Rockwell Automation, Inc.

Thank you for holding and welcome to Rockwell Automation's quarterly conference call. I need to remind everyone that today's conference call is being recorded. Later in the call, we will open the lines for questions. If you have a question at that time, please press star one. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Steve Edsel, Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasurer. Mr. Edsel, please go ahead.

Good morning and thank you for joining us for Rockwell Automation's first quarter fiscal 2019 earnings release conference call. With me today is Blake Moret, our Chairman and CEO, and Patrick Gores, our CFO. Our results were released earlier this morning and the press release and charts have been posted to our website. Both the press release and charts include reconciliations to non-GAAP measures. A webcast of this call will be available at that website for replay for the next 30 days. Before we get started, I need to remind you that our comments will include statements related to the expected future results of our company and are, therefore, forward-looking statements. Our actual results may differ materially from our projections due to a wide range of risks and uncertainties that are described in our earnings release and detailed in all of our SEC filings. So, with that, I'll hand the call over to Blake.

Thanks, Steve, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us on the call today. I'll start with some key points for the quarter. So please turn to page three in the slide deck. I'm pleased with our results for the quarter. Organic sales were strong, up almost 6% and well above expectations. From a vertical perspective, growth was led by consumer and heavy industries. In consumer, Food and beverage and life sciences were strong. Heavy industries growth was led by mining, pulp and paper, and metals. Oil and gas grew slightly above the company average. Within transportation, automotive was down about 10% in the quarter, weaker than expected, and tire was up low single digits. In the quarter, logics grew 7% organically, and process grew 5%. Revenue from information solutions and connected services, which is a measure of adoption of new value from the connected enterprise, once again profitably grew double digits. Commenting on regional performance in the quarter, North America, which for us is the combination of the US and Canada, grew 6% organically. We saw good growth across a wide range of industries, with the exception of automotive, which was weak. EMEA was down slightly in the quarter. Growth in consumer verticals was offset by declines in heavy industries. Asia grew 4%, with most countries in the region contributing to growth. China's sales were up mid-single digits. Latin America's sales were up 20%. We saw good growth in Brazil and Chile was strong due to increased mining activity. As you may recall last year, we won a big order with Codelco and we're starting to see this in our results. I'll make a few additional comments about our Q1 results. Adjusted EPS was up 13% and segment operating margin was up 40 basis points year over year. Book-to-bill performance for our solutions and services businesses was a strong 1.12 in Q1. We grew backlog in the quarter. Patrick will elaborate on our first quarter financial performance in his remarks. Let's move on now to the macro environment and our current outlook for full year fiscal 2019. We see continuing uncertainty due to trade tensions and geopolitical risks. However, forecasts continue to call for industrial production growth. We had a good first quarter and project quoting activity was strong. With one quarter behind us, our four-year outlook for organic sales growth and adjusted EPS guidance remains unchanged. We continue to expect our fiscal 2019 organic sales to be up 5.2% year-over-year at midpoint of guidance. Currency is now expected to reduce growth by 1.5 percentage points. Including the revised impact of currency, our fiscal 2019 guidance is sales of about $6.9 billion. Our guidance for adjusted EPS remains a range of $8.85 to $9.25. Now I'll turn it over to Patrick to provide more detail about our Q1 results and our 2019 sales and earnings guidance.