Douglas M. Baker
Analyst · your emerging markets that they're an area of strength in the quarter. I was just hoping you could give a little bit of color as to -- maybe some more regional -- more specific regional commentary there, and really, what's driving that in the face of really some pretty shaky second quarter growth. Is it share gains or were your end markets maybe not seeing that kind of wiggles in the economic environment in the emerging markets
Yes, well, we've worked -- we don't think about the emerging markets as like we have a mono strategy that we're applying to them all. We have, I'd say, a more nuanced view, so it's market-specific. Russia is -- primarily, but not exclusively, it's an energy story first, and I would say water story second, and those are the focus areas. Our Russian business continues to progress well as a result. Brazil, our focus is Energy and more on the food side, the Food & Beverage side. Both those businesses have progressed very well. Institutional around it is also doing pretty well as a result. GDP figures are not always a great indicator of how our business is going to perform, because GDP is made up of a whole bunch of areas that don't impact us. We are much more -- we pay much more attention to industrial production, to food production, to rooms sold, to restaurants visited, et cetera. I mean, those and the energy story, we already talked about in an earlier story. India had double-digit growth. That's a market that we're investing in. I would say happy to reinvest our profits from India into that business for the foreseeable future. In China, we've made a number of outsized investments and are seeing a larger business emerge. That business, in total, was just under double digits for the second quarter, and really, that was driven principally by energy weakness in the downstream market, where they just got overbuilt, and then they usually radically adjust production when they get into that situation there. But the core Ecolab businesses in China have recovered very well, are growing at -- handily in the double-digit range. Water business is improving. Paper business is improving there. So some of that is because last year, the industrial production in China was way off and much worse than GDP would have indicated. So in a lot of ways, we saw the bottom last year from an IP standpoint. While this year isn't great, I think in comparison to last year, it's modestly better, just the underlying market conditions there. So that's a quick walk around the world. I think in total, those businesses continue to outpace our other businesses, which you would expect. We think we're positioned well, and we think we've got strategies that work there, pretty much independent of GDP, obviously, not completely independent.