Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, my name is Sydney and I will be your conference call facilitator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Kimball Electronics First Quarter Fiscal 2020 Financial Results Conference Call. All lines have been placed on listen-only mode to prevent any background noise. After the Kimball speakers' opening remarks, there will be a question-and-answer period, where Kimball will respond to questions from analysts. [Operator Instructions] Today's call, on November 6, 2019, will be recorded and may contain forward-looking statements as defined under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Risk factors that may influence the outcome of forward-looking statements can be seen in Kimball's annual report on Form 10-K for the year-ended June 30, 2019 and in today's release. The panel for today's call is Don Charron, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer; and Mike Sergesketter, Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Kimball Electronics. I would now like to turn today's call over to Don Charron. Mr. Charron, you may begin.

Thank you, Sydney, and welcome everyone to our first quarter conference call. Our earnings release was issued yesterday afternoon on the results of our fiscal year 2020 first quarter-ended September 30, 2019. We have posted a financial summary presentation to accompany this conference call. The presentation can be found on our Investor Relations website within the Events and Presentations tab, or if you are listening via the webcast, you can follow along by advancing the slides or download them from the Downloads tab on the webcast portal. I will begin by making a few remarks on the overall quarter, and then, I will turn it over to Mike for the financial overview. After that, we will answer any questions that you may have. We delivered excellent growth results in the first quarter of fiscal year 2020, despite a general softening in the overall market. We achieved double-digit growth in three of our four end-market verticals, when compared to the same period last year, and we set a new quarterly record for net sales in our medical end-market vertical. We are also starting to gain some traction in the new business opportunities pipeline for our GES business as we cycle through the downturn of the semiconductor and smart mobile device manufacturing end markets, which today are still the primary end markets that our GES customers serve. Our integration work with GES continues as we have now identified a dozen or so of value-creating automation, optical inspection and artificial intelligence projects that will eventually improve the productivity of our own existing manufacturing facilities, and further leverage the technology we acquired with this acquisition. We are extremely pleased with the progress we made in expanding our operating margins in the first quarter, when compared both year-over-year and sequentially to the fourth quarter of…

Thanks, Don. During my comments, I'll be referring to the slide deck, Don mentioned, which can be found on our Investor Relations website within the Events and Presentations tab, or if you're listening via webcast, you can follow along by advancing the slides on the webcast portal. As shown on Slide 3, our first quarter net sales were $313.4 million, which was an 18% increase, compared to net sales of $265.6 million in the prior-year first quarter. Adversely impacting our net sales for the quarter were foreign exchange rates, which reduced our net sales by approximately 2% compared to the first quarter a year ago. However, offsetting the impact of foreign currency rates were sales resulting from the GES acquisition, which added 2% to our consolidated net sales in the quarter. Slide 4 represents our net sales mix by vertical market. Three of our four end-market verticals experienced double-digit growth over the prior-year quarter. Our automotive vertical was up 17% compared to the same quarter a year ago from increased volumes in each of our markets, led by North America, which was largely driven by the continued ramp-up of new programs. Our medical vertical was up 23% in the current quarter compared to the prior-year first quarter to a new quarterly record of $101.3 million. The year-over-year increase was primarily related to strong demand for existing programs. Our industrial vertical was up 13% from a year ago as a result of additional revenue associated with the GES acquisition, an increasing demand in smart metering programs and new program introductions. Lastly, sales in our public safety vertical was flat with the prior-year first quarter. Our gross margin in the first quarter, reflected on Slide 5, was 7.1%, which improved 30 basis points from 6.8% in the first quarter of last fiscal…

[Operator Instructions] And I'm not showing any questions at this time.

Okay, thank you. That brings us to the end of today's call. We appreciate your interest and look forward to speaking with you on our next call. Thank you and have a great day.

At this time, listeners may simply hang up to disconnect from the call. Thank you and have a nice day.