Badger Meter, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Q1 2026 Badger Meeting Earnings Conference Call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star 1 again. As a reminder, today's conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to turn the conference over to Barbara Noverini, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, Ms. Noverini.

Thank you, operator. Thank you for joining the Badger Meter first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. I'm here today with Ken Bockhorst, our chairman, president, and chief executive officer, Bob Rockledge, our executive vice president of North America Municipal Utility, and Dan Welstein, our chief financial officer. This morning, we made the earnings release, acquisition announcement, and related slide presentation available on our website, at investors.badgermeter.com. As a reminder, any forward-looking statements made on this call are subject to various risks and uncertainties, the most important of which are outlined in our news release and SEC filings. On today's call, we may refer to certain non-GAAP financial metrics. Our earnings presentation provides a reconciliation between the most directly comparable GAAP measure and any non-GAAP financial measures discussed. With that, I'll turn the call over to Ken.

Thanks, Barb, and good morning. Before getting into the specifics of the quarter, I'd like to start this morning by setting the stage for a more detailed discussion on our Q1 results and how we're thinking about our metering business more broadly. We operate in a market supported by strong, long-term macro drivers, recurring replacement cycles, and increasing adoption of advanced technologies ranging from our ultrasonic meters to industry-leading cellular AMI, beyond the meter solutions, and recurring software and analytics. These durable factors, combined with solid execution, have driven consistent value creation over time. At the same time, it has always been true that our business can be uneven quarter to quarter and year to year. Over the 2023 to 2025 time period, robust revenue growth, driven by multi-year cellular AMI share gains, and overlapping project activity reduced the visibility of this inherent unevenness. In mid-2025, we began to signal that the revenue contribution from certain historical AMI projects would decline as deployments concluded ahead of awarded but not yet started AMI projects. As a result of this project pacing and backlog normalization dynamic, we previously communicated that our 2026 revenues would be weighted toward the back half of the year. On page three of our earnings slide deck, you can see the impact from project pacing in our first quarter 2026 revenue. In addition, short cycle order rates, for which visibility is always more limited, were weaker than we anticipated, resulting in approximately $15 to $20 million of lower revenue versus our internal expectations. As a result of those combined headwinds, first quarter sales were down 9% year over year to $202 million. While our expectations for a solid second half have not changed, the softer start up to the year prompts us to anticipate full year 2026 organic revenue to be on balance with 2025. Normally, I would turn the call over to Dan at this point to walk through the financial results in detail. However, in light of the below expectation sales results, I'm going to turn it over to Bob to walk through greater detail on this multi-layered customer dynamic. In short, Bob will explain our view that this first quarter outcome is timing related and does not reflect the structural change in either market demand, our broader competitive position, or the long-term market drivers of our business. Bob will walk through a subset of anonymized details related to several awarded but not yet started AMI projects that are expected to begin deployment in the back half of 2026. This isn't the level of project detail we'd normally provide each quarter, But these awarded projects, along with others in the funnel, help to inform our outlook for the rest of 2026 and support our expected momentum into 2027. With that, I'll turn it over to Bob.