Mettler-Toledo International, Inc.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to our third quarter 2019 Mettler Toledo International Earnings Conference call. My name is Mike, and I will be your audio coordinator for today. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. I would now like to turn our presentation over to your hostess for today's call, Ms. Mary Finnegan. Please proceed, ma'am.

Mary Finnegan Hey, thanks, Mike, and good evening, everyone. I'm Mary Finnegan. I'm Treasurer and Responsible for Investor Relations and happy to have you joining us this evening. I am joined here today with Olivier Cilio, our CEO, and Shawn Zadella, our Chief Financial Officer. I want to cover just a couple of administrative matters. This call is being webcast and is available on our website. A copy of the press release and presentation are also available on our website. Let me summarize the Safe Harbor language, which is on page two of our presentation. Statements in this presentation, which are not historical facts, constitute forward-looking statements with 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 a discussion of these risks and uncertainties, please see our 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 Management Discussion and Analysis 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 differences between non-GAAP financial measures and the most directly comparable GAAP measure is provided in our 8-K. Let me now turn the call over to Olivier.

Thank you, Marianne. Good evening, everyone. I will start with a summary of the quarter, and then Sean will provide details on our financial results and guidance for the remainder of this year and for 2020. 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. Sales growth in the quarter was very good in our laboratory and industrial product lines. Food retail declined 15%, worse than we expected the last time we spoke. Total local currency sales growth in the quarter was approximately 4.5%, and excluding food retail, sales growth was 6%, which is in line with our expectations at the beginning of the quarter. Excluding food retail, growth in the Americas was excellent, while growth in Europe and Asia and the rest of the world was solid. We achieved very strong growth in operating margins and earnings per share, despite meaningful headwinds due to adverse currency and tariff costs. Overall, we are very pleased with the strong results for the third quarter. As we look to the remainder of 2019 and our initial thoughts for 2020, we face somewhat of a balancing act. On the one hand, we remain confident in our growth initiatives and our ability to continue to execute and gain market share. These initiatives have strong momentum, and are well ingrained in the organization and surface well in an environment in which it is more important than ever to focus on the best growth opportunities within our markets. The diversification of our business, products, and end markets is particularly helpful when there are mixed signals in certain end markets. Our sales and marketing programs are tailored to help guide our sales force to our best opportunities. Another positive for us is that we believe we will continue to see tangible results from our productivity and margin initiatives. Offsetting this positive factor is that we sit here today with an economy that is more uncertain than one year ago as macroeconomic data continues to weaken. We will also continue to face headwinds from adverse currency and tariff costs. What does this mean when we take it all together? We continue to invest for growth, but are cautious on the macro environment. We believe we can generate solid sales growth and strong earnings growth for 2019 and 2020. Sean will provide more specifics, but I wanted to provide some context up front. Let me now turn it to Sean to cover the financials and guidance.