Good day and welcome to the Trinity Biotech Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2017 Financial Results Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this event is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Joe Diaz of Lytham Partners. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Denise, and thank all of you for joining us to today to review the financial results of Trinity Biotech for the fourth quarter and full year 2017, which ended on December 31, 2017. With us on the call representing the Company are Ronan O'Caoimh, Chief Executive Officer; and Kevin Tansley, Chief Financial Officer. At the conclusion of today's prepared remarks, we will open the call for a question-and-answer session. But before we begin with prepared remarks, we submit for the record the following statement: Statements made by the management team of Trinity Biotech during the course of this conference call that are not historical facts, are considered to be forward-looking statements subject to risks and uncertainties. The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 provides the safe harbor for such forward-looking statements. The words believe, expect, anticipates, estimate, will and other similar statements of expectation identify forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned that such forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, including but not limited to, the results of research and development efforts, the effect of regulations by the United States Food and Drug Administration and other agencies, the impact of competitive products, product development commercialization and technological difficulties, and other risks detailed in the Company's periodic reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Forward-looking statements reflect management's analysis only as of today. The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly release the results of any revision to these forward-looking statements. With that, let me turn the call over to Kevin Tansley, Chief Financial Officer, for a review of the results. After Kevin's remarks, we will hear from Ronan O'Caoimh on his review of the quarter and the year. After which, we’ll open the call for your questions. Kevin?

Thank you very much, Joe. Today, I'll take you through the results for quarter four and then results for the full year 2017. You will note that there are some impairments and once-off charges which are being recognized this quarter, which I will discuss in the detail at the end of the income statement segment. In the meantime, the metrics I quote exclude the impact of these items. I will begin with an outline of the results for the quarter and then move on to the results of the year as a whole afterwards. Beginning with our revenues, total revenues for the quarter were $24.6 million, and this compares to $23.7 million in quarter four of 2016, thus giving an increase for the quarter close to 4%. Ronan will provide more details on the revenues for the quarter and the year as a whole later in the call. So I'll then move on and discuss the other aspects of the income statement. The gross margin for the quarter was 41.5%, compared to 40% last year. While this represents an improvement in the comparative periods, it is lower than we would have seen in more recent quarters. And this is due; firstly, to the ongoing impact of exchange rate move impact on distributor pricing which is something we would refer to speaking of before. And secondly, there is the impact of Infectious Diseases sales to China, which have significantly lower margin than average. China being a lower priced market and also one in which we sell through our distributor as opposed to in the U.S. where we sell directly on hands to earn better margins. Moving on to our indirect costs, our R&D expenses for the quarter of $1.5 million was higher than the $1.3 million we reported in 2016. However…

I am going to review our revenues for the quarter four briefly and then I'll review revenues for the year before opening the call to question-and-answer session. Our revenues for quarter four were $24.6 million compared with $23.7 million, which is an increase of 3.7%. Point-of-Care revenues were $3.8 million, which was 3% lower than the $3.9 million recorded in the prior year quarter. Clinical laboratory revenues were $20.7 million compared with $19.7 million, which is an increase of 5% over the prior quarter. The impact during the quarter of the cull of our MicroTrak and Bartels infectious disease products amounted to $750,000. Absent this factor, our clinical laboratory business demonstrated organic growth during the quarter of 9%, with our diabetes performing particularly strongly with growth of 15% when compared to the prior quarter. Now to look at the year as a whole, our revenues for 2017 were $99.1 million compared with $99.6 million in the prior year, which is a decrease of 0.5%. However, as you factor in this $3 million impact for the year of the cull of the MicroTrack and Bartels products, the organic growth rate for the year is 2.6%. Our Point-of-Care revenues for the year were $16.8 million which were down 1% from $16.9 million last year. Our U.S. HIV revenues decreased 11% year-on-year and this decrease is the same by the fact that all the cull spend in the U.S. on HIV testing continues to decrease. Meanwhile in Africa, our sales increased by 5% during the year. For more than 15 years, we had more than 90% of the African confirmatory markets and we believe that we will continue to do so, given the status of our product as gold standard. However, we have not valid to HIV screening product, which will be launch…

Certainly, sir. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] The first question will come from Jim Sidoti of Sidoti & Company. Please go ahead.

Can you give us an update on the Swedish facility with assuming the charges in the quarter, should we take that to mean that, that facility now is completely consolidated?

Yes, I mean what we -- yes that we would have released all the employees mainly in the first quarter of the year with the remainder of the last few going in the second quarter of the year. Since then, we have been negotiating then with a number of suppliers, whereby we’ve certain contracts minima, et cetera, for example to do with instrumentation and also land -- the landlords in relation to the property that we had taken and then some other commercial obligations which we had. And in the last few weeks of the year, we resolved all those issues and made our final payments on those, as you can see on the release we were able to release an access provision. So obviously the arrangements that we have made at those suppliers and service providers was lower than the absolute legal maximum that could be in the case. And that basically draw the line on to that, we have essentially no further obligations in Sweden we’ve no facility there, we’ve no employee and I don’t expect that to me further cash.

So now that facility is consolidated, should we see any impact in 2018 on the SG&A line?

No, I wouldn’t expect to see any impact I mean that's people who are in the facility, they have been let go earlier in the year and we would have accrued their cost at the end of 2016 and the year for the remaining period as we're just talking people who are being paid in redundancy and then tidying up with plant and just extracting ourselves from that situations. So, there isn't really a saving if that's what you're looking for an '18 versus 17.

Okay. And then the pickup in revenue in 2019, I think you said was the diabetes instrument and also the new HIV test. What should we think about in terms of gross margins for those products and the impact on 2019 gross storage?

Yes, I think first of all, what I would say is, when thinking about gross margin obviously the higher the revenue, that tends to propel our gross margins upward -- because what we'll in fact be doing, it’s spreading our fix cost over a wider revenue base. So, just volume of itself tends to improve our gross margin. I think also when we start getting to the HIV screening side of the business, that will have an above average impact on our gross margin by virtue of the fact that we’ve got a very good cost of manufacture in relation to that products, and the pricing was not as good as the confirmatory testing market is still reasonable at this juncture. So, I would expect slight increase at year-on-year so between even between '17 and '18 potentially and then even '18 and '19.

[Operator Instructions] And your question will be from Paul Nouri of Noble Equity Fund. Please go ahead.

Just wondering, if foreign exchange helped results at all in the fourth quarter and what impact it supposed to have in 2018?

And that is virtually zero, there was a few things around about in relation to the FX, there is the impact on foreign currency -- of the previous foreign currency movements and distributor pricing. And that has some impact on gross margin, but the actual movements in rates on foreign currency denominated revenues and costs as it was virtually neutral. So, there was not a headwind nor a tailwind on that. Going forward, I think if your rates would stay as they are, we might get a small tailwind in relation to the -- our revenue line is -- probably wouldn’t have a huge impact on our profit line because in essence we've got a natural hedge within our income statement. So, if rates stay where they maybe a slight tailwinds, but other than that nothing.

Okay. And then excluding one-time shortages, what was the amortization expense in 2017 versus 2016?

The amortization expense in 2017 was $3.3 million and it was $2.8 million in '16.

Okay. Because once the Cardiac program was abandoned out under the impression that costs were going to fall at least somewhat in 2017, but they seem to have continued increasing. So maybe you can reconcile that for me?

We have that obviously the vast majority of the cost in relation to Meritas had been capitalized as development cost. There was some costs which were going through the income statement and what we have said at the time was, that a lot of those costs would remain in the P&L because we would have people evaluating what their options were for that particular platform. We also decided that we will redeploy some of the individuals throughout the Company. And then, there were other costs which are mainly third-party costs which did get eliminated, would have been offset by the other inflationary costs within the SG&A line.

Okay. And then, how should we think about profitability then going into 2018 while operating expenses rise with revenue? Or what are some of the dynamics?

The majority of our operating expenses are fixed in nature. So we don't think there is going to be a huge increase, if revenues do increase. So obviously the key thing is in terms of what the revenue is going to be? Ronan would have outlined that to think about things in terms of zero to low-single digit growth. If you are to take that the lower end of that, which will be the zero end of that. I still think we'll get some improvement in gross margin for no other reason that mix didn't quite help with this year and we would have maybe modest increases in our SG&A costs. And we'd hopefully get a modest enough increase on operating profits. And if we go up to the sort of low-single digit level say for example $99 million or $102 million, you would be maybe seeing an operating profit moving somewhere like $5.4 million $5.5 million at the moment around $7 million $7.5 million maybe a little bit higher. It's quite a leverage effect as you get top line growth notwithstanding the fact that it isn't at such a modest level. So to say, we can go from that $5.5 million of operating profit with 99 to maybe 7.5, 7.7 in with $102 million.

Okay. And then I think if I read it correctly, capital expenditures were $4.5 million for the quarter which seems a little high. But what was the factor behind that?

I was similar enough I mean if you look at last year's number in quarter four which would have nothing from Meritas, it was broadly in line with just a little bit higher. We did have some expenditure in relation to our Brazilian plant, which we incurred during the quarter. And other than that it would have been broadly in line with what we would have seen before.

[Operator Instructions] And I'm showing no additional questions. Mr. O'Caoimh, I'll hand it back to you for your closing remarks.

Thank you very much. We'll close the call now and look forward to talking to you at our next conference call. So thank you very much and good afternoon.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, the conference has concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. At this time, you may disconnect your lines.