Westinghouse Air Brake Technologies Corporation

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Lab Tech second quarter 2024 earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please to know a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star and then one on a touch-down telephone. To draw your questions, you may press star and two. Please also note that today's event is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the floor over to Kyra Yates, Vice President of Investor Relations. Ma'am, please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Wabtec's second quarter 2024 earnings call. With us today are President and CEO Rafael Santana, CFO John Olin, and Senior Vice President of Finance John Mastelers. Today's slide presentation, along with our earnings release and financial disclosures, were posted to our website earlier today and can be accessed on the Investor Relations tab. Some statements we are making are forward-looking and based on our best view of the world and our business today. For more detailed risks, uncertainties, and assumptions relating to our forward-looking statements, please see the disclosures in our earnings release and presentation. We will also discuss non-GAAP financial metrics and encourage you to read our disclosures and reconciliation tables carefully as you consider these metrics. I will now turn the call over to Rafael.

Rafael Garcia- Thanks, Kyra, and good morning, everyone. Let's move to slide four. I'll start with an update on our business, my perspectives on the quarter, and progress against our long-term value creation framework, and then John will cover the financials. We delivered an honor strong quarter evidenced by robust sales and earnings per share growth. Sales were $2.6 billion, which was up nearly 10 percent versus prior year. Revenue growth was driven by strong performance from the freight segment. And adjusted EPS was up 39 percent from the year-ago quarter, driven by increased sales and margin expansion. Total cash flow from operations for the quarter was $235 million. The 12-month backlog was $7.3 billion, and the multi-year backlog was $22 billion. Overall, the WOTDAC team delivered a strong second quarter. With the first half behind us, we are focused on executing against our second half deliverables. Looking forward, I'm encouraged by the underlying strength and momentum across the business. Shifting our focus to slide five, Let's talk about 2024 and market expectations in more details. While key metrics across our freight business remain mixed, we are encouraged by the strength of our business, the strength of our international markets, and our robust pipeline of opportunities across geographies. North American car loads were up 2.1 percent in the quarter. Despite this car load growth, the industry's active locomotive fleet was down when compared to last year's second quarter, while WAPTEC's active fleet was higher. Looking at the North American railcar builds, last quarter we discussed the industry outlook for 2024 to be about 36,000 cars to be delivered, which has now been raised by industry sources back to the original forecast of 38,000 cars. This is still down, however, from the 45,000 in the previous year. Internationally, we continue to see that significant investments to expand and upgrade infrastructure are supporting a robust international orders pipeline. In mining, commodity prices and an aging fleet are continuing to support activity to refresh and upgrade the truck fleet. Finally, moving to the transit sector, the megatrends of urbanization and decarbonization remain in place, driving the need for clean, safe, and efficient transportation solutions around the globe. Next, let's turn to slide six to discuss a few business highlights. In North America, we secured a multiyear order for greater than $600 million. This is one of our largest orders for new Tier 4 locomotives ever. It demonstrates customer demands for a best-in-class solution to improve productivity, reduce fuel usage, improve reliability, and to significantly reduce emissions. I would also like to share with you a key international services order, a 10-year agreement in Brazil for which WAPTAC will manage the servicing of Valley's locomotive fleet to increase availability, reliability, and safety. In Paxton, we recently won a strategic order for 15 modernizations for Paxton Railway. This is a great example of the opportunities that we have to modernize locomotives in our international markets. And finally, our transit segment announced that our green friction braking solution is ready to begin commercial fleet operations in the greater Paris metropolitan area. This innovative solution will improve air quality in the transit's authority tunnels and underground network by reducing particle emissions from breaking by up to 90%. All of this demonstrates the underlying strength across our business, the team's relentless focus on execution, and the strong pipeline of opportunities we continue to deliver on. WAPTEC is well-positioned to continue to capture profitable growth with innovative and scalable technologies that address our customers' needs. With that, I'll turn the call over to John to review the quarter segment results and our overall financial performance.