Welcome to the MSA Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call. My name is Vivian, and I will be your operator for today’s call. [Operator Instructions] I will now like to turn the call over to Mr. Mark Deasy. Mr. Deasy, you may begin.

Thank you, Vivian, and good morning everybody. I, too, want to welcome you to our third quarter earnings conference call for 2013. Joining us on the call this morning are Bill Lambert, President and Chief Executive Officer; Stacy McMahan, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; Ron Herring, President of MSA Europe; Nish Vartanian, our newly elected President of MSA North America, who succeeds Joe Bigler in that role. I should mention on September Joe was appointed to a newly created position at MSA, that of Vice President and Chief Customer Officer. Our press release announcing their respective announcing new roles for Nish and Joe was issued on September 4th and that release is available on our website. And lastly we have with us Ken Krause, Executive Director of Global Finance. In addition to his financial management responsibilities I am pleased to let everyone know that Ken will be taking on a much more active and more visible role in our Investor Relations efforts. And in this capacity he will, of course, be working closely with Stacy. So hopefully you will have a chance to meet or speak with Ken soon. Our third quarter press release was issued this morning at 8:30 and it, too, is available on our website at www.msasafety.com. This morning, Bill Lambert will provide his commentary on our quarter. Stacy will then review our financials and then Bill will conclude with his closing comments. And after that we will open up the call for your questions. But before we begin, I need to remind everybody that the matters discussed on this call, excluding historical information are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements, including without limitation, all projections and anticipated levels of future performance, involve risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause our actual results to differ materially from those discussed here. These risks, uncertainties, and other factors are detailed from time-to-time in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our most recent Form 10-Q, which was filed on July 24, 2013. You are strongly urged to review all such filings for a more detailed discussion of such risks. Our SEC filings can be obtained at no charge at www.sec.gov, our own website, and of course a number of other commercial sites. That concludes our forward-looking statements. At this point, I will now turn the call over to Bill Lambert for his comments. Bill?

Thank you very much, Mark, and good morning everyone. As always, I want to begin by saying thank you for joining us today on this conference call, and for your continued interest in MSA. Presumably, all of you have seen our third quarter press release and have our financial figures, with all comparisons corresponding to the equivalent period in 2012. I’m going to start by running through some of the highlights of our third quarter results and talking about the progress we are making on key strategic priorities. I also will share some views on the current business environment and how it’s likely to affect us as we move through Q4 before I turn it over to Stacy to run through the actual results. Then, we’ll open it up for your questions. During our last investors call back in July, I indicated we had seen choppy but improving trends in order activity and business conditions during the latter half of the second quarter. Unfortunately, as we entered August and into September we started to see sequestration related delays, a lower level of large orders, customers requesting shipments to be delayed into future quarters and the continued slowing trend throughout the mining regions of the world. These trends combined to have an adverse impact on our third quarter financial performance. As noted in our press release, third quarter sales were $278 million, down $9 million or 3% from a year ago. Weakening foreign currencies decreased as reported second quarter 2013 sales by $6 million. So excluding the effect of currency, our sales were down 1%, or $3 million when compared to the third quarter of 2012, with growth in core products fully offset by a lower level of adjacent and peripheral product sales. The primary drivers of our sales performance are…

Thank you, Bill and good morning. I am pleased to share further insight into our third quarter financial performance. Additional information will be available later today, when we file our Form 10-Q with the Securities and Exchange Commission. As Bill mentioned, sales in the third quarter of 2013 were $278 million, down $9 million or 3% from the prior year. Excluding unfavorable currency effects of $6 million driven by weaknesses in the Brazilian Real, Australian Dollar, and South African Rand, revenue decreased $3 million or 1%. I will comment on 4 ways we look at our sales performance: by end-markets, by product groups, by geographic reporting segment, and then, by emerging markets. First by end-markets, global industrial market local currency sales were flat versus a year ago and represented 71% of our total business in the quarter. Global fire service sales representing 25% of our total business increased to 3%. And finally, sales to the military market represented 4% of quarterly sales down from 5% last year, on a lower level of gas mask sales in the United States and ballistic products sales in Europe. When you consider our sales by product, our 5 core product groups deliver growth of 3% on a local currency basis and represented 70% of total sales. The core growth was led by portable instruments up 9%, fixed gas and flame detection instruments up 7%, fall protection up 6%, and head protection up 1%. Breathing apparatus was down 2% from the prior year on lower large order activity and the aforementioned regulatory delays in the quarter. The remaining 30% of sales were down 10% primarily from a lower level of military business throughout all of our segments, as well as lower mining-related product sales in international markets. Moving to our reported segment sales performance, in…

As we move forward into the final quarter of 2013, we will continue to execute the same strategies that have transformed MSA into a company that has proven itself capable of delivering profitable growth even through challenging economic cycles. I am disappointed in our Q3 results but I am not discouraged. The sequestration and government shutdown-related delays are only temporary hurdles as we stay committed to our growth strategy. In light of the ongoing economics, uncertainty in some parts of the world, we continue to closely manage hiring and discretionary spending. We have put restrictions on discretionary spending but remain committed to maintaining our investments in innovation and high growth markets around the world to continue to drive top line growth and improve our market share position. While we all realize there will be short term fluctuations, our strategy has created shareholder value over the past 4 years and we expect it to continue to do so over the long term. The strategy has yielded very strong results over the past several years and I am confident that it positions MSA to create value for our stakeholders even in times of uncertainty. Thank you for your attention this morning. At this time, Nish Vartanian, Ron Herring, Stacy McMahan and I will be happy to take any questions you may have. Kerry Bove, who normally joins us on this call, is traveling in China and is unable to do so. Please remember that MSA does not give what is referred to as guidance and that precludes most discussion related to our expectations for future sales and earnings. Having said that, we will now open the call to your questions.

[Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from Richard Eastman.

Could you maybe speak to -- in Europe, when we look at the industrial piece of the business, you did comment that Russian industrial was lower, but is there any sense here that we maybe hit the wall a little bit in terms of distribution gains in Europe and now industrial and Europe is starting to reflect current market conditions there?

I think I would characterize it slightly differently, and I would say that in our reported European sales we also include, as you noted, Russia, but also the Middle East. And what we have seen really in the low as you called it is more I think related to slow down in Russia and the slowdown in the Middle East and some of the large orders that we have there being delayed into future quarters. The distribution -- on the distribution front for Western Europe, we have made some good gains in the past. But I still see some improving conditions there and I still think we have a little bit of runway ahead of us especially in Western Europe we’re seeing improving conditions in Southern Europe, and France and Italy in particular. So I think that our European performance is probably more reflective of what we have seen happen in the Middle East and in Russia than it is for Europe as a whole.

And Middle East, again that’s large orders and that’s on the fix gas and flame side primarily?

Yes, it’s a combination rig of both fix gas and flame detection and some SCBA orders – Supplied Air Respirators orders.

And then just maybe somewhat similar question, on the international side, maybe where were the surprises there? Mining has been weak and perhaps maybe the step down in 3Q which, as Kat [ph] mentioned today, is a bit of a surprise. But also in fire service, I guess you now had a known tough comp there and you still grew the business in international. But just where were the surprises on the industrial piece of international to end up with kind of a flat number there?

I think that mining has been, has had a lot of head wins for the majority of this year. I must say Australia continued to weaken during the quarter and in previous quarters we have had Latin America, Brazil, Chile, Peru, as being able to offset that. And a lot of those came from markets outside of the mining markets. So, for instance, in Chile we’ve talked in past calls of our success with breathing apparatus to the national fire brigades of Chile. And we just didn’t have some of those big offsets, and so the decline and the weakness in the mining market just became more apparent and probably looks as more – it shows itself more as a part of Asian in this past quarter than the steady decline that we’ve seen in mining for the past year.

Is that – is the industrial in international, maybe over-weighted towards the non-core kind of ancillary product lines?

When compared to the rest of MSA, I think that’s a fair assessment. As we’ve set up distribution around the world and many of the areas of the world were safety is less sophisticated so to speak, our tenancy was, and the market demanded that we provide lower levels of safety equipment which are really not in our core and so what we’ve been trying to do since this new strategy is to move, shift that international group towards more of the core areas of our business and define that part of the business which is really core-driven and adjacent product-driven. The peripherals, we’re definitely weaning ourselves off of.

Okay. And then just one last one, and I will get out of the line here. Just on the SG&A, then, I got Stacy's – and Stacey, your commentary on why the substantial decline in SG&A sequentially. Would it be the expectation that SG&A kind of holds at this level through the end of the year now?

It is somewhat variable regarding our sales performance for instance, in terms of how we accrue bonuses and compensation-related accruals and control expenses related to the sales performance, but essentially, I think the answer is yes. We can expect that if everything remains the same.

And the warranty cost -- how does it decline when the recall cost actually went up?

The warranty cost went up, correct. They actually went up as a result of the recall, a very effective recall, actually, which is a good thing. But it was – registered and warranty cost increased.

[Operator Instructions] And I'm not showing any further questions at this time.

Okay, Vivian. Well, thank you. Since we have no more questions. That will conclude today’s call. If you missed a portion of the conference, a replay will be available on our website for the next 30 days as well a transcript. So on behalf of our entire team here, I want to thank you again for joining us and we look forward to talking with you again soon. Have a great day.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today’s conference. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.