Element Solutions Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Element Solutions Q2 2026 Financial Results Conference Call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star 1 again. I will now turn the call over to Varun Gokarn, Vice President of Strategy and Integration. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and thank you for participating in our second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. Joining me today are our CEO, Ben Gliklich, and CFO, Carey Dorman. In accordance with regulation FD, we are webcasting this conference call. A replay will be made available in the investor section of the company's website. Before we begin, I want to remind everyone that our announced merger with Solstice Advanced Materials remains subject to shareholder and regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions. As such, we will be limiting our comments on the proposed transaction to what has already been made available in public filings and will not be taking questions about the transaction. During today's call, we will make certain forward-looking statements that reflect our current views about the company's future performance and financial results. These statements are based on assumptions and expectations of future events which are subject to risks and uncertainties. Please refer to the earnings release, supplemental slides, and most recent SEC filings on our website for a discussion of material risk factors that could cause actual results to differ from our expectations and predictions. Today's materials also include financial information that has not been prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP. Please refer to the earnings release and supplemental slides for definitions and reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to comparable GAAP financial measures. It is now my pleasure to introduce our CEO, Ben Gliklich.

Thank you, Varun, and good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining. Before we review this record quarter, I'd like to reiterate our rationale for the announced agreement to merge with Solstice Advanced Materials. This proposed transaction unites our complementary competencies to better meet customer demands for scaled, broad, strategic supply partners, while also increasing avenues to prudently invest our cash flows for growth and unlocking compelling synergies. Together, we stand to build an even stronger electronics portfolio across chip and PCB fabrication, packaging, and assembly, while accelerating investment in the commercialization of new advanced materials and other growth priorities. We will have a broader, highly differentiated value proposition in thermal management and front-end copper interconnect formation. The combined company will be a market leader in profit growth and cash flow generation with multiple high-growth businesses. Finally, the over $180 million in cost synergy potential is real and actionable with clear additional upside over time. Integration planning has begun and we're assembling a joint team of leaders from both of our businesses to ensure the organizations are integrated thoughtfully and we fully capture the strategic and financial promise of the combination. Carey will lead the effort on our side, equipped with deep knowledge of our businesses and as well as experienced successfully leading many similar exercises over his tenure at Element. Our North Star at Element Solutions has always been shareholder value creation and we've had a robust dialogue with our investors since this announcement and will continue to listen intently to their feedback. We work for our shareholders and value their input on important decisions such as this. As today's results show, our organic path has tremendous momentum and combining our business with Solstice should provide an incremental lever to deliver greater value than we otherwise would have. The stock's reaction to the announcement has been disappointing. And both ESI and Solstice recognize the need to show from a cultural as well as operational perspective that we can execute against this significant opportunity. The first test of that execution will be integration. And together with other leaders from ESI and our board, I'll be very focused on working to ensure this integration is planned and executed to our standards for excellence and delivery. Now, turning to our second quarter results, Element Solutions posted a record quarter as organic growth accelerated in our electronics portfolio and the specialties business continued to deliver bottom line growth despite a mixed backdrop. Our results were enhanced by strong contributions from our recent acquisitions, which are performing very well. Overall, these results demonstrate the ongoing success of our strategy to penetrate the highest value, fastest-growing subsegments in our addressable markets and are a testament to years of work by our teams, collaborating across labs, manufacturing sites, applications facilities, and alongside our customers at their locations. We're growing with our customers, increasingly as a partner, working together to address the most pressing technical challenges. There are significant opportunities for our teams to improve value and use manufacturing processes, particularly as pockets of the electronic supply chain have become constrained relative to accelerating demand. In the second quarter, we delivered double-digit organic sales growth for the third quarter in a row and margin expansion when excluding the impact of pass-through metals. Importantly, Our profitable growth is happening alongside increasing investment in people, technology, and plants to support the future. Sales in our electronics segment grew 20% organically as activity accelerated across our supply chain in support of the ongoing AI infrastructure build-out. Technical requirements in data center hardware and other high-performance electronics continue to increase, and our business provides critical enabling solutions across thermal management, power density, and advanced packaging applications to name a few. We're seeing volume growth in the highest value categories across our edge markets from leading edge semi and high end circuit board fabs to device assemblers and a strong pull for innovation to enable greater levels of device performance and manufacturing yield or throughput. This dynamic drove double digit organic net sales growth in each of our electronics verticals. As we discussed at our May Investor Day, we're making investments to meet the increasing demands of our customers, adding additional manufacturing capacity for several high growth product lines and increasing our laboratory footprint and innovation resources to remain on the leading edge. One of our largest focus areas has been Couprion, where we're working to commercialize a differentiated new technology to solve several emerging customer pain points around thermal management, power delivery, and plating copper on challenging substrates. Our development partners working with this material are incredibly enthusiastic, which is evident in a growing commercial pipeline. We're actively sampling products from our first plant to qualify it through our customers, and we have high conviction in the opportunity in this market and urgency to establish incumbency with this technology. Over the past quarter, we've made plans to increase throughput at our initial plant and increase the scope of our second site, which will be located nearby in California. Taken together, our capacity outlook for year-end 2027 is higher than it was entering the quarter. Beyond investments in organic growth, we continue to demonstrate the returns of prudent capital allocation into attractive adjacencies that bring value to our customers. The integrations of Micromax and EFC are going well. Both businesses are performing ahead of our plans for this year and contributed meaningful adjusted EBITDA growth in the quarter. It was both operational excellence and prudent capital allocation that led to the 27% increase in adjusted EPS we delivered in the second quarter. Carey will now take you through our second quarter business results in more detail.