Hubbell Inc

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the first quarter 2022 results conference call. 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. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. And now, it is my pleasure to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Dan Inamorato, Vice President, Investor Relations. 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 first quarter 2022 results. The press release and slides are posted to the investor section of our website at howell.com. I'm joined today by our chairman, president, and CEO, Gerben Bakker, and our executive vice president and CFO, Bill Sperry. Please note that 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. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Gerben.

Gerben Bergeron- Great. Thanks, Dan. And good morning, everyone. And thank you for joining us to discuss Hubbell's first quarter results. Hubbell is off to a strong start in 2022. Our markets remain healthy, with broad-based demand driving strong sales and order growth. In particular, our utility solution segment continues to build backlog, even as customer shipments picked up sequentially. Grid modernization initiatives continue to drive robust investment levels from our core utility customers as they seek to upgrade aging infrastructure and integrate renewables onto the grid. Operationally, supply chain headwinds persist. Inflation in raw materials and labor, tight availability and higher cost of containers, as well as shortages in key materials such as chips and resins, are leading to higher input costs and manufacturing and transportation inefficiencies across our businesses. However, we are executing effectively through these challenges to serve our customers, and deliver strong results for our shareholders. We continue to accelerate our price and productivity initiative, and we have now turned the corner on price material, which was a net positive in the first quarter. The combination of strong volume growth and positive price material enabled us to return to year-over-year margin expansion a quarter earlier than we had initially anticipated. Overall, we are pleased with the performance in the quarter. and we are confident that we are well-positioned to continue executing effectively over the balance of 2022. While the macroeconomic environment remains dynamic, our strong order book, significant price traction, and operational discipline gives us the visibility and confidence to race our full-year outlook today, which now reflects mid-teens adjusted earnings per share growth. We will provide more color on the full-year outlook later in the presentation. Before I turn it over to Bill to walk you through the financial results, I'd like to highlight some key accomplishments in the quarter. First, on capital deployment, we deployed 150 million of proceeds from the CNI lighting divestiture to share repurchase, returning cash to shareholders and generating approximately 10 cents of accretion in 2022 in line with our initial guidance. Our balance sheet and cash position is strong, supporting our bolt-on acquisition strategy, which we expect to continue executing over the short and long term to generate attractive returns for our shareholders. Next, I'm proud to highlight that Hubble received two of four annual awards from a major customer. Hubble Power Systems was awarded the Above and Beyond Award, for successfully managing through supply chain constraints to serve its customers. While Burndy was awarded the operational and technical excellence awards for improvements in operational efficiency and proactive management and communication. This recognition is particularly well deserved for our teams who are working so hard to effectively serve our customer needs during these challenging times. Not only is this an example of the strength of Hubble's individual brands and businesses, but it also demonstrates the quality of our portfolio across utility and electrical end markets. We have made good progress in our efforts to go to market collectively as one Hubble, and we see significant opportunity ahead in building on our strong channel partnerships to better serve our customers. And finally, Hubble is honored to have been named one of 2022's World's Most Ethical Companies by Ethisphere for the second consecutive year. I'd like to thank our over 17,000 employees who demonstrate the highest standard for integrity each and every day and note that this achievement is a recognition of their commitment to compliance and ethics as a foundation of our strategy and culture. We also released our second annual sustainability report in the first quarter, highlighting the progress we have made on ESG over the past several years. as a core element of our business strategy and product offering. We encourage all our stakeholders to view this report on the sustainability page of our website and to continue to actively engage with the Hubble leadership team on ESG topics. Let me now turn it over to Bill.