Avantor, Inc.

which you can do so by pressing start followed by the number one on your telephone keypads. I will now turn the call over to Christina Jones, Vice President of Investor Relations. Ms. Jones, you may begin the conference.

Good morning. Thank you for joining us. Our speakers today are Michael Stubblefield, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Brent Jones, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. The press release and a presentation accompanying this call are available on our investor relations website at ir.avantoursciences.com. A replay of this webcast will also be made available on our website after the call. Following our prepared remarks, we will open the line for questions. During this call, we will be making forward-looking statements within the meaning of the U.S. federal securities laws. including statements regarding events or developments that we believe or anticipate may occur in the future. These forward looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, including those set forth in our SEC filings. Actual results might differ materially from any forward looking statements we make today. These forward looking statements speak only as of the date that they are made. We do not assume any obligation to update these forward-looking statements as a result of new information, future events, or other developments. This call will include a discussion of non-GAAP measures. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures can be found in the press release and in the supplemental disclosure package on our investor relations website. As a reminder, on January 1st of 2024, we transitioned from our former regional segment structure to two global operating segments, laboratory solutions and bioscience production. Our Q1 2024 results are presented on this basis. With that, I will now turn the call over to Michael.

Thank you, CJ, and good morning, everyone. I appreciate you joining us today. I'm starting on slide three. The year is off to a good start as we delivered first quarter revenue in line with our guidance with reported revenue of $1.68 billion and organic growth of minus 6.3%. As anticipated, market conditions remain similar to the fourth quarter. Our team continues to execute well, as evidenced by our margin and profitability outperformance, with adjusted EBITDA margin of 16.8% and adjusted EPS of 22 cents. As Brent will outline in his section, our margins were driven by pricing, favorable product mix, disciplined cost management, and accelerated realization of savings from our multi-year cost transformation initiative. We also generated $107 million of free cash flow in the quarter. Consistent with our current capital allocation priorities, we paid down approximately $170 million of debt and continue to target an adjusted net leverage ratio below three times. As CJ noted, our new operating model became effective in January. Our new business segments enhance our focus on customers' needs in the lab and production environments, position us for accelerated long-term growth, and unlock significant operating efficiencies. We are early in our journey, but are out of the gate strong and are already realizing benefits from the new model. During the first quarter, we aligned our organization with the new business segments and initiated several work streams to optimize the Avantour customer experience. Our commercial intensity and the relevance of our workflow solutions resulted in multiple competitive wins and contract renewals with biopharma, healthcare, and education and government customers. As part of our innovation strategy, we enhanced our offerings for cell engineering, gene therapy, and synthetic biology applications through supplier partnerships and proprietary innovation. We are seeing strong customer response to recent proprietary new product introductions. including our viral inactivation solutions launched earlier this year, and our integrated mixing systems and fluid handling assemblies, which are delivering critical efficiency and quality improvements to our bioprocessing customers. We also advanced our multi-year cost transformation initiative, including footprint optimization, organizational efficiency, go-to-market, and procurement savings. Our disciplined execution enabled us to accelerate the realization of some savings into the first quarter. contributing to our margin and profitability outperformance. We continue to be encouraged by the positive trends we are seeing in our end markets. In laboratory solutions, biotech funding is improving, and our large pharma customers are engaging with us on new projects that are driving an increase in our commercial opportunity funnel. Core diagnostic testing has returned to growth, and QAQC workflows in the applied markets have been relatively stable. Additionally, internal and external surveys suggest that inventory health continues to improve. Collectively, these factors resulted in a sequential increase in sales of our consumables and chemicals offerings, both key drivers of our long-term growth. In bioscience production, the bioprocessing end market remains healthy, with a robust pipeline of new therapies, a favorable regulatory landscape including three new cell and gene therapy approvals in the quarter, and strong patient demand. Importantly, we saw another quarter of sequential improvement in our bioprocessing order rate. Within healthcare, medical implant procedure rates continue to be positive, and overall demand within the semiconductor end market has rebounded from the lows we experienced in 2023. Consistent with our inline revenue performance in the quarter, these encouraging market signals have not yet translated into an inflection in aggregate sales levels, as pockets of inventory destocking and cautious customer spending notably in equipment and instrumentation, continue to impact demand. We believe our current approach to guidance, which assumes a continuation of current market conditions, is appropriate, and we are reaffirming our full-year outlook. Should a meaningful market recovery take place within the year, that would present upside to our guidance. Before I turn it over to Brent, I'd like to share a few takeaways from the quarter, which show that our model is working. First, momentum in our consumables portfolio representing the vast majority of our revenue, largely offset industry-wide weakness in capital-driven equipment and instrumentation sales, and translated to outperformance in margins and EPS. Second, our bioprocessing offerings are strategically positioned to benefit from attractive end-market fundamentals, and we outperformed our bioprocessing guidance and realized another sequential step up in bioprocessing orders. Finally, we are taking action to strengthen performance and drive productivity. We made meaningful progress in transforming our operating model, and we are ahead of plan on our cost transformation initiative. With that, I'll now turn it over to Brent to walk you through our Q1 results in more detail.