John Bean Technologies Corporation

Good morning and welcome to JBT Morel's earnings conference call for the fourth quarter and full year 2024. My name is Pam and I will be your conference operator today. As a reminder, today's call is being recorded. At this time, 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. I will now turn the call over to JBT Morel's Director of Investor Relations, Marlee Spangler to begin today's conference.

Thank you, Pam. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our conference call. With me on the call today is our Chief Executive Officer Brian Deck, President Arne Sigurdsson, and Chief Financial Officer Matt Meister. In today's call, we will use forward-looking statements that are subject to the Safe Harbor language in yesterday's press release and 8K filing. JBT MARL's periodic SEC filings also contain information regarding risk factors that may have an impact on our results. These documents are available in the Investor Relations section of our website. Also, our discussion today includes references to certain non-GAAP and non-IFRS measures. A reconciliation of these measures to the most comparable GAAP and IFRS measures can be found in the Investor Relations section of our website. With that, I'll turn the call over to Brian.

Thanks, Marlee, and good morning. We are excited to be hosting our first earnings call since uniting JBT and Murrell. The combination, which we completed on January 2nd, represents the culmination of more than a year of work bringing together two leaders in the food technology industry. We are now seven weeks into integration and are increasingly confident in our ability to generate long-term value for our customers, shareholders, and other stakeholders. Given our focus on realizing the benefits of this combination, I will begin today's call providing an update on our progress. Then Arnie will provide color on the integration process and talk about Morale's 2024 performance. Lastly, Matt will provide an overview of JVT's 2024 performance followed by guidance for the combined company in 2025. In uniting JBT and morale, we have the ability to be an even more valuable partner to our global customers by providing holistic equipment solutions with enhanced application knowledge, service capabilities, and innovative technology. In terms of integration, our efforts are focused on best serving our customers' constantly evolving needs. That starts with a purpose-built company, leveraging talent from both organizations. We have already made significant progress establishing the JBT Morrell organizational design and expect to be materially complete by the end of March. We are also focusing on a customer-centric go-to-market commercial strategy that adopts an end-market focus. This will allow us to cross-sell the breadth of our solutions. We believe this customer-driven approach versus one organized by technology will streamline our commercial presence and enhance our value proposition to the customer. In fact, our diverse technology solutions were on full display at the recent IPPE trade show, otherwise known as the poultry show. The combination of JVT and Murrell's complimentary portfolio of innovative technology and service capabilities allows us to integrate primary, secondary, further, and end-of-line processing under one brand. This matters for our customers as it reduces the complex engineering required to integrate and commission full-line solutions. It also leads to improved operational efficiency, machine uptime, and traceability in high-volume operations. Additionally, our software and digital solutions are a differentiator as customers increasingly adopt digital technologies to optimize processing efficiency and improve profitability. Overall, our many productive conversations at IPPE, along with the recently reported financial results of our customers, confirm the strong fundamentals of the poultry industry. We believe we will see incremental investment in 2025 as customers look to take advantage of our technology to support automation and efficient operations by investing in existing facilities, as well as consider greenfield opportunities in a more meaningful way than we have seen in some time. I am pleased that we are already seeing the commercial strategies created by the combination. We secured a few significant orders at IPPE that included equipment we booked on the strength of each other's existing relationships. Speaking of orders, as you saw in our earnings release, JBT reported record orders of 523 million in the fourth quarter. Murrell also reported record orders of 474 million euros. Together, Orders totaled more than $1 billion for the period, benefiting from broad-based strength. Geographically, we enjoyed a pickup globally, with the sole exception of Asia Pacific. From an end market perspective, as already mentioned, the poultry industry remained strong in the fourth quarter and is expected to improve further in 2025. For other proteins, we enjoyed a very solid quarter for both meat and fish. While the fundamentals of these markets remain uncertain, we are starting to see increased pipeline activity for pork and remain confident in the long-term fundamentals for fish. We also enjoyed strong ordered demand in the fruit and vegetable and pharmaceutical markets, which have continued into the first quarter of 2025. While the beverage end market was weaker through most of 2024 due to challenging industry fundamentals, we saw some pickup exiting the year. Lastly, both pet food and ready meals performed well in the quarter, while AGV, our automated material handling business, experienced another solid quarter of demand. Our positive view on the key end markets must be balanced against macro concerns, including U.S. and potential retaliatory tariffs and the prospect of higher inflation. However, we believe that end market dynamics are generally favorable for investment, while our recurring revenue franchise for parts and service is expected to provide resilience, growth, and close to half of our total revenue. Most importantly, we are increasingly confident in the value created by this combination as it relates to serving our customers. Now let me turn the call over to Arne.