Operator
Operator
Good day and welcome to the Second Quarter 2008 Insight Enterprises Incorporated Earnings Conference Call. My name is Candice and I will be your coordinator for today. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. We will conduct a question-and-answer session after managements remarks (Operator Instructions). I would now like to turn the presentation over to your host for today’s conference Ms. Glynis Bryan, Chief Financial Officer. You may proceed. Glynis Bryan – Chief Financial Officer: Welcome everyone and thank you for joining the Insight Enterprises conference call. Today, we will be discussing the Company's operating results for the quarter ended June 30, 2008. I'm Glynis Bryan, Chief Financial Officer of Insight Enterprises. And joining me is Rich Fennessy, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Mark McGrath, President North America and Asia Pacific. If you do not have a copy of the earnings release that was posted this afternoon and filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Form 8-K, you will find it on our website at insight.com under Investor Relations section. Todays call and answer is being webcast live and can be accessed by the investor relation section of our website at Insight.com. An archive copy of the conference call will be available approximately two hours after completion of the call and will remain on our website for limited time. This conference call and the associated webcast contained time sensitive material that is accurate only as of today August 11, 2008. This call is the property of Insight Enterprises. Any redistribution, retransmission or rebroadcast of this call in any form without the expressed written consent of Insight Enterprises is strictly prohibited. Also, please note that during todays conference call management will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures when discussing the second quarter financial results. Specifically, these non-GAAP financial measures will exclude the total impairment charge taken during the quarter and the tax effect of this item. A reconciliation of non-GAAP measures would include in the earnings release we issued today and will also be posted on the investor relations section of our website. Finally, let me remind you about forward-looking statements that will be made on today's call. All forward-looking statements that are made in this conference call are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause the actual results to differ materially. These risks are discussed in today's earnings release and in greater detail in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2007. Insight Enterprises assumes no obligation to update any forward looking statement. With that, I will now turn the call over to Rich for opening remarks. Rich? Rich Fennessy – President and Chief Executive Officer: Thank you, Glynis. Hello, everyone and thank you for joining us today. We are pleased with the performance of our overall business in the second quarter. On a consolidated basis we have reported net sales of 1.4 billion up 9% year-over-year and gross profit also grew 9%. Earnings from operations excluding the goodwill impairment charge taken during the quarter were 46 million up 6% over the 44 million recorded in the prior year quarter. The Q2 2008 results include approximately 3.5 million in severance and restructuring expenses. While the second quarter of 2007 results include 2.8 million of severance expenses and 4.3 million of expenses associated with our stock option review. Diluted earnings per share was $0.58 excluding the goodwill impairment charge, but including the severance expenses I just mentioned, up from $0.54 last year. Our EMEA recorded very strong results in the second quarter. Net sales increased 15% to 382.3 million and gross profit grew an impressive 25%. Net sales in our hardware category in UK return to positive growth during the quarter, reflecting actions taken late in Q1 and our software and services categories in EMEA performed very well, posting sales growth of 21% and 33% respectively. We are especially pleased with our performance in certain new markets like Russia. For example, where we won our first significant new client as a result of our decision to establish a local presence in the country. Overall, the market in EMEA continues to be challenging, and we believe we are well positioned to continue to grow profitably. To get us more flexibility, during the second quarter we eliminated 28 positions in the region. As a result we recorded severance expense of approximately 2.2 million during the quarter and are targeting 1.5 to 2.0 million in annualized cost savings from those actions. Also we are excited about the acquisitions of Minx in the UK which we announced just a few weeks ago. While Minx is relatively small today generating approximately 25 million pre-year net sales, this strategic acquisitions give our UK utilization a stronger market position within the fast clearly networking category and provides us with a gold level certification from Cisco in the United Kingdom. Overtime we expect to leverage this acquisition along with the Calence transaction that we closed here in the US in April to build out our global capabilities around networking similar to what we enjoy today in the software category. Our Asia Pacific operating segmenting also had a very strong second quarter more than doubling its net sales and its earnings from operations compared to the second quarter of 2007. The decision we made in the first quarter to invest in 13 new sales professional in the region clearly paid big dividends during the quarters. We also are pleased by our performance in new markets like China where we grew 37% year-over-year. Now on to North America. Net sales in our North America segment increased 4% to 957 million in the second quarter. These results include the results of Calence the acquisition we closed on April 1st which more than offset decline in our legacy hardware business. We are very pleased with the performance of the Calence acquisition so far and look forward to continuing to grow our networking business faster than the market. Calence were mutual to EPS as expected, but contributed to the growth of both sales and gross profit during the quarter. Going into the second quarter, we were concerned about the uncertain outlook of our software business and put in place detail plan including the creation of our cross functional team to drive daily sales to our Microsoft, and incentive programs for our sales team ensure we optimize the quarterly results. Those plans worked very well and coupled with Microsoft strong efforts enable us to achieve solid results during the quarter. Net sales were relatively flat compared to our record studying second quarter of last year by added even higher gross margin. Excluding Calence net sales in our hardware category were down in the second quarter across all of our client sets reflecting the difficult market we are faced within 2008 as client rationalize their CapEx earnings and the fact that we have yet to fully regain loss crown associated with our IT systems migration the begin at the end of the second quarter of last year. As it relates to the market we continue to see very aggressive pricing during the second quarter. As a result, gross margin in North America were 14.2% down a little over 30 basis point compared to the second quarter of last year. Reflecting notable attribute over the 80 basis point declined we saw year-over-year in the first quarter of this year. Thanks impart to the contribution of the higher margin networking mail services business from Calence. Just a few updates on internal misuse before I handover the call to Glynis. First, our IT system upgrade project continue to progress during the second quarter. Net sales to SMB client increased 7% compared to the first quarter of this year reflecting the progress we are making to improve the lab experience on our new IT platform and win back clients. We are also slow on track complete the migration of our legacy US based hardware and services business by the end of this year. Second, on our last call we indicated we’re going to look deeply into our organization structure to identify way to reduce our expense profile by also increasing our effectiveness. In just a few minutes Mark McGrath will take you through the organizational restructuring efforts. We have to manage in our US business during June and July. As part of that effort we separated 44 people from the business, we recorded severance expense of 1.3 million in the second quarter. We are targeting 2.5 million to 3.5 million in annualized cost savings from these actions. We are generally pleased with the North American results in the second quarter and feel that we’ve regained some of ground lost in the first quarter particularly in an SMB business. Having said that we scale our work cut off was in the second half of the year as it continue to compete in a challenging demand environment. So we are reiterating our previously issued guidance and we expect full year 2008 diluted earnings per share to be between a $1.50 and a $1.60 before the goodwill impairment charge, severance, restructuring and other non-recurring charges. This outlook reflects our current slightly more positive view on our software business giving this performance in second quarter, offset by continued concern over the overall hardware market. And the expected benefits of the expense reduction action we implemented in the first the half of this year. Now I ask Glynis to provide more details our second quarter 2008 financial performance across each of our operating segments. Glynis?