Hillenbrand Inc

Hello, and welcome to the Hillenbrand Q1 2023 earnings call and webcast. If anyone should require operator assistance, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It's now my pleasure to turn the call over to Sam Meisenberg, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Hillenbrand earnings call for the first quarter of 2023. 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. As a reminder, the Bates Hill segment has been classified as discontinued operations for all periods presented. Our commentary will be based on the performance of our continuing operations unless otherwise noted. 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 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 organic comparisons for our segments, which exclude the impact from acquisitions, divestitures, and foreign currency exchange. I encourage you to review the appendix and slide three of the presentation, as well as our 10-Q, 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 results from our first quarter of fiscal 2023. Last week, we closed the sale of Batesville, completing our transformation into a pure play industrial company. This transaction represents a significant milestone in Hill & Brand's journey. First, it builds upon the momentum we created over the last 12 months with the strategic acquisitions we made in food and recycling. It also simplifies our portfolio to fully focus on our expertise in developing highly engineered, mission-critical industrial processing equipment and solutions for our customers. And finally, it positions Hill & Brand for long-term profitable growth through our leading brands and attractive end markets supported by secular growth trends. I want to thank our associates who have worked tirelessly towards the successful completion of this transaction. I spent 17 years of my career with the Batesville organization, and I'm confident that both companies are in a place of strength as we move forward to pursue our own unique opportunities to create value. We've built a strong foundation at Hill & Brand, in large part to the tenants of customer service, lean operations, talent development, and responsible corporate citizenship instilled through Batesville's legacy. I want to thank the entire Batesville team for their contributions. Now, I'll turn to our first quarter performance. Despite continued uncertainty impacting the broader global economy, we delivered a solid start to the fiscal year. Our first quarter revenue from continuing operations grew 16% compared to the prior year, driven by our recent acquisitions and healthy organic growth for our advanced process solutions segment. In the quarter, we saw good demand for our newly acquired food and recycling businesses, and we saw continued growth in our aftermarket business. Our backlog, which now includes linksless and peerless, nearly $2 billion at the end of the quarter. and our organic APS backlog remained at near record levels. Our APS project pipeline remains robust for our highly engineered equipment and solutions across our key growth platforms of durable plastics, recycling, and food. Starting with our core plastics business, we continue to see strong demand in Asia and the Middle East as polyolefin and engineered plastics customers are quoting projects with increasing output requirements to meet the growing global demand for durable plastics. This is a positive trend for us as we are a global leader in providing complete systems with high output, high quality capabilities. Turning to recycling, as we've discussed, we believe recycling will be a high growth area for us. Since our acquisition of Hairbold last year, the pipeline of orders have been even better than we planned, with growing demand in North America, India, and the Middle East. We're excited about the momentum in this area, which we aim to further bolster with our Recycling Innovation Center in Germany, which will be completed in April of this year. Now to food. We had better than planned orders and revenue in the quarter, driven by solid demand across North America and Europe. Through the combination of our Coperion and Linksys technologies, we are seeing increased quote opportunities as customers recognize the value of comprehensive solutions which we can now provide. We've been able to adapt certain feeding technologies that were historically used for our plastics applications to help increase share of Wallet with existing Linksys customers and have already seen success with this approach within the first few months of ownership. Finally, our integration program is proceeding well, and we remain confident in the value creation we expect to achieve from the Linksys, Peerless, and Dobbler acquisitions. While we're seeing solid momentum in our APS segment, the uncertainty of the macroeconomic environment continued to pose challenges for our MTS segment, which tends to be quicker turn and serves applications that are closer to the consumer. As discussed during last quarter's call, we experienced customer decision delays that resulted in order softness as we entered the quarter. This trend continued through the quarter, and while we're optimistically monitoring the reopening of China, we've not seen the order pipeline convert yet. as sales representatives are just now beginning to travel inside China again to drive these project decisions. Additionally, while the supply chain and inflationary pressures have begun to ease, we continue to experience shortages for chips and other electronic components, which more heavily impacts our MTS segment. We remain focused on deploying the Hillenbrand operating model to prioritize critical investments, manage discretionary costs, and drive operational efficiencies in response to the extended softness. Bob will address this further when he covers our results and full-year outlook. Overall, we continue to see strong performance and outlook for our APS segment, while remaining focused on managing through dynamic macro environment impacting our MTS segment. As we communicated at our investor day in December, our renewed strategy for the next chapter of our journey is to grow, enhance, and optimize. We're excited about the opportunities to continue our momentum through the disciplined deployment of capital towards higher growth, high return investments that will further position Hill & Brand for long-term shareholder value creation as a pure-play industrial leader. Lastly, before turning the call over to Bob, I'd like to quickly provide an update on sustainability. With the recent changes in our portfolio, we have revisited our materiality assessment to ensure that we advance our sustainability strategy with our stakeholders in mind. While also incorporating our new acquisitions and accounting for the Batesville divestiture, We plan to publish the results of our survey in our upcoming annual sustainability report later this year. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Bob to provide more details on our financial performance and outlook.