Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Matthews International Third Quarter Financial Results Conference Call. For the conference, all the participant lines are in a listen-only mode. There will be an opportunity for your questions. Instructions will be given at that time. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, today's conference is being recorded. I'll turn the conference now over to Mr. Steven Nicola, Chief Financial Officer and Secretary. Please go ahead sir.

Thank you, John, good morning. I’m Steven Nicola, Chief Financial Officer of Matthews. Also on the call this morning is Joe Bartolacci, our Company’s President and CEO. Today’s conference call has been scheduled for one hour and will be available for replay later this morning. To access the replay, dial 1-320-365-3844, and enter the access code 398561. The replay will be available until 11:59 PM, August 12, 2016. We have posted on our website, which is www.matw.com, the third quarter earnings release and financial information we will discuss this morning. On the top of our home page under the Investor tab, click on Investor News to access the earnings release. For the quarterly financial data, click on Financial Reports to access the information under the section, Matthews International Quarterly Reports. Before beginning the discussion, at the advice of legal counsel I have been advised to read the following disclaimer that pertains to forward-looking statements. Any forward-looking statements in connection with this discussion are being made pursuant to the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause the company’s actual results in future periods to be materially different from management’s expectations. Although the company believes that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are reasonable, no assurance can be given that such expectations will prove correct. Factors that could cause the company’s results to differ from those discussed today are set forth in the company’s annual report on Form 10-K and other periodic filings with the SEC. To begin the conference, I’ll review the financial results for the quarter. Joe will then provide general comments on our operations. Following that, we’ll open the discussion for questions. For the quarter ended June 30, 2016, the…

Thank you, Steve. Good morning. We're again pleased with our results for the third quarter. During the quarter, we continue to deliver strong synergy capture and good cost containment, which allowed us to exceed market expectations again for this quarter. One thing that we are particularly pleased with is that we reached our goal despite certain market challenges. During the quarter, in our cemetery products division, we saw lower volumes driven by the lower death rates in the previous quarters. As you know, given our market share in this division it is difficult to overcome these short term market downturns. Even with this modest decline, we had solid results in our cemetery products division which continue to have higher year-to-date volume over prior year in both our bronze and our stone product lines, representing good market share gains in that business. Our Aurora acquisition continued to go very well with expected synergies continuing to grow. We believe that we have passed our initial downturn of customer transition thus limiting the anticipated dyssynergies resulting from the acquisition. We remain confident that Aurora will add more than $40 million of EBITDA net of those dyssynergies once it is fully integrated versus the $35 million to $40 million we initially anticipated. What is also important to recall is that this incremental EBITDA will be added with only modest increases in our capital needs, thus further increasing our free cash flows. We think this acquisition will be a tremendous success. Moreover we believe that the benefits of our efforts this year are not yet being fully realized due to the slower death rates. As death rates normalize, we expect to see significant improvement in our results. Our hats go after the combined integration teams for their good work. With regard to our brand business,…

For those of you who will be asking questions, we request that you limit them to one question and a follow-up question until all those who wish to participate in the Q&A session have had an opportunity to do so. John?

[Operator Instructions] And first we'll go the line of Dan Moore with CJS Securities. Please go ahead.

Good morning. This is actually Robert Magic filling in for Dan today.

Good morning, Robert.

Can you update us on the amount of synergies you realized for both Shark and Aurora in the fiscal third quarter and year-to-date?

Yes, I would -- well, what we're projecting for the current year is little bit over $30 million aggregate for both, most of that obviously being from Shark with a small portion of that being Aurora.

Okay. Thank you. And for brand solutions, can you update us on the trends in Europe and if you experience any noticeable changes in spending patterns post Brexit?

To date, not necessarily. Time will tell. We've had some slowing in our U.K. market as we go through this, but not enough to materially change our results. Most of the projects we're working on have a longer lead time than the last several weeks. So not yet, let's put it that way.

I appreciate. I'll jump back in the queue.

And next we have Liam Burke with Wunderlich. Please go ahead.

Yes. Thank you. Good morning, Joe. Good morning, Steve.

Hi Liam.

Good morning, Liam.

Joe, could you give us a sense as to if you're seeing any kind of improvement over time in the North American market. I know there have been some regulatory issues that have been holding back consumer spending, but is it regulatory or is it more the economy that’s holding back that spending?

No, as a part of the matter the regulatory -- as you all may be aware, the improved modernization -- the Food Labeling Modernization Act has passed in the regulations associated with that have been finalized. We expect implementation to be by 2018 as it currently stands. There is some staggered implementation days based on size. So we should start to see some pick up from that. We believe that we've had some hold back with some of our brands as they get there, but Liam if you look at the P&Ls of our largest CPG accounts that we do, they’ve struggled in their top lines as well. And I think what we're seeing is just containment in their spending on the marketing side especially as it relates to the packaging as we move forward. So I think that it has more to do with the economy and a sluggish consumer then it does with any changes in their desire to spend on packaging long-term. So we think it should be a matter of time. We should see those things return to more robust markets and we're well positioned to take advantage of that.

Great. And Joe on the fulfillment side, you had lot of interest from some large customers on some of the fulfillment technologies you're rolling out. Is that interest still there or they're waiting for the new product release?

No question. The new product release is not necessarily in the fulfillment side -- we take a look at some of the automated warehouse literature and statistics out there. It's just a bit of downturn as we go through this. As we approach -- generally as we approach the Christmas season, we'll turn off the spending as it relates to warehouses. They do not want to be interrupting their distribution at the time of a busy season. We expect that to kind of return normalcy through the first and second quarters of 2017, but at the end of the day, right now what we're seeing is a slowing and we have enough on the lead time to see that it most likely will impact our next quarter there. More of a project based business Liam and as a result the projects come and go. The timing of those may impact a quarter or two, but generally the direction of that group continues to be the right one.

Great. Thanks Joe.

Next we'll go to Jason Rodgers with Great Lakes Review. Please go ahead.

Good morning, guys.

Good morning.

Good morning, Jason.

Could you quantify the benefit of lower bronze cost you saw on the quarter and if you expect similar type savings in 4Q?

Yeah, Jason, we typically don’t quantify the specific benefit related to those commodity cost for various reasons. We'll leave it at that, but we did see a benefit this quarter and this year-to-date compared to last year, not only in bronze, but other commodities including fuel for example.

I would remind you Jason given what our size is today relative to historical comparisons, bronze is critical but not overwhelming controlling of our results.

All right. And just getting back to the food labeling requirements is your expectation that benefits will start manifesting themselves beginning late in calendar 2016?

I think we’ll start to see work trickling in at that point in time. I think '17 and '18 will be where we'll see most of that work flow through. To be truthfully, the fruit -- the FLMA did not go as far as we would have hoped from a provider standpoint or where we require changes to packaging not as significant that we initially had proposed, but it will requires a touch on every single packages out there.

Great. And then if I could just squeeze in one more, looks like you're definitely going to exceed your initial 325 EPS guidance for fiscal '16 just looking at the fourth quarter, would you expect EPS to increase sequentially from the third?

It’s difficult to tell you at this point in time, we would rather keep you happy at the end of the quarter, but the fact of the matter is we're doing everything we can in the markets that we operate in. We have seen a light month of July on the death rate side. So could that come back in the next quarter or two sure. We have a couple of things we're waiting for our results with respect to the fulfillment side that could change in quarter. We've got a few things out there that could make it much better or put us right in line with where we expect to be. At the end of the day, suffice it to say that the next quarter is not going to make the difference. We think the direction of the whole group is going in the right way.

Yes. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] And gentlemen allowing a few moments, there are no further questions coming in.

All right. Thank you, John. Well, we would like to thank everyone for participating in the call this morning and we look forward to our fourth quarter earnings release and conference call in November this year. Thank you. Have a great day.