Acuity Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Acuity Brands' fourth quarter full year 2021 earnings conference call. At this time, participants are in 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. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to Charlotte McLaughlin, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Shannon. Good morning, and welcome to the Acuity Brands Fiscal 2021 Fourth Quarter and Full Year Earnings Call. As a reminder, some of our comments today may be forward-looking statements based on management's beliefs and assumptions and information currently available to management at this time. These beliefs are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties, many of which may be beyond our control, including those detailed in our periodic SEC filings. Please note that the company's actual results may differ materially from those anticipated, and we undertake no obligation to update these statements. Reconciliations of certain non-GAAP financial metrics with their corresponding GAAP measures are available in our 2021 fourth quarter earnings release, which is available on our Investor Relations website at www.investorrelations.com. investors.acuitybrands.com. With me this morning is Neil Ash, our Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer, who will provide an update on our strategy and detail highlights from the last quarter and the last 12 months, as well as Karen Halcom, our Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, who will walk us through our earnings performance. There will be an opportunity for Q&A at the end of the call, For those participating, please limit your remarks to one question and one follow-up if necessary. We are webcasting today's conference call live. Thank you for your interest in Acuity Brands. I will now turn the call over to Neil Ash.

Thank you, Charlotte. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us to discuss Acuity Brands. I'm pleased with our company's performance in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2021. In a challenging global supply chain environment, we grew sales 11%, and expanded our gross profit and operating profit margins. Our performance demonstrated our focus on product vitality and customer service. We allocated capital effectively by closing the acquisition of Osram's North American digital business and have created permanent value for our shareholders through the repurchase of company shares. 2021 was a pivotal year for us as we advanced our corporate transformation. And I'd like to take a few minutes to recap some of those achievements. We returned the company to growth. We grew sales in the third quarter, the fourth quarter, and the full year, and we expect this growth to continue. We expanded gross profit margins for the full year, despite a challenging global environment. We realigned our businesses into ABL, our Acuity Brands lighting and lighting controls business, and ISG, our intelligent spaces group. This alignment creates the necessary strategic focus on each business, and allows us to develop the leadership teams that will deliver on their potential. We generated strong cash flow and allocated capital in a way that creates permanent value for shareholders. We held our first ever investor day. We built a strong and diverse leadership team and are attracting new talent throughout the organization. Our continuing improvements around ESG are central tenets to our strategy. We have made significant progress by reaching carbon neutrality in our operations and by committing to the reduction of 100 million metric tons of carbon from our put-in-place products and services by 2030. We've made progress on diversity, equity, and inclusion, and on governance. And you can read more about all of this in our upcoming 10-K, our annual report, our annual Earthlight report, and our proxy. And finally, we have positioned ourselves well for 2022 and beyond. I now want to update you on our ongoing transformation in each of our businesses, and I will start with ABL. We've had a good year in ABL. Our focus on innovation through product vitality and increasing our service levels for the benefit of our customers has delivered strong results. And we are continuing our efforts to drive our product expansion. The CompactPro High Bay, which we have discussed before, continues to deliver from both a revenue and margin perspective in the high-growth industrial sector. Our product vitality efforts include improvements to existing products and the introduction of new ones. In the fourth quarter, we introduced the HomeGuard LED security floodlight. It's an exciting addition to our contractor select portfolio. This new platform offers a technology upgrade, higher efficacy, greater safety options, and ease of installation. Sales have been strong. We're off to a great start in a category where we currently have low share and strong growth opportunities. We are also continuing to increase our service levels and deliver productivity improvements. We are using better, smarter, faster to improve our processes and our technology for better, more efficient customer service. Today, I'd like to focus on Agile. Agile is our commerce platform that is used by our channel for all of the key steps that they need to do business in lighting and lighting and controls, from finding products to creating solutions for large projects to bidding on those projects to placing the orders And finally, tracking those orders to completion. Our team is constantly improving Agile. One of our key areas of focus has been to improve the quality of the product data that we provide. This improvement provides many tangible benefits, including ease of use and improved order accuracy. Another area of focus that I have spoken about before is order status. I bring this up again because it has been essential during this complicated period. we were able to provide clearer information to our channel about their order status, which allows us to better meet their needs in the face of the global supply chain challenges. These examples address significant historical pain points and are foundational, which allow us to improve our service levels today and in the future. As we enter 2022, the priorities for Trevor and the rest of the ABL team remain the same. Maintain high product vitality, continue to elevate our service levels, and continue to use technology to differentiate ourselves. Now, moving to the intelligent spaces group. The mission of ISG is to use technology to solve problems in spaces by making them smarter, safer, and greener. We believe that each of these provides ample opportunities for future growth. DISTEC Controls is a collection of open protocol products necessary to effectively operate spaces. Atrius provides applications which use data to deliver value in those spaces. We are having success across Europe and North America with our DISTEC platform, especially around campuses, data centers, and spaces that require a significant amount of control around the operation of the facilities. We continue to add products to this ISG portfolio. During the quarter, we added the Eclipse Connected Thermostat, an open protocol device that reduces installation costs helps manage energy costs, and improves the comfort of spaces. Now, before I turn the call over to Karen, I'd like to conclude with thoughts on our transformation and the opportunity ahead. In the face of a challenging global environment, we have demonstrably improved our company and its performance. We have demonstrated our ability to grow sales through innovation and our ability to service our customers. We have improved our gross profit margins through product and productivity improvements. We have improved our operating profit margin by leveraging our costs. We have allocated capital efficiently through reinvestment in the business, acquisitions, and share repurchase. We have the talent and the tools to build upon the operating strength we have developed over the last 18 months. As we look forward, we expect to continue this performance. We are strategically positioned at the intersection of sustainability and technology. We have assembled a world-class team, we have demonstrated the ability to both build and acquire businesses. We have strong organic cash generation, and we have demonstrated that we know what to do with it to create value. Now, I'll turn the call over to Karen, who will take a deeper dive into our performance and outlook for 2022. And then I'll be back for Q&A and closing remarks.