Corning, Inc. (GLW) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Corning, Inc. (NYSE:GLW) Q1 2023 Earnings Conference Call April 25, 2023 8:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Ann Nicholson - VP, IR

Wendell Weeks - Chairman & CEO

Edward Schlesinger - EVP & CFO

Conference Call Participants

Matthew Niknam - Deutsche Bank

Shannon Cross - Crédit Suisse

Steven Fox - Fox Advisors

Wamsi Mohan - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Samik Chatterjee - JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Asiya Merchant - Citigroup

James Cannon - UBS

Timothy Long - Barclays Bank

Martin Yang - Oppenheimer

Meta Marshall - Morgan Stanley

George Notter - Jefferies

Operator

Welcome to the Corning Inc. Quarter 1 2023 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions]. It is my pleasure to introduce to you, Ann Nicholson, Vice President of Investor Relations.

Ann Nicholson

Thank you, and good morning, everybody. Welcome to Corning's First Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. With me today are Wendell Weeks, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Ed Schlesinger, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; and Jeff Evenson, Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer.

I'd like to remind you that today's remarks contain forward-looking statements that fall within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements involve risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially. These factors are detailed in the company's financial reports.

You should also note that we'll be discussing our consolidated results using core performance measures, unless we specifically indicate our comments relate to GAAP data. Our core performance measures are non-GAAP measures used by management to analyze the business.

For the first quarter, the primary differences between GAAP and core EPS stemmed from restructuring charges and from non-cash mark-to-market adjustments associated with the company's currency hedging contracts and Japanese-yen-denominated debt. In total, these increased core earnings in Q1 by $97 million. As a reminder, the mark-to-market accounting has no impact on our cash flow. A reconciliation of core results to the comparable GAAP value can be found in the Investor Relations section of our website at corning.com.

You may also access core results on our website with downloadable financials in the Interactive Analyst Center. Supporting slides are being shown live on our webcast. We encourage you to follow along. They're also available on our website for downloading.

And now I'll turn the call over to Wendell.

Wendell Weeks

Thank you, Ann, and good morning, everyone. Last quarter, we told you that markets constituting about 1/2 of our sales were experiencing recession-level demand; that our first quarter sales would decline by greater-than-normal seasonality due to the pandemic-related disruptions in China; that we would raise prices again to offset additional inflation; and also begin to restore our productivity ratios to pre-pandemic levels; and as a result, our margins would increase 1 to 2 percentage points sequentially, despite lower sales. And that is exactly how the first quarter played out.