Gene Lowe
Analyst · UBS. Your line is open
Sure. So, yes, let's kind of – let's go by the two different areas. So I'll start with HVAC cooling, really there's two segments in that area. There's the open circuit cooling towers, and then there is the fluid coolers, which is closed circuit. Open circuits, the bigger one. We believe we're the leader in that market. We're very strong there. We have a very nice position, particularly in the upper-end of that market, large applications, so a very good business. On the fluid cooler market, we’re the relatively new entrant there, we just started getting products into that market, I would say maybe 15 – 10, 15 years ago. So we would be the third player in that market out of the three. It's a smaller market, but we see some nice growth opportunities in that market. If I look at margins, I would say they are in line with the rest of our business. I don't really see them being particularly accretive or dilutive. I do think, it provides some nice growth opportunities for us. We actually are broadening our product range, so it can hit – we're basically expanding our TAM, so we can go after more applications and we think that's going to provide some growth opportunities for the cooling business. With regards to the upfront costs, I would say there's – we have a lot of R&D in our cooling business, a lot of engineering hours that's always built into our model. So this is nothing outside of what's already built into our run rate business. So this is really a function of the priorities from product management who have executed it through engineering. So I wouldn't expect any upfront deviations, but we – frankly, we see this as a nice growth area and we're pretty excited about some of the innovations that have been coming out of there. It's been a segment we haven't spent as much time on as the open circuit and we think that's good. As a reminder, the company that we acquired HTF, they do have coils and coil products. So this can actually benefit us as we move to expand our presence in the fluid cooler market, so that's what we're talking about on the cooling side. On the heating side, a lot of our efforts really on building our expanding our product line in the commercial side and we've talked in great detail about the SVF, our stainless steel, high efficiency commercial product that is having a nice traction in the market. We feel really, really good about the product and how it matches up to the competitors, including Lochinvar who's the leader in that market, what we need to do is to really build out the channel where, historically we're a distribution model, resi 75% of our business, 25% is commercial. We need to continue to build out our commercial channel in line with our expanded breadth of product line. We have made a number of investments there in R&D, but that's already gone through the P&L. So we don't really see any really changes or deviation that's been built into. We have a very – a lot of focus on our NPI every year that's built into our KPIs and I don't think you'll see anything extraordinary in upfront costs with regard to those. But really I think both of those areas are good examples where there's been a pretty relentless focus from all of the businesses on organic growth initiatives and how to understand voice of the customer, how to build some really good products and strong value propositions and how to win in the market. So we're excited about the opportunities we see in the HVAC side.