I think there are a few companies active in that space @edgescape - one that has been very active across wastewater and water purification solutions here in Australia for a long time is Veolia Water Technologies - see here: https://www.veoliawatertechnologies.com/en - however I'm not sure they (Xylem or Veolia) compete directly with EGL - perhaps they compete more with EVS - Envirosuite - in terms of water quality monitoring - however EGL - The Environmental Group - has a Water division that is almost entirely concentrating on PFAS removal from water at this point, and it's not a profitable division for them yet, as it's just getting established and it's taking a fair bit of time to get all of the necessary approvals to do pilot plants and get customers comfortable with the technology. I don't actually attribute ANY value to EGL Water at this point - I just think it would be icing on the cake if it comes to something. It has Powerball-type potential - i.e. if it was to take off it could at some stage dwarf all of EGL's other divisions, but a lot of things need to go right for them to get from here to there. Having great tech doesn't always make for profitable investments if you can't successfully commercialise that tech in a meaningful way. So, my IT (investment thesis) for EGL is based on their other divisions at this point - the ones that ARE making profits already, and are also growing. EGL Water could be great one day, but that day is not within this financial year. And EGL is a great company just based on their other divisions.

Xylem already has financial and business scale advantage in the US for PFAS. They are running quite a few PFAS projects in US (will try find the link on their site but I believe it is more than 5). They still trade at a 40x premium to others in the market so not cheap.

Any small cap promising they can make it big in the "promised land" should think a bit carefully. And I'm not talking about just EGL but in general like SDV

That's all I'm highlighting. So not saying anything is wrong with EGL. Whether Xylem decides to set up pfas here is another story. They probably have a few regulatory hurdles such as approvals on imports etc before anything happens.

Xylem is a GAC solution so will only make sense in certain situations given the scale of a set up and regular replacement of GAC. More compact and what is often (or expected to be) a lower cost solution like EGL or SDV will have their own segments that make them suitable vs something like Xylem. Big problem, big market, many ways/need to tackle the problem and not a zero sum game so room for all to win a piece of the pie.

Obviously I have a bit of catching up to do on the technologies.

Heard stories that much is what is currently in the US market is inferior to what is on offer here.

The question for me the breakdown of the whole PFAS market. Obviously there are some solutions that maybe just sufficient enough to achieve the end result without going overkill on capex even if it is less effective than the expensive option. So I see a bit of a trade-off here.

Also this is my thinking for new entrants is the following so I could be wrong:

Positives:

1. Much better product than what is on offer

Negatives:

1. More capital spend on marketing in US to break down the Xylem goodwill in the form of relationships with customers which creates a bit of a moat/net effect.
2. Capex to scale and deploy
3. Other products under development.

The possibility that an encumbent such as Xylem gets too comfortable still exists. But they are not a billion dollar market cap for nothing.

Also appears that Xylem has much more than just 5.