IDEX Corporation: M&A strategy & Operating model
Former Idex Corporation President
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IDEX Corporation: M&A strategy & Operating model(January 22, 2025)
Former Idex Corporation President
Interview Transcript
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Was there anything that came as a big surprise when you joined the company compared to the talks you had in advance?
When Danaher acquires a company, the parachutes open, and ten people come down to tell you what DBS means. It's a very rigid process. IDEX has gotten better at this post-acquisition. We had assumptions about how the business works and the key elements to improve it, but it wasn't as rigid. In the first three months, we would observe to see if our assumptions were true and then make small changes within that operating model. It wasn't a take-it-or-leave-it approach.
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Was there anything that came as a big surprise when you joined the company compared to the talks you had in advance?
So, it was a bit unstructured. I wouldn't say chaotic, but it wasn't very organized.
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So, the businesses themselves are crucial. Considering industry dynamics and individual competitive positioning is very important.
Yes, the strategy was always to look for niche players with highly engineered products that are not easily replaceable. This gives us pricing power in niche markets. We wouldn't enter a $10 billion market—$1 billion would be borderline. There are pros and cons to this approach. The downside is limited growth, but the upside is stability. Even with poor management, these businesses are hard to destroy because they are deeply embedded in customer systems. That's a critical component—good businesses that aren't overly complex, allowing us to understand them despite inherent complexity. We focus on high material margins, avoiding areas with many multinationals competing, where there might still be M&A opportunities. However, we never approached M&A with the mindset of needing a valve company because we have a pump company, or a piping company, etc. We never aimed to transition from a component supplier to a system supplier. It was actually the opposite.
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