Belden Inc

Please stand by, your conference is about to begin. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to this morning's Belden Reports second quarter 2026 results. Just a reminder, this call is being recorded. At this time, you are in a listen only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star one on your touch tone phone. If you're in the question queue and would like to withdraw your question, simply press star 2. I'd now like to turn the call over to Aaron Reddington. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for Belden's second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. With me today are Belden's President and CEO, Ashish Chand, and Executive Vice President and CFO, Jeremy Parks. Ashish will provide a strategic overview of the quarter, and then Jeremy will cover our financial results and third quarter outlook, 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 investor.belvin.com. Turning to slide two. 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 10-K. We will also reference certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measures can 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, Aaron, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining us. Please turn to slide four. The second quarter was the strongest quarter in company history, and we are well positioned for what's ahead. Our team achieved record revenue of $750 million, up 12% year-over-year, and adjusted EPS of $2.34, up 24%, both above the high end of our guidance. Please note that our results include a net tariff benefit of approximately 25 cents per share related to the expected recovery of IEPA tariffs. Jeremy will cover the details. End market demand is strong with record orders of $836 million, up 19% year-over-year and up 23% sequentially. Our book-to-bill ratio came in at 1.11. Auto strength is broad-based across the end markets and we expect that to continue into the third quarter. Organic revenue growth was 8% for the quarter with discrete process and enterprise growth verticals all up double digits, reflecting a broad improvement in our industrial markets and our AI infrastructure strategy gaining traction with customers. The second quarter also delivered two milestones that I want to highlight as they are proof of our solution strategy executing at scale. First, a contract worth approximately $20 million with a tier one hyperscaler for fiber connectivity inside an AI data center. That order is closed and in production today. Second, a significant specification win with a leading global retailer where Belden has been selected to network autonomous elements across the U.S. distribution centers with first orders already received. This is physical AI in practice. AI-driven, intelligent, autonomous machines operating in real-world industrial environments requiring the kind of ruggedized, mission-critical connectivity that Belden is uniquely built to deliver. Together, these confirm the direction of our business and the execution of our strategy. I will walk through them both shortly. Finally, on July 1st, at the start of the third quarter, Ruckus Networks officially joined Belden. The integration is underway, and we are already in market. Ruckus is immediately accretive to revenue growth, EPS, and EBITDA. Our solutions mix crosses 20% at close. Our 2028 goal achieved three years ahead of schedule. Please turn to slide five. The numbers in this slide tell you exactly what kind of company Belden is today, and they reflect something more than just a bigger business. With Ruckus, we are now a full-stack networking and automation platform spanning passive infrastructure, active switching, wireless, and AI driven cloud software. Our offerings abroad, our solutions capabilities are deep and a competitive position is stronger than ever. Note, these figures are management estimates based on hypothetical full year results for the combined business and are not guidance. The financial profile reflects a fundamentally stronger company. Belden is now a $3.6 billion revenue company. Gross margins improved to approximately 43%, and adjusted EBITDA margins expand to 18%. Our active product mix reaches 35% of revenue, and our solutions mix stands at 20%. From the connector to the switch to the cloud, Belden now delivers every layer of the network from a single source. Please turn to slide six. Let me reiterate what Ruckus specifically brings to this combination, because these metrics reflect real product and market advantages. First, a gross margin profile north of 60%. And it is worth explaining why. Ruckus is not a hardware business. It is a platform business. Wi-Fi access points, enterprise switching, and cloud network management software sold together as an integrated solution. That differentiated product mix, including software and services, is what drives the margin profile. It is structural, not cyclical, and a creative development from day one. Second, Ruckus brings high single-digit growth, and with it, access to one of the fastest growing segments of the networking market. Wi-Fi 7 is the first wireless standard reliable enough for industrial use. and the enterprise upgrade cycle is just beginning. Ruckus sits at the front of that wave. What makes this particularly compelling for Belden is the opportunity to bring Ruckus into our existing industrial customer base. Customers across discrete manufacturing, energy and process industries who are already investing in automation, reshoring and network modernization. We are the only company that can deliver industry leading wireless alongside the full wired OD stack from a single source. That cross-sell opportunity is meaningful and a very powerful addition to the combined business. And third, our solutions mix steps up past 20% immediately. That matters because solutions engagements are larger in scope, on higher margins, are stickier with customers, and structurally more defensible than product only relationships. Every point of solutions mix we add expands the profitability and durability of this business and Ruckus accelerates our solutions trajectory. Please turn to slide seven. I want to show you what this actually looks like in practice because the product stack behind those financial metrics is what makes this combination genuinely differentiated. Belden now runs every layer of the network, both industrial and enterprise, from a single source. Cable and connectors, patch panels, edge devices, routers, OT switches, IT switches, and Wi-Fi 7 wireless access points. The complete infrastructure stack for AI-driven industrial and enterprise environments. With Ruckus One managing the IT network layer, and Belden Horizon managing the OT network layer. Two purpose-built software platforms under one convert solution with one trusted partner. For customers who want one partner accountable for the complete network, Belden is now that partner. Every additional layer we own lifts the value we deliver to customers through our solutions and deepens our relationship. This is the competitive moat we've been building over the past five years, and Ruckus accelerates that. With that context, let me turn to our data center strategy and the specific wins we delivered in the second quarter. Please turn to slide eight. Over the past several quarters, we have been building our data center presence with purpose, and the second quarter validated that investment. The wins we are reporting are not isolated events. Let me give you the framework for how we think about this opportunity. Enterprise data centers, hyperscale data centers, and physical AI collectively are one of our highest priority growth vectors. And this is not one opportunity. It is three distinct ones, each at a different stage of maturity. is our traditional enterprise data center business. Structured cabling, cabinets, and fiber connectivity for on-prem enterprise and co-location environments. This is our established foundation in the marketplace with an annual run rate of approximately $75 million today. Repeatable, growing, and the base from which our hyperscaler relationships developed. The second is AI and hyperscale data centers. the fastest growing part of a data center portfolio where momentum is building. We established a hyperscaler presence in the gray space, facility controls, cooling, power, and building systems. And in the second quarter, we expanded into the white space, the data hall itself. To put the second quarter activity in context, we booked approximately $40 million in hyperscaler orders in the quarter alone. That includes the $20 million white space win you will see on the next slide, as well as continued gray space wins that demonstrate the breadth of where Belden plays across the data center campus. Combined, this is now $100 million plus annualized business growing rapidly. What makes these wins meaningful goes beyond the contract value. When hyperscalers select Belden, it is because we bring something differentiated. solutions engineered for AI infrastructure, operational scale to deliver under urgent timelines, and engagement model built around solving real problems. We are winning on the value we bring, and those relationships are expanding. The third is physical AI, and this is the opportunity I'm most excited about for the long term. As robots and autonomous systems scale across factories and distribution centers, they require a network that is real time, Deterministic, Mobile, and Mission Critical. Wired and wireless, fixed and mobile, managed by software intelligent enough to handle the complexity at scale. That is precisely what Belden and Ruckus deliver together. Industrial grade wired infrastructure, Wi-Fi 7 for mission critical wireless, and the management layer that ties it all together. No other company delivers the full stack from a single source. Taken together and excluding ruckus, our data center and AI infrastructure business is at an annual run rate of approximately $175 million or more in revenue today. And we are still at the beginning. Enterprise data centers are growing, our hyperscaler relationships are expanding, and physical AI is just beginning to scale. We are not chasing this market. We are already inside it with the portfolio, the customer relationships, and now with Ruckus, the complete solution to win. Please turn to slide nine. In the second quarter, we closed a contract worth approximately $20 million with a tier one hyperscaler for fiber connectivity in the AI data center white space. Orders are closed and in production today with deliveries expected over multiple quarters. You know the AI build-out story. What is harder to see from the outside is what we've been doing internally to be ready for it. Over the past several quarters, we've been making sustained investments in the commercial and operational infrastructure required to compete in this marketplace. That means standardized product architecture designed for speed and repeatability, a supply chain built to absorb volume spikes, and a go-to-market approach built around delivery confidence rather than price alone. is a result of that work. The solution at the core of this contract is high density fiber connectivity engineered for AI workloads and deployed across the racks inside the data hall. What allowed us to win here was not price, it was execution. Hyperscalers need suppliers who can deliver qualified product at scale, on schedule, every time, including when auto volumes spike unexpectedly. That level of operational reliability is generally scarce in this market. We built it organically, quarter by quarter, and this is the model we intend to scale going forward. Now please turn to slide 10 for a second key milestone this quarter, where physical AI meets the real world. A leading global retailer has selected Belden for a specification position in their autonomous network, encompassing talking door automation across US distribution centers. These are vision-intensive, AI-driven systems designed for industrial environments, machines that perceive, decide, and act in real time alongside human workers and other autonomous elements. This is physical AI moving from concept towards production. What this customer required was ruggedized, high-performance, on-machine networking purpose-built for autonomous systems, not standard enterprise networking, which cannot meet the reliability and latency demands of this environment. Our industrial networking heritage, refined over decades across multiple industrial verticals, is precisely what qualified us. First orders have already been received for initial deployments. The full fleet opportunity for the specification win is approximately $20 million over four years across more than 4,500 autonomous installations. As this customer's automation footprint grows, we are positioned as their end-to-end network partner. With Ruckus, we can extend that relationship into the full facility network, wired, wireless, and cloud managed, a natural expansion of what we've already earned. We win on the robot today, and then we earn the right to the wired and wireless network backbone tomorrow. That is the compounding effect of a full stack AI and automation portfolio, and it is a playbook we intend to replicate across warehouse automation logistics and our manufacturing customers. I will now request Jeremy to provide additional insight into our financial performance.