Allegion plc

Good morning and welcome to the Allegiant fourth quarter 2024 earnings call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a comfort specialist by pressing star then zero on your telephone keypad. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to John Bukowinski, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Drew. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for Allegiant's fourth quarter 2024 earnings call. With me today are John Stone, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Mike Wagnus, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Allegiant. Our earnings release, which was issued earlier this morning, and the presentation, which we will refer to in today's call, are available on our website at investor.allegion.com. This call will be recorded and archived on our website. Please go to slide two. Statements made in today's call that are not historical facts are considered forward-looking statements and are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of federal securities law. Please see our most recent SEC filings for a description of some of the factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from our projections. The company assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements. Today's presentation and commentary include non-GAAP financial measures. Please refer to the reconciliation in the financial tables of our press release for further details. Please go to slide three, and I'll turn the call over to John.

Thanks, Josh. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us. Uh, Q4 marked the end to another solid year of growth and strong execution by the entire Legion team. We've demonstrated the resilience of our business model, expanded our industry leading margins and accelerated capital deployment to invest in our business and return cash to shareholders. I'm pleased with the top line growth in the fourth quarter and 2024 as a whole, especially in the Americas where we've delivered mid single digit growth for the past three quarters as comparisons have normalized. Over the past year, we have primed the portfolio and the organization to grow faster, especially as our business continues to benefit from the stability of our institutional base. We accelerated capital deployment in 2024, returning cash to shareholders and growing our business with accretive tuck-in acquisitions. Our strong cash generation, balance sheet, and pipeline of opportunities continue to position us well for future capital deployment to create long-term value for our shareholders. We're encouraged by trends in our America's non-residential business exiting 2024, and we'll share some additional market perspectives when we discuss 2025 outlook later in the call. Please go to slide four. Let's take a look at capital allocation for the full year. Allegiant marked 2024 with meaningful product launches that demonstrate our deep customer understanding and the strength of our R&D effort and market-leading brands. Throughout the year, you heard us speak to a few of these. The Schlage XE360 series, our next generation commercial electronic lock family that supports the latest credential technologies across multifamily and commercial markets. Schlage's new smart lock integration with Airbnb, which was yet another industry first for our company. And the Schlage Indication Solutions, a best in class lock portfolio that allows users to more easily see the locked or unlocked status of a door specifically designed with K-12 school security in mind. Lastly, the Von Dupern 70 series, a new product line that's leveraging more than a century of expertise in developing high-performance exit devices to meet the safe entry and egress needs of customers today. We're very proud of these and many others that you may have also heard about. Simons Voss in Germany launched AX2Go, supporting mobile smartphone-based credentials across both iOS and Android phones. And notably in Q4, Allegiant became the first security solutions provider to support mobile credentials on Wear OS by Google smartwatches. Look for more announcements like these in 2025 as Allegiant continues to build on our legacy and invest for organic growth. Allegiant executed M&A amounting to $137 million in 2024. This included five bolt-on acquisitions spanning our core markets. In Allegiant International, we added Boss Doors and Door Cuts to our portfolio, expanding how we go to market and expanding our electromechanical product portfolio. In the Americas, we added Krieger Specialty Products, Unicell Architectural, and Sauce Door Hardware, which increased the breadth of highly profitable specialty offerings in our non-residential portfolio. All of these are leveraging Allegiant's strengths, like spec writing capability and expertise, Our manufacturing distribution scale and strong customer relationships. We're very pleased with the accretive returns they bring to Allegiant. We continue to see opportunity to grow inorganically in 2025 and have entered the year with a very active pipeline. This was recently marked by our acquisition of the next door company in the United States and the announcement of our intent to acquire Lamar in Australia. We'll share more on both of these bolt-on acquisitions in our Q1 call. Allegiant continues to be a dividend paying stock and earlier this month we announced our 11th consecutive increase to our dividend. As we've shared before, you can expect our dividends to grow commensurate with earnings over the long term. Lastly, we made share repurchases in the year amounting to approximately $220 million. We remain committed to balanced, consistent capital allocation with a clear priority of investing for growth. We have an active pipeline that complements our core mechanical and electronics portfolio and leverages our channel strengths. I look forward to updating you as we progress through the year. Mike will now walk you through fourth quarter financial results.