Thierry Denis
Analyst · RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead
Thank you, Allison, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for taking the time to join us for today's conference call in review of our business results for the first quarter 2016. Joining us today are Mike Thaman, Owens Corning's Chairman and CEO; and Michael McMurray, Chief Financial Officer. Following our presentation this morning, we will open this one-hour call to your questions. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. Earlier this morning, we issued a news release and filed a 10-Q that detailed our financial results for the first quarter. For the purposes of our discussion today, we've prepared presentation slides that summarize our performance and results for the first quarter of 2016, and we will refer to these slides during this call. You can access the earnings press release from 10-K and the presentation slides at our website, owenscorning.com. Refer to the Investor's link under the corporate section of our homepage. A transcript and recording of this call and the supporting slides will be available on our website for future reference. Please reference Slide 2 before we begin, where we offer a couple of reminders. First, today's remarks will include forward-looking statements based on our current forecasts and estimates of future events. These statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially. We undertake no obligation to update these statements beyond what is required under applicable securities laws. Please refer to the cautionary statements and the risk factors identified in our SEC filings for a more detailed explanation of the inherent risks and uncertainties affecting such forward-looking statements. Second, this presentation and today's prepared remarks contain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of non-GAAP to GAAP measures may be found within the financial tables of our earnings release and in the appendix of this presentation on owenscorning.com. Adjusted EBIT is our primary measure of period-over-period comparisons, and we believe it is a meaningful measure for investors to compare our results from period-to-period. Consistent with our historical practice, we have excluded non-recurring items, and items that we believe are not representative of our ongoing operations when calculating adjusted EBIT. We adjust our effective tax rate to remove the effect of quarter-to-quarter fluctuations, which have the potential to be significant in arriving at adjusted earnings and adjusted earnings per share. In the first quarter we have utilized an effective tax rate of 33% on adjusted earnings, the midpoint of our 2016 range. We also use free cash flow, a measure helpful to investors to evaluate the company’s ability to use cash to pursue opportunities that enhance shareholder value. For those of you following along with our slide presentation, we will begin on Slide 4. And now, opening remarks from our Chairman and CEO, Mike Thaman, who will be followed by CFO Michael McMurray. Mike will then provide comments on our outlook prior to the Q&A session. Mike?