Franklin Electric Co., Inc.

Hello and welcome to the Franklin Electric Reports third 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 1-1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand has been raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce Director of Investor Relations, Dean Cantrell.

Thank you, Andrew, and welcome everyone to Franklin Electric's Third Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. Joining me today is Jennifer Wolfenbarger, our Chief Financial Officer, and Joe Ruzynski, our Chief Executive Officer. On today's call, Joe will review our third quarter of business highlights, Jennifer will provide additional details on our financial performance, and then Joe will make some additional comments highlighting our energy system segment and recent acquisitions. 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 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, except as required by law, the company assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. Earlier today, we published the 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. We had a very busy quarter, and I'm pleased to share our progress with you today. Let's move to slide three. We had a very solid third quarter. I'm proud of our team's performance in light of a sometimes challenging global backdrop. Not just executing for our customers every day and operating in a challenging environment, but bringing new products to market, growing our business, optimizing our footprint, and executing our strategy. Our strategy and discipline remain strong, and our balance sheet healthy. We saw some market softness localized in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and in South America as the Brazilian elections are providing some headwinds during the quarter. Excited to share today that we have found some great additions to our portfolio in cat pumps and now challenge pumps. We will talk about this later during the call. But both of these deals are aligned with our strategy of a portfolio pointed towards faster growing markets where our legacy channel and expertise can help us integrate and grow these acquisitions. As we expect in the future, acquisitions will play an important and balanced role in our growth. The first month of cat pumps was a great start, and our team is very excited about the future. Moving to slide four, our business was up 9% in revenue, with nearly 5% of our growth coming from our legacy business. We did see some pressure on our gross margins as we worked through some operational headwinds during plant moves and dealt with a more inflationary environment throughout the quarter. We delivered adjusted OI growth of over 11% and we delivered 15% growth in EPS during the quarter. We are very satisfied with our overall performance as a company. As we exited the quarter, our order rates remain healthy, our inventory positions are balanced in the channel, and our team continues to find great opportunities to win. We continue to work on pricing and productivity to offset this pressure and have implemented some important restructuring efforts to ensure our business is positioned well from a cost perspective. Jennifer will give some detail to these efforts shortly. Importantly, these efforts and some other recent consolidation and value chain repositioning efforts will bring productivity in 2027. If we can move to slide five, I'd like to share our progress on some of our strategic priorities. Our strategy is clear. We are focused on markets that are growing faster, supported by wider macro trends while diversifying our end markets. We are adding new channels and customers by bringing innovation and our leading services to broader end markets. In Q3, we saw strong growth again from new products, delivering over $28 million in new sales year-to-date, accelerating our growth and showing the desire for new Franklin innovations. We continue to expand our reach and saw strong dealer ads in water treatment, and our recently deployed OSI containers helped us to achieve $32 million of sales in the quarter, and increases in our share with current customers. As we add muscle and focus to our productivity with our new Chief Supply Chain Officer and Value Acceleration Office, we are building and executing on a sizable funnel as we enter 2027. and as a company with a healthy balance sheet and strong cash generation, we are excited about our recent deals and their performance. We are announcing a new and exciting one with Challenge Pumps today. That puts us in the operating cycle of the fast-growing mineral extraction market, adding to two great deals we've done in the past few years in this space. As talent and culture of Franklin's Bedrock, we are excited to announce Luciana Amaro as our new Chief Human Resources Officer. She brings a strong history of helping companies grow globally and will be a great addition to our team and help us with key integration of the new additions to our Franklin team. Finally, and most importantly, we are focused not only on building the strongest team in our industry, but growing a company that attracts, develops, and retains this great talent. Thank you. to our Franklin team for your tireless support of our customers and execution of our strategy. I'd like to turn it over now to Jennifer to review our financials in more detail.