Agilent Technologies, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us and welcome to the Q1 2026 Agilent Technologies Inc. Earnings Conference Call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please raise your hand. If you have dialed into today's call, please press star 9 to raise your hand and star 6 to unmute. I will now hand the conference over to Tejas Savant, vice president, investor relations. Tejas, please go ahead.

Thank you and welcome everyone to Agilent's conference call for the first quarter of fiscal year 2026. With me on the line are CEO Parikh McDonald and CFO Adam Elanoff. Joining for the Q&A will be Simon May, President of the Life Sciences and Diagnostics Markets Group, Angelica Reimann, President of the Agilent CrossLab Group, and Mike Zheng, President of the Applied Markets Group. This presentation is being webcast live. The press release for our first quarter financial results, investor presentation, and information to supplement today's discussion, along with a recording of this webcast are available on our website at investor.agilent.com. Today's comments will refer to non-GAAP financial measures. Non-GAAP measures are supplemental and should not be considered a substitute for GAAP results. You'll find the most directly comparable GAAP financial metrics and reconciliations in the press release and on our website. Unless otherwise noted, all references to increases or decreases in financial metrics are year-over-year, and references to revenue growth are on a core basis. all references to profitability metrics are on a non-gap basis core revenue growth is adjusted for the impact of currency exchange rates and any acquisitions and divestitures completed within the past 12 months guidance is based on forecasted exchange rates during this call we will make forward-looking statements about the financial performance of the company These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties and are only valid as of today. Agilent assumes no obligation to update them. Please refer to the company's recent SEC filings for a more detailed description of the risks and other factors that would cause our performance to differ from these forward-looking statements. And now, I'd like to turn the call over to Parikh.

Thanks Tejas, and welcome everyone. It was a solid start to the year with the Agilent team executing well in a generally improving, albeit dynamic, market environment. For the first quarter, Agilent reported $1.8 billion in revenue, growing 4.4% on a core basis within our November guidance range. End market conditions were largely consistent with our expectations, with top line results affected by the winter storm in the US during the last week of January. The storm drove roughly a $10 million revenue impact, with the majority recovered at the beginning of February. The impact primarily came from our logistic providers not being able to ship products from our main American logistics center in Memphis, Tennessee, for three days. This is typically the busiest shipping week of the quarter. Despite the weather, operating margins of 24.6% were in line with our expectations, setting a solid jumping-off point for the remainder of the fiscal year. Moving forward, we anticipate benefiting from leverage on increasing volumes, and we expect to see tariff headwinds continuing to decrease, as well as incremental benefits from our Ignite operating system that together will drive sequential margin improvement throughout the rest of the year. First quarter EPS of $1.36 also was within expectations. Adjusted for the impact of the storm, our first quarter revenue, operating margin, and EPS all would have been above the midpoint of our November guidance ranges, a healthy underlying outcome. Throughout the quarter, the Agilent team remained as always committed to delivering for our customers. Before getting into the specifics of our first quarter results, I want to share my thoughts on three key business initiatives that are fueling our growth. These include our highly differentiated service organization that reinforces our customer intimacy, a theme you've heard me talk about frequently, an update on recent innovations, and finally, how the Ignite operating system continues to drive Agilent's transformation. I want to start by talking about our differentiated customer intimacy. Last quarter, I highlighted our field service engineer's outsized contribution to our deal funnel and conversion rates. This time, I want to focus on our enterprise services business, where we had several marquee customer wins with major pharma accounts. Our enterprise services offerings allow us to cement our extraordinary customer intimacy and is a key strategic differentiator for Agilent that unlocks significant downstream value. This business represents roughly 10% of our total services revenue today and has grown nicely at a low double-digit CAGR. Beyond a direct revenue contribution, the relationship we build with our customer creates tremendous long-term value for Agilent and uniquely position us to gain wallet share over time. The offering includes embedding our expert on-site support technicians in customer sites and leveraging digital capabilities through CrossLab Connect that provide monitoring, alerting, and performance analytics. This allows us to gain unique insights and visibility into lab operations and critically deliver improved efficiency and economics for our customer labs. These successful outcomes position us as a trusted partner, one customers can count on to provide critical data and insights that inform their future technology needs and instrument purchasing decisions. We have agreements with nearly all of the top 20 biopharma companies. In addition, we've won 18 competitive displacements across our end markets over the past three years. Early customer feedback from a recent marquee win reinforces the value of having our specialists on site, including faster response times, improved parts availability, and better advice and consumer and system usage. The insights that we gain from our leading services team are a key success factor in driving customer-focused innovation that underpins durable long-term growth at above market rates. I want to highlight several recent examples that are resonating particularly well with our customers, starting with our Altura ultra-inert column portfolio. In October, we launched our first Altura column to support biopharma workflows, including GLP-1s. Already, 50% of the top 20 biopharma companies have ordered these columns since we launched, and Altura has more than doubled our biocolumn growth to over 30%, a testament to Altura's competitive performance. Just last month, we launched our next column in the Altura family, focused on improving PFAS workflows. These columns are specifically developed to solve key workflow challenges and address new EU regulations. Plus, they double throughput for customers by enabling separation of both short and long-chain PFAS in a single workflow. The launch is off to an excellent start with strong demand out of the gate and extremely positive customer feedback versus competitor offerings. You can expect continued expansion of the Altura family for new use cases later this year and beyond. Next, I want to highlight the ProIQ LCMS, which continues to build momentum since its midsummer launch. We're seeing a robust uptake with growth of our single-quad family exceeding 40% in the quarter. The value proposition of an advanced single-quad LC-MS with expanded mass range is resonating and is particularly compelling for farmer customers who are transitioning from small molecule to biologics and monoclonal antibodies. Our cancer diagnostics business also is innovating to meet customer needs. Last quarter, I talked about the expansion of our most advanced automated platform, Omnis, to a broader set of customers. This launch is off to a very strong start, offering medium throughput labs access to the latest technology with attractive economics. Also within cancer diagnostics is our new S540MD slide scanner system, which we announced in late January as part of our continued effort to enable the latest digital tools for our cancer diagnostic customers. Finally, early in the quarter, our market-leading spectroscopy business announced the release of our Rampant Insight BRT series alarm resolution system. The new system offers next-generation throughput and sensitivity to hand safety and streamline operations at airport security checkpoints. This new instrument helps secure a $9 million TSA contract during the quarter, and we are confident that we are well-positioned to win larger aviation security tenders in the coming years. The last topic I want to focus on is our Ignite operating system. As you know, we launched Ignite at the beginning of 2025 to drive execution excellence, accelerate decision making, and unlock the full value of Agilent as an integrated enterprise. Over the past year, Ignite has evolved into our enterprise operating system, a core differentiator that aligns strategy, resources, and accountability to drive sustainable growth, margin expansion, and long-term shareholder value. Ignite has already delivered clear financial results in its first 12 months, including doubling our pricing realization, generating substantial procurement savings, simplifying our organization structure, and launching our tariff mitigation program. Also, Ignite demonstrated its effectiveness in M&A execution through the successful biovector integration, establishing a repeatable playbook to accelerate value capture in future transactions. In this fourth quarter alone, Ignite delivered nearly 200 basis points of pricing, continued tariff expense reductions, and a very successful launch of our new Agilent.com website that helped drive growth in digital orders at more than two times of our overall order book. Looking ahead to the remainder of FY26, we are expanding Ignite into new value creation workstreams and leveraging a portion of savings to reinvest in the business. These workstreams include increasing returns and innovation investments by improving speed to market, advancing digital and e-commerce capability to enhance commercial productivity, and applying targeted artificial intelligence initiatives with clear ROI to enhance customer insights, automate routine work, and compress manufacturing cycle times. We are also accelerating software development and enhancing our supply chain capabilities by executing no-regret investments that improve efficiency, resilience, and proximity to customers in an evolving geopolitical environment. Now let me share some additional details about our Q1 results, starting with our end markets. The improvement that we saw in our end markets across last year was generally maintained throughout the first quarter. Overall, we are seeing underlying momentum in our markets. Importantly, secular trends in our largest end markets remain on a strong footing. That includes reshoring of pharma and semiconductor manufacturing, GLP-1 uptake and LCNGC instrument replacement cycles. Farmer growth was 7% in line with our expectations, with double-digit growth in the biotech space supported by increased funding and M&A activity late in the calendar year. Mid-single-digit small molecule growth was also solid, showing continued momentum from 2025. The quarter saw a modest benefit from continued normalization in the calendar year-end budget flush in line with our expectations. We delivered excellent GLP-1 growth of 50% with healthy contributions coming from our specialty CDMO as well as our analytical lab business. Our specialty CDMO business grew low double digits during the quarter, and we continue to expect mid-teens growth for the year. We saw continued strength in chemicals and advanced materials market. The 9% growth in CAM was above our expectations, with exceptional strength on the materials side of the business with growth of more than 20%. This strong result in advanced materials demonstrates our leadership in providing solutions for the top semiconductor manufacturers globally. The current shortage of memory chips and the global effort to achieve semiconductor supply chain independence has driven investment by these firms in our leading atomic spectroscopy tools. With support from the recent Omnus family launch, the diagnostics and clinical business continue to perform well, growing at 7% again this quarter. Environmental forensics was flat, with continued softness in government funding in the US and China offset by growth in the rest of Asia and Europe. In Q1, the food business declined 4%, which outperformed our expectations with strong low double-digit growth ex-China. As a reminder, the food market was the primary beneficiary of the large China stimulus that boosted growth in the first quarter of FY25. And finally, academia and government, our smallest market, was down 8%, more than expected in the quarter. Academia and government conditions in the U.S. continue to be soft, with customers using available funding to keep their labs running as opposed to investing in new capital equipment. Excluding academia and government, our instruments grew at a healthy mid-single-digit rate. Our instrument book-to-bill has now been at or above one for the eighth consecutive quarter. The Infinity Tree HPLC continues to delight our customers. The LC instrument replacement cycle momentum built by our differentiated Infinity Tree system during FY25 continued through the first quarter of FY26. And with LC growth in the high single digits, we are gaining share globally versus our competition. On the DC side of the replacement cycle, we saw low single digit growth, a strong result considering the tough year-over-year compare from significant volumes associated with last year's Chinese stimulus. Ex-China, GC instrument growth was mid-single digits, in line with our expectations of around 100 basis points of lift during the GC replacement cycle. And even with these strong results, the upside from farmer reshoring has yet to impact our numbers. we're seeing increased activity in U.S.-based pharmaceutical manufacturing as companies rethink resilience and capacity. Based on announced investments and recent customer activity, we estimate this will represent a billion-dollar addressable market opportunity through 2030. We continue to expect the first orders from Reshoring to book late this year and the revenue impact from those orders to bolster top-line growth in FY27 and beyond. As we look to the rest of the year, our priorities remain unchanged. Advance our Ignite operating system, further enhance commercial execution, and capture opportunities from improving end markets, innovative new products, and a multi-pronged replacement cycle. With a solid start to the year and the outlook for end markets broadly consistent with our original expectations, we are maintaining our expected core growth range of 4% to 6% for the full year. We now expect between $5.90 and $6.04 of earnings per share in FY26, with a $0.04 increase due to favorable currency impact. For Q2, early trends are encouraging, and we are expecting core growth of approximately 4% to 5.5%, which includes a majority of the $10 million storm impact from late in the first quarter. EPS is expected to be between $1.39 and $1.42, representing a 7% growth at the midpoint of our range. We remain highly disciplined around capital deployment, investing for organic growth through innovation and capacity expansion. Simultaneously, we are focused on M&A targets that are both a strategic fit and financially attractive. Now, let me hand it over to Adam, who will provide details on the quarter and our financial outlook.