Nordson Corporation

conference over to Laura Mahoney. Laura, 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 Stephen Shamrock, Vice President, Corporate Controller, and Interim CFO. We welcome you to our conference call today, Thursday, February 22nd, to report Nordson's fiscal 2024 first 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 30 days. There will be a telephone replay of the conference call available until Thursday, February 29th, 2024. During this conference call, we will make references to non-GAAP financial metrics. We've provided a reconciliation of these metrics to the most comparable GAAP metric 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 materially differ. Moving to today's agenda on slide three, Naga will discuss first quarter highlights. He will then turn the call over to Steve to review sales and earnings performance for the total company and the three business segments. Steve will also discuss the balance sheet and cash flow. Naga will then share a high-level commentary about our enterprise performance. He will conclude with an update on the fiscal 2024 full year and second 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 2024 first quarter conference call. At the outset, I'd like to recognize the dedicated Norton team who leveraged the NBS Next growth framework to deliver solid first quarter results. Sales of $633 million were near the top of our first quarter guidance range. This was driven by strong performance in our medical interventional, industrial coatings, and polymer processing product lines, which more than offset continued weakness in our electronics product lines. In addition, our focus on top customers and differentiated products improved product mix. This focus, in addition to simplifying and strategically adjusting costs, led to strong incremental margins, resulting in adjusted earnings per share of $2.21. This exceeded our EPS guidance for the quarter. Finally, I'd like to highlight our first quarter free cash flow of $165 million, which was 150% of net income. This was a new first quarter record. I would also like to recognize the steady progress of our ARAG integration, which contributed to our sales and EBITDA margin performance in the quarter. We continue to be excited about the technology and precision agriculture and market, as well as the engagement and energy of our new employees. I'll speak more about the enterprise performance in a few minutes, but first, I'll turn the call over to Steve to provide detailed perspective on our financial results for the quarter.