The Eastern Company

Good morning and welcome to the Eason Company's third quarter fiscal year 2024 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode and we will open for questions following the presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Marianne Barr, Treasurer of the Eason 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 third quarter of 2024. With me on the call are James Materitanda, Chair of Eastern's Board of Directors, and the company's CFO, Nicholas Lake. The company issued an earnings press release yesterday after the market closed. If anyone has not yet seen the release, please visit the investor 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, filed with the SEC on March 12, 2024, for the fiscal year 2023, and Form 10-Q, filed with the SEC on November 5, 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 Jim.

Thank you, Mary Ann. And good morning to those who are joining us by phone, as well as those participating via the web. Operationally, the third quarter was a strong period for the Eastern Company, with substantial year-over-year improvements in top and bottom line results. Actions were taken to improve pricing and strengthen gross margins. At the same time, Eastern's board of directors believes that there are more actions to be taken and significant progress to be made, and we have appointed a new leader to take Eastern to the next level. Before I go into details of our new CEO appointment, I'll talk about another significant step recently taken at Eastern. As discussed during our Q2 earnings call in August, we have been continuing the process of evaluating all of the company's businesses for long-term performance and growth potential. During that process, we determined that the big three mold business, one of the two businesses within the big three precision products, no longer fits our long-term business and financial strategy. Accordingly, we recently began taking steps to sell big three mold and reclassified it as discontinued operations. Unlike Big Three's returnable packaging business, which holds excellent potential for Eastern, mold is a complex niche business that, especially given today's market dynamics, offers many fewer opportunities for synergy and requires significant capital investment to remain competitive. The sale of mold will put Eastern in a better position to play to the company's strengths. In addition, We will now be able to focus all of our resources on Eastern's best-in-class manufacturing and assembling capabilities in the commercial vehicle, automotive, and other industrial end markets. With that introduction, I'll turn the call over to Nick for a more detailed review of our Q3 financial results. Nick.