Teledyne Technologies Incorporated

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Teledyne Q1 2024 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. Later, we will have a question-and-answer session, and instructions for queuing up will be provided for you at that time. Should you require operator assistance during the call, press star zero on your phone's keypad. And as a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to your host, Jason Van Wees. Please go ahead, sir.

Hi, thank you, and good morning, everyone. This is Jason Van Wees, Vice Chairman. I'd like to welcome everyone to Teledyne's first quarter 2024 earnings release conference call. We released our earnings earlier this morning before the market opened. Joining me today are Teledyne's Executive Chairman, Robert Moravian, CEO Edwin Rock, President and COO George Bob, SVP and CFO Steve Blackwood, and Melanie Sivek, EVP General Counsel, Chief Compliance Officer and Secretary. After remarks by Robert, Edwin, George, and Steve, We will ask for your questions. However, before we get started, attorneys have reminded me to tell you that all forward-looking statements made this morning are subject to various assumptions, risks, and caveats, as noted in the earnings release and our periodic SEC filing. And, of course, actual results may differ materially. In order to avoid potential selective disclosures, this call is simultaneously being webcast and a replay, both by a webcast and island. It will be available for approximately one month. Here's Robert.

Thank you, Jason. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our earnings call. Today, we reported record first quarter non-gap operating margin, record adjusted earnings per share, and record free cash flow. While overall orders remained strong, sales were impacted by deterioration in some of our short cycle imaging and instrumentation markets. We have previously assumed no full-year sales growth in industrial automation, as well as test and measurement markets. However, those markets weakened more than planned in the first quarter, and we now forecast full-year sales in those product families to decline meaningfully in 2024. Nevertheless, we believe Such sales declines will be offset by our marine, aviation, and certain defense businesses, resulting in full-year flat sales compared to 2023. Despite those anticipated sales reductions in what are among our highest margin businesses, we believe overall operating margin will remain flat. in 24 versus 23. Within the digital imaging segment, year-over-year sales declined due to significantly lower sales of machine vision sensors and cameras related to industrial automation. However, this was partially offset by organic growth and significant margin improvement at Teledyne FLIR. Given our unmanned system businesses, growth, and the resiliency of our core infrared imaging systems. Similarly, in instrumentation, we were relatively flat, where significant reduction in sales of test and measurement instrumentation were almost entirely offset by marine electronics and unmanned underwater systems. And despite the overall flat sales, segment margin increased considerably. In our smallest segment, engineer systems, which is largely a U.S. government prime contractor, sales were impacted by the very late approval of the U.S. 2024 budget. We also revised estimated progress and cost to complete on certain contracts resulting in some revenue and profit reversal. Finally, given that our even stronger balance sheet with quarter end leverage just at 1.7, combined with record free cash flow, we believe it's appropriate time for us to add stock repurchases to our capital deployment plan. I will now turn the call over to Edwin and George, who will further comment on the performance of our four business segments.