Hillenbrand Inc

Greetings. Welcome to Hill & Brand's fiscal fourth quarter and full year 2022 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in 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 from your telephone keypad. Please note, this conference is being recorded. At this time, I'll turn the conference over to Sam Minesburg, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Sam, you may begin.

Thank you, Operator, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Hill & Brand's fiscal fourth quarter and full year 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 will be 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 securities laws. 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 three of the presentation, as well as our 10-K, 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 turn the call over to Kim.

Thank you, Sam, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today as we review our fiscal year 22 performance and provide our outlook to fiscal year 23. 2022 was a pivotal year for Hill & Brand, and we made significant progress in executing our strategy to grow as a world-class global industrial company with a portfolio of highly engineered, mission-critical processing technologies and solution, and leading global brands that serve customers throughout the lifetime of our equipment. In our Q1 earnings call, which was my first after officially taking over as CEO, I communicated several key priorities for the year. First, to ensure our company culture, values, and working norms were aligned to the needs of the evolving global workforce. Second, to successfully complete the Millicron integration And finally, to drive continued growth for Hill & Bram through innovation, new product development, and strategic acquisition. We made tremendous progress on these priorities and now I'll cover some of our highlights. In June, we introduced our company's purpose, Shape What Matters for Tomorrow, which serves as the foundation of our culture and unites all of our associates around the globe through a shared vision of how we can drive a positive impact in the world through our people, our products, and our partnerships. Internally, our associates have taken ownership of our purpose, which they helped to create. It's been truly inspiring to watch the organization embed this purpose and our unified core values into our culture. Externally, purpose is demonstrated in our recent acquisition of Herbal Meckesheim, and also by the progress we have made in increasing our transparency through additional disclosures around energy, emissions, and DE&I, and by forging key partnerships with organizations like the American Heart Association, Girls Inc., and Net Impact, just to name a few of the ways this purpose influences our company. In addition, I recently signed the United Nations Women's Empowerment Principles as another step in our commitment to advance gender diversity and equality in our company, industry, and the broader community. Turning to the Millicron integrations, next week we'll reach the end of the third and final year of the integration program. As we announced last quarter, we achieved and have since surpassed our target of $75 million in run rate cost synergies ahead of schedule. I'm very proud of the commitment our teams displayed as they worked tirelessly in pursuit of achieving our goals and creating significant value for the company. As you know, this integration used the Hillenbrand operating model to build a scalable foundation for functions like finance, IT, and HR, as well as global engineering and supply chain that is leveraged by the entire enterprise. We believe the HOM is a key success factor that enables us to drive continuous improvement in our existing businesses and accelerated growth and value realization in our acquisitions. Now turning to performance highlights, despite significant macro headwinds from inflation, supply chain disruption, and foreign currency throughout the year, we achieved record levels for revenue and adjusted EBITDA in our industrial segments in fiscal year 22. Our molding technology solutions segment had annual revenue and margin expansion that came in near the high end of our expectations. And while we did see a slowdown in orders in the fourth quarter, largely due to the rise in global macro uncertainty, we are entering fiscal 23 with a strong backlog. We're closely monitoring the demand environment, as well as the continued zero COVID policy situation in China, and are taking appropriate action to protect overall margins. Bob will cover this when he discusses our financial performance and outlook. In our advanced process solutions segment, we entered fiscal 23 with another record level of backlog, providing us confidence and visibility in this uncertain operating environment. As discussed last quarter, we saw some delays in customer decision timing, but finished strong with a record Q4 order performance on an FX-adjusted basis, and we continue to see solid order pipelines for our large plastic systems, aftermarket parts and service, and our food and recycling applications. Last month, several of our teams across APS and MTS attended the K-Fair in Dusseldorf, Germany, the world's largest plastics convention. Each of our participating businesses saw a significant amount of lead and quote volume coming out of the show, which is a testament to the strength of this industry as evolving trends around durable plastics and especially sustainability provide a tailwind for long-term demand in both our MTS and APS segments. In particular, we have received considerable interest in the expanded recycling capabilities we can now bring to the market as a result of our acquisition of Herbold Meckesheim. Herbold is a leader in the front end of the recycling process with technologies that separate, shred, fine grind, wash, and dry recycled plastic, which can then be fed through our coperium feeding and extrusion equipment to be made back into plastic pellets. These plastic pellets can then be extruded or molded into products via injection molding, extrusion, and hot runner equipment, which are all fully equipped to process recycled content to create high quality, more sustainable products. This circularity within the plastics value chain is a perfect example of how our business helps to shape what matters for tomorrow. We're excited to share more details with you as the Kopirian and Herbal teams continue their integration and leverage our combined technologies to create enhanced customer solutions to serve this fast-growing end market. Now, turning to our recent acquisitions in food, yesterday in our earnings release, we announced the tuck-in acquisition of Peerless, a premier supplier of industrial food processing equipment, which is expected to close before the end of the calendar year. Together with the Coperion, Linksys Group, and Gobbler Brands, We anticipate our total food and pharma revenue to be over $400 million, now providing meaningful scale and balance to our portfolio. We're excited about the opportunities ahead of us, from bringing together the complementary technologies across these brands to drive enhanced value propositions for our customers, to the improved operational efficiency we expect to achieve through the deployment of the Hillenbrand operating model. Since closing the Linksys transaction in early October, our integration teams have been working closely together and are on track to drive synergy realization. We're confident in our ability to effectively integrate and improve our combined businesses, as we have proven before through the successful integrations at Millicron and before that, Coperium. In total, including peerless, we executed our disciplined M&A strategy to deploy approximately $740 million towards these acquisitions. expanding our position in complementary end markets with attractive long-term growth characteristics, where we believe our highly engineered, mission-critical processing capabilities and engineering expertise create a compelling opportunity to win. We believe these actions position Hill & Brand for continued long-term growth and shareholder value creation. Finally, before I turn the call over to Bob to cover our financial details and outlook, I want to touch briefly on the status of Batesville Strategic Alternatives Review. The process remains ongoing, and we are confident the final outcome will be the best result for our associates, our customers, and our shareholders. We will provide additional updates as appropriate. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Bob to cover our financial performance and outlook.