speaker
Jennifer Honeycutt
President and Chief Executive Officer

Please stand by, your program is about to begin. If you need audio assistance during today's program, please press star zero. My name is Margo and I'll be your conference operator this morning. At this time, I'd like to welcome everyone to Veralto's Corporation's first quarter 2025 conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during that time, simply press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press the star, then the number two on your telephone keypad. I will now turn the call over to Ryan Taylor, Vice President, Investor Relations. Mr. Taylor, you may begin your program.

speaker
Ryan Taylor
Vice President, Investor Relations

Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us on the call. With me today are Jennifer Honeycutt, our President and Chief Executive Officer, and Sameer Rohan, our Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Today's call is simultaneously being webcast. A replay of the webcast will be available on the investor section of our website later today under the heading Events and Presentations. A replay of this call will be available until May 9th. Yesterday, we issued our first quarter 2025 news release, earnings presentation, and supplemental materials, including information required by the SEC relating to adjusted or non-GAAP financial measures. In addition, we reaffirmed our full year 2025 earnings per share guidance, which now includes our current assessment of the macroeconomic environment, including tariffs and related countermeasures. These materials are available in the investor section of our website, beralta.com, under the heading quarterly earnings. Reconciliations of all non-GAAP measures are also provided in the appendix of our webcast slides. Unless otherwise noted, all references to variances are on a year-over-year basis. On that note, I'd like to point out that year-over-year sales growth in the first quarter of 2025 benefited from three additional shipping days as compared to the first quarter of 2024. During the call, we will make forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws, including statements regarding events or developments that we believe or anticipate will or may occur in the future. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, including those set forth in our SEC filings. Actual results may differ materially from our forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements speak only as of the date that they are made, and we do not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required by law. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Jennifer.

speaker
Jennifer Honeycutt
President and Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, Ryan, and thank you all for joining our call today. Before discussing our first quarter results, I'd like to take a moment to recognize our 17,000 associates across the world for their commitment to serving customers, driving continuous improvement, and safeguarding the world's most vital resources. As stewards of some of the world's most essential resources, we help ensure billions of people have access to clean water, safe food, and trusted essential goods each and every day. Dynamic business environments such as the one we are currently experiencing, provide us with the opportunity to demonstrate the essential nature of our products, the durability of our business model, and the power of the Veralto Enterprise System. Our team embraces challenges as opportunities to drive differentiated, winning outcomes for our customers, associates, and shareholders. That mindset has propelled us to a strong start in 2025 and prepared us to navigate this dynamic macroeconomic environment we are facing in the near term. In the first quarter, we delivered excellent results across the enterprise driven by disciplined execution in both segments and We are actively deploying several countermeasures to mitigate changes in the global trade and tariff landscape and enhance our operational flexibility. I'm proud of our team and our collective performance thus far in 2025. Looking at the first quarter results in detail, building off the operating momentum generated last year, we delivered 7.8% core sales growth 50 basis points of adjusted operating margin expansion, and double-digit adjusted EPS growth. Our commercial teams executed on strategic initiatives to gain new customer wins and increase market penetration while also capitalizing on favorable demand across our key end markets and geographies. Our core sales growth was driven primarily by volume and was broad-based across both segments. with pqi delivering 8.3 percent core sales growth and water quality 7.4 percent core sales growth in pqi positive trends in consumer packaged goods markets supported growth across all key product categories in our marking and coding business and across our digital workflow solutions in packaging and color notably in our marking and coding business q1 marked our fourth consecutive quarter with year-over-year growth in both consumables and equipment. In water quality, we continue to drive robust growth of our water treatment solutions in North America, complemented by steady growth in water analytics sales globally, including double-digit growth in Europe. Adjusted operating profit margin expanded 50 basis points year-over-year to 25%, an all-time high. We expanded operating margin in both segments with incremental margins in line with our long-term framework. Driven by high-quality sales growth and efficient operating leverage, adjusted earnings per share grew 13% year-over-year to $0.95. This exceeded our guidance primarily due to better-than-expected sales volumes. I'm proud of our team's disciplined execution to deliver a high quality performance in the first quarter in service to our customers. In addition to our strong organic growth performance, we continue to make great progress on recent acquisitions. The integration of trace gains is on track. Sales are growing in line with our expectations and we continue to invest in future growth. And in February, we signed a definitive agreement to acquire Aquafetus, an Austria-based provider of ultraviolet water treatment for $20 million. Aquafetus treatment systems are used in drinking water, wastewater, and a variety of industrial applications that require high-purity water, including food and beverage and pharmaceuticals. This is a fantastic addition to our Trojan business. It expands our ability to serve European customers with local engineering support and service, while also expanding our UV treatment portfolio with high-quality, efficient, fit-for-purpose solutions. We look forward to welcoming the Aquafetus team to Viralto and unlocking new growth opportunities together. Looking at core sales growth by geography and end market, growth was broad-based across key verticals and regions. Our commercial teams executed well, leveraging VES tools and capitalizing on the investments made last year to expand our sales, marketing, and innovation efforts. Sales growth in Western Europe was robust at nearly 11% with double-digit growth in both segments. In North America, sales grew approximately eight percent with high single digit growth in both segments and sales in high growth markets were up six percent year over year with pqi sales of high single digits and water quality up low single digits taking a closer look in western europe water quality grew 11.3 percent our water analytics team in western europe continued to deliver exceptional growth through rigorous lead generation funnel management and ves catalyzed commercial execution and in pqi sales into western europe grew 10.3 percent driven by double digit growth in packaging and color and high single digit growth in marking and coding In packaging and color, we saw strong software growth across most packaging applications, including increased mid-market penetration. This reflects increased focus on account management and fit for purpose solutions to accelerate software growth. And in marketing and coding, growth was driven across equipment, consumables, and spares. Moving to North America, core sales growth was led by water quality with 8.3% growth. We continue to capitalize on increasing demand for our chemical water treatment solutions, which grew double digits in North America. Our chemical treatment growth was broad-based across several industries with the strongest growth in power generation, food and beverage, and chemical processing. and we continue to see growth from new data centers as they become operational. Also, sales of Trojan's UV systems to municipalities primarily related to water reuse contributed to our growth in North America. The economic benefits of water conservation, reclamation, and reuse continue to provide opportunities for us to expand our business and support our customers' objectives to efficiently manage their water usage. Over the long term, continued North American growth in water quality is supported by attractive secular trends such as water scarcity, water reuse, more frequent severe weather events, and increasing demand from heavy water consumption applications, such as data centers and power generation. We also continue to benefit from positive market trends across PQI in North America during the first quarter, with core sales up 6.9% year over year. This was primarily driven by double-digit growth in recurring revenue, specifically consumables and software. This reflects a combination of improved end market demand from CPG customers, VES-driven commercial excellence, and market penetration from our strategic initiatives. In high-growth markets, core sales grew 6.1% highlighted by strong growth in Latin America, India, and the Middle East. In China, sales grew low single digits with strong growth in PQI partially offset by a decline in water quality sales related to timing of ultraviolet treatments installations, which were strong in Q1 2024. Overall, we delivered strong broad base growth in the first quarter across all of our operating companies. We believe the essential nature of our products, our durable business model, and the secular growth drivers across our end markets position us to create value for our stakeholders over both the short and long term. We remain confident that the Veralto Enterprise System will enable us to navigate ongoing changes in the macroeconomic environment with agility and discipline. In addition to delivering a strong first quarter, we implemented several countermeasures to help mitigate the impact of recent tariff hikes and enhance our operational flexibility. This includes strategic pricing roadmaps, targeted sourcing and supply chain initiatives, and shifts in manufacturing footprint, including the addition of Trojan's first U.S. factory in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This factory opened in February and is designed to support consumables and light assembly for our domestic UV water treatment customers. This expansion creates greater manufacturing and supply chain flexibility for Trojan to support its US customer base. We leveraged VES tools to prioritize and accelerate the opening of this facility by about four months ahead of schedule to help offset potential tariff headwinds. With greater flexibility and the exemption of product imports covered by the USMCA, our current exposure to Canadian tariffs has been reduced significantly. This is a great example of how well equipped our team is to navigate the current macro environment with focus, agility, and speed. And we have several levers to pull to mitigate risk while supporting our customers and maintaining business continuity. Our decentralized operating model empowers our business leaders who are closest to our customers to make decisions quickly. Our diverse global footprint and flexible supply chain give us agility and optionality to maneuver quickly. And our leading market positions, direct sales force, and the essential nature of our products give us the ability to be thoughtful with strategic pricing actions. Confidence in our ability to deliver on our commitments is, in large part, grounded in the Veralto Enterprise System, our proven system for driving growth, operational improvements, and leadership development. A core tenet of VES is continuous improvement, or Kaizen. As we do annually in the first quarter each year, we completed Veralto's second CEO Kaizen Week in February. CEO Kaizen Week is a long-standing tradition of our enterprise system and personally one of my favorite weeks of the year. this event is culturally important as it helps us stay close to the businesses and understand both their struggles and opportunities helping to catalyze decision making and prioritize allocation of capital and resources for one week we immersed 20 cross-functional teams at gemba where the real work happens at 10 locations across the world to address our biggest impact opportunities with the participation of Veralto executives. Building off our success last year, this year's CEO Kaizen Week was designed to help us accelerate growth and reinforce that at Veralto, we are all practitioners of continuous improvement. Among other opportunities, a few of this year's most strategic and impactful events focused on increasing adoption of packaging and color software within mid-market CPG customers, accelerating capture of design input requirements for new product development and water analytics, and reducing lead time for consumables in one of our marking and coding product lines. The benefits of any Kaizen week include immediate solutions that are rapidly implemented and yield real-time results. Success is proven by sustaining these results, which we track following the Kaizen events. That concludes my opening remarks, and at this time, I'll turn the call over to Sameer.

Disclaimer

This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.

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