Atkore Inc.

Greetings and welcome to the Acquire International first quarter 2019 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Keith Wisenand, Vice President of Investor Relations. Thank you, Mr. Wisenand. You may begin.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. With me today are Bill Waltz, President and CEO, as well as David Johnson, Chief Financial Officer. I would like to remind everyone that during this call, we may make projections or forward-looking statements regarding future events or future financial performance of the company. Such statements involve risk and uncertainties such that actual results may differ materially. Please refer to our 10Q and today's press release, which identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in our projections or forward-looking statements. With that, I'll turn it over to Bill.

Thanks, Keith, and good morning, everyone. It feels like we just had our end-of-year 2018 earnings call since it was just over 60 days ago. So I'll be brief and let David hit some of the financial details you want to hear about. Looking at our results on slide three and four, largely the quarter ended as we expected, and our strategy continues to deliver impressive improvements. We delivered net sales of $452 million, adjusted EBITDA of $70 million, and adjusted net income per share of 74 cents. These results are up 9%, 20%, and 32% versus last year. Looking at the highlights for the quarter, we delivered organic net sales growth of 7%. we did see volume strengthen in key categories like PVC conduit and specialty cable, where we get above average margin, but overall volume was lighter than our expectations. This is primarily due to the year-over-year difference from many of our distributors' push for a year ago to achieve calendar year-end rebates. If you recall, we're lapping a difficult comparison as that annual rebate-driven buying drove 9% raceway volume growth in Q1 of fiscal 2018. And once again, this has no impact on our view of the market for the full year, and we are still expecting 2% to 4% volume increases from the construction markets. I'm proud to report our pricing initiatives and our MP&S segment caught up with the cost curve in the quarter. Overall, the pricing environment was stronger than we guided in November, and we do not expect to see price versus cost to be a net headwind this year. I mentioned adjusted net income per share was up an impressive 32%. It's important to understand that this growth was despite a $5 million earnings headwind driven by last year's deferred tax revaluation. Finally, we repurchased 1.2 million shares on the open market, taking advantage of the market volatility over the last quarter and fully utilizing the balance of the $75 million repurchase plan our board approved in August of 2017. In summary, Q1 was another strong quarter and we continue to see a strong 2019 ahead of us. As I mentioned in the past, It's the team, the culture, and the Accor business system that together continue to provide the discipline to deliver on our commitments to our customers as well as our shareholders. With that, I'll turn the call over to David, who will walk us through our financials in more detail and provide additional insights into the quarter.