Terrence R. Curtin
Chief Executive Officer and and Board Member at TE Connectivity
Thank you, and I apologize for that technical difficulty. And I'll start at the beginning in my comments just to make sure we know where we broke off. But I want to talk about our results for the fourth quarter as well as fiscal 2021 as well as the outlook for the fiscal 2020 first quarter. So before Heath and I get into the slides, let me frame out the performance relative to the broader market environment that we're operating in. I am pleased with our results in the fourth quarter as well as the strong performance that we delivered for the full year. We continue to experience global GDP growth with strong end market demand across most end markets that we've strategically positioned TE to focus on, and this broad growth that we're seeing is both in the consumer and capital spending areas. And let me bring some color to that, how that relates to TE. On the consumer side, demand for autos and appliances remain strong, and we continue to see increases in medical procedures that benefit medical device sales.
On the capital spending side, we see increased investments that relate to cloud and data centers, factory automation, semiconductor capacity as well as the need for more renewable energy sources. And when you look at the results we're going to talk about today, you're going to see this broad strength reflected in our orders in our backlog and that will benefit us as we go into 2022 as well as our results in 2021. While certainly, this demand environment is a positive, the balance of this is that the reality is we're still in a world that's dealing with COVID, and global supply chains that have not been able to keep up with the strong demand trends. Within this backdrop, we are continuing to capitalize on growth opportunities across our served markets. In the fourth quarter, we delivered 16% organic growth despite auto production declines caused by our auto customer supply chain. This performance demonstrates the strength as well as the diversity of our portfolio.
We have strategically positioned TE around certain secular trends, and you're seeing the market outperformance in each of our segments as a result of this positioning. In transportation, our leadership position is enabling us to deliver content growth from both electrification of the core as well as increased adoption of electric vehicles globally. In industrial, we're benefiting from accelerated global capital spending around factories and in communications, we're driving content and share gain in cloud applications. In addition to the strong top line growth outperformance versus our markets this year, we have executed well to deliver margin expansion in each of our three segments. The last proof point that I think is important is -- and shows the strength of the portfolio is how our full year results compared to pre-pandemic levels of 2019. Both our sales and adjusted earnings per share in fiscal 2021 were up double digits versus 2019, and we expanded adjusted operating margins by over 100 basis points by continuing the margin journey that we're on.
More importantly, we also remain excited about the additional growth and margin opportunities that we still have ahead of us. Now with that as a backdrop, let me get into the slides, and I'll discuss the highlights that we have listed on slide three. Our teams had strong execution results in the fourth quarter despite reductions in auto production and ongoing challenges in the broader global supply chain. We generated sales of $3.8 billion with 16% organic growth and adjusted earnings per share ahead of guidance at $1.69, which was up 46% year-over-year. Adjusted operating margins were 18.5% as a result of the increases across all three segments, and I'll share more details about segment results a little bit later. When you look at the full year, year-over-year sales were up 23%, adjusted operating margins expanded approximately 400 basis points and adjusted earnings per share was up over 50% to $6.51. Also, as important of earnings is where we generated in free cash flow.
Our free cash flow was above $2 billion with approximately 100% conversion to adjusted net income for the year, demonstrating our strong cash generation model. We also continue to remain balanced in our capital deployment with about 3/4 of our free cash flow return to owners this past year and the remainder used for M&A including the earning acquisition in the industrial segment that we mentioned last quarter. When you look at our orders in the fourth quarter, they remained strong at $4.1 billion, with strength in each segment, and our book-to-bill was 1.08. With these orders and where we position TE, we do expect a strong performance of our portfolio to continue into the first quarter with approximately $3.7 billion in sales, which will be up mid-single digits organically year-over-year despite a roughly 20% expected decline in year-over-year auto production. We expect strong double-digit growth in both our industrial and communications segments, and I think this is another point that reinforces diversity of the markets that we serve.
Adjusted earnings per share is expected to be approximately $1.60 in the first quarter, and this will be up 9% year-over-year. Now let me talk about the market, and frame it to where we were just 90 days ago when we last spoke. In transportation, consumer demand for autos remained robust, but clearly, ongoing challenges with semiconductors and the broader supply chain continue to impact our auto OEM customers' ability to produce. Global auto production came in lower than we expected just 90 days ago as our customers reduced production to enable the supply chain to catch up. Auto production was approximately two million units lower than we anticipated in the fourth quarter. And we're expecting auto production to be in the 18 million unit range in our first quarter. This first quarter production will be well below the nearly 23 million units made in the first quarter of 2021. The key for us is that the trends around content growth for TE remains strong, and we expect content growth to be at the high end of the four to six point range in fiscal 2022 as we continue to benefit from increased electronification and higher production of electric vehicles.
Now versus 90 days ago in our industrial segment, the key is that we continue to see an improving backdrop, which is benefiting our industrial equipment and energy businesses, and our medical business is growing year-over-year as interventional procedures increase. The one area that we've not seen improved is the commercial aerospace business. It's sort of staying stable, and we've not seen an inflection point in that business yet, to hire or lower growth. In communications versus 90 days ago, we continue to see favorable end market trends with global growth in cloud capital expenditures and strength in residential demand benefiting our appliances business. Now while that's a view of what we've seen versus 90 days ago from a market perspective, I also believe in this environment, so it's important to tell you what we're seeing in our supply chain. While challenges remain in the broader supply chain, we have seen some improvement in our availability of certain raw materials in our own supply chain versus 90 days ago.
90 days ago, we thought we were impacted by about $100 million of revenue due to us not having availability of supply. This quarter end, we're only -- that's down to about $50 million. And with this improvement, this will enable us to increase production and inventory levels accordingly to ensure we can meet demand as our customers resolve their supply issues. Now before I move into orders, I will start on slide four. I do want to take a moment to mention a few key highlights on the progress we made this year on our ESG initiatives. Earlier this year, we issued our 11th corporate responsibility report, which discusses our One Connected World strategy, which really encapsulates our ESG strategy. And we hope that you read this report, which highlights the efforts that we're driving internally related to our impact on the planet as well as the innovation our engineers bring to our customers to make sure we're enabling sustainable applications.
Some of the key highlights I want to mention is that on the environmental side, we set up a new goal to decrease Scope one and Scope two greenhouse gas emissions by over 40% on an absolute basis by 2030. And this new goal is above and beyond the 35% reduction we've already made in absolute greenhouse gas emission reductions over the past decade. We also continue to make progress on sourcing renewable electricity. And today, I'm happy to say over 20% of TE's production currently uses carbon-free electricity. And also, this past year, we began to report Scope three emissions back in July. If you look at social initiatives, we set a goal to increase women in leadership position by over 26% by 2025. And I'm happy to say we continue to focus on employee safety and engagement throughout the pandemic. We've gotten good feedback from our employees on how we've been there for them during this typical time.
So clearly, I'm pleased with the continued progress that we're making towards what our purpose is as a company, which is to create a safer, sustainable, productive and connected future. So now let me please get into the orders on slide four, and we'll go through it by the segments in both -- and also, on a geographic basis. For the fourth quarter, our orders were over $4 billion, with year-over-year order growth in all regions. Our order trends and backlog remains strong in each segment, and the order patterns we're seeing are as we expected. As we've been mentioning through the year, and as you've seen in our book-to-bill ratios, order levels have been elevated with customers placing orders for delivery beyond the current quarter due to the broader supply chain situation. As a result, we're coming into fiscal 2022 with a strong backlog position that is higher than we typically see for our business. When we look at the order patterns at a segment level, industrial and communication orders are trending as expected, with continued momentum in areas like factory automation and cloud applications.
I also want to highlight and remind you that in the industrial and communications segment, we have a relatively large portion of our business that goes through our channel partners. And we're seeing our booking patterns begin to align more closely to our settlement, which is a good sign. The other key thing to highlight around our channel partners is that in 2021, we did not see inventory levels increase with them, even though they had a much higher level -- business levels that really they had a much higher churn in their inventories this year. Looking at transportation. We are seeing order levels match the production dynamics that are aligned with our guidance. When you look beyond the near-term noise of auto supply chain pressure, it is important to remember that consumer demand for autos remain strong and dealer inventories remain extremely low. So we believe this is a very favorable setup for medium- and longer-term auto production growth. Now let me add some color on what we're seeing organically from a geographic perspective on a year-over-year basis.
We continue to see growth in Asia, where China orders were up 17%, and growth across all three segments. In Europe, orders were up 21% and North America orders were up 26%. On a sequential basis, we saw orders decline in each region that reflect the order patterns I just talked about in our segments. But the one key difference is we did see growth in our transportation segment orders in China sequentially where our auto orders were up 9%. So with that, with an order backdrop, let's get into the segment year-over-year results, and they'll be on your slides five through seven. So starting with transportation. Segment sales were up 16% organically year-over-year with growth in each of our businesses. Our auto business grew 12% organically despite the declines in auto production that I mentioned. We continue to benefit from increased production of electric vehicles as our technology and products are enabling high-voltage architectures and applications with every leading customer on the planet.
Hybrid and electric vehicle production grew 50% year-over-year increasing from roughly six million units produced in 2020 to roughly nine million units produced globally in 2021. We also continue to benefit from content growth in nonelectric vehicles driven by ongoing safety, certainly data connectivity, comfort and autonomy features. As a result of these content drivers, our content per vehicle has accelerated over the past couple of years from the -- in the low 60s per vehicle into the mid-70s this year. And we expect to continue to outperform auto production going forward as the content that we've set up and the wins we have continues to grow. Turning to our commercial transportation business. We saw 38% organic growth with increases across all submarket verticals. We are continuing to benefit from stricter emission standards and the increased operator adoption of Euro VI, which reinforces our strong position in China. Also -- we're also pleased to announce that two leading heavy truck OEMs have awarded us the high-voltage connectivity wins on their new electric vehicle platforms that they're rolling out.
This will provide future content growth and reinforce our market leadership position in the commercial transportation market. In our sensors business in the segment, we saw 15% organic growth driven by transportation applications with the new program ramps that we've talked to you about in the past few years. And for this segment, adjusted operating margins expanded nearly 500 basis points to 18% driven by higher volume and strong operational performance by our team. Now turning to the industrial segment. Our sales increased 6% organically year-over-year. Industrial equipment was up 32% organically with double-digit growth in all regions driven by momentum in factory automation applications where we continue to see the benefit from accelerated capital expenditures in areas like semiconductor manufacturing as well as in the automotive space.
Our AD&M business declined 18% organically year-over-year driven by the continued market weakness I talked about earlier. And in our energy business, we saw 8% organic growth driven by increases in renewables, especially global solar applications. And it was nice that our medical business grew 5% year-over-year, and it's growing in line with the recovery that we're seeing in the interventional procedures. At a margin level, the segment expanded margin year-over-year by 200 basis points to 15.9% driven by strong operational performance. Now let me turn to communications. And clearly, our teams continue to demonstrate strong operational execution, while capitalizing on the growth trends in the markets that we serve in this segment. Sales grew 36% organically year-over-year for the segment, and in both businesses. In data and devices, performance continues to be driven by the position we built in high-speed solutions for cloud applications.
We continue to see capital expenditures increasing by our cloud customers, and our content growth enabled us to grow cloud-related sales at double the market rate this year. In our appliance business, we saw double-digit growth in all regions driven by both consumer demand as well as continued share gains. It's clear that our communications team continues to deliver an outstanding performance with record adjusted operating margins of 24.7%, and this is up 300 basis points versus a strong quarter in the prior year. Overall, our segment teams are capitalizing on the growth trends in their end markets. That's demonstrating the diversity of our portfolio while delivering on strong operational execution in a challenging supply chain environment. You're seeing this reflected in our results, both for our fourth quarter as well as our full year, and we expect this to continue into 2022.
So with that as a segment and a market overview, let me turn on to Heath, who will get into more details on the financials as well as our expectations going forward.
