Patrick J. O'Leary
Analyst · John Inch with Bank of America
You really kind of have to split our business up into sort of short cycle and late cycle to talk about that. If you look at how we behave historically, obviously, we're 2/3 short cycle. The businesses where we would normally look at them as lead indicators, like hydraulic technologies, sort of broad-based global business with a lot of different end markets, and the more Industrial side, the Flow, that's where we'd normally see our first indications of change up or down. And frankly, our shortest cycle business of all is the Test and Measurement segment. And you can see from both the Q3 results and our expectations for Q4 and the backlog being sustained despite significant organic growth execution in the shortest cycle businesses, we're not seeing a significant change in demand. I would characterize maybe the overall environment as slowing growth. And then, if you switch over to the longest cycle businesses, we really saw 2 major things there. Obviously, the Transformer business where we're seeing what I would describe frankly as robust demand, but pricing malaise are continuing. That business looks like it's at the early stages of a recovery going into 2012 based on double-digit increases in volume over a period of time for mostly replacement distribution transformers and, obviously, we've got a large power activity on the side. And then with respect to the largest, obviously, the Thermal segment, we're also at low-cycle demand for our historical large markets, which are Europe and the U.S., and you will know what the reasons for that are. So that business continues to be sort of I would say at the trough. And as we said on the call, it has remarkably stable orders. I mean, it doesn't actually feel like that business has been -- had flat orders year-to-date, 2011, and 2010 up, but that's the reality. Where we are getting strong quoting activity in the large projects is the Middle East and, frankly, that's kind of across the board. And there are decent-sized orders coming up in the U.S. We have one nice order for dry cooling in Q3, $50 million for solar project. So there, I would say in the emerging market, definitely, orders to be had but a very competitive environment, which is what you'd expect given the fact that the traditional markets are still lackluster.