Updated at 2:15 with details from annual meeting.

The soft global economy took a bite out of sales at Emerson at the end of 2011, and it has the company lowering its sights for the rest of 2012.

The company said profits fell 22 percent in its fiscal first quarter, to $381 million, and sales were off 4 percent, to $5.3 billion. The figures - for the three months ending Dec. 31 - came in a bit below Wall Street expectations, and the company's stock price was down 2.7 percent at market close on Tuesday.

Meanwhile Emerson trimmed its outlook for the rest of the year, too, projecting sales growth of 2 to 4 percent in 2012, down from the 4 to 6 percent it was estimating just three months ago.

Emerson makes a wide range of products - everything from garbage disposals to deep-sea drilling equipment - and sells them across the world, making the Ferguson-based manufacturer an indicator of sorts for the entire global economy.

It blamed the lackluster first-quarter results on one-time factors ranging from floods in Thailand to uncertainty over the AT&T/T-Mobile merger. But bubbling beneath all of it, chief executive David Farr told shareholders at today's annual meeting, was the general global slowdown.

"The economic environment around the world in 2012 is a lot more tenuous than it was a year ago," he said. "We're watching that very closely."

While Farr said he's reasonably confident in the state of the U.S. economy, the United States is home to less than 45 percent of Emerson's sales. Most of the rest comes from Europe and Asia, and they each have their own kind of struggles.

The debt crisis has Europe "very stressed," Farr said, and will likely take a decade or more to play out.

While he said the picture is looking better than it did six months ago, Emerson still plans to downsize its operations in Western Europe, likely closing plants.

"The European economy is going to struggle," Farr said. "We need to stay ahead of that."

Meanwhile, in China, rising labor costs have Emerson looking at ways to increase automization and shift manufacturing to cheaper inland regions - or out of China altogether to lower-cost countries such as Thailand and the Philippines.

That can come with costs, too, however. Emerson said it lost $300 million worth of sales in the quarter when flooding in Thailand knocked out a key supplier. Farr said the company learned its lesson, and has shifted production elsewhere.

"We made a mistake, allowing one of our key suppliers to locate in a floodplain," Farr said. "That won't happen again."

Emerson said it's getting the Thai plant back up and running, and expects to recover most of that $300 million in the current quarter.

Also, at the company's annual meeting, 77 percent of shareholders voted in favor of a proposal to declassify Emerson's board, meaning all company directors would be elected annually instead of serving staggered three-year terms. A proposal to implement that change will be voted on next year.