Unifi, Inc. New

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Unify's first quarter fiscal 2022 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 your question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to add a conference over to your Speaker for today, E.J. Acker, Vice President of Finance. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Jay, and good morning, everyone. On the call today is Al Carey, Executive Chairman, Eddie Engel, Chief Executive Officer, and Craig Creatore, Chief Financial Officer. During this call, management will be referencing a webcast presentation that can be found at Unified.com and by clicking the conference call link. Management advises you that certain statements included in today's call will be forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. Management cautions that these statements are based on current expectations, estimates, and or projections about the markets in which Unify operates. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve certain risks that are difficult to predict. Actual outcomes and results may differ materially from what is expressed, forecasted, or implied by these statements. You are directed to the disclosures filed with the SEC on Unify's Forms 10Q and 10K regarding various factors that may impact these results. Also, please be advised that certain non-GAAP financial measures, such as adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EPS, adjusted working capital, and net debt may be discussed on this call. I will now turn the call over to Al Carey.

Thank you, AJ. Good morning, everybody. Thanks for joining the call this morning. And we'll be discussing Unify's first quarter performance for fiscal 2022. So I'll start with a couple of broad themes for the first quarter. Then I'm going to turn it over to Eddie Engel, our CEO, and then Craig Kreator is our CFO, and they'll give you the performance review. Then we'll go to Q&A. So the first quarter results were very good. Looking at it from both year-ago comparisons and then to go back to two years ago comparison pre-COVID, revenues were up 39% and versus two years ago, they were up 9%, so the pre-COVID timeframes. EBITDA grew 119% versus year ago this year, and then up 62% versus two years ago. So both give us a strong start for fiscal 2022. In fact, it gives us confidence to firm up our full-year guidance and increase it modestly, even after considering the impact of some of these macro headwinds that we're looking at right now, such as labor, raw material increases, and supply chain challenges. So Craig and Eddie will take you through those details in the next few minutes. But here are four trends that we're seeing coming out of the first quarter. The first one is the diversity of our geographic portfolio is a strong positive for us. So this quarter, Brazil and Asia had a very strong Q1. North America came in right about what we forecasted, but they could have done better. The labor shortages in the U.S. kept us from producing to demand more. And we expect that that headwind is probably going to persist through quarter two. And then the second half of the year, we expect to see some improvement in that trend. Then I think you can expect North America to start contributing more to our growth. The second trend coming out of the first quarter was reprieve sales growth continues to build. So if you look at reprieve sales versus a year ago, first quarter was up 39%. And then from two years ago, pre-COVID, it was up 27%. I think customers right now are continuing to step up their commitment to recycled materials and apparel and footwear and auto, and we've had numerous positive customer wins over the last quarter. The third trend is productivity, and the investment in EVO cooler technology in our operation will provide strong long-term productivity, and we'll begin seeing a little bit of that in the fourth quarter of this fiscal year. The production on the current small scale that we rolled out is meeting our expectations in terms of efficiency and output. And the fourth trend is labor. And labor in the U.S. is a challenge right now. Our manufacturing and HR teams have been working on the obvious fixes, such as labor rate and benefits, to make sure that we remain competitive in the marketplace. However, they've discovered several longer-term solutions by conducting frontline employee roundtables in our plants. We've asked our employees what can we do to make their jobs more fulfilling and to keep them with us for a longer time. And they've come up with several very interesting improvements that are pragmatic and they're being implemented. Everything from the quality of training and the amount of training to changing the way that the work gets done. We sometimes forget, I think, that the employees that are closest to the action can solve problems probably better than anyone else in the company. So we'll share more of this with you in the upcoming quarters. So all in all, a good start for the fiscal year. There's still a great deal of work to do, but we're optimistic about the outlook. So at this point, let me turn it over to our CEO, Eddie Engel, for a continuation of the presentation.