Teledyne Technologies Incorporated

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Teledyne second quarter earnings call. During the conference call, phone lines are in a listen-only mode. We will have an opportunity for questions and answers later on. If you should require operator assistance during the call, you may press star and then zero, and operator will assist you offline. As a reminder, today's conference call is being recorded, and I'd like to turn the conference over to our host, Jason VanWees. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. This is Jason VanWees, Executive Vice President, and I'd like to welcome everyone to Teledyne's second quarter 2019 earnings release conference call. We released our earnings earlier this morning before the market opened. Joining me today are Teledyne's Executive Chairman, Robert Mehrabian, President and CEO, Al Pichelli, Senior Vice President and CFO, Sue Main, and Senior Vice President, General Counsel, Chief Compliance Officer, and Secretary, Melanie Cibik. After remarks by Robert, Al, and Sue, we will ask for your questions. Of course, though, before we get us started, our attorneys have reminded me to tell you that all forward-looking statements made this morning are subject to various assumptions, risks, and caveats, as noted in the earnings release and our periodic SEC filings. And, of course, actual results may differ materially. In order to avoid potential selective disclosures, this call is simultaneously being webcast, and a replay both by a webcast and dial-in will be available for about one month. Here is Robert.

Thank you, Jason, and good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our earnings call. Today, we reported the strongest quarter in Teledyne's history. Sales and earnings per share were all-time records. Operating margin was also an all-time record, and each of these exceeded prior records by significant magnitude. Specifically, in the second quarter, sales increased 6.8%, including approximately negative 1.2% of currency headwind. Organic growth was 3.6%. Earnings per share of $2.80 increased 20.7% compared to last year. Also, we have increased our emphasis on margin improvement, while at the same time continuing our proven strategy of disciplined capital deployment for compound growth in earnings and cash flow. On that point, we are pleased to announce the acquisition of 3M's gas and flame detection businesses during this quarter. We expect to close this acquisition in the third quarter. Teledyne continues to benefit from our balanced portfolio of common technologies serving different but complementary end markets. Our 2019 outlook reflects strong growth in our life sciences and defense imaging businesses, which are more than offsetting declines in some industrial machine vision businesses. In addition, our defense and space electronics businesses should far more than offset some lower sales of avionics to certain commercial air transport platforms. Finally, our balance sheet remains exceptionally strong. In fact, our quarter end leverage ratio of 1.4 was the lowest in five years. I will now pass the call to Al, and he will comment on the performance of our four business segments.