Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to Nike’s fiscal 2006 Second Quarter Conference Call. Today’s conference is being recorded. For those of you who need to reference today’s press release, you will find it at www.nikebiz.com. Leading today’s call will be Pamela Catlett, Vice President of Investor Relations. Before I turn it over to Ms. Catlett let me remind you that participants of this call are going to make forward looking statements based on current expectations and those statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. These risks and uncertainties are detailed in the reports filed with the SEC including Forms 8-K and 10-Q. Some forward looking statements concern future orders that are not necessarily indicative of total revenues for subsequent periods due to cancellations and a mix of Futures and at once orders which may vary significantly from quarter to quarter. In addition it is important to remember a significant portion of Nike Incorporated business including equipment most of Nike Retail, Nike Golf, Converse, Cole Haan, Bauer, Hurley and Exeter brands group are not included in these futures numbers. Finally participants may discuss non-GAAP financial measures, a presentation of comparable GAAP measures and quantitative reconciliation’s can also be found at Nike’s website, this call might also include discussion of non-public financial and statistical information which is also publicly available on that site www.nikebiz.com. Now I would like to turn the call over to Pam Catlett, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead ma’am.

Thank you. Good afternoon everyone and happy holiday. Thank you for joining us today to discuss our second quarter results. Nike issued ours results about an hour ago, and those of you who need to reference the press release as the operator said, you will find it on our website at www.nikebiz.com. Most of you know that we’ve been evolving our conference calls to streamline our communication and to appropriately address the topics that are most important to you. We are very excited about our portfolio’s performance and we want to highlight some key drivers in more detail. So we are mixing it up today with a slightly larger group than usual. First we’ll here from our soon-to-be a Nike veteran CEO, Bill Perez. Bill will give you his perspective on Nike and it’s stocks going forward. Then we’ll here from Don Blair, Nike’s Chief Financial Officer who will review our results. Finally, you will hear from both Mark Parker and Charlie Denson, Co-President of the Nike brand who will each share their perspectives on the Nike brand and business. After that we’ll look forward to taking your questions. Now it is my pleasure to introduce Bill Perez.

Thanks Pam. As I approach my first anniversary I guess I am about to loose my rookie status and qualify as a veteran but as a rookie or not, I continue to be very excited about the growth opportunities. For the Nike brand and our Nike Inc. portfolio. In one of my primary missions as CEO is to make sure this company has the right strategies in place to sustain long-term growth and ultimately double the size and value of our business. And while I am not going to give you an exact date, I can tell you that we’ve set the bar for ourselves very high. During the past ten months I spent much of my time working with our senior leadership team on an exhaustive strategic review. We’ve carefully analyzed the growth opportunities and the profit potential for each of our businesses. And the conclusion was that for the most part we have the right the game plan. Nike has an extraordinary amount of growth opportunities in product categories, in consumer segments, in developed and developing markets, in sports performance and in sports culture. Our multi-brand portfolio adds to those opportunities giving us the ability to reach consumers at all price points in all channels of distribution. The review has deepened our confidence that our core strategies particularly for the Nike brand are right, and that our long term growth aspirations are achievable. But while our strategies are sound, the review also showed us how we can further improve our growth profitability drivers and how we can be even more competitive. So while you won’t see radical change, you will see refinements in how we are managing the business. In emerging markets we’ll be more aggressive. Market such as China, Brazil, Mexico and India are evolving rapidly and…

Thanks Bill. In the past we told you about how we manage our global portfolio of businesses to deliver consistent growth in a dynamic business environment. While the second quarter of fiscal 2006 certainly threw us quite a few curve balls, we delivered very strong growth in revenues and profits and continue to invest in our business. Although the marketplace continues evolve rapidly we remain confident that we can deliver our financial growth goals for fiscal 2006. Our revenues for the quarter grew 10% to a record $3.5 billion. Changes in foreign currency exchange rates accounted for about one point of the growth in the quarter. This revenue growth was slightly higher than we had expected to a strong demand in the US and Latin America. Diluted earnings per share for the quarter was a $1.14 up 18% versus fiscal 2005 reflecting the strength of the top line and SG&A leverage, partially offset by lower gross margins. Versus the prior year quarter our consolidated gross margin fell 60 basis points to 43.5%. Currency changes contributed about a 150 basis points of improvement but this was more than offset by lower footwear product margins in every region and lower apparel margins in Asia. Erosion in footwear margins was somewhat more rapid than we had expected but continued to reflect the factors we’ve discussed before. Investments and product value in Europe and Asia, higher input costs primarily oil, and additional production and transportation costs to meet the strong unit demand for footwear around the world. A mix of products sold in the quarter also drove gross margin lower. While gross margins for the quarter were lower than we had expected, this was largely offset by more modest growth in SG&A as some demand creation moved to the back half of the fiscal…

Thanks Don and good afternoon everyone. As you heard we had a solid second quarter particularly in the United States and the Americas and in markets such as China and Central Europe. Retail in Western Europe and Japan is challenging but globally the Nike brand is strong with energy across both the sport performance and sport culture sides of our business. I can give you many examples today of the power of the Nike brand around the world and the close connections we are creating with consumers, such as our incredible Zoom Lebron III launch in China and the United States are biggest signature shoe launch in five years, kicking off with a $250 limited edition Zoom Lebron III that sold out in two hours in China, fantastic sell-throughs all around on this product as well as Carmelo Anthony’s Melo 5.5 from Jordan and Dwyane Wade’s signature shoes The Wade from Converse. There is also great momentum in sell-throughs in our Nike Pro apparel and our women’s fitness businesses with each being up 80% and 19% respectively year to date. We are seeing strong sales in Nike Retail including our new Nikestore on the Champs Elysee in Paris. And Run Americas 10K event a record 80,000 runs across seven countries in Latin America which drove our Nike Shox footwear and Nike Sphere apparel businesses. These wins and many others drove our great results in the second quarter but I’d like to spend my time today on what is ahead for Nike which is more exciting. We began fueling the World Football energy in the second quarter. The limited edition launch of the Ronaldinho’s golden R10 boot in October generated tremendous consumer and media response and drove growth in our Tiempo line. The re-launch of our high Hi-Vis soccer ball also…

Thanks Mark. Good afternoon to everyone. Happy holidays and my condolences to you who are sitting in New York facing a little tougher commuting home tonight. As Pam mentioned up front, our goal on these calls is to focus on a few topics beyond the financials that we believe are important. Don, Bill and Mark have both given you their perspectives so I’d like to round out today’s discussion by first giving you a little deeper insight into what we see going on in the global marketplace which as always has it’s challenges, what we call opportunities and offset by some areas where we have great momentum. If there is one sound bite I’d ask you to take away from me today, it is this: Nike, Inc.’s global portfolio is working. For the last several years we have talked about how our long-term success is reliant on our ability to manage a growing and diverse portfolio. As we continue to navigate a changing global marketplace, we have great momentum and brand strength in the USA, China and throughout South America, and our subsidiary units are growing above the corporate rate. What I’d like to cover should sound pretty familiar to most of you that have followed us over the last several years. It’s our ability to deliver financial results driven by certain segments of the portfolio, while specifically addressing issues where we may have in parts of the business where we have big opportunity. Today, you’ve already heard about our strong financial results, I would like to address parts of Western Europe, and Japan. Let’s talk about Europe first. We continue to see strong double digit growth coming from Central Europe, as our apparel business is accelerating across the continent as we approach World Cup, and we are addressing some…