Caterpillar, Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Caterpillar 2Q 2019 Analyst Conference. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode, and we will open the floor for your questions and comments after the presentation. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Jennifer Driscoll. Ma'am, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Catherine. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Caterpillar's second quarter earnings call. Joining us today are Jim Umpleby, Chairman of the Board and CEO of Andrew Bonfield, CFO, and Kyle Epley, Vice President of our Global Finance Services Division. We've provided slides to accompany the presentation. You can find them along with our earnings news release in the Investors section of Caterpillar.com under Events and Presentations. Today we will make forward-looking statements which are subject to risks and uncertainties. We will also make assumptions that could cause our actual results to be different than the information discussed. For details on factors individually or in aggregate could cause actual results to vary materially from our projections, please refer to our recent SEC filings and the forward-looking statements reminder in today's news release. As indicated on last quarter's call, we're not reporting adjusted profit per share again this quarter as restructuring costs are expected to be lower in 2019. It's our intention to report adjusted profit per share at the end of the fourth quarter of 2019 to exclude any mark-to-market gain or loss for the remeasurement of pension and any other post-employment benefit plans, as well as any other discrete items. As a reminder, our U.S. GAAP-based guidance for profit per share continues to include the benefit of the 31-cent discrete tax item we recognized in the first quarter. Please keep in mind that Caterpillar has copyrighted this call. We expressly prohibit use of any portion of the call without our written approval. Before I turn the call over to Jim, let me inform you about a change we're making due to investor preferences around the timing of earnings calls. Beginning next quarter, we plan to shift our earnings calls to begin at 8.30 a.m. Eastern Time. This timing allows us to conclude our call before the U.S. stock market opens. Accordingly, we also plan to accelerate the news release timing to 6.30 a.m. Eastern Time beginning next quarter. And with that, I now turn the call over to Jim.

Thank you, Jennifer. Good morning to everyone on the call. Please turn to slide three for our second quarter highlights. Sales and revenues this quarter rose 3% to $14.4 billion. Operating profit rose 2% to $2.2 billion.