James Hardie Industries plc (NYSE:JHX) Q1 2024 Earnings Conference Call August 7, 2023 6:30 PM ET

Company Participants

Aaron Erter - Chief Executive Officer

Jason Miele - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Shaurya Visen - Bank of America

Niraj Shah - Goldman Sachs

Keith Chau - MST Marquee

Lee Power - UBS

Daniel Kang - CLSA

Lisa Huynh - JPMorgan

Peter Steyn - Macquarie Research

Simon Thackray - Jefferies

Samuel Seow - Citigroup

Harry Saunders - E&P

Brook Crawford - Barrenjoey

Paul Quinn - RBC Capital Markets

Operator

Thank you for standing by. And welcome to the James Hardie First Quarter Fiscal Year 2024 Results Briefing. Today’s briefing is hosted by James Hardie CEO, Mr. Aaron Erter, and CFO, Mr. Jason Miele.

After the briefing, we will open up the lines to Q&A, and I remind participants to limit your questions to one plus a follow up. After the Q&A. I'll turn back to Mr. Erter for any closing remarks. I'd now like to hand the conference over to James Hardie CEO. Mr. Aaron Erter. Please go ahead, sir.

Aaron Erter

Thank you, operator. Good morning and good evening to everyone. And welcome to our first quarter fiscal year 2024 results briefing. Turning to Page 2, you will see our standard cautionary note on forward-looking statements. Please note that the presentation today does contain forward looking statements and the use of non-GAAP financial information also, except where we explicitly state otherwise during our prepared remarks, all references to monetary amounts should be assumed to be in US dollars.

Moving to Page 3, you will see our agenda for today. As always, I'm joined by our CFO, Jason Miele. For today's call, I will start by providing a strategy and operations update. Jason will then discuss our financial results, and I will return to discuss our outlook guidance and provide a brief closing. We will then open it up for questions.

Before we begin, I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our employees around the world who remain focused on safely delivering the highest quality products, solutions, and services to our customer partners. Our employees truly represent the very best in our industry, and consistently enable our superior value proposition.

Let's start on Page 5 with a brief business update. Our teams remain laser focused on partnering with our customers, managing decisively and controlling what we can control. Our first quarter results highlight how impactful that focus has been. In Q1, our adjusted net income increased 13% to $174.5 million, which was above the top end of our guidance range. This was driven by higher than expected volumes in North America, our North America volume of 748 million standard feet was a 5% beat to the top end of our volume guidance. And we delivered that at a record 31.3% EBIT margin, which is in line with the volume sensitivity analysis we provided you in May, Jason will unpack this a bit more in the financial section. The net income result was also supported by strong results in our Asia Pac and European regions. And importantly, we generated operating cash flow of over quarter of a billion dollar. While markets remain uncertain, our focus remains on partnering with our customers and controlling what we can control to deliver differentiated results.