Westinghouse Air Brake Technologies Corporation

Good morning, and welcome to the Wabtec Corporation first quarter 2019 earnings release conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Tim Wesley, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Nancy. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to our 2019 First Quarter Earnings Call.

We do have a lot to cover, so let's get started. I'm going to introduce everybody else here in the room with me. First of all, our Executive Chairman, Al Newfaber. President and CEO, Ray Bettler. Pat Dugan, our CFO. Rafael Santana, President and CEO of our freight segment. Corporate Controller, John Mastelers. And our new VP of IR, Christine Kabaki, who has recently joined us. We think Christine is familiar to many of you. She's got a lot of experience on the sales side, covering not just Wabtec, but many other companies in transportation and equipment. So we'll make our prepared remarks, as usual, and then we'll take your questions. We do ask that you limit yourself to one question and one follow-up, and of course, if we can't get to everyone's questions in the allotted time, we'll reach out following the call. We will make forward-looking statements during the call, so please review today's press release for the appropriate disclaimers. And also during the call, we will discuss non-GAAP financial metrics. We encourage you to read our disclosures and the reconciliation tables we've provided as you consider these metrics. So I'm going to turn the call over now to Al Newthaber. Thanks, Tim. Good morning, everyone. It's good to talk with you today. We're happy to report that we had a good performance this quarter and that we're on track to hit our guidance for the year. So we're off to a good start in 2019, especially as we begin to integrate lab tech and GE transportation after completing our merger in late February. Thanks a lot to a detailed plan and hard work prior to closing. We believe the integration has been seamless to this point. We have already validated our annual savings target of $250 million by year four. Before we get to the first quarter financials and discussion, I'd like to start off by talking about the management succession plan that we announced this morning. After conducting a thorough external and internal search, our board is named Rafael Santana, the company's next president and chief executive officer and a board member, to become effective July 1st of this year. He succeeds Ray Butler, who will retire as a Wabtec executive and board member. I will continue to serve as Wabtec's executive chairman. This transition comes at a time of strength at Wabtec given our diverse portfolio, excellent management team, and strong backlog and balance sheet. Raphael, as you know, joined WebTech earlier this year with the GE Transportation merger after serving as president and CEO of that division. Raphael held a wide range of executive leadership positions at GE and has spent more than a decade in the transportation industry. He's the right leader for this role. bringing to Webtek a passion for operational excellence and technology and a strong track record of growth and performance. A native of Brazil, Javier brings 25 years of commercial, product management, and executive leadership experience to this post. He has a proven track record of transforming businesses while delivering top and bottom line growth. While leading GE Transportation, he significantly expanded the company's regional footprint, built a strong overall and modernization capability, and backlogged through multi-year programs. Prior to that role, he was President and CEO of GE in Latin America, where he helped transform the market into one of GE's largest and fastest-growing regions. He also served as President and CEO of the Turbo Machinery Solutions business of GE Oil and Gas, where he drove significant margin improvement and growth in a contracting marketplace. Raphael has a degree in engineering from the Federal University of Engineering in Brazil and will be based at WAPTEC's new headquarters in Pittsburgh.