Mettler-Toledo International, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Medlar Toledo quarterly earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 in your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Mrs. Mary Finnegan. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good evening, everyone. I'm Mary Finnegan. I'm responsible for investor relations at Mettler Toledo and happy to welcome you to the call. I'm joined on the call today with Patrick Kaltenbach, our CEO, and Sean Zadella, our chief financial officer. Let me cover just a couple of administrative matters. This call is being webcast and is available for replay on our website. A copy of the press release and the presentation that we will refer to on today's call is also available on the website. Let me summarize the Safe Harbor language, which is outlined on page two of the presentation. Statements in this presentation, which are not historical facts, constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the U.S. Securities Act of 1933 and the U.S. Securities Exchange Act of 1934. These statements involve risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause our actual results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied by any forward-looking statements. For discussions of these risks and uncertainties, please see the discussion in our recent Form 10-K and other reports filed with the SEC from time to time. All of the forward-looking statements are qualified in their entirety by reference to the factors discussed under the captions, Factors Affecting Our Future Operating Results, and in the Business and Management Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations sections of our filing. Okay, just one other item. On today's call, we may use non-GAAP financial measures. More detailed information with respect to the use of and differences between non-GAAP financial measures and the most directly comparable gap measure is provided in the form 8K. I will now turn the call over to Patrick.

Thanks, Mary, and good evening, everyone. I am pleased to host the call tonight, which we are doing from Switzerland, as Sean and Mary are here with me, too. I'm excited to report another quarter of excellent results. Several factors contributed to these results. demand in our markets was very strong and broad-based. Second, we were able to capture these growth opportunities as a key priority since the onset of the pandemic was to stay in close contact with our customers and be strongly positioned once customer demand recovered. And finally, the teams around the world have done an excellent job in execution and customer support. Our supply chain team has had more than a share of challenges due to parts availability and logistics complications, while our market organizations have executed well to meet increasing customer demands. Our teams have shown resiliency and agility in an environment where conditions change rapidly. Now let me turn to our financial results. The highlights are on page three of the presentation, and you can see we had a great quarter. Local currency sales growth was 27% and we had very strong broad-based growth in all regions and most product lines. With this exceptional sales growth and combined with focused execution of our margin initiatives, we achieved a 45% growth in adjusted operating income and 53% increase in adjusted EPS. Cash flow generation was excellent in the quarter. Demand in our end markets remains positive, although our growth for the remainder of the year will reflect more challenging comparisons than we had in the first half of the year. We are making incremental investments, which will position us very well for future growth. We remain confident that we can continue to gain market share and deliver strong results in 2021 and beyond. Let me now turn it to Sean to cover the financial and guidance details, and then I will come back with some additional commentary on the business.