Mettler-Toledo International, Inc.

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

Thank you, and good evening, everyone. I'm Mary Finnegan. I'm responsible for investor relations, and I'm happy to welcome you to the call tonight. I am joined today with Patrick Kaltenbach, our CEO, and Sean Videla, our chief financial officer. Let me cover just some administrative matters. The 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 discussion 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 our 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 the financial condition and results of operations section of our filing. 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 the differences between the non-GAAP financial measure and the most directly comparable GAAP measure is provided in our form 8K. I will now turn the call over to Patrick.

Thanks, Mary, and good evening, everyone. I'm happy to host the call tonight, which I'm doing from Switzerland while Sean and Mary are in Columbus, Ohio. I want to start by thanking you for your interest and commitment to Metal Toledo. I knew many of the analysts on the call have covered us for quite some time and now as well. We also have very long standing shareholders who are also listening in. I look forward to our future interactions and hope that they can take place in person in the not so distant future. Let me make some brief comments on my impressions of the first several months at MentorToledo. It is clear that a company's strategies and initiatives are well developed and well ingrained throughout the organization. A high level of accountability is evident throughout the company, which underpins the culture of strong execution. I'm impressed with the interactions I have had with colleagues around the world, and I share their passion for customers and innovation that is very apparent in how they approach their responsibilities. It is exciting to join MetaToledo at a time of such strong momentum, which I think is also a great reflection on Olivier's legacy as a CEO. Under his leadership, the company developed a strong foundation for future growth. I'm also grateful for the thorough onboarding process Olivier prepared for me. I am committed to the organic growth strategy of MetaToledo and will work with the team to enhance our performance and continue the strong track record of top and bottom line growth that has been in place for many years. Now let me turn to our financial results. The highlights are on page three of the presentation, and you can see we are off to a fantastic start to 2021. It was apparent with our Q1 guidance that we expected a very good quarter. However, it came in even better than we expected. Local currency growth was 18% and we had strong broad-based growth in all regions. China in particular had outstanding growth and our growth in America and Europe was also better than we expected. Since the onset of the pandemic, the organization has been focused on identifying areas of growth and ensuring that we are strongly positioned once demand recovered. The team executed well to capitalize on recovering market demand and to meet customer needs. With the excellent sales growth combined with good cost control and benefit of our margin and productivity initiatives, we achieved a 64% growth in adjusted EPS. Cashflow generation was also impressive as we achieved an almost 200% increase in our free cashflow generation. We believe the positive momentum will continue into Q2 and expect another quarter of robust sales and earnings growth. As we look to the full year 2021, we believe we can continue to gain market share and deliver very strong results. 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 and an overview of the PendoTech acquisition that we completed in the quarter. Sean?