Mettler-Toledo International, Inc.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to our fourth quarter 2018 Mentler-Toledo International Earnings Conference Call. My name is Kathryn, and I will be your audio coordinator for today. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question at that time, please press star and then the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press the pound key. I would now like to turn our presentation over to your hostess for today's call, Ms. Mary Finnegan. Please proceed, ma'am.

Thanks, Catherine, and good evening, everyone. I'm Mary Finnegan. I'm treasurer and responsible for investor relations at Mettler Toledo, and happy that you're joining us this evening. I am joined by Olivier Filio, our CEO, and Sean Videla, our chief financial officer. I need to cover just a couple administrative matters. This call is being webcast and is available for replay on our website. A copy of the press release and the presentation that we refer to is also available on the website. Let me summarize the Safe Harbor language which you see on page two of the presentation. Statements in this presentation which are not historical facts constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the U.S. Securities Act of 1933 and the U.S. Securities Exchange Act of 1934. These statements involve risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause our actual results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied by any forward-looking statements. For discussion of these risks and uncertainties, please see our recent form 10-K. All of the forward-looking statements are qualified in their entirety by reference to the factors discussed under the captions factors affecting our future operating results and in the business and MD&A of financial condition and results of operations in our Form 10-K. Just one other item. On today's call, we may use non-GAAP financial measures. More detailed information with respect to the use of and the differences between the non-GAAP financial measures and the most directly comparable gap measures is provided in our form 8K. I will now turn the call over to Olivier.

Thank you, Marianne. Welcome to everyone on the call, which we are doing from Switzerland this quarter, which is why we started a little earlier than we normally do. I will start with a summary of the quarter, and then Sean will provide details on our financial results and guidance. I will then have some additional comments, and we will open the lines for Q&A. The highlights for the quarter are on page 3 of the presentation. We are very pleased with the strong finish to the year with our fourth quarter results. Local currency sales growth was better than expected as demand in our markets remained favorable and we continued to execute very well. Total local currency sales grew 8% in the quarter. We had strong broad-based growth in most of our laboratory and industrial product lines. China had another quarter of excellent growth. Our sales growth, combined with results from our marginal productivity measures, drove very strong improvements in operating margins. And despite a 5% headwind due to adverse currency and higher tariff costs, we achieved a 15% increase in adjusted EPS in the quarter. All around, these are strong results. Our outlook for 2019 remains positive, but similar to our comments to you last quarter, we remain concerned about the global economy. We do not see evidence of a downturn in our markets today, but macro data and rhetoric surrounding international trade disputes make us cautious. We remain focused on execution of our growth initiatives and believe we are well positioned to continue to gain share regardless of market conditions. Assuming market conditions remain favorable, we believe we can generate good earnings growth in 2019. Let me now turn it to Sean to cover the financials and guidance, and I will come back later with additional comments on our business.