Greetings, and welcome to the Quaker Chemical Corporation Second Quarter 2018 Results Conference Call. A brief question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions]. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Michael Barry, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President for Quaker Chemical Corporation. Mr. Barry, you may begin.

Thank you, Don. Good morning, everyone. Joining me today are Mary Hall, our CFO; and Robert Traub, our General Counsel. After my comments, Mary will provide the details around the financials, and then we'll address any questions that you may have. We also have slides for the conference call. You can find them in the Investor Relations section of our website at www.quakerchem.com. I'll start off now with some remarks about the second quarter. I'm pleased we have delivered a strong quarter, despite some market challenges. The quarter's impressive results were largely driven by two major themes. The first being sales increases and the second was gross margins improvement. Let me start with the margins. Since mid-2016, we have been in a generally rising raw material cost environment, and as we have discussed in the past with raw materials, there's a lag effect between changes in our raw material costs and adjustments to our product pricing. On the last conference call, our expectation was that we would be catching up on this lag effect with our price increases and our gross margin will continue to increase in the second quarter, and I’m happy to report it did. While raw materials continue to rise sequentially from the first quarter, our price increases were enough to more than turn the tide leading to our gross margin expansion. However, we are continuing to see raw material cost increases in the third quarter which we are addressing with additional price increases where necessary. How exactly this all plays out in the second half of the year is hard to predict in a precise manner, but our best estimate that our gross margins will be in the low to mid 36%. And going forward, we still expect our gross margins to get back to our…

Thank you, Mike, and good morning all. Before I begin, please remember that comments made during this call include forward-looking statements which are based on current expectations, estimates, projections, and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties which may cause actual results to differ materially. For a discussion of these risks, please review the cautionary statements regarding forward-looking statements included in our earnings release and the Risk Factors included in our 2017 Form 10-K filed with the SEC. These are available on our website. Please refer now to Chart 4 and 5 as I review our financial performance. Quaker reported a 26% increase in non-GAAP earnings per share to $1.56 as a result of strong operating performance across the company. In a similar scene to Q1 of this year, strong sales growth and good cost control were key drivers of performance and in this quarter we also saw gross margin improve both sequentially and year-over-year. All these factors combined resulted in a very strong quarter. Our net sales increased 10% to about $222 million compared to Q2 last year, with organic volume growth of 5% leading the way and our pricing initiatives driving selling price and mixed improvements of 3%. In addition, the generally weaker US dollar year-over-year benefitted our topline by about 2% with a major being the euro which appreciated 8% versus the dollar from 1.1 in Q2 2017 to 1.19 in Q2 2018. Our gross margin of 36.5% is up 8/10 of a percent versus last year’s 35.7% and is also up sequentially over Q1 35.6%. This is a second quarter of sequential gross margin improvement. In addition Quaker continued to share good cost discipline as we further leveraged our operating cost to support our strong topline growth. Note that our GAAP operating income and operating…

Thank you, Mary. At this stage, we’d like to address any questions from any participants on the conference call.

[Operator Instructions] our first question comes from Laurence Alexander of Jefferies. Please proceed with your question.

Our next question comes from Edward Marshall of Sidoti & Company. Please proceed with your question.

Our next question comes from Mike Harrison of Seaport Global. Please proceed with your question.

Our next question comes from Jon Tanwanteng of CJS Securities. Please proceed with your question.

Our next question comes from Liam Burke of FBR Capital. Please proceed with your question.

Our next question comes from Mike Gyure with Janney. Please proceed with your question.

Our next question comes from Garo Norian of Palisade Capital Management. Please proceed with your question.

Our final question is a follow-up from Mike Harrison of Seaport Global. Please proceed with your question.

Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve reached the end of our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the call back to management for closing remarks.

Given that there are no other questions we’ll end the conference call now. And I want to thank you for your interest today. We are pleased with our results in the second quarter and we continue to be confident in the future of Quaker Chemical. Our next conference call for the third quarter of 2018 will be in late October or in early November. And if you have any questions in the meantime please feel free to contact Mary or myself. Thanks again for your interest in Quaker Chemical.

This concludes todays’ conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.