Ecolab Inc. (ECL) Q4 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Greetings! Welcome to Ecolab's 4th Quarter 2025 Earnings Release Conference Call. 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 ROI 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 and beverage accelerated to 5%. Pest elimination and life sciences both accelerated to 7%. And specialty continued to drive significant share gains, growing 7% as well. Institutional underlying sales growth was consistent with prior quarters, excluding the unexpected short-term impact from lower distributor inventories. We also maintain 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 exclude impact from 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 to anticipate basic industries and papers 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 gr...