John K. Morgan – President and Chief Executive Officer
Thank you, Don and welcome everyone to our first quarter earnings call and happy new year. I will begin by briefly highlighting first quarter results and then Mark will provide a more detailed financial review. As always we will answer questions before concluding a call. Overall, I was pleased with quarter. Across our entire business including those pipeline process we began implementing two years ago, continued to gain momentum. We are targeting larger customers with a well defined set of capabilities. This is the result of insignificant growth involve transportation and industrial maintenance in markets and also a cross channels of distribution in particular with home improvement and automotive aftermarket retailers. Into thinking more strategically about accommodation or capabilities and how we can best serve the need of our customers.
Our recent success has been driven by three primary factors. Let me elaborate a bit on each to provide clarity as it relates to a long term strategy. First, over the past several years, we focused our teams on specific strategic and market such as transportation and industrial maintenance. The transportation market for our products has grown meaningfully as a result of new car sales, which has nearly doubled in production over the last few years. Average vehicle age, which is now nearly 12 years and miles driven which continues to increase. The industrial maintenance market is growing with improved GDP and increased employment.
Accommodation of these favorable market demographics exist differentiated and brought value proposition provides customers many advantages as compared to specialty competitors.
Today, more than 60% of our sales are to transportation industrial applications. Second, we continue to follow the demographic shift in janitorial and markets. Our investments in retail, distribution, and whole sale channels have allowed us to participate in shifting binding pattern for customers of Jan/San products. Third, we would not be in position we are in today without the incredible effort of the associates involved in our fire recovery app. The quality and speed of the recovery operation has been truly remarkable and has been instrumental in preserving business and strengthening relationships that with many of our customers. The combination of these factors have litigated a number of risks in our business and allows me to become increasingly optimistic about our future sales brands which I will speak to within few minutes.
First let me briefly highlight the quarter. Strength in our three major North American in markets drove record of first quarter net sales of $168 million thatrepresents 2% organic growth. On constant currency basis, net sales grew about 3% and excluding the impacts of the fire, net sales grew about 5%. Our transportation business increased driven by gains in our only end retail businesses. Our sales pipeline produced strong results with home improvement retailers including multiple promotions and the introduction of several new products. Our ZEP food specialist continued to gain traction on number of fronts including the introduction of new products and increased sales force capacity. Additionally our oil and gas specialist added nearly 300 new accounts in the quarter.
As a result of our top line success in the first quarter, our sales pipeline and progress we continue to make on our fire recovery effort and increasingly optimistic about our fiscal 2015 revenue expectations. Our success with these and other actions taken during the quarter have mitigated a number of risks allowing me to increase our revenue guidance to the full year. We now expect low single digit in net sales growth for fiscal 2015 compared to our previous expectation of flat net sales.
