Analyst: Let's start with the thing everybody argues about. Announced reshoring capacity on one side, commissioned lines actually running on the other. How big is that gap from where you sat?
Expert: Big.
Analyst: I'm going to need more than that.
Expert: You are, yeah. Sorry. We kept a tracker. Started as a spreadsheet, ended up as a wall of pins in the sales bullpen. The guys called it the ghost book, which tells you what the floor thought before I'd formed a view. Four states and a chunk of a fifth. January 2023 to when I stepped out, October, we logged a hundred and forty-odd announced projects we thought were addressable. Hundred forty-three at the end. Don't hold me to it, it moved every week, somebody was always pinning up another press release.
Analyst: And of the hundred and forty-three?
Expert: Thirty-seven issued an RFQ we could actually quote. Nineteen placed equipment orders with somebody, not necessarily us. Commissioned, meaning a line running and making sellable parts, eleven. Sorry, twelve. One came up in the spring after I'd left, so twelve. And some of the rest will still land, I'm not calling them dead.
Analyst: Twelve out of a hundred and forty-three.
Expert: Yeah. Before you write that down, it's my funnel, not the economy's. We don't quote everything. Somebody builds a chip fab, we're nowhere near that conversation, the tool vendors own it. So it skews general industrial, packaging, food and bev, and brownfield, because brownfield is where we win.
Analyst: How were you defining "announced"? That's usually where these comparisons fall apart.
Expert: A press release with a dollar figure and a state in it. Same bar the trade press uses. Which is the whole problem.
Analyst: Go on.
Expert: An announcement is a site selection decision plus an incentive negotiation. It is not a capital appropriation. Different meeting, different people, and they can sit a year and a half apart. I've been on the supplier side of a project that got the announcement, the groundbreaking, the fella with the oversized scissors, and the authorisation to spend didn't clear until the following spring. Phase one only. Call it fifty-five percent of the headline.
Analyst: Is fifty-five typical?
Expert: For the ones that convert at all, first phase lands somewhere between half and two thirds. Feel number, off maybe eleven or twelve projects where I had real visibility, so weight it accordingly. When you read a billion-dollar announcement, what gets built in the first three years is not a billion dollars.
Analyst: Announced dollars against dollars you could tie to a purchase order?
Expert: Our tracker had something north of forty billion announced over that stretch. What I could tie to issued equipment POs, ours plus what we could see of the competition's, and we see a fair amount, was under four. And the honest version is worse, because once you strip out the projects that were already funded before any of the tariff noise started—