Belden Inc

this morning's Belden Report Second Quarter 2025 Results Call. Just a reminder, this call is being recorded. At this time, you are in listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your touchtone phone. If you are in the question queue and would like to withdraw your question, simply press star 2. I would now like to turn the call over to Erin Reddington. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for Belden's Second Quarter 2025 earnings conference call. With me today are Belden's President and CEO, Ashish Chand, and Senior Vice President and CFO, Jeremy Parks. Ashish will provide a strategic overview of our business, and then Jeremy will provide a detailed review of our financial and operating results, followed by Q&A. We issued our earnings release earlier this morning and have prepared a slide presentation that we will reference on this call. The press release, presentation, and transcript of these prepared remarks are currently available online at .belden.com. Turning to slide 2, I'd like to remind everyone that today's call will include forward-looking statements, which are subject to risk and uncertainties as detailed in our press release and most recent form of the $10K. We will also reference certain non-GAAP financial measures, reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measures, and be found in the appendix to our presentation and on our website. I will now turn the call over to our President and CEO, Ashish Chand. Thank you, Adam,

and good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining us. Let's begin with slide 4, which summarizes our major accomplishments and the key messages for the second quarter. My comments today will reference adjusted results. First, I want to recognize the outstanding efforts of our team. Their dedication and focus enable us to deliver another strong quarter, continuing our positive momentum from the start of the year. Our team executed well, delivering results that exceeded our expectations. For the second quarter, both revenue and earnings per share surpassed the high end of our guidance, reflecting the ongoing progress of our solutions transformation. Revenue reached $672 million, up 11% -over-year, while earnings per share grew 25% to $1.89. Demand remained steady, and we exceeded expectations despite ongoing policy uncertainty. Further, we achieved 5% organic growth overall, with all major regions experiencing growth for the period. Order activity remained strong, with orders up 8% sequentially and 16% -over-year. We ended the quarter with a -to-book ratio of 1.05 compared to 1.0 in the prior period, positioning us well for the second half of the year. Our focus and profitability grew further improvement, with gross margins increasing 70 basis points -over-year to 38.9%, and adjusted EBITDA margins expanding 50 basis points to 17%. This margin expansion demonstrates the positive impact of our solutions transformation, which is driving a richer mix of high-value offerings and enhancing our earnings power. Our business continues to generate significant cash flow, trailing 12-month free cash flow at $216 million, in line with our expectations. Here today, we have repurchased 1 million shares for $100 million, demonstrating our commitment to disciplined capital allocation. Our balance sheet remains healthy, providing us with the flexibility to pursue strategic acquisitions that support our solutions transformation and, when appropriate, return additional capital to shareholders through buybacks. Overall, this was a quarter of strong execution, and I am very pleased with our performance. The progress we are making with our solutions transformation is clear in our results, and we are well positioned to build on this momentum going forward. Now please turn to slide five. I'd like to highlight a recent win that exemplifies the impact of a solution strategy and our ability to unlock incremental value from our portfolio with new use cases and applications. This quarter, we secured a multi-site solutions award to the leading hyperscale data center customer, a significant step forward in our data center and great space strategy. This win is a direct result of a team's ability to collaborate across the ecosystem, working closely not only with the end customer, but also with their OEM and systems integration partners to deliver a tailored solution. At the core of this project is our innovative use of Belden switches to support a critical PLC system embedded in an advanced modular cooling system. By leveraging a proven technology in new application, we delivered a low latency network with extremely fast recovery times, capabilities that are essential to hyperscale environments, but downtime can have substantial financial consequences. Importantly, this project is a prime example of IT OD convergence in action. At its core, IT OD convergence is about integrating the physical world of operational technology with the digital world of IT, unlocking powerful insights from industrial data to improve efficiency and drive smarter business decisions. Achieving this is a major challenge for many organizations as it requires bridging two worlds with historically different requirements for security, reliability, and performance. In this case, we successfully deployed an industrial grade switch traditionally used in operational technology environments into a high-demand AI data center application. This demonstrates our ability to bridge the gap as Belden is uniquely positioned to solve this challenge with a portfolio and expertise that span both the rugged industrial space and the high-performance enterprise environment, allowing us to deliver a truly robust and unified solution. This type of innovative application, leveraging our expertise across both domains, truly showcases the power of our solutions approach. By engaging deeply with customers and partners, we are able to identify and address new high-value use cases for our existing products, expand our reach into new applications, and deliver differentiated value in high-growth markets. This success provides a repeatable model for future engagements and will help us build a pipeline of similar high-value opportunities. We are excited about the momentum this creates and look forward to building on this success as we continue to execute our solutions-driven growth strategy. Now please turn to slide six for a second bin I would like to highlight for the quarter. This win underscores the benefits of our collaborative approach and broad portfolio, positioning Belden as a single global source for our business. We secured a global specification by a major U.S. automotive manufacturer to supply advanced connectivity products into the assembly line and related factory equipment. This is a multi-year opportunity representing a significant growth driver for our business, with the potential to deliver approximately $40 million over three years with additional upside as we deepen our business engagement. This award is made possible by the breadth of our global product offerings. It specifies a broad range of Belden products, including advanced connectivity solutions and cable assemblies, for use by all line builders supporting this customer worldwide. As a result, this positions Belden as a single source supplier for these critical components, streamlining our customer's procurement and ensuring consistency and reliability across all new installations. This achievement is a direct result of our core strengths, our balanced global manufacturing footprint with capacity and output well aligned by region, our ability to deliver integrated solutions that improve functionality and uptime, and our deep technical expertise. This unique combination demonstrates how customer focused innovation allows us to capture new opportunities and expand our presence within the entire ecosystem of line builders and OEMs globally. As manufacturers continue to invest in domestic capacity and modernize their operations, they are driving the reshoring and reindustrialization trends in the U.S. Our solutions are essential to this transformation, providing the reliable, high performance connectivity needed to bring advanced manufacturing back on show. Ultimately, this key spec position not only strengthens our relationship with this major manufacturer, but also establishes a platform for significant growth across the automotive and adjacent markets. By becoming a single source supplier for these critical components, we create operational efficiencies for our customer while securing a stable, long-term revenue stream for Belden. It's a clear example of how our strategy translates directly into durable, long-term shareholder value. I will now request Jeremy provide additional insight into our second quarter financial performance.