Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. I am Patrick Wright, your Chorus Call operator. Welcome and thank you for joining QIAGEN's conference call to discuss the results of the third quarter 2016. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Please be advised that this call is being recorded at QIAGEN's request and will be made available on their Internet site. The presentation will be followed by a question-and-answer session. At this time, I would like to introduce your host, John Gilardi, Vice President of Corporate Communications and Investor Relations at QIAGEN. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Patrick, and welcome to all of you and we appreciate you taking the time to join us on this call tonight. Our speakers today are Peer Schatz, the Chief Executive Officer of QIAGEN; and Roland Sackers, the Chief Financial Officer. Also joining us is Dr. Sarah Fakih from our IR team. You will see in the presentation the standard Safe Harbor statement explaining that the discussion and responses to your questions on this call reflect management's views as of today, November 2, 2016. We will be making statements and providing responses to your questions that state our intentions, beliefs, expectations, or predictions of the future and these constitute forward-looking statements for the purpose of the Safe Harbor provisions. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. QIAGEN disclaims any intention or obligation to revise any forward-looking statements. For more information, please refer to our filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. We will also be referring on this conference call to certain financial measures not prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP. You can find a reconciliation of these figures in the press release and the presentation for this call. Also, two quick points before I hand over to Peer. First, as you know, our analyst investor day will be held on Tuesday, November 15, in New York. We have changed the times and will now begin with registration at 9:30 AM, start the event at 10:30 AM, and want to end by 3 PM local time. We made this decision after another company in the industry changed its release date and we wanted to help you avoid this conflict. Second, QIAGEN will be at The Association for Molecular Pathology Meeting next week in Charlotte. We plan to hold customer events on Friday in the exhibition hall but will not be participating in the Corporate Day on Wednesday. We will recap our AMP activities at the Analyst Day. With that, I would like to now hand over to Peer.

Yeah, thank you, John. And I would like to welcome all of you to this conference call. Our results for the third quarter and first nine months of 2016 show QIAGEN's transformation is building momentum and the new sales growth trajectory is taking hold. The benefits of our transformation, which we have acknowledged has taken longer than we expected, are increasingly emerging as a result of our efforts to expand our leadership in molecular testing. We have a unique ability to serve customers along the dynamic continuum from basic research to clinical healthcare and will continue to focus on these opportunities. Let me go through our key messages. First, we delivered on our targets for the third quarter. Net sales rose 9% at constant exchange rates against our guidance of 8% to 9% constant exchange rate growth and were up 8% at actual rates to $338.7 million due to the 1 percentage point of currency headwinds. We had another strong quarter with 10% CER sales growth, excluding the U.S. HPV headwinds. Adjusted diluted earnings per share were at $0.29 at both actual and constant exchange rates, and this was ahead of our target for $0.28. Second, QIAGEN is building momentum in the second half of 2016 and setting a new sales growth trajectory based on our full year target for an increase of about 67% on constant exchange rate basis. The performance for the third quarter was another important step towards achieving our full year sales growth target. All regions grew in the third quarter, backed by gains in Molecular Diagnostics and Life Sciences customer classes and in particular Molecular Diagnostics rising 12% on a CER basis when excluding the U.S. HPV test sales. Our growth drivers are leading the transformation, maintaining a double-digit CER pace and representing about 35%…

Thank you, Peer. Good evening to all of you. On slide eight to review our financial performance for the third quarter and first nine months of 2016 and also to update you on our outlook for the fourth quarter and the full year as well as provide some initial perspectives on sales and adjusted earnings for 2017. We are continuing to make solid progress on the goals we set for 2016. We are particularly pleased with the faster sales growth in the quarter, the improved adjusted EPS of $0.29 per share compared to the third quarter of 2015, and also the 15% increase in free cash flow for the first nine months of 2016. For the third quarter, net sales was 9% at constant exchange rates and were up 8% to US$338.7 million at actual rates due to 1 point of adverse currency movement. As expected, about 3 percentage points of total constant exchange rate sales growth came from the acquisition of MO BIO which was completed in late 2015 and the acquisition of Exiqon in June 2016. That means we had solid 6% CER organic growth from the rest of the portfolio that even included 1 percentage point of headwind from reduced U.S. HPV test sales. These sales are expected to decline to about $30 million on a full year basis in 2016 and continue to fall further in 2017, but the headwinds are fading. After 1 percentage point of organic growth in the first quarter, we have now had two consecutive quarters at substantially higher sales growth. This reflects the impact of our transformation and the investments we have made to step up commercialization of our growth drivers and expand into new geographic markets. We are looking for a similar organic growth rate at constant exchange rate in…

Yeah, thank you, Roland. I'm now on slide 14 for a summary before we move into Q&A. So let me review what we just announced. First, we had another solid performance in the third quarter, achieving our targets for net sales and coming in ahead of our target for adjusted EPS while also generating a 15% increase in free cash flow on a year-to-date basis. Second, our results show the benefits of our transformation and we are moving ahead into a new growth trajectory as reflected in our full year sales growth target of 6% to 7% on a CER basis. We are moving ahead on new initiatives to continue the sales acceleration, while also improving our profitability. Third, as part of our increased commitment to return $300 million of capital to shareholders, we are on track to return $250 million in early 2017 through the synthetic share repurchase and the balance during the year through open market repurchases. Also, we have updated our full year 2016 guidance. We are confirming the previous target for 6% to 7% CER sales growth as we maintain a solid higher single-digit CER pace in the fourth quarter. We also continue to expect adjusted EPS of about $1.10 to $1.11 per share before the restructuring charge. Furthermore, we have given you an indication of what to expect in terms of sales growth and profitability for 2017 and we will provide you with much more information and details at our upcoming Analyst and Investor Day. And with that I'd like to hand back to the operator for the Q&A session. Thank you.

Thank you. And our first question today comes from the line of Vijay Kumar of Evercore ISI. Please go ahead.

Hey, guys. Congratulations on a really nice quarter here.

Hey. Thanks, Vijay.

So maybe, Peer, just thinking about the guidance, it's a little unusual for you guys to give FY 2017 color where I think the numbers, they were really encouraging, right. But can you just talk about some of the drivers there? I guess, A) does the 2017 guidance, does it bake in any additional HPV headwinds? And I think in the tools space in general, there's been a lot of noise from Academia, maybe some noise from Pharma. So if you could just give some color on what the guidance, the revenue guidance bakes in for 2017, I think that would be helpful.

Sure. Well, you are absolutely right, Vijay, we normally give guidance in Q1. But this year we obviously have the Analyst Day now coming up in the fourth quarter. And we thought it would be appropriate to be able to discuss 2017 outlooks with you in great detail, but you have that in preparation of that meeting. And we'll obviously be providing a lot more detail during the Analyst Day. In addition, there are also a lot of other things going on, including also some very significant initiatives across the company that we've preparing for quite some time and now moving into execution and that is a contributor to these charges that we are now seeing in the fourth quarter. And we just wanted to also give guidance on what we expect the impacts of those changes to be. In general, the company is on a very good trajectory and moving into the year as we go back into the beginning of the year, we probably would have not been expected really in this momentum, but what we actually were able to see now in the second and also in the third quarter now with the guidance of the fourth quarter continue is a very solid underlying growth trajectory in the range of 6% to 7%. And on top of that, we are actually layering initiatives that should further unfold for the years then thereafter. So everything is pretty well lined up at the moment. The 2017 guidance is an all-in guidance where all of these impacts are now included, both headwinds and tailwinds. And obviously if things go better, things go better. And then we'll communicate it as we go.

Our next question comes from the line of Tycho Peterson of JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Thanks. I want to hit on a couple things. I'll do it all at once here. First on, Peer, can you help us get comfortable with the 4Q margin step-up, ex restructuring? Second, you talked about spinning off certain activities as part of the restructuring. I'm wondering if you are exiting product lines. And then third, can you just talk about the GeneReader roadmap from here, your confidence in the workaround, whether the timelines around fusion and liquid biopsy capabilities have changed and will we get any data at AMP, in particular on the QIAsymphony front end option?

Sure. If okay, I'll take the two latter questions and then hand over to Roland for the margin question. So, the first was regarding the activity sites that we will be closing. There are two sites. One is a site in Valencia which is a call center and tech service center, and we'll be partly transferring these positions over to the East Coast to our Maryland sites and also are resorting to home office options for certain employees. So that's one of the actions. The other action is, we have an engineering site in Switzerland where we are planning a management buyout by the group and we will continue as a customer for select activities there, but on a more reduced basis. Those are the two larger spin-off activities. We are not anticipating a very material change in the top line due to product line exits or so, but clearly, we are always reviewing that if it makes sense for us to be in certain product lines or businesses. But as of today, that is not on the table. The second is on the GeneReader roadmap. We are really moving in full speed ahead and the feedback is phenomenal ex-U.S., where we are currently actively marketing and we, as I said, we are still targeting the original plan despite the set – this shows you how positive we are actually seeing the uptake ex-U.S. and all of the activities, be they panel or content expansions, be they additions of future editions, they are all fully on track. We might see a small delay in some of the improvement options outside the chemistry, but this is not really too material from a customer value perspective and something we'll talk about more at the Analyst Day. We will certainly be holding a number of sessions at AMP. I don't want to steal the thunder yet. There's a lot of news that we hopefully will be able to share at AMP and it will certainly include a lot of activities around next generation sequencing, informatics, but also new personalized medicine tests and other activities that we're working on that is of interest to the AMP crowd.

Yeah. On the margin side, Tycho, you probably have noticed that we were able to manage down our operation expenses as we indicated before, quite significantly down from the second to the third quarter, roughly $10 million less spending in the third quarter compared to the second quarter and modest comparable to the Q1 levels. So if you would assume for a second that same level, even assuming that there might be a smaller increase, you will see that we should be nicely be able to draw a Q4 guidance if it comes to the expense side and therefore to the profitability. And also in terms of overall margins, I think we have seen in years before also a margin around this 30% adjusted EBITDA. So I would say that it should give us enough comfort level here.

Our next question comes from the line of Steve Beuchaw of Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Steve C. Beuchaw - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC: Hi. Good afternoon. One question on QuantiFERON and then one follow-up on the GeneReader. The question on QuantiFERON is really just a request for a bit of a walkthrough; your visibility in the growth there. It's become a big product and a driver of more than 200 basis points of the total company growth, so it's particularly important that, say in terms of visibility on 2017 just to make sure we know how you are thinking about visibility on tenders and the drivers of what's going on in 2017, hopefully driving another year of 20% growth. And then I'll actually follow up on Tycho's question on GeneReader. Just to put a finer point on it, are you comfortable at this point saying that any material engineering design validation hurdles are cleared so that you can express confidence in a launch timeline on that new chemistry to get you back in the market in the U.S. in 2017? Thanks.

Yeah. Thanks, Steve. So first on QuantiFERON, you are absolutely right. It's a very important franchise for us and expanding very rapidly. We clearly have a vast untapped market opportunity out there. As we are increasing, we are seeing new types of screening strategies emerge, and QuantiFERON is clearly leading that effort and helping in many different settings and countries to help screen for latent TB. We are very active in this space. We have significantly stepped up the commercial efforts. What you see here in the growth rates accelerating is much better commercial execution and also timing coming with a higher awareness, more visibility of the data, and more global also, acceptance of QuantiFERON as the gold standard for latent TB testing. And in addition, we clearly had regulatory events for instance in China a couple years ago that are now starting to show fruit in other countries. So, this is the beginning of a very long trajectory. It's a very fragmented market. It's much less homogenous than other screening markets, meaning every market has different dynamics and different criteria that will be important. So we're very actively pushing that. On GeneReader, I'd really like to stick to the statement if I may – that I made before that we are confident we'll be back in 2017. And we'll provide further information on this hopefully shortly.

Our next question comes from the line of Jack Meehan of Barclays. Please go ahead.

Hi. Thanks. And congrats on the nice quarter. I was hoping you could elaborate just on the new marketing team roles in optimizing the sales channels. Just what's changing there? It's nice to see the top-line begin to inflect. Just want to make sure there's no real disruption on that front. And then one on personalized medicine; could you just comment a little bit more on the assay growth and what the expectation is for the royalty payments in the next year? Thanks.

Sure. So marketing really changed compared to where it was 10 years ago in the sense that a lot of the activities, a lot of the value chain in marketing is increasingly digitalized and also can be shared across different product and customer classes, much better than you could a few years ago. And what we did was take marketing activities that were running the different areas – we had three business areas as you recall, one life sciences diagnostics and informatics and the foundational activities, be they the marketing analytics, the campaign management, demand generation. And these types of things were now integrated to serve all three of these areas to create enough critical mass and to bring in very high caliber talent that we have across the company that focus them on the execution of certain activities versus having them dedicated to the smaller revenue activities and therefore, typically sub-critical mass. So it has a lot to do with consolidation, and that is where we are taking back office activities or support activities or activities I described before and leveraging them across multiple internal customers for further use. So we actually expect that this should further leverage our digital capabilities and also the ability to use those more effectively to get – to use the additional economy of scale to accelerate further revenue growth. In terms of the Companion Diagnostics portfolio, you saw growth rate was quite nice in the space again, and also the asset growth rate is doing quite well. We saw particular good growth rate in the blood cancer line and that's one that's often overlooked. It's quite a sizeable line. We have a 30%, 40% market share, in some cases more than 50% market share in certain assay, even blood cancer, actually globally. And that's a fantastic franchise that continues to be very important for us. The additional markers that are coming forth from Pharma, you will see some come forward potentially in the near term. We are seeing two, maybe three launches in 2017 in this area. So we had one-and-a-half years now a little bit quieter in terms of approvals, and they have to do with the sequencing and the timing of these programs.

Our next question comes from the line of Dan Arias of Citigroup. Please go ahead.

Hi, guys. Roland, on the guidance for next year, what within the 6% or 7% CER are you assuming today for M&A? And would you mind talking to the end market or segment assumptions built into that outlook in terms of MDx, Pharma, Academic, Applied? I mean, if I could, on the bottom line it looks like you'd be close to flat this year on the op margin. So what kind of expansion do you think you can do in 2017, excluding restructuring? Thanks.

Yeah. Thanks for the question. And of course, I don't want to take too much thunder away from the Analyst Day but – so therefore I try to at least to give you some indication. But starting with the bottom line, you clearly could see – and if you just do the calculation that this is again a quite significant ramp up in terms of EPS performance. I would say, it's somewhere around 15%. And so if you calculated into margin performance, it is rather close to a 200 bps improvement over 2016. And I think that is – again there might be certain impacts coming from the gross margin, but most of it – by far the largest share comes out of operational expenses, mainly out of SG&A. and Peer just mentioned a couple of factors where we believe we get actually growth not only a more efficient organization but clearly also impact on the top-line. On the top-line, it's quite clear that the underlying organic growth rate is going to accelerate next year compared to 2016. As the acquisition of MO BIO is annualized in that year, there's only a half year impact from the Exiqon acquisition. So you see a quite significant ramp up on the organic side and that is the main contributor within the 6% to 7%.

Our next question comes from the line of Daniel Wendorff of Commerzbank. Please go ahead.

Hi. Thanks for taking my question. And first question would be actually related to the restructuring program and maybe as a follow up to the last question. And can you quantify how the program will help you to improve the margin not only in 2017 but maybe also in 2018? And then a follow-up question on the GeneReader. And can you potentially help me understand who is actually buying the GeneReader or why you are placing it? Is it solely a PPI model based or actually customer buying the machine? So anything more on that front? Thank you.

Yeah. Let me take the first one here and get it out of our way. On the restructuring cost side, as Peer mentioned we are clearly focusing here on programs which we started over the course of a year and just bringing them all to the finish line. So it is clearly something where we ultimately – they actually do have long-term impact. So the savings which you will see as efficiency gains, you see for 2017 is clearly something what we also expect in 2018 and beyond and probably even to an accelerated, an increasing degree, because it would clearly take some time over the year 2017 for them to finally come into the system. A larger part of the savings and of the refreshing costs as you have seen before is non-cash, so it's roughly $35 million out of the total amount, and the other areas are clearly mostly around MBO and the site closures which also means that you have to get leases on that and things like that out of this way. And again, our focus here on getting a more consolidated view and want our regional hubs here in Germany, within Netherlands and also in Asia is clearly helpful, taking complexity out of the system, not only on the site basis but also in our structures and using the momentum which we gained over the last six to nine months and now we are seeing also momentum on the sales side. And turning that out in overall profitability will allow us that probably this programs has a payback pay at some, let's see, two-and-a-half, three years and therefore being a significant profitability to our – for QIAGEN going forward.

The other question, Daniel, was the question where the GeneReaders are placed. And we'll have further clarity at the Analyst Day also on this, but the typical customer is a molecular diagnostic lab mostly with pathology activities that has been doing some next generation sequencing very often but wants to get rid of the pain of all the moving parts and the complexity of doing that. And to target that, we obviously started with was solid tumor testing with the actionable panels that we have, and then we moved to liquid biopsy testing after that. And we are seeing everything from the very advanced Molecular pathology labs that just want to do high volumes of these samples in a very robust, reliable and accurate way with very simple to use reporting that the most powerful knowledge base is behind it. This has really resonated very well with such labs. We see that. We see it down to novices who are, in terms of next generation sequencing, novices who have molecular experience and are now starting to next generation sequencing as well. And they just see the enormous simplicity and the cost effectiveness of the solution that we can provide as a one stop shop where all solutions come from us. We also seek large national tenders that we won where there were international programs in how to do tumor sequencing where we are now routinely also being used to run the tests in large numbers and samples in such countries even. And so there is a range of different uses. I think everybody there is very united in the front that people are really looking for a better solution for clinical sequencing. It's not a super powerful machine that they are after. It's not something glitzy and dazzly that changes every few weeks. It's something that is high performance, very reliable, super accurate, and gives results that ultimately can benefit healthcare. And that's exactly what we created, and this resonates extremely well. And so we'll see more of these examples at the Analyst Day.

Our next question comes from the line of Doug Schenkel of Cowen & Company. Please go ahead. Ryan Blicker - Cowen & Co. LLC: Hi. This is Ryan Blicker on for Doug. Thanks for taking my questions. Two quick ones, starting with Japan, the double-digit growth in Q3 was clearly above recent trend. Can you provide more color on growth by customer class and your thoughts on the outlook for growth moving forward? And then on the balance sheet, could you give us an update on your thoughts surrounding M&A and capital deployment subsequent to the upcoming share repurchase? Are you still capable of doing bolt-on deals in 2017 or should we expect a pause in M&A activity, or should we expect a pause in 2017 with M&A activity maybe resuming in 2018? Thank you.

So the question on Japan, good catch. So we definitely saw very strong growth in Japan after some weaker years, and it's way ahead of market growth. The Japanese market is primarily a applied testing research market. The diagnostic market, molecular diagnostics is actually a very small market in Japan. It's $100 million maybe in size, maybe a little larger, but we have several big products in the Japanese market, but the growth really came from the academic sales, but also some companion diagnostic sales where we have a very good position in Japan as well.

And one the M&A side, of course we maintain our firepower here. It's again, there's all this opportunities for attractive deals, but of course they have to be financially attractive. And again, M&A as we said before, is part of our strategy. As you know in the past, we were clearly focusing on good deals around bolt-on acquisitions. I think we did very good acquisitions, not only the two last year's but just what we know on the performance from Exiqon on mobile. You see that acquisition's also overall an important contributor to our value generation. So we are clearly going to continue to focus again here the market going forward as well, and we do have flexibility to activate, create value for QIAGEN.

Our next question comes from the line of Bill Quirk of Piper Jaffray. Please go ahead. William R. Quirk - Piper Jaffray & Co.: Great. Thanks, and good evening. A couple of questions. I guess first is, just thinking about the adds to the QuantiFERON team you've made over the year, Peer, can you help us think about kind of how they are trending in terms of ramping up? You know, help us think maybe a little bit about their relative contribution in 2017.

Sure. So as you know, we started ramping up later in 2015 and into the second quarter of 2016. You know, the old rule that a sales rep is typically 20%, 30% productive in year one and 60% in year two and 100% in year three, it takes time to really ramp them up and for them to build the relationships. So we feel very comfortable with the resources we have onboard in the United States. We're looking at expansion in other countries as well. And this will not be like the sudden ramp-up that we saw between mid-2015 and mid-2016. This will more be a continual increase yet whilst probably getting a lot of leverage and economies of scale as we go. William R. Quirk - Piper Jaffray & Co.: Got it. And then just a second question. Just thinking I guess about the restructuring plans that you've announced today, help us think about how much you're contemplating kind of beyond what you've mentioned in terms of the couple facilities. Are you looking kind of across different pieces of the organization? Is there some additional leverage you can drive here over the longer term? Thanks, Peer.

Sure. So the two examples of the sites, those are important pieces to several activities that we're doing, so we are clearly working across the organization and also looking at many different things. And the programs that we kicked off, they are forming initiatives, of which sites are one, marketing another one, and they are basically seeking leverage across the organization here. And we are doing this from a position of strength, which is maybe unusual, but it just shows our commitment to drive value going forward. We feel very comfortable about the top-line trajectory and that being able to continue, but we completely recognize that we also had to ask for patience while we were pushing the top line. And before we were able to enter into the phase now of focusing on the bottom line as well, we needed to accelerate that through initiatives around the portfolio, but also the commercial channels. That being behind us, we're moving into that next phase, and this is why this is the logical consequence. All this is built in our plan and we already were planning this early in this year. And so, this for us was something that we turned to when we saw that the top-line was accelerating and was sustainable.

And our last question for today comes from the line of Scott Bardo of Berenberg. Please go ahead.

Yeah, thanks very much for taking my questions. Excuse me. So, just one question on QuantiFERON. Certainly seems that the business is performing very well, and you highlight here about some recent recommendations from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force and obviously more and more global activity and awareness surrounding this. So I just wondered if you could share thoughts. Is it beyond the realms of possibility that you accelerate growth further in this business given this increased global awareness and recommendation, or is that more difficult, given the relative size of the business now? If you could share thoughts there. And also, obviously you are in litigation with Oxford surrounding this product. We've seen how you've been potentially injuncted from one product in North America, albeit, hopefully temporarily. Is this is a risk that you see for this franchise that we should be aware of? Or perhaps you could share some thoughts about what the likely scenario is here. Thank you.

Hey, Scott, thanks. Well, clearly QuantiFERON is a very important growth driver for us. And as I said before, we see a long trajectory in front of us with the vast market opportunities they need to be converting. We are constantly adding new market opportunities. Basically, as we speak, the ability to detect transition, or risk of transmission – transition from latent to active, these are completely new opportunities that provide us a new clinical value to the test and open up new segments in a much more meaningful way, and potentially accelerate also conversion from the skin tests even more. So, it's just execution from here going forward. And the team is executing extremely well. We have great new innovation in this area that we launched, just the QuantiFERON-TB Gold Plus product, that was kind of quietly introduced a couple years ago and actually forcefully introduced it in the markets is phenomenal. It's a complete game changer in terms of workflow, but also with new technological features that we think are just going to be extremely valuable and important going forward. Now, for some reason the litigation has emerged in this area, which is still – we are scratching our heads a little bit why this is being done. And we have hundreds, even thousands of IP positions that we're working on and litigation that we are in. And QIAGEN is not typically the company that is – it's typically the company that has always found ways to settle, but this is – we just don't understand this situation and we'll absolutely defend our freedom here. The ability to create an injunction is not in the pathway of this litigation. But I'd leave it at that. The real focus that we have is not really on that. That I think is noise by a competitor who are in the meantime now outgrowing, even though we have eight times more volume than they do and are just doing phenomenally better. And unfortunately, we are seeing people resort to all kinds of stuff. So, this is just the way of life, unfortunately.

With that, I'd like to hand back, end this conference call and thank you for your participation. If you have any questions or comments, please don't hesitate to contact us.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the conference call. Thank you for joining and have a pleasant day. Goodbye.