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Carrier Global Corp., a maker of  air conditioners and freezer pods, began  trading  as a  standalone company  on April 3. It could have been a disaster : Most of the world  was locked down as the pandemic raged, and the stock market was  swimming  between  spectacular slumps  and wild gains. But  as 2020  ends,  Carrier  is the  best -performing industrial stock  in the S&P 500 - by a long shot.

Its shares  have climbed more than  200%  since  the company  separated from long time  parent United Technologies Corp. The split was  part of a three -way breakup that  also married  the company's  aerospace. business  with  defense contractor Raytheon Co. For  years analysts had questioned  why  the air.

Conditioning  business  and  the Otis  Worldwide  Corp. elevator unit  needed  to be  under  the same  roof as  divisions that sold jet  engines and  aircraft wheels. Eventually, activist investors Dan  Loeb and Bill  Ackman also backed  a breakup, arguing that  United Technologies' myriad business  would  benefit from  more-focused management teams. That's  helped , but  investors couldn't  have predicted things  like  ventilation and refrigerated trailers  would have such  a moment  in 2020.

Carrier, which  traces its roots  to 1902, is  credited with  inventing  modern  air  conditioning.  Its  heating  and  cooling  systems help maintain the  climate inside  the Sisten Chapel and the  Great Library  of Alexandria. Today  these same sysytems have become  an asset for  hospitals, hotels, and office  buildings in the fight  against  the coronavirus, a largely airborne  pathogen that  passes  most easily between  people  in poorly ventilated spaces. No air conditioning system can replace masks and social distancing. but adjusting  the controls to allow for  more outside air to flow into buildings and cleaning or upgrading filters can help prevent  the virus  from  spreading . Carrier's portable optiClean machine can be used  to scrub air or  to create  pressure  that keeps air from moving  between one room - say, an office bathroom  or a hospital room and-another. Time mazagine  named it  one of the best inventions of 2020.

 

Carrier says it  expects interest  in improving indoor air quality to endure  even after the pandemic pssses; it has sized  this new  market  at about  $ 10 billion  for the  the overall  industry, including  $165 million of  opportunitiesthe company  is already broaching with customers. In preparation  for a vaccine, Carrier introduced mobile freezer pods enabled with  its Sensitech monitoring  technology. It's also  working  with Amazon.com Inc.'s web services arm  to connect  its cold -chain storage operations  to the  cloud  and use  the collected data  to reduce vaccine  waste. Today about a quarter of vaccine  are never  administered because  of breakdowns in logistics, according to Carrier.