Ty Silberhorn
Analyst · CJS Securities. Your line is now open
Thanks, Jeff, and thanks everyone for joining us this morning. The first quarter was a solid start to our fiscal year, and I'm proud of the results our team delivered. This morning, I'll review the highlights from the quarter and the trends we're seeing in our business. I'll also give an update on our key initiatives. Then, Nisheet, will provide more details on the quarter and our full year outlook. After that, we'll be happy to take your questions. So let's start with the highlights from the quarter, which can be found on Page 4 of our slide deck. Our business rebounded strongly compared to last year's first quarter when the pandemic had a significant impact on our results. I'm pleased to report that in this year's first quarter, we grew both the top line and the bottom line. Let's start with revenue. We grew sales in all four segments. Our biggest dollar growth came from Large-Scale Optical, which has now fully recovered from last year's pandemic impacts. Architectural Services also performed well delivering double-digit sales growth as we continue to execute projects in our backlog. Let's turn to profitability. Compared to last year's first quarter, profits improved significantly. Again, LSO led the way. That segment is now back at its typical levels of profitability. We also achieved year-over-year margin gains in both Architectural Glass and Framing Systems, despite some inflation in material and freight costs. Earnings per share nearly tripled coming in at $0.42. This compares to adjusted earnings of $0.15 per share last year. From a cash and a balance sheet perspective, our financial position remains strong. We have relatively low debt significantly lower than a year-ago, and we returned $18 million of cash to shareholders this quarter through share buybacks and dividends. Based on the strength of our first quarter results and our outlook, we are increasing our earnings guidance for the full year to a range of $2.20 to $2.40 per share. That's up from our previous guidance of $2.10 to $2.35 per share. Now, let's look at our end markets. While non-residential construction remains in a downturn, we are encouraged by the positive trends we're seeing. In the near-term, we remain cautious as we still face uncertainty, especially in the shorter lead time parts of our business. The latest data on construction spending from the U.S Census Bureau shows that non-residential construction activity is down 6.5% compared to pre-pandemic levels. Notably, spending in every segment of non-residential construction that Apogee participates in is lower compared to a year-ago. However, the trends and forward looking indicators like the Architectural Billings Index and the Dodge Momentum Index are much more encouraging. These indicators turn strongly positive in recent months and remain so. That suggests we could see non-residential construction return to growth at some point in the next 12 months. In our own business, we are seeing early signs that sales pipelines and bidding activity are improving. Also, we are experiencing fewer project delays. In a few cases, we are actually seeing project schedules accelerate. While some uncertainty remains both in how quickly the market recovers and in the supply and costs of key raw materials, we do see increased reasons for optimism. In addition to the [technical difficulty] financial results, we also made very good progress on our key initiatives during the quarter. Those initiatives are outlined on Page 5 of our earnings presentation. Let me touch on a couple of areas, starting with enterprise transformation. During the quarter, we began to work on several foundational projects to enable our enterprise transformation efforts. We are working to strengthen core processes and systems and provide new digital and back office capabilities across several functional areas, including finance, human resources, and supply chain. Our level of effort and the spending on these investments will pick up in the next couple of quarters. These investments also support our cost saving efforts, ensuring we sustain and build on the work already under way. Over the past year, we started the long-term work to build a more competitive cost model. We are driving cost and operational improvement initiatives that will provide near-term benefits, and we see an opportunity to drive further gains over the medium to long-term, primarily in our Architectural Glass and Framing Systems segments. The efforts to further improve our cost structure will remain a top focus for the rest of our fiscal '22 and will be a key pillar of our strategic work going forward. Finally, we made substantial progress on our new enterprise-wide strategy. Last quarter, I mentioned that we had just started to develop a strategic roadmap to better position the company for long-term sustainable growth and to improve our overall financial performance. We began by taking a systematic outside-in approach. We're using a third-party to gather extensive input from dozens of key customers and to provide detailed competitive benchmarking. This work is clearly identifying our strengths as well as areas where we can make marked improvement. Addressing these areas will allow us to consistently grow above market at better margins and deliver stronger value to our customers. The pandemic and the subsequent downturn in nonresidential construction are bringing change to our end markets. We recognize the imperative to adapt our business so that we can succeed in the future. We are now deep into analyzing our current mix of products, services, and capabilities along with the markets and the customers that we serve. Our goal is to identify the best avenues for future growth with better margins. We are also evaluating how we compete. This will ensure we have the right operating model and capabilities needed to deliver consistent, profitable growth. Through our work so far, we've gained valuable insights, and we're excited about the opportunities we see ahead for Apogee. Importantly, our strategy work has validated the opportunity to achieve significant improvements in margins and raise returns on invested capital. This work will continue through the summer and we look forward to sharing more details in the coming quarter, but we will begin executing elements of our strategy as the work is completed. The implementation will be well underway as we head into the fall. So, we anticipate hosting an Investor Day at the end of this calendar year to share more details on our strategy as well as our longer term financial goals. Look for more information on our Investor Day in the coming months. With that, I'll turn it over to, Nisheet, to provide more details on the quarter and our full year outlook.