CAT - Caterpillar Inc. (CAT) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

2024-04-25 11:36:03 ET

Caterpillar Inc. (CAT)

Q1 2024 Earnings Conference Call

April 25, 2024 08:30 a.m. ET

Company Participants

Jim Umpleby - Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Andrew Bonfield - Chief Financial Officer

Kyle Epley - Senior Vice President of the Global Finance Services Division

Rob Rengel - Senior Director of IR

Ryan Fiedler - Vice President of Investor Relations

Conference Call Participants

Tami Zakaria - JP Morgan

Michael Feniger - Bank of America

Jamie Cook - Truist Securities

David Raso - Evercore ISI

Rob Wertheimer - Melius Research

Chad Dillard - Bernstein

Jerry Revich - Goldman Sachs

Stephen Volkmann - Jefferies

Mig Dobre - Baird

Angel Castillo - Morgan Stanley

Kristen Owen - Oppenheimer

Nicole DeBlase - Deutsche Bank

Presentation

Operator

Welcome to the First Quarter 2024 Caterpillar Earnings Conference Call. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Ryan Fiedler. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Ryan Fiedler

Thanks, Audra. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Caterpillar's first quarter of 2024 earnings call. I'm Ryan Fiedler, Vice President of Investor Relations. Joining me today are Jim Umpleby, Chairman and CEO; Andrew Bonfield, Chief Financial Officer; Kyle Epley, Senior Vice President of the Global Finance Services Division; and Rob Rengel, Senior Director of IR.

During our call, we'll be discussing the first quarter earnings release we issued earlier today. You can find our slides, the news release, and a webcast recap at investors.caterpillar.com under Events and Presentations. The content of this call is protected by U.S. and international copyright law. Any rebroadcast, retransmission, reproduction, or distribution of all or part of this content without Caterpillar's prior written permission is prohibited.

Moving to slide two. During our call today, we'll make forward-looking statements which are subject to risks and uncertainties. We'll also make assumptions that could cause our actual results to be different than the information we're sharing with you on this call.

Please refer to the recent SEC filings and the forward-looking statements reminder in the news release for details on factors that, individually or in aggregate, could cause our actual results to vary materially from our forecast. A detailed discussion of the many factors that we believe may have a material effect on our business on an ongoing basis is contained in our SEC filings. On today's call, we'll also refer to non-GAAP numbers. For a reconciliation of any non-GAAP numbers to the appropriate U.S. GAAP numbers, please see the appendix of the earnings call slides.

Now I'll turn the call over to our Chairman and CEO, Jim Umpleby.

Jim Umpleby

Thanks, Ryan. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. I'd like to start by thanking our global team for delivering another strong quarter, including higher adjusted operating profit margin, record adjusted profit per share, and strong ME&T free cash flow.

Our strong balance sheet and ME&T free cash flow allowed us to deploy a record $5.1 billion of cash for share repurchases and dividends in the first quarter. Our results reflect a continuation of healthy demand for our products and services across most of our end markets. We remain focused on executing our strategy and continue to invest for long-term profitable growth. ...

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