Apogee Enterprises, Inc.

Good morning, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Apogee Fiscal Year 2022 Fourth Quarter Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during this session, you need to press star 1 on your telephone. I would now like to hand the conference over to your host today, Jeff Hibschen. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Catherine. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Apogee Enterprises' fiscal 2022 fourth quarter earnings call. With me today are Ty Silberhorn, Apogee's chief executive officer, and Nishit Gupta, chief financial officer. I'd like to remind everyone that there are slides to accompany today's remarks. These are available in the investor relations section of Apogee's website. During this call, we will reference certain non-GAAP financial measures. Definitions of these measures and a reconciliation to the nearest gap measures are provided in the earnings release we issued this morning. As a reminder, unless otherwise mentioned, architectural framing system segment results include the SOTA wall business unit consistent with prior quarters. Beginning with the first quarter of fiscal 2023, the SOTA wall business unit will be included in the architectural services segment. I'd like to remind everyone that our call will contain forward-looking statements. These reflect management's expectations based on currently available information. Actual results may differ materially. More information about factors that could affect Apigee's business and financial results can be found in today's press release and in our SEC filings. And with that, I'll turn the call over to you, Ty.

Thank you, Jeff, and thanks, everyone, for joining us this morning. We continue to build momentum in the fourth quarter, delivering solid results to wrap up our fiscal year. I'm proud of what our team accomplished this year, and I'm very excited to update you on our progress and how that work is shaping our fiscal 23 outlook. This morning I will touch on how we are advancing our new strategy, preview some highlights from the quarter and the full year, and comment on our solid outlook for fiscal 23. Then the sheet will provide more details on the quarter and our full year outlook. After that, we'll take your questions. Entering fiscal 22, we expected this would be a challenging year. We were embarking on a new strategic direction while managing through the pandemic and dealing with a downturn in non-residential construction. As the year progressed, cost inflation and supply chain issues were added to our list of challenges, but our team rose to take those head-on. I want to thank the entire Apogee team for their tremendous efforts. We navigated through a difficult, but in the end, a very meaningful and productive year. Through our team's work, we have set the company on a path for significant long-term improvements while also delivering near-term results that were above last year. In the fourth quarter, we continue to execute our new strategy. As a reminder, our strategy has three pillars, which are outlined on page four of our deck. First, we are working to become the economic leader in our target markets. This means growing differentiated product and service offerings, while also building competitive cost structures and more efficient operations. Our goal is to become a top margin generator in our target markets. Second, we will be an active portfolio manager. We plan to grow our best performing businesses, address the underperformers, and invest to add more differentiated things. Our overall goal is to improve our return on invested capital. Third, we will strengthen our core capabilities. We're building an operating model, processes, and systems that better support our businesses, enable greater efficiency and lower costs, and provides more scalability as we look to grow and acquire in the future. These shifts will allow us to create peak value for all stakeholders. During the year, we drove progress across all three of these pillars. Some of the highlights are listed on page six of our presentation, and I will comment on a few. We completed the realignment of framing systems, creating a more integrated business that better leverages our scale and capabilities with more clarity in how we go to market and serve customers. In architectural glass, we completed the sale of our Statesboro, Georgia facility. We exited the Velocity business, and we transitioned all remaining production to our flagship plant in Minnesota. These actions position us to pursue our strategy of focusing on premium offerings where we can differentiate and deliver higher value for customers. During the year, we also took steps to strengthen our core capabilities. We drove progress on several projects that will improve back office operations. We also added key talent across the organization. This included establishing our new transformation management office to drive stronger execution of key initiatives. We brought in a new segment president for glass with strong operation skill set and relevant business experience. And we added new leadership for our lean continuous improvement program. Our revitalized lean efforts are already having a positive impact. The initial focus was our glass segment where we are driving productivity improvements that are now beginning to show in the P&L. And we are expanding lean to other parts of the organization with an emphasis on the framing segment this year. As we move into fiscal 23, we will continue to execute our strategy through the priorities listed on slide seven of the presentation. From a broader economic perspective, the external challenges we faced in fiscal 22 are likely to persist through much of our fiscal 23. We expect continued inflation and tight markets for some raw materials, freight, and other categories. With that in mind, pricing and cost management will remain key focus areas. Additionally, our business units and procurement teams are working to ensure the supply of key raw materials. This will allow us to maintain or offer better than market service levels for our customers. Despite these headwinds, we do expect to drive meaningful margin expansion, primarily in the framing and glass segments. We will do this by securing the benefits of the restructuring and cost reduction actions we completed this year, along with continued productivity improvements through our lean efforts. Turning to active portfolio management, During our investor day, we highlighted that acquisitions would be a key part of our growth strategy. To support this, we plan to strengthen our M&A capability, adding key talent, and improving our processes for identifying, evaluating, and integrating acquisitions. We've started the work to rebuild our M&A pipeline and will continue to evaluate potential acquisitions as we move forward. For us, portfolio management is more than just buying and selling businesses. As part of managing the existing portfolio, we conducted a thorough review of the SodaWall business as we staged it to move from framing to the services segment. In recent years, SodaWall has underperformed its potential, and it generated a loss in fiscal 22. As we previously announced, SOTAWALL will move into architectural services during the first quarter of fiscal 23. We plan to fully integrate SOTAWALL with our Harmon business within architectural services. They will have a single leadership team operating with a proven business model. We expect this transition will drive significant operational improvements in the coming years and will add scale and capabilities to position architectural services for long-term growth while maintaining its position as an economic leader. We are also working to improve the sales mix in our existing businesses, increasing the portion of revenue that comes from differentiated higher margin offerings. We have had great success with this in large-scale optical, where we have consistently offered and shifted sales towards higher value products. We aim to make similar progress in architectural glass with our shift toward the premium segment of the market. And in framing systems, our new alignment enables more focus on the parts of the market where we have the strongest competitive advantages. We expect to accelerate this shift to our selling and bidding activities in both segments which will position us for additional margin expansion in fiscal 24. Our third priority is continuing to strengthen our core capabilities. We will expand our lean program and begin to build out other elements of our Apogee management system. And we'll continue to advance our enterprise transformation projects to optimize and simplify back office processes. In support of this, we plan to make further investments to add capabilities and improve productivity. Through all these efforts, we expect to make further progress toward our financial goals, improving margins, increasing return on invested capital, and positioning the company for above-market growth. This should translate into significant earnings growth in fiscal 23 and beyond. Let me close by once again thanking the Apogee team for their contributions this year. I am confident we have the right strategy, that we are executing it well, and are positioned for continued success as we move forward. With that, let me turn it over to Nasheed to provide more details on our results and the outlook. Nasheed?