Badger Meter, Inc. (NYSE:BMI) Q1 2022 Earnings Conference Call April 19, 2022 11:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Karen Bauer - Vice President of Investor Relations, Corporate Strategy and Treasurer

Ken Bockhorst - Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer

Bob Wrocklage - Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Andrew Buscaglia - Berenberg Capital Markets

Rob Mason - Robert W. Baird

Nathan Jones - Stifel Nicolaus

Tate Sullivan - Maxim Group

Thomas Johnson - Morgan Stanley

Operator

Hello, good morning, and ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the First Quarter 2022 Badger Meter Earnings Conference Call. My name is Jema, and I'll be today's operator. [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. Thank you.

Karen Bauer

Thank you. Good morning, and thanks for joining the Badger Meter’s first quarter 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.

Ken Bockhorst

Thanks, Karen, and thank you for joining our first quarter earnings call. This quarter’s themes replicate those we experienced for much of 2021, including robust demand, operating execution, pricing activities, and operating expense leverage mitigating widespread inflationary pressures and manufacturing volatility from supply chain constraints.

We were extremely pleased with the record pace of orders and the mid-teens growth in utility water revenues in the quarter. Our team continues to do an outstanding job managing the dynamic environment, and I want to thank them for their tireless focus and agility in serving our customers. I'll talk about the current environment and our outlook later in the call.

But for now, let me turn the call over to Bob to go through the details of the quarter.

Bob Wrocklage

Thanks, Ken, and good morning, everyone. Turning to Slide 4, our total sales for the first quarter were $132.4 million, an increase of 12.4% over the $117.8 million in the same period last year. Utility water product line sales increased 15.1% year-over-year as continued strong order demand and production output was partially offset by intermittent supply chain disruptions that continued to restrict backlog conversion.