Babcock & Wilcox Enterprises, Inc.

Good evening. My name is Sierra and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a Q&A session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw your question, press the star key. Thank you. Sharon, you may begin your conference call.

Thank you, Ciara, and thanks to everyone for joining us on Babcock & Wilcox Enterprises' first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. I'm Sharon Brooks, Director of Communications. Joining the call today are Kenny Young, B&W's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Lou Salamone, Chief Financial Officer, to discuss our first quarter results. During this call, certain statements we make will be forward-looking. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, including those set forth in our Safe Harbor provision for forward-looking statements that can be found at the end of our earnings press release and also in our Form 10-Q that will be filed today and our Form 10-K that is on file with the SEC and provide further detail about the risks related to our business. Additionally, except as required by law, we undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. We also provide non-GAAP information regarding certain of our historical and targeted results to supplement the results provided in accordance with GAAP. This information should not be considered superior to or as a substitute for the comparable GAAP measures. A reconciliation of historical non-GAAP measures can be found in our first quarter earnings release published this afternoon and in our company overview presentation to be filed on Form 8K this afternoon and posted on the investor relations section of our website at babcock.com. I will now turn the call over to Kenny.

Thanks, Sharon. Well, good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us for our first quarter 2024 earnings call. We are off to a very strong start in 2024 with first quarter results that came in ahead of our expectations as we continue to advance and execute against our strategic plan based on selective higher margin new build projects, heavier focus on upgrades, parts, and services, and increased engineering engagements and feed studies for Climate Bright and Bright Loop. Demand from our global industrial and utility customers for solutions and power generation upgrades, environmental and renewable technologies, as well as hydrogen and syngas projects continues to expand as evidenced by the approximately $500 million in new signed contracts and awards in the first quarter. This is nearly double the total value achieved during the same period in 2023. Customer activity remained robust across all segments through the first quarter of 2024, despite what is historically a weaker seasonal period for B&W, which supports our positive outlook for the full year of 2024 and enabled us to recently increase our full-year adjusted EBITDA target to a range of $105 to $115 million. We also continue to make progress on our stated cost reduction efforts during the first quarter, which now total $20 million to date, as we work toward our target of over $30 million in annualized cost savings. Cash used within our discontinued operations is now significantly reduced to almost neutral. Cash from continuing operations is improving, and going forward, we are taking specific steps to increase liquidity as we focus on paying down or reducing our long-term debt. Our strategic focus on higher margin core business continues, as do our dedicated efforts to expand our Bright Loop low-carbon hydrogen technology and our Climate Bright decarbonization technologies. In particular, we're making significant strides within our research and development to advance both the engineering, performance, and particle manufacturing process for Bright Loop, to improve the attrition rate, which will lower overall cost of green hydrogen production. As mentioned, our first quarter performance displayed consolidated revenues in adjusted EBITDA that exceeded the company's expectations. These results, combined with strong bookings year-to-date, set the stage for our recently increased full-year adjusted EBITDA target range. Notably, we are already seeing the benefits from our strategic plan as adjusted EBITDA margins expanded during the first quarter of 2024 as compared to the first quarter of 2023. Our margins are benefiting from the shift to selective higher margin new build projects, particularly in the renewable segment, along with notable strength across our aftermarket parts and services businesses. From a segment perspective, our environmental business was a standout performer during the first quarter, with revenue increasing 23% compared to first quarter of 2023, and margins that continued to expand, which drove a 74% increase in total adjusted EBITDA compared to the first quarter of 2023. These results were primarily driven by higher volume and improved operating performance as we completed certain projects during the first quarter. As demonstrated by the new contracts and awards announced in April, we continue to see strong underlying industry trends with expanding global demand for clean power production and energy security and an over $9 billion global pipeline of identified project opportunities. These trends remain foundational drivers of our business outlook for 2024 and beyond. And we continue to make considerable progress in converting that strong global pipeline of identified project opportunities, which includes over $1.5 billion of Bright Loop and Climate Bright opportunities alone into bookings. Our backlog and implied backlog at the end of first quarter was $826 million, representing an increase of 29% compared to the backlog and implied backlog at the end of first quarter 2023. Looking ahead, given the new EPA requirements, we are seeing increasing opportunities for coal to natural gas and coal to biomass projects within the United States, which is very exciting for us as we look to the remainder of 2024 and into 2025. Many of these projects are either under development in the proposal stage or in final design with various revenue ranges of $50 million to $400 million in value for B&W. With our increasing visibility of customer demand and our near-term booking success, we are reiterating our recently revised higher full-year 2024 adjusted EBITDA targets of $105 million to $115 million, which excludes Bright Loop and Climate Bright. Importantly, we continue to invest in our Bright Loop opportunities and anticipate spending in the range of $7 to $10 million in 2024 on our Bright Loop projects and technology advancement, which excludes any spending on CapEx. Our efforts to progress Bright Loop and continue both our commercial development of existing projects as well as the continued focus on improving our overall operational effectiveness of our technologies to produce low-cost green hydrogen. With regard to recent developments across Bright Loop and Climate Bright, we are continuing to progress with engineering work for our previously announced Bright Loop projects in Gillette, Wyoming, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Massillon, Ohio. This includes the award we discussed previously for $16 million in matching funds from the Wyoming Energy Authority to fund the permitting engineering and development activities for the Wyoming project. which is a clean hydrogen generation facility with CO2 capture and sequestration, utilizing coal as a feedstock. B&W and our partners expect to perform all of the detailed engineering for that plant and will prepare for the civil and foundation work to be executed in the spring of 2025. These projects are definitely getting noticed, and you may have seen Brightloop featured in a number of major news and trade media outlets recently, including articles in Forbes, Carbon Capture Magazine, Power Magazine, and H2View as our Brightloop technology continues to gain recognition as a potentially superior alternative to other hydrogen technologies. We remained excited about the prospects and outlook for the Brightloop platform with a visible pathway to reach $1 billion in bookings by 2028 with a combination of small, medium, and large Brightloop projects that capitalize on our current identified pipeline, which I mentioned earlier includes approximately $1.5 billion in Bright Loop and Climate Bright opportunities alone. We continue to believe this level of activity has the potential to lead to the $1 billion in revenues by 2030, which would still only represent roughly 1% of the market share for total global hydrogen spend by 2030. Within Brightloop, it's been extremely exciting to watch our team advance the engineering process and the business towards deploying these technologies at scale and further expanding our suite of carbon capture solutions. We also continue to see opportunities for new projects related to waste energy in the United States and Europe, which should enable us to leverage our Climate Bright decarbonization platform and present additional higher margin prospects. We also anticipate we will soon be able to announce a significant U.S. coal to biomass fuel switching project that will utilize B&W's Solbright post-combustion carbon capture technology to produce energy with net negative CO2 emissions. Solbright, which is based on regenerable solvent absorption technology, is another component of our Climate Bright suite of solutions and one more area that we believe holds significant promise for the future. We also continue to progress and close out the legacy under our performing solar projects as planned and in line with previous targets. Our solar organization continues to improve performance with higher quality operations, improved margins, and stronger and expanding pipeline of opportunities. By the end of the first quarter, we are seeing significant cash flow improvements related to our solar operations as we have completed or nearing completion of certain legacy projects. I'll now turn the call over to Lew, who will discuss the financial details of the first quarter. Lew?