Good day everyone and welcome to the Roper Industries First Quarter Financial Results Conference Call. This conference is being recorded. At this time I would like to turn the conference over to your moderator for today, Mr. John Humphrey. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Anthony and thank you all for joining us this morning. As we discuss the results of first quarter performance. Joining me this morning is Brian Jellison, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer and Paul Soni, Vice President and Controller. Yesterday afternoon, we issued a press release announcing our first quarter financial results. The press release also includes telephonic replay information for today’s call. We have also prepared slides to accompany today’s call, which are available through the webcast and are also available on our website at www.roperind.com. Now, if you please turn to slide two; you will once again see our Safe Harbor statement. I want to remind you that today’s call includes forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks and uncertainties as described on this page. Additional information about specific risks are included in our SEC filings. You should listen to today’s call in the context of all that information. And now, if you please turn to slide number three. I will turn the call over to Brian Jellison, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer. After his prepared remarks, we will take questions from our telephone participants. Brian?

Thank you, John and good morning everyone. Well, the next slide you can see just an overview of what we will talk about today and then get into Q&A. We give you a little discussion around the enterprise in total and then talk about first quarter results for the enterprise and the individual segments. We are going to update our guidance, talk about kind of driving forces that we see throughout the rest of 2008 and then summarize what we have done today. So, next slide. If we look at first quarter it was an all time record for us in the first quarter for virtually every financial metric we have with the highest level of orders, sales, net earnings, EBITDA, cash flow, operating cash flow, and diluted earnings per share. Our sales and orders were both up 13% in total, 10% of that was internal growth in both categories hardly benefited by 3 points of foreign exchange. The backlog in the quarter went up from $520 million last year to $519 million that $17 million increase in backlog in the quarter, means we should have a strong second quarter. EBITDA in the quarter was $134 million and EBITDA margins went up again by 50 basis points to 24.6%, which is an exceptionally strong way to begin the year. Our net earnings were up 24% to $64 million up from $51 a year ago and the diluted earnings per share number was $0.68 up from $0.56 last year. Operating cash flow in the quarter was $72 million, up from $57 million last year, a 25% increase. So, as first quarters go this was a very strong start for Roper. Next, in the first quarter we have made two acquisitions, the large one CBORD, which we discussed in our yearend conference…

(Operator Instructions) We’ll take our first question from Wendy Caplan at Wachovia Securities.

Thank you. Good morning.

Good morning.

Brian, when you were talking about the RF technology segment, you didn’t talk about Freight Matching this morning. Can you talk about how that this is going and since you’re expecting some nice margin improvement Q2 versus Q1 in that segment. Can you kind of walk us through where we were here in the tollway CBORD at first quarter? Tollway CBORD in Freight Matching and where you think will be in Q2 on a margin basis or profit…some relative trends?

Well, it’s certainly a Freight Matching. We were very proud last year that we see some fall off in the activity just because of what was happening in trucking. We didn’t really see that, in fact we expanded the suite of offerings people can buy and we were getting enough new subscription value that would offset, whatever shortfall we had in the number of drivers subscribing, that trends continued, Freight Matching is still fine. Our Logistics business is good. In fact we’re looking at some things in that space that are somewhat interesting. We don’t really see a follow off. The growth in that space may not be as robust as it was two years ago, but it’s still fully satisfactory. When you look at the tolling side of things, we’re going to have a strong second quarter in that area because of projects that Florida is expediting and moving up and some new winds we’ve had. The mix in the first quarter of road applications if you will, was slanted more to design and construction activity helping people with engineering oriented kind of applications and those are always little less good than the product sales. So, Q2 will be benefited by that. The amount of money that we continue to invest in the design for the Black Diamond launch of products there and Radio Frequency and it won’t really produce sales probably until the third quarter. So, that pulls us down. So, we actually we had a fairly strong number here at 19.4 and it will go up nicely in the second quarter. So, we’re not really seeing anything pulling back, I think what perhaps people want to reflect on and it’s hard to put everything out in press release, but that internal growth in RF is really quite good because its as good as last year and half of last year’s reason for growth, couldn’t reappear because of the Middle Eastern project.

Thank you very much, Brian.

Okay.

We’ll take our next question from Shannon O’Callaghan at Lehman Brothers. Shannon O’Callaghan - Lehman Brothers: Good morning.

Good morning. Shannon O’Callaghan - Lehman Brothers: Hey, Brain. So, on the comments around organic growth, obviously decelerating makes sense, but 7% still very good in this economy. Are there any pieces, either on the organic growth or margins or anything? In the past we’ve had Redlake or DAP or some kind of issue that’s kind of a drag or something you are not happy with? I mean, would you characterize, the growth in the margins… do you seeing the quarter is from, you happy with it or there’re anything that are sort of underperforming or is it just…a little bit of a slowdown because of…just obviously the nature of a flat economy?

Well, if we take that in two pieces, what I’d say on the margin side, again we would expect the margins that we had in the first quarter would be our weakest of the year. I don’t think we are going to have another quarter, where we are not well above 20% operating margins. Also, even at 24.6 for EBITDA, I’d expect that’s our weakest EBITDA performance for the year, and that’s going to up. So, we will be much stronger in the second quarter and I think we’ll remain strong throughout the year. In terms of organic growth, when you are acquisitive the company, which we are, we separate the organic growth, everybody can understands what’s going on with sort of the same store sales, but a part of our world involves bringing in new entrants to our family. We are not doing bolt-on acquisitions. The beauty of our cash on cash model is, we were able to reinvest in some very strong assets. So, you’ll see dramatic increase in revenue in RF in the second quarter, when we actually report some meaningful numbers. For, CBORD, be in a five weeks, it hardly anything, and we are going to have a very strong second quarter out of CBORD. I think the situation around…the only areas that we were frustrated with were the camera business such where basically the US funding is just not going very well with government related issues, in the Japanese thing isn’t marvelous either. Those businesses really need to have research funds because that’s pretty much what drive the end-market demand for them. They’re not a big part of the company, so they don’t have a huge effect when they get that, but on the other hand they drag down our growth. If we were knew…

Well, generally what we do with these peoples we talk to them all the times. So, I don’t think we saw really a shortfall in supply, but we are seeing a lot of properties and we’re having discussions about a lot of things. I think the issue is the expectation around multiples of the EBIDTA you’re acquiring or the nature of the business acquired and you’re getting a little more realism, but not as much realism as we would like in that category. So, there’re tends to still be kind of a bid/ask spread, but as the year goes on people, who want to monetize aren’t have a lot of other choices. So, I think that’s favorable for us and all the conversations…well the conversations we’re having now are not with people who are desperate, but people who realize we’re able to get stuff done, whereas other people I talk to maybe can’t pull the trigger and get it done. When you look at our capital structure with one times, the debt to EBITDA number and we’re going to start pouring out cash in Q2 and 3. We’re going to certainly be in the driver seat for that kind of activity. So, I would expect that this will be a robust year for transactions for Roper. Shannon O’Callaghan - Lehman Brothers: Okay. Great thanks a lot.

Okay

And your next caller is Michael Schneider at Robert W. Baird.

Good morning, Brian. Good morning, John. How are you?

Hey good morning, Mike

Good morning.

Very nice quarter and great momentum, guys. Brian, I guess the first question is just on RF and these multiple operations projects as you call. I guess this is the first time at least I recall you underscored the momentum in that business and I have been writing for a while about how large this opportunity is. What’s changed there? Is it the technology on your part or it is a change in view among your customers? Just some color would be helpful.

I think two things, a little over a year ago we split the TransCore operation from its historical structure into two separate businesses. So, we have what we call commercial technology, which John Worthington is running and we have ITS, which John Simler is running. So, we’ve got a series of regional managers here in the US and broad focusing on the ITS’s activity. They are a very critical component for creating demand opportunities in the end markets, but they have a very clear focus on what they are doing and what kind of things we are interested in doing. We are also benefiting from a huge number of privatization projects that people are analyzing and studying, and we get the benefit of maybe helping people because we are pretty neutral in the respect for which one of maybe 50, what these public private projects are, the PPP things or PQ as they call. There is an enormous amount of activity going on in that area and I think we’ve designed quite a good business model to participate in that. Then on the commercial technology side, we’ve really allowed our R&D people to focus on a very clear pathway for product development, and complimentary products and services for people in the commercial RF space. So, I think that’s helped a lot. So, you get kind of the benefit of macroeconomics in the market place coupled with focus and clarity around what we’d expect and the margins we’d like to see in the area and the results is pretty positive first quarter and a very good remainder of year we think.

And Brain going forward as this business grows, is it added into margins or does it pressure the segment margins and especially vis-à-vis the tag work?

Well, when you are selling tags it’s added to margins, when you’re doing the design work, its dilutive to margins, but when we bought the company it was… the design work was pretty dilutive now its much less dilutive. So, in this quarter, where you had disproportion amount of ideas activity, we were still able to report 94 and if we didn’t have the startup expense for Black Diamond it would have been better. So, we are comfortable with that, but we would expect this to be the last quarter below 20%.

Okay. And regarding Neptune and ITT just held its call and they among others are talking about just a general slowdown or delay in some municipal spending vis-à-vis water projects. I’m curious what you are hearing from the field, obviously, Neptune had a great quarter, but is that market share gains that continued project rollouts that just have been underway and can you discern if indeed there has been hesitation on installation maybe on the day to-day meter business?

We are not seeing any delays, I mean as I said the first quarter we want to make sure people understood it, it wasn’t just a record first quarter. It was a record for any quarter in our history for orders. So, we’re just not seeing that, I think you remember it’s not the CapEx side of water activity. So, in fact, the Cincinnati project, which is one of the biggest ever was finished last year. So, people expected that the fourth quarter and certainly the first quarter of this year would be difficult comparisons. We heard that from everybody all the time and they are on, the difficult comparisons, but fortunately we have gifted people and they continue to deliver and we’re finding business that our people didn’t see this Mexico City project was also our finest. And so is the project out of country that’s going on and in fact much of the leadership team of that business is not in the United States today. So, we’re not talking about where we are and what we’re doing because we don’t want anybody to know, because I think we’re in places that other people aren’t seeing and that’s to their credit. Now, we’ve been cautious about guidance in terms of what kind of stuff we’ve been have because of the common sense of everything, you read the morbidity and the comments from everybody else about these spaces are pretty to accounting and we’re just not seeing that. I think remember we’re selling water meters and automated meter reading technology that produces revenue that’s somebody is buying for 100 bucks per unit. So, the payback is pretty strong, so we’re just don’t see any kind of pullback.

And just final detail, can you give us a sense of how the growth rates compared between the barometer business and then the air AMR portion of that division?

Yeah, John maybe comment.

Yeah, I do…Mike I think we have that, but it’s not at my fingertips. So, if okay with you I’ll follow-up with you on that.

Great, thank you very much guys and congratulations

Yeah.

Our next caller is Alex Blanton at Ingalls & Snyder. Alexander M. Blanton - Ingalls & Snyder: Hi, good morning.

Good morning, Alex Alexander M. Blanton - Ingalls & Snyder: Good quarter. I want to just ask you for clarification on the order rate. When you say net orders, what do you mean by that specifically and you mentioned a 13% order rate of which 3% was currency. That seems to be net of acquisitions. Is that what you mean?

If I understand the question our total orders were up 13%, 3 points of that came from acquisitions Alexander M. Blanton - Ingalls & Snyder: Yes

3 points from currency, so the… Alexander M. Blanton - Ingalls & Snyder: So, 3 points from acquisitions?

Yeah Alexander M. Blanton - Ingalls & Snyder: And 3 points from currency?

Right, and 7 % organic. Alexander M. Blanton - Ingalls & Snyder: So, 7% was organic, okay.

Right Alexander M. Blanton - Ingalls & Snyder: That wasn’t clear to me.

Okay. Alexander M. Blanton - Ingalls & Snyder: Secondly, you gave a lot of information about CBORD in the previous conference call, so you kind of went over it very quickly this time. Now, it was in the first quarter from five weeks is that?

That’s right, five weeks. Alexander M. Blanton - Ingalls & Snyder: And you announced three months ago that you paid 367, it was a $367 million deal.

Right. Alexander M. Blanton - Ingalls & Snyder: Is that still the number we should use and can be subtract that form the 378 to get the amount you paid for TechPro?

I think so, John you can?

The 367 is what we paid for CBORD, there are some additional fees as you know there always happened with these types of transactions. Unfortunately we can’t do these without attorneys, and so some of those fees get capitalized as well. I mean the total fess on this deal were in the normal range 1%, slightly over that and so the rest of that is going to be TechPro. Alexander M. Blanton - Ingalls & Snyder: The rest of…

So, if you take the 367, add a point to it, that’s going to be about $4 million of fee and the rest of it’s going to be TechPro. Alexander M. Blanton - Ingalls & Snyder: Okay. TechPro is really tiny?

Yeah, less than a million [ph]. Alexander M. Blanton - Ingalls & Snyder: Okay. Then could you just quickly go over the basics of CBORD for the benefit of people, who weren’t on the last quarters’ call to know what exactly what it is, relative size and so on, and sales?

Okay. What we’ve said is, we project CBORD to do somewhere between $8 million and $10 million of revenue a month. I know in the first 12 months of activity, it would be of course modest at the beginning, but second quarter will be at those levels at least. In the rest of the year, we expect it to run in that kind of span. What happens with CBORD is, they should have a very big installed base they are in about 750 campuses and whole variety of hospitals 300 beds and above. And they have know that the kind of everything that what happened in the cashless area plus, all of the access for a situation. So, in a student based environment they’ll have one card in the wall, that will allows the person to get access to the dorm room access to other universities situation, paper trail or paper less trail less around what’s happening of the library and bookstore. They can use the card as a debit card to charge against up with preset amounts. So, you don’t have this ugly thing people see or people try to get the student in and have charges it for over running the credit card. It’s not that kind of thing. They get revenue by providing all the software to handle the cash register transactions of everything that’s going on here. We’re expanding it with our parking control applications from our Amtec inside TransCore. The hospitals situation keeps a trail with their suite of software run Nutrition Management, its actually a supply chain forecaster for food consumption. The type of things we believe, it allows a patient to where another person that’s granted a card access to various place in the hospital they can deal with the pharmacy, they can…

Well, the first quarter would be the low point. It’s less than that. You can kind of figure out the math. It’s closer to $8 million for the stub period in the quarter Alexander M. Blanton - Ingalls & Snyder: Okay. Thank you.

Okay.

Our next caller is Deane Dray - Goldman Sachs

Thank you. Good morning.

Good morning.

My first question is more of an observation. You remember last quarter you provided a slide that was actually very insightful regarding your book-to-bill and how it tends to stay towards 1.0 and with only occasional deviations from that and it worked out to the decimal point that you’re hitting 1.0. So, we’re back to mean reversion, which is pretty positive. And Brian you made the comment on the up-tick in gross margin that you’re holding price. Can you give us a sense of where you’re getting price and out of that 7% core revenue growth how much of that was price?

I mean, that gosh…we do this with our field people all the time, I mean it’s a joke of course is that it’s just in the mix I mean. We have such a wide variety of businesses, gross margins could petty widely varying and it would be just very, very difficult. There is no standard products in almost all the businesses. So you windup with so many application possibilities that trying to track the absolute price is a hopeless task, but in Energy, where we had this very, very strong improvement, a lot of that is our petroleum analyzer work, in Lauda in Germany and Verson in France, lots of new products, lots of new applications just came in with higher gross margins than the things that they were replay. So, we have quite a sophisticated and diligent situation around how we look at R&D applications. And people know pricing is important, instead of too many businesses, who build up the cost and put a multiplier on it…it’s what we do here. And so people know we are going to really disappointed if we are hearing something coming in less than a 50% gross margin. And so that’s sort an underlying base. I don’t how great an answer that is, but it’s the truth.

Well, when the guys come in with their budgets for ‘08, are you looking at how much of a price they are assuming for the balance of the year or you focus on?

Well, we do two things here. We want to know what they are embedded thinking about prices and whether there is any erosion in any of the areas, and then we want to look at their direct material cost and do an exploded analysis about what’s happened on cost push inflation and whether we are get any reduction in material cost. So we do look at that. And I would say that the margin in Q1, the gross margins in Q1 were better than the plan.

Good, and then impression in your follow-up comments on your point that regarding the petroleum analyzers, we’ve went to some tradeshows, where you’ve got your equipment, the gas chromatography applications for oil and gas. Just give us a sense of where that business is today? What your leverages to the whole oil and gas cycle and where do you want to take the business?

Well, we bought a company a little over year ago called AC Controls in Europe and that gave us a better access to this field of activity. And so we’ve been building that technology into some of our other brands and what we call packets, its really in four different brands, but we had simulated under one division. That business is performed this just kind of 15 plus percent growth arena for quite a while now. A couple of years ago the business was more dependent on self regulation for instrumentation sales that cycle of activities long gone. And so we’ve got a lot of applications that are going well, I would say that a lot of our growth in the future two or three years from now, is going to be in beverage and food service. Because we have split the business and with the product management function today, so our gas chromatography is one aspect of what we are going to do, but certainly not be only towards at work.

Can we say beverage and food is that on food quality and safety?

Yes, in process, the bottling industry, there are a lot of things that we can do in there about what’s happening in the contents of what’s in a container.

And should that we expect that would be bolt-on or will you grow…

Its new product design that we have underway that we’re launching at a slow pace. So, we want to know more and more about what we’re doing, but its existing intellectual capital, we can deploy in these new markets.

Sure, thank you.

Operator, we have time for one more question.

All right, our next question is from Jeff Sprague at Citigroup Investment Research.

Thank you. I made it under the wire.

Okay. Well, it is better than being cut off in mid sentence last time.

We covered a lot of ground, just a couple of things Brian or John. How do you feel about your ability to use leverage in this set of capital markets, in terms of, turns on your EBITDA, would you take it up to three years or so if the right set of opportunities presented themselves or…

Well, it have to be pretty exiting opportunities, but I think we’re more likely to be in the 2.5 times to in 3 quarters times, but remember we generate a lot of cash. So if you think about our capacity here we are ending the quarter at 1.9 times, so you’re say 60 bps or more below or it you’d be. We got trailing EBIDTA 550 and you don’t have any pro forma number that’s released in there on CBORD. So, even if you looked at our guidance number for the year 605, you got a quite a lot of capacity there and then we reinvest that with the same kind of multiple. So, if we get $500 million or $600 million of transactions between now and the end of the year, we still have a very strong investment grade debt situation. So, I don’t see that as a difficult prospect for us.

Right and then you hit Neptune quite a bit with Mike’s question, but can you give us a little bit of the sense of US growth versus the new opportunities non-US that you are…

I think it was about a third non-US, two-thirds US growth.

And then, just finally, a lot of pressure on guys like GE Healthcare on procedures dropping off. You are not seeing any of that in your patient positioning businesses?

You know what happened, we saw that in the fourth quarter because of confusion around what was being reimbursed, but our stuff is middle-level technology. What we are doing is, the reimbursement confusion is lifted from our services in the space. So, we had very strong order inflow in the first quarter, and we have quite a bit of international business in that arena, which is different than CMS scheduled reimbursement in the US. So there was some noise and it’s behind us and when we had our quarterly review with the medical guys, we were all extremely impressed at their enthusiasm and comfort level because they were worried in the fourth quarter of last year about all its noise in the market place. So, I think it is probably a problem for GE, but it’s not a problem for us.

Right, thanks a lot.

We got two minutes.

That will end our question-and-answer session for this call. I will now turn the call back over to Mr. Humphrey for closing remarks.

Okay. Thank you, Anthony. And thank you all for joining us today. I do know there were two or three folks, who were still in the queue in terms of questions. I am sorry I have to cut this off at 11:00 o’clock. I will be available this afternoon for any follow-up questions you might have and as always we look forward to talking to you again in three months.

Thank you.

This does conclude today’s presentation. We thank everyone for their participation. You may disconnect your lines at anytime