Thank you, Patrick. And thank you for all of you for joining us today for our conference call. We are going to review the financial results we released last night for the first quarter of 2015 and provide a business update before the Q&A session. The speakers today are Peer Schatz, our Chief Executive Officer; and Roland Sackers, our Chief Financial Officer. On slide two, you will see the customary Safe Harbor Statement explaining that the discussion and responses to your questions on this call today reflect management’s view as of today, May 06, 2015. We will be making statements providing responses to your questions that state our intentions, beliefs, expectations and predictions for the future. And these constitute forward-looking statements for the purpose of the safe harbor provisions. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. QIAGEN disclaims any intention or obligation to revise any forward-looking statements. For more information, please refer to our filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Also during this call, we will be referring to certain financial measures not prepared in accordance with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles or GAAP. A reconciliation of these figures to GAAP measures is available in the press release and presentation. I would like to now hand over to Peer.

Thank you, John. And welcome to all of you. We are very pleased with our start to the year and have these messages to summarize our performance. First, we achieved our targets for the first quarter. As you saw in the press release, adjusted net sales rose 2% at constant exchange rates while adjusted EPS was $0.24 also constant exchange rates and ahead of our target of $0.22 to $0.23 per share. Reported results were obviously and as respected, impacted by currency headwind but we are currently rather well hedged due to our global cost base and Roland will discuss this shortly. Second, we are moving ahead on transforming QIAGEN. Our results continue to be impacted by the sharp decline in sales of HPV products in the United States. And in this quarter, they were down 54% and created approximately 6 percentage points of headwind. This was in line with expectations. The good news is that sales from the rest of our business rose 8% on a constant exchange rate basis in the quarter. The top seven emerging markets were an important incremental growth contributor, rising 22% constant exchange rate as a group, and led by China and turkey both growing at very double digit growth rates in the quarter. We delivered sales growth in all customer classes. In molecular diagnostics, we saw solid underlying sales gains on the back of contributions from our growth drivers. The applied testing customer class also continued to advance at a high single-digit constant exchange rate pace while academia and pharma showed low single-digit constant exchange rate improvements. One of the highlights was the expansion of our liquid biopsy portfolio, both through the addition of new sample technologies for circulated tumor cells or CTCs and a new co-development collaboration with Tokai for a companying…

Thank you, Peer. Good afternoon to everyone in Europe, and good morning to those joining from the U.S. I’m now on slide nine and will being with an overview of our financial performance for the quarter. In terms of adjusted net sales, we delivered on our goal for 2% growth at constant exchange rates and the currency headwind of about 8 percentage point was more than our estimate in January for 6 to 7 points. This led to the 6% decline in the reported sales compared to the first quarter of 2014. The acquisition of Enzymatics which was completed late December and BIOBASE in our in our bioinformatics franchise, provided about 2 percentage points of growth by the underlying organic growth of about 6% constant exchange rate was essentially offset by headwinds from U.S. HPV franchise. Consumables and related revenues were up 2% constant exchange rate in the quarter and provided 88% of sales and absorbed the lower U.S. HPV sales. Instruments kept up a solid pace with 9% constant exchange rate growth in the quarter and provided 12% of sales. Moving down to income statement, adjusted operating income declined 10% and the adjusted operating margin declined to about 23% of sales from 24% a year ago. As for the cost areas, the adjusted gross margin improved by about 60 basis point due to improving product mix and efficiency gain. At the same time, we increased incremental investments to support the growth driver, in particular next generation sequencing and bioinformatics as we also step up investment in our commercialization activities and e-commerce initiatives. This led to higher SG&A expenses as a percentage of sales and this was the main reason for the decline in the adjusted operating margin. To address the issue of currencies based, on the rates we saw…

Thank you, Roland. I am now on slide 15 for a quick summary before we move into Q&A. Let me review what we have announced. First, we delivered a solid overall performance in the first quarter of 2015, having achieved our targets for improvements in adjusted net sales and earnings per share at constant exchange rates by successfully executing on our strategy focused on delivering innovation and growth. We are also moving ahead on initiatives to transform QIAGEN through our growth drivers. We’ve had some important new product launches in the quarter, particularly in the QuantiFERON franchise and we are working on a number of new product launches and market expansion opportunities to further strengthen our portfolio. All of this is in line with our ambitious target to offer sample to insight solutions to our customers. The benefits of these efforts will become more apparent during the course of 2015 which is shaping up to be a good year. And as Roland just outlined, we’re reaffirming our guidance for the higher adjusted net sales and earnings per share at constant exchange rates. As with other companies, reported results will adversely be affected by currency movement. With that I would like to hand back to the operator for the Q&A session.

[Operator Instructions]. And our first question today comes from the line of Derik de Bruin of Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Please go ahead.

This is Anne Edelstein calling in for Derik. Just a few brief questions maybe on some of your growth drivers like the bioinformatics platform is actually in light of the two announcements that you made this quarter. So maybe just -- how do you think about the clinical opportunity as you move the bioinformatics platform from the recent academic setting into the clinic?

This is clearly a big initiative that we currently have underway. We have the phenomenal franchise used by double-digit thousands user base in the research area for tools including real-time PCR and next-gen sequencing. That knowledge base however is universally applicable also into clinical applications. And we therefore have a fantastic opportunity now link that also some of our diagnostic activities. And we have increasingly started to bundle also in the companion diagnostics area but also in routine clinical diagnostics bioinformatics solutions with assays with lab work. This is ultimately part of the package. So, we have a very good access to the user base clearly in topology but also across as the areas of molecular diagnostics. And with such a powerful knowledge base and our new tool emerging, our clinical decision support tool, we have a very unique opportunity to be the first mover with a very widely adopted tool in the research markets into this new merging area of complex genomic interpretation and analysis. So, this is within the bioinformatics area which is one of our five growth drivers. This is one of the most important initiatives for 2015 to continue to roll this out. The preliminary testings have been very positive and feedback has been fantastic. It is something we’re very much looking forward report on as it further enrolls.

Our next question comes from the line of Tycho Peterson with JP Morgan. Please go ahead.

Just two quick ones, if I can. First on QuantiFERON, can you maybe just give us a sense of how we should think about the ramp of the fourth-gen test, any update on timing for the Gold Plus U.S. submission and then QuantiFERON Monitor, you kind of introduced that as a concept last quarter, just wondering if you could kind of talk about timelines. And then bigger picture, just stepping back, I mean kind of trying to get people comfortable to the underlying growth in the business ex-HPV. So Peer, maybe based on what you laid out, do you see a path to kind of sustainable high single-digit organic growth and call it 2016 and beyond, and what in terms of the pipeline is a big swing factor there? Is it sequencing; is it liquid biopsy, I’m just trying to get comfortable with the longer-term trajectory beyond the HPV headwinds?

So, the first is, question was around the QuantiFERON launches. We launched fourth-gen in Europe, also some other countries; it’s been CE marked and the uptake has been very good. It is clearly something that takes time. There is a well established base of QuantiFERON-TB Gold users, the TB Gold Plus features which include easier workflow, include higher specificity, include also features that we’re currently validating to give indications on risk of progression into active TB. These are very, very unique features and giving us a significant competitive advantage and making it much easier to also convert skin test users into our product. That is something that just takes time, it needs conversion; it needs education on these new feature and further clinical studies and also support by the research and clinical communities. So, this will be an ongoing effort over the next few years and you’ll see both products partly working in parallel also in the markets for some time. We wouldn’t necessarily see that that would something that you would see on the revenue base, creating significant blips or jumps in terms of sales, but you’ll see this trajectory that we currently have which is good double digit growth and the QuantiFERON franchise which is north of $100 million in sales already, continue for the foreseeable future. Monitor has also been CE marked in Europe. And this is such a fundamentally new concept; it’s quite revolutionary that we’ve seen enthusiastic by first key opinion leaders on the capabilities of this product. But this is something that we’re bundling with our transplant and our immunology targets that include molecular and QuantiFERON assays and that bundle has been working very well. Actually at tradeshow just this week we have received phenomenal support by the transplant community. In terms of sustainable growth going forward, we have been recording high single digit, even double digit growth for the past quite a few quarters already, ex HPV headwind; we’ve maintained our leadership position in HPV albeit at a lower revenue base. And that headwind from the pricing -- primarily the pricing decline has dissipated. With that the company will have its much higher growth rate on the rest of the franchise exposed. And we believe that the nature of the growth drivers which is very long-term sustainable growth will therefore impact the overall growth rates significantly, meaning yes we are definitely poised to move up the top line growth significantly, doesn’t depend on any specific pillar but we have five pillars and they all are long-term trajectories, QuantiFERON; QIAsymphony; personalized healthcare; bioinformatics; and next-gen sequencing, all have a strong contribution to that long-term growth. This is not a one product story but we’re very well established company that builds insights -- contributes to insights for our customers and this is across different pillars and product areas.

Our next question comes from the line of Scott Bardo of Berenberg. Please go ahead.

Thanks very much for taking my questions, just two please quickly. Firstly, financial question just relates to the operating margin in the quarter, which is around 23% and probably a little bit weaker than we were anticipating. I appreciate the commentary around 25.5% adjusted operating margin flow for 2015. But I just really wanted to get a feel for how you’re thinking about 2016. I think you had some long standing targets out there for around a 27% margin, implying then a 150 basis points expansion on 2015. I’m just wondering if you could square some of the comments you made about increasing investments in liquid biopsy clinical trials potentially with such a spot launch costs for next-gen. Second, a quick follow-up was just on the GeneReader platform, pretty encouraging to see you hit some various development milestones. Just wonder whether you could shed some light on when we likely to understand a little bit better about this project and when will you showcase it, how far along are you within the commercial business plan, such that we can start seeing revenue contribution from this product?

Yes, as I said on the call, we thought also during the first quarter that we had a very good start into year and at the same time we’re quite excited about the pipeline we are having. So we saw at the same time also to prepare ourselves for all the activities once that get our report and things on our ways, so we invested quite significantly in a one hand side in sales and marketing activities and launch activities, but also at the same time especially on bioinformatics, NGS has a lot of additional requirements for example IT infrastructure. So, we are able to accomplish a lot of this in the first quarter. At the same time, I would like to reconfirm that if you are also quite strongly about margin improvement for 2015 for the middle and long term. So given the actual fix environment, we do believe that we should be at least able to improve our overall EBIT margin around 50 basis points, hopefully more and midterm we feel quite comfortable, we can reach up to 100 basis points growth year-over-year. Again this is of course without any currency impact which is always hard to predict. Operational efficiency, we could see not only in the EBIT level, but also in the gross margin level, a lot of the things which we did over the last 18 months are now also trickling through and giving us not only benefits on the P&L side but also on the cash flow side. So, I am pretty quite optimistic that we are able to improve our overall profitability quite nicely going forward.

Your question on the GeneReader, we did say today that the development is progressing as planned’ we’re targeting launch later in 2015. This is all reiterating what we previously said. The performance specs in many ways are already a visible kind of today because we have panels already in markets. When these studies that came out in the first quarter that show that or panels hence down beat the current gold standard in the market in terms of ease-of-use and coverage specificity and sensitivity. The goal of our development programs is not develop a sequencer but to make sure that customers who want to use our panels will have a samples inside workflow and the goal is to still make sure that the performance that they are used to seeing on other platforms today can be replicated on our workflow with world-class bioinformatics and the interpretation solutions to create the icing on the cake. And this data is already visible today and what gives you a pretty good hint where we think we will be hope to be later this year.

Our next question comes from the line of Brian Weinstein from William Blair. Please go ahead.

I wanted to go back into bioinformatics a little bit. Can you give us some idea about the dollars that that is generating right now and are there other areas that you need to round out? Obviously, you’ve made a number of acquisitions there, but just any updated thoughts on that? And then, can you talk about within the various product lines there, how you’re getting paid today?

Good question, well the easy one is what is the revenue base that we currently have? It’s approximately 4% of our sales base and seeing significant growth. The growth is really across all customer classes, very strong base in the research areas, clearly through the legacy products, ITA, also Ingenuity Variant Analysis or the CLC workbenches but were seeing strong adoption and in the mean time the clinical markets and that is driving a lot of the growth and actually across our customer classes but in particular our clinical will be15 strong growth contribution. It’s very difficult to assess that we have everything we need in such as dynamic and fast moving environment. But if we look at what we’re out to do is to create solutions that allow our customers to create valuable insights from complex molecular data, not only with the wet lab but also with the so-called dry lab or bioinformatics solutions. We have a very, very strong pipe already that we can put on to a wet lab solutions to create exactly that experience. So, if we take a very focused or narrowly focused view, yes we have everything underway for what we need now in the near term but as it’s obviously dynamic market with new potentials emerging and we are settling these opportunities as part of our overall strategy.

Our next question comes from the line of Jack Meehan of Barclays Capital. Please go ahead.

I just wanted to get any commentary on the HPV market internationally and just your outlook there, sort of the opportunities for greater penetration versus how the competitive environment looks and any changes there?

Thanks. It’s almost there is -- there are like two heads of the HPV story, one is the story in the Unites States; the other story is against all expectations and I think against everything that you normally would expect. The incumbent product, namely our product, is a very strong market leading solution with a majority of the market and has transitioned this now into a new pricing level which is fairly lower than -- substantially lower than what we saw a few years ago. And it’s a story very different ex-U.S. We are hands down beating competition in almost every large screening program because we’re -- if you look at competing products, the specification, the headline specifications just don’t live up to the requirements of a primary screening campaign in large populations. And we’re in the meantime undertaking several national screening programs that we have really announced this. And frankly because there is a lot of emotion around this whole portfolio in the United States, we’ve refrained from creating a lot of announcements about actually tremendous success that we’re having outside the U.S. winning and implementing national screening campaigns in very sizable countries where we’re talking about millions of women being screened. So, this is a continued long and bright future that we have with this portfolio. And we’re continuing to invest in it. As the leader, we also see the responsibility to do that. Story in the United States will start stabilizing later this year. We have therefore I think an interesting situation next year where we’re going to be talking about growth rates in HPV and not HPV headwinds that were due to some irrational behaviors in the market.

Our next question comes from the line of Dan Arias of Citigroup. Please go ahead.

Peer, on the liquid biopsy portfolio or business, is it your impression that there is basically a large group of companies that are putting together strategies here for liquid biopsy diagnostics or is it at this point are really the big cancer players that are pushing hard here. And maybe as a follow-up to the bioinformatics discussion and as it relates to BGI, is BGI looking to incorporate Ingenuity Clinical or is it pretty much fairly into the research projects at this point?

So, the first question on liquid biopsy, there are pillars of our strategy. The one pillar is that we’re enabling almost every player in the market with liquid biopsy solutions on the front end. So every time you read about liquid biopsies being used in novel tests and new companies emerging using this new approach to create new types of tests, you will almost always see our sample technologies either the manual solutions on QIAamp, on QIAcube or also now on QIASymphony being used on the front end. They are pretty much ubiquitous. Our market shares on the front and are staggering. And that’s something that we’re investing in heavily actually and you see also the breadth of solutions we have in the meantime. There is no other company that can easily jump between exosomes and circulating tumor cells and cell-free DNA, because the battle is not which of the three is better but the ultimate value proposition is where can we create most value per patient and that often depends. And the ability to move to different sample technologies or introduce different approaches continues to be very valuable by our customers. That’s a one strategy, absolute leadership and sample technologies for liquid biopsy. The second strategy is that we’re selectively integrating that into horizontal workload combining with some of our tests as well and benefiting just like we’re enabling other customers as well benefitting from this new approach for our own tests. And this includes existing tests like the EGFR portfolio; there are many others that we’re using in the meantime. They include for instance the compatibility of our next generation sequencing panels are liquid biopsy ready. This is unique. And while others fiddle around with different region combinations and different workflow combinations, we’ve immediately created compatibilities for both FFPE, primary sample type and liquid biopsy solutions for our GeneReader workflows. And we see a tremendous amount of momentum in this market. I think it will take some time to make sure that we are creating the right performance specifications in this market to really replace some of the existing assays or some of the new promises because early diagnostics very often look good and that proof is in the pudding and extensive validations. And this will be very, very important because we’re talking about diseases that are in many cases life threatening.

Our next question comes from the line of Jeff Elliott of Robert W. Baird GmbH. Please go ahead.

First one here is on the QIAsymphony. In light of all the assays you’ve been adding to that over the past couple of years, can you give us an update on where the installed base is at in terms of the mix between molecular diagnostics and applied customers and what they have reported right now on that platform?

It’s interesting to hear that Baird just turned into a GmbH; are you inverted into Germany? The QIASymphony portfolio is about two-thirds clinical and a third life sciences. The majority of the life science placements are however in the area of the applied testing, in particular forensic. We have some very interesting solutions for forensic customers. So, almost all from our industrial. We’re increasingly seeing a strong uptake in next generation sequencing labs because the QIAsymphony has unique capabilities to do high molecular weight, nucleic acid purifications which is very difficult to do and we have some unique protocols that are in the QIASymphony reflected that purpose. In addition, we have the ability to run also the liquidity biopsy technologies on the platform as well. So, the breadth and the quality of the sample types is very amenable to next generation sequencing and we’re seeing good uptake there as well. And that is both clinical and life science, but again the majority clinical, two-thirds clinical and the third lifeline, majority of that applied. The menu breadth in Europe is very significant and we are continually upgrading it. We had a big upgrade last year in hospital-acquired infections, have the full menu there actually, some very novel tests that are not available from any other player in this market, and have seen very good traction there are well. In the United States, the menu remains very limited. We’ll continue to put menu onto the platform, but we’re more integrating select FDA approved product with broader use in laboratory developed testing where the breadth and the flexibility of the platform is unrivaled and this is giving us good traction in the U.S. And if you look at the placements, there are actually significant approaching 50/50 I guess U.S. and rest of the world and this trend will probably continue that way. The pull-through is something that depends very much on the market. We’re seeing very strong growth in consumable and asset pull-through, very high double digit growth in this space. But on the overall franchise, pull-through is still south of 100,000 which considering that there is a big LDT base, it’s actually very good.

Our next question comes from the line of Dan Leonard of Leerink Partners. Please go ahead.

So Peer, just hoping you could offer some color on what you’re seeing in the pharma market. That was the slowest growth of your customer class this quarter, but it seems like many of your peers are talking of pharma as a source of strength, so hoping you could help me reconcile.

Yes, it’s a good question and to understand that the first part of the answer will be that there are different parts of supplies into pharma, so one is for instance in the area of production and quality control. We’re starting to see good ramp up of biologics and also therefore good expansion of the use of these tools. And this is an area that we have some exposure to but not really a lot. Our primary exposure is into the early stage research and/or preclinical research and the other half is in the areas of clinical research. And clinical research is continuing to do very well. We’re seeing good growth rate. The preclinical is very, very compressed due to cost saving measures and so that trend that started almost 10 years ago, that is just continuing. In addition, we’re seeing some lumpiness. There are quarters where you have a big clinical trial and then you have big orders coming through and then that can impact the quarter $1 million or $2 million in sales, from that percentage of revenue will have a big impact. We’re very committed to this because of the porosity into the clinical world especially through the companion diagnostics franchise. It’s sometime difficult for us to allocate between these two areas, but the expectation is that we’re going to see lower to mid single digit growth in the pharma market probably over the as a long-term trend.

Our next question comes from the line of Doug Schenkel of Cowen & Company. Please go ahead.

I have three, let me just rattle through them real quick. First, I believe you previously guided us to expect 60 basis points to 70 basis points of operating margin expansion for the full year, net of 30 basis points to 40 basis points of FX. I believe guidance is now for 50 basis points of operating margin expansion for the year. In your prepared remarks, you indicated there will be no incremental impact of FX on margin, if I have all these observations accurate, what’s the change here? That’s the first question. The second question is, on the last quarterly call you indicated that FX would reduce EPS by I think it was about $0.05 to $0.07 on a reported basis for the full year. Based on current rates would the impact on EPS now be about $0.10 to $0.12 on a reported basis? And my third question is constant currency consumables growth was about 2%. As we try to assess the puts and takes, can you breakout what the growth rate was for bioinformatics and M&A. I’m just trying to get at organic consumables growth excluding HPV, M&A and bioinformatics.

Let me try the first one and I guess background took my brain and I will do the third one at the same time. On profitability I think at the end of day nothing really has changed if it comes to operating margins, if you look at the final outcome what -- I think what we said earlier this year is of course it is a hard to predict where currency is going to go and therefore we strongly speak to our constant exchange rate guidance in terms of revenue as well as in terms of EPS and what we did is giving all this indication for the next quarter. Having all said, what we’ve seen on the first quarter at the end of day that on the one hand-side, we actually got some field in terms of impact on our margins and that was mainly driven by the relationship between euro and U.S. dollars on the one hand side as we do have a cost overhang in euro that is actually beneficial for us. At the same time, what we have seen which is clearly a quite significant change for us as well as is that currency relationship between U.S. dollar and Swiss francs [ph] improved which is also important one for us. So that was the reason how we ended on our Q1 results. If you would take now the April currency rates, actual currency rates of April as a given for all through rest of 2015, we do believe that we will have an actual rate probably at 50 basis points improvement for the full year 2015. And therefore I think we’re in line and what we said also on our mid and long-term guidance. Again we are right now running on full speed and that is…

Our next question comes from the line of William Quirk of Piper Jaffray. Please go ahead.

Two questions. First one is giving the experience that QIAGEN has in diagnostics and certainly in sample prep, where do you see the greatest uptake in the near-term for liquid biopsy and then what applications do you think will take longer to develop?

It’s something we’re thinking a lot about because there are lot of applications that look kind of interesting but will probably require a lot of validation. And as you well know, there has been – very often take a lot of money and a lot of the time and ultimately not lead to the results that we all expect. We see the market currently by far dominated by prenatal testing. This is the earliest form of high volume liquid biopsy testing that emerged. And that will -- it’s clearly a growth driver and will continue to be a growth driver for many years. And that will probably be the largest in terms of volume for quite some time. The next set is emerging as -- are not these very complicated fancy new tests but are actually existing tests that have been well validated in controlled clinical trials using primary tissue. And where we can then do a side by side like we did with the ASSESS study with AstraZeneca, where you basically have the tumor and the liquid biopsy sample running parallel and can do concordance studies. That is going to be much strong. I think that is underestimated in the public that’s actually where there is a bigger trend right now. And the third area I’d say these very complex new tests that are emerging for indications that previously were not testable, only very difficult to do. That is going to take some time to validate and become high volume routine tests over time. So commercially thus far the largest existing test in prenatal moving into liquid biopsy.

Our next question comes from the line of Daniel Wendorff of Commerzbank. Please go ahead.

One follow-up question on the liquid biopsy test development. Can you comment on how many developments like percentage-wise which I assume is the broad indication in oncology and what other indications are being pursued? And second question on the QuantiFERON-TB test, on the back of what you’ve said in the call, would you be comfortable to achieve a more than 20% growth for this test in sales in 2015 again?

The first question is follow-on to what we just talked about before with Bill is again the majority is currently prenatal testing and the various types of tests are emerging out of that and the secondary are the existing tests, very often single marker test but also next-gen sequencing panels in the meantime. And the newer tests will take some time to emerge. So oncology is by the most that we’re seeing right now but we’re also starting to see some other indications emerge but it’s -- the majority is oncology. The QuantiFERON franchise, the revenue base that we have today it’s over $100 million, it’s continuing to grow very rapidly into the market with new products are coming. We wouldn’t going to put any expectations on prior growth rate but the market is vast. And this is not a market that will suddenly snowball and start accelerating in growth rates. As routine with other similar tests in the past, you will probably see a trajectory, a long-term sustainable trajectory of penetration into the market. Over 50 million skin tests being done a year. The market is just expanded with higher prevalence countries now certainly become economically and clinically very viable areas to implement like TB testing and significantly expands the market size. And with that the growth rates definitely have a lot of support in terms of the environment, the market opportunity to also be able show very strong double-digit growth. I wouldn’t want to put out a number right now, we’re going to do that every year but the long-term trajectory is definitely -- I wouldn’t expect this to suddenly decelerate or suddenly accelerate, but very much continue like this.

So with that I would like to end the conference call. And thank all of you for your participation. If you any questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Thank you very much.