Welcome everyone to the William Blair Growth Stock Conference. Thank you all for coming. My name is Brian Drab. I'm the I ndustrial T echnology Analyst at William Blair. I've been covering EnerSys since 2010, and, actually, before we get started, I am required to make a quick disclaimer here. You can find a full list of research disclosures on our website, williamblair.com. With that, I'm very pleased to have with us Andrea Funk, CFO, aka Andy Funk, and Lisa Hartman, who's the Head of Investor Relations. So as many of you know, EnerSys is an industrial battery technology company, a leader in industrial batteries globally. They have primarily lead-acid battery technologies for the forklift and telecom backup power applications, but there is much more to the company than that. Andy will tell you all about that. But, I'll just mention a couple of the exciting things that are happening, is that they're getting into electric vehicle battery charging, and also larger battery energy storage systems that are lithium-based. And, also on that note, they have plans to build a large lithium battery plant in the United States in the near term, and, again, we'll hear more about that from Andy. But at this point, why don't I turn it over to you, Andy? Thanks, Brian, and thanks. Okay, thank you. Thanks for having us here, and thanks to everyone for your participation. Before we start, I'd like to direct you to the forward-looking statements that we have in our presentation. Okay, so for those of you not familiar with EnerSys, we are a $4 billion public company with over 10,000 customers. As Brian gave you a little bit of our history, we really are at an inflection point in the company's evolution from an industrial to an industrial tech company, as we've emerged from a primarily lead-acid battery company to a company that provides energy system solutions. Our EPS last year, which was our fiscal 2024, we're a 3/31 year end, was $8.35 a share, which was up from $5.34 per share in the prior year. We have a strong balance sheet, and we generate significant cash flows, so we have both significant revenue and profit growth in front of us that I'd like to share with you a little bit of information about today. We're well-positioned for both growth and margin expansion for several reasons. First, we have leading market positions with proprietary, differentiated products that solve the growing energy needs of large and growing end markets, which are expanding due to the impact of many global megatrends. Our resilient business model, combined with our strong cash generation, enables us to invest to seize these growth and opportunities. And we provide our shareholders with clear capital allocation priorities so that we're able to leverage our strong balance sheet and both invest internally as well as returning capital to our shareholders. And finally, we have an experienced and energized management team that's focused on long-term shareholder value creation. I mentioned our transformation a few times, and this slide walks you through some of the milestones in our evolution. We've accomplished a lot in recent years. We've created a culture of transformation, both mission and value driven. We significantly transformed our technology portfolio from this traditional lead-acid battery company to a customer-centered, end-to-end energy system solution approach. As evidence of this, in 2017, our traditional flooded lead-acid batteries comprised about three-quarters of our revenue. Our last fiscal year represented less than half, as we've had growth in our proprietary Thin Plate Pure Lead offerings, our lithium offerings, and our power electronic systems and software. These growth opportunities are fueled by megatrends, which I'll speak about in a moment. Think about electrification, digitization, automation, artificial intelligence, and the global need for access to reliable sources of power and grid resilience, which supports the critical nature of our products. Let me tell you a little bit about our business segments. We have four lines of businesses that are linked to these megatrends and will provide accelerated growth and margin expansion opportunities. First, our energy systems line of business. This is our largest line of business and is primarily made up of communication networks. So think about things like telecom and broadband customers, as well as data centers, industrial, and utilities. Then our second line of business, specialty, is made up of transportation and aerospace and defense. We're the largest supplier of batteries to the U.S. government, and in transportation, we sell batteries and chargers for premium automotive and over-the-road trucking. Our motive power line of business is primarily batteries and chargers for electric forklift trucks in logistics and warehousing. We enjoy over 50% of the U.S. market share of the forklift battery market. And lastly, new ventures, which we just launched this past fiscal year. We aren't separately disclosing it until it represents at least 10% of our revenue, profit, or assets per SEC requirements. But this initiative focuses on battery energy storage systems, which are an energy management tool for large real estate development companies, and tied to that can be pedestals for EV fast charging. Sometimes it can be a little confusing to understand who is EnerSys because we participate in so many diverse end markets. What defines EnerSys is really our core technology platforms that we leverage across all of our end markets, and this represents those technology platforms. We plug and play our three core technology modular platforms to create system solutions across all of our lines of businesses. So first, energy storage. You could think industrial batteries. We have lithium-ion batteries, our proprietary premium thin-plate pure lead batteries, and also flooded lead-acid batteries. Then we have power electronics. This includes chargers, and we recently launched wireless charging for forklifts, but now also we offer EV fast charging. This also includes everything necessary for powering to push signal along telecommunications and broadband networks. Next, software. This could be edge computing, asset management, smart batteries with ACE chips inside, or system monitoring. In our battery energy storage system, which is part of our new ventures, we have extensive software that provides energy management solutions for our large real estate development companies, such as rate shaving and bidirectional energy storage. Finally, our service network wraps around this technology platform and enables strong customer intimacy. So what is driving our growth? As I mentioned, one of the things that is exciting about EnerSys are the mega trends that are driving growth to us. You'll see on the bottom left here, the seven diverse end markets that I just mentioned: communications networks, data centers, industrial power, utilities, logistics and warehousing, transportation, aerospace and defense, and commercial real estate and retail operations. Think of how the arrows down the middle, these macro trends, are impacting each of those end markets that we talk about. Energy transition. That's a tremendous driver for us as we're transitioning more energy to electricity and away from fuels and petroleum-based systems. EnerSys is a critical enabler of this transition. For example, in our motive power line of business, 40% of forklift trucks still run on internal combustion engines. Our batteries and chargers enable the progression away from ICE to electric forklifts. And what is the biggest impediment to EV charging? Ample fast charging. Our B2B fast charge and storage solution will help to solve this problem, enabling DC- DC fast charging independent of what grid connection a customer has. And speaking of the grid, energy security. Think about the fragility of the grid, about ice storms in Texas, wildfires in California, and how important it is to have backup power to make sure that we're staying safe and that we're able to provide emergency services. The demand for access to reliable power is growing exponentially and cannot be handled by the grid infrastructure of today. It needs energy storage and energy system solutions. Our ability to help broadband customers in California meet the California Public Utilities Commission's 72-hour mandate backup power requirements with our lithium and thin-plate pure lead batteries demonstrates the criticality of our solutions. As the grid becomes even more unstable, our battery energy storage system in our new ventures line of business is an energy management tool that basically creates a virtual power plant by storing energy when it is abundant and enabling commercial and real estate customers to consume the energy when they need it through their stored energy solutions, with software that can also do predictive analytics on their demand needs and how that corresponds to peak charges and energy availability. Connectivity. What elements of our lives aren't more digitized than it was yesterday? How many apps did each of you run, including the conference app that you downloaded? Controlling your smart house, checking the weather, everything we do now is on our cell phone, and the amount of energy and electricity and data storage it takes to make this successful is a key driver of our growth. Think about the immense impact of artificial intelligence on data centers, which represents about 10% of our revenue, and the importance of both grid resilience, as mentioned above, as well as the need to carry that data, the last mile, to you and me through the broadband and telecom network systems. These customers must increase the speed and availability and access of their networks to handle this growing demand, which is exactly what our solutions enable. Automation. This is big in distribution center environments. There just aren't enough people in the workforce, so automation is a macro that's going to be around for a long time. This will drive both an increase in electric material handling equipment, in which our customers will continue to explore how they can automate any material handling that is currently done by a human touch to some type of an electric material handling piece of equipment, as well as increasing the value of our maintenance-free offerings and, and wireless charging that requires less human capital to manage. Then finally, and perhaps most importantly on this list, is decarbonization and what we can all do to make this a better planet. Batteries are a clean and sustainable source of power, enabling decarbonization efforts. We have multiple case studies in which our customers have piloted our solutions and then shifted all of their products to our offer... our maintenance-free offerings, as we were able to demonstrate that our solutions help them achieve their, their carbon neutrality goals while reducing their costs as well.... We will deliver this long-term growth through the three pillars of our strategy. First, innovate. We will continue to transition our portfolio to a greater percentage of high-value, high-margin solutions, like our proprietary Thin Plate Pure Lead and lithium offerings, and power electronic products. Two, optimize. We will increase margins through our EOS execution that drives out waste across the company. EOS is our EnerSys Operating System, that is our lean platform we use across the entire business. We will also use this to increase our maintenance-free production capacity at reduced costs. And three, accelerate. We will increase speed to market of our new product offerings and capacity expansions by deploying the IRA credits we're receiving and combining all of these tech platform offerings into scalable solutions, such as our new fast charge and storage product launch. In addition to helping our customers achieve their carbon neutrality goals, I'm very proud of the progress we have made on our own sustainability journey. Sustainability is a core aspect of our strategy and the products we provide and how we do business. We've been recognized by several third parties for lean management initiatives of our EOS. We are an industry leader in ESG practices and disclosures, and since 2020, as you can see from this roadmap, we form a sustainability team, ESG and DE&I steering committees that are both run by our management team and report into our board of directors. We set ESG goals and published our inaugural sustainability report, and we published annual updates and are on track to achieve our ESG goals. We reduced our Scope 1 emissions by 4% since 2022 and 25% since 2019. We've published our Scope 3 value chain emissions data for 2022 and 2023, and we increased female leadership to 15% from 9% since 2020. We encourage you to visit our 2023 sustainability report, which we just released, for more highlights. So now I'd like to provide a quick update on our most recent fourth quarter and fiscal year 2024 results. Again, we're a 3/31 year-end, so we just completed our fiscal year 2024. Our Q4 net sales of $911 million and our full-year net sales of $3.6 billion were down 8% and 3% respectively from prior year, due primarily to temporary pauses in network investments by our telecom and broadband customers. We remain very confident in the long-term opportunities in these end markets. As mentioned, there is really no one out there who wants slower or less access to the internet, and we remain confident in the robustness of these markets and the need for network investments to return. Our adjusted operating earnings were $109 million and $450 million for the full year, improving year-on-year on positive price mix cost recapture and IRA benefits, despite that lower sales volume. During the quarter, we booked an IRA benefit of $36 million as a reduction to cost of sales, for a full-year benefit of $136 million, compared to $17 million in the prior year, fourth quarter, and full year. Adjusted EBITDA was $124 million in the past Q4, versus $118 million in Q4 of the prior year, and $507 million for the full year, compared to $388 million in fiscal year 2023. Finally, our adjusted EPS was $2.08 for our fourth quarter versus a dollar eighty-two... I'm sorry, our adjusted EPS was $2.08 for the fourth quarter versus $1.82 per share in the prior year fourth quarter, and $8.35 per share for the fiscal year versus $5.34 per share in our prior fiscal year. I'd like to also take a moment or two to talk about a recent acquisition we are about to complete. We recently announced our agreement to acquire Bren-Tronics, a leading manufacturer of portable power solutions, including small and large format lithium batteries and charging solutions for military and defense applications. This will expand our presence in critical defense applications, broaden our product offerings, and strengthen our product development capabilities. This acquisition will accelerate EnerSys' progress in expanding our lithium product offerings, growing revenue and profitability, while advancing towards our fiscal year 2027 targets. At 8.7 times calendar year 2023 EBITDA, their EBITDA of $24 million will be immediately accretive to our results. We have not yet included the benefit of the Bren-Tronics financial results in our guidance, although we did include the interest expense impact on the planned acquisition in our guidance. We're working on detailed integration planning right now, which will ensure that the integration process is seamless for our customers day one post-close. We're very excited to welcome the Bren-Tronics team into EnerSys at closing, and we have history of collaborating with them on many defense applications. We anticipate to close near the end of our first quarter, subject to regulatory approval. Speaking of guidance, we introduced full year and net sales guidance this quarter for the first time and remain optimistic about the trajectory of our business. Our fiscal 2025 guidance range is $3.675 billion-$3.825 billion of net sales, and adjusted EPS guidance range is $8.55-$8.95 per share. We anticipate growing volume in motive power and specialty, while we anticipate an ongoing return to normalcy beginning throughout the year in telecom and broadband markets, and further earning expansions from the margin improvement actions taken in energy systems. However, we don't anticipate that network spending will return to normal by the end of the fiscal year. We have planned to increase our investment in our new Fast Charge and Storage line of business, our new ventures line of business, and we expect to realize our first revenue in the second half of this fiscal year from this product line. We also expect to benefit from the continued maintenance-free conversions in motive power and increased capacity flexibility with better cost absorption at our Missouri factories for our specialty line of business. During our last earnings call, we also shared an update on progress towards our fiscal year 2027 goals that we issued at our Investor Day last June. These goals in the aggregate are on track. As with any long-term plan, there are puts and takes. One headwind we had this year that we just discussed was the temporary pause in telecom and broadband CapEx spending. Although our resulting sales CAGR is below the targeted range, we are only one year into the plan, and we remain very confident that this market continues to have mounting growth potential for all of the mega trends that we discussed previously. Our only one question is when that spending will return. On the other hand, we've had numerous tailwinds as well, such as our accelerated maintenance-free conversions in motive power, as well as the expanding IRA benefits, both of which were above what we had anticipated when we set our Investor Day targets. Our fiscal year 2025 guidance and longer-term forecast demonstrates our confidence that our financial and operational goals will remain achievable. I should note that both our fiscal year 2024 actual adjusted EPS and our fiscal 2025 guided adjusted EPS are above what we had anticipated when we communicated our fiscal year 2027 EPS targets at our June Investor Day. We reiterate our expectation for our fiscal year 2027 EPS to be in the range of $11-$13 per share, with upside from the reinvestment of our excess cash flow, such as the return on our planned Bren-Tronics acquisition, which will be accretive to that EPS target range. We are confident that the foundation we have put in place this year, coupled with the investments we've made in our transformation, will deliver accelerating results in the coming years. In summary, we believe EnerSys provides a very compelling investment thesis. We have transformed our company from a Lead-Acid battery-focused business into a company that provides innovative energy system solution that enable the global energy transition. We have a leading position in markets that are expanding due to global mega trends. And finally, we have an experienced management team that is focused on achieving our strategy, which will deliver both top line and margin expansion, creating long-term shareholder value. And with that, I'm happy to open it up to any questions. I should have asked you for a microphone up here. I'll ask the first question. You don't need microphone. Sure. Use this microphone. Thanks very much, Andy. First question, we have about 7 minutes here, and by the way, the breakout session will be in the room called the Richardson 10 minutes following, then in this room. When we were on the road a couple of months ago or a month ago, it struck me that I think the most important question, like the most important opportunity in front of you right now, is in that battery energy storage system and the EV charging. And the reason I say this, 'cause when you look at those longer-term targets, and there's $1.5 billion of incremental revenue at the midpoint, but then inside that, you have this, you framed it as a $400 million-$700 million annual revenue opportunity in this product line that is really new. It's brand new, right? You've still, I think you're shipping the first 15 units this year. You're taking orders for 50. But can you just talk about that, you know, how many customers do you expect to have when you get to that run rate, and how much visibility do you have? It's just a very exciting opportunity, so I think that's a good place to start. It accounts for, you know, like a third of the incremental revenue in the forecast horizon. Yeah, you're exactly right, Brian. And, and I think one thing about our fast charge and storage solution is it, it really is a, a great example of what we talked about, of how we have these technology platforms that we plug and play across different end markets. So, this solution is a very exciting solution. Basically, the battery energy storage system is, you know, a large container full of lithium batteries that we had, we had developed for our, motive power originally. You put into this large container, which is very similar to the telecom containers that we use in our energy systems line of business for network powering, but much bigger. It does energy management for the real estate development company, so it can do, you know, use artificial intelligence to anticipate- Mm-hmm. When the energy is going to be consumed at the... whether it's a grocery store, a mall, shopping, whatever it could be, so that it can feed the batteries, and the batteries can allow you to do peak shaving and backup power, et cetera. And then you're able to hang these pedestals for EV fast charging. We consider ourselves the largest charger of EVs in the world because we have over 50% of the U.S. market share, 30% global, of forklift charging, and a forklift is very much the same as an EV charger. So, we've got this initial product that we have been working with one launch customer, Landmark. We received our first 50 system orders, and while we didn't disclose precisely what the PO amount was, we have said the average sale price is between $750,000 and $1.5 million, depending on the specifics of the system. And of course, that's just for the capital upfront, then there's ongoing service and software recurring revenue associated with it. Landmark alone could be a billion-dollar customer. We've been focused on just that customer right now to make sure it's a new product for them, a relatively new product globally, to understand how they best can use it, how we can structure it so that it's able to meet their requirements as much as needed. We've got the initial 50-system order, with the first 15 installations that we're working on right now, should be in the beginning of the second half of our fiscal year. And we have a lot of other interests that we're kind of holding back a little bit. We're starting to fill that pipeline. But as an example, one area that we're looking is data centers. We're in all the big data centers right now with Lead-Acid backup batteries. But the Lead-Acid is just there, the batteries are just there to kick on if the energy goes out until generators can come into play. One possible solution would be to use your battery energy storage system so that the batteries could be put to work every day, providing rate optimization as well as backup power for the data centers. So that's just another example how we can take these technology platforms and, look to expand them into different areas. So we've not started that yet. Right now, we're focusing on this one launch customer, but in our fiscal 2027 targets, we had said that our Fast Charge and Storage initiative could be between $400 million-$700 million. And obviously, since it's a large consumer of the lithium batteries, that's part of the driver for us to explore doing our own lithium battery plant, which we have purchased land in South Carolina and, have applied for a grant that we expect to know more about and do an official announcement in August, September of this year. It'd be helpful just to mention the business model for Landmark. They have a portfolio of properties and then a portfolio of customers that lease those. So the current purchase order is for one of their end customers. So when we think about Landmark's potential and the number that Andy just talked about, as the core key customer, they have many end customers that provide a pretty robust pipeline for that business. Just to be clear, when you say a Landmark could be a $1 billion customer, that means $1 billion annual revenue, like ongoing type of customer? One billion- Or you're saying they could buy $1 billion worth of equipment- They could buy $1 billion- ... cumulative. Cumulative, as well as software and services. Yeah. Okay. But again, just one customer. Got it. Okay. And that, that's not just the Landmark, because Landmark is the REIT, right? Mm-hmm. And then their customer is the one that's installing. Exactly. So you're saying Landmark overall, with all of their customers, could- Stores ... eventually purchase $1 billion worth of equipment and services? Yeah. Okay, great. We have two minutes. Is there anyone in the audience that has a burning question? Otherwise, I'll ask one more. So can you talk about 5G a little bit? You know, of course, the small cell build-out has not come yet, but there's a lot of, you know, many think that it's coming maybe 2025, start to build that out in earnest. You have all sorts of technologies that really, a lot of them have nothing to do with backup battery power. But, can you talk about that opportunity for EnerSys? Yeah. So, so the pause in CapEx spending of telco and broadband has had a significant impact for us this year. I think on the earnings call, we estimated from where we thought they'd be this year, probably cost about $0.50 a share in the quarter alone. So it, very significant. For us, the benefit, though, is we are diversified. So telco broadband is, you know, maybe 30% of our business, and inside that business, we do both maintenance, as well as network expansion. Our maintenance tends to be a little more replacement batteries and some software and some services, so it's our lower margin part of the business. When the telco broadband spending comes back, not only will that provide top-line lift, but that'll also be more of our power electronics products, which are proprietary and will now enable us to enjoy some of that margin expansion as well. We have no doubt that it will come back. You know, we're not just a fiber company, so we haven't been impacted as significantly because of the diversification. But you know, you look at... We just mentioned data centers, since it's a hot topic. Data centers alone, you know, you talk about every three days, a new data center is being opened up. Everything that's being processed in those data centers needs to get into all of our hands, and that's on telecommunications and broadband lines. You look at, you know, everything that's being automated, electrified, you know, and the need for that, that power. 5G, as an example, is a power hog, so really needs the power electronics that we provide to push the signal. We have over 90% of the U.S. market share for the broadband network powering, so this is an area we compete in, very heavily and have a strong presence, and a lot of that is with our proprietary products. And we have not seen orders, so, we don't expect that it's coming back this next quarter. I do think when it comes back, it's going to come back quickly. There tends to be a race among the big players in these markets. For example, when T-Mobile came out with 5G, all the carriers had to kind of quickly follow so that they could also advertise they had 5G. That was more the mid-spectrum, so it wasn't really the fast 5G. I think a lot of people's the reaction to when they had 5G... I know my kids were like: "This isn't all that faster than what I had before." It's that millimeter wavelength, the small cell 5G, that's really going to be the that, that fast, that fast connections. It'll be like outdoor Wi-Fi, and that's when you'll go from 300,000 macro cell towers to 5 million small cell sites. And that will really drive a lot of the growth for us. So we're ready for it when it comes back. We've been working on a lot of, new products with a lot of our customers, but right now, we're just waiting until those orders start to kick on. Thank you very much, Andy and Lisa. At this point, we'll conclude. We'll have the breakout in the Richardson. Thank you.