Nordson Corporation

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us and welcome to Nordson Corporation's second quarter fiscal year 2026 conference call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star one again. I will now hand the conference over to Laura Mahoney. Laura, 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 Chief Executive Officer, and Dan Hopgood, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. We welcome you to our conference call today, Thursday, May 21st, to report Nordson's fiscal 2026 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. 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 gap 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 second 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 2026 third quarter and full year guidance. We will then be happy to take your questions. With that, I'll turn to slide four and turn the call over to Naga.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining Norton's fiscal 2026 second quarter conference call. I'm very pleased to report a strong second quarter where all three segments contributed to our organic growth performance, surpassing the midpoint expectations of last quarter's sales and earnings guidance. We built upon the momentum of the first quarter with record sales of $741 million. This is an 8% increase over the prior year, which is inclusive of 7% overall organic growth. Order entry momentum continued throughout the quarter with accelerated activity in the last couple of months, driving up backlog 18% organically compared to the prior year. Solid execution and volume leverage drove record profit performance for the quarter, delivering EBITDA of $235 million which was a second quarter record and 32% of sales. Adjusted earnings per share of $2.86 were also a second quarter record. This was an increase of 18% compared to prior year. I would also like to highlight our free cash flow of $170 million. Our free cash flow conversion over 100% of net income continues to be a strength, enabling a healthy mix of shareholder returns and reinvestment in growth. We strategically deployed this cash to repurchase shares, return dividends to shareholders, and maintain our debt leverage while continuing to invest in the company. Also during the quarter, we acquired Capstan AG, a small but strategic precision agriculture company in North America. This bolt-on deal, which was valued at nine times adjusted EBITDA, enables Nordsten to grow our precision agricultural portfolio with mid-tier OEMs in the region. I'll talk more about the capstan deal and enterprise performance in a few moments, but first, I'll turn the call over to Dan to provide a detailed perspective on our financial results for the quarter.