More American businesses needed regular cleaning again as the pandemic began to end this spring, giving a jolt to the latest sales and profits at Ecolab Inc.
The St. Paul-based maker of cleaning products said Tuesday its second-quarter profit nearly tripled to $310 million and sales jumped 18% to $3.2 billion.
Sales to restaurants, office buildings and other institutions grew sharply, enough to offset a decline in sales to hospitals and other healthcare facilities. "We leveraged recovering markets with new business wins and new products," Christophe Beck, the company's chief executive, said.
As coronavirus rolled around the world in the year-ago period, demand for Ecolab products was the opposite: falling in restaurants and offices and soaring in health settings.
The company gets nearly three times as much revenue from what it calls its institutional business as it does from healthcare businesses. That means the revived demand in workplaces that closed or sent workers home during the pandemic has a bigger impact on Ecolab.
As well, the company has lifted prices of many of its products. Executives said the price increases have stuck and kept Ecolab ahead of rising input costs. "Pricing will provide further coverage as it builds through the second half," Beck said.
Ecolab, which gets about 45% of its revenue from outside the U.S., said that the recovery of those sales was unfolding in line with the spread of vaccines around the globe. Executives said business in Europe was returning not far behind the recovery in the U.S. The rest of the world is trailing.
"While the recent rise in COVID-19 variant infections and higher inflation may present near-term challenges, we have once again taken the right actions to address these," Beck said.
Ecolab stock rose about 1% on Tuesday.
