Crane NXT, Co.

Greetings and welcome to the Crane NXT Co. second quarter 2023 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. And please note that this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Jason Feldman, Vice President, Investor Relations. Thank you, Jason. You may begin.

Thank you, Operator, and good day, everyone. Welcome to our second quarter 2023 earnings release conference call. I'm Jason Feldman, Vice President of Investor Relations. On our call this morning, we will also have Aaron Saik, our President and Chief Executive Officer, and Cristina Cristiano, our Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. As usual, we will start off our call with a few prepared remarks, after which we will respond to questions. Just a reminder that the comments we make on this call may include some forward-looking statements. We refer you to the cautionary language at the bottom of our earnings release and also in our annual report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings pertaining to forward-looking statements. Also during the call, we will be using some non-GAAP numbers, which are reconciled to the comparable GAAP numbers and tables at the end of our press release and accompanying slide presentation, those of which are available on our website at www.cranenxt.com in the investor relations section. Now let me turn the call over to Aaron.

Thank you, Jason, and good morning. We appreciate everyone joining the call to discuss our second quarter financial results reported yesterday afternoon. Before we begin, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all of the NXT team members around the world for their efforts to produce a very strong Q2. As many of you know, this is our first quarter post separation, and I'm very pleased with our operational execution. Overall, the results were ahead of our expectations. Both Crane Payment Innovations and Crane Currency had very strong quarters, and year-to-date, both businesses have done better than we guided at the beginning of the year. You can see the highlights on our Q2 performance on slide three. We delivered $352 million in sales with 6% core sales growth ahead of our expectations. Adjusted EBITDA was $104 million with adjusted EPS of $1.12. Margin performance was also very strong, with adjusted EBITDA margins over 29% and adjusted operating margins of over 26%. Notably, adjusted operating margins were above 30% in both segments, and these margins reflect significant sequential improvement. Finally, adjusted free cash flow was 70 million. This supported $50 million of debt repayment in the quarter, driving down our net debt to EBITDA to approximately 1.5 times. This leverage continues to give us substantial financial flexibility for M&A, and we remain confident in our plan to achieve approximately 100% free cash flow conversion this year. Consistent with our culture, these results were driven by the disciplined execution of the crane business system and our mindset of continuous improvement. The strong first half positions us very well for the remainder of 2023 and gives us confidence to raise our full-year adjusted EPS guidance by 10 cents to a range of 385 to 415. The increased guidance primarily reflects our revised outlook for higher core growth driven by the strong orders and backlog at Crane Currency. In total, we now expect core growth to be in the range of 3% to 5%, up approximately 100 basis points from our prior guidance. We're very happy with how we performed in Q2 and the improved full-year guidance. I'm also very pleased with the progress of our separation. We continue to wind down the TSAs with Crane Company, and we're on track with our expectation for all aspects related to the separation. Now I'm going to hand the call over to Christina to walk us through more details on the financials. I'll come back after she speaks and provide some additional comments on our continued progress around our strategy. With that, let me pass the call over to Christina.