A.O. Smith Corporation

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the A.O. Smith First Quarter 2021 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Ms. Patricia Ackerman. Please go ahead.

Thank you, May. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the A.O. Smith First Quarter Results Conference Call. I am Pat Ackerman, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations, Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability, and our Treasurer. Joining me today are Kevin Wheeler, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Chuck Lauber, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin with Kevin's remarks, I would like to remind you that some of the comments that will be made during this conference call, including answers to your questions, will constitute forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks that could cause actual results to be materially different. Those risks include, among others, matters that we have described in this morning's press release. Also as a courtesy to others in the question queue, please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up per turn. If you have multiple questions, please rejoin the queue. I will now turn the call over to Kevin, who will begin our prepared remarks on slide three.

Thank you, Pat. Our global A.O. Smith team delivered first quarter EPS of $0.60 on a 21% increase in sales, demonstrating solid execution despite pandemic and weather-related challenges in our supply chain and operations. along with rapidly rising material costs. I greatly appreciate the diligence of our team to keep each other healthy and safe. Outside of India, where COVID-19 cases have recently surged, I am pleased that we have experienced steady improvement in this area since the beginning of the year. North America water treatment grew 12%, driven by continued consumer demand for home improvement products, which provide safe drinking water in the home. The direct-to-consumer channel with our Aquasano brand and the dealer channel contributed to solid growth to start 2021. Boiler sales grew 12% as we have seen strong demand, particularly within commercial boilers, as a result of completed projects carried over from 2020, as well as a resilient replacement demand. Our volumes of US tank residential water heaters declined in the first quarter due to weather disruptions at our facility supply chain constraints, which limited production. If not for limited production, based on our surge in customer orders in the quarter, our U.S. residential shipments would have increased compared with 2020. Strong orders in the quarter were largely due to extended lead times, our second price increase, which was effective April 1st, and announced third price increase effective in June. Due to continued pandemic-related disruptions in restaurant and hospitality new construction and replacement demand, our commercial water heater volumes declined in the first quarter, largely in line with our expectations coming into the year. In China, sales increased over 100% in local currency, driven by higher consumer demand, and an easy comparison compared with the pandemic-disrupted first quarter of 2020. I will now turn the call over to Chuck, who will provide more details on our first quarter, beginning on slide four.