Itron, Inc.

Good day, everyone, and welcome to the ITRON, Inc. first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. Today's call is being recorded. For opening remarks, I'd like to turn the call over to Mr. Ken Gianella. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, operator. Good morning and welcome to ITRON's first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. We issued a press release earlier today announcing our results. The press release includes replay information about today's call. A presentation to accompany our remarks on this call is also available through the webcast and on our corporate website under the Investor Relations tab. On the call today, we have Tom Dietrich, ITRON's President and Chief Executive Officer, and Joan Hooper, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Following our prepared remarks, we will open the call to take questions using the process the operator described. Before I turn the call over to Tom, please let me remind you of our non-GAAP financial presentation and our safe harbor statement. Our earnings release and financial presentation include non-GAAP financial information that we believe enhances the overall understanding of our current and future performance. Reconciliation of differences between GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures are available in our earnings release and on our investor relations website. We will be making statements during this call that are forward-looking. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially from these expectations because of factors that were presented in today's earnings release and the comments made during this conference call and in the risk factor section of our Form 10-K and other reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. All company comments, estimates, or forward-looking statements are made in a good-faith attempt to provide appropriate insight to our current and future operating and financial environment. Materials discussed today May 2nd, 2022, may materially change and we do not undertake any duty to update any of our forward-looking statements. Now, please turn to page four in the presentation and I'll turn the call over to our CEO, Tom Dietrich.

Thank you, Ken. Good morning and thank you for joining us. You will hear first quarter details from Joan coming up shortly, but I would like to provide a brief overview of the quarter. Revenue and was $475 million, adjusted EBITDA was $19 million, non-GAAP earnings per share was 11 cents, and free cash flow was $2 million. Turning to slide five, our first quarter bookings were $417 million with an approximate book-to-bill ratio of 0.9. While some quarter-to-quarter lumpiness in bookings is expected, we are still targeting at least a one-to-one book-to-bill ratio for the year. Total backlog remains near record levels at approximately $3.9 billion, excluding approximately $60 million of backlog associated with the sale of our non-communicating mechanical CNI gas business that we completed in the first quarter. Our 12-month backlog continues to grow steadily and is now up to a new record of approximately $1.6 billion, primarily driven by our network solutions and outcomes segments. Turning to slide six, I will now provide some operational insights on the first quarter. As I mentioned previously, we closed the sale of our non-communicating mechanical CNI business on February 28th. This is another proof point of the execution of our strategy as we steadily progress our business up the pyramid towards higher-valued networked and outcome-centric solutions and optimize our manufacturing footprint to an asset-light model. Market demand for ITRON's solution continues to be very healthy as utilities look to address aging infrastructure and future-proof themselves by preparing for the proliferation of electric vehicles, increasing visibility and control of the grid for distributed generation and renewables, and enhancing grid security, resiliency, and reliability. ITRON continues to be a leader in helping our customers through this dynamic environment as is evident with our distributed intelligence-enabled endpoints, which have grown cumulatively to over 4.2 million units, running millions of applications in the field. The distributed intelligence endpoints, combined with our suite of grid optimizer solutions, provide advanced grid management capabilities that will address significant customer needs, but also are important growth vectors for our outcomes business. We are extremely pleased with the current market demand for our solutions, and we remain steadfast in our strategy. However, as we stated in our last earnings call, we anticipate that semiconductor supply constraints and inflationary pressures will continue to impact our operations well into 2022. In the first quarter, we estimate the supply constraints limited our revenue by over $100 million, with the vast majority of that impacting our network solutions segments. As discussed in prior quarters, we have experienced no cancellations or loss of customers. We are actively addressing the temporal challenges of a supply-limited inflationary environment. We continue to drive efforts to overcome supply chain shortages and improve factory utilization. We are also working multiple initiatives to mitigate inflationary pressures with ongoing price-cost actions combined with a disciplined approach to discretionary spending. I am proud of our team's efforts to overcome these operational headwinds that have had significant impact on our current period financials. I will now hand off to Joan to cover our first quarter results in more detail.