Dave Powers - President and Chief Executive Officer
Management
Thank you, Kevin. Good morning to all. Welcome to Eagle Materials' conference call for the first quarter of fiscal year 2017. We are glad that you could be with us today. Joining me today are Craig Kesler, our Chief Financial Officer; and Bob Stewart, Executive Vice President of Strategy, Corporate Development and Communications. There will be a slide presentation made in connection with this call. To access it, please go to eaglematerials.com, and click on the link to the webcast. While you are accessing these slides, please note that the first slide covers our cautionary disclosure regarding forward-looking statements made during the call. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause results to differ from those discussed during the call. For further information, please refer to the disclosure, which is also included at the end of our press release. Let me preface by saying that we're on our call today from New York City, not our Dallas headquarters as is customary. The reason relates to the companion press release this morning with our earnings release that provides the details of our inaugural debt offering, a milestone for the company. We expect to price the notes this Friday, and so we are in New York as part of the launch and road show. We expect BBB and Ba1 ratings from S&P and Moody's respectively. These ratings are gratifying and a reflection of our track record of superior competitive performance through the cycles. Our debt offering will allow us to extend our debt maturities to better match our long-term asset base without long-term debt, and to do so at a time when borrowing costs are near all-time low. Clearly, this will provide us greater flexibility going forward for a number of purposes, including acquisitions and expansion pursuits. We are not trying to infer that acquisitions are not imminent, as we never elaborate on the status of our deal pipeline. I will reiterate what we've said numerous times, we are highly interested in growing the heavy side of our business, especially Cement assets, given the long-term outlook for well-positioned U.S. assets, which would match our investment criteria. I also want to continue to emphasis that we do not intend to compromise our returns criteria in making such acquisitions. Before Craig walks us through the financial results and the details on our bond offering, let me just offer a comment on our business conditions, and all of our construction businesses performed very well during the first quarter. Simply put, we continue to see trend improvements for our Cement, our Concrete, our Wallboard and our Paper businesses. And the midterm outlook for volume and pricing remains good. Now, let me turn it over to Craig to review our financial results.