IDEX Corporation

Greetings and welcome to IDEXX Corporation's third quarter 2022 earnings conference 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. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Allison Lawson, Vice President and Chief Accounting Officer. Thank you. You may begin.

Good morning, everyone. This is Allison Losses, Vice President and Chief Accounting Officer for IDEX Corporation. Thank you for joining us for our discussion of the IDEX third quarter 2022 financial highlights. Last night, we issued a press release outlining our company's financial and operating performance for the three months ending September 30th, 2022. The press release, along with the presentation slides to be used during today's webcast, can be accessed on our company website at IDEXCorp.com. Joining me today are Eric Ashleman, our Chief Executive Officer and President, and Bill Grogan, our Chief Financial Officer. Today, we'll begin with Eric providing an overview on the state of IDEX's business. Then Bill will discuss IDEX's third quarter financial results, provide an update on segment performance in the markets they serve, and discuss our outlook for the fourth quarter and full year 2022. Following our prepared remarks, we will open the call for your questions. If you should need to exit the call for any reason, you may access a complete replay beginning approximately two hours after the call concludes by dialing the toll-free number 877-660-6853 and entering conference ID 13724804 or simply log on to our company homepage for the webcast replay. Before we begin, a brief reminder. This call may contain certain forward-looking statements that are subject to the Safe Harbor language in last night's press release and in IDEXX's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. With that, I'll now turn this call over to our CEO and President, Eric Ashleman.

Thank you, Allison, and good morning, everyone. I'm on slide six. Our global teams achieved excellent results in the third quarter. We delivered record sales, adjusted EPS, and free cash flow. Organic sales grew 15%, with double-digit record growth across all three of our segments. Orders moderated a bit in the quarter, but backlog positions remain robust overall. It's been a strong record-setting year so far for IDEX, not easy to achieve in this environment. I'd like to thank all our IDEX employees around the globe for their outstanding efforts. On the capital deployment side, Last month, we announced our intent to acquire the Muon Group for 700 million euros, marking our largest acquisition to date. Muon expands upon a growing core of market-leading precision components technologies, an area of the portfolio we continue to invest in both organically and inorganically. Muon's technical capabilities, like many others within IDEX, are well-positioned, differentiated, and tunable towards high-growth niche applications within broader megatrends. Muon Technologies solve critical problems within the most demanding application sets of semi-manufacturing, patient care within med tech, food production, and other high-quality markets. This acquisition demonstrates the success of our expanded M&A strategy. We combine bottoms-up business intelligence with analysis and insights from a small strategic community across IDEX to build conviction within a grid of high-quality niche applications. Increasingly, as we build and optimize the portfolio, we find that we can drive growth within a target vertical from multiple points, organically from within IDEXX businesses and externally via M&A. We think this approach is unique and advantaged. It leverages 80-20 in segmentation, our operating model, and the quality and strength of our diverse collection of businesses. We also completed the sale of our Knight LLC business in the third quarter. Knight supports cleaning and sanitization within hospitality and janitorial markets. As we've discussed in the past, we continually seek to optimize our portfolio. When we identify businesses or product lines that would grow and thrive for other owners, we've divested those assets. I want to express my appreciation to the Knight team for all they've contributed in their 25 years with IDEX. Next, I want to share some exciting organizational news. I'm happy to announce that Melissa Aquino recently joined IDEX's Senior Vice President Group Executive for FMT and FSD. Melissa has a broad understanding of what it takes to grow and succeed as a team in manufacturing, having served in a wide variety of commercial, operational, and leadership roles. She has scale and depth of experience across multiple industries, including consumer, industrial, diagnostic, and life sciences. Although we are aligning these segments under a single leader internally, they will continue to be separate reportable segments. I'd also like to take a moment to celebrate the tenure and accomplishments of our HST group executive, Mark Ulaman. We've seen outstanding results under his more than 10 years of leadership at IDEXX, driving organic growth, operational excellence, and capital deployment in our fastest growing segment. Finally, we recognize there's considerable churn in the global economy right now, whether tied to geopolitical uncertainty, inflation, interest rates, or the fear of a recession. There are several scenarios that could play out, ranging from continued industrial growth to a shallow short-term pullback to a deeper recession. We have a plan of attack for each, and I'm confident we'll outperform as we have in the past. Our teams are smart and agile. They'll quickly adjust and put their best resources on the best opportunities. That's at the core of our operating approach. We've made great progress in building a strong and sustainable growth engine. It sits on top of a solid foundation of execution within any environment. That's the and, not or, that we talk about all the time at IDEX. We're leaning in as a team towards the challenges and opportunities ahead. With that, let me turn it over to Bill to discuss our financial results.