Nordson Corporation

Thank you for standing by. My name is Eric and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Nordson Corporation second quarter fiscal year 2024 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 followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw your question, press star one again. Thank you. I'd now like to turn the call over to 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 Stephen Shamrock, Chief Accounting Officer. We welcome you to our conference call today, Tuesday, May 21st, to report Nordson's fiscal 2024 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 30 days. There will be a telephone replay of the conference call available until Tuesday, May 28, 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 metrics 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 second 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 end market and provide an update on the fiscal 2024 full year and third quarter guidance. We will then be happy to take your questions. With that, I'll turn the call over to Naga.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining Nordson's fiscal 2024 second quarter conference call. Before we begin, I would like to welcome Dan Hopgood, our new executive vice president and chief financial officer to Nordson. Dan started with us yesterday. He brings more than 25 years of financial and operational expertise to the CFO role. Prior to joining Norton, he held roles of increasing responsibility at Eaton Corporation, a 23 billion multinational power management company. Most recently, he served as Eaton's controller and chief accounting officer. As I got to know Dan, I was impressed with his robust financial experience, his time as an operational leader, and his passion for developing talent. Today, he will be listening in, and we look forward to introducing him to all of you in the coming months, starting at the KeyBank Industrials and Basic Materials Conference in Boston next week. Now let's shift into our second quarter earnings results on slide five. At the outset, I would like to recognize the dedicated Norton team who have leveraged the NBS Next Growth Framework to deliver solid second quarter results. Sales of $651 million were within our second quarter guidance range. Growth was driven by the AIRAG acquisition as well as strong performance in our industrial coatings and fluid solutions product lines, which offset continued weakness in our electronics product lines. In addition, our focus on top customers and differentiated products improved product mix. This focus and strategically adjusting costs led to improvements in gross margins and top quartile EBITDA margin of 31%. In the quarter, we delivered adjusted earnings per share of $2.34, which was at the top end of our EPS guidance for the quarter. Finally, I'd like to highlight our second quarter free cash flow of $108 million, which was 92% of net income. We continue to convert earnings into cash flow and use this cash flow to retire nearly 100 million of debt within the quarter. I'll speak more about the enterprise performance in a few moments, but first, I'll turn the call over to Steve to provide a detailed perspective on our financial results for the quarter.