ESCO Technologies Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the fourth quarter 2024 ESCO Technologies earnings 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 during the session, you will need to press star 1 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. On the call today, we have Brian Saylor, President and CEO, Chris Tucker, Senior Vice President and CFO. And now, I would like to hand the conference over to our first speaker today, Kate Lowry, Vice President of Investor Relations. Kate, you now have the floor.

Thank you. Statements made during this call, which are not strictly historical, are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the federal securities laws. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions, and actual results may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements due to risks and uncertainties that exist in the company's operations and business environment, including, but not limited to, the risk factors referenced in the company's press release issued today, which will be included as an exhibit to the company's Form 8K to be filed. No duty to update or revise any forward-looking statements except as may be required by applicable laws or regulations. In addition, during this call, the company may discuss some non-GAAP financial measures describing the company's operating results. The reconciliation of these measures to the most comparable GAAP measures can be found in the press release issued today on the company's website at www.escotechnologies.com under the link Investor Relations.

Thanks, Kate, and thanks everyone for joining today's call. We are happy to give you an update as we close out another great year at ESCO. We are pleased with our fourth quarter and fiscal 2024 results. We hit a significant milestone this year with orders and sales both eclipsing $1 billion. This is a great achievement. but we feel like there's still a lot of momentum in our business and in the markets we serve. So while we feel great about 2024, we feel even better about the future. Chris will run you through all of the financial details for the quarter and the year, but before we get to that, I want to give you a few comments on each of the segments. Starting with aerospace and defense, we continue to have a strong outlook here. As you saw on the release, we finished the quarter with record backlog of just over $600 million. The backlog growth in 2024 was substantial on continuing strength from commercial and military aerospace, as well as continued strength of Navy orders at VACO and Globe. Notably, we did make progress during the year on reducing past due backlogs. That's been a big focus for our teams, and it's nice to see this start to move in the right direction. Probably in anticipation of some questions we might get later, I'd like to address the Boeing strike. We did not see any impact in our fourth quarter, and now that the strike is resolved, we do not anticipate any financial impacts to 2025. There could be some movement between quarters as the business ramps up and things are rescheduled, but with the overall backlog strength that we have, we anticipate that the outlook for 2025 can remain intact. Next is our utility solutions group, where we had another good quarter and also another year of nice top-line growth and margin improvement. The sales growth here picked up a bit when compared to the third quarter, and we were happy to see the margin expansion that the team delivered. Taking a second to parse out the different markets here, we see ongoing market strength on the regulated utility side of our business. The customer base here continues to increase capital spending forecasts in order to meet demand for increased electricity, and they also have to be sharply focused on running their current assets as efficiently as possible. These are both good trends for our Doble business. On the renewable side, the team delivered really nice orders and sales growth in the fourth quarter. We are still positive on our outlook here as we feel renewables will continue to have a role to play as overall demand for electric power increases. Finally, I'll touch on our test business. We are really happy with how the year turned out. We saw a nice sequential improvement from the business as we moved through the year. Certainly, the growth here is less than our other two businesses, but the team responded quickly when the business softened up at the beginning of the year. We saw profitability recover, and we also saw sales increase sequentially as each quarter progressed. The good news is that we've seen strong activity from our medical and industrial shielding customer segments of the business. And when the key wireless markets begin to recover, the team will be ready to capitalize on that activity. With that, I'll turn it over to Chris to run you through the financial details for the quarter.