Nordson Corporation

Good morning and welcome to Nordson Corporation's second quarter fiscal year 2023 results conference call. All participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. To ask a question, you'll need to press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Laura Mahoney, Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications. Thank you. 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 23rd, to report Nordstrom's fiscal 2023 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.nordsen.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, May 30th, 2023. During this conference call, references to non-GAAP financial metrics will be made. A 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 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, 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 three business segments. Joe will also discuss the balance sheet and cash flow. Naga will then share a high-level commentary about our earnings performance. He will conclude with an update on the fiscal 2023 full year and third 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 Nordstrom's fiscal 2023 second quarter conference call. During the second quarter, Nordstrom continued to experience a macro environment that can be described as a multi-speed economy. Customer demand in industrial, consumer non-durable, and medical interventional end markets were solid. Alternatively, electronic dispense product lines are being negatively impacted by the downside of the semiconductor cycle. And sales of biopharma product lines in our medical fluid components division continues to normalize against challenging prior year comparisons as customers continue to work through excess inventory. These factors balanced themselves out and the team delivered organic sales growth of 1% compared to prior year's second quarter. During the quarter, the teams also took targeted cost actions in areas where we are seeing weakness in customer demand. These will enable us to effectively navigate the current business environment and strengthen our long-term position for profitable growth. Overall, we remain invested in our competitive differentiators, including our direct sales force, product innovation, and the training and execution of NBS Next growth framework. In a few moments, I'll speak more about the business and what we're seeing in our end markets. But first, I'll turn the call over to Joe to provide a detailed perspective on our financial results for the quarter.