Hyster-Yale Materials Handling, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by and welcome to the Hyster Yale Quarter 1 2022 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.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us this morning. Welcome to our 2002 First Quarter Earnings Call. I am Christina Kometko, and I am responsible for Investor Relations at History 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 2002 first quarter results and filed our time queue, both of which are available on our website. Today's call is being recorded in 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 10Q 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 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.

Thanks, Christy, and good morning, everyone. Overall, our first quarter results reflect the impact of the various headwinds that we discussed in last quarter's outlook. Despite these headwinds, and while reporting operating and net losses, our results are substantially better than we anticipated in our fourth quarter earnings release, with all three segments, particularly the lift truck business, reporting better than expected results. In addition, significantly because of a favorable sales mix, and the reinstatement of tariff exclusions, our first quarter gross margins improved from the very low gross margins in the fourth quarter of 2021, even though these two periods had comparable revenues. Customer demand remains healthy, as evidenced by strong bookings during the quarter and our record backlog level. Further, as we expected, during the early part of the quarter, material and freight costs began to moderate. and we experienced a reduced number of individual supplier issues during the quarter. Nevertheless, shortages of certain critical components continue to disrupt our production levels and affect our shipments. Our teams continue to work closely with suppliers to obtain the components we need for production and on pricing to increase margins in our backlog, and particularly for new orders. Further, given the lift truck business record backlog levels, the opportunity for increased production as supply chain bottlenecks are resolved is high. However, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has caused further inflation pressure and supply chain shortages. The recent COVID related lockdowns in China are also affecting parts availability and have introduced additional difficulty in global supply chains. Both of these events have affected our outlook for the second quarter and for the back half of the year. Rajiv and Ken will provide more specifics on these topics. Now I'll turn the call back over to Christy to review the financial results for the quarter. Christy.