Pitney Bowes Inc.

and good morning and welcome to the Pitney Bowes Third Quarter Earnings 2021 Results Conference Call. Your lines have been placed in a listen-only mode during the conference call until the question and answer segment. Today's call is also being recorded. If you have any objections, please disconnect your line at this time. I would now like to introduce your participants for today's conference call, Mr. Mark Lautenbach, President and Chief Executive Officer Ms. Anna Chadwick, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and Mr. Ned Zachar, Vice President, Investor Relations. Mr. Zachar will now begin the call with the Safe Harbor overview.

Good morning, everybody. This is Ned Zachar. I manage the Investor Relations program for Penny Bowes, and I'd like to welcome everyone to the call this morning. We very much appreciate your participation. Part of my new duties includes covering the usual and customary Safe Harbor information for these calls. So please bear with me for just a few minutes. Included in today's presentation are forward-looking statements about our expected future business and financial performance. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to be materially different from our projections. For more information about these risks and uncertainties, please see our earnings press release, our 2020 Form 10-K Annual Report, and other reports filed with the SEC that are located on our website at www.pb.com and by clicking on investor relations. Please keep in mind that we do not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements as a result of new information or developments. Also, for non-GAAP measures that are used in the press release or discussed in this presentation, you can find reconciliations to the appropriate GAAP measures in the tables attached to our press release and also on our investor relations website. Additionally, we provided a slide presentation on our investor relations website that summarizes many of the points we will discuss during today's call. Our format today is going to be familiar. Mark Lautenbach, our President and Chief Executive Officer, will begin with opening remarks, which will be followed by Anna Chadwick, our Chief Financial Officer, who will provide a deeper discussion of our financial results. I'd now like to turn the presentation over to Mark Mark, the floor is yours.

Thank you, everyone, for joining today's call. And I would like to welcome Ned to the team. Ned brings a wealth of experience to the role, including investing and analyst experience. Ned has also been an investor in Ardette, so he is familiar with our company. Turning to the quarter, given a return to pre-COVID's top-line seasonality, the distortions in last year's results in supply and demand imbalances There were many different cross-currents running through the quarter in year-to-year comparisons. While it is easy to get lost in the numbers, from my perspective, the headline is this. Demand for our products and services remains strong, and we continue to make progress repositioning our company for long-term success. Our pre-sort business had an excellent quarter from both a top and bottom-line perspective. The pre-sort team was able to overcome labor and transportation inflation by managing price and productivity and moved back into our long-term profit model. Importantly, the investments we have made in our network and technology have positioned us well to drive even more productivity and help more clients. Our Santec business performed close to the long-term model even though supply constraints hit the top and bottom line. Equipment sales and our backlog both increased in a quarter evidencing strong demand. We will continue to battle through supply-demand dynamics, but clearly our new product innovations are making a very positive difference. In addition, more of our business is moving to a subscription model. While this depresses short-term revenue, increased subscription revenue is a very positive harbinger for the future. Within global e-commerce, while there are year-to-year aberrations, There are two things that are important to the long-term success of this business. The first is service to our clients. We have improved our end-to-end cycle times by 25% since the beginning of the year, which is a significant improvement. And secondly, gross margin. It is notable that gross margin improved from prior year despite the fact that we had a substantial capacity and without the benefit of peak volumes. We had foreshadowed that as volumes normalized, this margin improvement would happen, and it did. We have been very disciplined about the kind of volumes we have committed to the fourth quarter, and we like what we have, both in terms of overall volume commitments, the economics, and the kind of volume we anticipate receiving. Like others in the industry, we saw volumes decrease year to year in the quarter. but we very much like how we are positioned for the fourth quarter and going forward. However, to be clear, we expect there to be some challenges this peak season. Daily headlines talk about supply chain disruptions and larger players are already calling out an impact on the results or outlook. We are not immune to these supply chain constraints, nor as it relates to our e-commerce clients' supply levels and to a degree, our Centec products. While there remains a level of uncertainty, our team is substantially better positioned this year based on the actions we have taken thus far. Additionally, and similar to the market, we're looking at pricing to help offset some of the higher costs, particularly as it relates to transportation and labor. For example, within e-commerce, we have put in place a surcharge for this peak season and recently announced our annual general rate increase effective for 2022. and we've implemented pricing increases in other parts of our business where it is justified by the new and increased value we are delivering for clients through our new product portfolio. So lots of moving pieces, but from my perspective, a successful quarter across many dimensions, but most importantly, in terms of how the quarter sets us up for our going forward success. Now I will turn it over to Ana.