Badger Meter, Inc. (NYSE:BMI) Q4 2023 Earnings Conference Call January 26, 2024 11:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Karen Bauer - VP, IR, Corporate Strategy and Treasurer

Ken Bockhorst - Chairman, President and CEO

Bob Wrocklage - CFO

Conference Call Participants

Nathan Jones - Stifel Financial Corp

Andrew Krill - Deutsche Bank

Rob Mason - Robert W. Baird

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Fourth Quarter 2023 Badger Meter Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, today's conference is recorded.

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

Karen Bauer

Good morning, and thank you for joining the Badger Meter fourth quarter and full year 2023 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'll 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 all for joining our call. We capped off a record year with strong fourth quarter results across sales, operating profit earnings per share and cash flow metrics. Demand trends remained robust, and our continued manufacturing conversion allowed us to again make modest headway into the order backlog. Shortly after year-end, we added to our suite of smart water offerings acquiring the Telog/Unity network monitoring assets, as previously announced.

I want to thank all of our employees for their efforts in delivering another fantastic year for Badger Meter. I'll talk more about the acquisition, provide a recap of the year and discuss our outlook later in the call.

For now, I'll turn it 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 in the fourth quarter were in line with our expectations at $182.4 million, up 24% compared to $147.3 million in the same period last year. This brought our full year 2023 sales to a new milestone exceeding $700 million, specifically $703.6 million or 24% above 2022 sales of $565.6 million.