Brady Corporation

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Brady Corporation Q4 2025 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, please press star 11 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Ann Thornton, CFO. Please go ahead. Thank you.

Good morning and welcome to the Brady Corporation Fiscal 2025 Fourth Quarter Earnings Conference Call. The slides for this morning's call are located on our website at www.bradycorp.com slash investors. We will begin our prepared remarks on slide number three. Please note that during this call, we may make comments about forward-looking information. Words such as expect, will, may, believe, forecast, and anticipate are just a few examples of words identifying a forward-looking statement. It's important to note that forward-looking information is subject to various risk factors and uncertainties, which could significantly impact expected results. Risk factors were noted in our news release this morning and in Brady's Fiscal 2025 Form 10-K, which was filed with the SEC this morning. Also, please note that this teleconference is copyrighted by Brady Corporation and may not be rebroadcast without the consent of Brady. We will be recording this call and broadcasting it on the internet. As such, your participation in the Q&A session will constitute your consent to being recorded. I'll now turn the call over to Brady's President and Chief Executive Officer, Russell Schaller.

Russell? Thanks, Anne, and thank you all for joining us today. We released our fiscal 2025 fourth quarter results this morning, and I'm pleased to announce another company record high adjusted EPS for the quarter and for the year. We grew organic sales 2.4% in the quarter, acquisitions added 11.3% to our sales growth, and we grew adjusted earnings per share by 5.9% to a new quarterly record of $1.26 per share. Our Americas and Asia region once again reported strong organic sales growth of 4.3% in the quarter, finishing a terrific top line with 4.8% organic sales growth in 2025. Our Europe and Australia region has been operating in a challenging macro environment. Organic sales declined 1.3% in the fourth quarter. However, excluding the impact of facility closure and other reorganization costs in the region, operating income increased 7.9% in the quarter. This streamlined cost structure is better aligned to our expectations for the business in 2026. A consistent theme for the last several years and one of the primary drivers of our organic sales growth is our increased investment in R&D. We increased R&D by 31% in the fourth quarter of this year, which was driven by our investment in organic businesses, as well as through our acquisition of GraviTech from the beginning of the fiscal year and our acquisition of Funai's microfluidic solutions product line starting in the third quarter. Printers and the included consumable products for our printers represent just under 40% of our sales in fiscal 2025. And our sales of these products have been growing organically by between 6% and 7% annually for the last three years. In particular, customers have responded positively to our new flagship printer, the I7500 industrial label printer that we launched in the second quarter, with sales well above our targets. Our R&D investment focus on the development of high-performance materials, which are combined with our safety products, printers, barcode, and RFID readers, create an ecosystem of interoperable products. To this core product offering, we've added the capabilities of direct part marking through our acquisition of GravoTek, as well as through our acquisition of MECO last month. Brady's goal is to provide seamless interoperability across our products, and we are beginning to see the integration of multiple technologies into a single platform. For instance, we successfully combined our optics technology with our lasers and cortex decoder software to enable real-time image capture and verification. What makes this unique and has me most excited is we are able to use low-cost consumer-grade electronics combined with our software to provide a more cost-effective solution to our customers. Our goal is consistent, to expand our workplace safety and identification solutions portfolios by providing complete, tailored solutions that fulfill our customers' safety and identification needs. This quarter was a strong finish to 2025. Our 2025 adjusted EPS of 460 was another all-time record high following four consecutive years of record highs. We grew organic sales 2.6%, which was led by our Americas and Asia region with organic sales growth of 4.8%. We closed on the acquisition of Gravitech and Funai's microfluidic solutions product line, both of which add technical capabilities to our product portfolio, which we believe will be additive to our growth rate in the future. We increased our investment in R&D to another record high of nearly 80 million, which was 5.3% of sales. And we returned 96 million to our shareholders through dividends and share buybacks. Our priorities for the next year are consistent. Continue to develop unique products for our customers, particularly in the area of workplace automation, which we believe is a long-term growth opportunity. Continue to invest in R&D to stay ahead of the competition and deliver specialized products that help customers automate and drive efficiencies. Generate sales growth above GDP in the geographies where we operate. Deliver operational improvements that increase profitability as we grow. and to effectively deploy our capital to drive long-term shareholder value, which includes organic investments such as R&D, strategic acquisitions that add technical capabilities, and returning funds to our shareholders through dividends and share buybacks. We demonstrated our commitment to returning funds to our shareholders this year as we repurchased 733,000 shares for $51 million. And yesterday, we announced an increase in our dividend, which represents the 40th consecutive year of annual dividend increases. We're incredibly proud to reach this milestone of 40 straight years of annual dividend increases, which shows our commitment to returning cash to our shareholders while delivering long-term shareholder return. And now I'll turn the call over to Anne to provide more details on our financial results. Anne? Thanks, Russell.