To be joined this afternoon by Columbus McKinnon. The ticker is CMCO. Before we kick it off, let me remind everyone, we should have some time available for questions. If you do have any questions, press the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen, type them in, and we'll get to as many as we can, time permitting. I don't wanna take up too much extra time. I think there's a lot of people in the room anxious to hear some comments. We're so happy to be joined by CFO Greg Rustowicz and Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasurer Kristy Moser. With that, let me turn it over to you, Kristy. Thanks so much, Steve, for having us. Really pleased to be here today. Just as a reminder, we do have a couple of slides up available for your review on our investor relations website at investors.cmco.com. And of course, we have our safe harbor statement as always, for any forward-looking statements, as well as any non-GAAP financial measures and any reconciliation to those comparable GAAP financial measures as we go through. With that, I'll turn it over to Greg for a couple of opening remarks. Thank you, Kristy. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for spending time with us. I'm gonna begin with a quick overview of Columbus McKinnon, the highlights of a recently closed acquisition, and give you our investment thesis before we go into Q&A. First of all. Yeah, can you move, Kristy, to right page? Yeah. Next page. Yeah, right there. Perfect. Columbus McKinnon is a global leader in intelligent motion solutions for material handling. What we do is we provide professional-grade solutions to solve customers' high-value problems, enabling them to improve safety, efficiency, and uptime through lifting, moving, and positioning materials. We simplify and automate material handling and internal logistics processes, helping our customers solve high-value problems that are critical to their business. We serve diversified end markets with a focus on markets with secular tailwinds. We recently completed the acquisition of Kito Crosby, which materially changes the financial profile of the company. It provides scale as we double our revenue from $1 billion to over $2 billion, and it will also give us top-tier financial margins with EBITDA margins in the low-20s. We think our business is better positioned than ever before to execute on our strategic plan. Next page. For those new to the company, these are the product platforms that we have, and we have five key product platforms that address the $35 billion material handling solutions industry. We've built a portfolio of complementary products that expand the breadth and depth of our product offering and capabilities to provide customer solutions. The first of the attractive platforms we have is our lifting hardware, which includes products like chains, shackles, blocks, and sheaves, plus the technology solutions category, which includes cameras and other high-tech products used in lifting. The second platform is our hoist and cranes, which makes up just over a third of our revenue. The remaining platforms include precision conveyance with high-precision conveyance systems, connecting robots and workspaces, our automation platform, which encompasses our intelligent drives and controls, and our linear motion platform, which provides precision, movement, and position capabilities utilizing actuators. Next page. As I mentioned, we just recently completed a significant acquisition for the company. It was a $2.7 billion acquisition. We bought Kito Crosby, and there were substantial benefits that I wanna highlight on this page of why we think this makes us a better company going forward. First is the strategic business combination positions us for a stronger and more competitive future by materially increasing our scale to over $2 billion in revenue and expanding our product offering in the less cyclical lifting, securement, and hardware sector. By bringing together complementary geographic footprints across attractive end markets, we unite a portfolio of world-class brands that strengthen our presence in every major product segment. Our combined company also benefits from an attractive financial performance with value creation from significant cost synergies and revenue synergy upside. Together, we're creating a powerful platform to accelerate innovation, deliver more value to customers, and drive sustainable long-term value for our shareholders. All of this is backed by a proven leadership team of the best athletes on the field with deep histories, not only in these brands, but in the industries we serve. Next page. To conclude my prepared remarks, let me walk you through our investment thesis highlighting the upside potential we see in the business. CMCO is positioned for growth, margin expansion, and significant free cash flow generation that we plan to use to pay down debt and reduce our leverage. We think we have opportunities for outside sales growth. Our lifting business historically grows at GDP plus a point or so. We also see market share capture potential driven by revenue synergies. Additionally, our conveyance and automation platforms are expected to provide outside growth, given their exposure to growing end markets and megatrends relating to reshoring and scarcity of labor. Adjusted EBITDA margin is expected to expand as well. We expect to realize $70 million of net cost synergies over three years. We are also offsetting a $10 million impact from tariffs that were imposed last February, which won't repeat as we go forward, and a similar impact for the Kito Crosby business. As we grow our sales volume, we will also see benefits from absorption in our facilities. Our businesses together generate significant cash flow. Our number one priority is to pay down debt, accelerate cash flow, and which will also reduce our interest. We have a long history of delevering our business after acquisitions. As we approach our targeted leverage ratio of 2x, we believe we will be significantly scaled with mid-20% EBITDA margins, as well as a flywheel to generate significant cash flow in the future to reinvest in our growth. In summary, we believe this company will deliver outsized revenue growth, margin expansion, and significant free cash flow, enabling us to rapidly delever, making this a very attractive investment opportunity. With that, Steve, that concludes. Absolutely. The prepared part. Fantastic, Greg. Appreciate the opening remarks. As a reminder to everyone, if you have any questions, I see some already coming into queue. If you have any questions, press the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen and type it in and we'll get to as many as possible. You know, obviously a lot of the calls we've been getting over the last several months have been related to the Kito Crosby deal. I'm sure you've been having a lot of discussions as well with investors. Inevitably with these presentations, you get people who are new to the story or revisiting it after some time away. I just wanna start by asking, 'cause this was several months to close. It's a very sizable transaction. Just to reiterate or refocus on why was Kito Crosby the right fit at this time for Columbus McKinnon, what you think, why you thought this was the deal you wanted to do? Sure. Let me step back and give you a little bit of history on how this came to be. We first heard of a potential Kito Crosby sale in August 2024 when rumors began to circulate in the market. After the presidential election in November, KKR, the owner of Kito Crosby, launched a formal process. Being a major competitor of ours, it made sense for us to take a look to see if this made sense for us to pursue. Concurrent with this, we had just finished our strategic planning session with our board, and one of the items we felt that was holding us back from a valuation perspective was a lack of scale. Based on our initial review of their business and their financial profile, we decided to engage in a full diligence process. We went through the due diligence process. It confirmed for us that we knew the industry incredibly well, overlap in customers, products, vendors, et cetera, and that there would be many benefits from a potential combination. We saw the opportunity to benefit from scale as well as drive substantial cost synergies with upside potential from revenue synergies. If successful with the acquisition, this would meaningfully change our financial profile as we would double revenue and achieve low 20% EBITDA margins when cost synergies were fully realized. It would only make sense at an attractive multiple given the amount of EBITDA that Kito Crosby generated. We ended up buying the business at 10x EBITDA on an LTM basis, or 8x on a synergized basis. This was financed through a combination of debt as well as an $800 million PIPE. While our debt levels are currently elevated, we have demonstrated our ability to delever with past acquisitions, as the combined business will generate substantial free cash flow, and we expect to have our net leverage ratio below 4x by the end of fiscal 2028, which is in two years for us. Got it. It's very helpful. Can you talk a little bit? I mean, when we look at Kito Crosby, there's certainly substantial overlap. The couple of differences are it seems like it's gonna give you more geographic and end market diversity. Mm-hmm. It also has slightly higher consumables. Mm-hmm. Why you think that that's helpful? First from a diversification perspective, it has a higher mix of revenue in the Asia-Pacific region. Where ours has a higher percentage of geographic mix in Europe. In terms of geographies, we think that we can utilize the Kito Crosby footprint in Asia to cross-sell some of our products, particularly our Precision Conveyance product line. In Europe, we think we can help accelerate revenue in the lifting securement side. When you look at end markets, you know, the legacy Crosby business was highly dependent on oil and gas, but they've diversified substantially since the early 2010s timeframe. They now have a broader, diverse exposure to end markets similar to Columbus McKinnon. Their lifting, securement, and hardware business, we believe, is one that will be less cyclical in a downturn because it tends to be more of a replacement item. It's a low average sales price, and we think that will, you know, help us, you know, if in fact there is, you know, any downturns in the future. You know, the lifting, securement, and hardware is really linked to safety inspections. Right. ... it's really, you know, highly recurring revenue from our perspective. Got it. We're a little over a month or so since you closed on the deal. Any surprises, positive or negative, you wanna share? Sure. We've been working closely with the Kito Crosby teams really since October when we formed and staffed an integration management office, which was actually composed of employees from both companies. I've traveled in the last several months to several of their key sites in Europe, Japan, and the U.S. Two weeks ago, I was in Japan, where I met with the Kito team and was very impressed with the campus that they have. They have a world-class facility that is highly automated. We had really good discussions with the team on how we're gonna operate forward going forward. The team was very receptive to change. They asked very thoughtful questions, and I thought it couldn't have gone any better. Overall, I'd say it's been very refreshing to spend time with the teams. They're engaged, they're motivated, and they're excited to join Columbus McKinnon. They're very competent at what they do, and there are a lot of substantial similarities in our mission, vision, and values, and even how we're organized. You know, both companies are organized by geographic regions, so it made it seamless from that perspective to put the two companies together. You know, lastly, I would say that they understand how to drive results. We're working hard together as we integrate the two companies. All good news at this point. Got it. That's great. Steve, the only thing I'd add is, you know, as we've gone through this process and engaged more and more with the Kito Crosby team, I think it's built our confidence and our ability to execute on the synergy expectations that we have for the cost synergies, as well as the opportunities on the revenue synergy side and getting a lot more tangible around what is the low-hanging fruit that we can do early on. Right. That's CapEx light, where we already have, you know, in region distribution and manufacturing and such. It's becoming a lot more tangible and we're working to execute that with leadership on both kind of work streams within the integration management office and in partnership with the combined new leadership team of the combined Columbus McKinnon business with Kito Crosby. Now, I'd like to appreciate that, Kristy. It leads right into the sort of next question, which is, you know, how are you feeling now about the timing and targets around? Yeah. Synergy realization over the next three years and deleveraging over the next couple of years? We feel more confident than ever. We're committed to delivering $70 million of net cost synergies. Yeah. It's $80 million gross and $10 million of dis-synergies. Let me just pause there and explain that. We went in with our eyes wide open. Once again, we know this business very, very well, and as we looked at their structure, we said, "Wow, there's you know the potential for $80 million of gross cost synergies." We also knew that there were gonna be certain costs that we're gonna have to add back as we move them to public company standards, you know, both for things like SOX, for cybersecurity. You know, some investments perhaps that a KKR wouldn't make, but as a public company we absolutely needed to make, and they would be ongoing costs. You know, we're very thoughtful in how we came up with the net cost synergy number, and we've made substantial progress already with the cost savings. You know, the new leadership team is in place. With that, you know, there's cost savings that are pretty substantial that have already been actioned that will begin to show up in earnest in our fiscal 2027 results, which starts in two weeks. We expect to deliver 20% of synergies in year one. I would say there's a really good possibility that we will over deliver on that. Excellent. We expect to be 60% in year two and the full 100% in year three. The more we work on this, and there's a weekly cadence to a report out to the IMO. The more opportunities are surfacing. You know, we're going hard at professional services and third party spend. There's, you know, where there's overlap in structures, we're dealing with that. We also believe that there will be footprint consolidation opportunities as well. Any revenue synergies that we get, and we have people working on that full-time as well, that will be upside on top of this. The team is working very well together. It's, you know, it's not a parochial lens that people are looking through. They're trying to be data-driven, looking for what makes the most sense. Good example, we've had, you know, early wins, say with our freight costs. You know, essentially. Yeah. Looking at what do you pay, what do we pay, going to bid, and basically driving cost synergies in that area, and that's one that's, you know, one of our early wins that's already been actioned. Excellent. That's excellent. Positive news. On deleveraging, I know some of that will be, you know. Yeah. What do the markets do over the next couple of years in general, but how you're feeling about the ability? Sure. ... because you do have the history of quick deleveraging. We do have a- This is a little bit larger. Yeah. A little bit more to go on this. I'll just make some opening comments on this, and I'll let Kristy since she's also our treasurer speak a little bit more specifically. All of our free cash flow, other than our current dividend level, which is about $8 million a year, is going to go to paying down debt. We've got a very flexible capital structure that Kristy can talk about, but this is our number one capital priority. Kristy, do you wanna maybe jump in and go through the specifics? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You know, our mix of debt was a combination of Term Loan B and senior secured notes. We leaned more towards, in the final allocation, the Term Loan B because of how much cash flow we generate within the business which is very substantial. We wanted to make sure that we had enough in there that we could have that's prepayable without penalty to really accelerate this. When Greg says, you know, we're gonna pay down on this, it's not a, you know, once a year kind of thing. It's gonna be every, not just every quarter, but every month, every day. We've got, you know, certain parts of our capital structure like our AR securitization that allow us to pay down. We try to keep a very simple, elegant capital structure with a lot of flexibility so that we could use our substantial cash flow to, you know, create a flywheel, if you will, of more cash flow by reducing interest expense. Okay. In addition to the realization of synergies, which will further increase our you know cash flow generation from year to year and then. Yeah, just to clarify, there's really no limitations on the timeliness, speediness of at least the initial debt reduction? No. One thing to point out is, you know, we did have a forced divestiture as a result of this. Right. To finalize the antitrust approval, and all of those proceeds were applied against the Term Loan B already, you know, within a day of closing. We're also, when we negotiated our term loan B, we had the ability within a couple of months timeframe that any proceeds from the divestiture, we would actually get the OID back that, you know, we paid off 1%. In essence, we got more credit for debt repayment than the actual cash we actually used to pay down debt. You know, once again, we believe after the application of the proceeds from the divestiture, we're starting out at about 5x net leverage, and that's expected to decline going forward. Yeah. Steve, you know, we would have to pay if we were paying down voluntarily on the Term Loan B kind of 1% outside of what Greg just- Right. ... mentioned on the pay down there. You know, the structure of where we put this together with our AR securitization, you know, enables us to pay down consistently over the first six months without having a penalty. Okay. You know, it was thoughtfully put together that gives us room even without having to incur that 1% penalty for- Right. ... for voluntary pay down. Got it. That's helpful. We do have a couple of questions coming in from outside, regarding Kito Crosby, which I wanna touch on before we move on to some other topics. One was: How should we think about costs related to integration? Yeah. You know, in the first year, and how that might affect cash flow? Yeah. There are three buckets of costs that I'm gonna call out, and just to be clear, what they are as people think about this. There are the $10 million a year of the synergies, which is netted against the $80 million gross cost synergies. Okay. Which gets you to the $70 million net. That $10 million are going to be ongoing costs that are gonna be with us going forward. That's netted and kinda handled in the net $70 million. That's, you know, from a cashflow perspective, that's kinda covered. Yep. In addition to that, we modeled and assumed that in total, we would have to achieve the $80 million of cost synergies would cost us roughly $80 million. Now, there are certain costs or certain synergies that you can achieve that don't require any cost to achieve them. I talked about on my earlier remarks that we've already had some nice wins in the freight area. It doesn't cost anything to basically leverage our freight carriers to get the best pricing. Those are, in essence, free, no cost to it. The ones that involve people reductions, I mentioned, you know, the global leadership team has now been set, so those obviously do come with severance payments. But in general, none of them are going to be over, you know, one year's worth of pay, right? Okay. They're generally gonna be less than that. In general, you'd say, well, at that point in time, sounds like you're gonna be less than, you know, the $80 million of cost. Where it can get a little more expensive and what's gonna be more back-end loaded is gonna be footprint consolidation. Right. You know, when you look to move factories, that can be more expensive than one to one, just given the fact that you might have to impair leases, you've got severance payments, you've got movement, you've got asset write-offs, et cetera. That can be a little heavier than one to one. I would say in general, in the first year, it's gonna lean more towards maybe a little less than one to one. It depends how quickly we can move on a number of our initiatives. In general, we're comfortable with that. Now, there's a third category, which is what I would say, what we call one-time costs. We've modeled essentially $15 million over a three-year timeframe to essentially integrate the business. These aren't necessarily tied to achieving cost synergies, and they're not dis-synergies, but they're things we're going to have to invest in. Generally, it's professional services to basically integrate the company. The best example would be SOX. You know? Kito Crosby was a private company, didn't have to be SOX compliant. Yep. To make them SOX compliant is gonna be a major initiative for us, and which is underway as we speak. That is a one-time cost that will get paid out this year, and then we're done with it, right? Right. Another area with a bigger area in the one-time cost is going to be any consulting work that we have to help us drive the cost synergies, where that'll be for a period of time. It goes away. A third area would be in the IT area. To the extent we have to spend money to do something either in our cybersecurity area to, you know, bring them up to our standards, it's kind of a one-time cost, and it goes away. So those are the three buckets. I would say of that $15 million, it's gonna be heavier in the first year. Okay. Probably less in the third year. Okay. If you know, we accelerate this and do this right, it might be that we're kinda done with it by the end of year two. Great. Just to add on a little bit to that second bucket of the cost, $80 million of cost to achieve synergies, just to you know clarify, I think we said roughly, you'd be kind of looking at the gross synergies achieved. Just to make sure we're clear, because there's the net impact of $70 million. If you take away the $10 million out of each year, you've got kinda $24 million of gross synergies achieved in the first year. Yep. You've got $28 million and $28 million in the second and third year. Roughly follows that timeline, but may deviate a little bit for the reasons that Greg mentioned. You'd have the $15 million much more front-end weighted. You know, you can come up with the assumptions, but you're gonna be, you know, likely come up to, you know, between $30 million and $35 million in that first year. Mm-hmm. Just to clarify that on how you split up the synergies, those are run rate, right? The expectation is you're on a run rate by the end of year one on those synergies, unless you see some stuff earlier, right? Yeah. I would maybe a little different. Okay. We would expect to deliver, you know, the 20% of the first-year synergy of the $70 million target in year one. Really? Okay. Yeah. Great. Yeah, you know, once again, we've got points on the board already. Right. That helps. Very helpful. We only have about five minutes left. Sure. This has gone very fast. I do wanna touch on the business environment you're seeing now, though, before we have to wrap this up. Can you talk a little bit, the last couple of quarters you've seen U.S. getting better? Yeah. Short cycle really started to come back. Yeah. You ended the last quarter with very healthy backlog. Europe has remained choppy. Any changes on those, that sort of- Yeah. Trends? You're right. Last quarter we did speak about good growth in revenue and orders in the U.S., and I would say that has continued. We also called out Europe as being weak as our project business. Yeah. You know, even though it has a strong pipeline, orders had been slow to materialize, and then really since then, the war in Iran has created even more uncertainty. Yeah. There's higher energy prices there. In addition, we sell roughly, you know, $50 million on an annualized basis into the Middle East. Right. A lot of it is explosion-protected hoist. Right now, there's nothing moving, right? Right. Because there's planes aren't flying, ships aren't. Yeah. You know, going through. That's kind of been paralyzed, I would say, for the last couple of weeks, and we'll see, you know, how that progresses going forward. Right. You know, the good news is it's no more than 2.5% of our revenue, 2.5. Right. It's not a major piece of it, but. Yep. It is a factor. And how- I'll just add. Go ahead. I'll just add on, Steve, there, and if it becomes a pervasive longer term issue, with, you know, oil prices remaining high, I think there is the question of whether or not U.S. oil production will ramp. Yeah. That obviously would be a tailwind to our business as well, since we support a lot of that infrastructure on the refining and the. Yeah. That's right. Oil and gas exploration front. It becomes we have to worry about the macro, right? That's- Yeah. For another day. On costs, I mean, obviously a few weeks ago we were thinking we were gonna see $50 WTI in the back half of the year. Now we're looking at a strip that goes up 75+ even by the end of the year. Does that have an impact? I'm assuming just at least on shipping and freight. Yes. We're actually monitoring that very quickly. We're working with our business leaders to make sure they're following what's happening with inflation in their businesses. We have a history of reacting very quickly, and our history in the industry is rational from a pricing perspective, so everyone's gonna be feeling this. In general, you know, pricing is something that is very sticky. Yeah. You know, once again, that would be if we need to take action, we obviously will, and we'll move quickly. Got it. That's helpful. Tariffs, the expectation would be, it would start becoming dollar neutral- Yes. ... in future and then by next year, margin neutral. Right. Still on track? Yeah, I would say if anything with the IEEPA tariffs being struck down, that's going to help us, right? As you would expect, right? 'Cause then, you know, with the other tariffs, I think they're the- 120. 123? 122. Yeah, 122 tariffs. Those are gonna stop in July. Okay. You know, the likelihood from everything I've read is that there's not gonna be support to, in Congress, to, you know, that'll be helpful as well. What won't change is where there have been tariffs struck with individual countries. Japan, for example, the EU, for example, you know, there's 15% tariffs that they agreed to, and those are gonna continue, and so those, you know, will continue really. Got it. We are just about out of time, but I like to ask this and every time I see you, which is obviously the tariffs had a goal, which was U.S. onshoring, which could be a big plus to you. Mm-hmm. Have you seen any effects yet? What's your thought on what U.S. onshoring will- Yeah. ... can mean to Columbus McKinnon? We think it could be v ery, very big. I mean, to the extent. Yeah. You know, it's really all about manufacturing. I've seen some data that suggests investment estimates range from about $1.2 trillion in active tracker projects to about $1.7 trillion in announced reshoring projects. Some of it is, you know, some of it is actually occurring, but probably 80% of it is just announced at this point. Right. I think the trends are real. Right. I think tariffs are not going away, as we just talked about. Yeah. Scarcity to labor isn't going to change. Between that and the onshoring, and the need for automation, and the fact that there aren't enough folks that actually wanna work in factories, we think, you know, those are all positive mega trends that will drive all of our platforms. Excellent. I just add on, as companies are embracing AI, increasingly you hear that more and more. There's gotta be something that connects the physical world to the digital world. Right. That's essentially what we do, right? We move materials. We do it in a very precise way that interacts with robotics and other, you know, intelligent solutions. You know, I think we're very encouraged by the opportunities. It's super early stage and hasn't really progressed in a meaningful way, but I think that there's a lot of change that's gonna happen in the broader macro over the next couple of years, which will be interesting and potentially a meaningful tailwind for our business. I think we have about another hour of questions, but unfortunately we've already passed the time limit, and they’re sticklers here. If we didn't read your question, please email to me, or you can contact directly Kristy, and I know she's more than happy to answer your question, or I can direct them to her. Thank everyone for being here today. Greg, Kristy, thanks so much for covering- Yeah. ... a very wide variety of topics. There's a lot. I know you guys are really busy right now, so appreciate you taking the time out today. No, absolutely. Gregory Rustowicz. Yep. Thank you. Thanks, all. Thanks everyone for being here, and enjoy the remainder of the conference. Thanks, everyone.