William M. Cook
Analyst · Eli Lustgarten with Longbow Securities
Good question, Hamzah. Overall, we're still primarily an organic growth story as we have been over the past 2 decades. We think that we certainly see the opportunities to grow and diversify organically, and we also believe that, that's probably a safer model in terms of our financial and operating performance, not that, that we're averse to acquisitions, but they're the smaller part of our growth model. So we would project into the future maybe about 2% of our annual revenue growth should come from acquisitions and, say, roughly 7% organically, which is close to what -- organic is close to what we've done over the past 2 decades. I think the -- from organic diversification, we have some businesses that we're really trying to build out. I mentioned the Integrated Venting Solutions, which is sort of taking our disk drive technology into new markets and markets that move differently than other -- many of the other markets that we're in. That's where that business performed better or had such strong year-over-year comps. It's still small, but it's growing very quickly, so that would be an example. Regionally, we see where our shares are lower, that we see significant opportunities to get into some of the emerging economies that we think over time will run on different cycles. And then the third way of doing it organically is to build up a bigger aftermarket presence. That's typically more stable and tends to cycle, as we're seeing now differently than the OEM business. We would use acquisitions typically for bolt-ons into either markets that we're in or that are closely adjacent. But that doesn't preclude that if we saw a new filtration platform that would help us grow and diversify, that we would add it. But that hasn't been typically our model, but we would consider doing that. And certainly, we have the balance sheet that would afford us the opportunity to do that. We've talked about in our strategic plan, with discussions with people like you, Hamzah, about trying to build out our liquid filtration, especially in fuel filtration, but also maybe some other process liquids as well. So those would be the opportunities for further diversification as well.