Avantor, Inc.

followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. I'll 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 Emmanuel Ligner, 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 the 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 Emmanuel.

Thank you, Ali, and good morning, everyone. I appreciate you joining us today. As you know, I joined Aventor a little more than two months ago. I came on board because I believe this company has a tremendous potential. I have spent my entire career in pharma and lab science industries, spending meaningful time on three different continents. I was fortunate to spend two decades at GE Lab Sciences and Danaher, where I built out the Cytiva business, significantly accelerated the growth trajectory of the platform, and led its integration with PAL Lab Sciences. During that time, I had a front row seat to Aventor Trajectories, as a customer and supplier. I believe this experience enabled me to step into this role 10 weeks ago with a unique perspective on the company's strengths and area for improvement. Throughout my career, the primary lessons I've learned is that there is no substitute for going to Gemba. This concept literally means visiting the place where work is done and value is created. to learn and determine how to best improve our organization. And for the past two months, this is exactly what I have been doing. I have dedicated my time toward visiting our sites, meeting our people, speaking with dozens of our customers and suppliers across Asia, Europe and North America. This not only sharpened my initial instincts, but also provided invaluable insights as we map out our strategy moving forward. I want to personally thank all the stakeholders for the warm welcome, open dialogue, and trust they demonstrated for my first day in the role. Here are some of the important learnings. First, this is a great industry with strong secular tailwinds. scientific collaboration is more important than ever. If you talk to any pharma or biotech company right now, you will hear about the multitude of ways in which they are harnessing the power of technology and AI to accelerate the next breakthrough discovery. That gives us a tremendous amount of confidence in the long-term trajectory of the hand markets we serve and reinforces the importance of our positioning within the industry. Our recent announcement with Blue Whale Bio is a perfect demonstration of how Aventor is advancing innovation through collaboration, and we are committed to continue to do our part to facilitate the research, development, manufacturing, and delivery of next-generation therapies. Second, Aventor has a solid portfolio, a committed global team, and an incredible customer reach, serving more than 300,000 customers location across approximately 180 countries. As someone that has spent considerable time in recent years working to scale life science businesses, those attributes will be the envy of most companies. We have significant untapped potential and numerous opportunities in front of us, and we need to capitalize on those opportunities. Third, and most importantly, there are many things we can and should do better, and we are taking immediate action to turn the business around and hold ourselves accountable for rewarding the trust our investors place in Avento. Starting from a commercial perspective, I believe our business is overly complex, with unnecessary centralization, which inhibits frontline staff from most effectively meeting our customers' and suppliers' needs and expectations. Customers buy from Aventor because of the quality and service heritage of our incredible brands. VWR, JT Baker, Masterflex, Nusil. Those are some of the best-known names in the industry, and our commercial team are not being sufficiently empowered to leverage the equity of those brands. On the operation and supply chain side, I believe we need to make some investment and process enhancement to improve our ability to consistently serve our customers. Overall, I believe those challenges are generally self-inflicted. And the good news is that they are fixable with determination, focus, and time. At the conclusion of this call, I will share my preliminary thoughts on our plan for doing just that, which we are calling Aventor Revival. With those initial findings in mind, we strongly believe that our current share price does not reflect the long-term value of our platform. To demonstrate our long-term conviction in the prospect of this business, our board of directors has authorized a $500 million share repurchase program with immediate effect. which we will pursue opportunistically moving forward, while also delivering on our commitment to decrease net leverage. Now, I would like to turn over to Brent for a more detailed overview of our third quarter financial results and our updated full-year guidance.