The Middleby Corporation (NASDAQ:MIDD) Q1 2022 Earnings Conference Call May 10, 2022 11:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Tim Fitzgerald - Chief Executive Officer

James Pool - Chief Technology and Operations Officer

Bryan Mittelman - Chief Financial Officer

Steve Spittle - Chief Commercial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Mirc Dobre - Baird

Tami Zakaria - JPMorgan

Saree Boroditsky - Jefferies

Jeff Hammond - KeyBanc Capital

Larry De Maria - William Blair

John Joyner - BMO

Operator

Thank you for joining us today for The Middleby Corporation First Quarter 2022 Conference Call. With us today from management are CEO, Tim Fitzgerald; CFO, Bryan Mittelman; Chief Commercial Officer, Steve Spittle; and Chief Technology and Operations Officer, James Pool. We will begin the call with opening comments then open the lines for questions. Instructions on how to get into the queue will be given at that time. Also, please be aware that a presentation to accompany the earnings announcement is available on the Investor page of middleby.com.

Now I'd like to turn the call over to Tim Fitzgerald. Please go ahead, sir.

Tim Fitzgerald

Great. Thank you, Andrea, and thank you everybody for joining us today on our first quarter earnings call. We started the year with momentum building upon the progress we made in 2021 and continuing to execute upon our financial and strategic initiatives. Financially, we posted record sales and earnings for the first quarter, and we were able to largely maintain our profitability, while facing unprecedented inflationary impacts.

Supply chain disruption and the related cost impacts have become increasingly challenging as a result of the recent COVID shutdowns in China and the impact of war in Ukraine. Operationally, we remain focused on increasing our production to support our significant backlog, which again increased in the first quarter with incoming orders outpacing revenues. Our teams continue to execute in the face of daily challenges affecting parts availability with concerted efforts to work with our strategic vendor partners to minimize disruption operations. And we also continue to make investments in manufacturing equipment, facility expansions, and people all in an effort to increase production capacity.

While the additional recent disruptions to supply chain have placed further challenges on our operations. We increased shipments to a record level in Q1 and we are committed to continuing improvement as we progressed through the year. As we continue to manage operating challenges and the related margin pressures, we are not losing sight of our long-term profitability goals set forth for each of our three business segments. We continue to invest in R&D and launched new product innovations with a focus on increasing profitability of our sales mix.