Nordson Corporation

Please press star 1 again. Thank you. Laura Mahoney, you may begin.

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, Thursday, December 16th, 2021, to report Nordson's fiscal year 2021 fourth quarter and full year 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 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 December 30th, 2021. 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 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 Northam'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 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 sheets and cash flow. Naga will conclude with high-level commentary about our enterprise performance, including an update on the Ascend strategy, as well as our fiscal 2022 first quarter and 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 Nordstrom's fiscal 2021 fourth quarter and full year conference call. On the heels of 2020, a year marked by the COVID pandemic, I don't think anyone knew what to expect coming into 2021. We were well positioned, having both remained invested in our customer-centric businesses and started deployment of MBS Next growth framework. Our focus remained sharply on protecting the health and safety of our employees while also meeting the needs of our customers. The successful deployment of NBS Next ensured we were able to fully participate in the accelerated economic recovery experienced in 2021. Our division leaders use strategic discipline to identify and then focus on the best opportunities for profitable growth in their respective businesses. As a result, we surpassed Our prior record annual performance in sales by $108 million and in operating profit by $111 million. This new record was achieved through broad-based growth across most end markets and geographies. Fourth quarter was a solid finish to this record year. Sales were in line with our expectations, particularly in light of the timing of the approximate $25 million customer order that had been pulled forward into fiscal third quarter. Looking at the back half of fiscal 2021, we delivered 15% organic sales growth and 36% adjusted profit growth compared to the prior year second half. I'll speak more about the businesses 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.