The Eastern Company

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Eastern Company's first quarter fiscal year 2024 earnings call. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode, and the floor will be open for questions after the presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your phone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Marianne Barr, treasurer of the Eastern Company. Marianne, over to you.

Good morning, and thank you, everyone, for joining us this morning for a review of the Eastern Company's results for the first quarter of 2024. With me on the call are Eastern's president and CEO, Mark Hernandez, and Eastern's CFO, Nicholas Vallejos. The company issued an earnings press release yesterday after the market closed. If anyone has not yet seen the release, please visit the Investors section of the company's website, www.easterncompany.com, where you will find the release under Financial News. Please note that some of the information you will hear during today's call will consist of forward-looking statements about the company's future financial performance and business prospects, including without limitation, statements regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expenses, taxes, and business outlook. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results or trends to differ significantly from those projected in these forward-looking statements. We undertake no obligation to review or update any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances that occur after the call. For more information regarding these risks and uncertainties, please refer to risk factors discussed in our SEC filings, including Form 10-K Files with the SEC on March 12, 2024 for the fiscal year 2023 and Form 10-Q Files with the SEC on May 6, 2024. In addition, during today's call, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures that we believe are useful as supplemental measures of Eastern's performance. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for or in isolation from GAAP results. A reconciliation of each of the non-GAAP measures discussed during today's call to the most directly comparable GAAP measure can be found in the earnings press release. With that introduction, I'll turn the call over to Mark.

Thank you, Marianne, and good morning to both those who joined us by phone and those participating via the web. As you know, 2023 was a year of transformation for Eastern, during which we revamped our core operations for long-term growth and shareholder value creation. Our operational improvement initiatives drove increasingly strong results as the year continued, and in quarter one of 2024, we made additional progress, even though seasonally the first quarter is not a strong one for us. I'll provide just a few highlights of the quarter now so I can spend more time later in the call going over our plans and activities for 2024 and beyond. First, to our consistent focus on operational excellence, we greatly improved our gross margin and earnings year over year. Our drive to reduce Eastern's inventory down by 3.5 million from year end 2023 continued to contribute to our results. We made further progress in strengthening our balance sheet, reducing long-term debt to $43.1 million and positioning Eastern to pursue M&A opportunities that accelerate our objectives. In addition, we grew our backlog 22% to more than $97 million since the year end 2023, reflecting the positive impact of our steps to enhance relationships with key customers and more stable order flow we achieved. allowing us to enter phase two of focused commercial business, commercial transformation for organic growth. In all of our divisions, book-to-bill ratio, a very positive sign as we move into Q2 has been positive for all companies. Additionally, we're launching some significant new products in this quarter. It's a little too early to talk about them now, but I look forward to providing more details as we get further into the programs. I will now turn the call over to Nick for a quick review of our first quarter financial results.