What Honeywell Building Technologies is doing to improve air quality amid COVID-19

Yahoo Finance’s Julie Hyman, Myles Udland, and Brian Sozzi speak with Honeywell Building Technologies CEO Vimal Kapur about how the company is keeping buildings safe and will continue to do so in a post-COVID-19 world.

Video Transcript

- Of course, on this program and others, we spend a lot of time talking about what has changed as a result of the pandemic and what the world looks like going forward. Certainly the way that offices are structured is going to change, and one company that's at the forefront of that is Honeywell. For more on this conversation, we're joined now by Vimal Kapur. He is the president and CEO of Honeywell Building Technologies. And Vimal, it's great to speak with you this morning.

I'd love to begin with this conversation about, you know, kind of the future of the building and how you guys are thinking about the needs that companies are going to have, that individuals are going to have, as we are all now more cognizant, really, of the risks of gathering in one place and how some of the things you guys are working on can mitigate those.

VIMAL KAPUR: Yeah, so thanks for inviting me here today. I would say that the basic hygiene factors which have been emphasized over the last few months are almost-- is always going to be critical, whether it's wearing masks, whether it's practicing social distancing, all those are given. But what's becoming equally important is the air quality around us, which-- in which we live. And how good is that? I think that there has been an increasing amount of knowledge about it. And the area we are working on is that how do we ensure that air quality is not becoming a source of any infection, be it bacteria or viruses, that getting transferred through that?

So the technologies are always there. I think those technologies have become more important and more visible to everybody, and that's what we are really working on. We see a huge acceptance and penetration of that over the last six months. We launched a program called Healthy Building somewhere in May timeframe, and I'm very pleased to share that over the last six months, we have seen hundreds of customers adopting these technologies, whether it's in office space, hospitals, stadiums, airport terminals. So it's been pretty wide acceptance on how people are using what I will call engineering controls in addition to the basic hygiene which we all need to practice to be more safe in this environment.

- Vimal, have-- in the third quarter, you did see some delays in the business. Makes sense, it's COVID-19, we're seeing a lot of projects across the industrial space get delayed. Have those delays start to loosen up a bit in the fourth quarter?

VIMAL KAPUR: Yeah, I think, look, the market recovery is different in different parts of the world. In fact, I would say the projects which we were carrying on in March timeframe when things started turning back, they continued because nobody wanted to stop. If you have 60%, 70% midway of a large program, you don't want to stop your investment. So clearly new program activity started slowing down, but where we see that, we see a mix of two broad segment. We clearly see that the segment on commercial offices and retail, they are definitely stressed.

But we see very heavy activity in what I can call infrastructure, so whether you look at things like data centers, a lot of built-up health care facilities, equal amount of focus on warehouse capacity expansion, the grocery retail. So I think net-net for someone like us, which plays in multiple segments, it's getting balanced out in terms of things which are going down. They're kind of broadly offset by other things which are going up. So I'm sure as vaccine takes more penetration over 2021, things should turn back more normal in the second half of 2021.

JULIE HYMAN: Vimal, it's Julie here. How about the balance in terms of supply chain? Because we know there are a lot of people looking to get new filtration into their buildings right now. Are you seeing any supply constraints as a result of that?

VIMAL KAPUR: Yeah, it's an interesting question. I mean, look, the filtration is not the only thing we need to worry about. I will come to answer your question. We need to worry about, in air, about temperature, humidity, pressure, ventilation, and filtration. So there are, like, multiple elements for it. So our solutions really put new sensors so that you can measure all this. Then you change the control program so that you can run the air in a different way. And finally you provide the filtration.

We have introduced new type of filtration technology which acts in a way that you can broadly eliminate wide majority of viruses or bacteria, and we manufacture this product in different part of the world. So I think, to the extent the current demand is, we are lucky we are able to fulfill it. But, I mean, it'll be happy problem to have if the demand exceeds the supply.

But our solutions are, you know, applied in a manner-- I haven't seen a big demand supply gap at this point of time.

- All right, Vimal Kapur is the president and CEO at Honeywell Building Technologies. Vimal, so thank-- thanks so much-- sorry-- for joining the program today. I know we will talk soon. Appreciate the time. Happy holidays.

VIMAL KAPUR: Thank you. Thanks for the opportunity. Bye-bye.