The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company (NYSE:SMG) Q4 2015 Earnings Conference Call - Final Transcript

Good day and welcome everyone to the Scotts Miracle-Gro Q4 Earnings Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Jim King. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Cecilia. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining the Scotts Miracle-Gro year-end conference call. With me here in Marysville are Jim Hagedorn, our Chairman and CEO; Randy Coleman, our CFO; Mike Lukemire, our Chief Operating Officer; and several other members of the management team.

In a moment, Jim will share his thoughts about our 2015 results as well as some of the headlines entering our upcoming Analyst Day in New York. And Randy will cover the fourth quarter and full year financials as well as provide more detailed look at the 2016 guidance that we outlined in this morning's press release. After our prepared remarks, we'll take your questions.

As I just referenced, we're hosting an Analyst & Investor Day event on December 10 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York. We expect the presentations or the presentation portion of that meeting to begin at 9:00 AM. We'll work through the morning and then, hold a Q&A session as well as a lunch with the entire management team. We're still working on some of the details and we'll communicate more to you in the weeks ahead. If you are interested in attending the meeting, you can register by visiting our IR website, investor.scotts.com or by calling our Investor Relations department at 937-578-5968.

Given the proximity of our Analyst Day meeting to today's call, our intent this morning is to not provide a great deal of color on our 2016 operating plans and we ask that you keep that in mind during the Q&A session. And in the interest of time, we also ask that you limit your time to one question and a one follow-up.

With that, let's move on to today's call. I want to remind everyone that our comments this morning will contain forward-looking statements and as such, actual results may differ materially. Due to that risk, Scotts Miracle-Gro encourages investors to review the risk factors outlined in our Form 10-K, which is filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. As a final reminder, this call is being recorded and an archived version of the call will be available on the Investor Relations website.

With that, let me turn the call over to Jim Hagedorn to discuss our performance.

Thanks, Jim. Good morning, everyone.

We'll keep our comments brief this morning given the fact that we have our Analyst Day meeting in just five weeks. I want to spend a few minutes sharing my thoughts about our strong performance in fiscal 2015 and then outline what you should expect to hear from us next month. At the outset, I should state the obvious. Fiscal 2015 was the best year we've had in a long time. So I need to start by congratulating Mike Lukemire and his operating team.

As an