Fortive at Morgan Stanley’s Conference: Strategic Focus Post-Spin-Off

On Wednesday, 10 September 2025, Fortive Corp (NYSE:FTV) presented at Morgan Stanley’s 13th Annual Laguna Conference, outlining its strategic direction following a recent spin-off. The company emphasized a balanced capital allocation strategy aimed at boosting shareholder returns. Despite facing headwinds in certain sectors, Fortive remains optimistic about its growth prospects through innovation and customer-focused strategies.

Key Takeaways

• Fortive is executing its Axle Research Strategy to drive profitable growth and shareholder value.
• The company is confident in achieving its 2026-2027 financial targets, including 3% to 4% organic growth.
• Emphasis is placed on share buybacks, strategic bolt-on M&A, and maintaining regular dividends.
• AI integration into the Fortive Business System is a key focus for enhancing decision insights.
• Headwinds in healthcare and government sectors are normalizing as anticipated.

Financial Results

• Fortive aims for a 3% to 4% organic growth profile by 2026-2027.
• The company generates approximately $1 billion in free cash flow annually.
• Shareholder returns are prioritized through share buybacks and dividends.
• Fortive expects adjusted EBITDA margin expansion of 50 to 100 basis points.

Operational Updates

• Fortive operates 10 market-leading brands, focusing on customer intimacy to drive growth.
• The M&A strategy has shifted towards smaller, strategic bolt-on acquisitions.
• AI is being infused into operations to leverage software and data for customer insights.
• Fluke’s business model benefits from diverse offerings and recurring revenue streams.
• The AHS segment expects normalization in growth as healthcare reimbursement policies stabilize.

Future Outlook

• Fortive remains confident in its 2026-2027 financial framework, targeting high single-digit EPS growth.
• The company anticipates normalization of healthcare dynamics over time.
• Current subdued growth in 2025 is seen as a favorable comparison for future performance.

Q&A Highlights

• Discussions covered the impact of Fortive’s spin-off and strategic changes under new leadership.
• The potential for bolt-on M&A and divestitures was explored.
• The role of AI in Fortive’s operations was examined, highlighting opportunities for innovation.
• Analysts inquired about headwinds experienced in Q2 and expectations for recovery.
• Key performance indicators for business line health and the competitive landscape of the AHS segment were assessed.

For a comprehensive understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript.

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

Chris Snyder, U.S. Multi-Industry Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Thank you, everybody. Chris Snyder, U.S. Multi-Industry Analyst. I’m with Morgan Stanley. Very excited to have Fortive up with me today. We have President and CEO Olumide Soroye and CFO Mark Okerstrom. Thank you, guys. Olumide is going to start off with some opening remarks before we get into Q&A.

Olumide Soroye, President and CEO, Fortive: Thanks, Chris. Thanks for having us. It’s great to be here, as always. We are right into our first quarter as New Fortive. I thought I’ll provide just a few highlights as context for the Q&A. Really, kind of three main things. The first one is we are diligently executing the Fortive Axle Research Strategy that we laid out at our Investor Day. Our team is really excited about the progress we’re making. I would say that the goal for that strategy is to accelerate profitable growth. In that process, to also accelerate shareholder value creation in the next few years. We laid out three key pillars for driving faster growth: innovation, acceleration, commercial acceleration, and recurring customer value. As we laid out on our last earnings call, we’re making really strong progress on those, and it continues.

The second key point is, based on what we’ve seen so far in the second half of the year, we are right on track with the guidance we provided on our Q2 earnings call. That is really credit to the laser-focused execution by our teams. Nothing’s been surprising compared to what we said on that call. At the same time, we remain confident in the medium-term financial outlook that we laid out at our Investor Day 13 weeks ago. As you recall, we talked about a 2026-2027 financial framework. We remain very confident in that for a few reasons. One, in New Fortive, we now have this portfolio of 10 brands that are market leaders in really attractive segments with great circular trends. They come into 2025 with a demonstrated track record of delivering at or better than the financial framework that we laid out for 2026-2027.

We know this business has the capacity to deliver that. Execution on our growth acceleration strategy gives us a lot of confidence as we come out of 2025 to really accelerate. In many ways, the subdued growth in 2025 provides a great comp as we go into 2026-2027. We feel great about that. The final point I’ll make is on capital allocation. We’ve continued to really stay within the exact parameters that we laid out, which is a more balanced capital allocation strategy. At this point in time, that’s all about shareholder returns and maximizing shareholder returns. We believe right at this moment that buying back our shares is attractive. We are looking at small, attractive bolt-on M&A, but we hold those to a very high strategic and financial criteria bar.

We feel no pressure to do any bolt-on deals at all. We have also been really clear that we are not looking at large transformational deals. We like our portfolio. We like to have a runway to show the value we can create from that. We are not in the business of large deals at this moment. We will maintain the regular dividend. We did a reset on that, just consistent with the spin-off that we did. We will continue to invest in attractive organic growth ideas. That is really our story. We have got a clear strategy we are executing. We are on track with what we talked about on last earnings call. For 2026-2027, we are on track with the financial framework we laid out. Our capital allocation plays exactly what we talked about.

Chris Snyder, U.S. Multi-Industry Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Thank you for that. I guess, you know, it’s been three months post-spin. I guess, what does the separation mean for Fortive? What opportunities can arise by being a standalone, singularly focused company?

Olumide Soroye, President and CEO, Fortive: Yeah, I think it starts from simplicity. By having these 10 brands all about keeping the world safe and productive, that gives us just a singular focus on what we’re about. These 10 brands are also all consistently number one and number two in the markets that they play in, and attractive markets. That simplicity and that focus on a high-quality portfolio is very attractive, and that’s a big opportunity. The second thing that comes out of that is the chance to be a more consistent grower and a faster grower. We really do believe that each of these brands has a strong runway ahead of them, and we’re laser-focused on capturing that growth potential in the businesses. Finally, capital allocation. In New Fortive, we have a business that really has a portfolio that’s been fine-tuned for what we need.

We don’t need any dramatic activities from an M&A point of view, which means our capital allocation becomes really about we generate about $1 billion of free cash flow a year. We can really, at every point in time, put that in the best use, that use the best risk adjusted returns for shareholders. If that’s share buybacks, we’ll do that all day long, and we’ll keep a high bar on bolt-on M&A. On simplicity, growth, and just the ability to focus our capital allocation, that’s a very different play than before the spin.

Chris Snyder, U.S. Multi-Industry Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Yeah, and you know, maybe you specifically, you’ve obviously been at Fortive for a while, but first quarter as CEO, are there any changes that you’ve implemented as you took over that role? Are there any insights or any new perspectives that you’ve gathered, you know, maybe with some fresh eyes?

Olumide Soroye, President and CEO, Fortive: Yeah, we try to keep it consistent with the key value drivers. My focus really with our teams has been three things that probably wouldn’t surprise you. The first one is customer intimacy and growth. We really do believe that the 100,000 customers we already have across Fortive provide the best opportunity for us to grow, and there’s a great runway ahead of that. Personally, I’ve been spending a fair amount of my time with customers, which then means our whole team is also doing the same thing. This idea of just spending more time with our customers so we can understand what innovation they need, ways to accelerate value for them.

The insight coming out of that is, you know, I’ll tell you from the last few months, I am incredibly excited about how much our customers trust our teams, how much they look to us to help them unlock value from a range of things that only Fortive and our operating brands can do. That’s been the change for the company. I think it, you know, in the end, growth comes from being closer to your customers. That’s a culture shift for us that we’ve been driving. The second one is on capital allocation. With Mark, as my partner here, we’ve revamped our M&A engine completely to be a lot more focused on bolt-on M&A rather than bigger deals, really much higher strategic and financial criteria that we pass them through. I think that means the funnel’s become much smaller, but they’re higher quality prospects.

The things that if we were to do any of those would be incredible returns, similar to before we talked about that we did in the second half of 2023, which are now double-digit ROIC in the second year. It’s been a lot of kind of changing the mindset of the company around the role of M&A in our strategy, that we have a formula for value creation that does not require heroics from an M&A point of view. That’s been a change for our team. The final one is on the Fortive Business System, where we’ve just done a lot to infuse AI into what’s our secret weapon as our operating model, and also to infuse more growth tools into FPS. I think the insight coming out of that is our teams are energized by that.

Our teams want to grow faster because that’s where the flywheel starts for everything else. It’s been a great few months.

Chris Snyder, U.S. Multi-Industry Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Yeah, so while maybe M&A is not as big of a piece of the capital allocation profile, it’s still a piece. It feels like it could be a regular piece, just that the deals are smaller. I think on the last conference call, I think the quote was, "We’re open for business." I guess, when could we start seeing bolt-ons come through? Any sort of cadence to that? Did the "open for business" refer to only buying, or are there maybe small businesses within Fortive that could be thought of to be divested?

Olumide Soroye, President and CEO, Fortive: Yeah, I think the "open for business" comment really is about within the frame of our balanced capital allocation. Going forward, we will do share buybacks where it offers the best returns. Any M&A thing we do, which will be focused on smaller bolt-on deals, will have to compete from a return point of view, risk-adjusted, with buying back our shares. We’re always looking, and the way I’ll describe it is, you’re right, we have a great surface area of potential bolt-on deals that are attractive. At this point, there is a really high bar that we just introduced into the system. There’s going to be a period of time where we’re refining the funnel to get it to things that really pass muster under this new higher bar. We’ll play that through over time.

It is the case that targeted bolt-on M&A that help reinforce our growth capacity in our existing businesses will be a part of our formula over the medium term. We’re just not in a rush at all. When we do those deals, they will be great deals because we don’t feel the desperation to do a deal if we don’t find great ones.

Chris Snyder, U.S. Multi-Industry Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Yeah, I wanted to ask about what AI could mean for Fortive. On one hand, I could see that, you know, you guys sell productivity solutions. You guys could use AI to sell better workforce productivity solutions. The other side could be that, could AI be a competitor to some of the products that you guys have? How do you think about AI, you know, in that context for Fortive?

Olumide Soroye, President and CEO, Fortive: Yeah, I think overall, the AI theme for us is just an exciting opportunity. Because in the end, if you think about what we do at Fortive, there’s 25% of the company that’s kind of software type of product. They’re vertical software with deep proprietary data. A lot of them have two-sided networks to them, and a lot of them are deeply embedded in customer workflows. These are really important connections that we already have with customers. The conversations we’re having with customers is, and we have 100,000 customers, they’re saying, "You’re already in our system. We already trust you. Can you help us unlock the true business value from all these AI capabilities by embedding them as use cases within your solutions?" That’s what we’re doing at scale across all of our operating brands right now. It’s exciting. It’s exciting for our teams.

As you might recall, Chris, we had the foresight of starting our AI Center of Excellence almost seven years ago now, before GenAI became fashionable. We’ve had a chance to really have a leading position in introducing some of these use cases with our customers across our businesses. That’s what we see the most separate from how we deploy it for internal productivity. The productivity work that we do is not something you can abstract and do with AI because it’s really about delivering decision insights for customers at the right point. The more important thing is the connections than at some level the insights themselves. That’s why we’re excited about it.

Chris Snyder, U.S. Multi-Industry Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Appreciate that. You guys at the 2025 Investor Day targeted a 3% to 4% organic growth profile, modestly lower versus the mid-single digit that I think the company targeted at the 2023 Investor Day. Is that a function of where we are in the cycle? Is there more prudence? Are some verticals lower growth than we thought previously?

Olumide Soroye, President and CEO, Fortive: Yeah, I think if you kind of step back and look at the storyline on growth for this portfolio, this portfolio that’s now in New Fortive, and if you just, you know, kind of take that out of how Fortive existed before this, it’s a portfolio that’s delivered 4% component of growth rate organic for five years coming into 2025, and pretty consistently with a narrow band around it. We know it has that capacity. We are executing a set of strategies that I talked about in the beginning around product innovation, commercial acceleration, and customer value that we believe can increase that growth rate over time. If you step back, we certainly feel like the potential for this portfolio is exciting, and the history is very strong. What we did with the financial framework we laid out is we know we’re in 2025 right now.

That’s a little bit noisy and growth is a little bit subdued for a variety of reasons that we’ve talked about, macro reasons in 2025. What we really did was, based on the history, based on what we’re seeing in 2025, allow kind of a gradual ramp in that growth as you look at 2026-2027, which is what we said was kind of 3% to 4% in our framework. We said it gets better after that. It’s really more, if you think about the time series, nothing changed in our sense of the capacity for growth of the portfolio, but we really were just being balanced in the time series.

Chris Snyder, U.S. Multi-Industry Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Appreciate that. Maybe last one on strategy. You changed the guidance approach, and you’re only providing full-year guidance for adjusted EPS. I think there was a lot of people in the market that wanted more organic growth or kind of some more numbers around that. Has your perspective on this evolved at all since the call? Are you planning to provide more going forward?

Olumide Soroye, President and CEO, Fortive: That’s Mark’s favorite.

Chris Snyder, U.S. Multi-Industry Analyst, Morgan Stanley: I think we feel good about where we are right now. As you called out, we did two things. One was we went to full-year, updated quarterly as opposed to specific quarterly guidance. Secondly, we did reduce the number of metrics that we were guiding on. We did that at the same time as providing modeling help so we could make sure that the sell side and the buy side knew the cadence of how the year would unfold and some directional guidance on core revenue. We did it really to align with how we’re thinking about the value creation formula of this business, which really is a multi-year story that’s punctuated by years, not by quarters.

I think this gives us the ability to have the flexibility to make the investments that we need to make to drive towards our goal, which is benchmark beating returns over the course of the next three to five years. Appreciate that. I guess kind of moving more towards the operations a little more near term, you guys called out three headwinds in Q2, some fluid channel dynamics, government, and healthcare. Could you provide some color on each of these headwinds and when we could expect to see some of that alleviate?

Olumide Soroye, President and CEO, Fortive: Yeah, I think the headline on it is it’s all playing out exactly as we anticipated on our Q2 earnings call. I may just start with the first one, which is really the tariff uncertainty for some of our short cycle businesses in the latter part of June, especially had some customers that had big orders to place saying, you know what, I’m just going to wait a few weeks and see what comes out of that early July, July 9th time period that people were expecting there might be some change. Like we mentioned on our Q2 earnings call, the order pattern is normalizing already, and that continues to be the case. Part of what happened is we really just had kind of a backlog build in Q2. That’s playing through just as we expected, and we’ll be fine on that.

The tariff overhang and what happens with APAR and what the Supreme Court does with that, that’s obviously still out there. We think at some level, the system has embraced the uncertainty. We’re not finding that to be the headline news at this point. With respect to the other two, the second one was on healthcare, where some of the changes in reimbursement policy had hospitals really just, especially for capital equipment purchase, where they were trying to buy a new piece of sterilizer, saying, you know what, I’m just going to wait a little bit and see how this plays out. Again, this was in the context of June, where they were waiting to see what bill was going to get signed on July 4th.

Like we mentioned on our earnings call, we’re beginning to see customers emerge from that period of kind of hunkering down, and things are beginning to flow. Like we said, all of the deals in our funnel for those capital equipment are still there. It’s just a matter of timing. That will continue to flow through over the quarters ahead, just exactly like we presumed in the guide that we provided. For government spending, the same thing. It was a June year end for state and local agency question. They didn’t spend as much as they spent the last few years, keeping in mind some of those last few years, we were growing 20%+ in that business, so pretty tough comp. Those are essential projects that have to be done at some point. It’s all of our communities. The infrastructure maintenance has to happen at some point.

That’s beginning to flow through. It’ll take some time. Again, just exactly the way we presumed in our guide.

Chris Snyder, U.S. Multi-Industry Analyst, Morgan Stanley: On your comment about, I believe it was Fluke, effectively just built backlog during the quarter. I guess any sense of how long or how quickly that excess backlog will be worked through and brought down?

Olumide Soroye, President and CEO, Fortive: We’ve been through that a lot, as you can imagine, in the last few years. We fully know how to burn backlog, and I think we’re right on course. It’s not exceptional. We’ve been through periods of bigger backlog builds, so I think it’s within the normal range from my point of view. To Mark’s point, you know, this was more of a quarterly blip thing than anything of note.

Chris Snyder, U.S. Multi-Industry Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Appreciate that. I think a lot of the companies that are at this conference, they’re driven by industrial production. We can model that because we can tie it together. Fortive is harder. One thing I’ve always felt like, I think from the outside looking in, it’s sometimes hard to realize, like, what is making things better or worse? I guess, is there anything that we should be monitoring to kind of help us understand the status, the health, the trajectory of some of these business lines?

Olumide Soroye, President and CEO, Fortive: Yeah, and that’s something we continue to put a lot of thought into to make sure we’re as helpful as we can be. Obviously, for us, it feels simple because we see all of it. We’ll keep walking on that. I think while to your point, we have these two segments and they have slightly different drivers. In the end, the industrial part of Fortive, I think the PMI is a good index to look at. Now, you’ve got to translate that because we’ve been doing much better than PMI for a long period of time. You have to do some kind of adjustment to PMI. There’s some correlation, maybe separation in time. We may always do a certain number of business points better than PMI. That’s a good index to watch on the industrial side.

I think on the healthcare side, hospital procedure volumes and hospital CAPEX are certainly relevant indices because that tells you how much operational activity is happening in hospitals, which drives some of our businesses, and how much capacity expansion is happening, which the CAPEX will tell you. Again, while those may not be, if this goes up by 10%, we’re going to go up 10% the same quarter, those are kind of a few metrics that might help. Another one is kind of construction index, if you look at that for state and local agencies especially. I think between across those four, PMI, construction index for state and local, hospital procedure volume, and hospital CAPEX, that’s probably a good kind of set of metrics to get a sense of, is the underlying, you know, kind of market for Fortive getting better, getting worse?

Chris Snyder, U.S. Multi-Industry Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Thank you. That’s really helpful. Maybe talking about a facility asset lifecycle specifically, industry leader there for you guys. Can you talk about what really drives that business? Who is Fortive competing against to win that? Why does Fortive win there?

Olumide Soroye, President and CEO, Fortive: We have three operating brands. What we do is really help organizations and government agencies manage the lifecycle of their built environment. The important thing is we’ve selected vertical specific plays. Instead of trying to do a horizontal play that manages the built environment across everything for everyone, we’ve picked areas where we believe we have the number one businesses, there are deep profit pools, and there are circular trends that suggest it’s a good place to be in. In those few areas that we’ve picked, one in the case of ServiceChannel, is helping organizations with multi-site retail manage their billions of dollars of RMO spend. That’s attractive because it’s a lot of money they spend there. There’s a lot of value a customer can get from really being good compared to benchmarks on how they manage their RMO spend.

We happen to have a business that has the deepest two-sided network, so 100,000 contractors on one side and a whole list of the leading multi-site institutions on the other side. They meet on our platform every day to decide what’s the best place to execute any particular repair and maintenance activity in their facilities. That’s a very specific thing. It’s surrounded by proprietary data that we’ve had for decades. It’s surrounded by AI use cases that we’ve built on top of that data. It’s surrounded by this two-sided network that nobody else really has. That’s an example of a very unique play that we’ve picked. Competitors, it’s kind of hard to define because no one does exactly that. There are other companies that do something, but they don’t have two out of the five things that we have.

If you look at what we do in our Gordian brand, which again, very focused, and there’s a few elements of that, but the biggest one is helping state and local government agencies to execute their community construction projects in a way that complies with some of the regulations on how they need to procure projects in that particular jurisdiction. It’s written into law that if you want to do job order contracting, this is the way to do it. We happen to have the platform for them to execute that. If they spend less, we may make less money, but otherwise, it’s a great business. That’s why we grew 20%+ for a couple of years. Competitors, it’s just that it’s a different, there are other players that do pieces of it, but it’s a different bundle that we have.

The other one is Accruent, which really has a number of different pieces to it. That is probably the one that has the most observable universe of other players that do the same thing. It may be slightly less differentiated than the other two. The same idea applies. They’re deep leaders in the categories they play in. I think in many ways the reason we continue to believe that that file platform has more growth potential is because of the quality of those brands.

Chris Snyder, U.S. Multi-Industry Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Thank you for that. Facility asset lifecycle collectively, it’s a highly recurring business. Can you talk about how the company gets paid? I guess maybe throughout the lifecycle of a building, obviously construction, but then beyond that, how does that work?

Olumide Soroye, President and CEO, Fortive: If you look across FPL, 65% of it is just software businesses where the customer signs a multi-year SaaS license and they pay off something each year, and it escalates over the years. That’s pretty straightforward. There’s another 25% or so that is, we call recurring, which is really this piece around helping state and local government to execute their construction projects. The math on that is they spend $1 billion, and if they do it on our platform, using our data, using our software, using our network, we get a percentage of that spend. As long as they keep spending, we keep getting a percentage of it. The rest of it is just professional services that tend to be linked to executing some of the software projects that customers procure from us. That’s a simple way to think about it.

Chris Snyder, U.S. Multi-Industry Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Appreciate that. Maybe turning over to Fluke. In Q2, it wasn’t a destock headwind. It was more that orders weren’t effectively converting to revenue, if I understand that right. I guess kind of two questions on Fluke. How long can those stay disconnected? The follow-up is, can you just talk about why Fluke is such a durable business? I think from the outside looking in, people say, oh, the short cycle sells into distribution. Obviously, you guys have a different view, so I’d just like to hear that.

Olumide Soroye, President and CEO, Fortive: Yeah, I think on the first part of your question, Fluke’s continued to, from a point-of-sale point of view, order point of view, really maintained, we’re really happy with how it’s continued to perform. I would really say the Q2 event was a few big orders getting delayed a few weeks. I think there is really no disconnect in Fluke. I think it’s really shown itself to be really durable. On your point on why is it durable and why it’s different, I think a number of things. Fluke today is different than it was six years ago. 15% of the business is now recurring models. Software, AI use cases, service plans for customers, and high-value professional instruments. That certainly, and that’s growing double digit a year very quietly. That provides a bedrock. If you think about the Fluke brand, it’s global. We’ve got a set of solutions.

Some of the businesses, $100,000 price point products that are going into some of the leading institutions. Then you’ve got $600 digital multimeters for your local electrician. It’s just a really, it’s a terrific diversity of offerings that all connect because the person that’s buying the $600 instrument, they trust your brand because they know you do the $100,000 stuff for the person that sets the standard. It just has this beautiful aspect of it that we built by cobbling those pieces together over time. That makes it more durable. People always say, you know, PMI has been in contraction for a lot of time in the last five years, and Fluke orders keep growing. Is that ever going to stop? I’m like, it hasn’t, and I don’t hope it does anytime soon.

Chris Snyder, U.S. Multi-Industry Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Yeah, I mean, it feels like there’s a lot of benefits of productivity, particularly with the demographics that we see on labor. That really resonates. Maybe turning over to healthcare. The AHS segment, organic growth turned negative in Q2, down about 2%, 3%. You talked about second half being similar to that. Obviously, Q3 is the tough comp, but can you just walk us through the dynamics impacting the AHS segment and how you see the rest of the year playing out?

Olumide Soroye, President and CEO, Fortive: Yeah, so again, I think if you step back beyond 2025, we like the AHS kind of trends over time. I think we feel good about the things our teams are doing to keep the growth up. A few things I would observe. In 2024, the AHS segment grew about 6.1% organic growth. That’s a little bit faster than kind of its normal pace. To your point, Q3 especially was a particularly high comp, so some of that factors into it. Like I mentioned on the healthcare reimbursement environment, there was something that happened in Q2 with respect to these hospitals holding back, especially on capital equipment purchase. We just expected that would take some time to unwind. That’s what’s playing out. Some hospitals are now like, OK, I got to, I have to place this, so let’s go. We’re beginning to see that flow because we have the funnel.

We didn’t lose a single one of those things, so it’s going to flow through over time. What we don’t know is how quickly that flows through. Once it all flows through, the medium-term growth capacity hasn’t changed. It’s just customers getting through this period of uncertainty. We feel good about the financial framework we have for 2026-2027 and the role that AHS plays in that. Again, keeping in mind that 2024, that segment was actually above our fleet. It was kind of 6.1% growth, so this year is a little bit of that comp factor playing in. We expect that normalizes over time.

Chris Snyder, U.S. Multi-Industry Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Yeah, one thing that’s kind of been flagged in the market is that Asterix, a key competitor to ASP, had a strong Q2, guiding to, I think, even better growth in the back half. They don’t seem to be facing some of these pressures. I guess, can you just kind of talk about what could be driving that disconnect?

Olumide Soroye, President and CEO, Fortive: Yeah, I think, first of all, we’re always curious. We’re asking our team all the time, like, what’s going on? It’s a question, as you can imagine, we spend time on. I think a few things to keep in mind is these businesses are all very different. We have a lane that we’ve picked that we really like, which is low temperature sterilization, and we are the leaders in that lane. Some of these other companies do a lot of other things that may be going well at any point in time, so just keeping that in mind is important. I think comp is also important, especially if you look at capital equipment. I think we did really well last year on that, so keeping that comp factor in mind is important as well.

The thing we know is what we see with our customers, which is we have a great funnel of opportunities. We’re winning. We’re winning even more than we used to win. From a success point of view, we feel we like the trend line, but it’s just a list of very specific things that are delayed. We have clarity on what we’re seeing. I think for some of the other companies, it’s just different mix of businesses, different comp, different backlog, kind of scenarios that people start the year with. I think there are other things that just get noisy. We’re always pushing to learn what we can from it.

Chris Snyder, U.S. Multi-Industry Analyst, Morgan Stanley: I appreciate that perspective. Obviously, this year we’ve faced some headwinds. You called them out. As we look into 2026, do you feel like those normal targets are in scope? 3% to 4% organic with a 50 bps plus of margin expansion?

Olumide Soroye, President and CEO, Fortive: We remain confident in the financial framework that we laid out for 2026-2027. When we get to Q4 earnings, we’ll have more guidance on 2026. From a financial framework point of view for that 2026-2027 block of time, we remain really confident that, you know, kind of 3% to 4% core growth, 50 to 100 basis points of adjusted EBITDA margin expansion. I think we said high single-digit plus EPS growth. That’s still well, well on track for us. We also, importantly, had this plus-plus sign after 2026-2027. Our confidence remains that these businesses have a chance to do much better than those numbers for 2026-2027.

If you look at historically for the five years before 2025, the businesses we’re talking about all delivered better than that 2026-2027 framework that we laid out from a core growth point of view, margin point of view, and, you know, any way you think about kind of effective EPS growth point of view. We feel confident about that. The reason we feel confident about it is we’re doing the right things. We’re executing on innovation acceleration, commercial acceleration, trying to add more value to 100,000 customers. We believe these businesses have positions of strength in markets that are attractive. In many ways, the noise and subdued growth in 2025 is good comp as we go into 2026-2027. I think there’s a lot of factors that go into giving us that confidence on the framework.

Chris Snyder, U.S. Multi-Industry Analyst, Morgan Stanley: I appreciate that. We’re up on time. Thank you, Olumide. Thank you, Mark. Really enjoyed the conversation.

Olumide Soroye, President and CEO, Fortive: Thank you. Good to see you.

Chris Snyder, U.S. Multi-Industry Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Thank you.

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