Hubbell Inc

Good day. Thank you for standing by and welcome to the fourth quarter Hubble 2021 results call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone keypad. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would like to hand the conference over to Dan Inamorato. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Operator. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Earlier this morning, we issued a press release announcing our results for the fourth quarter of 2021. The press release and slides are posted at the investor section of our website at hubble.com. I'm joined today by our Chairman, President, and CEO, Gerben Bakker, and our Executive Vice President and CFO, Bill Sperry. Please note our comments this morning may include statements related to the expected future results of our company and our forward-looking statements as defined by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Therefore, please note the discussion of forward-looking statements in our press release and consider it incorporated by reference into this call. Additionally, comments may also include non-GAAP financial measures. Those measures are reconciled to the comparable GAAP measures and are included in the press release and slides. Before we get started, we also want to highlight that all results in our press release and the materials for this call are presented on a continuing operations basis, excluding the financial impact of our C&I lighting business following the recent closing of that divestiture and the classification of CNI lighting as discontinued operations. We've also recast prior period financial results on a continuing operations basis to ensure we're presenting the most relevant year-over-year comparisons and baseline for future results. These recast financials are summarized in this morning's press release. Now let me turn the call over to Gerben.

Great. Thanks, Dan, and good morning, everyone. And thank you for joining us to discuss Hubble's fourth quarter and full-year results. As you saw from our press release, we achieved a strong finish to 2021 with solid operating results in the quarter. The performance of our core continuing operations in the fourth quarter exceeded our expectations, which were embedded in our most recent outlook a few months ago. Most notably, our electrical solution segment drove exceptional performance with close to 50% year-over-year growth in adjusted operating profit in the fourth quarter. Demand remains strong for utility and electrical solutions. We grew backlog further in the first quarter as orders continue to outpace increased shipments, particularly in our utility segment. For the full year 2021, we grew orders more than 30% year over year and are exiting the year with a record backlog. While we expect supply chain dynamics to remain tight and continue to constrain output into 2022, We are confident that grid modernization and electrification are secular trends which will drive attractive GDP-plus growth over the next several years, and we will talk more about our unique positioning and the investments we are making. From an operational standpoint, I am also pleased to highlight we turned the corner on price material in the fourth quarter. We achieved 11 points of price realization, which fully offset the impact of material cost inflation on a dollar-for-dollar basis. Though material inflation has been an accelerating headwind throughout 2021, we have been proactive and aggressive in our pricing actions, which have stepped up significantly as we have progressed through the year, and this sets us up well to turn this equation into a net tailwind in 2022. Finally, we are providing our initial 2022 outlook this morning, which anticipates strong double-digit adjusted earnings per share growth. We will talk about the outlook in more detail at the end of this presentation, but we expect continued strength in customer demand and significant price material tailwind to enable Hubbell to continue to navigate through a challenging supply chain environment while investing in our business to better serve our customers, all while continuing to drive strong financial results for our shareholders. We thought it would be helpful to give a brief update on our portfolio and strategy following the divestiture of CNI Lighting. What we have achieved with this strategic action is a more focused portfolio with leading positions across the energy infrastructure, in front of the meter, behind the meter, and at the edge. Strategically, we are focused on providing our customers with reliable and efficient critical infrastructure solutions in markets with higher growth and margin characteristic, where we have a unique right to play and ability to win. Note that we have broken out the electrical solution segment for you to provide more context on our product offering and market exposures, highlighting the depth and breadth of our electrical offerings across the industrial, non-residential, and residential markets. However, as we announced over a year ago, we now manage this segment as a unified business to more effectively utilize the combined strength of our brands, products, and organizational talent in order to better serve our customers. This integration has been highly successful, and you will see some of the early returns on this strategy when we take you through the electrical solutions results. In the utility solution segment, we continue to believe that we have a best-in-class franchise with two highly complementary businesses. Our leading position across components, Communications and controls enables us to offer uniquely differentiated solutions to our customers across electric, water, and gas applications. Utility Solutions now represents over half our total enterprise sales following the divestiture of CNI Lighting. We are very pleased with the evolution of our portfolio, and we believe these actions position Hubbell well for the long term. We continue to view portfolio management as an ongoing process, and an important lever to drive value for our customers, employees, and shareholders. Hubble has a proven track record of effective capital deployment, and we expect to continue to deliver active, attractive returns to our M&A model. Now, building off the portfolio discussion, we also wanted to highlight the importance of ESG to our strategy. Hubble has made significant progress on ESG over the past year, increasing our disclosures, as well as setting multi-year targets for improvements on key metrics. We released our inaugural sustainability report in late 2021, and we encourage all of our stakeholders to view this report on the sustainability section of our website and to continue to actively engage with the Hubble leadership team on ESG topics. ESG at Hubble is directly aligned to our business strategy. In our utility solutions business, Our products are critical to ensuring that electricity is transmitted and distributed safely, reliably, and efficiently throughout the grid. As the leading utility T&D component supplier, we play a critical role in bolstering the resilience of the grid, as well as in hardening the infrastructure to withstand the impact of climate events and enabling the transition to clean, renewable energy. Our unique combination of utility components, communications, and controls also enables us to play a leading role in making the utility infrastructure smarter across electric, water, and gas applications. In our electrical solution segment, we provide solutions that enable the owners and operators of critical infrastructure to reliably and efficiently utilize electricity. These solutions are serving increasingly diversified end markets as electrification drives more applications to be plugged into the grid. Electrical T&D, utility automation and controls, renewables, data communication, and electric transportation are among our most attractive market verticals currently, and we see significant opportunity to drive further value for our customers and shareholders in these areas. When we talk about orienting our portfolio towards high growth, high margin verticals, these are the areas of our portfolio where we see the most opportunity and return our invested capital. And for these reasons, we are stepping up our investment levels in 2022. Reinvigorating our innovation strategy is a key priority for Hubble. But we plan to innovate while sticking to our roots and evaluating opportunities through a lens of where we have a clear right to play and ability to win. For instance, it has become increasingly clear to us over the past several years that our power T&D components business has transitioned from a GDP grower to sustainable GDP plus trajectory, and we are investing in additional capacity in key product categories in that business to effectively serve strong and visible customer demand. We've also driven substantial recent growth in our electrical connection and bonding offerings, for solar, telecom, and data center applications. And we are investing in additional sales and engineering resources there to more effectively pursue those opportunities. We are confident that we can accomplish this while continuing to deliver attractive and differentiated earnings growth over the near and long-term. And with that, let me now turn it over to Bill to walk you through our near-term financial results and outlook. Bill?