Valmont Industries, Inc.

We ask that you please ask one question and one follow-up, then return to the queue. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Renee Campbell, Director of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications for Valmont Industries. Renee, please go ahead.

Thank you, Kevin. Good morning, and welcome to Valmont Industries' fourth quarter and full year 2018 earnings call. With me today are Steve Koniewski, President and Chief Executive Officer, Mark Jaksic, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and Tim Francis, Senior Vice President and Corporate Controller. Morning, Steve will provide a summary of our fourth quarter and full year results. Mark will provide additional details on financial performance and our outlook for 2019. We will conclude with Steve discussing the Belmont-CrossFair partnership we announced yesterday, followed by Q&A. A copy of our press release and slide presentation is on the Investors page at Belmont.com, and an archive of today's call will be available for the next seven days. for accessing the replay are included in the press release. Also, please note that this conference call is subject to our disclosure on forward-looking statements, which applies to today's discussion and will be read in full at the end of this call. I would now like to turn the call over to our President and Chief Executive Officer, Steve Koniewski.

Thank you, Renee. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. I'd like to begin this morning by thanking our global team of over 10,000 associates for delivering another year of profitable growth in 2018. In what was a transformational year, we made great progress on our three-year growth strategy that we announced last March at our Investor Day. With that, let me turn to a recap of our fourth quarter, summarized on slide three of the presentation. Net sales of $697.4 million were 2.5% below last year. Excluding revenues from the grinding media business that was divested last April, fourth quarter sales were flat with 2017. Sales growth from pricing actions across all segments and higher volumes in the engineered support structures and coding segments were offset by lower project sales in both international irrigation and the utility segment. Foreign currency translation negatively impacted revenues by $13 million. Turning to the full year summary on slide four, revenues of $2.8 billion were slightly higher than last year, with higher volumes in the engineered support structures and coating segments contributing to sales growth. In the irrigation segment, North America sales grew more than 4%. Lower volumes in international irrigation were mainly due to 2017 projects in emerging markets that did not repeat this year. In the utility segment, sales were impacted by lower volumes from continued demand for smaller structures and a competitive pricing environment in a North European offshore wind business. Moving to the operations side of the business and slide five of the presentation, during 2018, we substantially completed our operations transformation, which was a major part of our strategy to simplify operations, improve efficiencies in our supply chain, and Optimize Our Global Business Model. These actions primarily impacted our ESS segment. Specifically, during the year, we closed five facilities, including three in China, and are in the process of closing an additional two by the end of the second quarter, which led to the increase in pre-tax full-year restructuring expenses from $27 million to $42 million. We brought our composite facilities under the Central Light Operations Management Team continuing our commitment to operational excellence and lean deployment across our sites. We expanded our shared service model for back office functions and finance, procurement, logistics, and supply chain, completing several actions to streamline cross-regional management teams. And we work to drive additional lean and agile methodologies throughout our business while streamlining and improving our internal processes. These actions position us well to capitalize on global growth opportunities, enabling us to deploy capital more strategically and to more quickly integrate our acquisitions, all of which would benefit our shareholders long term. I would now like to turn the call over to Mark.