Badger Meter, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Badger Meter first quarter 2021 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during this time, you will need to press star then 1 on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, today's conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to turn the conference over to Karen Bauer, Vice President of Investor Relations, Corporate Strategy and Treasurer. Please go ahead, Ms. Bauer.

Good morning, and thank you for joining the Badger Meter First Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. On the call with me today are Ken Bockhorst, Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer, and Bob Rockledge, Chief Financial Officer. The earnings release and related slide presentation are available on our website. Quickly, I will cover the safe harbor, reminding you that any forward-looking statements made during this call are subject to various risks and uncertainties, the most important of which are outlined in our press release and SEC filings. On today's call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial metrics. Our press release and slides provide a reconciliation of the GAAP to non-GAAP financial metrics used. Finally, during this call, we refer to core results for various financial metrics, for example, core utility water sales. Core, in this case, means the designated financial metric excluding the impact of the recent SCAN and ATI acquisitions. We believe this reference point is important for year-over-year comparability. With that, I'll turn the call over to Ken.

Thanks, Karen, and thank you for joining our first quarter earnings call. In summary, I'm pleased with our results for the quarter, delivering sales and EPS growth, margin expansion, and robust cash flow. Most exciting, we experienced record order rates for our smart water solutions across both lines of business as the underlying growth drivers for our digital solutions are embraced by customers. The well-publicized and widespread electronic supply shortages limited our conversion of these record orders into sales in the quarter. tempering core sales growth but resulting in a record high order backlog heading into the second quarter, which bodes well for the balance of the year. Our recent acquisitions delivered strong top-line results with net profitability muted, as expected, as a result of purchase accounting items. Overall, our acquisition integration activities are progressing as expected. I'll talk about the current environment and our outlook later in the call, but for now, let me turn the call over to Bob to go through the details of the quarter.