Exponent Inc 2026 Q3 Earnings Call

Please go ahead. Thank you, operator.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining us on Exponent's Third Quarter 2026 Financial Results Conference Call. Please note that this call will be simultaneously webcast on the investor relations section of the company's corporate website at www.exponent.com/investors. This conference call is the property of Exponent, and any taping or other reproduction is expressly prohibited without prior written consent. Joining me on the call today are Dr. Catherine Corrigan, Chief Executive Officer, Dr. John Pye, President, Rich Schlenker, Executive Vice President, and Eric Anderson, Chief Financial Officer. Before we start, I would like to remind you that the following discussion contains forward-looking statements, including but not limited to Exponent's market opportunities and future financial results that involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed here.

Additional information that could cause actual results to differ from forward-looking statements can be found in Exponent's periodic SEC filings, including those factors discussed under the caption Risk Factor in Exponent's most recent Form 10-Q. The forward-looking statements and risks in this conference call are based on current expectations as of today, and Exponent assumes no obligation to update or revise them, whether as a result of new developments or otherwise. Now I will turn the call over to Dr. Catherine Corrigan, Chief Executive Officer.

Kathryn? Thank you, Joni, and thank you everyone for joining us today.

I will start off by reviewing our third quarter 2026 business performance. John will then share his perspective on innovation and market trends, and Eric will then provide a more detailed review of our financial results and outlook, and we will then open the call for questions. Before I get into our results, I want to thank those of you who joined us in Phoenix last month for our first Investor Day. We focused that day on a theme that is increasingly central to our business, the convergence of technology, infrastructure, and humans, and the opportunities for Exponent that emerge where they intersect. For those of you who were not able to join us, you can view the non-demonstration portions of the Investor Day on the investor section of Exponent's website.

Our goal in Phoenix was not simply to tell you what makes Exponent different, but to bring that differentiation to life and to make it memorable. In many ways, our third quarter results provide another illustration of that story. Exponent delivered a strong third quarter with double-digit growth in revenues and earnings, reflecting continued demand for our specialized integrated engineering and scientific expertise. User research continued to be a strong contributor to our growth, and importantly, that work continues to broaden across clients, products, and real-world environments. We also saw growth on top of a strong prior year quarter in disputes, failure analysis, and product safety-related work across chemicals, consumer products, and transportation. While these engagements span broad areas of our business, they increasingly reflect the same underlying forces we discussed at our Investor Day.

Technology is advancing rapidly, becoming more deeply embedded in physical products and systems, and interacting with people in increasingly complex and consequential ways. We see that convergence particularly clearly in our user research work. As organizations bring new technologies to market, they increasingly need to understand not only whether the technology works, but how it performs when people actually use it in the real world. That is making our studies both more diverse and more technically complex. Wearable devices, for example, are becoming much more sophisticated. A watch cannot directly measure many of the health variables we care about. Instead, it measures signals that it can directly access at the wrist and increasingly uses sophisticated analytics and machine learning to make predictions about things like cardiovascular health. That raises a much more complex question than whether the sensor itself works.

Can those predictions be trusted as a basis for health decisions? Answering that question requires novel methodologies, benchmarking performance against clinical reference standards, and an understanding of how performance changes across different people and real-world conditions. In consumer electronics, we are increasingly evaluating technology outside of controlled environments. Device users may be riding a bike or driving a car or navigating an airport. Our work in sensory perception is also expanding, analyzing how devices communicate information when users are already processing a complex physical environment. These are not simply questions about a device or algorithm. They are questions about the interaction among technology, human behavior, and the physical world. Answering them takes a broader mix of expertise and requires us to design novel ways to measure both human performance and device behavior, and then interpret the results within the safety, regulatory, and business context our clients face.

We see a similar convergence from a different vantage point when products and systems do not perform as intended. During the quarter, we saw increased dispute and failure analysis work across consumer products, chemicals, and transportation. In consumer products, this helped clients assess potential and actual product recalls tied to safety concerns as expectations from consumers, regulators, and society continue to rise. As the race to embed AI into physical systems accelerates, the interaction among software, hardware, materials, human behavior, and the surrounding environment becomes more complex. A single product safety investigation, for example, can bring together thermal scientists, mechanical engineers, and materials and polymer experts working together as one team. This is where Exponent's differentiated position stands out. In transportation, we continue to see increased failure analysis work related to advanced driver assistance systems, another area where sophisticated technology must interact reliably with people and the physical environment.

In chemicals, we saw increased demand for dispute work tied to chemicals of concern, where evolving science, regulation, and societal expectations are creating increasingly complex questions for our clients. Across all these matters, the underlying need is remarkably consistent. Clients need confidence that increasingly complex products, technologies, and infrastructure will perform safely and reliably in the real world. When they fall short, the consequences of failure are high, and they rely on Exponent for independent, evidence-based analysis and expert judgment that can withstand scrutiny, whether in a courtroom, before a regulator, or in the boardroom. That is why the people and capabilities we highlighted at our Investor Day really matter. We showed you firsthand what sets us apart, our integrated ecosystem of highly talented scientists and engineers, and our ability to bring the right combination of expertise together to solve complex, high-consequence challenges.

I would now like to turn it over to our President, John Pye, to share his perspective on how AI is moving into the physical world and where he sees innovation heading across our markets.

John? Thank you, Catherine. At Investor Day, we described AI as a stack with five layers.

Starting at the bottom, with the electrons that power everything, the chips, the data centers that house them, the models, and at the top, the applications where AI interprets and acts on the physical world. Exponent has work at every layer of this stack. We draw upon our 60 years of science and engineering experience to help our clients extract the highest level of reliability out of supply chains that are under immense stress, delivering traditional products like generators, connectors, cables, even the concrete going into the buildings that make up a data center. We are also helping those same clients deliver the innovative products that stretch the performance of technology in things like denser network switches and advanced cooling systems.