Huntington Ingalls Industries, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the first quarter 2022 HII earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during this session, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you need further assistance, please press star, followed by zero, and you'll be patched through to an operator. I'd now like to hand over the call to Christy Thomas, Vice President of Investor Relations. Mrs. Thomas, you may begin.

First quarter 2022 earnings conference call. With us today are Chris Kastner, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Tom Seeley, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. As a reminder, statements made in today's call that are not historical fact are considered forward-looking statements and are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of federal securities law. Actual results may differ. Please refer to our SEC filings for a description of some of the factors that may cause actual results to vary materially from anticipated results. Also, in their remarks today, Chris and Tom will refer to certain non-GAAP measures Reconciliations of these metrics to the comparable gap measures are included in the appendix of our earnings presentation that is posted on our website. We plan to address the posted presentation slides during the call to supplement our comments. Please access our website at hii.com and click on the Investor Relations link to view the presentation as well as our earnings release. With that, I will turn the call over to our President and CEO, Chris Kastner.

Thanks, Christy. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us on today's call. Earlier this morning, we reported solid performance across each of our operating divisions with our focus on execution and growth, positioning us to reaffirm our previous revenue margin and free cash flow guidance. Our shipbuilding and mission technologies teams continue to execute well, despite facing some headwinds in the areas of human capital and supply chain disruption. Like the economy broadly, we are facing challenges created by the lingering effects of COVID. and its impact on the labor market, making it challenging to hire and retain employees. Moreover, our suppliers are being impacted by the same shortage of labor, as well as inflation issues, which creates risk of delays in delivery of key materials for our shipbuilding programs. We are aggressively working these challenges with our suppliers and our customers. In light of both of these challenges, I'm extremely proud of the resilience and the dedication of each of our 44,000 employees. to continue to focus on the mission of delivering on their customer commitments. Now, shifting to our results, sales of $2.6 billion for the quarter were 13% higher than 2021, and diluted EPS of $350 billion for the quarter was down from $368 billion in 2021. New contract awards during the quarter were approximately $2 billion, driven by the award for DDG 139. This results in backlog of $47.9 billion at the end of the quarter of which $24.8 billion is currently funded. At Ingalls, LPD-28, Fort Lauderdale, completed sea trials and was delivered to the Navy. LPD-29, Richard M. McCool, Jr., was launched, and we laid keel for LPD-30, Harrisburg. On the LHA program, LHA-8, Bougainville, is progressing well, and long-lead material procurement has begun for LHA-9. On the DDG program, DDG-123, Lena Steadcliffe-Higbee, achieved main engine light off, and DDG 125 Jack H. Lucas was christened this quarter. And finally, on the NSC program, serial production continues on NSC 10 Calhoun, launched in April. At Newport News, SSN 794 Montana completed sea trials and was delivered to the Navy, and SSN 796 New Jersey floated off in April. Also, as discussed in our fourth quarter call, SSN 725 USS Helena was re-delivered in January, which demonstrated the successful reconstitution of our submarine maintenance capability in support of the Navy. On the carrier front, Newport News and the Navy celebrated a centennial of U.S. Navy aircraft carriers and CVN 78 USS Gerald R. Ford was re-delivered to the Navy in the first quarter after completion of its inaugural maintenance and modernization period. Progress continued on CVN 79 Kennedy which is 83 percent complete. And CVN 80 Enterprise has begun erecting steel on the dry dock. On the RCOH program, CVN 73 USS George Washington is progressing in the testing phase and is 95 percent complete. And CVN 74 USS John C. Stennis is approximately 25 percent complete. A few weeks ago, we renamed our Technical Solutions Division Mission Technologies to better reflect our portfolio of capabilities. and our commitment to delivering advanced technologies and multi-domain expertise to our support of our national security customers. Contract awards at Mission Technologies have had a slow start to the year, but this was largely due to the continuing resolution and the resulting lack of adjudication of awards. Looking ahead, we are very excited about our pipeline of new business at Mission Technologies and are confident it will support our growth objectives. We currently have almost $6 billion of proposals in evaluation with $3 billion in proposal development and a total qualified pipeline of more than $25 billion. We had a significant win in unmanned with the selection of our Remus 300 vehicle as the U.S. Navy's next-generation small UUD program of record. We also recently released Odyssey, a suite of advanced autonomy solutions that offer scalable autonomy across a variety of platforms and is aligned with the industry open architecture standards. Regarding our shipbuilding workforce, I'm glad to report that we finalized the collective bargaining agreement at both shipyards. Our annual apprentice school graduation at Newport News Shipbuilding saw 170 graduates, and over 200 individuals will complete their apprenticeship program in May at Ingalls Shipbuilding. And we continue to work with local high schools and community colleges on our core hiring and development needs. Through the end of the quarter, we had hired over 1,000 craft personnel towards our plan of over 5,000 for the year, we remain focused on hiring and retaining a strong workforce as we continue to face the headwinds of a tight labor market. Turning to activities in Washington, Congress finalized appropriations for fiscal year 2022 in March. We saw continued bipartisan support for our programs reflected in the Final Defense Appropriations Act, including funding for two Arleigh Burke-class destroyers and two Virginia-class attack submarines. Additionally, The appropriations measure provided $250 million for advanced procurement funding for LPD32, advanced procurement for DDGs, as well as funding for our other programs. Also in March, the President submitted his fiscal year 2023 budget request, now under consideration by Congress. The proposed budget reflects continued investment in our shipbuilding programs, funding two amphibious ships, LPD32 and LHA9, two DDG51 surface combatants, and two Block 5 Virginia-class submarines. The budget request continues funding Ford-class nuclear aircraft carriers and aircraft carrier refueling programs and construction of Columbia-class submarines, as well as investment in the submarine industrial base. Beyond shipbuilding, the fiscal year 2023 request reflects an emphasis on research and development with increased investments in capability enablers such as AI, cyber, electronic warfare, C5ISR, and autonomous systems. that align well with our advanced technology capabilities of our mission technologies division. In conclusion, we remain well positioned to execute on our shipbuilding backlog and leverage it to generate significant free cash flow while continuing to capture anticipated work and growth within our mission technologies division. So with that, I'll turn the call over to Tom for some remarks on our financial results. Tom?