Avantor, Inc.

to ask any questions, which you can do so at any time by pressing start followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. I will now turn the call over to Alison Hosack, Senior Vice President of Global Communications. Ms. Hosack, you may begin the conference.

Good morning and 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 that 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. With that, I will now turn the call over to Michael.

Thank you, Ali, and good morning, everyone. I appreciate you joining us today. Before we get into our first quarter results, I want to address the CEO transition announcement we made this morning. After careful consideration, our board of directors and I agreed that now is the right time to initiate a transition in Avantours leadership. The board has initiated a search process to identify the company's next CEO, and we'll look for someone who has a strong track record of delivering growth and value creation. I plan to step down once a successor is in place and I'm committed to a smooth transition. In the meantime, as I will discuss in detail shortly, Our entire leadership team is focused on taking steps to accelerate growth and strengthen the business. With that, let's turn to slide three. I want to acknowledge that we are not satisfied with our first quarter performance. While we delivered earnings and margin in line with our plan, revenue in both segments fell short of our expectations. We entered 2025 with a clear focus on innovation-driven growth, margin expansion, and deleveraging. However, Sentiment in some of our end markets, particularly education and government, turned cautionary as customers reacted to policy changes announced by the new administration. Also, funding fell approximately 40% in the quarter for bench-stage biotech companies, leading to additional demand weakness for this important customer segment in our biopharma end market. We expect this market backdrop to continue, pressuring demand for the foreseeable future. which is reflected in reset guidance. While we cannot change the market environment, we intend to take every action within our control to enhance growth in both lab solutions and bioscience production while continuing to expand margins and reduce leverage. Specific to our lab business, we are making immediate and significant changes to drive growth. We are excited to have Corey Walker, President of Lab Solutions, fully onboarded. Given his prior experience with our business, he has ramped quickly and is conducting a deep dive into the business, evaluating every aspect of our strategy and execution. In the near term, he is working closely with the commercial team to grow and retain key accounts and aggressively pursue new accounts. In addition to the work that Corey has initiated, we have recently implemented a range of actions that will strengthen our business. First, our delivery excellence initiative is focused on ensuring greater supply chain efficiency and resilience. By improving data accuracy, accelerating fulfillment speeds, and optimizing inventory, we are enabling differentiated service levels to our customers that will drive growth across all channels. Second, we are accelerating digital enhancements to our platform, including the rollout of our new AI-enabled e-commerce platform to further streamline the customer experience. Another important step is strategically optimizing our approach to pricing by leveraging the integration of digital technologies. This transformation is expected to unlock new opportunities, maximize value, and improve profitability and growth. The program will be implemented in a phased approach with the first go-live scheduled for later this quarter. We also continue to focus on expanding our portfolio with highly attractive new products. In the first quarter, we made meaningful progress with the addition and advancement of several high-impact platforms, including signing a new distribution agreement with Abcam, a market leader in the antibody space with over 100,000 SKUs that will make their high-quality antibodies and reagents available to Avantor's customers across the globe, broadening our collaboration agreement with Fujifilm Irvine Scientific, a trusted provider of cell culture media and bioproduction reagents. The agreement includes enhanced distribution rights across the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, Latin America, and Mexico, and makes an additional 1,500 SKUs fully accessible through Avantor's distribution networks. Expanding our collaborative distribution agreement with the life science business of Merck, KGAA, Darmstadt, Germany for Western Europe. Further leveraging their market-leading lab filtration products in our portfolio. This agreement includes over 1,900 SKUs encompassing well-known brands and accelerating commercialization and adoption of recently launched JT Baker viral inactivation solution, which plays a critical role in downstream viral clearance within the monoclonal antibody production workflow. This solution is now specified into a significant number of platforms with many more currently in late stage evaluation. While we take steps to accelerate growth, we're also maintaining our relentless focus on efficiency and cost discipline across the company. We drove another quarter of outperformance in our multi-year cost transformation initiative and remain on track to deliver on our 300 million run rate target exiting 2026. I'm pleased to announce that we have expanded the initiative and now expect to generate approximately 400 million in run rate growth savings by the end of 2027. Brent will share more details on this shortly. Turning to slide four, let's take a closer look at our performance. In the first quarter, our organic revenue declined 2% year over year, driven primarily by underperformance in our lab business. While we were awarded several new contracts and secured extensions of a number of existing contracts in the quarter, including a renewal of our supply agreement with Regeneron, The work Corey and his team are doing to accelerate the pace of new account acquisition will be critical to returning this platform to growth. Organic revenue within our biosciences production segment also came in modestly below plan as growth in process ingredients and excipients, as well as double digit growth in our single use offering, was offset by weaker demand for our controlled environment consumables that are used to maintain the integrity of our customers' clean rooms. While this revenue is sticky and highly recurring in nature, this lower demand is mostly attributable to customers placing tighter controls on usage in response to the current macro environment while still maintaining throughput. Although we are encouraged by in-market fundamentals and continued momentum in our bioprocessing order book, we are not satisfied with overall growth and are taking action to improve performance across our organization. Despite the top line pressure, adjusted EBITDA margin increased 20 basis points year over year to reach 17%. This reflects the continued benefits of our multi-year cost transformation initiative. Adjusted EPS came in at 23 cents, consistent with our plan. Given continued macro and policy-related headwinds, we are revising our full-year revenue guidance. We expect continued spending caution from education and government customers especially in the US, due to concerns about funding. Additionally, the entire market continues to digest potential impact of tariffs, and we have been working diligently to mitigate the impact of current tariffs on our results. Based on the tariffs in place today, we have approximately 2% COGS exposure with China, which is our most significant tariff risk. Our tariff exposure to the rest of the world is modest by comparison. Brent will walk you through the details of our updated guidance at the end of the presentation. As I reflect on the quarter and look ahead, I'm encouraged that we delivered earnings in line with our plan, despite a challenging external environment. That speaks to the strength of our execution and the benefits of our structural cost actions. Nevertheless, we are not satisfied with our growth and we are taking aggressive actions to reignite the top line, regardless of the macro backdrop. With that, I'll now turn it over to Brent.