Good day everyone. And welcome to the Littelfuse Incorporated First Quarter 2009 Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time, I will turn the conference over to Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Gordon Hunter. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you. Good morning and welcome to the Littelfuse first quarter conference call. Joining me today is Phil Franklin, our Vice President of Operations Support and Chief Financial Officer. As we discussed in our call last quarter, we knew going into the first quarter that this was going to be a very challenging quarter for us. The quarter progressed even slower than we originally anticipated; and in fact, we did not see much improvement until well into March. As a result, we ended the first quarter of 2009 with sales of $84.4 million, down 37% from the first quarter of 2008. Sequentially, sales were down 20% from last year's fourth quarter. Key markets including automotive, consumer electronics and telecom were exceptionally weak during the quarter due to the global economic downturn and the credit crisis. Holiday shutdowns for automotive OEMs and electronic contract manufactures extended further into the first quarter than typical and electronic distributors continued to reduce inventories. The electrical business, which had been holding up fairly well until last year's fourth quarter continued to weaken in the first quarter. This reflected the downturn in non-residential construction and inventory reductions by distributors. The net loss of $0.36 per share for the first quarter was within the range of our guidance, but nevertheless, it was a significant decline for our earnings of $0.19 per share in the first quarter of last year. Returning to profitability is our top priority. We believe we've reached the bottom in the first quarter and that our results will improve considerably beginning in the second quarter. I'll talk more about this in a few minutes, but first I'll turn the call over to Phil Franklin, who will give the Safe Harbor statement and a brief summary of the news release.

Thanks, Gordon. Before we proceed, let me remind everyone that comments made during this call include forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties; and as a result, actual results may differ materially from those expressed in forward-looking statements. A discussion of these risk factors maybe found in the quarterly and annual reports filed with the SEC. As Gordon said, it was a very challenging quarter. Sales of $84.4 million were below the low end of our guidance and due to the exceptionally slow start to the year. There was a bright spot in the quarter. It was that our aggressive cost reduction actions enabled bottom line performance to be inline with expectations, despite lower sales and an unfavorable tax rate. Gross margin improved as the quarter progressed as costs declined throughout the quarter and sales picked up on March. We expect these improving sales and margin trends to continue through the second quarter. On our last conference call, we committed to $43 million of cost reductions in 2009 as follows. $20 million of savings related to manufacturing transfers, $15 million of operating expense savings and $8 million of non-transfer related manufacturing savings. We've now executed on all these commitments and working on additional costs reductions and will further reduce our breakeven point as the year progresses. The first quarter is typically our most challenging quarter for cash flow, and this year was and no exception. Cash from operating activities was negative $1.9 million for the quarter, as good working capital performance was not enough to offset our operating loss, plus $7 million of severance payments. In addition, capital expenditures were $7 million for the quarter, as we near the end of major spending related to our manufacturing transfers. We ended the quarter with a strong balance sheet and plenty of liquidity including $60 million of cash and $75 million of availability on our revolving credit facility. Now, I will turn it back to Gordon for some more color on the market trends and business performance.

Thanks, Phil. I'd like to begin my remarks with an overview of our three businesses. First quarter sales decreased 49% for the automotive and 40% for electronics compared to the first quarter of 2008. Electrical business was down 17% for the quarter excluding sales from Startco, which we acquired last September. Including Startco, electrical sales were up 17% for the first quarter. By geography, sales were down 26% in the Americas, 41% in Asia Pacific, and 47% in Europe compared to the first quarter of 2008. Looking at each of our businesses in more detail, I'll begin with automotive, which contributes about 20% of total Littelfuse sales. Globally, the automotive passenger car market continued to decline decreasing 39% for the first quarter of 2009 compared to the first quarter of last year. North American OEM passenger car production was down 53%, Europe was down 40%, Brazil was down 22% and Korea was down 36%. The bright spot was China, where production increased 4.5%. As you know, the vehicles build has been trending downward since the middle of 2008. This decline continued in the first quarter of 2009 with global car production decreasing 20% from the fourth quarter of 2008. The biggest decreases continued to in North America, Europe and Korea. The global off-road truck and bus market was down 42% for the first quarter, compared to the same quarter last year and down 20% from the fourth quarter of 2008. Sales of heavy trucks in both North America and Europe continued to lag significantly behind last year. However, the lower sales haven't stopped us from moving forward with our strategies to build a sales infrastructure and grow our presence in the off-road truck and bus market. This market is a natural extension of our existing automotive business and one with…

Thanks Gordon. So now I'd like to recap our outlook for the upcoming quarter and then I had a few comments about the back half of the year. Sales for the second quarter expected to be in the range of 93 to 97 million, which represents 10 to 15% sequential growth from the first quarter. This expected sales increase is supported by the following. We believe distributor inventories, which have declined for the last two quarters are nearing appropriate levels will not be reduced much further. Automotive demand is improving gradually in Asia and Europe and seems to have bottomed out in the U.S. Electronics order rates are improving and book-to-bill in April was 1.14. Due to the aggressive cost actions we have taken, we believe we can now breakeven with quarterly sales in the mid 90s, and we expect this breakeven point to drop into the low 90s in the back half of 2009. As a result, we believe that at the upper end of our sales guidance for the second quarter, we can return to profitability. We have reduced our capital spending plan for 2009 to approximately $23 million and expect to have positive free cash flow in the third and fourth quarters of this year. Before we conclude, I would like to mention a recent honor that we received. Forbes just recognized Littelfuse as one of the 100 most trustworthy companies in America. This was based on quality and transparency of accounting and corporate governance as determined by audit integrity and independent financial and analytics firm. We've always tried to be open in transparent and our communications and conservative in our accounting and governance and feel honored to be publicly recognized for this. This concludes our prepared remarks. Now we'd like to open it up for questions.

Thank you. (Operator Instructions). And our first question comes from Shawn Harrison with Longbow Research.

Hi, good morning. Just a few points of clarification for me; first, did you stay what the book to bill was for the March quarter?

We said at the end of the quarter, it was about 1.0.

And it's running at 1.14 currently.

Yeah, for the month of April.

If were to extrapolate, the run rate you are seeing in April in terms of revenues, where will that put you with in terms of the guidance. Or do you need to see further list in terms of the run rate as the quarter progresses.

The guidance was 10 to 15% sequential increase. So the 1.14 book to bill in April would seem to support something at least in the middle of that guidance that we gave.

Okay. I just wanted to make sure on that. The other side of that is just the cost savings here. Could you just do me... give me a flavor around with through real quickly, the savings plan that you started at the beginning of the call and then I think it was the manufacturing most of the OpEx in addition to tax rate?

So, I mean the plans that we talked about in our call back in February were mostly as we've been talking about for a while now that $20 million of 2009 savings related to the manufacturing transfers. The $50 million of operating expense savings and then in addition to that the other $8 million of manufacturing savings unrelated to the transfers for a total of $43 million of year-over-year savings. Those are the programs we talked about at the last call and then reiterated on this call that we have executed on. We also alluded to additional cost savings actions that we are taking, which we haven't been as specific about those yet. But we did indicate that we now expect operating expense savings in excess of $20 million compared to the 15 that we originally indicated. And I think you can take from that we're looking at other savings in addition to that as well.

Okay. I guess that was my follow up on the OpEx savings because quick math the $88 million, if just SG&A run rate achieved here in the first quarter is about 20 million below, kind of the 16 to $20 million below on what you've realized in terms of operating expenses in 2008. So it doesn't sound like there is much more room on a dollar basis for SG&A to decline from the point you had here in this quarter. Is that correct or are there some temporary moves here in the first quarter that may be coming back?

Yeah, I think what we're saying is that certainly there is some pieces of SG&A that are somewhat variable with revenues that will naturally increase as we go through the year. So we're going to certainly... we believe we are going to offsetting those. And again we indicated that we now think it's a minimum of $20 million, which I think we can take from that we are targeting something higher than that.

Okay. So, maybe, it's safe to assume the dollar amount of SG&A probably doesn't move much here one way or the other.

Yeah, I think it will move down some, but not dramatically.

Okay. And then last, just may be you could just provide some commentary on what you think incremental gross margins are here given you've completed a number on these moves in terms of the manufacturing side and then you have the additionally 8 million of shares here as well.

Incremental gross margins, I'm assuming, Shawn, you are referring to...

Your contribution margin.

Our marginal contribution on incremental sales, those... it's going to be something north of... little bit north of 50% is typically how we look at that. And it depends on which business those are coming from and which products they are coming from, but a good average is probably something between 50 to 55% drop through on additional sales.

Okay, thank you very much.

Yup.

(Operator Instructions). And it appears that we have no more questions. I would like to turn the call back over to Mr. Gordon for any additions or closing remarks.

Well, thank you for joining us in our call this morning. The key points, I hope you'll take away from this that we're responding to the economic situation with a strategy that incorporates reducing costs and moving operations to lower cost regions that are close to our customers, more continuing to develop new products and pursue designing opportunities. We believe this multi prolonged approach combined with our strong financial position will position us to be a stronger, healthier competitor when we economy recovers. We look forward to updating you on our progress next quarter. Thank you.

And this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation.