That didn't meet where we were headed. But below that, there was a lot of growth in some of these key nodes that we've been able to build in aerospace, space, and food and pharma, and even within some of our more advanced commercial vehicle applications. And so now, plus we worked hard to get all of that operational efficiency through really strong operational excellence work, continuous improvement, Lean Six Sigma, etc., etc. So we've got a heritage now of building up that capability, and we've got a margin profile that we believe is sustainable. And then we can go out there and say, "Sustainably, we're now above the 30% mark and the ability to grow from there. Just a minute. Just on that, two-thirds of the Sealing Technologies segment is aftermarket, driven by strong MRO specification positions across a number of end markets, a very small percentage of total customer spend, but absolutely critical to our customers' processes, and we enter every year with two-thirds of visibility, with a tremendous installed base, with brand recognition, pricing power, and technological capabilities as our customers look to us to solve their most challenging problems. Thank you. We're running out of time, but just maybe quickly, if you could address capital allocation priorities in terms of M&A, would you consider larger deals? Would you ever consider using your stock price, for example, as currency, given how well it's done? Just any quick comments on the M&A priorities. We understand all the tools and levers at our disposal, right? And I would say we're not focused on using our equity position to do that, although I wouldn't rule it out and say you can't say we would never do that, but that's not where we're focused. We're focused on using our cash flow, using our balance sheet to invest behind positions of strength and other adjacencies that fit our strategic criteria that we talked about and what it means to be an Enpro business and have the capability or demonstrated ability to deliver the same margin and free cash flow profile. AMI was a perfect example of that. It fits right down the lane with both the strategic, financial, cultural leadership of what it means to be an impro business. I see us continuing to do those types of acquisitions over time while we maintain a very responsible balance sheet and leverage position. Great. Thanks so much, Joe. Thanks, James. Pleasure to have you guys with us again this year, and all the best for impro. Great. Thank you, Justin. Thanks, Justin. Thank you, Justin. With that, we have Mueller Water joining us. We are pleased to have on stage with us today President and Chief Operating Officer Paul McAndrew and Vice President of Investor Relations, Whit Kincaid. Mueller has 146 million shares outstanding, is trading around $25.50 for a $4 billion market cap, $111 million of net debt for a total enterprise value of $4.1 billion. Just a quick background, Mueller is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. It primarily manufactures and sells iron gate valves and specialty valves for water distribution, in addition to other products such as fire hydrants and repair products. Paul joined Mueller just over two years ago. He was named COO in August of 2023, followed by President in 2024. Whit joined in 2018 as Senior Director of Investor Relations and Corporate Development, and previously has held several financial positions at other companies such as Krispy Kreme and Denny's. So it's now my pleasure to turn it over to Paul for a brief presentation, and then we'll start Q&A. Thank you, Sarah. Good afternoon, everyone. Great to be here. It's my first time at this conference. Obviously, we're not originally from Atlanta. I'm from Wales in the U.K. But I want to give you kind of a few slides and an overview of Mueller Water Products. We've really seen a step change in the business over the last 12-18 months. So if you look at the business itself, it's predominantly U.S. sales, or 92% of the sales are in the U.S., 6% in Canada, and 2% in the rest of the world, mainly Western Europe for our repair products. We have around 60%-65% we sell to municipalities, and then about 30% through residential construction and 10% in the gas market. When you think about the products that Mueller Water Products manufacture, it's predominantly in the infrastructure world, where we've been doing this for over 165 years. But the only product that you really see that Mueller manufactures is the fire hydrant. Everything else that we make predominantly is under the ground. All the different gate valves, brass valves, service products, generally buried. So we are known for the fire hydrant, which comes in many different colors and thread patterns across all the different fragmentation in the U.S. From a sales perspective, we're just shy of $1.4 billion over the last 12 months. EBITDA up at $303 million. We've seen a significant step change in 2024, which I'll explain a little bit later. We are highly vertically integrated, most of the manufacturing locations in the U.S. We operate three foundries. We used to operate four foundries, but we operate two steel iron foundries for the hydrants and gate valves. And then we operate a brass foundry for the service brass products. And when I say two, the fourth foundry, we just recently closed a legacy 100-year-plus-old brass foundry where we invested in a new state-of-the-art new brass foundry, particularly to ensure we have enough capacity for the lead service line replacement that's going to be happening in the U.S. Just high level where we are from our strategic priorities, operational excellence was a key initiative that we started two years ago, where we are really seeing the benefits now in our margin changes over the last 12 to 18 months, really ensuring we're focusing on not just the Lean Six Sigma and our operational productivity, but how that actually translates into our supply chain, freight, and the whole productivity, not just in the COGS world, but also in the SG&A world. Part of that operational excellence and dovetailing together with commercial excellence is ensuring that our service levels are world-class. We ensure that our customers get the products, the service levels they need. That was really amplified after the COVID demand and the whipsaw of channel destocking that took place. Internally then, how we operate as one organization, the Mueller One that we branded in terms of how we collaborate across the organization. All those three pieces then, how are we going to expand margins and the path that we're on right now, which I'm going to talk more when we get to the financials. Underpinning that is the digital transformation. When I think of digital transformation, I think about two main pieces. I think about how we interact with our customers, website, PIM, how customers place orders, how they interact with us digitally. Then internally then, from an operational perspective, how we can leverage technology to support our operational excellence. What does Mueller do? It really connects communities to life's essential resource, water. I really never worked in a water company before. That's kind of struck me how certain parts of the world just take water for granted, and a lot goes on in an infrastructure then to ensure that we all get the water we need every day. So, looking at the historical financial performance I just talked about, we have pretty steady sales growth over the last seven years. Only the real one-year decline was the COVID year. But from a margin perspective, our EBITDA dollars are relatively flat over that period. So, from a margin, we were dilutive as a percentage. But then all the work that we've put in over the last two years then from an operational excellence took a big step change as we went into fiscal year 2024. So, we improved our EBITDA by 590 basis points year over year from fiscal 2023 to 2024. And our current guidance is another 90 basis points going into fiscal year 2025. And that really kind of goes off what I just shared in terms of the strategic initiatives and investments we've made in the business from an operational perspective. So after a strong Q1, we did increase our guidance. We saw much healthier demand in Q1 than we've originally anticipated, particularly on the short-cycle products. And when I say short-cycle products, I mean iron and hydrants, gate valves, service brass, which is typically a two- to four-week lead time. We have the specialty valve business, which is a longer lead time in terms of ETO-type product for water treatment plants. They're much more bespoke-type valves. So, from where we sit right now, a nice increase in our guidance. I think it's about 5% on the midpoint from a revenue perspective and nearly 9% on EBITDA, so continuing to leverage that operational performance, and we believe we're well positioned with the teams we have in place and the operational excellence that's been put in place, commercial excellence, that we are going to continue to drive margin expansion going forward, so talking about the kind of key initiatives here, we have really, really strong brands within our organization. It's well positioned with the water municipalities to continue to drive more growth going forward. We have the headwind, sorry, tailwind, my mistake. We have the tailwind from the infrastructure bill. Although we all think it's happening a lot slower than we want, but we know we are well positioned from an AIS, BABA, vertically integrated U.S. manufacturing company to benefit from the infrastructure bill. We're going to continue to be leveraging across the distribution network from the water perspective. And then in terms of how we are now positioned commercially and operationally, there's a lot of tailwinds for this organization. And the momentum that we've built, we're really, really excited about where we can take this organization. So with that, Sarah, I'll take over some questions. Excellent. Thank you for that overview. And I'm going to start with what you noted about yourself, is that you've been with the firm for over two years and you never worked at a water company before. So what brought you to Mueller? What was the potential you saw at the company? Yeah, it's a great question. First of all, when you think about the water industry and how critical it is to how people operate in the world we live in, being such an essential resource, that excited me. And looking at where Mueller's margins were historically and where they were just before I joined then, I felt that my experience from large industrial companies, I could offer a lot to the organization in terms of trying to bring some operational excellence to the organization. And that excited me. And it's been great. I think the fact that we've seen the benefits now of everyone's hard work and where we are as an organization and such an inflection point last year, not just from our margins, but from the stock price perspective, there's a huge amount of momentum and excitement in the organization now. So glad I joined. Yeah, absolutely, and you do operate under two segments. The first one, water flow, is more below the ground. Can you talk about the addressable market in the U.S. that you have and the market share and positioning of Mueller Products? Yeah, we don't really talk too much about market share, but we are the leading brand, particularly in the iron products, the gate valves and hydrants. And in terms of go-to-market, we are predominantly through distribution. And that's because there's over 50,000 water utilities in the U.S. and nearly 15,000 wastewater utilities. The fact to service all these utilities would be, frankly, very cost prohibitive. And the fact our channel partners that we sell through distribution have strong relationships on how they collaborate and work together with the end customer. It's a benefit in terms of how we sell a total project with the channel partners and being able to leverage the scale then of the distribution network. For this year, the firm has put out an outlook of mid-single-digit growth. Can you walk through a bit what the drivers of that growth is? Also, you mentioned the IIJA and the $15 billion allotted for replacement of service lines. Of course, you're not participating on the pipe side, but perhaps what are the products that you are selling that will have to be replaced with those lead pipes? Okay. First of all, the question on the fiscal 2025 guidance, it's about 5% at the midpoint. We just announced price increase, which will be low single digits. The rest then coming from volume. We do have some channel destocking that took place. It's going to take place this year on the service brass. We had an elevated brass backlog in fiscal 2024 that we took down. So we will have a little bit of a headwind there from the service brass backlog. But kind of high-level perspective, you could kind of split that in half in terms of between price and volume right now. And then on the lead service line, yes, we don't participate in the pipe itself. But if you think about a distribution water line running in the street, that's then connected at the curb then and going through it to somebody's property. There's multiple service brass valves and couplings along that line, and that's where we do participate. I think Whit can comment some more on the IIJA. Yeah, and I'll just kind of add to the lead service line piece. So, our valves are going to be a few hundred dollars of a, could be a $5,000-$10,000 type replacement project. But overall, IIJA for us, we think about specialty valves as another area. So, think about a new wastewater treatment plant, maybe a drinking water treatment plant. So, either it could be a replacement or a build-out because you have meaningful population growth. So that's where we have a kind of think about a compliance program, and we've really invested in a way. And you would see this in kind of sales and marketing if you were to go to a trade show to educate the water utility on what is available overall from a funding perspective. But more importantly, what products do we have that qualify for what we'll call Build America, Buy America, which is a much higher American-made content standard than the American Iron and Steel Act. So we're kind of well prepared to take advantage of those. And RFPs is something that we track pretty closely because we can see the compliance request for documentation that our products qualify for that project. So we've started to see kind of a trickling and a modest increase in those RFPs, but we don't think on our national scale, it's kind of a meaningful change at this point. But we continue to be excited about it because we think about it almost as an additional tailwind on top of just an existing tailwind of this aging infrastructure that we have here in North America. Any sense of what's delayed some of the spending coming from the federal government? I think the right, other than just, well, it's really thinking about this is really locally and state-driven. So the federal government's primarily allocating dollars to the states, and then the state EPAs have mechanisms through the revolving funds. So what we've seen is think about less than $5 billion is probably, and this isn't speaking directly to our products, just in general for water-related projects, has been allocated directly to a project that has been approved and is something's going to happen, so to speak. So I think that is a very small portion compared to the $55 billion. And so that's kind of what's the latest kind of what people were tracking kind of the end of last year. But we think the American-made requirements are a major reason for the difference because American Iron and Steel Act was a much lower requirement. Now you're thinking about, in some cases, 100%, everything in that product has to be American made. So that's where I think our sense is that's probably the biggest hurdle. The other sense is really just the water utilities. Not everybody needs this funding. And what I mean by that is large cities could go get muni bond funding and funding from other areas. I think just to add to that, Sarah, in terms of the investment we made in the brass foundry, obviously there was an aged old foundry which needed to be replaced, but the capacity that we've put in place was also in kind of thinking ahead for the lead service line because it's going to drive so much more incremental volume on the service brass products. There's over nine million miles estimated recently of the amount of lead service lines that need to be replaced in the U.S. I think one of the biggest challenges on the infrastructure bill is going to be the labor availability to actually do those projects. Absolutely. And I'll just, anyone from the audience, I'll open it up if we have any questions. And maybe while we're getting the microphone, coming outside of water, how do you think about just new products? Are there new features? Anything you can add? I mean, will I be able to remote shut off when my pipe bursts from the main line to my house? Or how do you think about technology or instilling new features into some of the products? Yeah, obviously some technology about remote shut-off valves typically would be around the water meter type valve from a remote shut-off. It is an industry that moves slowly then from a new product perspective. But what really matters, I think, and it's going to matter more to the utilities is how they capture more of the non-revenue water that they lose in right now in terms of all the money that's spent in treating water and improving the water quality. And then it's not being cashed out through the homeowner because it's lost in a network of pipe leaks. So I think pressure management and leak detection is where municipalities and utilities are going to have to focus then so they can really capture that, what we call non-revenue water. So, just excuse me, a couple of questions related to your margins in the new foundry. So first of all, what sort of percentage of your revenue maybe at some point will that foundry make up? I'm curious right now, what's the utilization of that foundry? Where do you expect that to get to, especially as these IIJA spending comes through? And big step change in your margins last year, but looking at a few years again as that gets filled up, where can we think about margins getting to at some point? Yeah, so when we think of the brass foundry, just when I think of brass products first, the foundry is obviously making the casting. And then when we put them into brass valves or brass couplings, then it's machining and assembly, which makes the final product. But brass is in fact in most of our infrastructure products. There's a huge amount of brass inside a fire hydrant. There's a huge amount of brass inside a gate valve. So that vertical integration allows us to ensure that we don't rely on any outsourcing from a brass perspective, gives us competitive advantage. In terms of growth, that's really one piece then of our growth multiple in terms of the brass and the IIJA. And again, we are a little bit at mercy how quick the infrastructure bill rolls out. To answer your question on a margin perspective, we've said that running two foundries was about 80-100 basis points from a total company perspective as a duplicative cost that's now going to be eliminated then, which is part of our guidance then of the margin improvement we showed in fiscal year 2025. Beyond that, right now, we're not providing margin guidance. In terms of our strategic initiatives, margin expansion is one of the key focuses of the company. Okay. From a utilization perspective, obviously, when we built this and designed this new foundry, we built it with much more capacity than we had with the existing foundry, which means we can operate that different ways. We can run less shifts right now in terms of demand perspective, but from a capacity perspective, we have significant more that we can tap into from the new foundry. So, maybe continuing with gross margins, the 2025 guidance implies about 200 basis points expansion, which was noted on your February call. Obviously, a piece of that is the new foundry and decommissioning the old one. Maybe you could walk through the rest of the margin expansion for us this year. Yeah. So again, we have such strong brands. Our price cost is always going to be targeted to be accretive to margins from that perspective. And obviously, our price cost was calculated before where we are from a tariff perspective right now. So that disclaimer, that's obviously going to be continually evaluated as the climate changes there. The rest would come from our material and freight and labor productivity initiatives that just continue to roll over that we started 18 months ago. Great. And how would you benchmark yourself against best-in-class peers? Are you still at a significant gap to them? And how quickly can you narrow that, if so? That's who you're speaking about, which types of peers? So I mean, if we look at, I don't know, maybe Xylem, which isn't a pure play, but they're a segment, maybe 40% gross margin. Yeah, so I think. No pressure. Yeah. And we haven't guided to anything beyond 2025. But when we look at, we are different than the other water companies because of, think about the markets that we play in, where our products are specified by water utilities versus maybe building codes and some other areas. So less commercial, industrial, more municipal. And I think for us, I think because we're vertically integrated, we think that really that gives us kind of benefits as we put more volume through our foundries primarily. We can really leverage that. And part of the, I think one of the benefits you're seeing that we've talked about from the margin improvement is our iron gate valves and hydrants. We've really taken out a lot of cost, and then you've had volume improvements, and that's kind of flowed through very well. And so as we get an uptick in orders, it doesn't have to be a big inflection, but those can flow through very well. Yeah. That's fantastic. This year, your margin guidance does imply some reinvestment below gross margin. I guess, where are you spending that incremental money? What kind of projects do you have? Yeah. High level, two main pieces. There's a piece going back from the IT perspective, particularly around cybersecurity. We did have a cyber attack back in October of 2023. So that's a piece of it. But the other piece is in terms of from a commercial perspective, I talked about the digitization of how we go to market then. There's some processes and systems that need to be updated there. And then along with our sales force itself, we predominantly want to invest in our sales force where the biggest growth is from a market perspective. Think about the Southeast, South Central as population migration is really moving to those areas then. That's driving a lot more of the housing starts in those particular areas. And also think about some of those areas where population migration is growing, they don't really have access to water. If I think of Phoenix as an example, big growth from a population perspective, there needs to be a lot more treatment, pump plants, etc., getting that water to those areas. Free cash flow, the expectation is 80% cash conversion. I know the foundry had required some incremental inventory or now starting to work that through, but can you talk about working capital expectations as well as your CapEx for this year and maybe long term? Are there any major projects coming now that the foundry is complete? Yeah. If I take the CapEx question first, then we guide $45-$50 million of CapEx this year. We typically are going to be sub 4% of sales. We do have highly vertically integrated. We do have foundries which are capital intensive from a maintenance perspective. Then from an inventory perspective, yes, we certainly added some inventory from the brass perspective as we covered growing inventory to shut down the old foundry and transfer it to the new foundry. But I also think from an inventory perspective on certain products like gate valves, hydrants, and service brass products, having a, I won't use the term elevated then, having a healthy inventory allows us to provide a competitive advantage from a sales perspective as well. So we're always balancing those two. Okay. And then priorities for free cash flow and capital allocation, your balance sheet, you're about one and a half times leverage today. It seems like a comfortable range, but priorities going forward? Yeah. So I think the M&A will be a priority. But over the last two to three years then, with all the chaos that was going on from an operational perspective and trying to get these large capital projects over the line, M&A was really put on the back burner. And I don't think any shareholder would want us to do M&A and a distraction with every other piece of chaos that was going on in the organization. But now that we've put that behind us and looking forward, yes, we need to be disciplined about our M&A. We want to find companies that are complementary to our portfolio. The challenge is always that the majority of these companies are family private owned, and it's just got a lot of timing. We have those relationships. It's a timing game. We will continue to invest capital back into the organization. The other piece would be dividends and share repurchase. Maybe just quickly as a last question, financial criteria for these acquisitions, what would be the sweet spot in terms of size for Mueller and for an acquisition? I think we're really open to all opportunities depending on what the synergy would be from that acquisition. Is there any kind of channel synergy or manufacturing synergy that we could leverage? So no real tight criteria around that right now. Yeah. And I'll just add, I think the Krausz repair products acquisition we did in 2018 was a really good example. It's a little over $40 million in annual sales, a lot of overlap in the channel. So think about the distribution channel for us, short cycle business. And so that would be a good example of a size, kind of a bolt-on acquisition for us. Well, thank you both for. Thank you. Coming to New York. Thank you very much. We appreciate your participation.