Albany International Corporation

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Albany International first quarter 2024 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during this session, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, J.C. Chetnani, VP of Investor Relations and Treasure.

Thank you, Operator, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Albany International's first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. As a reminder for those listening on the call, please refer to our press release issued last night detailing our quarterly financial results. Contained in the text of the release is a notice regarding our forward-looking statements and the use of certain non-GAAP financial measures and their reconciliation to GAAP. For the purposes of this conference call, those same statements apply to our verbal remarks this morning. Today, we will make statements that are forward-looking and contain a number of risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ from those expressed or implied. For a full discussion of these risks, and uncertainties, please refer to both our earnings released of April 29, 2024, as well as our SEC filings, including our 10-K. Now, I will turn the call over to Gunnar Cleveland, our President and CEO, who will provide opening remarks. Gunnar?

Thank you, JC. Good morning, and welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining our first quarter earnings call. I'll provide an overview of our business performance and Rob will later discuss our financial results in detail. We had another good quarter as our businesses delivered solid results and are executing to their plans. Machine clothing grew year over year, primarily driven by our Heimbach acquisition, offset by lower organic demand, primarily in Europe. North America remains strong, and our global order backlog has improved from the beginning of the year, which provides us confidence in our full year guide. Integration at Heimbach is making excellent progress. We implemented a two-brand strategy, which has been well received by the market. Procurement and supply chain continue to see savings, and we have been integrating functions across both our organizations. We continuously assess our global manufacturing capacity and footprint, and recently we announced that we are closing our South Korea facility and transferring capacity to other sites. We also sold a non-manufacturing location in Sweden, further optimizing our footprint. We'll continue to evaluate other opportunities as the year progresses, with integration actions occurring in late 2024 and into 2025. We expect meaningful margin expansion as the integration progresses. Moving to our engineered composite segment, we're pleased to see continued ramp-up on our programs, especially on the commercial side, including space and other emerging platforms. On the defense side, for the year, we see growth on our CH-53K and JASM platforms, offset by relative weakness on our Joint Strike Fighter programs. Overall, we're reporting growth of over 10% in revenue versus the prior year on a constant currency basis. Additionally, our profitability continues to improve with adjusted EBITDA margins of 19.4%, up 120 basis points versus the prior year. This reflects our long-term strategy of winning newer programs with higher profit margins. Turning to the LEAP program. We've been working closely with Safran to set the 2024 production plan in light of the situation at Boeing. We anticipate LEAP revenue to be relatively flat with the prior year. As a reminder, the LEAP engine is used on both Boeing and Airbus aircraft, both of whom have multi-year backlogs. Finally, for AEC, we continued to develop a healthy business development pipeline with continued wins across various platforms. In a quarter, Sikorsky awarded Albany a long-term agreement for future CH53K lots on all our legacy contents, similar in duration to the previously announced AFT Transition LTA. This represents the largest contract award in AEC history next to our LEAP program. Given that our expertise in research and technology is critical to the success of Albany, We have created a new role of Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Albany International reporting directly to me. We have promoted Rob Hansen from his prior role as Senior VP of Research and Development at Machine Clothing to this role. By aligning closely with the leadership team, we have the opportunity to leverage our unique competitive technological capabilities to accelerate impactful innovation across our businesses. And with that, I'll hand it over to Rob to provide more details on the quarter. Rob?