Eaton
Q1 2022 Earnings Call
May 03, 2022, 11:00 a.m. ET
Contents:
- Prepared Remarks
- Questions and Answers
- Call Participants
Prepared Remarks:
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Eaton fourth-quarter earnings call. [Operator instructions] I would now like to turn the conference over to our host, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations Yan Jin. Please go ahead.
Yan Jin -- Senior Vice President of Investor Relations
OK. Good morning, guys. Thank you all for joining us for Eaton's fourth quarter 2022 earning calls. With me today are Craig Arnold, our chairman and CEO; and Tom Okray, executive vice president and the chief financial officer.
Our agenda today, including opening remarks by Craig, highlighting the company's performance in the first quarter. As we have done in our past calls, we'll be taking questions at the end of Craig's comments. The press release and the presentation we'll go through today have been posted on our website. This presentation, including adjusted earning per share, adjusted free cash flow and other non-GAAP measures, they're reconciled in the appendix.
A webcast of this call is accessible on our website and will be available for replay. I would like to remind you that our comments today will including statements related to expected future results of the company and are therefore forward-looking statements. Our actual results may differ materially from our projected -- forecasted projections due to a wide range of risks and uncertainties that are described in our earnings release and presentation. With that, I will turn it over to Craig.
Craig Arnold -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Thanks, Yan. And we'll start on Page 3 with highlights for the quarter. Overall, I'd say we had a strong start to the year, Q1 coming in modestly better than guidance despite additional headwinds and commodities in the quarter. We had a particularly strong quarter in our electrical global and aerospace businesses, and this enables us to deliver a first quarter record for adjusted EPS of $1.62, a 13% increase over prior year.
Our sales were $4.8 billion, up 10% organically from last year, and this was above the high end of our guidance range of 7% to 9%. Most of our end markets remained strong with significant strength in industrial, commercial, residential markets for electrical and commercial aftermarket and commercial OE for aerospace. And our orders continue to accelerate, allowing us to post another record for backlog. For our combined electrical business, orders on a rolling 12-month basis were up 30%, an acceleration from last quarter, which was up 21%.