IDEX Corporation

Greetings and welcome to the IDEX Corporation First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are on 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 Wendy Palacios, Vice President, FP&A and Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Good morning, everyone. This is Wendy Palacios, Vice President of FP&A Investor Relations for IDEX Corporation. Thank you for joining us for our discussion of the IDEX first quarter 2024 financial highlights. Last night, we issued a press release outlining our company's financial and operating performance for the three months ending March 31st of 2024. The press release along with the presentation slides to be used during today's webcast can be accessed on our company website at www.idexcorp.com. Joining me today are Eric Ashelman, our Chief Executive Officer and President, and Abhi Kendawal, our Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Following our prepared remarks, we will open the call up 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 number 137-42103 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 an IDEXX filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. With that, I'll turn this call over to our CEO and President, Eric Ashelman.

Thanks, Wendy, and good morning, everyone. I'm on slide three. In Q1, our core execution capabilities delivered strong results, particularly within our fluid and metering technologies and fire and safety diversified products businesses. We experienced an encouraging lift in sequential orders from our core industrial and municipal markets after a period of elongated destocking. And we were able to quickly capitalize on this bounce and deliver for our customers. Our lead times and overall responsiveness are at outstanding levels as we stripped out excess inventory and improved overall productivity. Our closest to consumption businesses within FMT pulled back a bit in March after a strong January and February launch, but things stabilized again in early April, suggesting our initial take on overall modest support for 2024 remains the correct call. The health and science technology segment performed to expectations, but there are puts and takes there as we consider individual recovery rates within our markets and application sets. Our tactical priorities favor those growth initiatives that best leverage our most differentiated technologies in line with markets showing higher probabilities of near-term inflection. Largely through inorganic efforts, we've expanded our technical capabilities within HST to support the highest quality semiconductor technologies to power the AI revolution. We have increased content within the transformative world of low-orbit space broadband, We are increasingly called upon to help companies develop and deploy advanced technologies for national defense, and we have ambitions to continue to add to these capabilities as we further leverage our balance sheet through M&A. We continue to watch for signs of recovery in life sciences and analytical instrumentation and are ready to capitalize on growth at the first signs of improving customer demand. Our businesses serving these spaces are exceptionally well-positioned with highly credible expertise. We have confidence in our ability to outperform again once this market correction runs its course. Overall, it's clear that economic and geopolitical uncertainty persist as a backdrop for all companies. We've leaned into that with a conviction that the three core tenets of the IDEX difference, an expression of our most basic differentiated mindset, help us play offense. Our great teams and talent work together in superior businesses with a special culture. We practice 80-20 to align around the few things that really matter, And we leverage natural proximity to the customer to solve their toughest problems quickly to support our outstanding economics. We ultimately create compounding value for shareholders by driving organic growth outperformance through our top growth bets. We amplify these bets through acquisition of complementary faster-growing companies, and we expand margins and generate strong free cash along the way as our leaders apply the five core tools of the IDEXX operating model. I'd like to thank our IDEXX teams around the globe for their dedication to these principles and for delivering strong performance in Q1. With that, I'll turn it over to Abhi to discuss our financial results.