Xylem Inc.

Good morning, and welcome to the Xylem first quarter 2020 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode, and the floor will be open for your questions following the presentation. If you would like to ask a question at that time, please press star 1 on your touch-tone phone. If at any point your question has been answered, you may remove yourself from the queue by pressing the pound key. We ask that you please pick up your handset to allow optimal sound quality. Lastly, if you should require operator assistance, please press star zero. I would now like to turn the call over to Matt Latino, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Christy. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Xylem's first quarter earnings conference call. With me today are Chief Executive Officer Patrick Decker, Chief Financial Officer Mark Rakowski, and Chief Supply Chain Officer Tony Milando. They will provide their perspective on Xylem's first quarter results and our outlook. Following our prepared remarks, we will address questions related to the information covered on the call. I'll ask that you please keep to one question and a follow-up and then return to the queue. As a reminder, this call and our webcast are accompanied by a slide presentation available in the investor section of our website at www.xylem.com. A replay of today's call will be available until midnight on June 6th. Please note the replay number is 800-585-8367, and the confirmation code is 603-36487. Additionally, the call will be available for playback via the investor section of our website under the heading investor events. Please turn to slide two. We will make some forward-looking statements on today's call, including references to future events or developments that we anticipate will or may occur in the future. These statements are subject to future risks and uncertainties, such as those factors described in Xylem's most recent annual report on Form 10-K and in subsequent reports filed with the SEC, including in Form 10-Q, to report results for the period ending March 31, 2020. Please note that the company undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements publicly to reflect subsequent events or circumstances, and actual events or results could differ materially from those anticipated. Please turn to slide three. We've provided you with a summary of our key performance metrics, including both GAAP and non-GAAP metrics. For purposes of today's call, all references will be on an adjusted basis unless otherwise indicated, and non-GAAP financials have been reconciled for you and are included in the appendix section of the presentation. Now, please turn to slide four, and I will turn the call over to Patrick Decker. Thanks, Matt.

Good morning, everyone. Let me start by expressing my sincere hope that you and those close to you are keeping safe and well. Predictably, this earnings call is going to be different than normal. The full team's not here with us. It's only Matt, Mark, and I that are together, and we're spread rather distantly around a big room. Given the times we're in, we're going to keep our prepared remarks brief. As it's especially important, we leave more of the call for Q&A. I'll start by sharing how we've guided our COVID-19 response around the world. As you know, we felt the impact of the outbreak early, given our sizable business in China. Our anticipation of that impact in isolation turned out to be just about right, and our business there has recovered strongly. Having said that, as the impact spread across Europe and then the U.S., we saw steeper declines in revenue than we expected. So we moved early to reduce spending and are now finalizing further structural cost actions. We're privileged to serve markets in which our products and technologies are vital to the continuity of essential services. And having entered this period in a very strong financial position, we've been able to maintain and even further enhance our liquidity since then. So looking ahead, economic conditions are evolving too quickly to forecast demand in the near term. So we consider it premature to reset guidance just now. We will, however, share what we're seeing in our end markets and offer more detail about our outlook. We'll address how we see the marketplace responding to the pandemic, including a notable flight to quality, and we'll share how we're using that to shape our investments as certain trends accelerate across the sector. In particular, we see COVID-19 shifting how our customers are thinking about sustaining their essential services. And that provides an opportunity to shape both our cost structure and our investment priorities to emerge in a strong position on the other side of the pandemic. Before we get into the results, it's important to provide some insight into how we've responded to the spread of COVID-19. I want to begin by expressing how deeply humbling it is to watch frontline utility operators all around the world step up to serve their communities. They are delivering essential services in extremely difficult circumstances. I'm also very proud of the Xylem team's response, supporting these folks. When COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan, China, our team activated our business continuity plan. The first priority was to provide for the safety and well-being of our frontline colleagues, our customers, and our partners. We then quickly moved to understand our customers' most urgent needs. It was clear that water, sanitation, and hygiene were going to be essential to combating the spread of the disease. So we shored up our supply chains and we got critical equipment into our customers' hands so they could keep essential services flowing. We then acted to protect our financial and competitive position. With the China team's response underway, we activated our corporate pandemic plan to coordinate actions around the world. We put Tony Milando, our chief supply chain officer, in charge of the global response efforts. Tony is with us on the call today to answer any specific questions you may have about that response. As COVID-19 spread beyond the initial outbreak to major supply hubs like Italy and Germany, and then we dealt with lockdowns across the U.S., India, and elsewhere, we applied those same principles modeled first in China. We also significantly reduced our spending both in the areas of OpEx and CapEx. And we put in place a package of employee support to underpin the well-being of our workforce and to make sure they could focus on serving our customers' mission-critical work. Before passing to Mark to talk about Q1, I also want to mention how rewarding it's been to partner with our customers to help communities around the world. Through Xylem Watermark, our corporate citizenship program, our employees have found ways, both large and small, to support the sustainability of our communities. working side by side with our customers and our channel partners, and I am so proud of all of them. Now, with that, I'm going to hand it over to Mark to provide detail on the first quarter.