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<p>Minnesota-based Ecolab, which offers cleaning and sanitizing products, water treatment systems, and consulting services, aims to reduce water use. Ecolab provided its expertise in water technology and digital monitoring solutions to Moeve, a leading Madrid-based energy company, to develop a circular recycling system, lowering water use at San Roque Energy Park, a refining, chemical, and biofuel production hub in southern Spain. The system sends a reusable stream back into San Roque’s operations by means of a membrane water system, ultrafiltration, and specialized chemistry. The collaboration between Moeve and Ecolab reduced fresh-water intake, and the San Roque lab was able to recycle up to 317 million gallons of water per year and cut down on exposure to risks from drought. 
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Change the World

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Ecolab provides water, hygiene, and energy technologies and services that support safety, sustainability, and operational efficiency. The company serves a wide range of industries including food service, health care, hospitality, and manufacturing. Its solutions include cleaning and sanitizing products, water treatment systems, and consulting services. Ecolab operates globally with a focus on helping customers manage resources and meet regulatory standards.

Q2 2026

Q1 2026

Q4 2025

Q3 2025

Q2 2025

Q1 2025

Q4 2024

Ecolab (ECL): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

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Ecolab

ecolab

At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero from your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. At this time, it is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Andy Hedberg, Vice President of Investor Relations. Andy, you may now begin.

Thank you. Hello everyone, and welcome to Ecolab's fourth quarter conference call. With me today are Christophe Beck, Ecolab's Chairman and CEO, and Scott Kirkland, our CFO. A discussion of our results along with our earnings release and the slides referencing the quarter's results are available on Ecolab's website at ecolab.com/investors. Please take a moment to read the cautionary statements in these materials which state that this teleconference and the associated supplemental materials include estimates of future performance. These are forward-looking statements, and actual results could differ materially from those projected. Factors that could cause actual results to differ are described under the Risk Factors section in our most recent Form 10-K and in our other materials. We also refer you to the supplemental diluted earnings per share information in the release. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Christophe Beck for his comments.

Thank you so much, Andy, and welcome to everyone joining us today. 2025 was another record year for Ecolab with record-breaking sales, margins, earnings per share, and free cash flow. This was all enabled by the exceptional total value our team and technologies delivered to customers, helping them achieve better business outcomes, operational performance, and environmental impact. Thanks to our team's dedication and expertise, we're entering 2026 with strong momentum and are very well positioned to deliver continued high performance with confidence. In Q4, we delivered 15% adjusted EPS growth, with quarterly growth strengthening throughout the year. This was driven by accelerating underlying sales growth and continued strong OI margin expansion. Organic sales grew 3%, driven by 3% value pricing and positive volume growth. Volume actually was stronger than it appeared, with performance improving across most of our businesses. Food & Beverage accelerated to 5%.

 Life Sciences both accelerated to 7%, and Specialty continued to drive significant share gains, growing 7% as well. Institutional's underlying sales growth was consistent with prior quarters, excluding the unexpected short-term impact from lower distributor inventories. We also maintained strong double-digit growth in Global High Tech and Ecolab Digital. And taken together, this strong momentum lifted Ecolab's underlying volume growth to 2%, driving mid-single-digit underlying organic sales growth when we Basic Industries, Paper, and these lower distributor inventories. In other words, our core businesses and our growth engines are doing very well. We expect the distributor impact to largely normalize in the first quarter of 2026. We also continue Basic Industries and paper's performance to progressively improve in 2026.

Combined with strong new business wins and continued momentum across our growth engines, we expect volume growth to get back to 1% as we exit the first quarter, with growth accelerating further as the year progresses. Our strengthening underlying sales drove organic operating income growth of 12% and expanded our organic operating income margin by 140 basis points to 18.5%. This resulted in a full-year operating income margin of 18%, up 150 basis points versus last year. We're confident we can continue to expand our OI margin well beyond the 20%. Now, before I move into our 2026 outlook, I want to take a moment to acknowledge current events in Minnesota. Ecolab has customers in more than 170 countries, but Minnesota has been our home for more than a century.

It is where our headquarters sits and where thousands of our colleagues, customers, and communities count on us every single day. In recent weeks, Ecolab, along with other business leaders across the state, have come together to call for de-escalation and a constructive path forward. As a company that has always believed in doing well by doing good, we stepped in early to help rally business leadership and support the efforts underway. I'm proud of the progress we're seeing and encouraged by the positive momentum. As expressed in an open letter signed by 60 Minnesota-based CEOs, the business community has an important role in supporting stability, strengthening local businesses, and helping build a brighter future for Minnesota. We will continue to work together to help ensure Minnesota remains a strong and resilient place to live, work, and grow. Now, looking ahead to 2026, our priorities are very clear.

First, it's to rapidly grow total value delivered to customers across our core businesses. Second, it's to accelerate our One Ecolab Growth Initiative. And third, it's to fuel our growth engines. We expect 3%-4% organic sales growth this year, with growth accelerating as the year progresses, driven by strengthening volume gains and continued 2%-3% value price. Total reported sales, including the Ovivo acquisition, is expected to grow upper single digits in 2026. And with this strong growth, OI margin is anticipated to expand 100-150 basis points to more than 19%, resulting in an OI growth of 14%-16%. Altogether, this is expected to drive strong EPS growth of 12%-15%, which includes the headwind of additional non-cash amortization from the Ovivo acquisition. Our first priority is to rapidly grow total value delivered, or as we call it, TVD.

Across our core businesses, TVD is our formal framework for measuring the business outcomes, operational performance, and environmental impact we deliver to customers. When we deliver measurable value across these three dimensions, it not only drives share gains, but it earns Ecolab's ability to value price. And with a strong customer value pipeline heading into 2026, we remain very confident in delivering 2%-3% pricing this year. What makes our value model so powerful is our best-in-class approach. With our scale, digital intelligence, and global service, Ecolab partners with customers to define what best-in-class looks like and scale it across their operations, helping them achieve peak performance. This is how we consistently help customers lower costs, reduce risk, and improve performance across their entire enterprise. Innovation is also essential to our best-in-class value model, and our 2026 lineup is strong and keeps getting stronger.

In Global High Tech, we're launching direct-to-chip cooling as a service to the data center market. This brings liquid cooling right where it's needed the most, the chip. By combining our CDU platform with Ecolab 3D TRASAR real-time monitoring, advanced coolant technology, and on-site service, we improve uptime, lower cooling costs, and allow more power to be put towards compute. In Food & Beverage, we're launching CIP iQ, an AI-enabled digital solution that uses real-time analytics for a smarter way to optimize cleaning plants. It decreases capacity, reduces water and energy use, and improves quality control and product safety, helping customers run more efficiently at a time when every hour of production matters. Early interest is strong, and we're looking forward to a healthier rollout in 2026. In Institutional & Specialty, we focused on scaling our iQ suite: Dish iQ, Aqua iQ, Kitchen iQ, and Beverage iQ.

These solutions directly address labor shortages, guest satisfaction, and rising operating costs, giving operators smarter, more automated ways to run their kitchens and front-of-the-house operations. We expect strong growth from the suite in 2026 as well. And in Pest Elimination, we're expanding beyond our rodent-focused smart devices with a new smart solution for cockroaches, extending the reach and impact of our Pest intelligence platforms. Moving into our second priority in 2026, expanding the One Ecolab Growth Initiative. We've demonstrated immense success over the last year. We've aligned our global resources to better serve our top 35 global customers, where there is a $3.5 billion growth opportunity. In 2025, sales growth with this group outpaced total company by approximately 2 percentage points. This year, we're expanding this model to our largest regional customers around the world, leveraging the tools, processes, and sales structures built for our top 35 customers.

Within One Ecolab, we've also delivered more than $100 million in SG&A savings as of year-end 2025. We achieved this by consolidating functional work into our global centers of excellence and deploying a number of agentic AI applications as one of the most advanced companies. As we shared at Investor Day, our initial One Ecolab rollout exceeded expectations, allowing us to increase our savings target from $140 million to $225 million by 2027. And today, we're increasing our savings target again to $325 million by the same year, 2027, due to the continued success of the overall program. Finally, looking at our growth engines, they now represent about 20% of our portfolio, including Ovivo Inc., which closed earlier than expected. Together, our growth engines have very attractive long-term OI margin profiles. And in 2026, we expect them to collectively grow double digits, lifting Ecolab's sales growth.

When we look at what's fueling that trajectory, Global High Tech is leading the way as AI expands and every part of its value chain depends on water: the fabs that make the chips, the power plants that fuel the chips, and the data centers that run and cool them. Ecolab is uniquely positioned in all these markets to help enable the AI build-out. With Ovivo now part of Ecolab, we provide the ultra-pure water essential for semiconductor manufacturing, supporting the fabs producing the world's most advanced chips. As we bring our unmatched capabilities together, we're building a unique circular water offering for the fast-growing microelectronics sector. Ovivo is off to a strong start in 2026 as we have already secured several new fabs where our leading ultra-pure water technologies will be deployed.

On the data center side, the industry expects unprecedented demand for AI to continue to rapidly expand. Higher rack densities and rising chip heat make liquid cooling mission critical. Our direct-to-chip cooling platform, including integrated 3D TRASAR monitoring and on-site service, positions us to help data centers improve cooling asset performance, reduce the power required to cool, and return more power to compute. And as the industry increasingly turns to water to cool next-generation chips like NVIDIA's Vera Rubin platform, we're very well positioned, backed by more than a century of experience managing cooling and water systems in complex environments at scale. As strong as that momentum is, it's only part of our growth engine story. Another major contributor is Pest Elimination. Nearly every Ecolab customer today uses some form of Pest Elimination.

With our One Ecolab selling strategy, we're unlocking a $3 billion cross-sale opportunity by delivering the most compelling outcomes in the industry, targeting 99% pest relocation through our digital-connected Pest Intelligence platform. We're leaders in deploying digital technologies to this commercial market and expect to have more than 1 million smart devices in the field in 2026. This technology not only drives best-in-class outcomes for our customers, but it also frees our team to spend more time driving strong sales growth while continuing to expand margin. We're Life Sciences. we delivered our best year yet in Bioprocessing, with sales Life Sciences has the potential to be one of Ecolab's highest-margin businesses, where we target long-term operating margins of 30%. We're investing behind this attractive and significant long-term opportunity with breakthrough biopharma purification innovations, new digital solutions, and capacity expansions.

That includes Life Sciences industrial water purification business, which is expected to begin production in the second half of this year, removing the constraints that created a drag in 2025 and positioning us for stronger growth in the years ahead. The fourth engine powering our growth is Ecolab Digital. We've grown this business to $400 million in annual sales, increasing more than 20% in 2025, and we're still in the very early days. We're investing heavily to bring market-leading digital solutions to our customers across our portfolio. In 2025, more than 25% of our innovation pipeline was digital, which has grown significantly over the last few years. The strength of Ecolab Digital comes from its focus on solving critical customer challenges and increasing the Total Value Delivered to our customers.

With all of this, we enter 2026 confident in our ability to deliver continued strong performance, and we're off to a strong start in the first quarter. For the year, we expect reported sales growth of 7%-9% and organic sales growth of 3%-4%, with organic growth accelerating as the year progresses, driven by strengthening volume growth. With 100 to 150 basis points of OI margin expansion, we expect 14%-16% OI growth and EPS growth of 12%-15%, including the impact of Ovivo. I'll end where I often do. The best of Ecolab is yet to come. Our ability to improve customers' business outcomes, operational performance, and environmental impact is more relevant than ever, and it's powering consistent double-digit EPS growth. Thanks so much for your interest and your investment in Ecolab. I look forward to your questions.

Thank you, Christophe Beck. That concludes our formal remarks. Operator, would you please begin the question and answer period?

Thank you. We'll now be conducting a question-and-answer session. We ask that you please limit yourself to one question per caller, so those who will have a chance to participate. If you have additional questions, please rejoin the Q&A queue. If you'd like to ask a question at this time, you may press star one from your telephone keypad, and a confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you'd like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment, please, while we pull for questions. Thank you. And our first question is from the line of Tim Mulrooney with William Blair. Please proceed with your question.

I just wanted to double-click on the color you gave a lot of good color in the prepared remarks, but I just wanted to double-click on that volume cadence as you move through the year, specifically organic volumes, because I know you've got a couple of headwinds from paper and basic, and as well the inventory thing with Institutional. So how do you think about these headwinds moving through the year, as well as then on the other side of it, you got that solid momentum in some of these other businesses? Can you walk me through these pieces and taking that all into account, how you're thinking about the trajectory for organic volumes, specifically as you move through the year?

I'd love to, Tim. Our framework remains the same, which is the 1%-2% volume growth and 2%-3% to get to these 3%-4%. So for the year, accelerating in 2026. And when I step back, the truth is that the volume growth in Q4 was almost the same as in Q3, as you know. So we round up or down our volume. And the difference versus around 0 and around 1 was actually only $a few million. So at the end of the day, it was almost the same in Q4 as in Q3, which is why earnings were strong. And I feel great about where we're going. But what makes me the most optimistic about our future is that, well, 85% of our businesses are doing great.

As mentioned, F&B, which we're building around this F&B United idea of bringing hygiene and water very closely together. That's done in North America. Well, it's accelerated Life Sciences to 7%, pest to 7%, water ex paper and basic to 5%. And I&S ex this distribution inventory story, there, well, it was going the same at 4% with Specialty steady at 7%. So in other words, what I really like is that our portfolio is shifting to higher growth, higher margin businesses, which is exactly where we want to go. And we deal, obviously, with the 15% of the portfolio that need to work. There will always be something, and I expect paper and basics to kind of get to a much better place as we progress in 2026.

So if I put all that together, improving the underperforming businesses of paper and basic, normalization of the distributor inventory in Institutional, and 85% of the company growing very nicely, I expect Q1 to be pretty similar to Q4, but with acceleration towards the end of the quarter and acceleration continuing in the quarters to come during the year of 2026. So overall, a very good trajectory, especially from the underlying growth.

Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Manav Patnaik with Barclays. Please just use your question.

Thank you. Christophe, I was hoping you could just double-click on the Global High Tech piece, the water, the semis, the data center piece, post-Ovivo, just help us size what do you think the growth rate is, where the opportunities are, and perhaps if you see any roadblocks to you achieving some of your growth ambitions there?

I'd love to. Manav, thanks for that question. So Global High Tech is kind of a new business for us, started it 3-4 years ago, really focused on data centers and on fabs, which is the short name for semiconductor manufacturing of microelectronics chips. And if I step back, as I've mentioned so many times, why are we so interested in that field? On one hand, well, AI demand is booming. Is that going to be a straight line to heaven? Probably not. There's going to be ups and slower ups probably as well going forward, but the trends are clearly up, and we see it from an investment perspective. Second, the power and water that's required for that is incredible.

As mentioned, so by 2030, we expect an incremental need of power for the whole of the electrical consumption of India and the incremental needs of the freshwater use of the whole United States. So at the end of the day, well, at the heart of AI is water, as mentioned before, to produce the chips because they're produced in ultra-pure water to power the chips because power generation is the second-largest water user in the world after agriculture. And the third one is to cool chips, which is shifting towards water at the same time. So high-growth market where water is at the heart of it, and especially so on those two key areas of fabs and data centers. And one might argue that power generation is also part of it. It was kind of a flat market for a very long time.

Well, that's changing because we need much more power. That's going to help as well on the side, but it's not part of our Global High Tech. So the way we're thinking about building it on fabs, since one fab requires the amount of water equivalent to 17 million people, that's an example in Korea, for instance, there. Well, the solution is to provide technology where you can recirculate water within the fab, which is really hard because at the same time, the quality of the water that's used to produce the chip is directly correlated to the quality of the advanced chips. And that's 1,000 times more pure than water that's used in blood injections, by the way. So recycling water that's difficult to recycle at the super high standard. Well, that's exactly what Ovivo helps us to do.

That was the piece of the puzzle that was missing for us. Now we can provide to the semiconductor manufacturers with circular water solutions, and we're seeing very high interest from the key players out there. The second and last I'll mention is data centers. Well, for a long time, they've been air-cooled. That required cooling towers with a lot of water that we've been used to manage for a very long time. Now that's shifting to liquid cooling, which means that you reuse the liquid in the data center, a liquid that's coming straight on top of the chip. And that liquid is not water today, but it's getting towards water tomorrow because it's the liquid with the best thermal properties, which is what we master the most as well at the same time.

Liquid cooling in circular mode for data centers and circular water for fabs manufacturing, that's the way we're thinking about it. We added Ovivo for fabs, and we will keep building our capabilities on data center today. Combined, these two businesses are roughly $1 billion, growing strong double-digit right now at very high margin. We see many opportunities to make that business way bigger in the years to come.

Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Ashish Sabadra with RBC Capital Markets. Please receive your question.

Thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to drill down further on the drivers for the 100-150 basis points of margin expansion. You obviously raised the One Ecolab savings targets and talked about $100 million of savings already achieved in 2025. I was wondering if you could provide any incremental color on the savings in 2026, but also tailwinds from pricing as well as mix shift in 2026. Thanks.

Great. Thank you, Ashish. I'll pass it to Scott just to start the answer here.

Yeah. Thanks, Ashish. Similar to the targets we set out at Investor Day last fall, this 100-150 basis points is anchored on really two things: gross margins, which is at 75-100 basis points annually, which we're thinking about that long-term, same sort of targets for 2026, and then this 25-50 basis points of SG&A leverage annually through 2030. So that's how we get to this 100-150 basis points. And then just diving into the gross margin, the drivers of that being the value-based pricing that Christophe referenced, our mix of businesses, as you see these growth engines being higher margin businesses, but also innovation. And then on the SG&A savings, if you look at over the last five years, we've delivered sales productivity almost 30%, which is sort of sales per head, which is part of that driver.

Then on top of that, with that, we're also driving the One Ecolab program, which Christophe announced that we've now increased that savings target to $325 million. And that $325 million, as we think about it, about $120 million. So think of sort of a third, a third, a third, a little bit more than a third through the end of 2025. And then the remaining $200 million will be sort of equally over the next two years. And so that'll be a driver of that 25-50 basis points as well.

Our next question is from the line of John McNulty with BMO Capital Markets. Please receive your questions.

Yeah. Good morning or good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. So wanted to drill down a little bit into the incremental margins because it looks like what we saw in pest was kind of a really explosive incremental margin in terms of how much kind of came down to the bottom line. And then when I Life Sciences side, it was dramatically less so. It was probably the weaker of the performers of your businesses. So I guess, can you unpack that a little bit in terms of what some of those dynamics might be, why we're seeing such different results by segment, and how we should be thinking about that going forward?

Hey, thank you, John. Looks like Scotty's on a roll, so he's going to take the first part of the answer here.

Yeah. Thanks, John. As we've talked about in the past, we don't really think about incremental margins in that way. But Life Sciences, you saw the oi growth in low single digits in Q4. But frankly, that was as we expected because we had targeted OI margins in that mid-teen range. It was due to two things. One, as we've talked about, we're investing in that business. Underlying margins are actually better. And then on top of it, you had a year-on-year comparison, sort of bad Life Sciences, really because of performance-based compensation. And that business sales accelerate throughout the year, as Christophe talked about. And the OI growth for the full year was 30%. And so they've earned that performance-based compensation.

But we really expect that business going forward to increase that OI to increase double digits into 2026 and going forward. And then pest, as you mentioned, was sort of the opposite. And again, that was comparing against a comp last year. As you might remember, we had a spike in accidents at the end of last year, which was creating a lower base point for them. But again, that business is doing really well, as Christophe said, growing 7% top line and OI margins north of 20%. And we expect to continue that trajectory.

So maybe a few points here to build on what Scott just said. Not every quarter is created equal. You can have year-on-year, obviously, some comparisons like our accidents in Pest Elimination, which were unfortunate a year prior. Obviously, that's changing, obviously, the margin profile on a year-on-year basis. It's also investment pacing by business. We all, in the spirit of investing the right way, at the right time, it's not always equal in every quarter. And here I'm Life Sciences, for instance, as well. But generally, it's really making sure that we get to beat the 20% OI margin that we've talked about so far 2027. We feel really good about it. So we're at 18%. So last year, we're planning to be north of 19% in 2026.

I'm already thinking about what's beyond the 20% because many of our businesses are either beyond 20% already or have underlying margins that are already north of it, which is the case of Life Sciences.

Our next question is from the line of Chris Parkinson with Wolfe Research. Please receive your question.

Good afternoon. Christophe, if we could just dig in a little bit to what you're seeing in the global water business. Over the last couple of quarters, there's been a bit of a divergence between light and heavy within water. Mining seems mixed, perhaps some life-concerning metals. F&B, it seems like it's inflected, and papers continue to be a drag. But can you just kind of give us some insights on how you're thinking about that business in 2026, what you would need to see at the top and the bottom end? And forgive me for coming out of my own range, but to the 3.5%-4.5% range, call it fourth, fifth point, obviously.

Just how are you thinking about this business, and what are you hearing from your teams to kind of confirm or deny the bottom or the top end of that range? Thank you.

I'd love to, Chris. Water is half the company. So it's a big chunk of it. We've built that business since 2011, obviously, when we acquired Nalco. And our ambition was really to create the world's water company. And we've come to that ambition over the last 10 years. And there's that feeling that we're just getting started on that journey. Now, that being said, we're serving many end markets with water. Obviously, some are growing very fast, and some are growing a little bit less. But no one has the capabilities that we do have and the reach that we have around the world, plus the digital technology that we bring into it in order for our customers to reuse and recycle water. So in a closed circle, as mentioned, so for the GHT or Global High Tech example, as I described a little bit before.

So if we look at the performance of that business, Chris, yes, we grew 2% organic in Q4 as a whole. But if you exclude pulp and paper, which are in a down part of the cycle, well, water was growing 5% in Q4, which is very strong performance. And we still want to get better than that. As I mentioned, so the biggest business in there is Food & Beverage. We are merging hygiene and water to provide the best solutions for our customers around the world. We've done it in North America. It's led to very good results. 5% for that business is good in an industry that's flat, by the way. I mean, the end customers that we are serving as well here. And we've only done North America with F&B unit. We're going to keep expanding around the world.

Then there's the Global High Tech story that I just described before, Chris, which is close to $1 billion, which is growing. So in strong double-digit rate with very high margins as well at the same time. And then you have all the businesses in between, from manufacturing areas, for instance, to our Institutional water business as well, which is providing water services to our Institutional businesses as well. But online, so we end up with a business that's underlying growth is close to the mid-singles. So this 5% dragged down by basic and paper. But those two will recover. That's the good and the less good things of a little bit more cyclical businesses. And we will deal with that. So you bring together strong underlying growth, acceleration in Global High Tech, and recovering of basic and paper industries.

You end up in a pretty good place in a business that has strong margins. We had a very good quarter in Q4. I think it was the second highest quarter of the last five years from a margin perspective. Water will get as well. So to the 20% and move beyond the 20% in the years to come.

Thank you. The next question is from the line of Seth Weber with Wells Fargo. Please receive your question.

Christophe, in your prepared remarks and the slide deck, there were a bunch of mentions about new business wins. I'm wondering, can you just give a little bit more color around that? Are these conquests from other providers or just new companies that are new to the space that are kind of just adding suppliers? Or any color around these new business wins would be helpful. Thank you.

Yeah. New business is the number one focus of the whole company. We have this mantra of we're all in sales. So no one is not selling in the company. It's either you're dealing with customers every single day, or you're supporting someone. We're serving customers every single day. I have this objective myself to meet once a week the CEO of a customer. And last year, I met close to 100 customers as well. So this is where we all collectively spend most of our time. Now, we are focusing, first and foremost, on our current customers and our largest customers as well. As mentioned earlier, so our top 35 customers have a gross potential of $3.5 billion. Well, this is where we want to focus our attention first and foremost because it's the most obvious growth to get.

And that's why we're growing much faster with those customers than everyone else. And it's the most cost-effective way, obviously, to get new business because we have service people going into those sites already today. So it's expanding the share of wallet. And at the same time, it's helping our customers because we go with end-to-end solutions, helping them get to best-in-class performance. They get better Total Value Delivered, better for their P&L. We get a share of it. So at the same time, we get higher growth, better margin for us, and it's a better deal for our customers. That's the first priority that we have. And second, it's to do the same for our local large customers around the world. And the third priority are more the individual customers around the world.

The last thing I'd say, we had our global blitz two weeks ago, which is engaging the whole organization around the world on new business. Within one week, we managed to grow our new business versus the same week a year ago by over 30% during that week as well. A very good story. Our value proposition is very well received by our customers because they need it more than ever, either because they don't have enough water, or they're trying to improve their cost performance because they have price pressure, cost pressure, and so on. This is the value that Ecolab provides to them. This is the way we sell. And this is why our new business is going very well, while retention remains very stable as well across our businesses around the world.

Thank you. The next question is from the line of Andrew Wittmann with Baird. Please receive your question.

Great. Excuse me. Thank you. I guess I wanted to ask a couple kind of maybe kind of punch list items here. But usually, you all have a view on FX that's included in your guidance. And I didn't see one in this press release, Scott. I was wondering if you could talk about the FX rates that are implicit in your EPS guidance rates. So that was kind of one there. And then just on the expected volume improvements on the water side, Christophe, are you seeing that? Is this just going to be a comps game where the comps get easier? Or are you, in fact, expecting the volumes in some of those more challenged industries to actually improve? And if so, what are you looking at that gives you that indication? Thank you.

Thank you, Andy. So let me start with the second part, and then I'll pass the mic to Scott for very different questions, obviously. The new business for the whole company has kept going up in absolute terms, so dollar of net new business, so net of what we might have lost, which is very little usually. This is true for water. And this is true for the challenged businesses as well of basic and paper. They also got to record new business. It's just that the demand then afterwards of those businesses is lower year-over-year. And that's driving the growth or the slight decline that these two businesses are experiencing as well at the same time. But generally, new business, Andy, is a very strong proposition for us.

That's why we focus the whole organization on it, making sure that whatever happens out there, new business is where you need to focus your time, gain share, even in a market that might be declining. So good story even in our challenged businesses. Now on FX, Scott?

Yeah. Happy to answer the mechanical questions, Andy. So on the FX for 2026, we're not expecting significant help or hurt. We're sort of thinking it's neutral the year, just given the current position of the dollar, probably slightly favorable in the first half, but really assuming neutral in the second half going in. Obviously, the FX is pretty dynamic, the macro environment. So that could change. But that's our going-in assumption. But even any upside in the first half, as you look at sort of all items below OI, there's going to be offsets to that. As we had in our guidance, the tax rate is going to go up from the 20.2% we had this year to somewhere between 20.5%-21.5%. And then also, which wasn't in our specific guidance, but other income is going to be a little bit of a headwind.

It'll be about $30 million next year. So that's about a $20 million decrease on that other income just due to pension assumptions. So if you look at as a whole below OI items, they're not a net help to us.

But maybe a point on this FX because it's always, when we think about so the next year or the beginning of the year, so what are the assumptions that we've taken. When I think a year ago or even all the years prior, Andy, we were almost never right. We thought that FX would be a massive headwind in 2025, while it was not. We thought that our delivered product cost would be pretty benign. Okay, the whole tariff situation changed quite a bit during the year as we know. And we adjusted. So we've gotten used to become very agile, to adapt to local conditions, and make absolutely sure that we still deliver our 12-15 earnings per share. So we hope or we think that FX is going to be pretty benign in 2026. Maybe it's not.

If it's not, we would adjust accordingly as well as we've done in the past few years.

Thank you. The next question is from the line of Vincent Andrews with Morgan Stanley. Please receive your question.

Thank you. Good afternoon. Just a question on the One Ecolab cost savings. You raised it again. I'm just wondering if your assessment is that this will probably be the last raise to it or if you still think there's opportunity there. Maybe there's some conservatism in the number because it looks like the cash costs associated with achieving these benefits are still nicely above the benefits themselves. I often think of those two lines or those two numbers ultimately intersecting. Maybe just your latest thoughts there and how that might carry forward into 2027. Thank you.

Maybe a comment before I pass it to Scott. I don't think it's conservatism. It could have been, but it's not in that case. We're leveraging, obviously, some technology, AI agents, agentic technology as well here that no one has really done so far. So there's no real benchmark blueprint out there. You've probably seen that we ranked number nine on the Fortune AI list of most prepared companies. So for the age of AI, I really saw encourage the whole team to embrace technology, to stay at the frontier of what's out there, and to see how it works. And for the most part, it's been a very good story. It's not a perfect story. There are places where it didn't work.

But 80% of the time, it's working really well, where it's driving better outcome for our customers, for our teams, the way we operate, while at the same time driving huge productivity gains. And my feeling is that it's going to keep improving in the years to come. But we don't know exactly where it's going to come from because the technology, in some cases, doesn't even exist. Scott?

Yeah. Christophe said it very well, Vincent. The savings momentum is better than we expected, as you said, moving from that 225 to the 325 now by 2027. And it's that way as we're learning, but also moving up the value chain as we deploy technology and AI in these high-touch processes and then leveraging the global COEs that Christophe referenced before, which allows us to deploy that technology at scale. But I think as we think about 2026 to 2027, that incremental $200 million from what we've already realized, I would think about that pretty evenly. And then long term, this is really an enabler to this 25 to 50 basis point of SG&A leverage, which is our long-term target. And that's relative to historically what we've done of about 20 to 30 basis points.

Really almost doubling our SG&A leverage that we've had historically enabled by the One Ecolab and the scalability that it provides.

Thank you. At this time, the next question is from the line of Patrick Cunningham with Citi. This is easier question.

Hi. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. Just on the digital sales piece, could you maybe give us an update on how your ability to monetize these technologies has evolved in 2025, where you ultimately see it going, and where you're getting the best traction with customers?

Thanks, there Patrick. I love that question. Well, at Ecolab, we've been for a long time in the business of building great new businesses. And Ecolab Digital, as we know, as you know, is a fairly new business that we started two years ago. It's not that we started digital technology and digital offerings to our customers two years ago. We just did it as part of our offering for 30 years when we invested in 3D TRASAR technology. And we haven't monetized directly that offering to our customers for, okay, 28 years of the last 30 years that we've been in that field. So we're building that new organization. We created a dedicated organization on that opportunity. In the early years, it's not perfect. It's a bit rough on the edges at the beginning. But that's always been true when we build new businesses.

But the fact that we are already generating close to $400 million of sales, which encompasses only two components of it, it's connected hardware and it's software. Those are the two elements that are driving those $400 million, a very high margin and growing, obviously, north of 20%. And I think we'll grow probably 25% in 2026 as well here. And we're really at the beginning of it. The way we think about digital sales at Ecolab, and especially in the future, is what we call the 100, 100, 100, where 100% of the customer locations that we serve will have to be connected. 100% of the applications that we provide to each of those locations, think about a hotel where you have a dish machine, a laundry machine, an AC unit, Pest Elimination, EcoSure audit systems, and all that. Those are the applications.

100% of them need to be connected. The third element is 100% of the time where people pay for it. 100% of the units, 100% of the applications, 100% billable offering. This is the way we think about it. That's why when I think about the $400 million we have today, we have just scratched the surface of what we can do. We still have a lot of customers using those technologies that do not pay because they're still on the old programs. We have a lot of customers that do not use it today, especially in Institutional because it's relatively new that the cost barrier is not the barrier anymore. For most of our customers as well. We have millions of customers out there that can use it. That's why Ecolab Digital is a great story, very early in that development.

I think it's going to become one of the biggest growth drivers of our company going forward by driving customer benefits ultimately because our promise is to have them reduce their total operating cost. That's the TVD that we've always promised to our customers.

The next question is from the line of David Begleiter with Deutsche Bank. Please receive your question.

Thank you. Christophe, Basic Industries and paper. is your confidence in a back-end recovery just because of easier comps? Or are you seeing some underlying improvement in these end markets as we progress through the quarter? Thank you.

Thanks, David. It's a combination of both. That industry, so the paper and packaging industry, has had a dual challenge. On one hand, okay, a demand that was pretty low. And at the same time, related to it, consolidation of the industry. So consolidation means that they were closing paper mills. And a paper mill for us is a big chunk. So it can be up to $10 million or $15 million of sales in one location. Well, if it happens that that location gets closed, okay, there's not much you can do because you're not going to sell much to that location anymore. So we had to go through that the last 12-24 months. And that seems to be behind us. We haven't seen in our environment mill closures in the last few months, which obviously is a good news for us as we enter 2026.

New business is good in that business as well. Innovation is strong as well at the same time. The margin of that business was, what, 13% last year? It's not Ecolab average, but it's still okay, if I may say. The combination of both, kind of recovering progressively and pretty good margins even in a down environment in 2025 makes me a bit more optimistic for 2026. I'm not even close to declaring victory on this one. Same Basic Industries, different industries, obviously, but similar model as well. We're dealing with it, making sure we make money in all of those businesses. We keep gaining share as well. As those industries recover, that's going to help us as well over the next few quarters.

The next question is from the line of Shlomo Rosenbaum with Stifel. Please receive your question.

Hi. Thank you very much. Quick questions. Christophe, if you normalize for that distributor inventory reductions, again, just looking at a normalized way, what's going on with the volumes? Are the volumes actually going up? If you didn't have that surprise, are the volumes going up, or are you still you're kind of at a flattest trajectory? And then there's just a technical question I want to ask afterwards. On slide 13 on the top left, it talks about water's organic operating income growth is expected to something in the first quarter of 2026. And it's blank or there's a word missing. Is that expected to go up, go down, be flat? If someone could just answer that. Thank you.

Thank you, Shlomo. A few questions, obviously, that you have in there. I&S, Institutional & Specialty, basically nothing changed from a demand perspective. And if you normalize, it was 4% organics for I&S and 3% for the Institutional division and 7% for Specialty. Generally, nothing to see in I&S. In a market that's a difficult market, as you've probably noticed, the restaurant and hospitality industry is not doing great right now. But we're gaining a lot of share, which is really good. Maybe a comment on this distributor inventory. Why did they go down? And that's not under our control. It's obviously our customers deciding that. Well, the better we become in our supply chain service, the more reliable, the more accurate we become, well, the less inventory they need to carry from our products. We've seen that in the past a few times already.

That happens mostly at the end of the year as well. Well, that's exactly what happened in the fourth quarter. And that takes a few weeks to happen. And then it takes a few weeks or a few months to normalize as well. But it's driven by two good things. On one hand, demand hasn't changed. And on the other hand, the inventories went down because our service improved. Okay, we don't like the updates, but generally, it's a good thing as well going forward. And your question on the water, so for the slide 13, I had no idea what slide 13 was, to be honest. So I'm glad I have some help here. I think that the word was missing. And what I'm seeing here, it should have said expected to accelerate. Probably perhaps.

Thank you. The next question is from the line of Jeff Zekauskas with J.P. Morgan. Please receive your question.

Thanks very much. I have a couple of questions about Ovivo. Is Ovivo roughly $500 million in sales, maybe growing to $550 million? And is the EBIT, I don't know, $75 million, the EBITDA $100 million? Can you give us an idea about that? And Ovivo is a combination, I think, of sale of equipment and consumables. What's the balance between equipment sales and consumables? And in the fourth quarter, it seems that you excluded it. That is, you took out the interest costs that were connected with the acquisition and the revenues of Ovivo itself. Why did you treat it that way from an accounting standpoint? And what do you plan to do in the first quarter? Thank you.

Thank you, Jeff. So stop looking at me because I'm not the accountant here in the group there. So he's going to take that question of the December accounting. And I'll cover your other questions after that.

Yeah. Thanks, Jeff. So as you know, Ovivo closed a bit earlier than we expected and wanted to show the Q4, really show the underlying business without the transaction noise, which was very consistent with how we handled both the Purolite and Nalco acquisitions. So if you look at it, because in Q4, the deal closed in the middle of December. In Q4, we had like a half a month of interest expense, but very minimal sales and a little benefit just given the timing of close and mix of the business geographically. So it would have been very noisy and was not part of our guidance that we had for Q4. And again, it's consistent with how we treated Purolite and Nalco.

That's the first part of the question. So I hope it answered your question, Jeff. And so now on Ovivo as a business, it's roughly $500 million. Yes, it's a bit less than that. And it's growing double-digit. The way it looks for the first quarter is double-digit growth as well. I've been very pleased with the new business in that field. It's focused 99% on fabs, as you know. And we've closed a few very interesting deals in Singapore and in the U.S. It's very few customers, as we know, that are producing some microelectronic chips. But those are very big every single time. There's no one that can do what Ovivo can do. And there's no one that can do what together we can do, which is this circular approach of using and recycling ultra-pure water.

95% of the water does not get recycled in microelectronics today, which is a major issue. Our ambition, it's to get north of 80% recycled, so from 5% to 80% or in some cases, even 100% of reuse. Now to your question on equipment and consumables, Ovivo as such is mostly technology and much less consumable. What's important to us is the combination of Ecolab and Ovivo, which then becomes very much like an Ecolab business where it's mostly consumables and technology as a secondary growth driver. That's why we really like it. It was a technology that was really hard to develop. No one is even coming close to them, Jeff. We could have developed it ourselves. It would have taken years. The second issue is to get the credibility with those microelectronics manufacturers. They're very few.

They're not exactly risk-takers for technologies that are absolutely critical to the chip manufacturing. That would have been a second hurdle for us as well. Everything is happening as we speak as well at the same time. A great business coming with what we have done for a very long time in terms of water management. Well, it's a typical 1 + 1 equals three. I think that for our fabs business, it's going to be game-changing.

Thank you. The next question is from the line of Matthew DeYoe with Bank of America. Please proceed with your question.

Yeah. Thanks for taking the call. My question. So I think you're done with year one of One Ecolab that you'd rolled out to the three largest customers. What's the feedback and any wins, learnings you can take as you deploy this to I think it's the top 25 customers in 2026, so an incremental 20 or so adds. And when do we see this as more of a top-line driver? What kind of rollout do you ultimately need? Because it did feel like you have a pretty considerable amount of sales opportunity just with that top 35 based on the kind of conversations we've had over time.

Yeah. So it's 35 customers. So it's our top 20 largest customers in the world and what we call our emerging 15. So those are not the biggest, but the ones having the potential to become some of our biggest, microelectronics being a perfect example of one of those 15. So you get to 35. That could drive $3.5 billion of share increase potential. That's why we focus on those ones first and foremost. It's simpler because it's fewer customers, and it's the biggest potential, the $3.5 billion, in many locations around the world. So we've gotten organized behind those 35 customers, which are the biggest brands, obviously, that you know in all industries as well at the same time. So that organization component has been done.

The growth of those 35, as mentioned before, so is two percentage points higher than the rest of the company. Facts are demonstrating that it's working. It's probably the second biggest moat that we have as a company, our first being our team serving our customers everywhere around the world, is delivering best-in-class performance. Basically, we help each of those customers understand what's the best-in-class performance within their own company. If it's a restaurant, what's the best guest satisfaction, what's the best cost performance, what's the best environmental impact. If it's a data center, it's uptime, cost, and impact. You get the system here. We help them drive the performance of all their units towards the best-in-class performing unit within their company. We do the same across the industry, not sharing the names, obviously, to help our customers understand all day from best-in-class performance.

So it's been developed based on an idea from a few of our customers a few years back. And those customers are ultimately asking even more than what we can deliver today, which is kind of a good problem to have because our customers, I would say, are ahead of us in terms of what they would like to see from us and what we can deliver. Well, that's a good problem to have. And that's where we are.

Our next question is from the line of Mike Harrison with Seaport Research Partners. Please receive your question.

Hi. Good afternoon. Christophe, you mentioned the iQ suite. I was wondering if you could talk about what penetration looks like today versus where you think penetration could go over the next, say, 2-3 years. Just curious, are you 5% or 10% of the way to where you hope to be or more like 30%, 40%, 50%? And I guess as we think about growth in the iQ suite, where would we expect that to show up? Does it show up in digital sales? Does it show up in Institutional volume growth? Or does it show up in margin expansion or all three?

The short answer is all three, Mike. So first, your question, penetration, it's in the low single digit today. So we're very early here. As mentioned often, this is something we did not exactly do in our Institutional markets because it was too expensive for our customers to embrace that technology. Things have changed dramatically in the last two years. And we have the knowledge and expertise from our water industrial businesses. So we're kind of very well positioned for that. So very early on that journey. Second question, where it comes, well, our reporting segments are our traditional four reported segments that we have. The digital sales that we're mentioning are the digital sales of those four segments. So they're included in the four segments, which is the way we've presented it the last 12 or 13 months that we're doing that.

Last but not least, yes, it improves the margin because digital sales have way higher margins because there's no real cost or hardware cost related to it on the software side. On the hardware side, it's a little bit different, but it's much higher than the average gross margin we have in the company. It's all three.

Ecolab (ECL) Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

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