GE Vernova Inc.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to GE Vernova's first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. My name is Liz, and I will be your conference coordinator today. If you experience issues with the webcast slides refreshing or there appears to be delays in the slide advancement, please hit F5 on your keyboard to refresh. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the program over to your host for today's conference, Michael Lapidus, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please proceed.

Thank you. Welcome to GE Vernova's first quarter 2024 earnings call. I'm joined today by our CEO, Scott Strasik, and our CFO, Ken Parks. Our conference call remarks will include both GAAP and non-GAAP financial results. Reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP measures can be found in today's press release and in the presentation slides available on our website. During this call, we will make forward-looking statements about our performance. These statements are based on how we see things today. However, while we may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, we specifically do not have any obligation to do so. As described in our SEC filings, actual results may differ materially due to risks and uncertainty. With that, I'll hand the call over to Scott. Thanks, Michael.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our first earnings call after successfully completing our launch as an independent company on April 2nd. We delivered solid results in the first quarter. I'm pleased with how we are executing on the strategy we laid out at our investor day on March 6th. We're excited about the opportunity ahead for GE Vernova, a purpose-built company to electrify and decarbonize the world. Even in the last seven weeks since our investor day, The drumbeat of dialogue is only growing louder with the customers and policymakers on the challenges and opportunities ahead to meet growing demand while accelerating our decarbonization pathway. These macro trends are creating real opportunities for us to continue to lead in the energy transition while we are running our businesses better, driving disciplined growth, margin expansion, and higher free cash flow. If we shift to the left-hand side of the page, lean remains at our core, driving continuous improvement in safety, quality, delivery, and cost. And as we do with most of our meetings at GE Vrnova, I want to start today on safety. Our focus here is driving real results, with our injury and illness rate improving 5% over the last 12 months. We have had no fatalities year-to-date and we'll always run GE Vernova with safety as the top priority to ensure every employee, contractor, and partner we work with goes home safely each day. To give a little more color on lean, we executed on over 800 Kaizen events in Q124 alone. And I'd like to share with you an example of the progress we are making with one of the Kaizen events where I participated for three days in January at our grid automation business in Ontario, Canada. Grid automation is an important business inside electrification that provides protection and controls for electrical substations on the grid, in addition to solutions for monitoring and diagnostics for essential electrical equipment like transformers and breakers. This business is experiencing double digit top line growth, but still has parts of its supply chain using batch processing for inventory. At the Kaizen event, three teams executed on transforming batch processing of generator protection panels into a lean line with single-piece flow, focusing on pre-wiring activity first. Since the Kaizen event in January, we've seen our work-in-progress inventory reduced by over 50%. Output has increased 15%, and we've decreased the distance parts travel to site by roughly 80% for this pre-wiring. This is just one example of what is happening every week across GE Vernova to enable us to decrease delivery times, increase output, and lower costs, ultimately improving outcomes for our customers. In addition to embedding Lean within our facilities, we are also using Lean to simplify our business operations and reduce our costs. Our Q1 GNA growing versus Q1 23 is not one of the areas our leadership team is happy about as we sit here in April, but our expenses now reflect the additional costs of our standup as a public company, as well as the cost transferred from GE corporate on IT, finance, and HR. We are laser focused on action with urgency, leveraging lean to eliminate waste in our G&A processes. Now I'd like to spend a minute on the right-hand side of the page on our three business segment trends and the markets they serve. Our power businesses, led by gas power and the over 7,000 gas turbines in the fleet, are continuing to see strong uptick in demand. Our utilization of the gas fleet, depending on geography, is growing low single digits, driving continued strength in our high-margin services business. In addition, with expected increases in electricity demand growth in the coming years, along with a continued shift away from coal, interest in adding incremental gas capacity is growing. Customers are focused on how capacity additions this decade can be decarbonized in the next decade with both hydrogen and carbon capture. Gas power services orders increased double digits in the first quarter And equipment orders grew 75% versus last year, showing the robust demand for services into our install base and trends for new gas capacity. We are accelerating our focus and our strategy working with our supply chain partners on how to potentially create incremental capacity to meet this growing demand. I, along with others on the leadership team, are spending time with the team in Greenville in a few weeks to focus specifically on this. Turning to wind, we continue to expand margins as we improve this business, benefiting from a better onshore wind backlog in a lower cost structure in total. Even in a very low volume Q1, with just over a billion of onshore wind revenue, the onshore wind business still delivered positive EBITDA for the third straight quarter, as discussed at 4Q earnings. we expect second-half revenue will be substantially higher than first-half revenue with a larger North America mix. While we remain cautious on the exact timing of significant onshore wind orders growth in the U.S. as our customers navigate the challenges that come with permitting new projects, we are very excited about where this business performance can go as the orders and revenue accelerate in the medium term. In offshore, We are working through our existing backlog, and while we believe offshore is key to the energy transition, we will remain highly selective on new orders. Finally, electrification, our fastest growing segment. Profitable growth continues to accelerate as customers modernize and invest in the grid. Significant demand exists for a number of our products, such as transformers and switchgears, products key to ensuring a reliable electricity system and for connecting new generation. Orders this quarter were over two times revenue, which we expect will drive revenue and profit growth well into the future given healthy margins on what we added to backlog. Of our three business segments, electrification is the one where we have the best opportunity to challenge ourselves on both growth and margins we can achieve in the medium term given this segment has the strongest demand and pricing dynamics. Turning now to our first quarter performance, where we delivered a solid start to the year. We will continue to be disciplined on our top line growth, and Q1 had orders down 1% and organic revenue growth of 5% versus the prior year. Our backlog continued to grow up over 8 billion compared to Q1 23 with healthy margins. Overall, we expanded margins, increasing almost 500 basis points. All three segments improved margins driven by price, productivity, and continued cost reductions, combined with high single-digit services growth. In the quarter, we improved free cash flow compared to last year and expect a meaningful acceleration in cash flow as we move through the year. We are reaffirming the guidance provided at Investor Day in March. For more details around that and our first quarter performance, I will turn the call over to Ken.