Speaker 1:
From the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, welcome inside the Ice House. Our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange is your go-to for the latest on markets, leadership, vision, and business. For over 230 years, the NYSE has been the beating heart of global growth. Each week we bring you inspiring stories of innovators, job creators, and the movers and shakers of capitalism here at the NYSE and Ice's exchanges around the world. Now let's go inside the Ice House. Here's your host, Lance Glinn.
Lance Glinn:
In 2024, the Inside the Ice House podcast brought you 59 new episodes, engaging in insightful conversations with business leaders, CEOs of NYSE listed companies, entrepreneurs and visionaries. We explored their journeys, the challenges they have overcome, and how they're plotting the futures of the companies they represent. You can tune in every Monday to all major podcast platforms to catch these discussions and watch full video episodes on tv.nyse.com and on the NYSE YouTube channel. So as we start 2025 this January, we have brought you four new episodes with five guests, covering a range of topics including AI, healthcare, global industrials, and the convenience real estate sector. The first episode of the New Year, episode 452, welcomed Roy Jakobs, CEO of Philips. That's NYSE ticker symbol PHG. AI has infiltrated all industries and is having an impact on health care. Philips, a leader in improving patient care, is fully utilizing the technology, delivering innovative solutions and bettering consumer well-being.
Roy Jakobs:
Yeah, I think healthcare practice has been undergoing a lot of change and will continue to have to go through a lot of change, and there are a few reasons for it. The first and most important one is, as I started off with, there is this strong increase of demand for healthcare and that means that the current way of working is just not up to that increase. So we need to change the way of working. We need to change the clinical practice that on one hand still improves the outcomes because we want to fight cancer in a better way, we want to treat a stroke patient earlier, we want to actually have the cardiac diagnosis before the cardiac arrest happens. So the very clear objective in getting to better quality outcomes, and at the same time we also need to work on how can we provide more care to more people with this growing need of healthcare with less staff.
And that's actually where then technology can and has to play a role to think through how do we get to better stroke treatment? And we are tangibly working with the best clinical practices, but then also our technology and can be hardware and software to actually make this a reality. Let me give you an example of what we're doing now in the Alzheimer treatment. That is a very popular recent theme. It's quite exciting that we can treat Alzheimer now with new medicine, but actually that requires much more imaging and imaging of the highest level. And for that you need to go to an MR scanner. But an MR scanner traditionally needed helium to operate because of helium it was quite expensive. You also need to locate it in the basement of a hospital. Also, given the complexity of the scanning it took, and it takes quite a while before one scan is taken, can be 30, 45 minutes for one patient and then actually thereafter you need to do reporting on a lot of data.
So that actually takes some time. So if you take that use case and whatnot is coming. So we have a new drug for Alzheimer that actually is very transformative in healthcare, but you need to think of all the steps before to be able to support that. So what we have been working on is A, how can you come up with an MRI technology that has less helium, less cost, less energy usage on one hand. Because it doesn't have helium, you set MR free so you don't have to put it in the basement because of the crunch pipe and the helium usage, because of the dangers that it has. You can now use it anywhere in the hospital. You can take it outside of the hospital, close to patients, even close to elderly homes so that actually you can scan them where they are. So it's much better patient experience. Then we used a smart speed algorithm to triple the scan time and therefore you can scan double the amount of patients with less time in MR. So that actually helps to absorb the load need that actually that new imaging has.
Lance Glinn:
Episode 453 features, Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO of Snowflake. That's NYC ticker symbol Snow. Staying on the topic of AI, its rapid evolution is transforming the business landscape, driving efficiency, automating processes, and uncovering new opportunities. Under Sridhar's leadership. Snowflake has emerged as a pioneer in harnessing AI to revolutionize how organizations utilize data for smart faster decision making. He joined us to discuss the technology's rise, why he views 2025 as an adapt or die year, and how the company is positioned for the future.
Sridhar Ramaswamy:
First and foremost, I tell people that this is such a rapidly changing technology that first and foremost, they should make sure that they're familiar with what is possible. A lot of people are intimidated by this technology. They're even afraid to try. I'll give you a simple example. I consider myself pretty proficient with using AI tools and yesterday my son told me that if he wanted to convert a table, for example, in a paper that he's reading, he would just take a picture of it, upload it to a model and have it pull out the structured information. And sure enough, somebody sent me a presentation today, I just took a screenshot of that, used an AI model, extracted the structured information, transformed it, and made a new view of the data. And it took me more time to describe what I did than to actually do it.
It's like less than 30 seconds. That's the magic. At one level, people, executives, but also mid-level managers, employees of companies, I've just got to internalize what is possible and honestly have fun doing it. I generate a lot of cartoons, sometimes to my PR team's dismay about various things that are going on in the world. It's just having fun. So I would say that level of baseline knowledge is important, but the thing that we tell our customers is AI needs to be a real enabler. Just spending money on AI for the sake of AI is just not useful. We always start with utility. I tell people any place where you have a search engine, for example, an internal search engine, a chatbot is likely a better answer 'cause it makes it easier to get at the data.
Any place where you have a fixed and unwieldy dashboard, a chatbot like Cortex Analyst that can help you look at the data, slice it and dice it however you want and get different perspectives off it is a clean new application. On then come the composite applications where you say, I'm going to take data from one place, put it into a different application. Those are almost second order things. That's what I tell our customers, which is, yes, some of this technology looks a little bit magical, but you don't need to know the internals of the magic to be able to get value from it. Familiarize yourself, try simple examples. You don't need to waste money building AI products, rapidly iterate and build more useful things that your teams, your company gets value from and the value will accumulate soon enough.
Lance Glinn:
Episode 454, featured two guests inside The Ice House, CEO, David Dunbar and CFO, Ademir Sarcevic as they discussed industrial growth Company Standex, that's NYC ticker symbol SXI, 70 years since its founding in '55 as an NYC listed company, Standex has undergone transformations from an M&A focused operation into a globally recognized leader in engineered products and solutions. Now, after making the largest acquisitions in company history, David and Ademir joined the podcast to discuss Standex's future.
In our earlier conversation, you mentioned something that really stuck with me. You said you're never too far away from a Standex product. It's a powerful thought considering how the company's solutions really touch millions of people every single day. So for those who just may not be familiar with Standex or who may not know that they're being impacted by a Standex product, how would you explain what the company does and just the impact that it has?
Speaker 5:
Well, just from that perspective of everybody being close to a Standex product, we're relatively small company, but our products really are everywhere. So in our electronics business, we make 600 million read switches a year, and those read switches go into everything from toys to security systems, and maybe the best example, anyone who has a security system in their home, in the window there is a magnet and in the frame is a re-switch. So when you open it, the magnet goes away from the re-switch, the re-switch opens, your light goes on. So that probably covers half your listeners here today. If anyone gets in a car every day, our engraving business texturizes the hard plastic parts in the car in almost every vehicle in North America and Europe and very many of them in China. So if you look around the car, those parts that are in hard plastic but look like leather or look like textile, we probably did that texturizing.
Lance Glinn:
And Standex is approaching two remarkable milestones, 70 years since its founding. That'll be reached in 2025, 55 years as a listed company this year in 2024 here at the New York Stock Exchange. Achievements that are milestones as I mentioned before, and speak to the company's enduring success over the last seven plus decades as a company and five plus decades as a listed company here at the NYSE. As the leader of the company during these celebratory times, what does this legacy and this rich history and tradition mean to you?
Speaker 5:
Well, if you start with how long we've been listed, well, we were founded in '55, we were listed in '69, and we were here five years ago to celebrate our 50th. And at the time, the archivist of the stock exchange told us that in 1969, there were about 2,800 companies on the exchange. Of those less than 280 are still listed. So we repeat that to ourselves all the time because those two numbers represent the creative destruction that is capitalism and some businesses fade, new ones arise, and capital seeks the most productive use. And so to be a survivor, Standex has naturally reinvented ourselves from the inside, and we've transformed many times. I'm sure we'll talk about that as we go this morning. So we use that as an indicator, having a scrappy, agile, nimble culture. So we're very proud of that.
Lance Glinn:
We all drive along towns and city streets and past small retail locations, often representing those bigger brands we know and love. While in episode 455, we spoke to David Lukes, CEO of Curbline Properties, that's NYC ticker symbol Curb, to discuss the first publicly traded REIT focused exclusively on convenience real estate. David joined us inside The Ice House to discuss the industry, the appeal of convenience retail, and what the future of the still sector looks like.
David Lukes:
Well, any strategic action for a larger mid-cap public company is likely the result of a combination of necessity and opportunity. The necessity part was really driven by the fact that the shopping center REIT industry has a number of companies that have portfolios that are substantially similar. Some grocery anchored, some urban, some suburban, some street retail, some power centers, some lifestyle centers. And when you look at all these companies that the sameness means that it's very difficult to distance yourself in the pack and become a long-term winner, it's just more complicated.
When, kind of the first year or two after Covid, when everyone's operations were fantastic, retail was basically entering a new renaissance that had been largely vacant for 10 years prior. The opportunity was for us to try and distance ourselves and become more unique. And so I think necessity was more about wanting to outperform, and the opportunity was the fact that we had spent some serious years, about five years, studying convenience properties and trying to really understand what makes them work. And if we could get the first move or advantage and be the largest and the only way to address that thesis in the public REIT space and list it on the New York Stock Exchange, that would be a winning strategy, and that's really what we went for.
Lance Glinn:
So you mentioned being the first and really taking advantage of this opportunity. Why do you think the market wasn't flooded, the sector wasn't flooded with players already? Why do you think it took curb-line properties to be the first to really make a dent in what is convenience retail?
David Lukes:
Well, it is funny, if you look at the commercial real estate sector, it's a $20 trillion industry in the US and retail is one of the dominant larger food groups in that. And if you look at the amount of transaction volume of buying and selling retail properties in a five-year period, you could see, gosh, $200 billion trade and about 20% of that trade is in unanchored convenience-oriented properties, but it's mostly, meaning like 96%, is being traded by local investors. Institutions have almost exclusively gone to large format and traditionally having a grocery component. So the real question is, why is that the case? Why are institutions so convicted on grocery? And there are some positive things about anchored retail. It's got strong credit, they certainly have name brands. I think people have a great understanding of being able to look through the credit and understanding who those retailers are.
But the primary reason in my mind is that there's statistics, there's data. And for a large institution to make a real estate bet, it has to be more than a hunch. A local guy can make a hunch, but an institution putting out billions of dollars, they need to have data. And that data was historically in the form of tenant sales. If Wegmans does a thousand dollars a square foot in sales, if Whole Foods does $800 a square foot in sales, you know they're three times the national average. It must be a great property. Therefore, all the shops adjacent to the grocery must also be doing well. Now we have statistics, we can make a bet. What changed in Unanchored is the advent of geolocation data on cell phones.
Lance Glinn:
You can listen to these episodes along with all past and future inside the Icehouse episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes are also available on tv.nyse.com and on the NYC YouTube channel. Be sure to join us every Monday for inspiring conversations with leaders, entrepreneurs, visionaries, and CEOs of NYC listed companies.
Speaker 1:
That's our conversation for this week. Remember to rate, review and subscribe wherever you listen and follow us on X at Icehouse podcast. From the New York Stock Exchange, we'll talk to you again next week Inside The Icehouse. Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither Ice nor its affiliates make any representations or warranties express or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of the information, and do not sponsor, approve or endorse any of the content herein, all of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy any security or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the preceding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.