Zurn Elkay Water Solutions Corporation

Good morning and welcome to the Zurn LK Water Solutions Corporation second quarter 2023 earnings results conference call with Todd Adams, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Mark Peterson, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and Dave Pauley, Vice President of Investor Relations for Zurn LK Water Solutions. This call is being recorded and will be available for one week. The phone numbers for the replay can be found in the earnings release the company filed and an AK was SEC yesterday, July 24th. At this time, for opening remarks and introduction, I'll turn the call over to Dave Pawley.

Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us on the call today. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that this call contains certain forward-looking statements that are subject to the Safe Harbor language contained in the press release that we issued yesterday afternoon, as well as in our filings with the SEC. In addition, Some comparisons will refer to non-GAAP measures. Our earnings release and SEC filings contain additional information about these non-GAAP measures, why we use them, and why we believe they are helpful to investors, and contain reconciliations to the corresponding GAAP information. Consistent with prior quarters, we will speak to certain non-GAAP metrics as we feel they provide a better understanding of our operating results. These measures are not a substitute for GAAP, and we encourage you to review the GAAP information in our earnings release and in our SEC filings. With that, I'll turn the call over to Todd Adams, Chairman and CEO of Zurn LK Water Solutions.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for calling in this morning. As Dave said, we released our earnings last night and taken as a whole. They were very much in line with our internal expectations, not only for Q2, but really for the first half. It's been 12 months since the LK transaction and all the work we did to accelerate the integration and simplify the business is essentially behind us. And we're now beginning to see the benefits, both from a growth and profitability perspective with the initiatives we've been working on. Sales in the quarter were ahead of our guidance and orders even more so with a high single digit order rate growth in the quarter. Profitability of 21.6% showed the progression we've been talking about. And then, you know, you'll obviously see another step change over the second half that Mark will talk about a little bit later. With our supply chain and service levels now back to pre-pandemic levels and even better or shorter in many cases, our free cash flow was again very strong and it enabled us to repurchase 4 million shares in the quarter, bringing our year-to-date repurchases to $87 million as total leverage actually ticked down to 1.5. We also expect that to continue to decline over the second half based on a strong free cash flow expectation and end the year right around 1.2 times. With that, I'll turn it over to Mark, and he'll take you through the quarter.