company and your business overall. Can you just kind of walk or talk a little bit more about the underlying drivers of the low single digits growth that you’ve had in aftermarket and just what is the biggest driver of that performance as you think about that business?

Richard Lewis, Chief Operating Officer, Donaldson Company: Yeah, our aftermarket business, you’re specifically talking mobile, I take it?

Angel Castillo, U.S. machinery and construction analyst, Morgan Stanley: Yeah, sorry, mobile aftermarket solutions.

Richard Lewis, Chief Operating Officer, Donaldson Company: Yeah, we have two channels. We sell through our OEM and their channels, and we also have an independent channel as well. A large portion of the incremental growth there is intellectual property, where we have filtration products that solve problems for our customers, where really there’s not very much alternatives in the marketplace. We’ve also been growing our share in our independent channel through larger deals like NAPA, but also a lot of smaller deals around the world, where we take over small portions of business. There’s a natural growth to that market, plus there’s incremental pricing. On top of that, we would have share gains as well.

Angel Castillo, U.S. machinery and construction analyst, Morgan Stanley: Can you maybe expand on that? I think that’s one of the areas that’s maybe a little bit harder from my seat to kind of quantify just the share gains, whether it’s NAPA or the one you just indicated out of your last quarter. What is allowing you to take market share in those businesses? Anything kind of shifting in the competitive environment? Is it something about your product? How do you see that evolving in terms of the longer term tail to the opportunity on market share gains?

Richard Lewis, Chief Operating Officer, Donaldson Company: Yeah, I would say one thing that has been unique historically about Donaldson Company is we do have a very strong position on the OEM equipment side. If you look back over probably like the last couple of decades, those customers have put a greater emphasis on their service part businesses. We’ve brought technology and intellectual property that have allowed them to secure more of that market share on their channel. That channel has actually grown quite rapidly. We’ve been able to use both our technology and our position on the first fit side. On the independent side, it’s really a story of availability, having a broad product coverage, and having inventory in the right places around the world. We’ve invested in demand planning.

We put our entire company on Oracle a few years ago, really to have a good integrated network and have good information management so we can know where our customer demand is at, where our inventory is at, and be able to optimize that basically globally. We’ve used our strong balance sheet to make investments in inventory to take care of our customers through some very difficult supply chain challenges. I think that reliability has also been a big factor in our share gain.

Angel Castillo, U.S. machinery and construction analyst, Morgan Stanley: As you think about just the mobile solutions, kind of steady growth, particularly in the aftermarket, we talked about the market share gains dynamic. What about just the underlying kind of normal degree of demand in that business? How do you kind of see that over time? Is there any aspect to that where if you’re seeing weakness in on-road, off-road, where there’s maybe some strength, how does that ebb and flow? As you think about the broader cycle for mobile solutions?

Richard Lewis, Chief Operating Officer, Donaldson Company: Yeah, I’ll add my comments, and then maybe Brad can jump in. I think if you look across that entire business, think about the equipment side as sort of GDP. The aftermarket side is GDP plus a couple points with pricing, and then you can layer on another point or two of market share. That’s how the algorithm works internally to the company. I don’t know, Brad, if you would add anything else.

Brad Pogalz, Chief Financial Officer, Donaldson Company: I think that’s it for the algorithm. The side that I’d say for the share gains is we’re looking for opportunities around the world. The thing that favors Donaldson Company is as equipment moves up the technology curve, there’s big opportunities because then there’s a new need for more advanced filtration. Over time, some of these lower tech, smaller regional players just end up being consolidation of share in these specific markets that gives us new market, new growth in specific places.

Angel Castillo, U.S. machinery and construction analyst, Morgan Stanley: Maybe just diving into some of the end markets specifically, you know, within on-road and off-road, I think you had guided to a little bit of a rebound here in fiscal year 2026. I think high single digits in on-road, mid-single digits in off-road. Can you just give us a little bit more insight into what you’re seeing in those markets and what gives you confidence in that kind of recovery throughout the year, whether it’s something you’re hearing from your customers or kind of the shape of that?

Richard Lewis, Chief Operating Officer, Donaldson Company: Yeah, I think it’s, you know, obviously those equipment markets are cyclical. The interesting thing is the sort of the shape of the cycles is fairly predictable. The timing of them is not always easy to predict. Essentially, what we’re looking at is age of vehicles. We’re looking at channel inventories. On the farming side, it’s obviously farmer income, commodity prices. It’s a little bit of a bet on the on-road side that we’ll see the market recovery, but we also know when that market recovers, it’s generally 40% or 50% to peak to trough and trough to peak. We’re putting in high single digits. We’re planning on a late fiscal year, kind of mid-calendar year sort of rebound. We’ll see what happens. The degree of impact for our company is relatively small. It’s a small portion of our business.

We believe we have plenty of other offsets in the plan that if that doesn’t happen, we’ll be okay to our guide. The ag market’s a little bit, you know, it’s a little bit more moderated in our expectations, but we do believe that, and we’re hearing from a lot of our customers that they believe that our trough and they’re slightly optimistic going into next year.

Angel Castillo, U.S. machinery and construction analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. No, that’s helpful. I guess as you think about, you mentioned, the OE side is still ultimately the first fit. The OE side is still a small part. I guess how should we think about the recovery of, or as you start to see recovery in some of these first fit, the implications to the aftermarket? Is there any kind of nuance there on the growth of the aftermarket side?

Richard Lewis, Chief Operating Officer, Donaldson Company: Yeah, I think it’s changed. Over the time I’ve been involved in the business, I would say they were fairly bifurcated on how they performed. What we’ve seen the last couple of cycles is, as there’s been an uptick in equipment demand, there’s been an early maybe getting to the top end of their stocking levels on their replacement parts because they want to make sure they’re well positioned for the replacement part cycles that they’re expecting also to be good. We didn’t see that in the past. They would tend to sort of keep those things pretty much segregated. The last couple of times on the way down, we’ve seen a little bit of inventory cut. I think post-COVID, people have been protecting their inventories a little bit more because of the supply chain challenges that went on.

Generally, we would see a little bit of uptick in replacement part demand as they get ready for hopefully better utilization rates.

Angel Castillo, U.S. machinery and construction analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. Okay. No, that’s helpful. Maybe just to kind of round out the mobile solution side, can you just remind us how you kind of, your content per vehicle differs within mobile solutions, I guess, as you evolve across diesel or battery or hydrogen fuel cell? I know there’s been a lot of challenges perhaps on the clean energy side of the equation for transportation, but just ultimately, you know, how you kind of see that world and maybe any implications of a slowdown in penetration on your business.

Richard Lewis, Chief Operating Officer, Donaldson Company: Yeah, content per vehicle will vary depending on the end technology. We obviously follow this very, very carefully. We model it at an excruciating level of detail. Plus, we have other third-party sources of information. Everything that we’ve seen says the timing of this would be further out than we originally anticipated. We’re still thinking in terms of, you know, it’s a decade plus on the equipment side to reach peak. The replacement part side is much longer given the age and the length of these vehicles that are in the field. If you look at a fuel cell application, we would actually have a higher level of content than we would a diesel engine. If you think about combustion engines using lower carbon fuel sources, more or less the same content. If it’s a battery-powered vehicle, we would have a smaller amount of content.

We do have products that would be applicable there, but it would be a lower content.

Angel Castillo, U.S. machinery and construction analyst, Morgan Stanley: You had the partnership with Daimler on the Freightliner super truck. Just curious, in that collaboration, any learnings about that or how are you seeing the willingness of partners to invest in some of these future technologies?

Richard Lewis, Chief Operating Officer, Donaldson Company: Yeah, I think where we’re seeing across all of our customers is even though the technology change has been pushed out, they’re still investing as a strategic part of their long-term technology development. I don’t think anybody’s pulling back. I think maybe there’s more partnerships we’re seeing because people need to sort of hedge these costs. Also, the big play is going to be what other diesel emission regulations come into play while this is being pushed out. Generally, those have been good for us because it usually means a higher level of technology required on the filtration side. There’s a little bit of uncertainty on that, but I think clearly they’re committed to the technology and will continue to partner with them across multiple product lines.

Angel Castillo, U.S. machinery and construction analyst, Morgan Stanley: Yeah. Can you just expand on that a little bit? I guess as we think about the EPA 27 being under review and all these other EPA emissions regulations, what are the implications to your business if one of these gets delayed, if they get pushed out, if they get repealed? Any kind of puts and takes, or are you just kind of indifferent?

Richard Lewis, Chief Operating Officer, Donaldson Company: I don’t want to say we’re indifferent. Clearly, it’ll drive a cycle in some of the businesses. We’ve seen that multiple times. What I’ve seen is historically every emission regulatory change that we’ve been involved with, we’ve expanded market share. We’ve generally upped the requirements of the filtration across the portfolio products that we sell. I know one particular product line I was running a business, I don’t know, 10, 12 years ago. We were really kind of a niche player with the equipment manufacturers. The lead competitor had not been investing in technology. Regulatory change came in, higher technology filtration required. We actually had something on the shelf for another business, an industrial business that we were able to leverage and move over to the mobile side. We quickly built pretty close to a $100 million business in one quoting cycle.

That’s a good example of where we actually don’t mind regulation in that particular area. It’s generally been good for us.

Angel Castillo, U.S. machinery and construction analyst, Morgan Stanley: Okay, that’s very helpful. Maybe switching over to industrial solutions, can you just remind us here on the power generation side? I guess ultimately how are you impacted by everything that’s happening with powering AI data centers? How does Donaldson Company play into that world? Ultimately, what are you seeing, the trends and the impact to Donaldson Company?

Richard Lewis, Chief Operating Officer, Donaldson Company: Yeah, I think if you look at data centers, it’s just another usage of power off the grid. We’ve seen a continued upcycle in natural gas-powered demand. It’s not specific that we are naturally tied to those, but as it pulls power, it requires more gas turbines. Clearly, it’s been good for our business. All of our customers are, I would say, trying to secure capacity for the next couple of years. We’re booked out pretty solid in our plants. We do have some upside in capacity, but the utilization is probably as high as it’s been in a long, long time.

Angel Castillo, U.S. machinery and construction analyst, Morgan Stanley: Can you just maybe elaborate a little bit more on, because a lot of, I think, the OEMs ultimately manufacturing these turbines are backlogs out a couple of years. Does that mean your utilization will run at those levels for a longer period of time? Are there any other kind of, you know, I guess, what is the competitive dynamic in this market? Are you seeing others be attracted by the growth and look to enter it a little bit more? Just a little bit more of color there would be helpful.

Richard Lewis, Chief Operating Officer, Donaldson Company: Yeah, I don’t think so. I mean, these are fairly intensive engineered-to-order custom design products per application. The depth of application knowledge, the base technology required, it would be hard for somebody to enter. Even going from a non-pulse sort of technology, which is half the market, we tend to play on more of the pulse side. Even jumping across there is not easy. Different applications, different expertise required. I think probably the biggest thing will be if this cycle continues on and continues to grow, how much capacity will people bring on to deal with it? Right now, everybody seems to be holding position for the most part from what we can see.

Angel Castillo, U.S. machinery and construction analyst, Morgan Stanley: Yeah, okay. No, that’s helpful. I guess maybe just on the connected parts side, I think you’ve mentioned a goal to grow the number of connected parts by 30% in this business. Can you just talk about a little bit more of kind of your go-to-market strategy here and just what attachment rate you’re seeing, kind of a new parts and what that has been?

Richard Lewis, Chief Operating Officer, Donaldson Company: Yeah, on the industrial side, it’s a different business than our aerospace and defense and our OEM side where you compete really hard. You win a big program, you’re on that program for 8, 10, 12 years. Every day we’re out hunting on the industrial side. We have a lot of dust collectors in the field. Our competitors have a lot of dust collectors in the field. Our ability to connect those, predict when they’re going to have maintenance issues, provide the stickiness to the customers that we believe, based on data we have, helps us win new first-fit business, but also helps us have better retention rates on the replacement parts. Our connected base right now is sort of low single digits in % terms. We’re adding thousands every year, but it’s a slow process.

All of our new collectors, where the technology works, we’re sending out into the field when we control that. When we design the full system with the controller, we’re sending those out connected. There’s a high % of those going out every year. We’re also trying to retrofit collectors that are in the field. We’re also adding a service element onto it as well. It’s like, hey, you have a problem here. We see an alert. We can send out a technician. We can put you on a maintenance contract. We’re using both connected solutions and services to create better stickiness with the customer, a more intimate relationship, and hopefully better demand generation over time.

Angel Castillo, U.S. machinery and construction analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. Maybe switching over to life sciences, maybe just to start out, I guess, you used to actually work with that business.

Richard Lewis, Chief Operating Officer, Donaldson Company: I did.

Angel Castillo, U.S. machinery and construction analyst, Morgan Stanley: Just good insight there. I guess help us understand what you’ve seen kind of under the hood of happening in there because there’s a lot of kind of moving pieces. If you could maybe unpack that from a distro perspective, from an FMB, and separately kind of bioprocessing.

Richard Lewis, Chief Operating Officer, Donaldson Company: Yeah, you hit on it. Life science is really a collection of different reporting units. What makes them sort of have some commonality is the base technology. The filtration technology that we use across all of those is usually a polymer-based filtration technology. It’s a little bit different than what we would use in some of our other markets. It started with distrive. That was the first one. We came into food and bev. We also sell membranes into medical applications. Now we’re getting into bioprocessing. I think if you look across that portfolio, they’re all in different levels of maturity. Distrive is a very mature business. Food and bev is a business that’s still growing and rapidly expanding. Bioprocessing is a business where the modalities that we’re focused on, we’re at the very beginning of their journey.

We’re at different points of the life span of these businesses across this portfolio.

Angel Castillo, U.S. machinery and construction analyst, Morgan Stanley: From a growth standpoint or kind of a top line or even margin standpoint, what does it mean for distrive to be a little bit more mature? I feel like that’s been an area that’s been seeing good growth of late or good level of recovery. Help us understand what that means for just the steady growth of that business going forward.

Richard Lewis, Chief Operating Officer, Donaldson Company: Yeah, just to give you an example, it’s not completely apples and apples applicable, but I was at a heavy-duty business forum when I was running our mobile business. It was right after COVID. One of the guys, he has a business where he was selling basically laptops with a software into the heavy-duty space. I think he said he had like three years’ worth of laptops. He didn’t have any, and then he had too many. We saw the same thing with our distrive business. Coming out of COVID, it was pretty hectic. We saw that business compress down cyclically for two years in a row. It’s come back the last two years. It’s been really nice step-ups. I’d say we’re back at a steady state, kind of normalized performance level. We would expect that business to continue to grow sort of low, maybe mid-single digits.

Kind of like PowerGen, there are some capacity constraints in the market, not necessarily with us, but with some of the supply chain pieces to that market. Food and bev is a faster growing business, a more mature or less mature business, obviously growing more high single digits and then buy-outs pretty early.

Angel Castillo, U.S. machinery and construction analyst, Morgan Stanley: Perfect. I wanted to touch on bioprocessing a little bit more. There’s been a little bit of push out of some of the demand there in that business. As you think about, particularly as you were running that business, what are some of the learnings, some of the positives, some of the negatives that you see, both either things that you would have done differently or maybe opportunities that still make you really excited about this business?

Richard Lewis, Chief Operating Officer, Donaldson Company: We like the end market. I think about it as an advanced industrial market. At the end of the day, whether we’re selling into microelectronics, food and bev, dust collection, we’re helping them protect their manufacturing processes. We’re helping them get better quality, better productivity. If they’re making a drug, it’s a more regulated process. Clearly, it’s a longer process to bring a drug to market than some of the other products that we sell into. It has pushed out. Post-COVID, the environment was very open to any changes that would improve the processes. I think it’s settled back into kind of normal, you know, follow the regulations, follow the drugs through the process. We like that market. It’s a market that values technology, and it’s a market that continues to evolve very rapidly. We think it fits with kind of our core strengths.

Clearly, the companies we bought are early stage, and they’re also pointed to early stage therapies that are still developing the science behind those. We think it’s a longer-term candle burn than maybe what we originally thought. We still like ultimately the market, and we’ll continue to advance our technologies. If they’re really hitting home in the market, we’ll be putting more money behind them and pressing them. If they’re not, then we’ll sort of scale back, just like we would on any investment across our portfolio. If you think about the one we just talked about, distrive, if you go back and distrive 40 years ago, that business nearly didn’t exist.

I know for like the first five years of its existence, it wasn’t clear whether that market was going to be a good market, a bad market, but we sort of stuck with it and kept advancing the technology. The market took off. We see buyouts kind of the same thing, just kind of stay with it, plant the seeds. It’s just going to take longer to sort of see some of these mature.

Angel Castillo, U.S. machinery and construction analyst, Morgan Stanley: I want to come back to the capital allocation point that you made in a little bit, but just maybe first, how do you kind of see this structural or longer-term margin opportunity for this business as you both cost improvements that you might be making, as well as the recovery, as well as the longer-term opportunity in bioprocessing? What does that kind of look like over time?

Richard Lewis, Chief Operating Officer, Donaldson Company: Yeah, it’s above company average for sure. You know, think about growth rates that are high single digits and margins, operating profit margins in the 20s.

Angel Castillo, U.S. machinery and construction analyst, Morgan Stanley: Is that just macro recovery, or what aspects is from a self-help that you can do to kind of get it closer to that level?

Richard Lewis, Chief Operating Officer, Donaldson Company: Yeah, so if you think about the non-bioprocessing part of the business, it runs above company average on growth rate and margin. I think the bioprocessing is really about just advancing the products. We’re releasing two of the products this year. We’re a little delayed in those. As the market pulled back, we also were a little careful. We’re advancing two product lines this year. We have a couple that are a little bit more mature. They have several customers in clinical trials. We need those clinicals to see their way through and see those drugs get on the market.

Angel Castillo, U.S. machinery and construction analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. Okay. That’s helpful. Maybe just back to the capital allocation dynamic. You’ve made several kind of smaller acquisitions or duck-ins here. Could you just talk about the appetite, given a little bit of that slowdown or the push-up that we’ve seen to do something near-term, or should we think about the capital allocation strategy as perhaps pivoting more toward shareholder returns or other deployments of capital, other areas where you might see opportunities aside from bioprocessing as that kind of gets a little bit further along?

Richard Lewis, Chief Operating Officer, Donaldson Company: Maybe Brad can cover the capital allocation strategy broadly, and then we can talk specifically about M&A and life sciences.

Brad Pogalz, Chief Financial Officer, Donaldson Company: Yeah, the biggest opportunity for us still is internal investments. We do have an appetite for M&A. We’re disciplined buyers, and the criteria in a lot of ways is at least directionally the same as what we’ve been talking about: a focus on life sciences space, a focus on industrial. Growing the service business is where we’ve put some money. If we can extend products or geographies within industrial, we would welcome that too. I think as far as opportunities in M&A, it’s probably something that if we’re in the bio space, more specific on revenue generation or more a commercial application versus more pre-revenue. Of course, you know, M&A is tough because there’s a buyer and a seller dynamic. We’re always starting with the technology and then thinking about how it can apply. Angel touched on an important part though too.

We’ve got this invest in the business and invest in growth as a core part. That’s number one. We have a pretty longstanding dividend policy. We’ve increased our dividend annually for the last 30 years in a row, member of the S&P High Yield Dividend Aristocrat Index. On top of it, we repurchase our shares as a means of giving back to shareholders. Overall, we write a pretty conservative balance sheet with the idea that we want to be prepared for acquisitions when they come along and investment opportunities in organic growth when they come along. We would deploy the capital towards share repurchase as kind of a moderating lever. Last year, we accelerated that a bit. Now this year in our fiscal 2026, it’s a little bit more of a normal level.

Angel Castillo, U.S. machinery and construction analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. I think you mentioned that conservatism, right? Your balance sheet’s quite strong, and it does provide you a lot of flexibility. The way I think about some of the deals that you could kind of do or that you’ve done in the past on the smaller side, and just given how stable also your business is, why not, I guess, lever up the two terms and still have the flexibility to kind of lever up more while giving back perhaps more cash to shareholders via buybacks kind of near term?

Richard Lewis, Chief Operating Officer, Donaldson Company: Yeah, money is less free than it was. That’s part of it. I think that for us, looking at this around one time turn makes sense. We are below that. Again, the acquisition is an interesting part of an opportunity for us. There was a year where we did a handful in the same year. You mentioned they’re tuck-ins for sure. We want to be prepared for those moments too, so that we’re not at a point where we miss an opportunity as a function of the balance sheet. I think we’re well covered on both sides.

Angel Castillo, U.S. machinery and construction analyst, Morgan Stanley: As you think about your pipeline today and what you’re seeing from the potential M&A side, do you feel like the current environment is bringing some potential deals your way? As you mentioned, you might be dealing with privates or smaller companies. How does that pipeline, how does that shape it out? Is it moving closer in terms of potential deals sooner, or is it making things harder? How do you think about that?

Richard Lewis, Chief Operating Officer, Donaldson Company: We have a fairly structured process for M&A. There’s always a pipeline at different stages. Sometimes it’s nurturing relationships. Sometimes we might be nurturing a relationship for five, seven years before a deal ever materializes. Some are, we’re just answering inbound inquiries. The pipeline is a bit slower than what we would like, but we feel like it does seem like it’s starting to heat up. We are, as you said, positioned to do deals, but they have to be the right ones. We’re going to be disciplined about it. It has to be very strategic in nature. As Brad Pogalz pointed out, on the life science side, we have bets on the table. We’re comfortable with those bets. If we look at other deals in that space, we would be looking for more profit-generating companies at this point.

Angel Castillo, U.S. machinery and construction analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it.

Richard Lewis, Chief Operating Officer, Donaldson Company: Unless it was a very, very unique technology that was clearly going to have a large play in the market.

Angel Castillo, U.S. machinery and construction analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. You mentioned, again, you’ve done some tuck-ins, right? With the balance sheet flexibility of power that you have, you could do something a little bit more transformative. As you think about that pipeline, what’s kind of the mix of potential more smaller tuck-ins versus something that’s a little bit more transformative for the portfolio?

Richard Lewis, Chief Operating Officer, Donaldson Company: Yeah, it’s interesting. There’s not a lot of transformative deals that are out there. I mean, the market’s consolidated a fair bit. There still are a few, and we think there’ll be some in the future. There’s nothing clear on that side. I think the smaller, you know, we have a business that has four out of six products, and we have a great commercial engine. There’s a couple smaller to mid-sized companies that bring the other two products. You know, we can do it organically, but it might take five years, or we can go and put those two together. I think there’s more of those types of deals out there as we speak today. You know how that is. That could change tomorrow.

Angel Castillo, U.S. machinery and construction analyst, Morgan Stanley: Yeah, especially in this market right now. A lot of changes. I guess maybe just, you know, kind of bringing it full circle in terms of some of the market share gains and dynamics you mentioned, consolidation. As you think about your business, where are there still pockets where you might be able to consolidate or gain more market share? You think about, again, longer term, the ability to continue to deliver record earnings as the market recovers. Right now, your end markets are actually in a pretty tough spot. As that recovers, do you kind of foresee yourself hitting new records? What does that kind of growth look like at that point?

Richard Lewis, Chief Operating Officer, Donaldson Company: It’s funny. I’ve been with Donaldson Company going on 24 years. We were having the same conversation 23 years ago.

Angel Castillo, U.S. machinery and construction analyst, Morgan Stanley: Not a bad problem to have.

Richard Lewis, Chief Operating Officer, Donaldson Company: The good news is we’re generally every market we’re in, we’re either the leader or we’re one of the leaders. Most of our markets have natural growth tailwinds. When you layer in on top of that, some of the strategic moves we’ve made operationally with technology, we’ve been able to consistently outgrow our markets. Maybe not by a huge portion. You know, like our food and bev business has almost doubled the market growth rate for several years in a row. That’s a good example. Some other ones, it might be a point or two. We think the formula works. We don’t see any reason why the formula won’t continue to work for a long period of time. The share gains are small, and they’re generally incremental. It’s really about just doing the basics that we’ve sort of put in place really, really well.

We do think if you look across all of our products, our applications, there’s some, you know, we’ve got some businesses where our market share is really, really high. I don’t know that it can go much higher, but that’s probably the minority. Every other business, I’d say 90%, 95% of our revenue, we’re either mid-teens to mid-single digit market shares and expanding, but slowly. There’s a lot of blue sky out there. We also think in some of our markets, there’s going to be a fairly big shift. You think you look at the mobile market, you know, four companies have half the market. The other half is very fragmented. We think over time, there’s going to be a lot of consolidation there. Time will tell. We believe we’ll be a consolidator of choice on that side of the house.

With what we’re doing on the industrial from a connection service, we think we’ll be able to continue to try to up the technology game. Some of the smaller players that are more just hardware product focused, they won’t be able to come along with it. For the more larger companies that we do business with, we think that value add will sort of separate into two parts of the market, kind of a low end and a high end. We’re very confident we’ll continue to set records. We’ll have to deal with any economic shocks like a housing bubble or a COVID. The formula, we would still see mid-single digit growth and delivering higher levels of earnings on that growth.

Angel Castillo, U.S. machinery and construction analyst, Morgan Stanley: Perfect. I think we have one question here. You got him, Michael.

Unidentified speaker: Same trajectory when it came to clean energy transition and transition of the transportation sector. Now those trajectories have somewhat diverged. Does that divergence in trajectory across the three major regions create more R&D requirement? Does it create less operating efficiency as you’re servicing three different markets which have different trajectories and different requirements in technology?

Richard Lewis, Chief Operating Officer, Donaldson Company: Yeah, so if I understand your question, does the different trajectories create inefficiencies for us? It’s interesting. I would say not really. If you think about our on-highway business, where we’re strong is we’re really strong in Japan. We’re really strong in the U.S. We’re solid in China, but it’s not been a big part of our business. If you think about the trucks in China, they’re significantly less cost than a European or a U.S. truck just by design, and so they haven’t really wanted to move up the technology chain. We really haven’t put a lot of emphasis. It’s been more of the off-road. We specifically picked off-road there because the Chinese OEMs are going fully global, and so they want technology that competes on a global basis. They’ve tended to go higher technology straight away.

We’re also, like on the ag side, as we see more industrial-sized farms coming into China, they want European and U.S. style equipment, more automation, more efficiency. That fits perfectly into what we do. If you get into the base filter, not the first-fit systems that go on the vehicle, but the base filters, the manufacturing assets are very fungible. We can make an on-road filter and an off-road literally set up to set up. It’s just a matter of making more of one and less of another. No, it hasn’t really created any inefficiencies for us. The agility and our global footprint and our ability to pivot is actually, it’s actually been okay for us.

Angel Castillo, U.S. machinery and construction analyst, Morgan Stanley: I think that brings us to the end of time. I appreciate your time. Thank you so much for coming here today.

Richard Lewis, Chief Operating Officer, Donaldson Company: All right, thank you. Appreciate it, Angel.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.