IDEX Corporation

Good morning and welcome everyone to the IDEX Corporation fourth quarter 2025 earnings conference call. Today's conference is being recorded. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question during this time, simply press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star one again. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Jim Janikoras, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to IDEX's fourth quarter 2025 earnings conference call. We released our fourth quarter financial results earlier this morning, and you can find both our press release and earnings call slide presentation in the investor section of our website, idexcorp.com. On the call with me today are Eric Ashelman, President and Chief Executive Officer of IDEX. and Sean Gillen, our Chief Financial Officer. Today's call will begin with Eric providing highlights of our fourth quarter and full year results and a discussion of our current business outlook and strategies. Then Sean will discuss additional financial details and our outlook for 2026. Following our prepared remarks, we will open the line for questions. But before we begin, please refer to slide two of our presentation where we note that comments today results could differ materially from these statements due to a number of risks and uncertainties which are discussed in our press release and sec violence as idx provides non-gap financial information we provided reconciliations between gap and non-gap measures in our press release and the appendix of our presentation materials which are available on our website with that i will turn the call over to eric thanks jim good morning everyone and thank you for joining us today

Before I dive in, I want to welcome Sean Gillen, who joined us in January as our Chief Financial Officer. Prior to joining IDEX, Sean served as CFO at AAR Corp for over seven years, and he brings extensive experience driving profitable growth, operational execution, and disciplined capital allocation. His expertise and track record of successfully implementing operational efficiencies, optimizing portfolios, and executing on strategic M&A fully complement IDEX's strategy. He's hit the ground running as he finishes up his first month of onboarding, and we look forward to benefiting from his leadership as we continue to shape and execute our enterprise strategy. Welcome to the team, Sean. I'm proud of the results the IDEX teams collectively delivered in the fourth quarter. We'll go into each of these in more detail, but we delivered organic sales growth and margin expansion for IDEX while also significantly expanding the order book within HST as we closed out 2025. These results show signs that our strategy is working and provides strong momentum as we enter our fiscal year 2026. I'd like to thank our teams around the world for their hard work, agility, and disciplined execution. Turning to slide three. We are progressing well through phase three of IDEX's purposeful evolution as we thoughtfully expand and integrate our capabilities in targeted advantage markets. With the support of our 80-20 playbook, we are making this pivot both organically and through M&A. As a key element of this strategy, we built new scalable growth platforms that allow us to compound our efforts through cross-business unit collaboration. Please turn to slide four, where I'd like to illustrate how this work is paying off within our HST segment. We've seen acceleration in order rates over the last year and a half, with our strongest mark coming in Q4 of 2025, with organic orders growth of 34%. This has driven organic sales growth towards a mid-single-digit level as we move into 2026. In our performance pneumatics group, we are helping customers support data center construction driven by demand from artificial intelligence. Specifically, our air, tech, and gas businesses are collaborating within thermal management applications to support data center liquid cooling and onsite behind-the-meter power generation. We provide blowers, vacuum pumps, valves, and other specialty components to solve key problems in these areas. If customers have asked us to scale up quickly, our pneumatics teams have leveraged their own global footprints while also utilizing shared Asia-Pacific facilities and capabilities within IDEX. We first talked about this emerging growth potential about a year ago. It's inspiring to see how far we've come since then. We walked through the strategic building blocks of our material science solutions platform on last quarter's call. At the highest level, we've mapped each business's unique capabilities to one of three competitive attributes as we form unique properties from materials, shape and control surfaces, and enable surface function through coatings capabilities. We continue to see strong growth across the platform within space and defense, semiconductor, and data center communication markets. In 2025, we complemented our organic efforts with a small but meaningful acquisition in MicroLAM, a very high-quality bolt-on that brings proprietary difficult-to-machine forming capabilities into our already-advantaged optics toolbox. Integration into IDEXX is going well, and it's great to see strong growth momentum out of the gate for the business. They are largely booked for 2026 as we work to expand capacity by applying the IDEXX operating model. At Mott, which transforms material powders for specialty filtration, we see growth within these same MSS markets for many of the same customers. In fact, our life sciences, MSS, and Mott leaders are expanding the scope of coordinated commercial efforts for maximum focused impact. Our life sciences team, operating within our longest chartered integrated platform, continues to win in the pharma space as a key initiative within their long-term growth strategy. Our materials processing technologies group, with strong food and pharma-focused global development and production resources, is also driving favorable growth results for HST. And our ceiling solutions businesses are seeing nice growth from Semicon ceiling applications, largely in support of the increased demand for data center memory. Our 8020 playbook, which supports the formal resource choices and segmentation to drive growth in this way, also has a part to play to support margin expansion within the segment. Our teams will be taking advantage of the flywheel effect of HST growth from our 80s to support the next round of 20 simplification to help boost overall segment portfolio margin. We'll call out some of these results in the quarters to come as we highlight the top line and bottom line power of 80-20 within our enterprise strategy. Before I turn it over to Sean for more detailed financial commentary, I'd like to pull back up quickly restate the highlights for HST and expand our IDEXX Q4 story with some framing comments around the more industrial and municipal facing businesses within FMT and FSDP. I'm on slide five. IDEXX delivered better than expected fourth quarter results despite the continued challenges our businesses face given macro uncertainties. Our health and science technology segment, as I just covered, grew organic orders and sales 34% and 5% respectively, as they capitalized on advantage growth supporting the AI-related ecosystem within and near data centers. HST is also seeing growth in semiconductor filtration and ceiling consumables, space and defense applications, and wins within food and pharma markets. Industrial and auto market exposures within HST, which make up about 20% of segment revenues, remain flattish, and we have not observed any meaningful signs of demand improvement. HST also drove 60 basis points of margin improvement year-over-year. As we leverage volume growth, apply 80-20 and operational excellence standards in newly acquired entities, and improve mix, we will drive continued margin expansion within HST going forward. In fluid and metering technologies, organic orders and sales grew 4% and 1% year-over-year, respectively. Our municipal water-facing businesses remain strong. Growing mid-single digits and mining through our AVO franchise continues to be an area of strength as demand for precious metals increases. While the general industrial landscape all in continues to trend flattish, SMT is experiencing noticeable softness in chemical, energy, and agriculture markets. Regarding the broad, mature, and fragmented industrial end markets, there does seem to be an emerging consensus that 2026 will see a return to growth after three years of PMI contraction. made more likely if last year's volatile policy headwinds moderate. But at this point, as we look at our leading indicators, we are not seeing an inflection point in activity, and our guidance reflects this reality. Due to the rapid replenishment nature of our businesses, if there is a return to growth, we'll see it quickly, and we are well positioned to capitalize on it should it occur. Finally, in our fire and safety diversified product segment, growth in our North American fire and rescue business was more than offset by pressures outside the U.S. and cyclical softness and dispensing. Bandit is trending generally flat alongside our other diversified industrial businesses. And with that, I'll pass it over to Sean to discuss our financials and our 2026 outlook in greater detail.