DuPont de Nemours, Inc.

Good day and welcome to the DuPont first quarter 2024 earnings call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press star one again. We ask that you please keep it to one question and one follow-up per person. For operative assistance throughout the call, please press star zero. And finally, I would like to advise all participants that this call is being recorded. Thank you. I'd now like to welcome Chris McRae to begin the conference. Chris, over to you.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us for DuPont's first quarter of 2024 financial results conference call. Joining me today are Ed Breen, Chief Executive Officer, and Laurie Tosh, Chief Financial Officer. We've prepared slides to supplement our remarks, which are posted on DuPont's website under the Investor Relations tab and through the webcast link. Please read the forward-looking statement disclaimer contained in the slides. During this call, we'll make forward-looking statements regarding our expectations or predictions about the future. Because these statements are based on current assumptions and factors that involve risks and uncertainties, our actual performance and results may differ materially from our forward-looking statements. Our Form 10-K, as updated by our current periodic reports, includes detailed discussion of principal risks and uncertainties which may cause such differences. Unless otherwise specified, all historical financial measures presented today are on a continuing operations basis and exclude significant items. We will also refer to other non-GAAP measures. A reconciliation to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures is included in our press release and presentation materials that have been posted to DuPont's Investor Relations website. I'll now turn the call over to Ed.

Good morning and thank you for joining our first quarter 2024 financial review. Our results for the period exceeded our expectations, driven by better than expected volumes in all segments. Broadly, the first quarter confirmed that we are past the bottom in electronics and on the road to recovery. Our semiconductor technologies business reported sequential sales growth of 8% in the first quarter and 10% year over year. driven by a pickup and underlying chip demand and normalization of customer inventory levels, both slightly earlier than expected. In InterConnect Solutions, we saw a second straight quarter of year-over-year volume growth, with volumes up 4%. We did, however, continue to see channel inventory destocking as expected, resulting in year-over-year revenue declines in certain industrial-based businesses But we believe those conditions have bottomed, and our assumed recovery timing is also consistent with our previous expectations. That said, and given first quarter performance, we are raising our full year 2024 guidance for net sales, operating EBITDA, and adjusted EPS. Lori will further detail the outlook shortly. Compared to a year ago period, first quarter reported sales at $2.9 billion declined 3%. Operating EBITDA 682 million declined 4%, and adjusted EPS of 79 cents per share declined 6%. We continue to prioritize working capital and delivered significant year-over-year improvement in cash flow during the quarter. In late April, we completed the 500 million accelerated share repurchase transaction launched in February, retiring a total of 6.9 million shares in this tranche. and bringing total share repurchases to over 15% of our outstanding shares since November 2022. Turning to slide four, I want to reiterate that we remain excited about the growth potential of our businesses centered around five secular high growth areas. We are excited about the three cycle strength of our portfolio as end markets recover from recent destocking headwinds and our teams continue to focus on operational excellence. Almost one-third of sales exposure for our portfolio today is focused on electronics, including leadership positions and strong customer relationships serving semiconductor manufacturing, primarily via consumables used in the chip manufacturing process, as well as serving broader consumer-based electronics markets with films, displays, and printed circuit board materials used in smartphones pcs and tablets we are very pleased to participate in the ai driven growth acceleration within electronics we are semi-related products geared towards advanced node chips for data centers and other key ai applications such as mobile products electronics and markets have positively inflected and we expect continued volume pickup in both SEMI and ICS over the course of 2024. Our water business at 12% of our portfolio constitutes a broad range of filtration technologies and operates in markets expected to generate strong growth driven by evolving wastewater regulation and the global response to concerns around water scarcity and circularity. We believe demand for filtration products, which have been impacted by slower project work in China in the last year, and associated distributor destocking, has bottomed and will begin to recover later in the second quarter. We have excellent leadership positions in various end markets within protection and industrial technologies. Within industrial technologies, about 10% of the DuPont portfolio is geared to growing healthcare markets, including Spectrum Medical Devices, Tyvek Medical Packaging, and Livio Biopharma consumables. We have seen ongoing solid demand for devices and expect to see recovery in medical packaging beginning later in the second quarter. Biopharma product demand is expected to recover beginning later in the year. after bottoming in recent periods dupont's next generation auto market participation constitutes about 10 percent of total sales and is geared to advanced technologies enabling secular demand trends for hybrid and electric vehicles within battery motor and other applications demand for our advanced auto related products has remained healthy and we have a global customer base that includes ev customers in each region we see excellent longer-term opportunity across our auto-related portfolio. With that, let me turn it over to Lori to review our financial performance and outlook.