Canadian Solar Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to Canadian Solar's first quarter 2019 earnings conference call. My name is Albert and I'll be your operator for today. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded for replay purposes. I would now like to turn the call over to Merima. With Canadian Solar's IR department, please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and welcome everyone to Canadian Solar's first quarter 2019 earnings conference call. Joining us today on the call are Yan Zhong, our acting chief executive officer, and Dr. Hui-Feng Chen, our senior vice president and chief financial officer. Before we begin, I remind our listeners that management's proposed remarks today will contain forward-looking statements, which are subject to risk and uncertainty, and management may make additional forward-looking statements in response to your questions. Therefore, the company claims the protection of the safe harbor for forward-looking statements that is contained in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ from management's current expectations, and therefore we refer you to a more detailed discussion of the risks and uncertainties in the company's annual report on Form 20-X, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In addition, any projections as to the company's future performance represent management's estimates as of today's core. Canadian Solar assumes no obligation to update these projections in the future unless otherwise required by approval law. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to our CFO, Dr. Huifeng Chen. Huifeng, please go ahead.

Welcome, everyone, to our Q1 call. Earlier, we sent out a press release that explained why Sean cannot join us on this call. Sean is resting at a rehabilitation center in Beijing from a recent physical injury. He has been in constant communication with us during this period. He asked me to tell you he regrets his absence, he is recovering well, and he looks forward to speaking to you soon. Sean knows that we all miss him. So via telephone, he hopes to speak at our Solar Future Forum to be held in New York City on June 20th. He says that he appreciates your support over the years and he looks forward to speaking to you soon. To allow Sean and his family to focus on recovery and ensure continued operations without disruption, our board decided to appoint Yan as acting CEO. We are delighted to have Yen speak about our Q1 results. Many of you have met with Yen and are familiar with him already. Yen has worked for Canadian Solar for over 13 years. In 2006, he served as a director of Canadian Solar. In 2009, he became vice president of Global Sales and Marketing and was later promoted to Chief Commercial Officer and President of the MSS business. Yan has worked extremely close with Xiaohua and fully understands the operations of the company. We are in good hands during this interim period. With that said, let's welcome Yan.