Franklin Electric Co., Inc.

Good day and welcome to the Franklin Electric Reports first quarter 2026 sales and earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand has been raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. It is now my pleasure to introduce Director of Investor Relations, Dean Cantrell.

Thank you, Andrew, and welcome everyone to Franklin Electric's first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. Joining me today is Jennifer Wolfenbarger, our Chief Financial Officer, and Joe Rosinski, our Chief Executive Officer. On today's call, Joe will review our first quarter business highlights, Jennifer will provide additional details on our financial performance, and then Joe will make some additional comments highlighting our distribution segment. We will then take your questions. A replay link of the webcast will be archived for seven days, and a transcript and audio version of this call will be available on our website tomorrow. Before we begin, let me remind you that as we conduct this call, we will be making forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties, many of which could cause actual results to differ materially from such forward-looking statements. A discussion of these factors may be found in the company's annual report on Form 10-K and in today's earnings release. During this call, we will present both GAAP and certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures is included in the appendix of our earnings presentation. All forward-looking statements made during this call are based on information currently available, and as except as required by law, the company assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. Earlier today, we published a slide deck to accompany our prepared remarks. The slides can be found in the investor relations section of our corporate website at www.franklin-electric.com. With that, I will now turn the call over to Joe.

Thank you, Dean, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining today's call. I'm pleased to share our results for the first quarter with you all today. Let's move to slide three. Our first quarter was a strong one for all segments. Organic growth was healthy across our end markets with volume growth and disciplined pricing across our segments. Our quarter finished with healthy backlogs and order trends as we entered the second quarter. Our balance sheet remains healthy as we look to continue to invest in our strategic initiatives and returns for our shareholders. Our launch of the Value Acceleration Office is off to a great start with a strong funnel and some good initial returns. If we could move to slide four. I'd like to look at our performance in terms of our strategic objectives and specifically growth. Our sales were up 10% and each segment saw volume growth along with positive pricing and contribution from new products, channels, and new customers. Our operating income was up 9% with adjusted income up 17%. Gap EPS was up 15% with adjusted EPS up 24%. Our adjusted EPS growth in Q1 more than doubled our sales growth year over year. This was helped by strong improvements in our income and SG&A productivity. We've worked through some thoughtful restructuring as we align our capacity and production to our regions and markets that are growing, and we work to streamline parts of our business that have grown through acquisition these past few years. We are positioned well for 2026 with a backlog of 10% and a positive book to bill as we enter the quarter. If we move to slide five, I'd like to share our progress on some of our strategic priorities. Our value creation model starts with clear growth focus, and we continue to see opportunities to innovate and serve markets that are seeing good underlying strength. Our dewatering business was driven by 10% growth in the mineral OPEX market, and we are thoughtfully bringing together recent acquisitions in this space. channel expansions, and customer acquisition together to build a great part of our portfolio. In Q1, we launched a great addition to our pressure boosting portfolio with our new VersaBoost product. We are thinking of scale and velocity for new products, and our VersaBoost Pro delivers smarter, reliable water pressure with effortless installation and lasting performance in residential markets. These types of launches will help us set a new bar in 2026 and 2027 for new product vitality and revenue. Our margin expansion efforts are on track with our new value acceleration office, launched in 2025. Our funnel is growing, and we expect to solve our biggest growth and productivity challenges with sound governance and speed. We see our office delivering over $15 million in productivity this year, with an opportunity to accelerate this as we move into 2027. Our expectation is to deliver over 100 basis points of productivity a year once we ramp up our efforts. We are pleased to see our focused margin improvement efforts in water treatment up 410 basis points and our distribution business up 210 basis points in the full year 2025. This demonstrates that growth and efficiency can work hand in hand. We are expanding our capital deployment for new projects this year and have recently inaugurated our new water factory in Izmir, Turkey, with more focused expansions and regional efforts in India, South America, and Mexico, to name a few. We've continued to smartly buy back shares, 120,000 in Q1, and have continued our dividend expansion in 2026, now at 34 years of growth. Most importantly, on team and talent, a big thank you to Franklin's employees as our growth happens every day with every customer served. Every problem we solve, growth strategy we execute, and employee we keep safe helps us to grow and to build on our strong culture. Our people and our talent are our bedrock. With that, I will turn the call over to Jennifer to discuss the financial results in more detail.