Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator's Instructions) And your first question comes from the line of Jeff Sprague with Citi Investment Research.
Jeff Sprague - Citi
Thank you. Good morning in Houston and everywhere else. Hey, Kirk, maybe a little bit on growth. So if you're going to go to cost related defense to kind of growth related offense, where do you actually see the opportunities and maybe split them between organic growth — you talked about investing in your front end versus M&A? You and everybody has been a little bit of an M&A holiday here for the last year and a half. Do you see anything opening up there?
Kirk S. Hachigian
Good question. So let me talk about organic because that's what we focused on first. I think Terry made the comment, we really have not cut sales, engineering, product management, and tried to sustain the core growth capability. If you went back and looked at the five year up-cycle, Jeff, we had 6% core and I think that's really sort of the best in class of an industrial company out there and so we think we can kind of get back on that. It has to do with Smart Grid, it has to do with LED technology, it has to do with lighting controls, it has to do with solar and wind and getting into some of these markets that are seeing growth.
I think the MRO business comes back. I think our electronics business out at Bussmann is going to see good growth going forward, and I think the international, Jeff, while we're doing a better job and we've gone from a $1.2 billion to $2.4 billion last year internationally, boy I got to tell you, the Middle East we just opened that new plant, Korea the EPCs, China — just tremendous opportunities. We're still 10 years behind some of the big Europeans and stuff that's been out there for 30 or 40 years now.
So we can do a much better job on all that. The acquisition side, you're right we've been taking a little time off, not on purpose because we just couldn't get a line on valuations, but we still have a good deck of projects that we're looking at. The question gets back to valuation on these things and as we have in the past we've never let the money burn a hole in our pocket, but we think there's some great opportunity of course given our balance sheet now with a debt to total capital at 16% to do some damage there too.
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