Greetings, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Thermon Group Holdings First Quarter Fiscal 2023 Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note that this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to our host, Ivonne Salem, Vice President, FP&A and Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you, Diego. Good morning, and thank you for joining today's fiscal 2023 first quarter conference call. Earlier this morning, we issued an earnings press release, which has been filed with the SEC on Form 8-K and is also available on the Investor Relations section of our website. Additionally, the slides for this conference call can be found in our IR website under News and Events, IR Calendar, Earnings Conference Call Q1 2023. During the call, we will discuss some items that do not conform to generally accepted accounting principles. We have reconciled those items to the most comparable GAAP measures in the tables at the end of the earnings press release. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to, and not as a substitute for, measures of financial performance reported in accordance with GAAP. I would like to remind you that during this call, we might make certain forward-looking statements regarding our company. Please refer to our annual report and most recent quarterly report filed with the SEC for more information regarding our forward-looking statements, including the risks and uncertainties that could impact our future results. Our actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by those forward-looking statements, and we undertake no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future developments or otherwise, except as may be required by law. Now I would like to introduce Bruce Thames, our President and Chief Executive Officer, for his opening remarks.

Thank you, Ivonne. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining today. Thermon had an excellent quarter to start our fiscal year with better-than-anticipated organic sales growth, record Q1 revenue and bookings, exceptional operating leverage and year-over-year margin expansion that illustrates the momentum we carried into Q1 from the strong finish to our fiscal year '22. Our team executed extremely well in the quarter despite supply chain challenges that persist to serve our customers with commitment and grow our market share. These results were largely driven by continued investments and a winning strategy, strong execution by our Thermon team around the globe and fiscal discipline around cost management. As part of that growth strategy, we acquired Powerblanket on May 31, which contributed approximately $1 million to the top line in the month of June. We'll provide more details on the acquisition later in this call. We're seeing strength in North America and a recovery in oil and gas maintenance spending driving $95.4 million in revenue, a first quarter record, growing by 34% over the prior year quarter. More importantly, we saw the team deliver strong operating leverage as compared to the prior year quarter with adjusted EBITDA more than doubling to $16.6 million and more than 3x the rate of our revenue growth. Free cash flow for the quarter was particularly strong at $10.3 million, which represented the second consecutive quarter of free cash flow over 150% of net income. Adjusted EPS was $0.25 a share in the quarter, bringing the trailing 12-month adjusted EPS to $1.05 a share for the business, an increase of 31% from the prior quarter. While we are seeing a weakening outlook in Europe and FX headwinds, we're raising revenue and EPS guidance for the full fiscal year given the strong performance and strong backlog…

Thanks, Bruce. Turning to Page 6. Before I jump into the specifics, I want to note we are very pleased with the financials this quarter, and it's a reflection of the global team's commitment to driving profitable growth while meeting a level of customer demand that remained elevated past the typical timing of the heating season. We believe demand, particularly in North America, was driven by elevated levels of maintenance this spring and early summer after deferrals in the 2020 to 2021 time frame. Revenue in the first quarter was $95 million, up 34% versus prior year and exceeding internal expectations. The large onetime labor contract contributed $1 million in new orders and $7 million in revenue in the quarter. So excluding that project, Thermon revenues were up 24% versus prior year. As mentioned on our previous call, on-site work for this contract was completed in May. FX impacted revenue by a negative $2.9 million due to the stronger U.S. dollar, which we expect to continue to impact our business in the quarters ahead. Revenue is significantly higher in both the U.S., Latin America and Canada regions this year versus last, with both regions seeing elevated materials demand from our installed base where we realized the combined $14 million of incremental material sales in North America. While we typically see the seasonality effect in our process heating business begin to taper off in late March, we observed elevated daily order rates for those products through June, helping to drive the revenue outperformance in the period. We continue to see progress in our diversified end markets with power up 85% and food and beverage up 19% year-over-year. While maintenance spending in the oil and gas markets is growing considerably, we are keeping our global sales teams focused on executing against our…

Thank you, Kevin. I'd like to now direct your attention to Slide 11 on our strategic initiatives. In our fiscal year '23 plan, we have investments of roughly $6 million in incremental SG&A expense and $4 million in CapEx to drive growth across these 3 strategic platforms in the fiscal year. To capitalize on developing markets, we're expanding our manufacturing capabilities in India to meet lead times and price points for process and environmental heaters in a very fragmented Asia Pacific market. While we're off to a slow start in the first quarter due to COVID lockdowns, we anticipate 20% to 30% top line growth across the region in this fiscal year. As noted last quarter, our efforts on diversification have really begun to gain traction with approximately 60% of our end markets now outside of the oil and gas sector. The initial focus on food and beverage, commercial and rail and transit expands our addressable market by over $1 billion. A new business development manager has been hired to cover the European market where we can leverage our relationships with large OEMs in the transit sector. And we continue to invest in research and development dollars for rail and transit and commercial applications with new product launches planned later this fiscal year. Technology-enabled maintenance, our third strategic platform for growth, capitalizes on the digital transformation underway. We've recently updated our Genesis Network software to monitor and manage third-party controllers which opens up a wider range of brownfield opportunities. We've also secured our first Genesis Network order in the Middle East and based upon the pipeline of opportunities anticipate tripling systems sales this year -- this fiscal year. Turning now to Slide 12 to illustrate how Thermon solutions are enabling a more sustainable and cleaner future. There are a wide…

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Jon Braatz with Kansas City Capital.

Can I get a little bit more color on your revenue expectations? Bruce, you talked about some of the pluses and some of the negatives. And I guess a couple of questions. Number one, how much of a headwind is Europe at this point? And what might it take to change or to see some improvement in the European business?

Yes. So Europe is down modestly year-over-year. It's really the only area where we've seen any contraction in Asia is roughly flat. We obviously are seeing the impact of the war on Ukraine as well as higher energy prices and just some uncertainty in depressed demand. So certainly, we expect that. We're kind of projecting some of these revenue shortfalls going forward. But our revised forecast factors in just the strength that we're seeing in the Western Hemisphere, U.S., Latin America as well as Canada. Our business levels are quite robust. And we're also seeing really a recovery in that oil and gas spending that we talked about last quarter, Jon, as being the potential upside to this fiscal year. And certainly, in the first quarter, we've got a great start to that.

Bruce, you talked about the strength in the maintenance spending in oil and gas and maybe elsewhere. What kind of legs does that have to kind of continue on for -- the maintenance spending continuing on for another 3, 4 quarters? And then what would your expectation be about maybe some additional capital spending in the oil and gas industry and some new projects moving forward?

Yes, that's a great question. So Jon, I think as we look at the oil and gas sector, we're seeing very different behaviors in this cycle, a lot more fiscal discipline around new investments in CapEx and really a focus on return to shareholders. And so what we've seen here is with just the demand recovery, and this is upstream as well as downstream, we just see a lot of this maintenance spending and that's been deferred for a couple of years. So I think there's some activity there. But a lot of what's really driving the, just the groundswell of activity is really focusing around maximizing the assets that they currently have and debottlenecking, throughput, utilization, those types of investments to really get the most out of the capital investments that are on the ground. So just I think given the demand -- kind of the tight supply-demand picture that we see, and that's really being exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, we anticipate this remaining relatively strong going forward even if there is some slowing of demand maybe on the heels of a recession. So we think this is a fairly -- going to be fairly resilient for several quarters to come.

Okay. Okay. One last question, Bruce. Obviously, there's a lot of talk these days about controlling methane releases and so on. And obviously, you talked a little bit about EnviroDyne, and you got an initial 20 units ordered. Two things. Number one, how big can this business be? And what are we talking about in terms of revenue on 20 orders? How significant is that?

I mean it's less than $1 million. So it's not a huge order, but a question around how big this could be. These are really targeted for use in more remote areas. A lot of this would be in gathering systems, particularly where you don't have the availability of electricity and you have fugitive emissions from smaller sources. So this is kind of where this plays best. And so if you kind of think about it, carbon tax is one of the things that -- and certainly, a push to reduce Scope 1 emissions are really what's driving this, both economically and just from a from ethical and environmental standards perspective. So this could be a sizable opportunity. There's certainly competing technologies, and it's not clear what would win today. But this really has some distinct advantages over some of the other alternatives, particularly in remote areas where electricity and some other infrastructure for carbon capture and sequestration may not be available.

Our next question comes from Brian Drab with William Blair.

So the revenue upward revision, just to be clear, so the upward revision is about like a $17 million to $18 million related to Powerblanket and $10 million organic. Is that how to think about that?

Yes, Brian, you're right on. We think about Powerblanket, that's the 10 months of revenue we'll consolidate for our fiscal '23 plus the -- call it, the outperformance in first quarter as well.

Right, right. And then you had a nice gross margin improvement, like 250 basis points or so year-over-year. How sustainable is that, do you think, as you move through the year? Are we going to maybe be at a run rate of 200 or 300 basis points above gross margin that we saw in fiscal '22 potentially?

So Brian, I think when we look at gross margin, leveraging the fixed costs, and clearly, when we see an environment where volume is going to be higher, we should have some of that fall to the bottom line with gross margins. I think you've seen over the past couple of quarters, we've been able to manage that value gap, the price/cost equation. I think we expect to be able to continue to do that through the year. And I think really what we would point to and where we expect to see some additional value in the gross margins is really the continuous improvement initiatives, the operational transformation that Roberto, since he's joined the team, is really getting a lot of traction, a lot of excitement in the plants. And I don't want to put a number on it specifically, but we certainly think there's more opportunity to come related to the continuous improvement efforts as well.

Brian, I would also add to that. As we've completed the large onetime contract this quarter, it's labor only and it's single-digit margins. So as we see that drop off, we envision the mix in the next 3 quarters to be significantly better over what we experienced last year, and we also -- I believe that's going to contribute to the gross margin expansion in the next 3 quarters.

How big a headwind to gross margin was that 1 project?

Kevin, do you have that?

Yes, it's significant, Brian. If you think about all in, it was about $31 million of revenue that started in Q2 of last year. The bulk of it was Q4 and then this Q1. But at the end of the day, as Bruce mentioned, that was a pretty low-margin contract. And so as we lap those comps, there's certainly some upside just on the reported margins as well.

Okay. And then you mentioned on the last call, I think it was, that Russia was about -- running at about like $5 million in revenue per quarter thereabouts, and then that was going to run off. How much revenue was there from Russia in the first quarter? And how does that run off in terms of timing?

Yes. I think the numbers you may have been referencing were more kind of the business last year. We have roughly about close to $20 million in backlog in Russia. We expect that to kind of run off over the next 18 months. I think we did roughly $3 million in revenue in the first quarter, and we would expect somewhere in maybe $8 million to $10 million in revenue in the fiscal year as we execute on those contracts.

Okay. And then maybe just the last couple of questions. The orders were down sequentially from $113 million last quarter to $103 million. But is that largely seasonality? Or is that start -- are we starting to see impact from Europe? And so that's my first question.

Yes. So Brian, I mean you know this business. We're very seasonal. By far, our Q1 is the weakest incoming order rates in the business. And these -- and I would really point to you, quite frankly, sequential bookings and revenue don't really tell you much in this business. You really have to factor it over the prior year just due to the seasonality because it is so pronounced. So I would really point you to the relative improvements year-over-year and not the sequential order rates. And I would -- that's for every quarter because it depends. Some are over under and you can really be misled both directions if you look at sequentials just due to seasonality.

And Brian, when we look at orders, the TTM numbers where we focus, that's, I think, in the $395 million range at this point. So it kind of puts you right in the middle of the guide as well.

Got it. Okay. Can you -- lastly, can you just talk at all about what you saw in terms of year-over-year change in orders for North America, Europe and Asia?

Yes. So really, the bulk, like we said, of the activity was not only revenue, but the incoming order rates were really in the Western Hemisphere. U.S. and Latin America, very strong and really a broad base of industrials. And Canada as well, really a lot of strength. Asia, the incoming order rate was solid, but the back -- the kind of the pipeline and the opportunities are building in Europe. We do see some weakness year-over-year. And a big part of that's having Russia fall off. So some of that we anticipated, but as we've really suspended the oil and gas orders in that legal entity, so certainly, that's a headwind for Europe when we just look at year-over-year comparisons. But we're focused on really driving the incoming order rates in Western Europe particularly to really drive our results and performance this fiscal year.

Okay. And just sneaking in one last one. On interest expense, it's become relatively minor. Now is that -- is what we saw in terms of interest expense in the first quarter and tax rate for that matter similar to what we should expect for the subsequent quarters in this fiscal '23?

Yes. I mean, Brian, you've obviously got rising interest rate environment. So as the base goes up, that will accrue through. But I think you can factor in those types of changes that we don't have control over. But I think it's generally indicative of what we expect over the next couple of quarters.

Yes. And tax rate, too?

Oh, sorry. Yes, same. No changes on tax rate. I think we're still at 26% for the year.

Got it. Okay. I'm seeing 29% effective tax rate in the model that we plugged in today. Is that -- was that higher than what you're expecting for the rest of the year? Maybe I just have a typo.

No, I can double check that with you off-line, Brian, but I think for the total year, we're still at 26%. I think we had some discrete items related to the European operations that might be driving it in the quarter. But let me double check with that, and we can follow up with you off-line.

Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'll turn the floor back to Mr. Bruce Thames for closing remarks.

Thank you. Well, thank you all for joining our call today. We appreciate your interest and investment in Thermon. Enjoy the rest of your day.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference. All parties may disconnect. Have a good day.