Zurn Elkay Water Solutions Corporation

and welcome to the Zern LK Water Solutions Corporation third 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 Pauly vice president of investor relations for Zern 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 in an 8K with the SEC yesterday, October 31st. At this time, for opening remarks and introduction, I'll turn it over to Dave Pawley.

Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us on the call today. Before we begin, I would 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're 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 Zern LK.

Thanks, Dave, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for taking the time to join us this morning. To jump right to it, we had a really strong Q3 operating performance. Margins improved to 24.1% of 410 basis points over the prior year. We also delivered record-free cash flow in the quarter of almost 100 million, bought back another 445,000 shares, and increased our dividend 14%. As we highlighted in our earnings release one year into the Zurn-LK combination, we're really hitting our stride in terms of the benefits from the transaction, both from a synergy savings as well as capturing the enormous secular growth opportunity we see in clean, filtered drinking water. Over the next 12 months, We will be introducing more new products in the drinking water category than at any point since LK developed the category just over a decade ago. This is both on the filler side as well as the filtration side. And all this is happening as we see continued positive momentum on the legislative front as well as traction from the significant internal investments we've made to drive growth, to grow the overall category. One year in, we've accelerated the growth rate of drinking water and now expect mid-teens organic growth for drinking water in 2023. In terms of the underlying market, while we grew in line with our Q3 guidance, we were expecting a little better internally after a pretty good start to July and August, which was offset by a so-so September. I'll dive into what we're seeing from a market perspective a little bit later, but as we look at how the years unfolded, it's not hard to see from all the external data, as well as our internal data, that the market has more uncertainty in it than any point over the last year. What I'll also cover is we don't believe that this is some sort of apocalyptic issue for 2024 and 2025. Now I'll turn it over to Mark.