Badger Meter, Inc. (NYSE:BMI) Q4 2022 Earnings Conference Call January 27, 2023 11:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Karen Bauer - VP, IR, Corporate Strategy and Treasurer

Kenneth Bockhorst - Chairman, President & CEO

Robert Wrocklage - SVP & CFO

Conference Call Participants

Nathan Jones - Stifel

Thomas Johnson - Morgan Stanley

Robert Mason - Baird

Tate Sullivan - Maxim Group

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Fourth Quarter 2022 Badger Meter Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, today's conference is being recorded.

It is now my pleasure to turn the conference over to Karen Bauer, Vice President of Investor Relations, Corporate Strategy and Treasurer. Please go ahead, Ms. Bauer.

Karen Bauer

Good morning, and thank you all for joining the Badger Meter fourth quarter and full year 2022 earnings conference call. On the call with me today are Ken Bockhorst, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Bob Wrocklage, Chief Financial Officer. The earnings release and related slide presentation are available on our website.

Quickly, I will cover the safe harbor, reminding you that any forward-looking statements made during this call are subject to various risks and uncertainties, the most important of which are outlined in our press release and SEC filings. On today's call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial metrics. Our earnings slides provide a reconciliation of the GAAP to non-GAAP financial metrics used.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Ken.

Kenneth Bockhorst

Thanks, Karen, and thank you for joining our fourth quarter earnings call. The Badger Meter team finished the year with another strong performance, delivering solid revenue growth while achieving yet another positive book-to-bill ratio.

Despite persistent macro challenges with sustained inflation and sporadic component shortages throughout 2022, gross profit margins have consistently been within our tightened normalized range of 38% to 40% and we improved SEA expense leverage during the year.

We generated robust cash flow in 2022 and utilize that growth capital to acquire Syrinix in early January 2023, adding to our comprehensive hardware enabled software offerings. I'll talk more about Syrinix provide a recap for the full year and discuss our outlook later in the call.

But for now, I'll turn the call over to Bob to go through the details of the quarter.

Robert Wrocklage

Thanks, Ken, and good morning, everyone. Turning to Slide 4. Our total sales in the fourth quarter were $147.3 million, sequentially similar to last quarter's record level, and 8.5% higher than the $135.7 million in the same period last year.