APi Group Corporation Jefferies Global Industrials Conference 2026

Thanks for having us. Okay.

Yeah. So, that business, if you go back to 2024, for those of you that follow the company for multiple years, that business went through some kind of disciplined customer and project selection and made sure the work they are going after was in good end markets with good customers at good margins. They have really come out of that disciplined customer project selection with a lot of strength. We kind of saw it back even in 2025 as we kind of got halfway through the year last year, they really started to see some strength. I would say it is not specific pockets. It is really broad-based across the businesses within specialty, but also across various end markets.

Data centers obviously been a point of strength in that the specialty business has seen a lot of good opportunities on the data center build-out as well as kind of the service from data centers as well. Critical national infrastructure has been a point of strength as well for specialty, whether it's water treatment plant work or even just fiber optic cabling. We're starting to see some of the BEAD funding flow through to our customers, which has been good work on the fiber side. Advanced manufacturing continues to be good. Semiconductor work continues to be good. Is that business going to grow at 20% every single quarter? No, obviously, but they're seeing a lot of strength across the business and across a lot of different and diverse end markets. We're really pleased with how that business has been growing the last year plus.

Well, you notice that she asked me that question because I'm probably almost two times as old as him, and I've been through it three times as long as him. I would say that what you're seeing specific to the data center market is unprecedented. I haven't seen anything like it in my career, in the industry. If you take data centers out and you look at the industry in general, as a kind of on a macro basis, the industry was flat to declining. Data centers basically has buoyed the entire sector. I think the biggest difference is maybe not necessarily the quantity, but the size. The size of the data center projects, they're big and that's probably just the best way to put it. But there's other end markets that are really robust.

Adam touched on it, but certain aspects of advanced manufacturing, if you look at Eli Lilly as an example, what the investment they're making primarily in GLP-1s, whether that's in their home state of Indiana or what they're doing in Milwaukee. We happen to be involved with the Milwaukee opportunity. You've seen that be really robust. Semiconductors continues to be robust. I don't know that I would credit that necessarily to reshoring, and some of the policies or not. I'll leave that up to each individual to decide. But you are seeing critical infrastructure and a number of opportunities there continue to provide a lot of opportunity. But I would say that the data center component of it is the part that I'm going to put in the unprecedented bucket.

Well, at the end of our last call, I tried to make sure I took the opportunity to remind everybody that APi is a services company first that is going to take advantage of the robust project environment. That has not changed since our last call. It will not change in advance of our next call, and it won't change a year from now. Our focus is going to be on continuing to build out the inspection and service component of our business, but we want to take advantage of the data center market. I would tell you that the way we're looking at the data center project opportunity, is that we're putting our people to work on projects that are committed, and we're being prudent about how we're allocating our people.

Our people are precious gems, and we need to make sure that we're protecting them, and we're putting them to work with our good customers on good customer sites in places where people are going to value their expertise and their work. So we are, I think, being very prudent in how we're looking at customer selection and project selection, and where we're going to continue to put our people to work. So, we talked about our backlog being at a record level of over $5 billion. If we don't have a signed contract, it's not in our backlog. So, when we talk about that, we're actually managing that quite well, and I think we've got the company in a really good position.

Also, we are spending the time to do our own work and not just speculate on what does the data center opportunity and opportunity set continue to look like. If you look at the projected demand curve that's going to come with AI as companies start to ramp up and utilize AI more, the data center build-out is not going to keep up to the demand. So unless you're going to stop using this, then the opportunity is going to continue to come. You have to make sure you're putting your people to work in the right places. Power is the next opportunity that's going to come right behind it, because there's not enough power to support the build-out and the capacity requirements that are coming from data centers. So, did I answer your question?

Well, I'm going to start answering your question by saying business isn't linear. I think sometimes people think that business just automatically goes in a straight line like this, and that's just not the reality of where it's at. Our North American business continues to see really strong organic growth in our inspection and service business, which is, again, the bellwether we want you to measure us by. We're obviously seeing good organic growth on the project side of the business as well. But we are going to continue to focus on double-digit growth in inspections and continuing to build out our inspection sales force to support that work, and we continue to make really good progress there. We continue to feel really good about it.