Nextpower Inc.

At this time, for opening remarks, I would like to pass the call over to Mary Lai, Vice President of Investor Relations. Mary, you may begin.

Thank you and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to NextTracker's fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2024 earnings call. I'm Mary Lai, Vice President of Investor Relations. I'm joined by Dan Sugar, our CEO and founder, Howard Wenger, our president, and Dave Bennett, our CFO. Following our prepared remarks, we will transition to a Q&A session. As a reminder, there will be a replay of this call posted on the IR website, along with our slides and press release. Today's call contains statements regarding our business, financial performance, and operations, including the impact of our business and industry that may be considered forward-looking statements, and such statements involve risks and certainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations. Those statements, are based on current beliefs, assumptions, and expectations, and speak only as of the current date. For more information on those risks and uncertainties, please review our earnings press release slides and our SEC filings, including our most recently filed Form 10-Q, which are available on our IR website at investors.nexttracker.com. This information is subject to change, and we undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements as a result of new information, future events, or changes in our expectations. Please note, we will provide GAAP and non-GAAP measures on today's call. The full non-GAAP to GAAP reconciliations can be found in the appendix to the press release, the slides of today's presentation, as well as the financial section of the IR website. And now, I will turn the call over to our CEO and founder.

Dan? Thank you, Mary. Welcome to our fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2024 earnings call. Fiscal year 24 was a fantastic year for Nextracker and the solar industry. As I reflect on the past year and what's before us, it's increasingly clear that solar will continue to be the leading choice for new power generation, and Nextracker will continue leading solar trackers and system solutions. Our accomplishments last year significantly advanced our mission to be the most trusted and valued renewable energy company by delivering intelligent, reliable, and productive solar power. Nextracker's DNA is about meeting or exceeding expectations with our customers and all stakeholders, including investors. Our results for the last fiscal year reflect that. And Q4 is our fourth consecutive quarter of beating our revenue and profit targets. In Q4, Strong execution by Team Next Tracker enabled us to achieve record revenue, profits, and backlog. Revenue grew 40% year-on-year to $737 million. We also doubled our adjusted EBITDA year-over-year to $160 million, and this excludes significant IRA 45X tax credit benefits. In the quarter, both U.S. and international deliveries beat expectations. We reached record international revenue in Q4 of $242 million, nearly a 90% increase year-over-year. And we reported our fifth consecutive quarter of year-over-year double-digit revenue growth. Looking at our fiscal year, Nextracker achieved strong execution and significant growth. We accelerated revenue profits and cash flow to record levels. Equally important, we increased our pace of innovation and products, expanded our global supply chain, and our talented global team. We exited the year with $2.5 billion in revenue, an increase of over 30% from prior year, and more than doubled adjusted EBITDA to $521 million. Our growth was enabled by relentless focus on exceeding customer expectations through innovation, execution, and customer service. Moving to our new contracted bookings, strong sales momentum globally resulted in a new record backlog of over $4 billion. Backlog increased more than 50% from last year's $2.6 billion and tripled over the last two years. As always, our backlog is defined to a strict standard of executed contracts or purchase orders with deposits, bills of material, and ship dates. for specific projects. With robust backlog exiting fiscal 24, we're introducing annual guidance for next year. For the full fiscal year 25, we expect revenue to be in the range of $2.8 to $2.9 billion and adjusted EBITDA in the range of $600 to $650 million, approximately 20% year-over-year growth at the midpoint. Dave will share more on guidance. We're thrilled to announce we have reached a new company milestone of 100 gigawatts shipped since inception. 100 gigawatts of power is twice the peak load of the state of California, the world's sixth largest economy. While we are the first U.S. solar company to achieve the milestone of 100 gigawatts shipped, we view this accomplishment as a win for the entire clean power industry as well as NextTracker. We're also pleased to announce that we have successfully expanded our global supply chain to over 50 gigawatts annually with US capacity at over 30 gigawatts annually. Expanding our global supply chain footprint has been instrumental to scaling the business. We now have over 80 major suppliers strategically located across five continents to support our growth. In the U.S., we played a key role in revitalizing domestic manufacturing by enabling domestic production in 20 new or expanded partner facilities since 2021. About two years ago, for example, we inaugurated a new facility in Pittsburgh with JM Steel. Just last month, we celebrated the expansion of the same facility with JM Steel and tripling annual capacity. Today, we are in an excellent strategic position globally with manufacturing partners operating more than 80 facilities with bespoke Nextracker-dedicated production equipment in many of them. We're raising the bar even higher. Just a few weeks ago, we launched the industry's first low-carbon tracker solution with up to 35% lower carbon footprint and announced sales orders from leading customers. Initially offered in the United States, The low-carbon tracker solution includes lifecycle assessment documentation using third-party verified analysis of environmental benefits. Nextracker also achieved a carbon footprint label certification issued by the Carbon Trust for our NX Horizon low-carbon tracker. And we've doubled down on innovation. Over the last two years, we've doubled our R&D investments to drive product development and allow for global expansion. Fiscal 24 was a key investment year as we built out product groups, program management teams, sales and engineering teams. We also began a third global R&D center for solar excellence in India, complementing our existing R&D facilities in Brazil and headquarters in Silicon Valley. These centers all have dedicated labs and teams co-located with field testing and piloting of products and solutions. And finally, We've trained over 1,000 solar workers in five of our PowerWorks training academies around the world. Our training programs include tracker installation, commissioning, and operations and maintenance. This is a value-added service for our EPCs, owners, and developers, and we're helping elevate the solar sector with skilled workers. We believe our technologies, protected by over 500 issued and pending patents, enable our customers to achieve the best financial returns because they operate at the lowest levelized cost of energy. We further believe this is achieved because our systems generate more energy and are lower cost to operate and lower risk across a wide range of extreme weather, including wind, hail, and flooding. We also recognize that our activities can have an impact on the environment. In our recently published environmental policy, we outline our commitment to managing operations in an environmentally responsible manner. Providing a safe workplace for our people and our partners is one of our core values, which is why I'm pleased that we earned the ISO 45001 certification for our safety management system during the fiscal year, achieving the latest global occupational health and safety accreditation. We'll now provide a market update. Solar deployments continue to accelerate in most of the world because solar is the lowest cost option for new power. As covered on our last call, the U.S. Energy Information Administration is forecasting solar to be the fastest growing energy technology with a 26% compound annual growth over the next five years and becoming the number one energy source within a decade. Next Tracker's history of 30% CAGR over the last five years reflects favorably on the EIA forecasts, as does our strong backlog. On prior earnings calls, we've had questions regarding sector headwinds and interconnection permitting in other areas. We noted that these headwinds can be real for any given project or customer, but that the total universe of projects and customers has grown such that in totality, the market continues strong growth. We thought it would be helpful to put some numbers to that using our largest market, which is the U.S. In our slides, you will find analysis from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley Labs that pulls source data from U.S. independent system operators related to the U.S. pipeline. The result is that solar totally dominates plant power with 60% of the current Q positions. Nearly 7,000 solar projects have Q positions in the U.S., with solar and solar plus storage comprising about 1,500 gigawatts of new capacity. For context, the new solar and solar plus storage projects have more total capacity than the entire existing U.S. power generation sector. This Q position analysis by DOE provides graphic proof that solar and storage are leading the U.S. energy transition. Solar dwarfs Q positions for natural gas by an astounding factor of 25 times. And there are zero new nuclear or coal plants in the queue. This trend is not a strictly U.S. phenomenon, rather a trend of multiple regions globally. Solar is leading global energy capacity additions, and solar economics have never been more favorable. As the world transitions to renewable energy, Nextracker is increasingly well positioned in the solar power ecosystem to drive growth. Now, I'll turn the call over to Howard Wenger, our president, to expand on our commercial progress and products.