Nordson Corporation

Good morning. My name is Dennis and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Norton Corporation fourth quarter and fiscal year 2023 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 this time, simply press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, press star one again. I would now like to turn the conference over to Laura Mahoney. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning. This is Laura Mahoney, Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications. We welcome you to our conference call today, Thursday, December 14th, 2023, to report Nordstrom's fiscal year 2023 fourth quarter and full year results. I'm here with Sundaram Nagarajan, our President and CEO. Joseph Kelly, Executive Vice President, and Stephen Shamrock, Interim Chief Financial Officer. While Joe recently took a new role as Executive Vice President, Industrial Precision Solutions segment, he was CFO for the entirety of fiscal 2023 and will represent that viewpoint in today's call. 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 21st, 2023. 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 Nordstrom'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 three 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, including an update on the Ascend strategy, as well as our fiscal 2024 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 Nordsten's fiscal 2023 fourth quarter and full year conference call. In 2021, Nordsten launched its Ascend strategy to achieve top tier growth with leading margins and returns. We set a goal to deliver $3 billion in sales and greater than 30% EBITDA margins by 2025. As we complete the third year of our strategy, we are on track toward achieving these objectives. This is a testament to our employees who have, in the last three years, developed and deployed the Ascend strategy and tackled dynamic macroeconomic conditions, including a pandemic, global supply chain pressure, labor challenges, and rising interest rates to name a few. In 2023, we also managed the unique period of biopharma destocking as well as the cyclical electronics and markets. The core elements of our business model has enabled us to deliver profitable growth throughout these challenges. This includes a fundamental focus on our customers, commitment to innovation, diversified geographic and end market exposure, and a high level of recurring revenue through aftermarket parts and consumables. Since launching the Ascend strategy, we have added new capabilities to our model, including the NDS Next growth framework and a division-led structure which has empowered our teams to respond rapidly to changing market conditions. This led to solid financial performance in the quarter and the year, exceeding our targeted incremental and decremental profit targets in all three segments. Combining all of these factors With our capital deployment strategy to strengthen our precision technology portfolio, we delivered record sales, 31% EBITDA margin, and record cash flow in fiscal 2023. I'll speak more to this in a few moments, but I'll now turn the call over to Joe to provide more detailed perspective on our financial results for the fourth quarter and fiscal 2023.