John Engel
Analyst · JPMorgan. Please go ahead.
Yes. If you think about EES as being three kind of operating groups within it. We have construction business, Patrick, we've got industrial business, we've got an OEM business. So momentum vector wise, I think Dave touched upon it earlier in the call, but I'll come back to it. Our momentum versus prior year and sequentially improved for both construction and OEM in the third quarter or EES. That's a good indicator. Industrial, though, we saw slowing – a slowing in momentum and that ties to the kind of industry-wide sluggishness in the industrial markets in the U.S. principally. We saw a materially better results in Canada for both construction and industrial versus the U.S., a very good position there. That economy is performing a little differently than the U.S., and we had very nice results there. For EES overall, also, Dave mentioned, I'll highlight, backlog actually grew sequentially. And that's not typical for EES. Typically, EES' biggest backlogs in Q2 and you start to eat the backlog as you go through all the construction season through Q2 into Q3 and early Q4. So that's kind of the overall momentum vector. Again, we – remember, we're not a residential construction business. We're a non-resi business. So everything other than resi, we have all those types of projects. And it's just – it's a big composite when you think about our construction business. So – Dave, I don't know if you want to add? Maybe solar is – what we saw is we're comparing against some challenging comparables from 2023 last year – excuse me – and if you look, we had some large solar project business in the first three quarters of last year. So that's not a new dynamic or a new driver, Patrick, in Q3. That was also the case in Q1 and Q2. And our solar business like-for-like year-over-year is down double digits, strongly down double digits. But that's not dissimilar to others in the space, right? If you go and look at others who have reported, I think it's being called out by a number of other companies as well. And look, I still think there's renewables growth in the U.S. There's no doubt about it. Depending on the election outcome, that will determine the mix, as I said earlier. But think of 2024, just given the project timing for electrical distribution as being some challenges, some more of a down year for solar.