[Starts Abruptly] …the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are made based upon the company’s expectations and beliefs concerning future events impacting the company and therefore involve a number of risks and uncertainties. The company cautions you that forward-looking statements are not guarantees and that actual results could differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements. Potential risks and uncertainties that could cause the actual results of operations or financial condition of the company to differ materially from those expressed or implied by forward-looking statements used in this call, include but are not limited to the overall level of consumer spending on the company’s products; general economic conditions and other factors affecting consumer confidence; disruption and volatility in the global capital and credit markets; the financial strength of the company's customers. The company's ability to implement its growth strategy, including its ability to organically grow each of its historical product lines, the ability of the company to identify potential acquisition or investment opportunities as part of its acquisition strategy; the company’s ability to successfully execute its acquisition strategy or that any such strategy will result in the company’s future profitability; the company’s exposure to product liability or product warranty claims and other loss contingencies; the stability of the company's manufacturing facilities and foreign suppliers; the company's ability to successfully integrate Sierra Bullets, changes in governmental regulation, legislation or public opinion relating to the manufacture and sale of bullets by our Sierra segment, and the possession and use of firearms and ammunition by our customers. The company’s ability to protect patents, trademarks and other intellectual property rights; any breaches of or interruptions in our information systems; fluctuations in the price, availability and quality of raw materials and contracted products, as…

Thank you Cody and good afternoon everyone. It's a pleasure to be joining you. First, I would like to express my appreciation to our Broad of Directors for their confidence in appointing me as the President of the Clarus Corporation and supporting the future as we are trying to create it. I have been with the company for approximately 18 months and during this time we have instilled a clear strategic focus throughout the organization and hopefully within the industry, reinforcing BD as one of the most disruptive brands in the outdoor industry. We expect to apply the same playbook at Sierra. My appointment as President also solidifies our new focus, while our key priority is integrating and growing the Sierra business it’s important to reiterate that we also remain fully committed to the long term capital acquisition strategy. As we evaluate future opportunities, we now intend to be focused on the outdoor and consumer industries. We believe straying too far from the company in this space would underutilize the great people and their significant capacities and goodwill we’ve built in these industries at both the Clarus Corporate and individual brand levels. We look forward to updating our shareholders as this more industry focused M&A strategy unfolds. Now onto our financial results. We ended 2017 on a strong note growing fourth quarter sales by 27%, with our Black Diamond segment up 11%. This strong performance was broad-based, driven by growth in North America and Europe and across all of the primary product categories of climb, mountain and ski. In fact, we grew our ski category by 24% in the fourth quarter, driven by 33% sales growth from our PIEPS brand. PIEPS has benefited from Black Diamond’s focus on a broad collection built around snow safety and leveraging the Clarus platform…

Thank you John and good afternoon everyone. Sales in the fourth quarter of 2017 increased 27% to $52.7 million compared to $41.4 million in the same year-ago quarter and on a constant current basis sales were up 25%. Along with the strong category growth John mentioned in his opening remarks, particularly in climb and ski, the increase was due to our acquisition of Sierra Bullets on August 21, which added $6.8 million to our sales in the fourth quarter. Excluding the acquisition however sales still increased organically by a healthy 11%. In fact, the fourth quarter of 2017 benefited from a 10% year-over-year increase in pre-season orders, while improved fulfillment rates and healthier inventory levels drove a solid 28% increase in At Once orders. As a result, our inline business grew in the fourth quarter by 15%. These increases were partially offset by a 46% decrease in the amount of discontinued merchandise sold during the quarter, further reflecting the improvements being made on our supply chain, inventory management and streamlined apparel initiative. In fact this point also ties it nicely to our gross margin performance. Gross margin in the fourth quarter increased 350 basis points to 32.6% compared to 29.1% in the year-ago quarter. The increase was primarily due to a favorable mix of higher margin products, the stabilization of our sourcing strategy, particularly in our in-house manufacturing and reflected more normalized levels of discontinued merchandise as we expected. Excluding a fair value inventory step-up associated with the Sierra acquisition of $1.7 million, adjusted gross margin increased 670 basis points in the fourth quarter to 35.8%. Excluding the acquisition, gross margin was up 630 basis points to 35.4%. Selling, general and administrative expenses in the fourth quarter increased to $16.5 million compared to $12.6 million in the year-ago quarter. The…

Thanks Aaron. Before moving to our strategic outlook, I’d like to recap our fourth quarter results. The parts of our business that we used to measure execution are all on track. Sales were up across all major categories, geographies and channels and our gross margins have continued to improve significantly. On a full year basis these metrics for the most part were directionally the same. We are investing in sales and marketing campaigns that are driving enhanced consumer awareness, which have driven both strong ASAP orders and strong bookings for 2018 and we are well on our way to integrating Sierra and building cash flow to help further our acquisition capabilities. Now pivoting to product and a few comments on our fall ’18 line-up. We are very excited about the brand’s momentum heading into the fall ’18 season, which we expect will feature the interdiction of more than 15 new products across all three categories. Now having recently finished trade shows in both the U.S. and Europe, we continue to see strong brand momentum both in product innovations, as well as our aggressive marketing on lighter, faster, stronger. In Climb we continued our innovations with ICE, launching the industry’s lightest UL Ice Crew and the new Reactor ice tool. New innovations in [Chalk][ph] with the launch of Pure Gold, a Chalk additive that increases moisture absorption by 10X; we also expect new developments in bouldering pads, bouldering accessories alongside new colors of our rock shoe collection. We’ll continue to build momentum in the ever growing bouldering category. Within the growing popularity of backcountry skiing and boarding, BD continued to push the innovations in our ski and snow safety category with the new Helio Ski Collection and in the award winning Boundary Pro series, new Ultra Light Bindings, new Black Diamond…

Thank you, sir. [Operator Instructions] And we will take our first question from Andrew Burns with D.A. Davidson.

Thanks. Good afternoon guys. Just a quick one on the weather. Clearly a bit of a headwind in the Western U.S. but beneficial in Europe. Would you say when you sum up all the different parts, categories and regions the weather materially impacted results one way or the other in 4Q? Hello?

Caller, your line is open.

Hi, good afternoon guys. Just a quick question on weather, not sure what happened there, but when you look at the various regions and categories, it was tough in the Western U.S., beneficial in Europe. Would you say that rolling it all up weather had an impact one way or the other material on the results for 4Q?

Ladies and gentlemen, please stand by. Looks like we’re having technical issues. Speakers, please resume. [Technical Difficulty]

And we will take a question from Jim Duffy of Stifel.

Hi, this is Peter McGoldrick on for Jim. Thanks for taking my question. I was curious, as you looked forward to high single digit Black Diamond growth. Could you size the opportunity between your categories and channels? Hello?

If you could please re-ask your question?

Hi, thanks for taking my question. This is Peter on for Jim. I was curious if you could break down the drivers of the high single digit Black Diamond brand growth between channels and categories?

Sure, if you want me to take it John.

Yep.

So, this is Aaron, Peter. First of all at the channel level what we saw was our domestic business grew 10%, our international business was up 12%, the North American business was up 9%, Europe was up 17% and as communicated our rest of the world was a bit flat. Now the primary drivers here was in North America in particular was associated with our client business, the continued roll out of our climbing shoes, ropes, harnesses, but also some early launch products for Spring ’18 such as trekking poles. We also had a very strong initiative around our gloves and also our snow safety and in Europe with the weather the way that it was, it was strongly driven by snow safety that of beacons and also [indiscernible].

Okay, and regionally with the weather in the Rockies and then in American west, was that an impact or did that catch up as fourth quarter progressed.

It was definitely an impact and I think everybody felt that. As we said in the report, I think it is both a blessing and the curse of BD as the 33 categories of products that we perform in, when its bad we were able to balance our business into other areas that are growing and likewise if it was really huge you know we may not get a full impact of it, because its only partial of our business, win some. I mean I will say it’s probably in total balance because Europe was up so strong when the U.S. West was down. But in the Backcountry Ski brand, we are more of a Rocky Mountain to North West brand than we are a Mid-West Ski brand.

Okay, and then on previous calls you discussed the lifestyle apparel opportunity. Can you speak a little bit about how that is progressing?

We feel very strong on apparel. As we said, what you saw in the third and fourth quarter of last season was the start of our execution of the new apparel program, lifestyle being a part of that and mainly around Climb, and specifically you will see that as we move into Spring and Summer aspects of it. Our business is predominately in the fall and winter based on outerwear, typically driven along the west, the ski market and so our apparel didn’t have as much lift as was potential given the western winter.

Okay, thank you. And then finally I was just curious on your gross margin outlook. You mentioned channel mix and supply chain being opportunities for continued expansion. Especially with Sierra Bullets are you seeing input costs pressures and if you could dimensionalize those that would be great thanks.

You bet, so as communicated you know we are focused more on the adjusted EBITDA percentage this time around. This is where we want to focus our investors but also provide us with the flexibility as we continue to grow and scale the business. We are expecting an expansion of gross margins. At the BD level it is due to the channel mix and also continued improvements in our sourcing and supply chain activities, as well as our in house manufacturing. At the Sierra business we are seeing some headwinds or pressures on the business due to its reliance on certain commodities such as copper and lead. For example, you know about 50% of its overall cost of goods sold is a component of copper and lead and with the increase in those two commodities on the combined basis of about 30%, we are seeing some pressures of about 500 basis points on that businesses gross margins that we are actively looking at of how we can mitigate, but also improve from here, whether it be through higher levels of throughput and you know maximizing the output of our manufacturing facility, but also through new innovation and being able to reset pricing along the way as well.

Thank you.

[Operator Instructions]. And our next question will come from Andrew Burns of D.A. Davidson.

Hey guys, can you hear me this time?

Yes, we can. How are you?

Excellent! Great! John I know you talked about from distribution opportunities in some of your more popular categories, whether it’s lighting or trekking poles. Is there any distribution expansion in ’18 that’s going to be helping out, whether it’s run specialty or something broader in the lighting category? Thanks.

Yes, we are definitely expanding our lighting into broader distribution as well as broader categories as you mentioned, specifically trail running is a strong initiative for Black Diamond into 2018 and beyond. We will see growth not only in the distribution opportunities, but also in expansion of both the skew level and the door level in lighting amongst our top retailers. I think head lamps have proven to be here for the future.

Great. Thanks and I appreciate the commentary on the M&A strategy and I’m just curious, I understand it’s a very different business than it was a few years ago. When there was sort of a more industry focus to the acquisition strategy, valuation was frequently a sticking point. Is that still the case or do you see valuation at more sensible levels for potential acquisition targets. Thanks.

We’ll continue to be focused on valuation, but more importantly on the opportunities. You know every time we evaluate a potential detail it’s all about how it would fit into the current organization, but also how we’d be able to leverage our time as management and also what it contributes to the overall ecosystem of Clarus. And so we’ll continue to be once again mindful of the valuation. We expect every deal to be accretive from the get go, but we also recognize as we continue to focus on the outdoor and consumer industries specifically that those you know opportunities come with a certain type of valuation or certain type of theses along with it and we recognize it and we are embracing that.

Best of luck in ’18.

Appreciate it.

And there’s no further question is the queue. I’d like to turn the call back over to Mr. Walbrecht for closing remarks.

Thank you, Britney. We like to thank everyone for listening today’s call and we look forward to speaking with you when we report our first quarter results. Thanks again for joining in. Bye.

Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.