The Company’s global Health, Safety and Environmental management systems implemented in 2013 resulted in a steady reduction in incident rates. Our total recordable incident rate has dropped significantly throughout the year on a global basis and is a testament to our em- ployees’ commitment to these programs. This is only the beginning – maintaining a safe work place and protecting the environment is a primary objective of the Company now and in the future. 

Dril-Quip  continues to move from a Quality Control system focused on inspecting out non-conforming parts at the back-end of the manufac - turing process to a Quality Assurance program that assesses design and manufacturing risk. Data from this assessment is used to create front-end controls to avoid non-conformances in our pursuit to produce conforming parts every time with no rework. This effort was aggressively moved upstream into the product design and manufacturing processes utilizing Advanced Product Quality Planning (APQP) tools and was introduced in Houston, Aberdeen and Singapore operations during 2014. Cross-functional teams laid the groundwork for an ongoing effort to ensure that the Company’s products are safely manu- factured to our normal high quality standards while minimizing non-conformances, resulting in reduced costs and improved delivery times. Customers have indicated that the Company will be setting a new standard for quality systems once the APQP process is fully implemented. 

In 2014, we repurchased $190 million of Company stock, which is almost double the aggregate dollar amount that the Company has repurchased since going public. More than half of those repurchases in 2014 occurred in the latter half of the year after our stock price started to decline. 

