The Eastern Company

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Eastern Company's first quarter fiscal year 2025 earnings call. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode, and the floor will be open for questions following the presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during this 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, Investor Relations. Marianne, the floor is yours.

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 2025. With me on the call are Ryan Schroeder, Chief Executive Officer, and Nicholas Vallejos, Chief Financial Officer. 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 11, 2025, for the fiscal year 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, I'll turn the call over to Ryan.

Thank you, Marianne, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. At the highest level, I'll say this. The first quarter met our earnings expectations, yet still with plenty of challenges in the marketplace. Revenues came in at $63.3 million, down slightly from Q1 of 2024. EBITDA came in at $4.8 million, and earnings per share at $0.31 per share, very close to where we expected it to come in for the year or for the quarter. A few high-level updates before I turn it over to Nick on more details from the quarter. These updates are from really the last time that we spoke. We've made meaningful structural changes in Big Three Precision. We've been able to sell the ISBM blow mold business, also known as Centralia Mold. Furthermore, within Big Three, we've been able to close the Dearborn facility and improve our structural competitiveness within our racking business. Additionally, we've been able to complete a share buyback program of 200,000 shares. I'm also happy to report that the board approved an additional share buyback program of an additional 400,000 shares. Also, throughout the quarter and the first part of the year, we've been able to complete our leadership team transition plans, and I'm very happy about the leadership team. I'll touch on that within each of the portfolio businesses a bit more as we get further into things. And then lastly, I'd like to say I'm extremely pleased to have Jan Del Bato join us. on our board of directors. Previously, Chan was the CEO of Cerberus Operations and Advisory Company. There, he was on a number of different boards, probably most notably as co-chairman of Albertsons. Most recently, Chan was the chairman of New Flyer Industries. I'm super excited to have Chairman join the board. 2025 will be a year of enhancing our strategic growth plan, eliminating bureaucracy, and optimizing our cash flow. So with that, I'd like to turn it over to Nick on additional details for the quarter.