Nordson Corporation

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Norsen Corporation second quarter fiscal year 2021 conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during today's session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your 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 Nagarajan, our President and CEO, and Joseph Kelly, Executive Vice President and CFO. We welcome you to our conference call today, Tuesday, May 25th, 2021 to report Nordson's fiscal 2021 second quarter results. You can find both our press release as well as our webcast slide presentation that we will refer to during today's call on our website at www.nordson.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 Tuesday, June 1st. During this conference call, references to non-GAAP financial metrics will be made. A complete reconciliation of these metrics to the most comparable GAAP metric was 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 Nordson'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, Naga will discuss second quarter 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 balance sheet and cash flow. Naga will conclude with high-level commentary about our enterprise performance, as well as our updated fiscal 2021 full-year 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 2021 second quarter conference call. Throughout fiscal 2020, we remained invested in what makes Norton strong, our direct sales model and innovative position technology portfolios. We also advanced our new NBS Next growth framework, which ensures we focus our resources on the best opportunities for profitable growth. This strategy has positioned us well last year, and as the recovery continues to accelerate in 2021, it has put us in an excellent position to respond to our customers and deliver record sales, gross margin, operating profit, and EBITDA during the fiscal 2021 second quarter. As the quarter progressed, end market demand accelerated faster and to a greater degree than we originally anticipated, particularly in medical, electronics, and industrial end markets. Norton's dispense applications in the industrial precision solution segment benefited from the pickup in industrial and markets, as well as the sustained demand for food and beverage packaging. In the advanced technology solution segment, a data-centric economy where increasing demand for semiconductors and complex electronic devices drove the need for our test and inspection and fluid dispense products. We have also started to see recovery in our medical intervention solution product lines as the outpatient surgeries are beginning to increase following the COVID-19 related slowdown. Our medical businesses continues to benefit from accelerated growth of single-use plastic fluid components for biopharmaceutical applications. I want to congratulate and thank the Nordstrom Global team for achieving this record second quarter. I'm also proud of our team's dedication to meet this accelerating demand while maintaining COVID-19 safety protocols and effectively managing supply chain and capacity constraints. 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.