Terrence R. Curtin
Chief Executive Officer at TE Connectivity
Thank you, Sujal, and we appreciate everybody joining us today, and I do also want to wish everybody a happy new year.
As I normally like to do before we get into the slides, I do want to take a moment to discuss our performance this quarter along with what we're seeing in our markets versus our last call 90 days ago. We continue to be in a slow global economic environment. Against this backdrop, the performance of our markets is largely consistent with our expectations, and it resulted in our first quarter sales being in line with our guidance of flat revenue growth. Our transportation segment once again grew year-over-year driven by content growth, and this offset the declines that we saw in our industrial and communications segments.
Our team's execution was strong in the quarter with 20% year-over-year adjusted earnings per share growth, and this was driven entirely by adjusted operating margin expansion to 19%, and this was on flat sales. This margin performance demonstrates we're successfully executing on a number of structural margin improvement levers across our segments. Those leverage drove margin expansion through the second half of last year and are resulting in a further step-up of margin performance, particularly in our transportation segment. We expect to deliver strong margin expansion this year that will be driven by our Transportation and Communications segments based on what we're currently seeing in our markets. And just as important is the quality of our earnings, and you see this in our record first quarter free cash flow of $570 million, which builds on the strong cash performance from last year, and that we expect will continue.
During the quarter, we deployed approximately $1 billion of capital. That included returning $600 million to shareholders as well as $350 million to acquire Schaffner, and Schaffner expands our product portfolio and factory automation. Our cash generation model continues to give us both confidence and opportunities to return capital to shareholders while supporting ongoing bolt-on M&A activities.
So, let me now share what we're seeing in our market since our call 90 days ago. As I mentioned already, on an overall basis, markets are playing out as we're -- we expected. And we also had orders growth of 4% year-over-year, and this was across all three segments. We are seeing sales growth across the majority of our businesses, but we do have a few business units that are continuing to be impacted by inventory destocking by our customers, and we'll highlight these during the call. Our view of the transportation end markets remain unchanged from our prior view, with global auto production expected to grow slightly this year. And while we're seeing some puts and takes in production by region, China production and EV adoption is stronger, and this is offsetting some weakness in Europe and in North America.
In our Industrial Solutions segment, three out of our four businesses continue to have growth momentum, and we expect to continue to see sequential growth in each of these three businesses as we go forward. You see our strong positioning of renewable energy in both solar and wind applications. Commercial air sales continue to grow as production increases for both single- and twin-aisle platforms. And our medical business is benefiting from increases in interventional procedures. When you compare versus 90 days ago, the one market where we've seen incremental weakness is in our Industrial Equipment business. Destocking began a few quarters ago in this business, and we now expect it to continue into the second half of this fiscal year. And lastly, in our Communications segment, we continue to see destocking, but what's really nice is it's now just occurring in pockets. And we do expect to see growth in the second half of this year in our Communications segment, driven by our wins in artificial intelligence programs.
As we look forward, our long-term value-creation model remains unchanged and is centered around three pillars. The first is our portfolio is strategically positioned around secular growth trends, including growth in electric vehicles, adoption of renewable energy, and applications for cloud and artificial intelligence, just to name a few. Second, we have operational levers to enable margin expansion despite a slow economic environment. The drivers encompass strong operational execution, including footprint consolidation, portfolio optimization benefits, and price actions that we implemented to offset higher input costs. And third, we've established a strong cash generation model to return capital to shareholders while investing in bolt-on M&A opportunities.
So, with that as an overview, let me get into the slides, and I'd ask you to turn to Slide 3 and I'll discuss some of the additional highlights for the first quarter and our outlook for the second quarter, and then Heath will provide more details in his section.
Our first quarter sales were $3.83 billion, which was in line with our guidance as I mentioned. In transportation, we saw 5% organic growth driven by content expansion in our auto business. In industrial, we saw growth in aerospace, defense and marine, medical and energy, which was more than offset by weakness I talked about in industrial equipment. And finally, in communications, it was down as we expected, but we are well-positioned for growth in the second half driven by AI applications.
Adjusted earnings per share was ahead of our guidance at $1.84, and this was up 20% versus the prior year. Adjusted operating margins were 19%, and these were up 290 basis points year-over-year, driven by strong operational performance. And the margin performance was the driver of our EPS being ahead of guidance. As we look forward to the second quarter, we're expecting our second quarter sales to increase over the first quarter to $3.95 billion, with the sequential growth being driven by the industrial segment, partially offset by a slight decline in transportation. Adjusted earnings per share is expected to be around $1.82, and this will be up 10% year-over-year in the second quarter with approximately 200 basis points of adjusted operating margin expansion versus the prior year.
So, to move away from the financials for a second, and before I get into orders, I do want to highlight that we were pleased to be included in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index this quarter for the 12th consecutive year. This designation continues to demonstrate TE's dedication to sustainable business practices that do provide value to our customers and that they expect and are aligned with our commitment to our owners.
So, now let's talk about orders, and I'd ask you to turn to Slide 4. At the total company level, we have orders of $3.8 billion, and this was up 4% year-over-year and consistent with our expectations. And that was really nice, this is the first time since after the COVID crisis in 2001 [Phonetic] we've seen all three segments have year-over-year order growth. We continue to see stability in our overall order levels with year-over-year growth in each of the segments and with backlog remainining at near-record levels. And this gives us confidence in our second quarter outlook.
Transportation orders grew 4% year-over-year and reflect stability in overall global vehicle production. In the first quarter, auto production came in a little bit over 22 million units and we saw stronger production in China that offset some of the weakness in Europe and North America. Going forward, we expect global auto production to be roughly 21 million units per quarter as we move through this fiscal year.
In our Industrial segment, we saw growth in orders both year-over-year as well as sequentially. The order strength is driven by our AD&M, medical, and energy businesses, and we saw the weakness in industrial equipment end markets, and this was across all regions of the world. And in our Communications segment, orders grew 3% year-over-year. And like I said earlier, we do see destocking by our customers now only occurring in pockets in certain applications.
So, with that as an orders overview, let me now get into the year-over-year segment results that we saw in the quarter, and that's on Slides 5 through 7 of your slide deck, and you can see the details on those slides. So, starting with Transportation. Overall, the segment had sales growth, and it was up 5% organically year-over-year, driven by our auto business. Our auto business grew 8% organically with 13% growth in Asia and 7% growth in Europe. And this more than offset a decline in North America. Our performance continues to be driven by content growth from our leading global position in electric vehicles as well as electronification trends within the vehicle. Our global outlook for electric vehicle growth is unchanged. And it's important to note that over two-thirds of EV production will occur in Asia. We are very well-positioned to capitalize on this growth due to our strong content and share in local Chinese OEM platforms that is driven by our innovation. Overall, our growth will continue to be driven by content outperformance that leverages our leading global position in the auto market.
In the commercial transportation business, we saw 1% organic sales growth. And this was driven by Asia and it was partially offset by declines in North America. And in our Sensors business, about half of the sales decline that you see on the slide was driven by the portfolio optimization efforts we've been talking to you about where we're continuing to organically exit lower-margin and lower-growth products. The rest of the decline in Sensors was driven by weakness in sensor applications and industrial markets, partially offset by growth in automotive applications.
For the Transportation segment, adjusted operating margins were nearly 21%. We expect Transportation segment margins to run approximately at our 20% target margins for the rest of this year. As you know, we've been driving several improvement actions in our operations. We have been able to optimize our factory footprint through our restructuring programs and are getting cost savings from these actions. We are also seeing improvement in our EV product margins as volumes increase. And in our Sensors business, we have been driving margin expansion improvement through portfolio optimization, which I mentioned earlier.
Also, I'd like to highlight that our teams are continuing to effectively manage pricing to offset higher input costs. We've been talking to you about all these actions, and I'm pleased with you that the team is successfully executing on them and delivering on the strong results that you see.
So, with that as a backdrop of Transportation, let's move to the Industrial segment. And in this segment, sales were down 5% organically in the first quarter. But we did see growth in three of our four businesses, and we expect to see continued sequential growth in AD&M, medical, and energy as we go into Quarter 2.
In the first quarter, our AD&M sales were up 13% organically, with increased production of both single- and twin-aisle platforms in the commercial air market. In medical, sales in the quarter were up 16% organically, driven by ongoing increases in interventional procedures. And in our energy business, we saw growth in renewable applications, and these were partially offset by slower utility demand in Europe. And finally, you can see on the slide, in the Industrial Equipment business, our sales were down 26% organically. And in this business, we're seeing the destocking that began a little bit later in the cycle. So, we expect this inventory digestion to continue. And this is a trend that is similar to what you've been hearing from other companies.
From a margin perspective, for the Industrial segment, adjusted operating margins were 15% with the impact from the volume decline in Industrial Equipment. And we expect to continue to see segment margins running in the mid-teens until this destocking environment improves.
So, let me turn to Communications. Organic sales were down 17% year-over-year and we expect the second quarter sales to be similar to the first quarter level. Starting in our third quarter, you will begin to see favorable year-on-year growth in this segment. We are well-positioned to grow in our artificial intelligence programs and now are expecting $200 million of contribution in fiscal '24 from AI applications. And in these applications for artificial intelligence, let's face it, we're focused on providing high-speed, low-latency connectivity to meet the needs of the artificial intelligence workloads. And as we've mentioned to you before, we generate 50% more content in an accelerated compute AI platform versus traditional compute servers. Also, we continue to work closely with the cloud customers as well as leading semiconductor companies to ensure reference designs that call out our solutions.
On the margin front, for the segment, adjusted operating margins were 18.7% and they were up 170 basis points despite the decline in sales. Our teams are executing extremely well, and we now believe we'll be able to maintain the high-teens margin in this segment as we move through this year.
So, with that as an overview of performance, let me turn it over to Heath to get into more details on the financials and our expectations going forward.
