Crane NXT, Co.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Crane NXT fourth quarter and full year 2023 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants have been placed in a listen-only mode. The lines will be open for your questions following the presentation. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the call over to Rima Haider, Vice President of Investor Relations, to begin the presentation. Rima, you may begin.

Thank you, Operator, and good morning, everyone. I am Reema Haider, Vice President of Investor Relations, and I want to welcome all of you to the fourth quarter 2023 earnings call for Crane NXT. Before we begin, the slides we will reference during this presentation can be accessed via the Investor Relations section of our website at craneNXT.com. A replay of today's call will also be available on our website. Before we discuss our results, I encourage all listeners to review the legal notice on slide two, which explains the risk of forward-looking statements and the use of non-GAAP financial measures. Additionally, we refer you to the cautionary language at the bottom of our earnings release and in our forms 10-K and 10-Q filings pertaining to forward-looking statements. During the call, we will also be using some non-GAAP numbers, which are reconciled to be comparable GAAP numbers in tables at the end of our press release and accompanying slide presentation, both of which are available on our website at craneNXT.com in the investor relations section. On our call this morning, we will discuss 2023 highlights, our financial results and 2024 guidance, as well as our goals and strategy for this year. For this discussion with me today are Aaron Sake, our President and Chief Executive Officer, and Cristina Cristiano, our Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. After our prepared remarks, we will open the call to analysts for questions. Now, let me turn the call over to Aaron.

Thank you, Rima, and good morning. We appreciate everyone joining the call to discuss our fourth quarter and full year 2023 results, as well as our outlook for 2024. 2023 marked the start of Crane NXT's journey as a premier industrial technology company. And I wanted to take a moment to reflect on that year and thank all of our associates around the world who made 2023 so successful. One of our shared values is people matter. And I couldn't be more proud and grateful to be part of this outstanding team. In April, we successfully launched the company. built out our new corporate leadership team, and continued our disciplined approach to operating our core business. We also established our five-year vision to grow the company to 3 billion, building from our strong position as a trusted partner, providing technology solutions that secure, detect, and authenticate what matters most to our customers. As we announced yesterday, we've delivered strong operational performance, growing revenues organically by 4%, with adjusted segment operating profit of 28% and delivering adjusted EPS above our guidance. A hallmark of our company is our strong free cash flow. We ended the year with adjusted free cash flow conversion of over 100%, allowing us to further pay down our debt and giving us confidence as we move forward with an increase to our dividend by 14% for 2024. And finally, we developed a strong M&A pipeline and we are on track for our first acquisition in 2024. I'm very proud of our accomplishments during our first year as Crane NXT and believe we have set up the company for long-term success. Moving to our full year 23 financial results, we executed very well to close out this year, delivering results at or ahead of our guidance on all key metrics. We had revenue of $1.4 billion with core sales growth of 4% in line with our guidance and improved segment operating profit margin by 30 basis points over 22 and above our guidance. Adjusted EBITDA was $388 million, which was also above our guidance, and adjusted EPS of 416 exceeded the high end of our outlook. Adjusted free cash flow conversion for the full year was 111%, Our very strong cash conversion enabled us to pay down 245 million of debt in 23, lowering our net leverage ratio to 1.1 times. We will continue to focus on this disciplined execution in 2024, utilizing the power of the crane business system. And as you saw in our earnings release yesterday, We're starting the year with core sales growth guidance of negative one to plus 2% over 23 and adjusted EPS of $4.10 to $4.35, which we believe is an appropriately risk-adjusted guidance given the dynamics in our businesses. With that, I'm now going to hand the call over to Christina to walk us through in more details our Q4 and full year 23 financial performance, as well as provide more details on our guidance. Christina?