Hyster-Yale Materials Handling, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by and welcome to the Hyster Yale Q4 2021 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker 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. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Christina Kometko. Please go ahead. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us this morning.

Welcome to our 2021 fourth quarter and full year earnings call. I'm Christina Kometko, and I am responsible for Investor Relations at High Street Yale. Joining me on today's call are Al Rankin, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Rajiv Prasad, President, and Ken Schilling, our Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Yesterday evening we published our 2021 fourth quarter and full year results and filed our 10-K, both of which are available on our website. Today's call is being recorded and webcast. The webcast will be on our website later this afternoon and available for approximately 12 months. Our remarks that follow, including answers to your questions, contain forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties. that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements made here today. These risks include, among others, matters that we have described in our earnings release issued last night and in our 10-K and other filings with the SEC. We disclaim any obligation to update these forward-looking statements, which may not be updated until our next quarterly earnings conference call, if at all. In addition, we will be discussing non-GAAP information that we believe is useful in evaluating the company's operating performance. Reconciliations for these non-GAAP measures can be found in our earnings release on our website. In a moment, I'll discuss our current quarter results, but first, let me turn the call over to our chairman and CEO, Al Rankin, for some opening remarks. Al.

Good morning, everyone. The 2021 calendar year was very challenging, more so than 2020, in fact. Our fourth quarter and full year results reflect the impact of those challenges. As you saw from the release we issued last night, our fourth quarter results, excluding some non-cash charges, were directionally in line with the outlook we provided last quarter. But still, due to the non-cash charges, which arose as a result of how this challenging environment has affected our nearer term forecasts, were lower than we anticipated. Well, Christy will discuss these specific charges and our financial results in detail in a moment. I will provide some high-level thoughts on our results. Lift truck market demand remained strong during the fourth quarter and continued to grow over 2020 levels, but as we expected, it decreased from the third quarter of 2021 as markets continued to moderate from the peaks achieved in the first half of the year. This year-over-year market growth, as well as share gains, resulted in strong lift truck bookings for the fourth quarter, which contributed to a new record lift truck backlog level and exceeded the historically high level achieved in the third quarter. Given these factors and as a result of production changes made in the fourth quarter, and despite the continuing supply chain challenges exacerbated by several critical component shortages, Our fourth quarter shipments were the strongest we've seen since the start of the pandemic. Last quarter, we indicated that we expected significant losses at the lift truck business in the fourth quarter of 2021 as a result of anticipated continuing supply chain constraints and significantly rising material and logistics costs, leading to margin contraction for trucks in our backlog. These challenges continued in the fourth quarter with only modest part shortages improvements and inflation continued to rise in the quarter but at a slightly lower rate of change. These factors along with the non-cash charges led to the substantial consolidated operating and net losses we reported for the consolidated company in the fourth quarter. Our teams continue to work diligently to obtain the components we need for production and to increase margins in our backlog and particularly for new orders. Further, given the record backlog levels, the opportunity for increased production as supply chain bottlenecks are resolved is high, as evidenced by the substantial increase in shipments in the fourth quarter of 2021. After Christy reviews the financial results for the quarter, Rajiv will provide more detail on these supply chain challenges, as well as provide an update on our business operations and strategic projects Ken will then discuss our outlook in this very challenging, but we believe, improving environment. Christine?