Rockwell Automation, Inc. (ROK) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending December 31, 2022

January 26, 2023 8:30 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Thank you for holding, and welcome to Rockwell Automation's Quarterly Conference Call. I need to remind everyone that today's conference call is being recorded. Later in the call, we will open up the lines for questions.

At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Aijana Zellner, Head of Investor Relations and Market Strategy. Ms. Zellner, please go ahead.

Aijana Zellner – Head of IR and Market Strategy

Thank you, Julianne. Good morning and thank you for joining us for Rockwell Automation's first quarter fiscal 2023 earnings release conference call. With me today is Blake Moret, our Chairman and CEO; and Nick Gangestad, our CFO. Our results were released earlier this morning, and the press release and charts have been posted to our website. Both the press release and charts include and our call today will reference non-GAAP measures. Both the press release and charts include reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures.

A webcast of this call will be available on our website for replay for the next 30 days. For your convenience, a transcript of our prepared remarks will also be available on our website at the conclusion of today's call. Before we get started, I need to remind you that our comments will include statements related to the expected future results of our company, and are therefore forward-looking statements. Our actual results may differ materially from our projections due to a wide range of risks and uncertainties that are described in our earnings release and details in all our SEC filings.

So with that, I'll hand it over to Blake.

Blake Moret – Chairman and CEO

Thanks, Aijana, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Let's turn to our first quarter results on Slide 3. I'm pleased with our team's exceptional focus and execution as we delivered another quarter of strong growth and profitability. Organic sales and earnings were both up year-over-year and better than we expected this quarter. Rockwell's continued investments in resiliency and agility, along with a gradually improving supply chain environment, helped more than offset many of the headwinds we faced heading into Q1.

Orders and backlog were up sequentially in the quarter. Order cancellation rates were flat to prior quarter and remain in the low single digits through January. We are encouraged by the continued strength of our end user demand across all business segments and regions. Total sales grew almost 7% versus prior year. Organic sales were up 10% year-over-year, better than our expectations despite a very dynamic supply chain environment. Currency translation reduced sales by 4% and acquisitions contributed about a point of growth this quarter.