Quanta Services, Inc.

Greetings. Welcome to Qantas Services' first quarter 2023 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone today should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero from your telephone keypad. Please note, this conference is being recorded. At this time, I'll turn the conference over to Kip Rupp, Vice President, Investor Relations. Kip, you may now begin.

Thank you and welcome everyone to the Qantas Services first quarter 2023 earnings conference call. This morning we issued a press release announcing our first quarter 2023 results, which can be found in the investor relations section of our website at QantasServices.com, along with a summary of our 2023 outlook and commentary that we will discuss this morning. Additionally, we'll use a slide presentation this morning to accompany our prepared remarks, which is viewable through the call's webcast. and is also available on the Investor Relations section of the Quantum Services website. Please remember that information reported on this call speaks only as of today, May 4, 2023, and therefore you are advised that any time-sensitive information may no longer be accurate as of any replay of this call. This call will include forward-looking statements intended to qualify under the Safe Harbor from Liability established by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. including all statements reflecting expectations, intentions, assumptions, or beliefs about future events or performance or that do not solely relate to historical or current facts. You should not place undue reliance on these statements as they involve certain risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that are difficult to predict or beyond Qantas control, and actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied. We'll also present certain historical and forecasted non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of those financial measures to their most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are included in our earnings release and slide presentation. Please see slide two and the appendix of the slide presentation for additional information regarding our forward-looking statements and non-GAAP financial measures. Lastly, if you would like to be notified when Qantas publishes news releases and other information, please sign up for email alerts through the investor relations section of Qantaservices.com. We also encourage investors and others interested in our company to follow Qantas IR and Qantas services on the social media channels listed on our website. With that, I would like to now turn the call over to Mr. Duke Austin, Qantas president and CEO.

Duke. Thanks, Skip. Good morning, everyone. and welcome to Qantas Services first quarter 2023 earnings conference call. On the call today, I will provide operational and strategic commentary, and we'll then turn it over to Jayshree Desai, Qantas CFO, to provide a review of our first quarter results and full year 2023 financial expectations. Following Jayshree's comments, we welcome your questions. Before we begin reviewing our financial results, I would like to briefly highlight the recognition that Quanta recently received from Engineering News Record, a leading engineering and construction industry publication. ENR selected Quanta for its prestigious and highest honor, the Award of Excellence. Quanta was selected for its safety leadership with our innovative capacity model, a unique safety and training program that is designed to not only create a work environment that prevents incidents, but also build in the capacity to fail safely and that focuses on learning from mistakes in order to drive improved outcomes. Kiwana is changing how we, our customers, and the industry think about safety excellence, and I want to congratulate Kiwana employees for their dedication to safety and their shared success in being recognized with this award. Our first quarter results. which include double-digit revenue growth and adjusted diluted EPS of $1.24, demonstrate a good start to the year. More importantly, we continue to enhance our self-reform model and remain on track to achieve our full year 2023 and multi-year expectations. Additionally, total backlog at the quarter end was $25.3 billion, a record and considerably higher than the same period last year. Notably, we see opportunity to significantly increase backlog as we move through the year, driven by our base business and larger energy transition projects, such as the SunZia transmission and SunZia wind projects we announced this morning. We believe we are in the early stages of capitalizing on significant opportunities across our service lines, which are driven by our collaborative, solution-based approach that is designed to ultimately benefit consumers. Additionally, the growth of the programmatic spending with existing and new customers and favorable megatrends provide greater flexibility into our near and long-term growth outlook. Our electric power infrastructure solution segment continued to perform well and generated record quarterly revenues. Demand for our services is strong, driven by broad-based business activity from utility grid modernization, grid security, and system hardening initiatives as well as our reputation for consistent and safe execution. We continue to work with our customers to provide them with resources to meet their capital deployment initiatives and to help them address supply chain constraints. As we have discussed over the past several quarters, our view is that the electric power grid will require significant upgrade and modernization to handle the energy transition. We also believe that electric vehicle penetration could increase at a faster rate than expected, which could create significant grid constraints that we believe are underappreciated by many. We expect the issue in the near term to medium term in most regions will not be generation load supply availability, but the inability to move supply to areas with accelerating EV-driven load demand to the current distribution system. According to estimates from UBS, United States EV Car Penetration, is expected to be more than quadruple from approximately 4% in 2025 to approximately 19% by 2030. We believe this developing grid capacity challenge will be acutely impacted as commercial fleets, medium and heavy-duty trucks, and buses become increasingly electrified. For example, yesterday Navistar, a long-standing key partner to Kiwana for medium and heavy-duty trucks, announced a partnership with us to provide its customers a turnkey battery electric vehicle product and charging infrastructure solution that enables fleets to deploy battery EVs quickly and efficiently. The partnership intends to leverage Navistar's approach to delivering fully integrated e-mobility solutions to its customers with Qantas' expertise in assessing and designing EV charging infrastructure and building the interconnecting EV battery charging infrastructure into the power grid. One understands infrastructure and its partnership agreement with Navistar is an example of the unique vantage point we have into the growing challenges with the power grid as the energy transition and electrification of everything accelerates. As we have discussed on prior calls, to meaningfully reduce carbon emissions and increase electrification of the economy will require substantial incremental investment in transmission, substation, and renewable generation facilities to produce and transport clean power and to ensure grid reliability due to the growth of intermittent power added to the system. One of the strategic reasons we acquired Blattner was because we believe the addition of utility-scale renewable generation solutions to Quanta's holistic grid solutions would transform our ability to collaborate early with our customers on their energy transition strategies over the coming decades and create a value proposition unique in the industry. To that end, this morning we announced that Quanah was selected by Pattern Energy to provide comprehensive infrastructure solutions for the Sun-Zia transmission and Sun-Zia wind projects, which together compromise the largest clean energy infrastructure project in the United States history. Quanah will leverage the capabilities of multiple operating companies to execute these projects for Pattern We believe these project awards validate the power of our combined high-voltage transmission and renewable generation solutions and demonstrate the value of our collaborative approach to providing energy transition infrastructure solutions, which can serve as a model for the renewable and utility industries going forward. As expected, normal seasonality and the solar panel supply chain and regulatory hurdles from last year resulted in a slow start for our renewable generation project activities in the first quarter. However, these dynamics are improving and renewable generation project activity is accelerating, which we expect to continue throughout the year. For example, at the end of April, we were in various levels of construction on 28 utility scale renewable generation projects. We are in active discussions with clients about projects in 2024 and beyond and are focused on scaling our resources and capacity to handle what we expect to be record levels of new renewable generation capacity additions over the coming decade, at least. Additionally, we are pursuing billions of dollars of high voltage transmission projects that are designed to support current and future renewable generation capacity growth and overall system reliability. We are pleased with the performance of our underground utility and infrastructure solution segment in the first quarter, which delivered double-digit revenue growth and record levels of first quarter profitability, demonstrating solid execution across our operations in the segment. Our industrial services operations executed well and experienced strong demand following two years of deferred activity during the pandemic. We also experienced solid demand for our gas utility and pipeline integrity operations. which are executing well and are driven by regulated spin to modernize systems, reduce methane emissions, ensure environmental compliance, and improve safety and reliability. We continue to believe our operational portfolio is a strategic advantage that provides us the ability to shift resources across service lines and geographies, which we believe will become increasingly important as the energy transition accelerates. We believe our portfolio approach approach positions us well to allocate resources to the opportunities we find the most economical and attractive to achieve operating efficiencies that enhance our operational and financial consistency. The energy transition towards a reduced economy continues to progress, and we believe it's gaining pace. Quanta is successfully executing on our strategic initiatives to drive sustainable and resilient operational excellence, total cost solutions for our clients, consistent profitable and value, consistent profitable growth and value for our stakeholders, all of which gives us confidence in our ability to deliver on our 2023 and multi-year financial expectations. We are focused on operating the business for the long term and expect to continue to distinguish ourselves through safe execution and best in class field leadership. We will pursue opportunities to enhance Qantas based business and leadership position in the industry and provide innovative solutions to our customers. We believe quantum diversity, unique operating model, and entrepreneurial mindset form the foundation that will allow us to continue to generate long-term value for all our stakeholders. I will now turn the call over to Jashree Desai, our CFO, for her review of our first quarter results and 2023 expectations. Jashree.