Mark A. Blinn
Analyst · a question
Well, I mean, I think that's issue we talked about. It's not just a concern in general, it's the size and complexity of these projects. They want to make sure -- you used the term getting the most bang for their buck. I mean, keep in mind, at times that's lowest cost and particularly, you see a lot of that in the Middle East. But in other parts of the world, that's around efficiency, making sure the process conditions are right, making sure you have the right support long term. So what I want to suggest is they are certainly competitive, but they want to make sure that you can deliver a quality product on time because they -- in the world, you may pay less for a piece of equipment, but if it doesn't work, it is worthless to you. So I think you're absolutely right, is what they're seeing is the size and complexity of these projects and they're just being very thoughtful. They need them, they need the infrastructure, but they're just being very thoughtful, and that's what tends in these cycles to kind of push things out. What you saw -- the reason it ran up so quickly, so fast back in '07 and '08, is you all of a sudden saw all the material cost and all these commodity costs spike so quickly. And what was happening during that period of time is these folks would budget these projects at X and the next time they went through a budget effort not too long afterwards, it was 1.5, 2x. And so they had to rush to market because they were concerned that 2x could go to 4x. And you saw that with kind of the commodity boom at that point in time. And this one, what you're seeing is the commodities are elevated. Certainly, oil is. Commodities justifying spend and infrastructure. But they can certainly be very thoughtful. That's not a bad thing for our industry because when you see a spike up like you saw a number of years ago, they start splitting orders. It -- they start extending lead times. Those -- that's how the market responds. So we see a fairly orderly move is for everybody. Do we all wish it would have been sooner? We certainly do. But we also understand why these things take time. Meanwhile, as we made in our comments, what we're going to do is continue to focus on what we can. The 4 walls, driving the run rate, driving the aftermarket business, which has really been the primary contributor to our earnings.