Jeff Edwards
Analyst · Roth Capital
Okay. Thanks Roger and good morning everyone. I’d like to begin on slide five with some highlights, data points and key accomplishments in the first quarter. First of all, sales reached an all time record of $967 million in the quarter, that’s up more than 7% over the same period last year. Our newly launched business and continuing demand for SUV and light truck gave us solid volume and mix improvement on the top line, even though the total global light vehicle production was down. Foreign exchange rates were also a positive factor, especially in Europe and Asia. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $123 million. This was a first quarter record and an increase of more than 10% over last year. The key driver of the increase was $25 million in cost reductions from improved operating efficiencies. Our global team continues to make terrific progress towards world class in both our manufacturing facilities and in our administrative functions. These continuing improvements help to offset the headwinds from material cost increases in customer price adjustments, driving the strong quarter results. The safety of our employees remains the top priority for everyone at Cooper Standard. We are very proud of our 65 locations that finished the quarter without a single safety incident. Our total incident rate was once again improved versus last year and better than our world-class benchmark. Our total safety culture has been embraced throughout the company and the commitment to keep each other safe will continue to drive even further improvements. We had a very strong quarter in terms of new program launches as well, a total of 50 of those. This represented an increase of more than 85% compared to the first quarter last year. While this is significant volume, our flawless launch system enables our team to smoothly manage these launches, certainly providing the outstanding service and quality our customers deserve and have certainly come to expect from Cooper Standard. Successful launches are a key consideration of our customers when they are awarding contracts for future business and its certainly part of the reason we continue to receive many new contract awards. In the first quarter our annual net new business awards totaled $140 million. Product technology and innovation are also key factors in winning new contracts. Our latest technological advances that continue to be very well received. In fact during the quarter we received contract awards for our innovation products totaling $70 million in annualized sales, including both new and replacement business. Turning to slide six, with these most recent innovation and sales awards, our total since we first began to commercialize our innovations in 2016 now exceeds $0.5 billion, and these awarded contracts – as these awarded contracts come into production, our higher value add, higher margin products will soon begin to have more significant financial impact within our core automotive business. We anticipate annualized sales of our innovation products in the automotive industry will exceed $1 billion within the next five years. Our innovations are opening doors with new customers and expanding opportunities with the existing ones. During the first quarter our Fortrex technology was approved, certified by a key automotive customer in Germany. We believe this lends further credibility to the technology and will likely lead to other European and Asian customers approving it, placing orders for it in the near future. Additionally, outside of the automotive industry we’ve initiated an accelerated program to add Fortrex technology to our industrial and specialty group product lineup and we refer to that as the ISG group. This program is in early stages that could begin to generate revenue by the third quarter of this year. Initially we will look to convert existing products and customers to Fortrex technology with the expectation that increased awareness for the benefits of Fortrex will resolve in incremental demand going forward. Moving on to slide seven, increasing customer orders and demand certainly provide evidence that our innovations are valued in appreciated. Industry recognition such as the Automotive News PACE Award is further evidence that the automotive industry overall is taking notice of our breakthrough technology. We are very pleased to have received a PACE Award last month for our innovative Fortrex technology in automotive sealing applications. Known as the automotive industry benchmark for innovation, PACE Award honors superior innovation, technological advancement and business performance among automotive suppliers. It’s a prestigious honor for our innovation team and the entire company. We thank Automotive News and the Automotive Parts Manufactures Association for running this rigorous judging process that highlights the best of the best innovations that have been developed and commercialized by automotive suppliers. Moving to slide eight, we are also very pleased to have been recently selected as the General Motors supplier of the year and also a finalist for the Fiat Chrysler Suppler of the Year Award. GM gives their prestigious Supplier of the Year Awards to a select group of suppliers each year who go above and beyond GM standards in providing value through innovation, quality and service. This year approximately 130 suppliers received the honor out of a total of more than 20,000; so it’s certainly a significant achievement. We’d like to congratulate our Fluid Transfer Systems team as their continuing hard world and dedication is what earned this high level of customer appreciate. In addition to these notable global awards, we continue to win numerous honors awards and customer recognition at the regional level or in our individual production locations. In fact, in total we’ve received over 40 customer awards in the past 12 months. Receiving these types of customer and industry recognition puts us in elite company and we believe they help confirm the progress we are making towards becoming a world class company. So congratulations to all the employees that contributed and we are very honored that our customers are excited to be doing business with Cooper Standard. So Jon, let me turn the call over to you.