Business Description

Overview — MSA Safety Incorporated (the "Company" or "MSA") is the global leader in advanced safety products, technology and solutions. Driven by its singular mission of safety, the Company has been at the forefront of safety innovation since 1914, protecting workers and facility infrastructure around the world across a broad range of diverse end markets while creating sustainable value for shareholders. The Company's comprehensive product line, which is governed by rigorous safety standards across highly regulated industries, is used to protect workers and facility infrastructures around the world in a broad range of markets, including fire service, energy, utility, construction, and industrial manufacturing applications as well as heating, ventilation, air conditioning and refrigeration ("HVAC-R"). The Company's principal product categories are detection, fire service and industrial personal protective equipment ("PPE"). In addition to its principal product categories, MSA continues to deploy and grow its MSA+™ ecosystem, its turnkey approach to MSA hardware, software, and services to simplify and improve safety operations for customers while delivering recurring revenue. The Company’s leading market positions across various products in our portfolio are supported and enabled by a strong commitment to investing in new product development that continually raises the bar for safety equipment performance, all while upholding an unwavering commitment to integrity. We dedicate significant resources to research and development, which allows us to produce innovative safety products and solutions that are often first to market and usually protected by intellectual property. Our global product development teams include cross-functional associates throughout the Company, including research and development, marketing, sales, operations and quality management. Our engineers and technical associates work closely with the safety industry’s leading standards-setting groups and trade associations to develop industry-specific product standards and to anticipate their impact on our product line. We leverage the MSA Business System ("MBS") to develop and introduce innovative safety solutions, secure new business opportunities, and operate with greater efficiency. The MBS is our approach to working at our best - at our most efficient and most empowered. It is a combination of behaviors, processes and tools that provide a framework to run the business and continuously improve. We strive to serve our customers and help them solve their safety and compliance challenges while creating value for our shareholders. As part of our differentiated development process, we embed ourselves with our customers to deeply understand their processes, pain points and desired outcomes. Our commitment to MBS has enabled us to drive customer satisfaction and profitable growth while generating significant improvements in operating results. Segments — We tailor our product and solution offerings and distribution strategy to satisfy distinct customer preferences that vary across geographic regions. To best serve these customer preferences, we have organized our business into four geographic operating segments that are aggregated into two