Mettler-Toledo: Pricing, Decentralization, & Vertical Integration

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So the EPS makes sense at the whole company level. But at the SBU unit level, I'm curious if there were other targets you focused on.

The big question is how to achieve that overall goal of increasing shareholder value or earnings per share. To do that, I would say the next main focus was to increase the profitability of the product. Usually, as an SBU, you weren't allowed to expand into different markets with a product unless its profitability was high enough. This was to ensure that you didn't dilute the overall financial figures. Only products that were truly profitable were allowed to grow in the market.

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Do you know of other companies that can produce these super high-tech, very specific features in their balances, or is it just some?

It's also a question of cost and how well these features work. I have personally seen, once in a lab when we visited a customer in Switzerland, that they had some issues with a Sartorius balance. They wanted to work in a flow box or flow chamber. With the variances that can affect the weight, and the special filters these balances have inside, we could make an offer beating the main competitor, as others usually don't have such good filters or features. It's not just electronic filters; it's also about how you construct the load cells or the weighing sensor inside. That's something Mettler-Toledo does itself. It's its own production, and the whole electronics around it are the same. You need to keep all the pathways very short and have some tricks to reach this limit.

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