Good morning. Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Jerome, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the first quarter 2019 results conference call. [Operator Instructions]. Thank you. Now it's my pleasure to hand the call over to your host, Ms. Maria Lee, Treasurer and Vice President Investor Relations. The floor is yours.

Great. Thank you. Good morning, everybody, and thanks for joining us. I'm joined today by our Chairman, President and CEO, Dave Nord; and our Senior Vice President and CFO, Bill Sperry. Hubbell announced its first quarter results for 2019 this morning. The press release and earnings slide materials have been posted to the Investor section of our website at www.hubbell.com. Please note that our comments this morning may include statements related to the expected future results of our company and are forward-looking statements as defined by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Therefore, please note, the discussion of forward-looking statements in our press release and consider it incorporated by reference into this call. In addition, comments may also include non-GAAP financial measures. Those measures are reconciled to the comparable GAAP measures and are included in the press release and the earnings slide materials. Now let me turn the call over to Dave.

All right. Thanks, Maria. Thanks, everybody. Good morning. I know it's a busy morning this morning. It appears that April 30 is a very -- has become a very popular date from when we first decided to move our earnings out. So I want to make sure that we get through the stuff, we have a lot of good things to talk about, so try and get through briefly and as we can to allow time for some of your other commitments. You can see it from our press release this morning. We had another quarter of strong earnings growth and free cash flow generation. I certainly feel confident about our market position, and our ability to deliver differentiated results over the long-term. Couple of key items in the first quarter, let me talk to, and I'm on page 3 of the slide deck that we sent out. As I mentioned, first and foremost, strong organic growth with end market steady, growing modestly. Most of our end markets were up in the quarter, with particular strength in the industrial, gas distribution and electrical T&D. Importantly, in one of the key topics we talked about, certainly, for the second half of last year was around pricing. And our pricing actions continue to gain traction. And we've turned the corner on price cost, which was a net positive for us in the quarter after being a headwind throughout all of 2018. We're actively managing price across the portfolio and remain focused on completing in areas where we can offer differentiated value and earn attractive returns. This is particularly true in Lighting where we're starting to see the hard work Kevin and his team has put into his business over the last several years and really is starting to pay off. True overall,…

Thanks, Dave. Good morning, everybody. Thank you all for joining. Dave gave you the highlights from pages 3 and 4. I'm going to start on page 5 where we break down our end market performance. And as you can see, the end markets are continuing to provide a constructive backdrop, driving our financial performance. Of the 10% sales growth to achieve over $1 billion of sales in the quarter, 5 points of that were organic. So nice strong organic performance, and if we disaggregate that into its individual end markets. To talk a little bit about nonres for a second, we've got three lines of business with exposure in nonres, all of them seeing growth ranging between the low- to mid-single digits I think consistent with third-party data on momentum there. So positive story for nonres. Industrial, it's been a highlight from the quarter. Heavy being a little bit stronger than light for us. And again, consistent with some third-party data where we see industrial production and manufactured goods and durable goods showing some good strength. On the oil and gas side, we do see a little bit of mixed performance there. On the oil side, despite having constructive energy cost in terms of price per barrel of oil, our exposure there being, just to remind everybody, more in the upstream, we prefer offshore content versus nonshore, and that oil piece was [indiscernible] for the first quarter. And I think in contrast to gas business where we saw quite strong demand, strong shipments. We're seeing both maintenance as well as new conversions to gas on buildings driving demand there for the last months on the gas side. Within electrical T&D, distribution a little bit stronger than transmission, but a lot of the order activity and quoting that we're seeing bodes…

Thanks, Bill. Capital structure on page 10. Our balance sheet remains strong. We ended Q1 with $205 million of cash and $50 million of commercial paper outstanding. During the quarter, we paid down amortization on our term loan as well as funded the dividend, invested $23 million of CapEx and bought back $10 million worth of shares. Our four tranches of senior notes have favorable rates in the low to mid 3% range and have maturities that are will spread out to the next in 2022. Our net debt-to-cap ratio is healthy at 42%, and our leverage in terms of gross debt-to-EBITDA is about 2.5x. This is down from more than 3x a year ago pro forma for the Aclara acquisition. On a net basis, debt-to-EBITDA is about 2x. We feel confident in our ability to continue managing our leverage given our cash generation and repatriation potential. Importantly and consistent with our long-standing growth strategy, we believe our balance sheet is in solid shape to support bolt-on acquisitions near term. Now I'll turn the call over to Dave to talk about the outlook.

Okay. Thanks, Maria. So on page 11, talking about our end-market outlook for the year, our dynamics there are pretty steady. We continue to see low-single digit growth, overall. The one change here is a little tweaking down of the oil and gas. Originally, we had said 3% to 5%, keep it down to 2% to 4%, mainly given the softness we saw particularly in oil in the first half, not on the gas side. But again, we expect some pickup in that in the second half. So -- and gas should be good for us and remaining strong throughout the year. As we talked about before, we do think there's some level of trade-off between price and volumes. And so while we typically target outgrowing our markets, we're happy to grow in line, at least near term, at more attractive margins with the market. But this is something we're going to continue to actively manage throughout the year. I'm very confident in our ability to manage this and deliver on our commitments. Turning to page 12 then on the outlook. As I said we're reaffirming our outlook for the full year where we continue to expect net sales growth of 4% to 6%, with end markets up low single-digit, acquisitions contributing a point and then price realization on top of that. I think that growth rate is very much consistent with what we saw recently in a survey of 200 electrical distributors. I think their forecast for the year was about 6% growth overall, which would include price. My experience says that they tend to be more positively biased. So I probably discount that by a point. But on the other side, we've got 200 electrical distributors who have -- really are on the ground and have a really…

[Operator Instructions]. Your first question comes from the line of Nigel Coe from Wolfe Research.

This is actually Michael on for Nigel. All right, could you just walk through how you guys are seeing the cadence for price/cost? We're kind of assuming that 1Q was toughest quarter. How do you see the remainder of the year?

Yes, I think Michael, we anticipate that we need to continue to pull price. And we had been pulling price off through last year. So that price eases actually as you get through the second half, you end up passing some of the pricing pieces that we'd implemented last year. On the second half of the equation, though, on the material side, particularly steel, which is the large raw material of ours, you'll start to see potentially some favorability, which creates, I think, the effects, you're seeing where you can end up with some contribution from that as the year progresses.

Got you. That's helpful. And then just one more. On the Lighting spend, does this change your view at all on the Hubbell portfolio in its totality?

Well, look, we've been investing in lighting, as David mentioned, over the last several years. We've been taking some of their fixed costs out, been reorganizing the business. We've been investing in the front end on the agent side, and it's good to see those investments paying off right now, for sure.

Your next question comes from the line of Christopher Glynn from Oppenheimer.

What about the comment of investing in agencies side of Lighting, can you talk a little bit about, specifically, what's going on there?

Well just over the last couple of years, we had added and strengthened our representation on the front end in specific markets in, for example, the Southeast, in the Midwest, not on the West Coast, Chris. So those are -- that's not new news, that's just yields on investments we've made over the last couple of years.

But I think -- but importantly, Chris, that's something that Kevin and his team focused on one of the reasons that contributed to our underrepresentation was our inability to actually perform at a level that good agents were expecting. So the first was to get the operations in line and performing with the right product mix and the right service levels, which then made it easier for us to be able to convince good agents to move over to a good company with Hubbell Lighting.

Sounds good. And then on Aclara, could you talk about the growth there a little bit? I'm curious about, obviously, your win rate is good, but curious about actual competitive displacements that you're seeing and share gain in that respect from Aclara? And how much of that is because Hubbell now owns them?

Yes, I think it's a little hard for us to attribute that other than anecdotally, I think, we've gotten a lot of really positive feedback from our core customers that they are happy that it's in our portfolio. Somebody who they value and trust in relationship with us and the quality of the products we provide and standing behind our products. So I do think there is some benefits there. But I think the -- and I'm not sure if there is displacement that we see, specifically. I do think that between that it will good for us and is to get more communication, higher-margin communication product into that mix, Chris. And I think that, that combines which you had in question where our traditional customers and those sell cycles are over a couple of years, right, if not over a couple of months or quarters. And that's what where we're looking forward to is the communication side of that growth catching up to the other side rather than some...

Yes, Chris, I think one of thing that Bill just mentioned is on big projects, the sell cycle is a little longer. But I can tell you that there are examples at a smaller level ones that you wouldn't notice of where there's been benefit on the legacy Hubbell Power Systems in Aclara customers that we historically hadn't penetrated and vice versa, which is exactly the premise of the strategy for the acquisitions. Not only Hubbell is bringing the technology, but also bringing a comparable market presence that we can build on. So I think there's a lot of good things going on, but the big hits are going to come over time.

And that has a benefit of sitting in, Chris, on customer meetings where we have both Aclara senior management with Hubbell Power Systems senior management and as Dave said, it's a real powerful meeting that -- different than meetings that we used to have and either have. So I think there's a big complementary nature to that, that our customer base is favorably reacting to.

And last one. It sounds like price cost favorability might widen a little bit with the steel factor there? You also have restructuring was a little lower in the first quarter, that's going to step up. Should those two -- as we think about the first quarter base, are those two kind of offsetting going forward? Or is it more the net restructuring kind of lifts off?

I think it's the net restructuring that starts to pick up, Chris.

[Operator Instructions]. Your next question comes from the line of Deepa Raghavan from Wells Fargo.

Good Q1. It looks like it was better than your expectations.

Thank you.

The full year guidance was maintained, though. Just a question on that. How much of the full year guide being maintained is largely a function of historically maintaining guidance in April versus some of the incremental weakness you called out versus your prior expectations? Example, oil and gases, restructuring steps up, but generally if you can help me why the guide remains unchanged and some puts and takes that's helpful? And I have a follow-up.

I'll give you the overall and Bill can weigh in on any specific puts and takes. But clearly, if you go back in history, we just don't change early in year. Because remember, we're largely a short-cycle business. So our visibility is somewhat limited. So we're relying on market expectations. And so we're always cautious going -- coming out of the first quarter. Certainly, our results in the first quarter gives me confidence that our guide is good. And as opposed to some periods in the past where we might not have had that level of confidence, but I think it's -- it would be premature to change anything, specifically, unless there's a major move in there, which we don't have.

Yes. I think, Deepa, if we were looking for what we learned in the first quarter, I think there was a couple of important learnings: one was the market strength hung in there; and two, that our pricing strategy had some traction. So I think that -- those things underline from the Dave's confidence that it feels good to be off to a good start.

Got it. Can you talk about how the quarter played out by months, if you can? And specifically, if you can address the momentum exiting the quarter and into April? Generally, how do you feel about start to the current quarter, that would be very helpful?

Yes, I'm not sure there's much significance to monthly analysis as the year went by, Deepa. I think January can be a distorted month for us. There was probably some pull forward in some of the tariff-sensitive areas in the fourth quarter that causes some softness in January that can also be affected by customer incentive. So I think as we analyze our results by month, we didn't draw much momentum conclusions month-to-month, but rather looked at the quarter as being a good contributor. We spent some time thinking about what the first quarter usually contributes from a sales OP and earnings perspective to the year, and it felt good to have reasonable comparisons there that we're not depending on a back end load or anything like that.

So you feel good about April so far? That's the read for me, right?

Yes, I think what we've seen is consistent with our outlook, yes.

[Operator Instructions]. At this time, there are no questions on queue. Presenters, you may continue.

Okay. Great. Thanks, everyone, for joining. This concludes today's call. Dan and I will be available following the call for question. So thanks, again, for joining us.

Thank you. And that concludes first quarter 2019 results conference call. You may now disconnect.