Good day and welcome to the Titan Machinery Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2015 Earnings Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. John Mills of ICR. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Titan Machinery second quarter fiscal 2015 earnings conference call. On the call today from the company are David Meyer, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Peter Christianson, President; and Mark Kalvoda, Chief Financial Officer. By now everyone should have access to the earnings release for the fiscal second quarter ended July 31, 2014, which went out this morning at approximately 6:45 a.m. Eastern Time. If you have not received the release, it is available on the Investor Relations portion of Titan's website at titanmachinery.com. This call is being webcast, and a replay will be available on the company's website as well. In addition, we are providing a presentation to accompany today's prepared remarks. We suggest you access the presentation now by going to Titan's website and clicking on the Investor Relations tab. The presentation is directly below the webcast information in the middle of the page. Before we begin, we'd like to remind everyone that the prepared remarks contain forward-looking statements, and management may make additional forward-looking statements in response to your questions. The statements do not guarantee future performance and therefore, undue reliance should not be placed upon them. These statements are based on current expectations of management and involve inherent risks and uncertainties, including those identified in the Risk Factor section of Titan's most recently filed annual report on Form 10-K. These risk factors containing more detailed discussion of the factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in any forward-looking statements. Titan assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statement that may be made in today's release or call. And lastly, due to the number of participants on the call today, we ask that you keep your question period to one or two questions and then rejoin the queue. The call will last approximately 45 minutes. David Meyer will provide highlights of the company's second quarter results and a general update on the company's business. Then Peter Christianson will discuss the company's international overview and segment operating results and next, Mark Kalvoda will discuss the company’s financial results in more detail and the fiscal 2015 annual revenue, net income, earnings per share guidance and non-GAAP operating cash flow guidance ranges, along with outlook and modeling assumptions. At the conclusion of our prepared remarks, we will open the call to take your questions. Now, I'd like to introduce the company's Chairman and CEO, Mr. David Meyer. Go ahead, David.

Thank you, John. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our second quarter fiscal 2015 earnings conference call. As John mentioned, to help you follow today's prepared remarks, we've provided a slide presentation, which you can access on the Investor Relations portion of our website at titanmachinery.com. If you turn to slide two, you will see our second quarter financial results. Revenue was $451 million, primarily reflecting lower agricultural equipment sales, more than offsetting improvements in construction sales. Adjusted pre-tax income, which excludes certain items was $3.3 million and adjusted earnings per diluted share was $0.04. On today's call, we will discuss the headwinds we're facing in our agricultural segment, the improvements in our construction business, the challenges we face in our international segment and the initiatives we're putting in place to address this part of our business. Mark will provide an update on our inventory reduction plan, which is on schedule as well as our updated annual fiscal 2015 guidance. Now I would like to provide some more color for you today on the agriculture and construction industries in which we operate. Peter will provide color on the industry within our international segment. On Slide three is an overview of the agricultural industry. The primary headwind facing the Ag industry are lower commodity prices, reflecting the above average yields for corn and soybean production in North America and the resulting increase from projected ending stocks. The reason was to report reiterated the estimate for record corn production this year. We're experiencing normal yields in the northern footprint and above average yields in our southern footprint. In the most recent report, which was updated at the end of August, the USDA adjusted the projected net farm income to be down 13.8% in calendar year 2014, from their previous estimate for calendar year…

Thanks David. On Slide five, we have an overview of the industry and our international segment, which includes stores in Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia and Ukraine. The cereal grain harvest has been completed and fall row crops are in good conditions throughout the majority of our footprint. Our Bulgarian customers experienced an extremely challenging cereal grain harvest due to prolonged rainfall and flooding in many of the agriculture regions. This has resulted in low crop quality, reduced yields and negative farmer sentiment. Due to weaker balance sheets of our international customers compared to North American farmers, lower global commodity prices are impacting international customers more than farmers in North America. The weak economic financial conditions present in our international footprint are impacting our customers as they are experiencing a much tighter credit environment throughout Eastern Europe and Ukraine. These factors have led to higher industry-wide equipment levels in our international market resulting in the equipment margin pressure as we strive to achieve our revenue targets. In Ukraine, the current geopolitical and financial turmoil is negatively impacting our customers and our operations. Limited credit availability, rising interest rates and the devaluation of the local currency are affecting all businesses throughout the country. Although the Ukrainian farmers have a decent crop coming this year, they are limited in their ability to finance purchases of equipment. On Slide six, we have outlined important key initiatives that we are implementing to improve our international results and account for the current environment in this segment. We are currently implementing improved inventory management procedures throughout our European operations. We have recently centralized our inventory procurement process. By centralizing our procurement we are able to better control and forecast inventory requirements to support our revenue forecast. We're standardizing our machine specifications, which will enable us to better leverage…

Thank you, Peter. Turning to Slide 11, our total revenues for the fiscal 2015 first quarter was $451 million, a decrease of 7.6% compared to last year. Equipment sales decreased 10.7% quarter over quarter reflecting the Ag headwinds David discussion in his remarks partially offset by improvements in construction and growth in our international business. Our parts and service business was also pressured in the quarter, as part sales were flat and service revenue declined 3.6%. These results were primarily due to lower Ag, parts and service sales, which were impacted as Ag customers are being cautious with product support spending given the conservative sentiment within the industry. Our rental and other revenue increased 13.7% in the second quarter reflecting our expanded rental fleet, a slight increase in our rental fleet dollar utilization to 29.6% for the quarter compared to 29.2% in the prior year quarter along with positive industry trends for construction. On Slide 12, our gross profit for the quarter was $79.7 million and our gross profit margin was 17.7%, an increase of 60 basis points compared to the same quarter last year. The margin increase is due a favorable shift in product mix as their higher parts, service and rental and other makeup a larger portion of our gross profit. Our operating expenses as a percentage of revenue in the second quarter of fiscal 2015 were 15.1% compared to 14.4% for the same quarter last year. The increase in operating expenses as a percentage of revenue is primarily due to the deleveraging of our fixed expenses as total revenue decreased from the prior year. Equipment sales, the more cyclical aspect of our business were the main driver of our lower revenue. We remain focused on opportunities to reduce our overall operating expenses. In the second quarter of…

[Operator Instructions] We'll take our first question from Rick Nelson with Stephens. Rick Nelson – Stephens: Thanks. Good morning. I’d like to ask about the guidance, what it might assume about international results in the back half of the year and your commitment to international operations, especially the Ukraine?

Yeah, Rick. This is Peter and regarding the guidance for our back half of the year, we’re looking at the international segment and we’re looking at reducing our operating loss by half. So our front half was $6 million loss and we’re looking at reducing that to $3 million. Regarding the Ukraine, we’re doing -- we’re taking measures that we can to mitigate any exposure as we get through the turmoil that they’ve got going on in that part of the country. I guess I would remind you that our regions that we operate are in the center of the country and so we still will continue business there. Rick Nelson – Stephens: Okay. Got you. And how about capital equipment margins, which had some expansion year-over-year as well as sequentially, is that in the construction segment where that’s occurring and I know your guidance is going from flat to down, equipment margins for the year; if you could comment on the quarter, what’s driving that growth?

Sure Rick. This is Mark. Yeah, so it was up quarter-over-quarter, still down for the six-month period versus six-month period last year. The strength primarily came from the construction side of the business. There is a little bit of strength on the Ag side, but we do not have that modeled in for the rest of the year. As you indicated, we’ve adjusted down slightly our total equipment margins for the full year. So some strength in the current quarter primarily on construction, little bit on Ag, but we’ve pulled down those assumptions for the full year. Rick Nelson – Stephens: Okay. Thanks for that. Finally, if I could ask you about your appetite for acquisitions versus other alternatives and you’re sitting on a nice cash position. It sounds like cash is going to be building and the capital allocation priorities.

Well Rick, we’re constantly in discussions with our Board regarding our capital allocations and we evaluate on all options on an ongoing basis and you can see we just did one, I think was a pretty strategic and accretive acquisition in Wayne, Nebraska, but we’ll continue to look at all our options going ahead. Rick Nelson – Stephens: Will that include stock buybacks if stock is returning pretty big discount to tangible book?

Yeah, like I said, we’re going to continue to evaluate all options Rick and… Rick Nelson – Stephens: Very good. Thanks a lot and good luck.

And we’ll move along to our next question from Mircea Dobre with Robert W. Baird.

Good morning, guys. Thanks for taking my question. I guess -- maybe a little bit of clarification, Mark, as to why the guidance on rental utilization has just ticked down in spite of the construction business being pretty good and kind of being quite positive.

Well, first of all I’ll just comment a little bit -- we continue to work on our fleet mix, matching the specific units to the market and I think we have some opportunities there and Mark, you can maybe just comment on specific numbers there.

Yes. So our rental utilization, obvious it’s tracking little below what we expected. That’s why we made the adjustment. Compared to the prior year, we’re pretty much on target, but as you know we’re pretty much comparable to the prior year. But as you know we ended the year at around that 30% to 31% utilization. So I think it’s a combination of what we’ve experienced for the first six months and obviously looking ahead what we anticipate in the next couple of quarters.

But you’re not trying to tell us that there's may be still an execution issue here that we have to worry about. You're saying that’s simply end market expectations that are being adjusted.

Hopefully it makes us the main driver on the utilization and we’re still learning about the market demands in each one of the different larger markets where we've got our fleet located, Mig.

All right. I’ll move on here, just for the floorplan interest question if you would, I remember you commenting that you expected the floorplan interest expense to be in fiscal '15 somewhat similar to '14, is that still your expectation for the full year?

No, Mig. It’s actually tracking a little bit higher now than what we anticipated. Some of it is due to some of the -- our international operations. We had some rate increases in Ukraine specifically as some of the turmoil unfolded over there in the last quarter. So I think some of the rates involved there and the lack of the lower sales having a higher -- resulting in higher inventory specifically overseas .that is interest bearing at these higher rates is causing that to be up a little bit and up somewhat from what we experienced last year. So that’s one of the changes in assumptions as well that’s driving the -- revised earnings per share guidance.

Appreciate that and last one for me is, maybe a little clarification on the parts and service business. From what I recall planted acre is -- were actually pretty decent this year in your footprint and yet you counted on this business maybe facing some headwinds. How do you think about this business going forward? What do we need to see happen in order for this business to continue growing? Is it that we need growth in planted acres or is it that we just need meaningful shift in farmer sentiment?

Well, the first thing that drives your parts and services business is the part of equipment you have in your markets. So as we continue to maintain and grow share, that’s important to long-term parts and services business. So our customers always have decisions that at what level they’re going to put the parts and servicing machine and obviously if they have situations where they’ve got downtime on their bolt on you either fix or they’re going to do what’s it going to take, but sometimes on their proactive preventive maintenance they’ve got different levels that they’re going to do. So sometimes if there is a little bit of a negative sentiment, they’ll wait and see. They may instead of spending $8,000 to $10,000 on a combine repair, maybe they’ll say, hey, this part will run one more a year and maybe they’ll spend that $5,000 number. So we’re just seeing a little bit of that right now. Some of this could be a little bit of timing issues, but the base is -- this is the part that you’ve got in your markets and then -- and we’ll continue to do the marketing and some of the initiatives we have to keep driving that business because that’s -- it's an important for our business and we like it and we’re good at it.

Thank you.

And we’ll take our next question from Neil Frohnapple with Longbow Research.

Hi, good morning guys. Just wanted to follow up to an earlier question and spend a little bit more time on the reduced equipment margin outlook for the full year. So you guys are running about 8.5% year-to-date and you typically see an uptick in the fourth quarter due to manufacture volume incentives. So are you guys just being conservative or was there further pressure at the end of the quarter and into August that’s given you guys a little bit of caution here?

Well, I think the first thing is that we’re really focused on our inventory reductions and I guess what we’re going to look at is -- if takes a dip in our margins just a little bit to make sure we’re hitting on inventory targets during the year. We want to make sure we’re prepared to do that.

Great, and then given the pressure on used equipment prices you guys have called out, is there any risk to abnormal inventory write-downs in future quarters?

Well, we’ve been taking proactive steps going back probably the beginning of the year. And so some of that’s reflected in our current results and so I think we feel pretty confident where we are today in the guidance that we’ve given you.

I think maybe to expand on that, just -- what -- when we talk about pressure in our used equipment margins, that’s including some of these write-downs that we continue to have on a regular basis. We have monthly write-downs on our lower cost to market that we experience even in good year. So that’s reflected in our current numbers as well as our full year guidance on our equipment margins.

Great. Thanks very much guys.

And we’ll move along to our next question from Steve Dyer with Craig-Hallum

Good morning, guys. Thanks. So just to be clear there are monthly mark-to-market lower cost to market reductions here, it’s not subject to an annual impairment test or anything like that. This is happening on an ongoing basis.

We value our inventory at lower cost to market, we’re required to for GAAP. So we do that on a monthly basis. That’s correct.

Okay, and then as you look forward, kind of out-pass this year, if corn stays in this range, which is not necessarily unusual, if you’re looking historically, how do things play out? Taking into consideration the age of the fleet etcetera is it your opinion that farmer input prices get rerated down based on where corn is and it's necessarily a farm income or farm revenue number, but more of a farm profitability number that starts to turn up next year because input prices are down because it’s my understanding that the reason that it’s largely or partially unprofitable for them this year is input prices are -- we're still based on much higher grain prices. What are your thoughts kind of beyond this year if corn sort of hangs around here?

Well, obviously there’ll be some industry adjustments out there. I believe the manufacturers will probably reduce some supply in line with demand. I think we all have to understand there probably are some costs to the manufacturers due to the Tier-4 technology that’s out there that’s baked into some of this equipment. So I think we’ve to just keep reminding ourselves of the strong balance sheets our growers have right now. We continue to have recordable interest rates. We still have that global demand for protein in the developing nations -- their standard of living as they continue to improve, we’re going to see increased exports and we got the long-term population growths and we still have to understand, we’ve got 30% to 40% of our corn crops still going in ethanol production. So I think the long-term prospects are good, but obviously there’ll be some type of correction in the industry if this level of commodity stays there for an extended period of time.

Okay. Great. Thanks guys.

And we’ll move along to our next question from Brett Wong with Piper Jaffray.

Hi guys. Thanks for taking my questions. First I wanted to ask what you’re doing in terms of trade-ins and how that impacts your intentions for used equipment inventory.

Well, as we evaluate and do the appraisals on the trade-ins, we’re definitely cognizant of where the market is today, where we think it’s going to be in the two to three months from now. And so I think all our stores and all our sales people that they are trading these machines in will be focused on maximizing margins and minimizing our days of inventory and pricing equipment accordingly.

Any impact to or reluctance to take trade-ins?

Well, when you say that, you’re going to probably see a little bit of a trend where I believe over the last three to four years in the strong bull run we’ve had, there were some growers that migrated to annual roles where they traded their fleet off every year or may be if you roll the clock back five or six years ago or maybe they did that every three years, every five years, so I think we’re going to see a lesser amount of these one year roles. In addition, there was probably some growers out there that for a long period of time, they’d buy one-year-old trades and two-year-old trade and they may be moved to a brand new trade and ideally we’d like to ship some of those growers back to take that one and two year old trade. So I think you’ll see those two phenomenons taking place.

Great. Thanks and then just wondering -- talking about equipment margins historically specifically in Ag and how bad have they gotten in past down cycles?

Can you repeat that question?

Yeah, just kind of trying to get an idea on Ag equipment margins and how bad you’ve seen equipment margins get in past down cycles.

I think we go back and we’re at some of the lower levels that I’ve certainly seen since I’ve been here with Titan over the past seven years. I think what you have is when you have big adjustments in the industry where the total industry units are down quite a bit, that’s where you see some of this, so we’re just talking about before some of this lower cost of market where you’re adjusting this -- you're used to kind of current pricing out there where you’ve experienced more of a drop-off and compression in your used margins at that time. If you remain at that level, like the level today, just even going in to the next year you don’t have some of those same pressures on your margins that you do have. So I think, to your question, we’re some of the lower levels that we’ve seen in the past.

Great. Thanks a lot guys.

And we’ll move along to our next question from Joe Mondillo with Sidoti & Company. Joe Mondillo - Sidoti & Company: Good morning, guys.

Good morning, Joe. Joe Mondillo - Sidoti & Company: Question the floorplan interest; I was wondering if you could give us what your expectation for the year is now?

Yeah, Mig asked about that earlier, Joe. So last year, we were at about $16.8 million in floorplan interest expense and I just kind of indicated it -- I think last time I indicated was going to be right around that. At this point, I’d say it’s going to be up, somewhat from that, call it $2 million or $2.5 million and primarily the reason for that is in Europe, with the lack of sales or the lower sales than anticipated primarily in Ukraine and some of the higher rates associated with that inventory because of the -- and that floorplan because of the conditions over there, that’s causing our overall floorplan interest expense to be higher than what we originally anticipated and that of course is baked into our current guidance that we’re putting out there for the year. Joe Mondillo - Sidoti & Company: Okay, right, and then that's expected to climb in the third quarter and then full on the inventory reduction in the fourth quarter. Is that correct?

That’d be pretty similar in the third quarter and down a little bit there in the fourth, yes. Joe Mondillo - Sidoti & Company: Okay, and then of the $250 million of inventory reduction, is most of that at this point in time interest bearing?

I’d say it’s a combination of both. If you look on the chart on that inventory slide, you can see a lot of it is in the new, pretty much all of it is in the new because as we sell the new we get the trade-in and we get the used-in. So I’d say it’s a greater percentage of it being valid. At this point, it’s a greater percent still being noninterest bearing, but what does happen is anything that still has noninterest bearing term on it with the new that does flip into the use for a period of time into that trade-in. So we can get the benefit on some of that, but all that being said, Joe, what we said in kind of our remarks is that overall we’re going to have a higher percentage of that interest bearing going forward. So even as inventory comes down, that percentage overall is going higher, which isn’t resulting in significant floorplan savings in the current year, the following year being in that range. Joe Mondillo - Sidoti & Company: Yes, I was just going to ask looking out to next year, how do you anticipate that play out within the year in terms of interest and how does that in terms of I guess managing the inventory, how does that affect everything?

So we're staging ourselves pretty well to achieve a much better return for the next year with getting our inventor to $250 million down target by the end of the year. That should bode well to have fresh inventory and have overall improvements on that noninterest bearing as a percent of your total inventory out there. So yes it should bode well for us for next year. Joe Mondillo - Sidoti & Company: Okay. And then just lastly on the last conference call you stated that you expect the construction segment to reach profitability this year, but you are also reducing the rental utilization. So I am wondering if you could just give us your thoughts on that comment that you made on the last conference call.

Yes, I think it's a combination of couple of things, I think gets you to the same answer. We did bring down rental utilization, but we did bring up overall sales which was primarily driven by the equipment sales. So the combination of the two kind of offset each other somewhat and I think what we talked about before is still, still in play. Joe Mondillo - Sidoti & Company: Okay. Great. Thanks a lot.

And we will take our final questions from Larry De Maria with William Blair.

Hi. Thanks. Good morning, guys. Can you help us to eliminate, A; OE versus used profits or AG? What’s the mix like and the differential like and margins and if you are profitable in both.

Can you repeat the question, Larry?

Yeah. I was just trying to delineate OE versus used profits for AG. What’s the margin differential like between the two and if you are profitable in both?

Yes there is margin on both new and use Larry.

Okay.

And it's basically a function of how you book the use trade-ins in and further there is growth margin in both areas.

And typically you say it's higher than new, I believe right and that would still be the case presumably.

Typically in a normal environment you would have used that would be higher, but in a market where things are adjusting downward somewhat you have got that risk the valuation on the used where we're taking some of the lower cost to market and that is currently causing our used equipment margins to be lower than the new.

Okay. Got it. A few follow-ups then. You might who is pricing for evaluation purposes the equipment for this monthly lower cost of market calculations? I recall it’s the regional managers. Is that right or there is another mechanism for that?

Well we've got a fairly comprehensive appraisal evaluation process and then we have some centralized management that checking balance through that and then we've got some built-in mechanical processes, which we feel are fairly conservative. But we thing we've got a number of checks and balances and oversight and central oversight so on, on a continued basis. Like I say, we're trying to drive turns in days of inventory, not to mention that from an incentive standpoint for our sales people, the quicker, less the fewer days in inventory, the better the commissions are and so I think we've got a number of initiatives and built-in process to ensure the integrity of that number.

Okay. And then just a couple of final things, just curious what -- thank you for that. C&H to help you move the inventory, are they offering you incentives or cash help to move some of the stuff and if there are issues on obviously on the wells line, which is the case now, does C&H come in and help you out there? And then finally depreciation, Section 179 I assume you guys are modeling that, if it does not come back, but do you think there is pent-up demand for some equipment if it does come back into the end of the year, are some people waiting for it?

So you got three questions. So the answer to the first one is C&H is very good about providing necessary pricing and programming line with the market conditions to be competitive about there. So I think as you can see there is advertise, interest free and low rate interest and some things like that and specific programs targeted at certain markets out there. So I think we have a good partner with C&H there. Again as we said in our call, we've got a really good working relationship with our bank and our Bank Syndicate and we're real positive of that and we also have a good relationship with the folks at C&H industrial capital. So between the two of them, we're really confident in the capitalization of our company and also our ability to secure long-term financing on that and then your third question, can you repeat that again Larry.

Yeah just, about the depreciation section 179, I guess obviously in your guidance you said that it does not come back I believe just curious in your talks and checks in the field, do you think there is some pent-up demand if it does come back to some customers will come to market and utilize it if does come back say post elections.

Well, I think one phenomena that you saw there is a lot of grain that the customers are actually sold into this calendar year. So they're going to have some tax exposure. So definitely if those tax incentives come back, which in our conversations with a lot of politician, I’ll say there is a fairly strong settlement that will go. They are definitely going to be some people, farmers out there going to need some tax write-offs and we're conservative our approach at that, but I think that you are going to see some end of the year buying base if that does happen because there are definitely some tax issues. Not to mention there is some grain that got sold at higher prices this year that was forward contract. So between what got rolled into this year from last year, plus the forward contracting there is definitely going to be framers looking for some tax write-offs.

Right. That can help move some of the inventory into year end, but your inventory reduction targets do not reflect that that comes back right or they do?

No, we are going at this with what we have today and a very conservative outlook and so I would just see a plus if that happens.

Yeah. Understood. Thanks very much and good luck.

Okay. So that’s the end of the call. I want to thank you for your interest in Titan and we look forward to updating you on our progress on our next call. Have a good day everybody.