Nordson Corporation

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. My name is Kelvin, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Nordstrom Corporation first quarter fiscal year 2025 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 the star button followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, simply press the pound key or star two. Thank you. I would 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 Dan Hopgood, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. We welcome you to our conference call today, Thursday, February 20th, to report Nordson's fiscal 2025 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 27, 2025. 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 security and exchange commission that could cause actual results to materially differ. I also want to take a moment to highlight that effective November 1st, 2024, which is the beginning of our fiscal year, the measurement and control solutions division, formally reported as part of the industrial precision solutions segment, has been realigned to the advanced technology solutions segment based on a reassessment of our portfolio. Our segment reporting reflects this change and prior year financial information has been revised to be comparable. Please refer to the appendix in our earnings press release for comparative segment data by quarter for fiscal 2024. Now moving through today's agenda on slide three, Naga will discuss first quarter highlights. He will then turn the call over to Dan to review sales and earnings performance for the total company and the three business segments. Dan will also discuss the balance sheet and cash flow. Naga will then share a high level commentary about our enterprise performance and provide an update on the fiscal 2025 second 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 Norton's fiscal 2025 first quarter conference call. We're starting the year with the sales of $615 million, which is at the low end of our guidance range due to soft demand in key end markets, particularly electronics and industrial, and foreign exchange headwinds that were slightly worse than expectations. This more than offset the solid performance of our Atrion acquisition, as well as organic growth within our consumer non-durable product lines. Positively, order entry rates accelerated throughout the quarter, growing double digits above the prior year order entry run rate. You can see this growth in our backlog, which increased sequentially from fiscal year end by approximately $85 million, ending at approximately $670 million as we exit the first quarter. The improvement in order entry rates and backlog is particularly encouraging to see in our electronics businesses. Our continued focus on top customers and products, coupled with leveraging NBS Next to drive factory efficiencies and manage costs led to another strong quarter of operational performance. The team delivered 56% gross margin, 26% operating profit margin, 31% EBITDA margin, and converted free cash flow at nearly 150% of net income. We achieved adjusted earnings per share of $2.06, slightly above the midpoint of our guidance despite weaker sales. As a growth compounder, we remain steadfast with our balanced capital deployment strategy repurchasing approximately $60 million in shares during the quarter. In addition, we paid $45 million in dividends and decreased our net leverage ratio to 2.4 times exceeding the first quarter comfortably within our targeted range. Our consistently strong operating performance quarter over quarter positions as well to capitalize profitably on growth as demand improves throughout fiscal 2025. I'll speak more about the enterprise performance in few moments, but first I'll turn the call over to Dan to provide detailed perspective on our financial results for the quarter.