Thanks, everyone, for joining us this morning. I'm Vijay Kumar, the life science and med tech analyst at Evercore. A pleasure to have with us Mettler-Toledo. Representing the company, we have CFO Shawn Vadala, and we also have Adam Uhlman from Investor Relations in the audience. Shawn and Adam, thanks for taking the time this morning. Yeah, thanks for hosting us, Vijay. Great to be here. You know, tools has been pretty interesting this year. I do have my bunch of questions, but before getting to questions, if you wanted to make some opening remarks about third quarter, and then we could proceed to the Q&A. Yeah, sure. So the third quarter, you know, certainly didn't come in the way we expected it in terms of sales. You know, a big part of the story was China was a lot weaker than what we expected. I assume we'll talk more about China this morning. But, you know, maybe kind of stepping back from it, I also think it's important to remember, too, that I think the organization is still executing really well. You know, the resilience and the agility in the organization is still really excellent, and I think the organization's ability to focus on our strategic pillars, our different initiatives, continue to drive margin expansion, protect profitability, but most importantly, positioning the company for the future. You know, and I think this is something that's very much on our mind, is how do we, you know, how do we make sure that we come out of this a stronger organization? And so there's a lot of thought and efforts kind of put into that, whether it's through innovation, whether it's through continuing to invest in the areas that we see as great growth opportunities for the future, like our service business, or whether it continues to be to invest in our internal programs that will, I think, kind of help drive growth in the future. In Q3, to be fair, I think the rest of the space has had its fair share of issues. Mm-hmm. So I don't think, like, you guys were unique. When I look at the components of what drove your third quarter performance, labs down, high signals. I know you don't look at, you know, pharma versus non-pharma necessarily, but I think your peers have been citing, you know, challenges within that segment. So maybe comment on what did pharma do for Mettler in third quarter, and what have you been hearing, you know, specific to that customer segment? Yeah. So, you know, in addition to China, I mean, our core end markets were also down in the quarter, which kind of led to a more challenging result. But, you know, when you look at our core end markets, about 40% of our business is sold into life sciences more broadly. And clearly, pharma and biopharma was down a lot more than the other segments, and we kind of saw that in each region of the world. And one of the things that kind of stood out to us is that, you know, we typically benefit a lot from our diversity. You know, if you think about it, we're selling instruments right from R&D through process development right into production. If we look at the different product categories throughout the portfolio, they were all down in the third quarter, which shows you that there's really a fundamental step back in terms of spending, you know, more broadly in that space. And what we kind of continue to hear is, you know, things are being delayed. You know, like, there's a good engagement with customers, there's certainly a lot of interest in customers, there's opportunities with customers, but the reality is that funds are not available and budgets have been cut, or things are being delayed. Sorry, 40% of your revenues is life sciences. Is that a proxy for pharma, or, what is pharma for Mettler? You know, so within that number, we would have, you know, large molecules, small molecules, CROs, CDMOs, and testing labs. The small molecule would be, you know, larger than or bigger than the large molecule, you know. But, as you know, we have a very diverse exposure. You know, on the large molecule side, we would have, like, liquid handling. So think about pipettes, you know, that are used, you know, in research, but also in quality labs. We'd also have process analytics, you know, that is used in bioproduction. You know, if you think about our process analytics business, we're actually the first company to have in-line sensors and bioreactors. So it's really part of the brand and the history of the company there, and then we've been able to expand that over years with other different sensor technologies. We also provide pure water solutions into biotech. And then we have, like, more nichier things, like protein aggregation that we can you know kind of analyze through our automated chemistry business. And then, but even, like, on the industrial side, we're selling, you know, you know, if you think about a lab reactor, you know, there's a lot of process control that goes into weighing and filling the reactors and formulation. That's all kind of connecting weighing technology with terminals and process control, so there's a lot there. And then on the kind of the more traditional small molecule side, of course, we have a very wide range of instruments, whether it's our balances or analytical technologies. But what's also interesting there is that we sell up to 40% of the instruments on a typical quality lab bench, you know, and we can connect a lot of them with our LabX software. And so that's that continues to be a real differentiator for us. We think that that's gonna resonate in the market, and then we think that that's gonna be a really important value proposition going forward. And it kind of goes beyond just the ability to help out companies with data integrity. It helps them with automating workflows. You know, I think that's, as companies look for more productivity in the lab, LabX is gonna be increasingly, you know, more important. Overall pharma bucket, was it down in line with your labs, down high singles in third quarter? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And within, you know, you mentioned large, small, CRO, CDMO. We'll keep China aside for a second. Yeah, sure, yeah. But were there any differences between these different buckets, you know, CRO versus CDMO versus, you know, large pharma, small pharma? I mean, nothing, nothing that, you know, nothing to point out from my perspective. Yeah, nothing to point out. I mean, I'm sure there were certainly differences, like for example, we know that bioprocessing was down. There were some destocking issues with single-use sensor technologies. I mean, that certainly stood out, you know, during the quarter. But, you know, broadly, I wouldn't want to try to you know, paint a picture that there's a good part here. You know, I think there was just a everything was kind of down, some maybe a little bit worse than others. Understood. So you would say bioprocessing was a tad worse than the other areas? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Why, you know, just taking a step back, different companies have cited different reasons for, you know, pharma cautiousness. When you speak with your customers, what's been the feedback on why customers have turned cautious? Yeah, I mean, I think that's the question everyone's kind of looking for, right? And of course, it's complicated. You know, one of the themes that I kind of hear and that I kind of think about myself, and might be a little bit more of my own theory, is that I just feel like people entered the year with a different expectation. You know, they entered the year assuming business levels were gonna be at a much higher level. And I'm talking about from our customer's perspective. And then when the business conditions changed, they had to change and adapt, just like, you know, just like we have to change and adapt. I think, you know, as a result, people had to focus on their own productivity and their own, you know, cost savings initiatives, and kind of just revisited what they were intending to spend, you know, during the year, and they had to revisit that. So I feel like there is an element of just kind of rethinking through, you know, spending and budget flows and, you know... But it's dynamic, and we'll see how that plays out as we kind of get into next year. Understood. I think, look at your fourth quarter guidance. I think guidance is for revenue is down high singles. How do you characterize the macro environment, relative to that guidance? Have things been playing out in line with that sort of, your expectation? I know your earnings was fairly recent. Yeah. So it's a little bit of a moot question, but, I have to ask. Yeah, sure, sure. No, I understand. Of course, like you said, there haven't been too many working days since we provided guidance just a couple of weeks ago. But maybe it's good to reflect on what was on our mind when we provided that guidance, you know? So first of all, we expected China to be down similarly in fourth quarter as we saw in third quarter. Now, the comparison gets a little bit better there, but we, you know, we're still a little bit cautious on China here for the fourth quarter. And then, the other big assumption was the year-end budget flush. You know, we typically don't talk a lot about budget flush in our business, but the reality is there's some level of year-end seasonality to the fourth quarter each year, and it's kind of hard to estimate, you know, what that means or what that is. We kind of looked at it by the different product categories. And, you know, typically for the group, our seasonality would be something like the sequential from third quarter to fourth quarter would increase by low double digit in a typical year. This year, our guidance is more in the, like that 4%-5% kind of a range. So, we did take a more cautious view on it versus historically, but that's certainly something that, you know, we'll see kind of how that plays out, in the fourth quarter. So that up mid-singles versus historical double digits, sequential ramp-up, essentially the delta is no budget flush. Is it right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, I'm sure there's other things about, like, you know, weak market conditions in China, you know, weak market conditions, but certainly there's an element, a large element to that would be, quote, "the budget flush." Yeah. In a typical year, when, when, when do we start seeing a budget flush? Should it be around this time, or is that late in December? I mean, a lot of it is in December. I mean, some of it would already start around this time. You know, of course, we knew the October results when we provided guidance, you know, but I don't really have any new insights, like I said, at this point in time. Gotcha. And so no, perhaps it is a delayed start, but we haven't seen anything so far from a customer activity level. That's a fair comment? I'm sorry, can you repeat that? We haven't seen a pickup in customer activity level from a budget flush perspective. Typically, it starts around this time period, but we haven't seen a pickup so far. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't want to give too many insights with just a few working days since we last provided guidance. But yeah, it's, I think it's a fair comment. You know, you did bring up China. That's been another big topic for the tools companies. I think you know, down double digits for fiscal 2023, and all of it almost driven by second half weakness, right? What is... I guess you know, you guys are probably close to customers in China as anyone else. What are customers telling you in China? What's driven this almost an about turn? Yeah. I mean, we always say things in China can change quickly. You know, we've said that many times in the past, and I'm sure you've heard me say it. And, you know, sometimes it changes for the good, and sometimes it changes for the bad. I mean, a year ago, I think we would've been sitting, not in the same location, but we would've been sitting together, and you would've been asking me about our outlook for 2024... and I would have probably told you that one of the things on our mind was that we're concerned about these prolonged COVID lockdowns in China, and what effect that would have on the country. Literally, just a few weeks after that, the lockdowns ended. About, you know, over 80% of our workforce got COVID in a few weeks. I mean, it was crazy. We got through it, and then we all kind of entered 2023, you know, kind of optimistically. You know, I think everyone viewed that as an, you know, a signal that the government was gonna focus less on COVID and was gonna focus more on, on the economy. And so there was this expectation, kind of in the year, that there would be a lot more investment and more stimulus, and everyone was asking questions in that regard. And I think we all expected something to happen, and then nothing really happened, you know? And then I think, you know, if you look at China, people do tend to, or companies tend to look more towards the, the, the government for direction. Then what was happening is that uncertainty started, you know. And as uncertainty started about, like, what the government—if they were gonna focus on the economy or not, they started to, you know, kind of hold back in terms of their investments. And then what we started to see is kind of an acceleration of that happening in the third quarter. And what we saw in our business was that there was a lot of spending that happened during COVID, you know, you know, especially in the lab space. Like, the government really spent a lot of money, not only in testing, but through development and everything, and so there was a lot of spending. So it's hard to, like, necessarily really get your arms around, like, what was all that spending for? Was that maybe somewhat of an acceleration of a replacement cycle, or was it really, truly, spending on COVID? And so I think there was some element of some stocking also that went on because, you know, with the lockdowns, there was a lot of focus on supply chain, and so there was an element to that. Now, our products aren't typically the kind of products that you would stock, but I think there might have been more of that in China than there would've been in other parts of the world. And like I said, there was an expectation of the stimulus that didn't happen. And then, you know, and then with some of the geopolitics, right, there's lower levels of foreign investment at the moment. And then there were other topics going on in the country that were creating uncertainty, you know. So just not a very good investment climate. But if you kind of, like, pivot from that, right, and you say, "Okay, well, what does our business look like there?" What we're hearing is that there's a lot of delays. You know, we're not necessarily hearing cancellations. I mean, the team there still has some optimism, believe it or not, you know, despite the numbers being down so much because I think there is a strong pipeline of activity in the country. The government still is very committed to life sciences, and I think that's important. You know, if you think about it, this is a country that, you know, really was focused on having their own vaccine. You know, they wanted to develop their own vaccine. They wanted to produce their own vaccine, and I think that's a strong signal for how they think about life sciences going forward. So I think there will be a lot of focus on research and development. There will be a lot of focus on the production of pharmaceuticals and biologics in the country as well, too. At the same time, there's also a lot of focus on being self-dependent in a lot of strategic end markets, like lithium-ion battery, like semiconductors, like new materials. These end markets are very important to us because we provide solutions throughout the entire value chain, from R&D through, all the way through, through production, and we've seen very good growth opportunities in those different industries. So I think as the government continues to focus on that, that will be important for us. And then, you know, we talk a lot about trends in automation and digitalization. China's no different. You know, they're looking for more automated solutions. They're looking for more connectivity. They're very interested in collecting data. And so our instruments really help them with, with those types of, trends as well, too. And so we've seen very good growth in those types of areas over the last few years as well. So, I think once we kind of get through this reset, I think there is a lot of opportunity there. You know, if you look at our business, you know, we're, we're not that exposed directly to foreign investment. About 15% of our business is sold to multinationals. Out of the rest of the mix, about 60% is to private companies in China, with the other 25% being on the state-owned companies. And it's that 60% that still looks to the government for direction, that we're just looking to have more confidence, you know, like we're... And I think, you know, at some point, the government is providing, you know, some types of support to the economy now. You know, there's clearly priorities on the real estate market and just kind of supporting the general economy. Not directly our end, our business, but indirectly, I think that still helps, you know, to kind of provide some more confidence in the overall economy. Lots of helpful details out there, Shawn, but maybe one on your comment about hearing a lot about delays in China but not seeing cancellations yet. Have you looked at that funnel and that order book? Like, are they stale or, I'm curious, has sales been having conversations with customers, and how robust is that funnel or, I guess, the staleness of that funnel, if you will? Yeah, I mean, we typically are only sitting on about 1.5 months' worth of backlog, you know, so, like, what, kind of what you see is what you get to a certain degree, you know. And, but, you know, like I say, like, we're, you know, nothing I would read into any of that, you know? But, but I'd say that, you know, there is, you know, we're going through a challenging reset at the moment, but I think, you know, coming out of that reset, there's, you know, there's still optimism for the future. And, you gave the breakout between, you know, MNCs and, and private companies and government-owned entities in China. When you look at third quarter, China overall was down 25%. Were all these different buckets down in a similar magnitude, or did you see any, any, you know, plus or minuses between those buckets? Yeah, I didn't see it. Yeah, that's a good question. I didn't see the breakout in terms of private versus MNC numbers. But maybe the way that we did see it is, like, in terms of product category, you know, about 50% of our business is lab, and about 40% is industrial, or core industrial. And that core industrial would have been, like, 60%, like, 10 years ago. And within that core industrial, I'd say we have a much better mix of business than we did in the past. But the lab business was down over 30%, probably closer to, like, mid-30s%, in the quarter, where the core industrial business would have been down high teens%. So I think that says a lot about, like, you know, where the biggest weakness was, which was, you know, pharma, biopharma. But it wasn't like the industrial business was insulated. Now, our industrial business does sell into pharma and biopharma- Yeah as well, too. But I think some of the other core end markets were also under a bit of pressure in the quarter. Based on your current guidance or outlook for China, what's the implied CAGR, when you look at the China revenues versus pre-pandemic 2019 levels? Are we back at trendline levels? Has the excesses of, you know, spending that's been flushed out of the system? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, the way we look at it is, like, when we provided our view on, like, medium to long-term growth a year ago, when we did that, we didn't assume China was gonna continue to grow the way it historically grew. You know, our expectation that it would grow high single digit, and that's still our expectation. You know, for the reasons that I mentioned a few minutes ago, like, we do think that there's gonna be a lot of investment in China for China, and we think that we're very well positioned to capture those opportunities in the country. Or maybe to ask the question slightly differently: How long do these cycles in China last? Oh, okay. Yeah. Right. Is that six months, 12 months? Is there more, pain to come in China? Yeah, I mean, of course it's difficult. You know, you know, given the... historically, we don't have too many reference points with China slowdowns, fortunately, but probably the most recent one was in, like, that 2013, 2014, 2015 kind of a range, where it was like a slower, more elongated recession. But there was also a lot of change fundamentally going on in the economy. You know, like, this was, I think, probably the beginning of how they when they wanted to pivot more towards a consumer-driven economy, and then some of the five-year plans started coming out, out of that, that started focusing on a little bit more of the end markets that are more strategically aligned with us. And so, and that was a great opportunity for us. You know, back then, pre that time, our business was probably 60% core industrial, with a mix much more towards heavy industrial. We exited some of those businesses, and now we have a much more favorable mix of businesses with 40% of core industrial. But if I look at our business historically, whenever we've had sharp declines, usually things have come back in a shorter time period. Now, I'm not trying to call anything here on that, and I certainly don't want to call- Yeah ... you know, a V-shaped recovery here. But I would just say, historically, when things have gone down suddenly, the recoveries come back a little bit quicker. What triggered those historical recoveries? Like, was that typically associated with some sort of government stimulus program? Is that what we should be looking for? Well, I mean, I'm kind of talking a little bit more globally here when I say that, but usually a lot of these things are when there's... Sharp declines usually happen when there's a lot of uncertainty, and then when that uncertainty is removed, you start to see the strong recoveries. And so, if you apply that to China, a lot of the uncertainty is around the things we talked about, whether it's, you know, lack of stimulus or even just government support, people questioning, you know, where the government's focus is. Certainly, some of the geopolitics, you know, are at play with some of the foreign investment and topics like that. But in the end, it will come down to, you know, I think the government has so much influence on their own economy there, and just kind of, like, giving the signals that, you know, eliminate some of the uncertainties that have been there for the last, you know, few months. Just given the macro issues that China's facing, is there any reason to believe any stimulus programs this time around perhaps might be different from prior cycles, as in, any stimulus programs might be less favorable to life sciences? Would that make sense? Yeah, I mean, it could be a little bit. You know, I think their priorities right now are, you know, if you put yourself in their shoes, right, you have the real estate topic, which is a pretty big issue for the country. There's a lot of wealth associated from a personal side with real estate there, so that affects, ultimately, consumption. Real estate also historically is a source of funds for a lot of their stimulus programs, and so rightfully so, there's a lot of focus on the real estate market, and then they have, you know, broader issues with their economy that they need to focus on, too. I do think that the—I mean, I think that that does not mean that they're gonna ignore life sciences. I think life sciences are, and the health of their society is still a priority to them, and so I think we will see some benefits, but it just won't be from a priority perspective, the first couple things on the list. So I wouldn't. I'm not expecting anything in terms of a direct benefit, you know, here in the short term, but I'm more optimistic about the medium and long term. I think you were in China recently, correct, Shawn? Well, I'm actually going in a couple of weeks. Yeah, so- Oh, we should have had the fire side in- Yeah ... two weeks. I'm sure it'll make for an interesting, interesting, J.P. Morgan conference fire side. You know, maybe going back to pharma... You know, a lot of your peers speak about destocking. Is destocking done, or how does Mettler-Toledo track destocking phenomena? You know, there's two areas that were more pronounced in our business. The first was pipette tips. You know, if you think about all the COVID testing, people were having a hard time getting a hold of tips, and so there was a lot of stocking that went that was associated with that. And you think about it, tips can store, and there's a long shelf life. They're plastic, you know, so it kind of makes sense. The other area was in process analytics. You know, as people were producing the vaccine and the sensors that are in the reactors, you know, there was concerns about supply chains globally, just more broadly, you know, in terms of production, and so people were starting to stock some of those consumables. Some of our consumables, a lot of our consumables have shelf lives to them, so they couldn't stock too many. But when you start getting into single-use sensors, which are plastic, there's no shelf life, and people could stock them for a lot longer. So on the pipette tip topic, I feel like we've pretty much lapped that issue, you know, that started about a year ago or so. And then, but in terms of, like, the process analytics sensors, you know, specifically the single-use sensors, I think we still have a little bit more time to go. And then, you know, kind of beyond those categories, it's always kind of hard for us to say if people were stocking something or not, you know. Like, typically, you wouldn't stock our products so much, but like I said, in China, there might be a little bit of that. Understood. Then one, switching gears to industrials. I think 40% of your revenues are industrials, but it's a little bit of a misnomer, right? Just give us a high-level overview, what goes in the industrial bucket and what is true cyclical exposure? Mm-hmm. Sure. So if you think about our industrial business, there's really two parts to it. There's the core industrial part, which is 25%, and then you have the product inspection business, which is about 15%. So together, that makes up the 40%. On the core industrial side, this is a business that historically was more cyclical, you know, out of our whole portfolio. And whenever PMIs were down, people would always ask us about our core industrial business, and probably a year ago, people were asking a lot of questions about that. It's really interesting for me to see how resilient that business has continued to be over the last few years. And you know, now, right now, it had a tough quarter. A lot of that had to do with China, because it's disproportionately exposed to China. We also had some tough comp issues in the Americas. And it's not immune to the economy. I think it's still a valid question and something that we're looking at. But when you look at the business, it also is serving, you know, a better, healthier mix of end markets in general. You know, we've really about 60% of that business now is sold into a combination of pharma, biopharma, food manufacturing, and chemical, and chemical for us is more specialty chemical. And that didn't happen by accident, right? Like, this gets into Spinnaker, you know, and so when you think about Spinnaker, Spinnaker is taking this great opportunity of fragmented markets. You know, we're the leader, global leader, you know, maybe 75% of the time, but we still only have about 25% market share, and in core industrial, it's probably in the low 20s, you know. And so there's a lot of market share to be gained in core industrial. But as we're looking for the market share, we're trying to target the industries that we think are gonna be the most favorable, you know, and so. And that's what Spinnaker is about, is it's about not only how to, how do you use your sales resources in the most efficient manner to go after this opportunity? And so we target certain industries that we think are more favorable, have higher growth opportunities, provide more, and are more profitable. And sometimes we're getting into some of these hot segments that we talk a lot about, but they're also just the core segments. And so we do that by, you know, starting looking at territories. You know, so if you, like, look at a territory, like, you know, like in the old days, you know, someone would have had a territory, and you would have been given a quota, and as long as you met your quota, everybody was happy. Well, part of Spinnaker is looking at that territory and saying, "Hey, what's the real potential in that territory? You know, what - You know, what can we do better with cross-selling in that territory? What are customers that we don't even serve in that territory?" And through all those analytics, we come up with an account plan for the sales rep, and then we might take away-... Certain customers that are gonna repeat customers. You know, we know certain customers tend to buy, you know, certain things each year. We can service them more efficiently from the inside. And then so we start off with territory planning. Then the second thing is then, okay, now, how do we help you go after that opportunity? So then now we run analytics, and we provide individual profiles. And like last year, to put it in perspective, we probably had something of 130,000 of these profiles that look at specific investment opportunities for either new accounts, investments with existing accounts, or maybe cross-selling opportunities. And then we produce these profiles that then we provide a lot of information about the customer, the opportunity, their tendencies, testimonials, maybe internally about the customer, analytics about the penetration opportunity, all different types of information, even Google Maps. And so there's a lot of information there about the opportunity. And then the last thing we do is we say, okay, the salesperson's job is now harder, right? You're having to really penetrate something, maybe cross-sell or go after a new customer. So we have a library of all kinds of digital tools to help them to convert that sale, and like value selling guides and things like that. And what we've seen over the last few years is that the result of all this is that we've been able to guide the sales force. We literally call it sales force guidance. We guide them towards the best opportunities, and we've also seen conversion rates going up, over the last, you know, you know, three to four years as we've been kind of, like, really doing this. And more recently, this whole program is much better integrated into Blue Ocean and into something that's more, now more dynamic, fully integrated into our CRM program. So it's actually pretty exciting. Sorry for a little bit of the sidetrack on Spinnaker, but I just think industrial is such a great opportunity about what we do with Spinnaker, and it's a lot of. It helps to better understand the success there. Now, of course, there's a lot of good innovation that's happened also in our industrial business. I think we've certainly benefit from trends in automation and digitalization. We've invested a lot in our portfolio in that regard. And I think kind of going forward, this is an area that will benefit also from a lot of the different on-shoring and near-shoring opportunities. The other part of it, industrial, is our Product Inspection business, you know, which is about 15%. Product Inspection is much more of a cyclic- I mean, secular exposure. About 70% of that business is sold into packaged food companies, with the remainder largely pharma. And so this, this is a business that's a customer group that's focused on brand protection, food safety. You know, anytime you see a recall, that's what they're trying to. They buy equipment like ours to try to avoid that. But they're also looking for productivity, too, you know, and so we can help them with that. And so we have a very broad range of offerings at the end of the line to help them meet those needs. The packaged food business is a little bit more under pressure these days. I've been saying that for the last few quarters, and it's kinda held in there better than what we would expected, but we're a little bit more cautious as we look at the fourth quarter. I think we started to see some of the more challenging results in Q3, and then I think in Q4, we'll see it... I mean, in the U.S., and I think as we look to Q4, we're expecting to see more challenging results in Europe as well, too. And this business is, these customers have been under a lot of different pressure from inflation and input costs and topics like that. You mentioned some of the hard areas in industrial. I think battery testing is something- Mm-hmm ... you've spoken about in the past, but we've, you know, seen some headlines about investments being scaled back in that area. Does that have an impact for Mettler-Toledo, just given a, you know, pause in investment, if you will? Yeah. I mean, hey, we still see a lot of opportunity there. You know, like, I mean, we think it's a great growth opportunity. We've seen that in China. Now, China is an area where we have seen things scale back when it comes to battery, but when we look at other parts of the world, you know, like you know, just from an internal perspective, I sign off on any deals that are over a certain threshold, like $1 million. And from a pricing perspective and, you know, we continue to see some interesting opportunities out there in Europe and as well as the U.S., when it comes to battery. And it just shows you the magnitude of some of these projects. You know, those are, those are really good-sized projects for us. And so we're still optimistic. You know, we still think that there's a lot of opportunity, and it's just amazing to me to see when I look at, like, literally recently for the... We just presented our annual plan to the board a few weeks ago, and we had a slide in the deck that just showed the end-to-end value chain of battery, and it just mapped out, like, all the different instruments to the different applications. And it's just, it's just so interesting to see how many things we can touch, you know, right from, like, the, the lithium ore, you know, like, and, you know, with industrial scales and all the way through the value chain. And so there's a lot of opportunity there all the way through production, and so we think it's a good opportunity. Now, it's not a huge business for us, but certainly one that we think has good growth prospects, and it's just a good example of the things we do, right? Like, we're never like, we're not the kind of company that has to rely on one thing to get a result. Like, let's say, it's no longer gonna be an opportunity a year from now. Well, there's gonna be other opportunities, right? And then, that's part of the whole, that's part of Spinnaker, is just having a pulse on where the opportunities are and pivoting. It's not like we had to develop new products for battery. We can leverage our existing portfolio and our marketing capabilities and really try to target them towards these opportunities. Understood. So, just from a big picture perspective, longer term, in a normalized environment, right? I think historically, you've characterized Mettler-Toledo as a mid-single digits company. Should it be like a mid-single digit plus, given some of these newer opportunities, the change in mix over the past few years? Well, yeah, historically, we, we would've said mid-single. About a year ago, we started saying... We were a little more precise, right? We said, we said 6%+, right? And, and we still feel good about the 6%+. You know, it's, it's- and it's all these opportunities. I mean, it starts with, you know, hey, historically, we've, we've been doing this level of growth for, for quite a while. If you look at the mix of our business today versus what it was 10 years ago, it's, it is a better mix of business. So I mean, we all know pharma and biopharma is going through a tough time right now, but, but I think we also feel like this is gonna be a really good end market to be exposed to going forward. It's about 40% of our business. We feel like we also have good exposures in other core end markets. We have these hot segments that we talk about. In addition to lithium-ion batteries, we also have semiconductor, which, you know, if you think about most countries in the world have some kind of a program that's focused on developing their own autonomy when it comes to semiconductor production. And we have a lot of different solutions in semiconductor as well, too. It's not new to us. It's always been part of our process analytics business with pure water solutions, which is really important from a cleaning perspective of the wafers. But we also have a lot of different things that we do throughout semiconductors on the industrial side, as well as the lab side, like titrators are actually used on every semiconductor line as well, too. In addition to that, we have, like, the trends we talked about in terms of automation and digitalization. They're important not only in labs, but on the industrial side. And then I think this on-shoring and reshoring opportunity, I think it's gonna be a real unique opportunity for this generation of business that, you know, we haven't seen in the past. And I think we're in the very early innings of that. I think there's, you know, there's certainly risk, you know, as things move around, but I see a lot of opportunity, and that's something that we're super focused on internally, something that we spend a lot of time during our planning meetings, you know, when we meet with different businesses around the world, challenging the teams about how are they, you know, monitoring these opportunities and making sure that we're capturing them. Because I think there really is a really good opportunity there. Yeah, and then you kind of also just look at the fragmentation of our business that we talk a lot about, right? Like this, you know, only having about 25% market share, that gives us the ability. Just getting a little bit of market share allows us to kind of grow each year. And then we haven't even talked about services, right? Yeah. Like, if you look at our installed base of instruments, we probably have about $3 billion of serviceable install base in terms of service dollars, and our service business is probably about $800 million. So there's a lot of opportunity for us to continue to penetrate that, sell services, whether it's at the point of sale, whether it's through analytics, and looking at that install base and reaching out to customers. So we feel like there's a lot of opportunity. Yeah. Definitely. I mean, that services sounds fascinating, but before we get to services, I think look at your fiscal 2024 guidance, flattish revenues. Is the assumption first half down mid-singles, back half up mid-singles? Is, is that sort of, how we look at it? We haven't gotten so precise yet, but clearly, you know, we have kind of indicated that we expect the first... You know, we'll provide more precise guidance a little bit about 1Q on our next call, but we certainly have kind of indicated that we're expecting the first half to be similar to the second half of this year, which kind of, you know, would kind of get you to your math there, so. I think margins is one, you know, where I do get some questions, Shawn, because- Mm ... historically, Mettler-Toledo has shown a leverage even in challenging market environments, with the current operating margins at, you know, close to 30%. Are we at peak margins? Is that why, you know, EPS guidance for flattish for next year? And related to that, should we still continue to expect 75 to 100 basis points annual OM expansion in a normalized environment? What is peak margins for Mettler -Toledo? We feel really good about our margin story. I mean, it's hard to answer, of course, when volumes are down because, like, you know, we're not gonna expand margins by 100 basis points when our volumes are down the way they are. But, you know, just the fact that even in 3Q, we were able to have some margin expansion. I thought was a good, you know, testimony of what we do in terms of the inside the organization, in terms of execution. Margins will be down for the next, you know, couple quarters, while volumes are down. But I think, you know, our guidance overall for next year is still, you know, reasonable guidance in terms of, like, margin expansion. And then when you... Well, I guess we're probably flattish in terms of operating margin. I was thinking about gross margin. But kind of going forward, we still feel very good about our ability to increase margins, and we do. You know, we say that for a few reasons. One is, we feel like our organic growth story is a big part of that. Two, the pricing program, we feel like the value proposition that we have is been enhanced during COVID, and we feel like the program remains very strong with all the analytics and the tools, but more importantly, just the fundamentals. You know, if you're thinking about it, we're selling personal instruments at relatively low price points, often directly to the end user. So we have somebody-... who's a direct sales force that's dedicated to that application, who's an expert in that application. They're not a generalist, and then they know how to articulate the value proposition to the end user. And that's something that, like, resonates very well in terms of the program, and it allows us to achieve the results we do. And then Stern Drive. I mean, Stern Drive is a program where we just launched the third wave of it. This is like our operational excellence programs in the supply chain. And, you know, if you think about all the energy that the supply chain team has been focused on over the last few years with COVID, and kind of redeploying all that energy towards pursuing productivity projects, there's a lot we can do. There's a lot we can do that we're excited about in areas like smart automation. You know, in our business, it's historically been hard to have a lot of automation. You know, there's exceptions like pipettes, but there's new technologies, you know, that we can now leverage to automate, like, different processes that Adam and I were talking about. Like, we literally got a demo this summer, and the two of us could figure out how to program and automate something within a matter of 10 minutes. So I think that shows you how easy the tools are to use. So there's a lot of neat opportunities there. And then, of course, we have the Blue Ocean program that enables a lot of these opportunities as well, too. Well, whether it's automating processes or just leveraging the different analytics we have for better insights into the business. Fantastic. I think with that, we're out of time here, Shawn. Thanks for the time this morning. Great. Thank you, Vijay. It's great to spend time with you as well, too.