Nordson Corporation

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Nordstrom Corporation fourth quarter and fiscal year 2020 conference call. At this time, all participant lines are on mute. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. After this, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press start one on your telephone. If you would like Any further assistance, please press star zero. I would now like to turn a call over to speaker today. Laura Mahoney, please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning. This is Laura Mahoney, Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications. I'm here with Sundaram Navarajan, our President and CEO, and Joseph Kelly, Executive Vice President and CFO. Hello. We welcome you to our conference call today, Wednesday, December 16th, 2020, to report Northen's fiscal year 2020 fourth quarter and full year results. You can find both our press release as well as our new webcast slide presentation that we will refer to during today's call on our website at northen.com forward slash investors. This conference call is being broadcast live on our investor website and will be available there for 14 days. There will be a telephone replay of the conference call available until December 30, 2020. During this conference call, references to non-GAAP financial metrics will be made. A complete reconciliation of these metrics to the most comparable GAAP metrics has been provided in the press release issued yesterday. Before we begin, please refer to slide two of our presentation, where we note that certain statements regarding our future performance that are made during this call may be forward-looking based upon Norton's current expectations. These statements may involve a number of risks uncertainties, and other factors as discussed in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission that could cause actual results to differ. Moving to today's agenda on slide three, Naza will discuss fourth quarter and full year highlights. He will then turn the call over to Joe to review sales and earnings performance for the total company and the two business segments. Joe also will talk about the year-end balance sheet and cash flow. Naga will conclude with high-level commentary about our enterprise performance, as well as our fiscal 2021 first quarter guidance. We will then be happy to take your questions. With that, I'll turn to slide four and hand the call over to Naga.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining Norton's fiscal 2020 fourth quarter and full-year conference call. In this unprecedented fiscal year, we did not just weather a challenging macro environment. We advanced our long-term strategy and achieved solid financial results. First, I want to thank our Nolson employees for their flexibility, resilience, and commitment as we navigated fiscal 2020. From the beginning of this pandemic, our leadership team has worked together to protect the health and safety of our employees and respond to the needs of our customers. Representatives from our global teams came together to share best practices and lessons learned as COVID-19 spanned the globe. We implemented new protocols of social distancing and face coverings, as well as regular cleaning and temperature checks. all of which continues to this day. By protecting our employees, we were able to offer uninterrupted service to our customers, many of whom were deemed to support critical infrastructure. Norton products serve a very diverse set of end markets, including medical, electronics, consumer non-durables, and general industrials. This diversity helped us drive the relative stability of our results. They've also stayed invested in our direct sales, application, and service model and committed to the innovation in our precision technologies. For the full year, sales decreased only 3% compared to prior year, which is commendable in this environment. Simultaneously, we made meaningful progress on our long-term objectives. We built and started to deploy the next generation of Norton business system, which we are calling NBS Next, our growth framework. Using critical insights generated by NBS Next segmentation tools, our divisional leaders are prioritizing investments in our best growth opportunities and simplifying non-value-added tasks in operations to deliver best-in-class product quality and delivery. Use of this data-driven growth framework led us to take actions that could strategically position our portfolio for sustainable long-term profitable growth. In September, We announced the technology acquisition of Vivamos, which designs, develops, and fabricates high-end image sensors that would further differentiate our X-ray inspection product offering. Earlier this year, we acquired Florotech, a precision plastic extrusion manufacturer in medical device industry. Florotech brings highly differentiated PTFE medical tubing expertise, which is complementary to our current value-added component offering for minimally invasive therapies, such as heart valve replacement. Scaling up our highly differentiated testing inspection and medical product lines will continue to be a priority of our capital deployment strategy. We also took actions to simplify our portfolio in less differentiated areas. On December 3rd, we announced the divestiture of our screws and barrels product line from our polymer processing systems division to Altair Investments. While this business is a respected leader in the plastic industry, it does not meet Norton's long-term profitable growth objective. We believe it will be better positioned with Altair. By divesting this business, we will focus our resources on growing more differentiated, profitable product lines that will deliver on our long-term growth objectives. We believe our remaining PPS division has the right degree of differentiation and related technical competitive advantages to deliver Norton-like growth and returns. I'll speak more about the business in a few moments. But first, I'll turn the call over to Joe to provide more detailed perspective on our financial results for the quarter.