Steven Loranger - Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer
Analyst · Credit Suisse. Please go ahead
Thanks, Denise. Well, as you can see, 2007 was certainly a year where ITT delivered very strong results. On 2008, there’s been a lot of discussions about an economic slowdown. And other than a few areas that Denise highlighted, we're not seeing a broad based slowdown at this point in time. However, we have spent a lot of time looking at what a slowing would mean for our business, and we have planned and forecasted accordingly. We have solid contingency plans in place, within the commercial businesses and we will react quickly if we see trends, which differ, materially from our forecast. And as Denise mentioned, we've already experienced some of the weakness in the small residential segment of Fluid Tech with submersible pumps and within the pool and spa business within Motion & Flow. But these conditions have already been factored into our forecast. So, let me reiterate a point we made in November. We operate strong businesses in attractive markets supported by long-term secular demand trend. And we have committed management teams dedicated to a culture of continuous improvement. Our commercial businesses are well positioned geographically. They have excellent end market diversification and we continue to see a strong order flow. Plus, our Defense business, now with EDO has a fully funded backlog of $5.2 billion, which provides excellent visibility into 2008 and beyond. So, let me be clear about this point. We are very, very confident about our ability to deliver our forecast of strong results in 2008. We're watching the order flow closely and it is showing solid trends that we forecast. In short, our overall portfolio is designed to deliver consistent and predictable results over the long term and this is exactly what we intend to do. The last point, I want to make today before we open this up for questions is, I wanted to mention that Peter Milligan is graduating from the Investor Relations' role. We very much support talent development at ITT and Peter has done an outstanding job leading our Investor Relations effort, earning the right to move up to a significant increase in responsibility. We're proud in his contributions and he will certainly be in a key role as we drive our portfolio to achieve additional value. Peter's new job will be to lead the finance organization in our Electronic Systems Group. And as you may know, much of the EDO business is moving into that... into the Electronic Systems value center, where the revenue will be in excess of $1 billion making it one of the largest value centers in the company. And his leadership capability is well matched to the important growth opportunities that we have in that segment. So, today, we will offer Peter our congratulations for a job well done and wish him well in the further. We will announcing a new Director of Investor Relations in the next few weeks. And so, now let me turn things over to Peter to begin the Q&A session.