The AES Corporation (AES) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

The AES Corporation (NYSE:AES) Q4 2022 Earnings Conference Call February 27, 2023 10:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Susan Harcourt - Vice President, Investor Relations

Andres Gluski - President and Chief Executive Officer

Steve Coughlin - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Angie Storozynski - Seaport

Durgesh Chopra - Evercore

Cameron Lochridge - Bank of America

Richard Sunderland - JPMorgan

Steve Fleishman - Wolfe Research

Gregg Orrill - UBS

Ryan Levine - Citi

Operator

Good morning and a warm welcome to the AES Corporation Fourth Quarter and Full-Year 2022 Financial Results Call. My name is Candice, and I will be your moderator for today’s call. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to hand you over to our host, Susan Harcourt, Vice President of Investor Relations. The floor is yours. Please go ahead.

Susan Harcourt

Thank you, operator. Good morning and welcome to our fourth quarter and full-year 2022 financial review call. Our press release, presentation, and related financial information are available on our website at aes.com. Today, we will be making forward-looking statements. There are many factors that may cause future results to differ materially from these statements, which are discussed in our most recent 10-K and 10-Q filed with the SEC.

Reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures can be found on our website along with the presentation. Joining me this morning are Andres Gluski, our President and Chief Executive Officer; Steve Coughlin, our Chief Financial Officer; and other senior members of our management team.

With that, I will turn the call over to Andres.

Andres Gluski

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our fourth quarter and full-year 2022 financial review call. Today, I will discuss our 2022 financial results and strategic accomplishments, as well as our 2023 guidance. Steve Coughlin, our CFO will discuss our financial results and outlook in more detail shortly.

Beginning with our 2002 results and accomplishments on Slide 3. I am very pleased with our performance in 2022, which was our best year ever. Adjusted EPS came in at $1.67, above our guidance range of $1.55 to $1.65. This accomplishment is primarily the result of three factors: strong performance across our portfolio, growth in renewables, particularly from solar and energy storage in the U.S., and the benefit of embedded optionality in our LNG contracts.

Turning to Slide 4. I would like to highlight an area in which we are particularly proud of our performance, our success in bringing our construction projects online. In 2022, despite numerous market-wide challenges throughout the year, we added approximately 2 gigawatts of new projects to our portfolio, which was consistent with our expectations at the beginning of the year.