Neogen Corporation

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Neogen Corporation second quarter FY2026 earnings conference call. At this time, all lines are in listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. If at any time during this call you require immediate assistance, please press star zero for the operator. This call has been recorded on Thursday, January 8, 2026. I would now like to turn the conference over to Bill Waltke, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you for joining us this morning for the discussion of the second quarter of our 2026 fiscal year. I'll briefly cover the non-GAAP and forward-looking language before passing the call over to our CEO, Mike Nassif, who will be followed by our new CFO, Brian Rigsby. Before the market opened today, we published our second quarter results as well as a presentation with both documents available in the investor relations section of our website. On our call this morning, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures that we believe are useful in evaluating our performance. Reconciliations of historical non-GAAP financial measures are included in our earnings release and the presentation, slide two of which provides a reminder that our remarks will include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. These forward-looking statements are subject to risk that could cause actual results to be materially different from those expressed in or implied by such forward-looking statements. These risks include, among others, matters that we have described in our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and in other filings we make with the SEC. We disclaim any obligation to update these forward-looking statements. I will now turn things over to Mike.

Thank you, Bill. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining the call today. I continue to be energized by the significant opportunity I had at Neogen, working alongside our highly engaged global team as we transform the company with a clear focus on improved top-line growth and profitability. We are the scale provider in a highly attractive industry, supported by strong long-term secular trends, and I have high confidence in our ability to overcome recent macroeconomic and execution-related headwinds. Our second quarter performance represents encouraging early progress with a return to positive core growth across the enterprise and adjusted EBITDA margins, improving nearly 500 basis points sequentially. The initial phase of our transformation is centered on stabilizing and strengthening our core, providing a solid framework for future innovation. We began with cost structure improvements implemented in the second quarter, expected to deliver approximately $20 million in annualized savings. We will continue to rigorously evaluate resource allocation opportunities and instill a culture of disciplined operational execution across the organization. Turning to our commercial teams, we are implementing a rigorous process-oriented approach to commercial excellence, emphasizing strong operational planning and data-driven decisions. In food safety, where our scale and breadth of offerings provide a clear competitive advantage, we see significant opportunity to shift towards solutions-based selling This approach should increase customer stickiness and drive greater cost portfolio penetration. Globally, over 75% of our food safety customers already purchase multiple product categories from us, and we have targeted initiatives underway to increase that percentage further by delivering comprehensive solutions tailored to their needs. In animal safety, we are focused on elevating our portfolio of products through our longstanding partnerships and have made investments to enable our commercial teams to drive growth. To accelerate all these priorities, we have strengthened our leadership with highly experienced operators, including our new CFO, Brian Rigby, and our new Chief Commercial Officer, Joe Friels. Joe is a seasoned diagnostics executive with extensive senior commercial experience at Abbott and Cepheid. He understands what work-class sales execution looks like, and I'm confident he will help transform our sales culture. We have also added Tammy Rinaldi as Senior Vice President and General Manager of our Food Safety Business Unit, James Meadows as Head of North America Food Safety, and Jeremy Yarwood as Chief Scientific Officer. These leaders bring proven track records from top-tier companies and will accelerate both innovation and execution excellence at Neogen. In parallel with our commercial focus, we are applying the same discipline and urgency to operational efficiency and key project execution. We saw early benefits in the second quarter from our cost actions, which attributed to the sequential adjusted EBITDA margin expansion. We have continued to make progress on our sample collection product line and expect it to become a positive contributor to gross profit in the second half of this fiscal year. While there remains room for further improvement, we're committed to fully optimizing sample collection over the long term, alongside broader enhancements in inventory management and operational efficiency. Another key priority is the integration of feature film, which remains on track for the second quarter of fiscal 2027 timeline previously shared. We're currently in the latter stages of the production testing process, which has gone well. In parallel, we have moved into the initial stages of product validation, which is a comprehensive internal process to validate our ability to produce each of the 17 SKUs that we expect will be completed this summer. As part of the testing and initial validation work we have done so far, we've demonstrated the ability to manufacture peach effluent plates. These plates will continue to be subjected to a wide range of internal quality performance testing, but the early results have been encouraging. As Brian will discuss later in the call, we are making positive progress on the previously announced sale of our genomics business, the completion of which will provide an opportunity to accelerate the deleveraging of our balance sheet. As a reminder, This past summer, we divested our cleaners and disinfectants business, which allowed us to pay down 100 million of debt. To wrap up my opening remarks, I'm pleased with the initial progress we've made over the past few months, which has led us to raise our outlook for the year and represents a solid step in the right direction. We are still in the early innings of our transformation journey, and the in-market backdrop is not without some challenges. However, we believe they are solvable or transitory in nature. I have every confidence in our ability to exit this fiscal year as a stronger, leaner and more disciplined organization positioned to increasingly focus on innovation and the next leg of growth in fiscal 2027 and beyond. I look forward to meeting with many of you at the JP Morgan Conference next week, where we will provide more details on our operational strategy. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Brian to share some details on our results and our updated outlook.