Service Corporation International (SCI) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending March 31, 2023

May 2, 2023 9:00 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Good morning, and welcome to the Service Corporation International First Quarter 2023 Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this event is being recorded.

I would now like to turn the conference over to SCI management. Please go ahead.

Debbie Young

Good morning, everyone, and welcome. This is Debbie Young, Director of Investor Relations. And today, we're going to be providing an overview of our business results for the first quarter. Before we begin with prepared remarks, let me quickly go over the safe harbor language. Any comments made by our management team that states our plans, beliefs, expectations or projections for the future are forward-looking statements.

These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated in such statements. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, those factors identified in our earnings release and in our filings with the SEC that are available on our website. Today, we will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of these measures to the appropriate GAAP measures can be found in the tables at the end of our earnings release and also on our website under the Investors Webcast and Events section.

Now that that's out of the way, let me turn it over to Tom Ryan, Chairman and CEO, for opening remarks.

Tom Ryan

Thank you, Debbie. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us on the call today. Before I begin, I want to take a moment to honor our Founder and Chairman Emeritus, Bob Walter. He passed away at the age of 92 on February 27. Without Bob's vision and tenacity, there would be no SCI. He was a tremendous mentor in the consummate funeral service professional. We will all be forever grateful for this company he created and we're all better for having known and learned from such a great man. He will be missed immensely. This morning, I'm going to begin my remarks with some high-level color on our business performance for the quarter and then provide you with some greater detail around our solid funeral and cemetery results.

For the first quarter, we generated adjusted earnings per share of $0.93, which was in line with our expectations, but down from the prior year, which benefited from a significant pandemic impact. We continue to see significant earnings per share growth over pre-pandemic results. Compared to our first quarter of 2019 of $0.47 per share, we have effectively doubled earnings per share from 4 years ago, growing at a compounded at annual rate of 19%.