Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Nordson Corporation's Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2021 Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand the conference over to Lara Mahoney.

Thank you. Good morning. This is Lara Mahoney, Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Communication. I'm here with Sundaram Nagarajan, our President and CEO; and Joseph Kelley, Executive Vice President and CFO. We welcome you to our conference call today, Tuesday, May 25, 2021 to report Nordson's fiscal 2021 second quarter results. You can find both our press release as well as our webcast slide presentation that we will refer to during today's call on our Web site at www.nordson.com/investors. This conference call is being broadcast live on our investor Web site, and will be available there for 14 days. There will be a telephone replay of the conference call available until Tuesday June 1. During this conference call, references to non-GAAP financial metrics will be made. A complete reconciliation of these metrics to the most comparable GAAP metric was provided in the press release issued yesterday. Before we begin, please refer to Slide 2 of our presentation, where we note that certain statements regarding our future performance that are made during this call may be forward-looking based upon Nordson's current expectations. These statements may involve a number of risks, uncertainties, and other factors as discussed in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission that could cause actual results to differ. Moving to today's agenda, on Slide 3, Naga will discuss second quarter highlights. He will then turn the call over to Joe to review sales and earnings performance for the total company and the two business segments. Joe also will talk about the balance sheet and cash flow. Naga will conclude with high-level commentary about our enterprise performance as well as our updated fiscal 2021 full year guidance. We will then be happy to take your questions. With that, I'll turn to Slide 4, and hand the call over to Naga.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining Nordson's fiscal 2021 second quarter conference call. Throughout fiscal 2020, we remained invested in what makes Nordson strong, our direct sales model and innovative position technology portfolio. We also advanced our new NBS Next growth framework, which ensures we focus our resources on the best opportunities for profitable growth. This strategy has positioned us well last year, and as the recovery continues to accelerate in 2021, it has put us in an excellent position to respond to our customers and deliver record sales, gross margin, operating profit and EBITDA during the fiscal 2021 second quarter. As the quarter progressed end market demand accelerated faster and to a greater degree than we originally anticipated, particularly in medical, electronics and industrial end markets. Nordson's dispense applications in the Industrial Precision Solutions segment benefited from the pickup in industrial end markets as well as the sustained demand for food and beverage packaging. In the Advanced Technology Solutions segment, a data centric economy where increasing demand for semiconductors and complex electronic devices drove the need for our test and inspection and fluid dispense products. We have also started to see recovery in our medical interventional solution product lines as the outpatient surgeries are beginning to increase following the COVID-19 related slowdown. Our medical businesses continues to benefit from accelerated growth of single use plastic fluid components for biopharmaceutical applications. I want to congratulate and thank the Nordson global team for achieving this record second quarter. I'm also proud of our team's dedication to meet this accelerating demand while maintaining COVID-19 safety protocols and effectively managing supply chain and capacity constraints. I'll speak more about the business in few moments. But first, I'll turn the call over to Joe to provide more detailed perspective on our financial results for the quarter.

Thank you Naga and good morning to everyone. On Slide #5, you see second quarter 2021 sales were $590 million, an increase of 11% over prior year's second quarter sales of $529 million. This double-digit growth is more than a bounce back. In fact, as Naga noted, this is a quarterly record for the company, breaking the previous record established in Q3 of 2017. The sales increase was primarily related to 10% organic volume growth, off of a relatively strong Q2 2020 performance. Favorable foreign currency and the net negative impact from acquisitions and divestitures. The benefits from the Fluortek and vivaMOS acquisitions were more than offset by the negative headwinds from the divestiture of the screws and barrels product line. When excluding the divested product line in the prior year for comparability purposes, sales growth would have been 15% in the current year second quarter. Robust growth in electronics and consumer non-durable end markets as well as strengthening medical and industrial end markets were the primary drivers of this performance. From a geographic perspective, growth was strong in all regions except Japan, which has been more heavily impacted by shutdowns related to the pandemic. Gross profit totaled $338 million or 57% of sales in the quarter compared to $290 million, or 55% of sales in the prior year. This 260 basis point increase in gross margin was driven by the combination of improved sales mix, volume leverage and benefits from structural cost reduction measures taken in fiscal 2020. The divested screws and barrels product line at the beginning of the fiscal second quarter was a significant contributor to the improved sales mix. It is noteworthy that a gross margin of 57% is a new quarterly company record. Also records in the quarter were operating profit of $166 million or…

Thank you, Joe. Let's turn to Slide 9. Again, thank you to the Nordson team for delivering this outstanding performance in the quarter. We hosted an Investor Day on March 30 to detail our long-term plans for making a strong Nordson even stronger. If you did not have a chance to participate in our Investor Day, the replay of the event is available on our Web site. Now, I'd like to summarize a few highlights. First and foremost, we describe the strong growth drivers enabling Nordson's future profitable growth performance, including diverse end markets, new applications and emerging markets. While our growth drivers are unique to each of our divisions, the diversity of our end markets and the high-level of recurring revenue made us resilient through fiscal 2020 and our strengthening in fiscal 2021 results. At our Investor Day, we also reiterated our commitment to innovation, one of Norton's key competitive advantages. Our customer intimate model gives us insight to the needs of our customers, and we develop our product roadmap as an enabler of their new technologies. In the presentation, we highlighted two of our newest products, the ProBlue Flex melter for packaging customers, and the new Vantage integrated dispense and automation system, which is the first fully integrated wafer handling system designed for the semiconductor industry. In both cases, these new products are advancing automation, reducing cost and accelerating productivity. Both products contributed to record sales in the quarter. To make a strong Nordson even stronger, we also spoke to the new competencies that we are building, notably the NBS Next growth framework. This data driven framework is driving our decision making. We are already starting to see the benefits of our deployment of NBS Next. Last year, we announced structural cost reductions that were based on our…

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from the line of Allison Poliniak with Wells Fargo.

The next question comes from the line of Saree Boroditsky with Jefferies.

The next question comes from the line of Connor Lynagh with Morgan Stanley.

The next question comes from the line of Jeff Hammond with KeyBanc Capital Markets.

The next question comes from the line of Mike Halloran with Baird.

The next question comes from the line of Chris Dankert with Longbow Research.

The next question comes from the line of Matt Summerville with D.A. Davidson.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from the line of Christopher Glynn with Oppenheimer.

The next question comes from the line of Andrew Buscaglia with Berenberg.

The final question comes from the line of Walt Liptak with Seaport Global Research.

I will now turn the call back over to Naga for closing remarks.

All right. Thank you. I want to reiterate that we are well-positioned to benefit from the accelerating recovery, and our position technologies remain a critical solution to our customers through the cycle ahead. Additionally, our management team is fully engaged in advancing the implementation of the Ascend Strategy, which will establish a growth framework, entrepreneurial organization and a deepened a diverse team to drive sustainable profitable growth. Thank you for your time and attention on today's call. Have a great day.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.