Welcome to the WD-40 Company’s fourth quarter 2009 earnings release conference call. At this time I would like to turn the call over the Vice President of Corporate and Investor Relations for the WD-40 Company, Ms Maria Mitchell.

Thank you for joining us for our fourth quarter earnings call for fiscal 2009. Today we’re pleased to have Garry Ridge, President and CEO and Jay Rembolt, Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. This conference call contains forward-looking statements concerning WD-40 Company’s outlook for sales, earnings, dividends and other financial results. These statements are based on an assessment of a variety of factors, contingencies and uncertainties considered relevant by WD-40 Company. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties which may cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking statements including the impact of commodity prices, changes in foreign currency exchange rates, impacts of new products and brands and the uncertainty in economic conditions both in the United States and internationally. The company’s expectations, beliefs and projections are expressed in good faith and believed by the company to have a reasonable basis, but there can be no assurance that the company’s expectations, beliefs or projections will be achieved or accomplished. The risks and uncertainties are detailed from time to time in reports by WD-40 Company with the SEC including Forms 8-K, 10-Q, 10-K and readers are urged to carefully review these and other documents and stay up to date with our most recent company developments provided in the investor relations section of our website at www.WD-40company.com. Our annual shareholder meeting will be held on December 8, 2009 at 2:00 pm at the University of San Diego. A note to our shareholders; we will be using the noted and access method to deliver our proxy materials this year. You will be getting a notice in the mail to help you access your electronic materials and instructions on proxy voting. Our first quarter fiscal 2010 earnings conference call is scheduled to take place on Monday, January 11, 2010 at 2:00 pm. At this time, I’d like to turn the call over to Garry Ridge.

Good day and thanks for joining us for today’s conference call. This has been a turbulent and rough year but one with many successes. Unfavorable significant shifts in foreign currency exchange rates greatly impacted our results and excluding that impact, both our sales and income grew versus the prior year. The global recession hit us hard particularly in Q2, but we did see the trend reverse in Q3 with further growth in the fourth quarter. We experienced volatility in our raw material costs, yet managed the business to significantly improve the gross margin to exceed our goal of 50% in the back half of the year. We took a $6.7 million in impairment charges related to our home care and cleaning brands which was partially a result of our practice multi-purpose maintenance products. However, that shift in focus has positioned us well going forward which I’ll expand on in a moment. A rough year, absolutely. Down and out, absolutely not. Not only have we been surviving but we spent fiscal year 2009 positioning ourselves for growth in the future. First, we refined our strategy to focus on multi-purpose maintenance products, the sand box as we call it where we have the right to win. The strategy alignment includes new product development, acquisition criteria, WD-40 brand exploration and strategic marketing initiatives. Second, we developed the WD-40 D&A signature to use on selected products to further leverage the trust and credibility of the WD-40 brand. Thirdly, we developed Blue Works, an entirely new brand and product line of superior industrial grade multi-purpose maintenance products. Fourth, we increased our distribution of recent renovations including two new products under the 3-IN-ONE brand, the 3-IN-ONE no rush shield and the 3-IN-ONE professional garage door lube. The bottom line is, while there were many unfavorable forces…

In addition to the information presented on this call, we will suggest that you review the 10-K which we’ll file next week. Our fourth quarter results, our gross margin increased to 51.6% of sales in the fourth quarter compared to the 44.8% of sales in the same period last year. The increase in margin was primarily attributable to price increases, lower discounts, lower petroleum based costs. Gross margin also benefited from cost reductions resulting from sourcing changes and product conversions. These positive impacts were offset by some higher costs of aerosol cans, foreign exchange impact and some sales mix changes. Regarding the price increases, we implemented them in Q1 and Q2 of fiscal ’09 and that added approximately 480 basis points to our gross margin percentage in the fourth quarter. The price increase was primarily across our multi-purpose maintenance lines although we did have some implementing for our home care and cleaning products in the U.K. Our promotional discounts during the quarter, we had a lower percentage of our sales were subject to trade promotional allowances than in the prior year. As a result of these lower advertising, promotional discounts, our gross margin was positively impacted by 70 basis points in the fourth quarter. Promotional discounts are certain A&P costs such as customer rebates, display allowances, slotting, coupon, that are treated as a reduction in sales. Cost of products, as we look at our input costs, we have lowered costs for petroleum based materials but that benefit was nearly offset by the higher cost for aerosol cans. Due to inventory cycles, the cost of our petroleum basis products in our Q4 costs of goods continued to be relatively low and positively impacted our gross margin by 450 basis points. This benefit was offset by the dramatic increase in the cost…

Now let’s discuss our outlook for guidance for fiscal 2010. We see sales growth for ourselves in light of the improving economic conditions and the initiatives we have been working on as part of our strategic vision including the launch of our Blue Works product. We anticipate the growth to flow through to net income if raw material costs maintain at recent levels. The following fiscal year 2009 guidance does not include any acquisition activities and assumes foreign currency exchange rates will remain close to fiscal year 2009 levels. We expect our fiscal year net sales results to be in the range of $298 million to $380 million, a growth of between 2.2% and 8.9% versus fiscal 2009. We expect our global advertising and promotional investment to be in the range of 6.5% and 8% of net sales. We expect net income to be between $30.2 million and $32.8 million which would achieve EPS or earnings per share of $1.80 to $1.95 assuming 16.8 million shares outstanding. So before I leave you today I’d like to share a quote with you from our sixteenth U.S. President, Abraham Lincoln. “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new so we must think anew and act anew.” Finally, DW-40 Company has two significant assets; product and people. To all our tribe members, the folks in the United States, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, the U.K., Scotland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Portugal, Canada, China, Australia and Malaysia, a special thank you as you carried the day in this challenging year. You never gave up. You resisted panic for a belief that we all have something significant yet to do. A really big good on you mates to all of you. Thank you very much for joining us today. We’ll be pleased to answer your questions at this time.

(Operator instructions) Your first question comes from Liam Burke – Janney Montgomery Scott. Liam Burke – Janney Montgomery Scott: Garry, Southeast Asia, Asia Pacific rather was down both in the quarter and the year. If I took out, how did China do within those results?

China had a tough year. It started just before the Chinese New Year last year when manufacturing went down. I don’t think it’s in any way a long term issue. We’ve seen China start to come back again now, so overall we grew the year before 65% or something there about so it was a big comp to come round in this condition. So I’m comfortable with where we are and I think we’ll start to see China circle round. Liam Burke – Janney Montgomery Scott: On Blue Works, is the performance or the sales, do you expect to be more of a second half event or would you see something sooner, earlier in 2010.

We don’t start to ship until November, early December, so there’s virtually nothing in this first quarter. Liam Burke – Janney Montgomery Scott: Jay, I know with a lot of activities overseas, the tax rate tends to jump around. Is there any tax rate that we can sort of estimate for 2010?

As I look forward, I think we are looking and projecting at around 34.5%.

Your next question comes from Jeffrey Zekauskas – J.P. Morgan, Chase. Jeffrey Zekauskas – J.P. Morgan, Chase: The impairment charge of $3.95 million pre tax, what was that after tax? Did you pay any book taxes or were there book taxes allocated to that?

Yes. We got a full tax benefit for that. That is the book charge and net of our tax rate gets us to a net number less than that which we didn’t break out separately. Jeffrey Zekauskas – J.P. Morgan, Chase: That’s what I’m asking about, what that number is.

We didn’t break it out. Jeffrey Zekauskas – J.P. Morgan, Chase: So we don’t know the after tax effect of the $3.95 million charge?

We hadn’t specifically broken it out, but it’s easy math on our average tax rate. Jeffrey Zekauskas – J.P. Morgan, Chase: In your revenue projections for next year when you do your earnings guidance, what do you include for Blue Works?

There’s not a lot. We don’t ship Blue Works until late November, early December. So we don’t see a big inflow of Blue Works revenues until certainly the back half of the year, so there’s not a material amount of Blue Works certainly in the first half of the year, and we think it will be a slow build up. We’ll know more as we start to ship in the first quarter. There’s a little unknown there. We’re getting very favorable responses from the end users and the customers but the real volume won’t be known until we start to ship. At this time the guidance doesn’t have a lot of Blue Works in it. Jeffrey Zekauskas – J.P. Morgan, Chase: What’s the goal for the fourth quarter of next year? Do you want to be at $2 million quarterly run rate of $3 million? Is that the right order of magnitude or is the order of magnitude larger or smaller?

I honestly would not be doing justice to try and predict that because I will be materially wrong whatever number I give you. We’ve identified Blue Works as being a great opportunity going forward. We won’t know its run rate completely until we start to ship distribution and get our customers buying it. We intend to update the market every quarter and a step by step basis on how Blue Works is being accepted and what its success is looking like. Jeffrey Zekauskas – J.P. Morgan, Chase: Jay went through a nice discussion of all the puts and takes on gross margin and I think I probably muddled myself in listening to it. As I understood what you were saying, it sounded like price increase was the largest single factor behind the year over year gross margin improvement and that raw materials year over year hadn’t appreciably changed. Is that true or have I muddled that?

In some ways, the oil based materials year over year were about equivalent, so there was a minimal impact on an annual basis year over year of oil based materials. We did have a fairly significant increase in the cost of our cans which had an impact, a negative impact. So our input costs on an annual basis were not favorable to us. Jeffrey Zekauskas – J.P. Morgan, Chase: So it was prices that really determined the gross margin leverage in the quarter.

We did have a significant impact from price increases in the fourth quarter, although in the fourth quarter which was different from the annual year, we did get benefit from lower oil based products. We got nearly 450 basis points from that I believe.

The other impact was the actually realizing the improvements that we’ve made in the supply chain, particularly capital equipment that we put in place, our packages that reduced our cost because of increased line speeds. We benefited from re-formulations in products such as our 2000 flushes product. So really the reductions or the savings came from that area to the tune of about 110 basis points. Jeffrey Zekauskas – J.P. Morgan, Chase: Can you give me an idea of whether your volumes changes in the fourth quarter versus the fourth quarter last year?

Globally if you took it in U.S. dollars, you’re talking volumes globally. Jeffrey Zekauskas – J.P. Morgan, Chase: Volume like the number of ounces sold. Did the number of ounces you sold change very much?

We never really discuss that.

Your next question comes from Alan Robinson – Royal Bank of Canada. Alan Robinson – Royal Bank of Canada: Jay could you clarify the cost reductions you’ve negotiated on tin can costs. So I know normally you get a reset every January I guess in terms of your tin can input costs. So is it the case this time around that you just pre negotiated that price which will be in effect for 12 months. Is that right?

We don’t know that to be the case. What happened is that as we got near the middle of our year in the late summer, there had been a continued gap between the underlying cost of steel and tin plate, and there’s a number of discussions and negotiations that suggested that price should come down. We had some acknowledgement from can manufacturers that they also felt that that price should come down. So as we continued having those discussions, we were finally able to achieve I think it was a 6% price reduction in the cost of cans that will be in effect throughout the remainder of our calendar year. I’m not sure what the temperature is for our January price reset. That will be revisited on our first quarter call. Alan Robinson – Royal Bank of Canada: You mentioned that this will take effect in the second fiscal quarter of yours but presumably it takes awhile for these cheaper goods to go through your inventory.

That’s exactly right. Alan Robinson – Royal Bank of Canada: Clearly you did very well on the gross margins this quarter, in the fourth quarter. You discussed your view of gross margins for the fourth quarter back on your last call in July where you stated you expect the margins to be somewhat close to what you saw in the second quarter, just below 50%. What changed your view for the fourth quarter where it’s almost 52%?

We were looking in July the third quarter margin, up over 50% and we projected that forward as opposed to the year to date third quarter margin which was still down below 50%. So we saw the margin holding above 50% for the fourth quarter and I’ll apologize for that lack of clarity in communication.

The next question that you probably have and we see given what we know today, that we are going to be able to maintain the level of margin in that 50% range through the year as long as oil doesn’t hit $140 a barrel and other things go south on us. But certainly there are a lot of embedded cost reductions in our system now that we’re comfortable with particularly in some of the areas of production and our out sourcing program. Alan Robinson – Royal Bank of Canada: It sounds like your production improvements really were perhaps a little bit better than you had expected. Is that fair?

We didn’t get the full benefit of them until later in the year. And that may be hit by mix of sales too. For example the amount of Solvol we put in the new high speed lines, and certainly the more we sell there’s a benefit there. Alan Robinson – Royal Bank of Canada: Looking at your home care line in Europe, it looks like it’s doing just fine on a constant currency basis. How do you view your competitive situation there in Europe in terms of home care over the next year or two? Are you starting to see some of the larger multi-national home care competitions increase their investments and promotion there?

The answer is yet, but I think in the category we’re in over there, which is a little different from here, we have a very strong brand in 1001 that dominates in one particular segment over there which is basically the carpet care and cleaning segment. We are a much stronger brand in that segment than we were in the U.S. where we had one or two products in a segment. So I think we’re reasonably comfortable that we’ve got a good robust brand in 1001 and should see that continue as long as we continue our level of investment and our product development for that brand in the U.K. which we intend to do. Alan Robinson – Royal Bank of Canada: Are you shipping Blue Works globally next year or is it just domestically?

We’ll start in the U.S. in November/December and we believe that come the mid year you will start to see it move definitely into Europe and probably into Asia later in the year. But we have some learning still to do, but there is a lot of activity going on now in determining marketing opportunities is Europe and Asia, particularly given the formulations are all complete.

Your next question comes from [Henry Caplan – Oppenheimer] [Henry Caplan – Oppenheimer]: I was surprised to hear you say that there was a lower level of promotional activity in the quarter given that a number of companies recently talked about being more promotional. I was wondering why that was. Is there something in particular in your categories or retail partners that’s driving that?

It was primarily timing. If I look at some of the larger promotions that we have at customers, what I heard is there are few that slipped into the beginning of fiscal ’10. So there’s some of that.

But no decisive move to change. It was just the way the cards fell at the end of the year. [Henry Caplan – Oppenheimer]: In terms of the advertising, the advertising expense was certainly lower than we had expected. Figure out if that was lower advertising because you sort of cut …

Advertising comes in a lot of different shapes and forms. We don’t do a lot of what people would call the traditional advertising that comes from lower rates on TV and whatever. But certainly we do use a number of different vehicles and it’s a matter of timing and when we move them around that what we do at certain times that creates that. It was still within our range, maybe a little bit at the lower end of the range. \ [Henry Caplan – Oppenheimer]: I wanted to gauge your sense about, talk about the acquisition in M&A environment. You’re sitting on roughly $45 million of cash right now. I know you talked about de-leveraging the balance sheet. I wanted to see where M&A came into play if at all.

We continue within our sand box and where we have the right to win look for the opportunities. We’ve looked at opportunities in the past year and quarter. Nothing has floated our boat yet, but we do have resource. We have talent that is assigned to that role particularly and we certainly have a very clear understanding of what we don’t want. And therefore, we’re busy trying to find what we do want at a price that we believe is value to our shareholders and something that we can return, get some good returns out of. [Henry Caplan – Oppenheimer]: Would that likely skew towards the multi-purpose maintenance products or the home care and cleaning?

No. We have stated that we will be reducing the impact of the home care and cleaning products on our business over time and you would not find us making acquisitions in that space. If you had a chance to go and look at our slide of maintenance products, [audio break] where we feel lead to those acquisitions. We’ll be looking globally too. It’s not necessarily in the U.S. We see those opportunities in other countries around the world. [Henry Caplan – Oppenheimer]: I think on the call you mentioned retailers may be becoming a little more aggressive in terms of inventory levels. I wanted to see to what extent that had been a rebuild in inventory at retail had been built into your guidance for 2010?

I don’t think there’s a rebuild. I think there’s a stabilization. There might be a new level now, but you can’t do business from an empty barrel so the retailers have to make sure they’ve got product on shelf. But we’ve never really benefited from a great build up in inventory. Our product moves through fairly quickly. But what we are seeing is a new level of certainty which is getting retail to promote more and really work with us on some of those activities. But I’m not anticipating that our results are a huge inventory build up. I think they’re more about promotional sale through and those sort of activities.

Your next question comes from Frank Magdlin – The Robins Group. Frank Magdlin – The Robins Group: That was a nice quarter. I’m looking and saying from your perspective what went better than you thought? You gave guidance and I know you do a good due diligence but some favorable things that you could highlight.

I think what we thought is it didn’t get any worse than it did. I know that’s a funny answer, but I think we live in a bit of uncertainty and certainly that got a little let up in the quarter. Certainly our gross margin was a little better than we had anticipated and that was a pleasing off set to us. We started a little bit to see the dollar come back a little bit. That was good for us. We loved the stabilization of our household products in the U.S. We think we’ve got that stabilized. The U.S. had a good come back in the fourth quarter, so more promotional activities than usual. I think overall the business climate got a little more certain and we were able to control costs pretty well. We’ve got a pretty good job of keeping the lid on stuff through the year, so I think that was also good.

The margin did improve a little bit more than expected. We were anticipating a little over the 50% so to see it get to 51.6% was not what we clearly saw as we gave guidance in the third quarter. Frank Magdlin – The Robins Group: When you’re looking out as we’re trying to figure out quarterly results, is there anything other than the back end for the Blue Works that’s taking place that might change the strength of a quarter?

We’ve always said please don’t try to manage us quarter by quarter, and I know that’s tough because that’s something you have to do. But it will depend on promotions shift and when they fall. We feel okay about the year at this time and we’re going to, I’m describing this year as a perfect game of golf. And why do I say that? We have to play each month as if it was a new hole, not letting the past month or the hole in front of us influence our thinking that much as far as operational excellence is concerned. So I think that the things that are good is a little stability. The doom and gloomers have probably gone away a little bit and that’s opening up our opportunities. I wish I could give you a better guidance. We did guide quarterly last year because we saw such a big fluctuation in what happened before, but we don’t necessarily know if it’s going to happen this year. Frank Magdlin – The Robins Group: To switch to manufacturing, the Smart Straw in Europe, was that in effect for all of the fourth quarter?

A large chunk of the fourth quarter.

Your next question comes from Jeffrey Zekauskas – J.P. Morgan, Chase Jeffrey Zekauskas – J.P. Morgan, Chase: When you were talking about your prices being up, did you mean your prices were up or did you mean your mix was positive?

If we look at the impact of our margin, and I’m hoping we’re talking about the same thing, we did have price increases in Q1 and Q2 of ’09, of the current year which had an impact as we got to the end of the year and when we have comparisons year on year. So we saw for the full year, we saw nearly 470 basis points of impact because of the price increases. Jeffrey Zekauskas – J.P. Morgan, Chase: What I was trying to understand is you’ve done a nice job of penetrating your demand base for more Smart Straw and I would imagine your Smart Straw can is more expensive than the non Smart Straw can. You’ve had other improvements in your product line so I was wondering how much came from selling these higher priced cans and how much came from the straight price increase with the same product year over year.

About 39% of our business is now Smart Straw so there is a big part of that in Smart Straw, and there’s no doubt our revenue per ounce has increased because we had an increase in cost with Smart Straw and an increase in sell price with Smart Straw so there is a little bit of that going on. But it’s still about 39% of our total volume of our multi-purpose maintenance products, so there’s still 60% that is in the classic can. Jeffrey Zekauskas – J.P. Morgan. Chase: So by the end of next year, what do you think the percentages will look like?

Probably reasonably similar because the big change was the conversion in the U.S. We’re not planning to wholesaling convert any other markets although we are increasing our volume in Smart Strewing in the developing European markets through just over time. We’re more allowing the consumer there to make the choice and they are making Smart Straw choices. So I don’t know that that will change a lot from what I can see today. Jeffrey Zekauskas – J.P. Morgan, Chase: In the first quarter of fiscal 2010, you’re going to go up against a revenue comparison that really happened before the financial crisis began. So I would think that, and you probably still have some tougher currency comparisons all things being equal, so all things being equal is it likely that your first quarter is your toughest earnings comparison of the year?

I would choose as I never do make those comparisons public, not to make that comparison. But I’m not sure the economic conditions hadn’t already started to happen back then. Also remember the first quarter last year we were selling against price rise as well. So I think that the thing that we’re looking at now is we’re going into a new year. Our margins are holding up. We think volumes have stabilized. We getting a lesser impact on the U.S. dollar. We won’t get the full; the biggest impact on the dollar was in the second quarter when we dipped down to $1.35 to $1.40. So the comps have got to get better going forward, but I don’t know that they’re going to be that dramatic. Jeffrey Zekauskas – J.P. Morgan, Chase: Do you think you can grow household products next year or is that too hard?

No. We don’t plan to grow household. It will grow outside of the United States. We’re now harvesting household and I think it’s stabilized. But because we made the decision not to increase investment particularly in R&D and put it into things like Blue Works and some other initiatives that we’ve got in the works for our multi-purpose maintenance products and adjacent categories, no we won’t.

We have no further questions. I’ll turn the conference back to our speakers for any additional or closing remarks.

Okay, we’re done. Thanks very much and we’ll be with you come December time.