Hillenbrand Inc

Greetings and welcome to Hill & Brand's fiscal third quarter 2022 earnings 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. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Sam Mindsburg, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Hillelbrand's fiscal third quarter of 2022 earnings call. I'm joined by our President and CEO, Kim Ryan, and our Senior Vice President and CFO, Bob VanHembergen. I'd like to direct your attention to the supplemental slides posted on our IR website that we referenced on today's call. Turning to slide three, A reminder that our comments may contain certain forward-looking statements that are subject to the safe harbor provisions of the security clause. These statements are not guarantees of future performance, and our actual results could differ materially. Also, during the course of this call, we will be discussing certain non-GAAP operating performance measures, including pro forma comparisons for our segments. I encourage you to review the appendix and slide 3 of the presentation, as well as our which can be found on our website for a deeper discussion of non-GAAP information, forward-looking statements, and the risk factors that could impact our actual results. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Kim.

Thank you, Sam, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I'd like to start by acknowledging our associates throughout the enterprise. I'm truly grateful for their sustained dedication to Hillenbrand and their determination in executing our strategy again this quarter. Overall, we delivered a solid quarter of revenue and EPS growth, led by a strong performance in our molding technology solution segment. While supply chain disruptions, foreign currency headwinds, and inflation continue to pose challenges across our business and the broader industry at large, I'm pleased with how our teams have responded. Through our effective deployment of the Hillenbrand operating model, we saw our overall price-cost coverage improve again this quarter to fully offset inflation on a dollar-for-dollar basis. Additionally, we have executed our recovery plan to help mitigate the disruptions to our Hot Runner product line caused by the COVID-19-related shutdowns in China that we communicated on our Q2 call. Based on the current situation in China, We have not incorporated any impact from future COVID-related shutdowns in China into our outlook, but we are closely monitoring the situation. Our order pipelines remain solid across both the APS and MTS segments. We did experience customer delays for a few large polyolefin decisions that were expected to close in the quarter, but we've already seen some of those decisions materialize in the current quarter, and we continue to see healthy demand for our large plastic systems, particularly in China, India, and the Middle East. We remain laser focused on factors that drive our top and bottom line performance. In regards to Batesville, we signed a long-term contract with key customer in the quarter, and the Batesville team continues to have great success in attracting and partnering with other large customers as well, which is a testament to their industry-leading products and services. We will remain nimble in investing for long-term profitable growth and managing expenses through various levers we can pull that will allow us to successfully navigate this environment. As you know, we have a strong track record of execution through up and down cycles enabled by the Hillenbrand operating model, and I'm confident that we are well positioned as we move forward. I'll briefly provide an update on our strategy and key priorities, including progress made on our sustainability journey. As you know, our strategy is centered around four pillars, which we believe have positioned us well to drive long-term profitable growth and deliver meaningful value to our shareholders. These pillars are, first, to build business platforms, both organically and through M&A. Second, to manage base bill for cash, Third, build a scalable foundation for growth using the Hillenbrand operating model. And finally, effectively deploy strong free cash flow. During the quarter, we continued to execute against our priorities. A few specific examples are, we successfully achieved our synergy target for the Millicron integration ahead of schedule. We expanded into higher growth end markets through organic and inorganic opportunities, effectively positioning Hill & Brand for long-term growth in line with our communicated strategy. We focused on defining our company culture, values, and working norms across the enterprise to serve the evolving needs of our global workforce, supported by the creation of our company purpose. And we also published our third annual sustainability report that I'll discuss in more detail a little later. To expand further on these accomplishments, I'm pleased to announce that we achieved our communicated target of $75 million in annual run rate synergies for the Millicron integration ahead of schedule. I could not be more proud of our teams and their execution throughout this global integration, despite a historically dynamic and sometimes challenging operating environment over the past three years. We are confident in the capabilities that we've developed, the processes put in place as a part of the HOM, and the foundation created during this integration, including global supply management, global engineering, and financial shared services, just to name a few. This foundation will be a key enabler of our success in integrating future acquisitions. As you know, another key priority of ours has been growth, with a focus on taking our existing capabilities for highly engineered processing equipment and solutions and expanding our footprint in end markets with attractive long-term growth characteristics. Over the past five weeks, we announced agreements to acquire Herbold Meckesheim, a leader in plastics recycling solutions, and Linksys Group, a leading global provider of process equipment and automation solutions for the food industry. In addition, we completed a small tuck-in acquisition, Gobbler Engineering, a specialized food extrusion company. These strategic transactions are highly complementary to our existing products and solutions and further our strategy to build leadership positions in the end markets of recycling and food, which have attractive, long-term secular growth potential. Next, on July 20th, we also announced the initiation of a process to explore a range of strategic alternatives for Batesville. Batesville continues to be a leader in the death care industry in North America with an exceptional team that has been tireless in their efforts to deliver best-in-class quality, innovation, and service to our customers. Batesville is a significant part of our history, and we are confident this process will determine the best path forward to benefit our associates, customers, and shareholders. As we mentioned, there is no specific timetable for this review, but we will update you again at the conclusion of the process. Finally, we continue to demonstrate our commitment to ESG as we published our third annual sustainability report in June. I'm excited to share with you all the progress we are making as a company, leveraging our global organization. In the report, we disclosed for the first time our Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions across our major sites. and made additional disclosures regarding our efforts on DE&I and our progress on governance initiatives. The report was published as a part of Hill & Brand's commitment as a signatory of the United Nations Global Compact and includes alignment with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, Global Reporting Initiative, and SASB standards. In that report, we also introduced our company's purpose, shape what matters for tomorrow. which will propel the organization forward in both what we will do and how we will do it as we leverage a culture of operational excellence, collaboration, and innovation to shape solutions that best serve our associates, customers, communities, and all other stakeholders. We were very careful and deliberate in selecting the words that define our purpose. Shape. We are the engineers, designers, manufacturers, and molders who take pride in our expertise and technical capability and allow the company to put the right pieces together to bring forward new solutions for our customers. What matters? Our end products affect the world. They impact life across how people live, work, play, eat, travel, and heal. For tomorrow, we continue to look at what's next. As innovators in our respective industries, we will work to shape a stronger future for our world. Embedded in our purpose is a set of four core values, unifying Hill & Brand's more than 10,000 global associates. First, win as one. Next, partner with possibility. Then, make it matter. And finally, drive to deliver. Together, our purpose and core values tell the story of who we are, what we stand for, and where we're going as a global organization. I'm very proud of the collective efforts of all of our associates have made in helping us to create, define, and embed our purpose into the organization to shape what matters for tomorrow. This is a pivotal time for Hillenbrand. And I'm excited for our future and confident that we are well-positioned to continue to drive long-term growth and value for all of our stakeholders. I'll now turn the call over to Bob to provide details about our overall financial performance, segment performance, and outlook.