Zurn Elkay Water Solutions Corporation

Good morning and welcome to the Zearn LK Water Solutions Corporation third quarter 2024 earnings result conference call with Todd Adams, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, David Pauly, Chief Financial Officer, and Brian Wendland, Director of FP&A for Zearn LK Water Solutions. A replay of this conference call will be available as a webcast on the company's investor relations website. At this time, for opening remarks and introduction, I'll turn the call over to Ryan Wendland.

Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining 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. 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.

Thanks, Brian, and good morning, everyone, and thanks for taking the time to call in this morning. I'll start on page three. The third quarter, again, slightly exceeded our guidance across the board, and we are also raising our outlook, again, for the full year. We leveraged third quarter core growth of 4% into 9% adjusted EBITDA growth, which drove margins to 25.6%, equating to 150 basis points of margin expansion year over year. Through nine months, our consolidated EBITDA margins sit at 25%, and as you may have seen in the release, we raised our outlook for the year-over-year margin expansion to 250 to 270 basis points. Free cash flow in the quarter was $87 million, and we deployed $50 million of that to repurchase 1.6 million shares during the quarter at an average price of under $31. Leverage falls to 0.8 times, and as we mentioned in the release, we are raising our outlook for free cash flow and now see the full year around $260 million. And finally, we again raised our dividend this year to $0.09 a quarter, which represents an increase of 12.5%. Later in the call, I'll spend some time on the outlook for our end markets heading into 2025. But much like we've said throughout the year, the resilience of our end markets and perhaps our unique exposure to particular verticals give us confidence of an improving backdrop over the course of the next couple years. I'll hand it over to Dave to take you through some more color on the quarter. Dave? Thanks, Ted.