Columbus McKinnon Corporation

Good afternoon and welcome to Columbus McKinnon's third quarter fiscal 2026 earnings conference call. My name is Constantine and I will be your conference operator today. As a reminder, this call is being recorded and I would now like to turn the conference over to Krista Moser, Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasurer.

Thank you and welcome everyone to our call. On today's call, we will be covering our third quarter fiscal 2026 earnings financial and operational results. On the call with me today are David Wilson, the President and Chief Executive Officer, and Greg Rustowitz, our Chief Financial Officer. In a moment, David and Greg will walk you through our financial and operational performance for the quarter. The earnings release and presentation to supplement today's call are available for download on our Investor Relations website, at investors.cmco.com. Before we begin our remarks, please let me remind you that we have our safe harbor statement on slide two. During the course of this call, management may make forward-looking statements in regards to our current plans, beliefs, and expectations. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties and other factors that can cause actual results and events to differ materially from the results and events contemplated by these forward-looking statements. I'd also like to remind you that management may refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. You can find reconciliations of the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures on the company's investor relations website and in its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Please see our earnings release and our filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission for more information. Today's prepared remarks will be followed by a question and answer session. We respectfully ask that you limit yourself to one question and one follow-up question. With that, I'll turn the call over to David.

Thank you, Christy, and good afternoon, everyone. Last week, we were very pleased to announce that we closed the Keto Crosby acquisition. We've been working diligently over the past few quarters towards closing this transformational acquisition and are excited to now get to work on delivering the benefits associated with bringing these two innovative companies with industry-leading technical expertise, customer-centric cultures, and a shared vision for operational excellence together. We are welcoming the Keto Crosby team to Columbus McKinnon as we combine the best of our collective talent and capabilities to deliver an enhanced value proposition for our customers. Additionally, we expect to close the previously announced divestiture of our US power chain hoist and chain operations by the end of this quarter. This will be the final step in aligning the combined company towards our next phase of growth. Let me now shift to our quarterly results. As part of our permanent financing, which was recently completed at attractive interest rates, we pre-announced key metrics for the third quarter and are happy to share that we came in at the high end of those ranges. We delivered double-digit growth in sales, orders, EPS, and backlog year over year as we saw continued stabilization in U.S. short cycle order activity and capitalized on our strong project backlog. We continue to see an attractive global funnel of opportunities, and our backlog remains at healthy levels, positioning us well for the future. Adjusted EBITDA was $40 million with an adjusted EBITDA margin of 15.4%. This margin was flat to the prior quarter as our tariff mitigation actions offset normal seasonality. Adjusted EPS improved 11% from the prior year to 62 cents. Additionally, we made meaningful progress on operational improvement, tariff mitigation, and integration preparedness initiatives. While it's becoming increasingly difficult to estimate tariff costs as vendor price increases begin to replace tariff-specific surcharges, we believe that we came in slightly ahead of our 10 million net tariff impact in the first three quarters of fiscal 2026. We continue to expect that we will achieve tariff cost neutrality by the end of the year and margin neutrality in fiscal 2027. I'd like to thank the entire Columbus McKinnon team for their unwavering commitment to our customers and strong execution in the quarter. The team successfully managed through a complex set of strategic objectives and an evolving market landscape while delivering ahead of our initial expectations for the quarter. Orders were up 11% to 247 million. The U.S. grew 15% driven by strength and lifting, automation, and precision conveyance, and EMEA grew 3% despite the continuation of a weaker economic landscape that is causing slower order conversion. Globally, growth was balanced across both short cycle and project orders, reflecting stabilization of short cycle demand, traction on our commercial initiatives, and implementation of tariff-related price increases. Our pipeline of quotation activity remains encouraging, and we continue to see a strong funnel of new business opportunities. We expect U.S. demand to remain healthy, driven by lower interest rates, favorable CapEx deduction rules as part of the new tax legislation, and benefits from onshoring, all of which will serve as tailwinds for our business. As mentioned previously, in EMEA, we expect choppiness to persist given the forecast for a challenging demand environment in the near term. While the pipeline for new business continues to build, order conversion is expected to continue to be slower than typical. We are focusing our efforts on vertical end markets with tailwinds like metal processing, government and defense and heavy equipment, as well as end markets where we've been building a leadership position like battery production, e-commerce, food and beverage, and aerospace. Our backlog is strong, up 15% versus the prior year to $342 million, with an increase across all platforms in both our short cycle and project businesses as we've continued to deliver on our commercial initiatives and capitalize on U.S. market stabilization. I'll now turn the call over to Greg to share the details of our third quarter financial results.