Hubbell Inc

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the first quarter 2024 Hubbell Incorporated 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 would need to press star 11 on your telephone. You would then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would like now to turn the conference over to your speaker today, Dan Enamorato, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Michelle. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Earlier this morning, we issued a press release announcing our results for the first quarter of 2024. The press release and slides are posted to the investor section of our website at hubble.com. Joined today by our Chairman, President, and CEO, Gervin 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. 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. Now let me turn the call over to Durbin.

Great. Good morning, and thank you for joining us to discuss Hubbell's first quarter 2024 results. Hubbell is off to a solid start to 24, and we are well on track to deliver on our full-year outlook, which contemplates double-digit adjusted operating profit growth at the midpoint. Performance in the quarter was highlighted by strong organic growth and margin expansion in electrical solutions. Electrification and U.S. manufacturing activity is driving broad-based strength across our markets, most notably in renewables and data centers, which continue to grow double digits in the quarter. Our connectors and grounding business, which is strategically positioned in these verticals, as well as in broader industrial markets, realized double-digit sales growth in the quarter. We also continue to make progress in our HES segment unification strategy, with 80 basis points adjusted operating margin expansion in the quarter, despite increased restructuring investment in footprint optimization. With the completion of our residential lighting divestiture in February, we are confident that our electrical solution portfolio is aligned to structurally higher growth and margins going forward. In our utility solution segment, performance in our core utility T&D markets was solid, driven primarily by strength in our grid automation businesses and transmission markets. As anticipated, utility distribution markets continue to be impacted by channel inventory normalization, though end market demand remains solid. We're also pleased with the positive contributions from our acquisitions in the quarter. Systems control is off to a good start, and the integration is running smoothly, while Balestro and EIG delivered strong results in the quarter. Telcom markets were weak in the quarter, driving significant sales and margin declines in our utility enclosures business. While we continue to have a positive outlook on the long-term growth prospect of fiber deployment and broadband access, we expect this weakness to persist in the second quarter and are taking additional targeted actions in response. Bill will walk you through the details within the quarter in a few minutes, but overall we are confident in the setup for utility solutions over the balance of 2024 as our leadership in attractive utility T&D markets positions us well to meet the grid modernization and electrification needs of our customers. From an operational standpoint, we executed well in the quarter against a challenging prior year comparison. We're very pleased with our early traction on price realization, which continues to be supported by a strong position and leading service levels. While the operating environment remains inflationary, we achieved positive price cost productivity in both segments in the quarter. As we highlighted throughout 2023, We accelerated our investment levels as the year progressed in areas such as innovation and engineering, capacity and lean, as well as sourcing and procurement. These investments continued in the first quarter, and we are confident they will deliver attractive payback through higher long-term growth and productivity levels. Before I turn it over to Bill, I wanted to share some insights from our Hubbell Utility Connect customer conference a few weeks ago. We hosted over 400 utility customers to showcase our solutions across each of our brands, product lines, and end markets. This was the first time Hubbell held a customer event of this magnitude across the entire utility solutions franchise. And I'd like to thank Greg Gumbs and his leadership team for creating a unique forum for us to engage with our customers, to educate, and collectively problem solve to make our critical infrastructure more reliable and resilient. Key takeaways from several days of discussions with our largest customers were clear. Utilities are in investment mode. Our customers anticipate a multi-year T&D investment cycle as the combined effects of aging infrastructure, renewables, electrification, and load growth will require more hardened infrastructure as well as unique solutions to emerging challenges. Hubbell's leading quality and service levels together with our proactive investments in capacity and innovation, will position us well to grow with our customers as their investment levels accelerate in the coming years. In particular, utility customers are focused on the impact of load growth driven by data center power consumption. While this phenomenon is still early days, the impact to our customers is real and will require incremental investment over a period of many years as large projects progress and require grid interconnections. Higher load growth, and more specifically higher peak load growth, will require more transmission and substation infrastructure, areas where Hubble has recently doubled down and will be well positioned to serve. It also means novel solutions in grid modernization will be required to solve the emerging problems, and Hubble's unique leadership across utility components communications, and control will enable us to partner with our customers for continued long-term success. With that, let me turn it over to Bill for more details in the quarter.