Acuity Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the Acuity Brands Third Quarter Earnings Call of fiscal 2022. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, the company will conduct a question and answer session. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to Charlotte McLaughlin, Vice President of Investor Relations. Charlotte, please go ahead.

Thank you, Michelle. Good morning and welcome to the Acuity Brands Fiscal 2022 Third Quarter Earnings Call. As a reminder, some of our comments today may be forward-looking statements based on our management's beliefs and assumptions and information currently available to our 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 our 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 and their corresponding GAAP measures are available in our 2022 Third Quarter Earnings Relief, which is available on our Investor Relations website at www.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 highlights from the last quarter, and Karen Holcomb, our Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, who will walk us through our third quarter 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 interesting QT brands. I will now turn the call over to Neil Ash.

Thank you, Charlotte. And thank you to everyone on the call for joining us this morning. Our team delivered a strong quarter of sales and operating profit growth driven by solid execution across both our lighting and spaces businesses. This performance is a direct result of the significant and ongoing improvements that our team has made over the last two years. Third quarter sales continued to trend and marked a bit of a milestone. It was the fifth consecutive quarter of double-digit revenue growth. Sales were over $1 billion this quarter for only the second time in the company's history, as we continued to successfully capture price and drive volume through product vitality and service in both the lighting and spaces businesses. This quarter, we were aggressive with our share repurchases. We repurchased about 5% of our shares outstanding in the third quarter. We are confident in the future of our company and these repurchases add leverage to our future success and create permanent shareholder value. Moving on to our segments, both our lighting and spaces businesses performed well in the third quarter. First, on Acuity Brands Lighting. Our lighting and lighting controls business had another very strong quarter, with top-line growth driven by our product vitality efforts and our focus on service. Market demand in the third quarter remained strong, and we continued to work through our backlogs. which continues to be above normal levels. Our strategy of increasing product vitality, increasing service levels, and using technology to differentiate both our products and our service is working. Our product vitality efforts are the combination of new product introductions and improvements to our existing products. Over the last two years, we have dramatically accelerated these efforts. As a result, our products are more valuable to our customers and more profitable for us. One of our key product leaders recently finished a complete refresh of his product families, and he asked me, what do we do now? And my answer was simple. We do it again. With product vitality, I like to tell our team that if you're in front and you run faster than everyone else, no one can catch you. We believe that we have the best engineering and design teams in the industry, and they are delivering. Our service has also been strong. In May, several members of the ABL team and I went to the National Association of Electrical Distributors annual conference, where we met with many of our key distributor partners. This was the first time this group had been together since the pandemic, and each company we met with had the same feedback for us. Acuity had the right products and was able to deliver throughout the pandemic and the subsequent supply chain shortages when others could not. It was great for the team to receive affirmation from the marketplace on the changes that they've made. It reflects the value of having the right products and being able to deliver them no matter what is going on in the world. Now, moving to our Intelligent Spaces Group. Spaces continue to perform well with strong sequential quarterly sales growth of 17% and 5% year-over-year growth, as well as year-over-year margin improvement. The mission of our Spaces Group is to make spaces smarter, safer, and greener. Our DISSEC Controls products power controls, sensors, and other activities in built spaces, and our Atrius cloud-based applications deliver value to owners and end users in those spaces. I'd like to focus on Smarter and Greener for a few minutes. A few weeks ago, I was in California at the DISTEC Connect conference, where we gathered together key systems integrators who buy and install our DISTEC products. It was the first time that this group was in person since 2018, and everyone was excited to be back together. Between 2018 and now, DISTEC has grown significantly through continued product development and strong partnership with these independent systems integrators. Our open protocol technology and continued product innovation is proving to be the way to make spaces smarter, faster. And our partnership with independent systems integrators allows us to move quickly and service more and more of the market. DISTEC powers the facilities and generates data. Atrius is a collection of cloud-based applications that use this data to solve specific problems and spaces. DISTEC and Atrius can operate independent of one another, but together we can deliver true edge-to-cloud technology and applications. One of our core offerings under the Atrius brand is Atrius Building Insights, which is targeted to multi-building operators to provide a single source for their energy usage, carbon, and cost management through data aggregation. Excuse me. Currently, this platform is used in thousands of buildings across North America. Similar to DISTEC, our customers include a diverse group of some of the smartest technology companies, commercial customers, and institutions. Our activity buildings, of course, use Atrius Building Insights to monitor and reduce our energy usage, our carbon footprint, and our costs, and is a key part of our Earthlight initiative. You'll see more about this when we publish our Earthlight report later this year. There's a lot to get excited about in ISG. and I look forward to sharing more developments in the future. Now, I want to touch on capital allocation. Our capital allocation priorities remain the same. We will continue to prioritize investments for growth in our current businesses, invest in acquisitions, maintain our dividend, and allocate capital for shareware purchases when we perceive there is an opportunity to create permanent value for shareholders. Karen is going to talk about our decision to allocate capital to inventory later in the call and give more color on our additional shareware purchases this quarter. But before I pass this to Karen, I want to leave you with a few thoughts. I'm proud of how our team continues to perform. They continue their focus on product vitality and service while managing the ongoing supply constraints. We expect the marketing conditions in the fourth quarter to remain largely consistent, and I'm confident that our team will continue to deliver. Now, I'll turn the call over to Karen, who will take a deeper dive into our third quarter performance, and I'll be back later in the call for Q&A and for some closing remarks.