You are given a text that consists of multiple sentences. Your task is to perform abstractive summarization on this text. Use your understanding of the content to express the main ideas and crucial details in a shorter, coherent, and natural sounding text. 
Text: I am Jason Feldman, Vice President of Investor Relations.
After which, we will respond to questions.
craneco.com in the Investor Relations section.
We finished the second quarter with record adjusted earnings per share from continuing operations of $1.83, up 205% compared to last year and record adjusted operating margins of 17.6%.
We delivered core sales growth of 19% with a number of strong leading indicators reflected in core order growth of 45% and core backlog growth of 7% compared to last year.
Based on this performance, we are raising our adjusted earnings per share from continuing operations guidance by $0.30 to a range of $5.95 to $6.15, which is effectively our fourth guidance increase so far this year.
Please allow me to take a moment to put this in perspective.
The midpoint of the updated guidance at $6.05 is above our prior peak pre-COVID adjusted earnings per share of $6.02 in 2019.
While we expect to exceed that $6.02 prior peak this year, there are some notable differences this year compared to 2019.
In particular, the $6.02 in 2019 included earnings from Engineered Materials, which is now classified as discontinued operations and excluded from our 2021 guidance.
As we have mentioned previously, this is about $0.44 of earnings per share now excluded in discontinued ops.
Further, most of our end markets are still in the very early stages of recovery and remained well below their pre-COVID peak levels.
The only real exceptions to this are Crane Currency and our defense business.
And thinking about 2022 and beyond, it is worth noting that the commercial side of our Aerospace & Electronics business will still be almost $200 million below 2019 levels this year and a recovery to pre-COVID levels in this business alone would add more than $1 per share to EPS.
At Payment & Merchandising Technologies, the core non-currency business will be slightly more than $200 million below pre-COVID levels, with more than half of that amount in our very high margin core Payment Solutions business.
Throughout the recovery and beyond, this business will continue to benefit from very favorable long-term macro drivers, helping our customers drive productivity and security by automating the payment and transaction process, with many of those trends strengthening with ongoing labor shortages and wage inflation.
And in Process Flow Technologies, we are just beginning to see an inflection to positive core growth on the process side of the business over the last month or two.
And while sales growth has just barely inflected positive, we haven't had a backlog in our process valve business this high since 2014 and sales will certainly follow.
So, how are we driving earnings above 2019 levels without a full market recovery yet?
Message is the same, execution on our growth initiatives, together with the consistent cadence and discipline of the Crane Business System to drive growth, productivity and cost savings.
And as mentioned many times before, we have delivered on margins and free cash flow while maintaining 100% of our investments in strategic growth initiatives throughout the entirety of the pandemic, because of their importance in our ability to sustainably drive long-term, profitable growth.
These initiatives will continue to drive above market growth.
Paired with the market recovery and our consistent execution, we are very excited about our growth prospects, strong top line growth, solid operating leverage driving substantial growth in free cash flow, credibly delivering on expectations.
I discussed at our February Investor Day event how Crane was at an inflection point for accelerating growth after years of organic investments and consistently excellent execution.
In the first quarter, you saw substantial evidence of that inflection and the related themes from Investor Day reading through.
At our May Aerospace & Electronics investor event, we showed you numerous examples of how we continue to effectively drive above-market growth, expecting 7% to 9% compound average growth over the next 10 years.
Also in May, we announced the sale of Engineered Materials as part of our strategic portfolio management process to increase our overall growth profile while continuing our simplification journey.
And today, you can see even more evidence of that inflection in our core sales growth as well as in our leading indicators, including orders and backlog.
Consistently executing on our investor thesis, that is, we are well positioned for accelerating organic growth as our end-markets continue to recover.
We are outgrowing our end-markets because of our consistent and ongoing investment in technology, new product development and commercial excellence.
Solid execution continues to leverage that growth into earnings and strong free cash generation, which creates substantial flexibility for capital deployment and continued evidence of the value we create through acquisitions with stellar performance at Crane Currency, Cummins Allison and I&S.
Inflection, we have clear momentum with increasing traction from our growth initiatives.
We will continue to generate substantial and sustainable value for all our stakeholders.
At Aerospace & Electronics, sales of $158 million were flat with the prior year.
Adjusted segment margins, however, improved 420 basis points to 19.6%.
In the quarter, total aftermarket sales turned positive, growing 3% after a 29% decline in aftermarket sales last quarter.
Commercial OE sales increased 4% in the quarter after a 32% decline last quarter.
Defense OE sales declined 4% in the quarter and are flat on a year-to-date basis.
We continue to believe that the fourth quarter of last year marked the trough for both sales and margins at Aerospace & Electronics.
We expect sales to continue to improve slightly on a sequential basis throughout the rest of this year as the pace of the recovery continues to improve and our expected timing of a recovery to pre-COVID levels continues to get pulled forward.
More specifically, we are seeing North American airlines bring a substantial number of aircraft back into service to meet expected domestic demand levels, with the in-service fleet now at about 90% of mid-2019 levels.
On the international side, traffic continues to improve, albeit a little more slowly, with substantial room for recovery-further recovery as global ASKs are now a little better than 50% of 2019 levels.
In general, pent-up demand will drive recovery faster than expected as COVID restrictions continue to ease.
And our confidence in our outlook for this business is about more than just a market recovery.
We are seeing accelerating growth resulting from consistent and continued investment in technology.
Our growth investments over the last decade have not wavered and we are seeing the benefits of those investments today.
These investments also continue to expand our addressable market and align our business with accelerating secular trends, most notably electrification.
And we are delivering on truly breakthrough innovations that are critical enablers to our customers' growth strategies and that are transforming the growth trajectory of our business, really exciting opportunities in our power conversion business, sensing and fluid and thermal management.
Taken together, and as we explained at our Aerospace Investor Day in May, we expect a long-term overall compound annual growth rate of 7% to 9% through 2030.
Process Flow Technologies sales of $311 million increased 30% driven by a 22% increase in core sales and an 8% benefit from favorable foreign exchange.
Process Flow Technologies operating profit increased by 83% to $49 million.
Adjusted operating margins increased 450 basis points to 15.7%, reflecting the higher volumes, strong execution and benefits from last year's cost actions.
Sequentially, trends improved across the board with FX-neutral backlog up 5% and FX-neutral orders up 8%.
Compared to last year, FX-neutral backlog increased 11% and FX-neutral core orders increased 28%.
During the first quarter, order growth was strongest in our short-cycle commercial business.
However, orders at our core process business inflected positive on a year-over-year basis in March and that trend continued throughout the second quarter.
We are also seeing clear evidence of improving end demand and in some cases, the start of released pent-up demand.
We expect the recovery to be led heavily by the chemical end market, which is continuing to show signs of strengthening around the world.
And remember that the chemical market is our most important market, where we have the strongest position and the most differentiated offering, and generated more than 35% of sales on the process side of this business.
We are seeing continued strength in MRO sales, and project activity is clearly picking up for necessary debottlenecking activities as well as larger capacity expansions, particularly for specialty chemical applications.
We are seeing this most significantly right now in the United States and China with Europe projects likely to pick up next year.
General industrial activity has also strengthened but primarily in the United States.
Conventional power and oil and gas markets remain fairly sluggish.
However, remember that collectively, upstream oil and gas and conventional power are a small part of this business and less than 10% of segment sales.
As orders convert to sales in these core process markets later this year and into 2022, we expect very strong operating leverage.
For the shorter-cycle non-residential and municipal end markets, we are seeing a continuation of the strength that we saw during the first quarter.
For Process Flow Technologies overall, our outlook continues to improve.
We now expect high single-digit core sales growth, with approximately 5% of favorable foreign exchange on a full year basis.
Full year margins should be somewhere between where they were in the first and second quarters.
At Payment & Merchandising Technologies, sales of $328 million in the quarter increased 31% compared to the prior year driven by 26% core sales growth and a 5% benefit from favorable foreign exchange.
Our Currency business core sales increased in the mid-teens range with the Crane Payment Innovations business inflecting to a positive 34% of core growth, but still well below pre-COVID levels.
Segment operating profit increased 285% to $78 million.
Adjusted operating margins increased 1,500 basis points to 23.7%.
Really impressive performance again in the quarter, as expected, and now with our legacy payment business beginning to contribute meaningfully, paired with the ongoing superior performance at Crane Currency.
For the payment business, with the phased economic reopening, we continued to see very strong growth in the gaming and retail end markets.
And during the second quarter, vending started to recover as well.
Transportation, particularly parking, remained softer, although we have seen some substantial fare collection project activity during the quarter.
At Crane Currency, we continue to see strength in both the domestic and international markets, and we continue to gain share both with our technology and bank note offerings.
As we explained last quarter, we do expect margins to moderate further over the course of the year given timing and mix, with full year margins likely toward the high-end of our long-term target of 18% to 22%, with core sales growth this year now approaching mid-teens with a 4% favorable foreign exchange benefit.
And like our high-margin Aerospace business, the recovery has just begun at payment-Crane Payment Innovations.
Turning now to more detail on our total company results and guidance, we had extremely strong cash flow performance in the quarter, generating $141 million in free cash flow compared to $102 million in the second quarter of last year.
Year-to-date, free cash flow was $184 million compared to $62 million last year.
During the second quarter, we also received approximately $9 million from the sale of a property in Arizona following receipt of $15 million last quarter from the sale of another property.
These proceeds are excluded from free cash flow given required classification as an investing activity.
However, one of these sales was directly enabled by our ongoing restructuring efforts as we moved operations from this facility to other locations.
And the other reflects our proactive approach to identify underutilized assets.
Since 2017, we have received proceeds from real estate and other asset sales made possible by restructuring activities of approximately $56 million, which means that much of our restructuring has been self-funded.
As a reminder, on May 24, we announced that we had signed an agreement to sell our Engineered Materials segment for $360 million.
That process is ongoing, and we continue to work on obtaining regulatory approvals.
When the transaction closes, we expect proceeds, net of tax, to be approximately $320 million.
Our balance sheet is in extremely good shape.
During the second quarter, we repaid the term loan originated in April of 2020 in full using cash on hand and some commercial paper.
As we discussed in May, we believe we will have approximately $1 billion of M&A capacity by the end of this year.
Valuations today are quite lofty, and we will remain disciplined.
But I am confident that over time, we will continue to find attractive transactions where we can deploy our capital to create value for shareholders.
We will also maintain discipline about our balance sheet efficiency.
During periods where acquisitions are less actionable, we will consider returning excess cash to shareholders rather than maintaining an efficient-inefficient balance sheet.
However, over the long term, we continue to believe that we will be able to add the most value through acquisitions.
The adjusted tax rate in the quarter was 18.4%, which included an excess tax benefit of approximately $4 million or $0.07 per share related to stock options exercised during the quarter.
For the full year, we now expect an adjusted tax rate of 20.5% rather than the previous 21% guidance.
As Max explained, we are raising our adjusted earnings per share guidance by $0.30 to a range of $5.95 to $6.15, reflecting the strong second quarter performance and our expectation that end markets and execution will be ahead of where we forecasted them earlier this year.
Remember that our original guidance for 2021 was $4.90 to $5.10, and that guidance included $0.44 of earnings contribution from Engineered Materials.
That means we have effectively raised guidance about $1.50 on an operational basis since the beginning of the year.
While uncertainty remains related to COVID variants and sporadic supply chain constraints, overall we have a high level of confidence in our revised guidance based on our team's outstanding performance, driving incremental price and proactively and effectively managing inflation and their supply chain.
Our revised guidance also reflects the same cadence of earnings progression we have discussed since the beginning of the year.
Specifically, we continue to expect a step-down in earnings per share next quarter given timing and with fourth quarter following its usual pattern as the seasonally weakest quarter across most of our businesses.
Our revised guidance assumes core sales growth of 7% to 9%, which is 200 basis points higher than our prior May 24 guidance.
Favorable foreign exchange is also now expected to contribute 3.5%, up 100 basis points from late May.
Free cash flow guidance was increased to $320 million to $350 million, up $20 million from prior guidance, reflecting higher earnings and slightly lower capex at $70 million.
Corporate expense is now expected to be $80 million, up $3 million compared to prior guidance.
Overall, an excellent year continuing to unfold with outstanding execution from all of our teams driving exceptional results, growth, margins, free cash flow and we remain excited about continued tailwinds in 2022 and 2023 as end markets continue to recover.
Operator, we are now ready to take our first question.

user
crane co raises 2021 earnings per share guidance.
q2 earnings per share $1.83 from continuing operations excluding items.
raises fy earnings per share view to $5.95 to $6.15 from continuing operations excluding items.
raises fy gaap earnings per share view to $6.05 to $6.25 from continuing operations.
revised fy guidance assumes core sales growth of +7% to +9%.

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