Badger Meter, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the third quarter 2024 Badger Meter earnings conference call. After the prepared remarks, there'll be an opportunity to ask questions. If you'd like to ask a question during the Q&A, you can do so by pressing star followed by one on your telephone keypad. It's now my pleasure to turn the conference over to Karen Power, Vice President of Investor Relations, Corporate Strategy and Treasurer. Please go ahead, Ms. Power.

Good morning, and thank you for joining the Badger Meter third quarter 2024 earnings conference call. On the call with me today are Ken Bockhorst, Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer, and Bob Rockledge, Chief Financial Officer. Also joining our call today is Barb Noverini, our new Senior Director of Investor Relations. I have made the decision to retire after our annual shareholder meeting in the spring of 2025. Barb and I will be working together over the next six months to seamlessly transition investor relations, sustainability, and strategy activities, and I know she will be a great resource to the company and to you all in the years ahead. Let the countdown to my last earnings call begin with two to go after today. Moving on, the earnings release and related slide presentation are available on our website. Quickly, I'll 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 earnings slides provide a reconciliation of the GAAP to non-GAAP financial metrics used. With that, I'll turn the call over to Ken.

Thanks, Karen. We will definitely miss your expert safe harbor reading skills. But all joking aside, we recognize the importance of a professional IR function and consider ourselves very fortunate to have had Karen's expertise as Bob and I began our first public company CEO and CFO roles about six years ago now. It's also why we believe in well-planned transitions, and we're happy to have Bob on board to work alongside Karen. Turning to the third quarter, I'm very pleased with our financial results, which reflect continued strong performance across a broad array of metrics, including delivering 12% year-over-year top-line sales growth against increasingly difficult comparisons. We reported record operating margins of 19.5% with both year-over-year gross margin expansion and SEA leverage contributing. We delivered strong EPS improvement, even with a higher tax rate. And last but not least, we generated robust year-over-year cash flow growth. In summary, our team continues to do a tremendous job in executing against our strategic priorities in support of our customers. I'll hand the call over to Bob to go through the details of the quarter, and I'll come back to talk about market conditions and the outlook.