EMCOR Group, Inc.

Good morning. My name is Marlise and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the MCOR Group's first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then two. I will now turn the call over to Andy Backman, Vice President of Investor Relations. Mr. Backman, you may begin.

Thank you, Marlise, and good morning, everyone, and welcome to MCOR's first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. For those of you joining us by webcast, we are at the beginning of our slide presentation that will accompany our remarks today. This presentation will be archived in the investor relations section of our website at MCORgroup.com. With me today are Tony Guzzi, our chairman, president, and chief executive officer, Jason Dalbandian, senior vice president, and MCOR's newly appointed chief financial officer, and Maxine Mauricio, Executive Vice President, Chief Administrative Officer, and General Counsel. For today's call, Tony will provide comments on our first quarter. Jason will then review our first quarter numbers before turning it back to Tony to discuss RPOs, key market drivers and how they impact our business segments, as well as reviewing our revised 2024 guidance before we open it up for Q&A. Before we begin, as a reminder, this presentation and discussion contain certain forward-looking statements and may contain certain non-GAAP financial information. Slide 2 of our presentation describes in detail these forward-looking statements and the non-GAAP financial information disclosures. I encourage everyone to review both disclosures in conjunction with our discussion and accompanying slides. And finally, as a reminder, all financial information discussed during this morning's call is included in our consolidated financial statements within both our earnings press release issued this morning and in our Form 10-Q, filed the Securities and Exchange Commission. And with that, let me turn the call over to Tony. Tony?

Good morning. Thanks, Andy, and thanks, all of you, for joining our call. I'm going to begin my discussion on page four. We had an exceptional start to the year at MCOR. It was another quarter of records as our performance established new first quarter records for revenues, operating income, operating margin, and diluted earnings per share and operating cash flows. We earned $4.17 per diluted share and grew revenues by 18.7% to $3.43 billion. Revenues increased 18.5% organically, and we were still able to grow RPOs to $9.2 billion, an increase of $1.3 billion, or 16.5% versus the year-ago period. Our consolidated operating margin was a very strong 7.6%. The performance of our electrical and mechanical construction segments this quarter continue to exceed our already high expectations. Our electrical construction segment revenues grew 18.6%, with operating margin reaching a record 12%. Our mechanical construction segment grew revenues 32.4%, with record first quarter revenues and a record first quarter operating margin of 10.6%. We executed well with strong demand across many of the market sectors we serve, including high-tech and traditional manufacturing, as well as networking communications, which includes our data center work. We had outstanding performance on some of the most demanding projects for our most sophisticated customers. Central to our success is how our leadership teams effectively plan where and how we will compete and select the right sectors and geographies that allow us the best opportunity to earn the best outcome when deploying our precious resources. Then our excellence in BIM, which is really a lot more than building information modeling. It's much evolved into virtual design and construction. You'll hear me talk about BDC. That's how we talk about it at MCOR, which then moves into prefabrication, estimating project planning and management, and our best-in-class labor sourcing management and training have all supported and continue to support this strong performance. Our leadership teams from the segment through the subsidiary level down through our project managers, and frontline supervision are performing work productively and, most importantly, safely, resulting in excellent outcomes for our customers and shareholders. Our industrial services segment reported its best quarter post-pandemic. We continue to see improved demand for our services and completed some of our largest turnarounds in over five years. Our shops continue to perform well, and the electrical business within this segment is experiencing increased demand both from traditional upstream and midstream customers, as well as for certain renewable fuel projects. Within our U.S. building services segment, our mechanical services business continues to perform well with solid high single-digit operating margins, and strong demand persists for our energy efficiency, building controls, and retrofit projects. Our U.K. business continues to hold up well despite a tough economic environment. You know, we always have challenges, and this quarter was no different. As mentioned in our last few calls, we've had a few contract losses in our U.S. site-based services business as real estate companies in this market continue to be aggressive and take work at or near cost. In addition, during this past month, we had a retail customer file for bankruptcy, which caused us to increase our bad debt reserves, offsetting the increased profitability otherwise experienced within our U.S. building services segment. Overall, we had a great quarter and are seeing continued strength in the market trends we have been discussing for the past few quarters. In addition, in April, we closed three acquisitions that will add to our capabilities in our mechanical construction segment and our U.S. building services segment. We spent $137 million in upfront consideration on these three acquisitions and are excited to integrate them into our business, and integration is well underway. We have also signed a definitive agreement to acquire another company for $38 million in that will add to the electrical capabilities in our industrial services segment. This acquisition is expected to close on or around May 1st. We ended the quarter with strong RPOs and a balance sheet that continues to support the growth of our business, both organically and through acquisition. With that being said, Jason, I will turn the call over to you.