Hubbell Inc

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Hubble's fourth quarter 2023 earnings conference 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 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Dan Inamorato, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Dede. 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 2023. The press release and slides are posted to the investor section of our website at hubble.com. I'm joined today by our Chairman, President, and CEO, Gerben Bakker. 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 is defined by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Therefore, please note the discussion of forward-looking statements in our press release, consider it incorporated by reference to 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. Now let me turn the call over to Gervin.

Great. Good morning, and thank you for joining us to discuss Hubbell's fourth quarter and full year 2023 results. Hubbell delivered a strong finish to an exceptional year. For the full year 2023, we achieved 9% sales growth, over 500 basis points of operating margin expansion, and over 40% growth in operating profit and earnings per share. These results were driven not only by our strong positions in attractive markets, but also by the consistent execution of our people in maintaining industry-leading service levels for our customers while driving price and productivity across our businesses. Our strong financial performance also enabled us to invest back into our business in capacity, innovation, and productivity initiatives. We invested $165 million in capital expenditures in 2023, almost double our investment levels from 2021. We are confident that these investments will drive future growth and productivity for our shareholders, and as we will describe in more detail later, we intend to grow profitably off of a strong multi-year base of performance. Turning to the fourth quarter, we delivered strong growth and margin expansion in both segments. Notably, we also returned to year-over-year volume growth in electrical solutions. As we noted on our previous call in October, we were confident that the channel inventory management that we had seen earlier in the year had largely normalized. As a result, we saw stronger seasonal performance in the fourth quarter, as well as continued strength across data centers and renewables verticals. We also continue the trajectory of strong margin expansion in the electrical segment, ending the year with adjusted operating margins of 16.6%. We continue to see structural margin expansion opportunities as we make progress in our strategy of competing collectively as an operating segment, and we plan to accelerate our restructuring investment in 2024 to drive long-term productivity. In utility solutions, fourth quarter trends were largely consistent with the third quarter. Transmission markets were strong, and we continued to convert on past due backlog in communications and control as supply chain conditions have improved. Utility distribution markets continue to be impacted by channel inventory normalization as anticipated, though we continue to see visible demand strength in 2024 and beyond. Telcom markets were weak in the quarter, and while our long-term outlook here remains positive, we are taking a cautious initial view on 2024 until we have more visibility on timing of investments. We also executed on two important portfolio actions in the quarter as we closed on the previously announced acquisition of Systems Control and announced a definitive agreement to sell our residential lighting business, which we expect to close in early February. These transactions reflect our ongoing strategy to create a focused portfolio strategically aligned around grid modernization and electrification. These transactions improve the long-term growth and margin profile of our portfolio, and we anticipate that they will be net accretive to 2024 adjusted earnings per share. We will provide more details on our 24 outlook at the end of this call, but we remain confident that Hubble is uniquely positioned in attractive markets, and that we can build off the success of this last several years to drive profitable growth off this higher base of performance. With that, let me turn it over to Bill to walk you through the details of the quarter.