General Electric Company (NYSE:GE) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Larry Culp: Hey Deane.

Carolina Dybeck Happe: Good morning Deane.

Deane Dray: First is a follow-up to Jeff’s free cash flow question. Larry, when you joined GE, you talked about an initiative to kind of smooth out the free cash flow cadence for the year, trying to avoid that historical hockey stick. And look, there are still some seasonal impacts. You can’t get away from like scheduled outages that will impact the fourth quarter. But has there been progress? Is that still something that’s an initiative here in terms of smoothing out free cash flow? And then I had a follow-up macro question.

Larry Culp: I would say that there has been progress. There is still a lot more to do. And we talk about it, when you hear us use the word linearity, right, it gets back to Lean 101. We just want to make every hour of every day count, every day, every week, every week of every month. And there is still a bit of a dynamic. Some of this is us, some of this is our customers, where we migrate towards quarter end, we migrate towards year-end. So, I am encouraged by the progress. And I think more people today understand how we can be more linear. If you look at just the reviews we have had the first three weeks of this year at aerospace, right. We are looking at how we have started this year, how we have started this month, vis-à-vis, December, vis-à-vis, January a year ago. Those are the sort of operating cadences, which really help us in that regard. So, pleased, but we are not done.

Deane Dray: Appreciate that. And then just given the uncertain macro, can you cite any changes, any meaningful changes in demand indicators that you are looking at, whether it’s quote activity, front log, anything that you could share here this morning.

Larry Culp: Well, we are looking at just about everything that we can. Obviously, in aerospace, we are watching not only departures, bookings and everything that can precede that. The only thing that we have seen, and this is in a proprietary view, Deane, is obviously, freight has softened here as the short-cycle economy has done the same. I think with respect to for Vernova, we look at utilization in gas and when we can see what’s happening in real time. Even in Europe, we have been encouraged, I think by the utilization of the gas fleet. That said, we don’t want to suggest that we are immune with 60% of revenue now and services tied to those real-time dynamics we are watching carefully, but we wouldn’t be guiding a high-single digit top line number this year if we weren’t confident that our positioning both with the aerospace recovery and the energy transition sets us up to do well here in €˜23.

Deane Dray: Larry, thank you.

Larry Culp: Thanks Deane.

Steve Winoker: Larry, any final comments.

Larry Culp: Steve, we have covered a lot of ground here this morning. I would just wrap up with the group saying that 2023 really, I think was a historic year for €˜22 rather the historic year for us, we finished very strongly. The plans, the spends are advancing. We couldn’t be, I think, more thrilled with how things have played out for healthcare. But more importantly, we are excited about what lies ahead. Certainly appreciate everybody taking the time today to join us, your interest in our company and your investment in GE. And again, we hope to see many of you in March in Cincinnati.

Steve Winoker: Thank you. Thanks everybody.

Operator: Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This concludes today’s conference. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.

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