Crane Company (NYSE:CR) Q3 2023 Earnings Conference Call October 24, 2023 10:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Jason Feldman - Vice President, Treasury & Investor Relations

Max Mitchell - President & Chief Executive Officer

Rich Maue - Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Scott Deuschle - Deutsche Bank

Damian Karas - UBS

Matt Summerville - D.A. Davidson

Nathan Jones - Stifel

Operator

Greetings. Welcome to Crane Company's Third Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this conference is being recorded.

At this time, I will now turn the conference over to Jason Feldman, Vice President of Treasury and Investor Relations. Mr. Feldman, you may now begin.

Jason Feldman

Thank you, operator, and good day, everyone. Welcome to our third quarter 2023 earnings release conference call. I'm Jason Feldman, Vice President of Treasury and Investor Relations. On our call this morning, we have Max Mitchell, our President and Chief Executive Officer; and Rich Maue, our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. We’ll start off our call with a few prepared remarks, after which we will respond to questions.

Just a reminder that the comments we make on this call may include some forward-looking statements. We refer you to the cautionary language at the bottom of our earnings release and also in our annual report, 10-K and subsequent filings pertaining to forward-looking statements. Also during the call, we will be using some non-GAAP numbers, which are reconciled to the comparable GAAP numbers in tables at the end of our press release and accompanying slide presentation, both of which are available on our website at www.craneco.com in the Investor Relations section.

Now let me turn the call over to Max.

Max Mitchell

Thank you, Jason, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining the call today. Well, we delivered another impressive quarter with results again outperforming expectations. We delivered core sales growth of 9% with a 42% increase in adjusted operating profit and adjusted EPS of $1.03, with strong performance across all of our businesses.

Our performance year-to-date along with our market outlook gives us confidence to narrow our guidance range with a midpoint $0.175 higher than our prior guidance updated in July. Our revised adjusted EPS guidance range is $4.05 to $4.20.

While the comparison to last year's EPS isn't meaningful, given the recent separation, on an operational basis, our revised full year guidance reflects 7% core sales growth driving a 24% increase in adjusted segment profit. Strong core growth, along with very impressive execution on productivity and pricing initiatives deliver more than 50% operating leverage with operating profit increasing more than three times the rate of core sales growth.