Huntington Ingalls Industries, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the second quarter 2021 Huntington & Giles Industries earnings conference 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, you may press star then 1 on a touchtone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then 2. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you need further assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. I would now like to hand the call over to Dwayne Blake, Vice President of Investor Relations. Mr. Blake, you may begin.

Thanks. Good morning and welcome to the Huntington Ingalls Industries Second Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. With us today are Mike Petters, President and Chief Executive Officer, Chris Kastner, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, and Tom Steele, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. As a reminder, statements made in today's call that are not historical fact are considered forward-looking statements and are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of federal securities law. Actual results may differ. Please refer to our SEC filings for a description of some of the factors that may cause actual results to vary materially from anticipated results. Also in the remarks today, Mike, Chris, and Tom will refer to certain non-GAAP measures. Reconciliations of these metrics to the comparable GAAP measures are included in the appendix of our earnings presentation that's posted on our website. We plan to address the posted presentation slides during the call to supplement our comments. Please access our website at HuntingtonEngles.com and click on the investor relations link to view the presentation as well as our earnings release. With that, I'll turn the call over to our President and CEO, Mike Petters. Mike?

Thanks, Dwayne. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us on today's call. This morning, we released strong second quarter 2021 financial results driven by another quarter of solid operational performance. So let me share some highlights from the quarter, starting on slide three of the presentation. Sales of $2.2 billion were up from $2.0 billion in the second quarter of 2020. Diluted EPS of $3.20 was up significantly from $1.30 in the second quarter of last year, and pension-adjusted EPS for the quarter was $3.05. New contract awards during the quarter were approximately $1.2 billion... resulting in a backlog of approximately $48 billion, of which approximately $24 billion is funded. And Chris will provide some color on a few of the key awards for the quarter during his remarks. Shifting to activities in Washington, we are pleased that the congressional markup process for fiscal year 2022 has begun in earnest following release of the President's budget request in May. Of note, the budget requests continued recapitalization of the nation's strategic ballistic missile submarine fleet and supported funding for CBN-80 and CBN-81 Ford-class aircraft carriers, two Virginia-class submarines, one DDG-51 Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, and LHA-9. We were also pleased that a second DDG 51 class destroyer was included as the number one priority on the Navy's unfunded requirements list for fiscal year 2022. And we look forward to working closely with the Congress during the FY22 markup process to urge support for the second DDG and other critical priorities, including the efficient production of amphibious warships. In closing, slide four provides some key takeaways from the recently announced agreement to acquire Alliant Science and Technology. The team is preparing for closing of the transaction, and we are very excited about the addition of Alliant to the HII family. Alliant is a perfect complement to our existing capabilities in the technology-driven defense and federal solutions space. The solutions and products they provide are directly in line with the strategic focus that we have articulated for our technical solutions business, and it enhances our technical capabilities and customer access in high-growth national security markets, including C5ISR, military training and simulation, and next-generation technologies and solutions. We firmly believe that Alliant offers significant growth potential and represents an investment in capabilities that support the evolving DoD national security requirements, which, in turn, are expected to generate significant long-term sustainable value for our shareholders, our customers, and our employees. Now I will turn the call over to Chris for some remarks on the operations.