Good afternoon for the second day of the Jefferies Industrials Conference. It's Laurence Alexander with the Jefferies Chemicals team. It's my pleasure to introduce Donaldson, and with us today is CEO Todd Carpenter, CFO Scott Robinson, and Investor Relations Sarika Dhadwal. There will be a brief presentation, and then afterwards, we'll do a little bit of Q&A. Thanks, Laurence. Can you hear me? I'm okay? All right, so I want you to take away five topics or points from the presentation today about Donaldson Company. Donaldson's a filtration company. We solve complex customer issues that allow us to be the leader in filtration worldwide. Our technology allows us to have best-in-class technology. We continue to invent cool things every day for our customers and allows us to have, therefore, long-term profitability. Think of us as a proprietary razor to sell razor blade-based company. Being a filtration company, we are an enabler of the more green modern-based economy. Our growth plan is strategic, specifically targeted, and balanced, and we are currently entering the life sciences market, and we'll talk a little bit more about how we're doing that in presentation today. At the overview of our company, we are a 109-year-old company. We have roughly 14,000 employees. You see, we have 3 reporting segments. We have our Mobile Solutions, Industrial Solutions, and Life Sciences segment. Their percentages are on the lower left. Important, that razor to sell razorblades, we are roughly 34% or 35% razors and 65% replacement parts. Down on the bottom, you'll see our latest fiscal year, which we reported two years ago. Each of those years shown on the bottom represent record revenues and record earnings. Our company continues to do quite well. Our strategy is working, and we're very proud of how we're performing as a corporation. Most importantly, strategy is often misunderstood from companies. I just consider it to be choices, the choices the company makes. The number one choice is we are a technology-led company. As a result of that, we have over 2,700 active patents. If you look at our Investor Day in April 2019, and our most recent Investor Day of April 2023, during that four-year period, somewhere in the world, on average, Donaldson received a patent every day. We are very serious about technology and our proprietary approach to all of our businesses. We are roughly 40% in the United States and Canada, 30% in Europe, 10% Latin America, 20% in APAC. Shown along the bottom are the larger business end markets that we serve, and it's important to understand the first-fit split, as well as the replacement part sales within each of those, and you can see that within the blue designations. Also important is we are everywhere the customer wants us to be, allowing us to have deeper customer relationships. We are represented in roughly 80% of where we do business. Very importantly, long ago, our company established a build within region to support region strategy, and today, 75% of everything Donaldson manufacturers stays within that particular region. So you can see a lot of this resourcing, reshoring, all these conversations that many companies have. We do not have those conversations. It's just always been part of who we are. We have also global engineering teams across the world to get a strong relationship with all of our customers, and that is part of that strategic approach that we have. Here you see the financial highlights. We have sales, of course, throughout these four years. We have grown roughly mid-single- digits. We expect in our outlook that we just gave here a while ago to repeat that again, to mid-single-digit growth this year. We look to expand our operating margin again this year. You can see how we have nicely expanded it from 13.5- 15.4 over the last three years. We'll now look to get that into the high 15s in this fiscal year, and therefore, you can see our adjusted EPS, so the company continues to leverage quite nicely. We like to say that we are committed to driving higher levels of return on higher levels of business. As a filtration leader, our advantages as a company is we have a very long history of being the technology leader in the markets that we serve. Again, we have very deep customer relationships, and we take great pride in those relationships. We are an enabler of the green, more efficient, modern economy, with many of the inventions that we bring forward. We are a very diversified business and very diversified set of businesses and a diversified company. For example, we make filters for medium and heavy-duty diesel engines, air and liquid. We make filters and systems for weld fumes, wood chip, for example, dust creation, all the way to hearing aids, ostomy bags, and many, many other applications. The portfolio of Donaldson's businesses allow us to actually continue to grow as we feel an offset or, say, headwinds in a particular end market. So one of the strengths of our corporation is our diversified portfolio of businesses, and we look to continue to enter new markets and continue to further diversify the company, all with a technology-based foot forward. We have high aftermarket retention because of that proprietary razor to sell razor blades, and we're very proud that we have best-in-class operations taking care of our customers wherever they may be. We have three reporting segments, as I told you. Each of them have the growth opportunity. Within Mobile Solutions, you hear today a lot about alternative powers. We are playing in things such as hydrogen-based solutions in the combustion process of engines. That's one potential solution. We have won programs from OEMs in that regard. We are playing in fuel cell-based hydrogen solutions. We play in the hybrid-based solutions, all through alternative type of powers within Mobile Solutions. Donaldson is using its technology, usually from other businesses where it got its foundational beginning, and applying that across that space. Within Industrial Solutions, we have a broad portfolio of businesses, and we're doing quite well. Our most recent strategy is to connect our products, so we are digitizing how you do dust collection, for example. If you can imagine, if you're a maintenance person, and the last thing you wanna do is worry about your dust collector and is that actually doing okay, you wanna make whatever product it is in whatever industry, and keep that product line going. So we monitor it for you. We hooked up a thousand applications this year. We'll probably do another 2,000. We just released this recently in India, China, and Thailand, where we'll start connecting those and supporting those manufacturing operations. If you're the maintenance person, you will get an alert that says, "Hey, go do this," to be able to make sure your manufacturing process continues to work, and that's how we operate. We have also found every time we connect it, we get a higher aftermarket replacement because it's just easier for them to buy parts from us. On Life Sciences, we are entering that space in a very targeted approach, where we believe we have a right to win to support cell and gene therapies, and we have done this organically as well as inorganically, and I'll talk a little bit more on this slide about that. Our overall addressable market is about $50 billion at this point. You can see how much share we have within these, being a $3.5 billion company, almost $3.6 billion. Mobile Solutions addressable is $14 billion, Industrial Solutions is $15 billion, and in Life Sciences, it's $21 billion. We have added four... or sorry, five acquisitions 'cause we just closed the most recent one. Each of these are very different. They are targeting in a disruption way relative to a specific niche-y area within life sciences. So, for example, if you look at Purilogics, Purilogics is a membrane-based chromatography solution. Rather than using resin beads, as they currently use today, in order to the, to purify the overall cell and gene therapy, you'll be able to run that through our cassettes, our Purilogics-based product, and you'll get 10x more efficiency. Now, that is a pre-revenue company, but we believe we understand media, media treatments, and also the mechanics of cassette-based applications, where we'll be bringing that product to market here in the quarters ahead. Again, it's pre-revenue, but we look for that to really boost forward when we do finalize all of our work. Medica is the most recent acquisition. It brings an interesting technology called hollow fiber membranes. So if you just mentally think about this, it is think of a straw. Your hair, for those of you that have hair, unlike me, is about 10 microns in diameter. The wall structure of this is about 0.2 microns, which is what you need in bioprocessing, and so we have teamed with them. We'll bring out bioprocessing-based solutions in that hollow fiber membrane, like, type of application here in the quarters to come. That'll take some time, but we are already working on that now. It is a new technology for Donaldson Company to enter that space. Medica does kidney dialysis, so a lot of renal-based type of applications within blood filtration, and we'll just make those products available. We own 49% of Medica, and we do have a path to 100% in the short years ahead. We have a balanced capital allocation framework. So you can see our first priority is to invest back into the company, organically and inorganically. Organically, in the last three years, we have invested back about 21%. Through acquisitions, we have done 20%, so you can see the majority of our cash goes in that direction. It's roughly 40%. You can see 25% then goes to dividends, which is our next priority, and then certainly last and most flexible is share repurchases. We have a very strong balance sheet. In our release here last week, we just told you our net debt to EBITDA ratio is 0.5. That means we have a lot of dry powder, and we continue to improve that balance sheet this year, even while closing acquisitions. We're doing a very good job at cash management. We feel very comfortable long- term, just operating the company at a ratio of about 1. Our free cash flow currently is above averages over time. We average about 85% over time, but we're closer to 100% at this point. And we look to likely stay there here within the guide this year, so closer to 90%, give or take a little bit. So we're very comfortable. We have cash available to us readily, which makes us an acquirer of choice. So we have a focus team looking for acquisitions specifically within the space of Life Sciences, as well as some industrial-based service type applications. That's where we are targeting, and we have people now that get up every day and look to execute the inorganic piece of our company strategy. Also, within our release, we We're receiving a lot of input from all of you that our Fiscal 2026 or three-year targets on our operating margins for Industrial and Engine were already above our three-year targets. We have done exceptional within our execution as a company within those two segments, and should we just continue to stay in that space, then, of course, it could be surmised that our margins would go down. Clearly, we do not expect our margins will go down. We thought this was the best opportunity to re-rack them and let you know our longer-term thoughts relative to the successes and the good management we've had within Mobile Solutions, as well as Industrial Solutions. So we have a nice operating margin there. But we also took the time then to embrace the fact that Life Sciences is likely taking a little bit longer in some of the spaces. We do know in our traditional businesses, when we win a program and it goes forward, if a schedule slips within those businesses, it'll be one to two quarters. Interestingly, in Life Sciences, it's more like one to two years. And so we did embrace that, and so we also touched those. We're still incredibly pleased with what's going on in Life Sciences. We do think to leverage it as we fully expect it will take just a little bit more time. So we adjusted the whole outlook, and so Donaldson Company will by Fiscal 2026 grow between 3% and 7% CAGR, and our operating margin as a company, which used to be at 16%, is now at 16.2%. So we raised that as well as a direct result of the good work going on in the company today. So with that, I could turn the floor over to you, Laurence, and we will open it for questions. I guess I'll start with on the margin side. So there's no structural reason why longer-term Life Sciences would be, margin target would be any lower than what you previously put out, 22%? Not at all. Actually, longer- term, we believe that the Life Sciences margin will be above company average. It's fully expected to mix the company up, over time as we continue to grow it. Certainly, we took a more balanced approach to the growth rates we would expect, in the next couple of years. But longer term, it's a wonderful market and we see that. We see our gross margins above company average already. Is it fair to say you also give a mix effect, that if you get to an upcycle in many of your other markets that are currently depressed, you'd be above margin in those as well? I would say on the industrial cycle, certainly we'll leverage. On the Mobile Solutions aftermarket or replacement part cycles, we will certainly leverage and mix the company up. The one noted exception in the company where we would likely feel a little bit headwinds is, as you're all very well aware, agriculture, construction, and mining, and on-road truck first-fit manufacturing are a bit compressed at this point in time. When they do come back, that will give us a little bit of a mix headwind. Not so much that we would expect our overall operating margin to take a tremendous hit, but I do wanna recognize it that clearly when first-fit does bounce, we'll get a little bit of a headwind. Overall, though, even trying to bake that into our model as we did, we still feel that we'll expand the company operating margin over the next couple of years. And then on the digitalization side, is your view that it is a net sales benefit or also an earnings margin enhancement, or is this just a cost of- On, on- -doing business? On which one? The digitalization- Oh, yeah. So on the industrial digitization that I talked about, that's a net margin benefit, just simply because of the fact that we already know of all those devices, those systems that we have connected. We're receiving a greater aftermarket share just because it's making it easier to do business with us. We have a new internet-based system. We also allow you to order over your phone from this now. So we make it so easy to get the parts to keep your machine running, that we have double-digit increases over the old way of doing businesses. So for us, we're laser-focused at connecting as many machines as we possibly can, which is the reason why we did two things: We expanded the product availability to India, Thailand, and China this year. But then we did the second thing, which is we altered that technology just a little bit to where as soon as you plug that dust collector in now, it will light up and be available. So think of it like an OnStar type of an approach in your car. That's now available in your dust collector, versus prior years, we would have to go out there, hook it up, et cetera. So now we—you can still put our technology in a dust collector, no matter who the manufacturer, so across all of our competition's dust collectors as well, but we now make it very convenient and easy with the ones that we ship. If you were to take some of your balance sheet and just aggressively pursue this, what would be the likely payback period on rolling out the dust collectors if the customers were willing? You know, it actually is not simple to hook one system up with a team of people. It'll take you one day at least to do one system. It's not like it's a simple activity if it wasn't really readied, particularly in some of the competitors' units. So if you think about how much you really would need if you wanna accelerate the retrofit, if you will, of all those, it really doesn't pay back as quickly as we would want it to. And so we're just taking a balanced approach. With ours, we can hook them up pretty quickly. You know, it's not uncommon for us now... There was a recent example here about a month ago, where one customer had sixty dust collectors on their sites, large manufacturing facility, and they said: "Look, just hook one up. Let's check it out." And in about three weeks, they called us back and said, "Okay, do everything." And that's what's happening to us now because of the simplicity of what's happening. They don't get up every day to look at how their dust collector is working. They get up every day to make whatever widget they need to make to make money for their company, and so they just want us out of the way, and we could do that for them now. So there's a common way of framing Donaldson as a filtration company or as a filter company. We've heard throughout this conference from other companies doing digitalization that they're getting into system design. And we've spoken in the past, I think it was at our last conference, about the Life Sciences and system design related to that. Can you just talk a little bit about your philosophy on where you draw the box for what Donaldson will do? Like, how far into system design or system sale do you want to be, rather than just the filtration unit? I think it's important when we deal with Life Sciences, for example, and our new entry point, to understand what we're doing here. We have taken some industry experts, we've hired them, we've taken our filtration experts, and we have really gone down to the one-foot level of processes, and we've married them in order to say, "Hey, where do we have a right to win?" And we just look at things a little bit differently, being a filtration company, and this is... I'll give you one example of the outcome of that. Within life sciences, if you're making GLP-1 drugs, for example, you have a thing called a chromatography column, and inside this chromatography column, you have to, within the process, in order to polish that, you take a solvent called acetonitrile. Acetonitrile is typically brought into the United States from China and Western Europe. Our current partner brings this in over a boat from Western Europe, trucks it all the way across the United States into California, uses it on a single column, and there are thousands of columns in work across the world, and in this single column creates 2 million liters of waste in order to be able to create a GLP-1 drug. That waste has water, acetonitrile, and some other particulates. If you can reclaim the acetonitrile above 95% efficiency of purity, then you could reuse it. No one has been able to crack that and get it above 85%. Donaldson can now reclaim acetonitrile over 99% pure. We have done it over and over again, and we have received all the patents necessary for all the solvents used within the Life Sciences sector in order to reclaim all of them, and we will be bringing acetonitrile reclamation forward here in the months ahead. The current way to dispose it is every week, a 5,000-liter truck shows up at that site and drives it into Mexico so it can be incinerated. The whole supply chain, as well as the waste structure, is disrupted. As a filter company, how do we do it? We filter it, we filter it, we distill it, and we filter it, and the filters are not easy. So that gives us an opportunity to create a brand-new business within our Life Sciences segment that's clearly dependent upon selling gene therapy productions and the entire chromatography process. People didn't think it was possible, but these are the kind of ways that we look at processes and to the one-foot level, and as we push forward, and it'll take a number of years, this is one of the projects that actually slipped a little bit because the supply chain to actually now build the system will be more like 12-18 months, but after we get the system done, our customer will save millions, and Donaldson will make millions. Taking that to the very high level, I mean, you talk about the $50 billion TAM. How much of that TAM is even close to Donaldson in quality, so worth doing the M&A? I'm not sure I completely understand. There’s other companies have talked about- So- how, like, there's a certain amount of Yeah like, phantom EBITDA or Yeah, yeah Zombie companies you don't really wanna buy. You don't wanna buy a steel bender. Yeah. So, you know, I'd say we're. It's easy to talk about we're really focused on niche-based areas where that can be disruptive, that rely or at least relate to Donaldson Company's core-based technologies with filtration, and we do that within the Life Sciences sector. But also on the Industrial sector, we look for potential service-based activities. We've bought another one of those here within the last quarter. It's, you know, less than $10 million worth of revenue, but it helped us support that deeper customer relationship, and really make sure we get that aftermarket opportunity. So we're focused on those kind of applications within the industrial space. That's where we're really focused as a overall acquisitions team. And then lastly, can you just do a quick round the world in terms of which end markets you're most concerned on and where you're seeing demand pull forward or bright spots that might be underappreciated? Clearly, the tougher spots, and you saw that within our quarter right now, are China. We thought China was at bottom. It dipped further, surprised us. China used to be as high as 9% of company revenue. It's now down roughly around 5%. China is tough, and when they say it's tough, multiply that x10. And the other one that's actually a little bit more careful at this point would be Western Europe and some of the industrial spaces because they're not doing manufacturing expansion, and they have a little bit more careful relative to industrial production. You see that within our Industrial Filtration Solutions quarter, where we were down. Those two really drove that. Our aftermarket businesses, though, remain very robust. We're very pleased with them. We continue to get share gain in the Mobile Solutions sector and in the Industrial sector. You know about the strategies. We talked about those already here this afternoon. And so we look for those to offset that f irst-fit based headwind that we have. And when the first-fit headwind does come back, of course, clearly, we'll ride that wave, too. Then just lastly, a question on culture. Is Life Sciences mostly a hire from without and build a separate team, or is it a cross-pollinated team with Donaldson? Do people have career paths where they can go from Life Sciences into Mobile, or would that be kind of viewed as, you know, if you're in Life Sciences, you either do well or exit? No, no, no. It's clearly Life Sciences, culturally, is the same as the balance of Donaldson Company. Sure, there are people that have their career that we have brought in, that have PhDs, that are really Life Sciences-based personnel, but we have also mixed that with overall Donaldson filtration technology. Or as I like to call all of us, we're just a bunch of filter geeks, and so we get all the way down to the fiber-based technologies and the raw materials and understand that. And it's the mesh of the two that give us the power to find new solutions within the overall Life Sciences segment. And so those people completely some are in the labs, and they're doing cell and gene therapy type of analysis, so that we can help outcomes of those. We have so many chemists in Donaldson Company, we don't really even talk about it. Although they are our specialty chemists, they have career opportunities to come back in the company. They could run our corporate, technology organization one day, for example. We really think highly of them because of, you know, smart people do good work. Okay, and on that note, thank you very much for the discussion.