Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Opeartor Instructions) Your first question comes from the line of Ann Gurkin – Davenport & Co.
Ann Gurkin – Davenport & Co.
I wanted to start with your comment about nearing completion of shipping in some regions. Can you tell us the percentage of your annual shipping volume that you have completed now?
Hartwell Roper
Ann, we don’t have a precise percentage. But we know proportionally, we have shipped more tobacco out of the most of the regions – those are crops we handle in those regions – in the current year. So we just, proportionally, have shipped a lot more tobacco than we did at same point in time last year.
Ann Gurkin – Davenport & Co.
Okay. What was shipped in the fourth quarter, some of that was pulled into the third quarter? Is that fair?
Hartwell Roper
That’s right.
Ann Gurkin – Davenport & Co.
Okay.
Karen M.L. Whelan
If you just look at, for example, places like Africa, where the crops are smaller, we didn’t simply reduce the same percentage of our shipments by the percentage that the crop is lower. We are still shipping at a normal pace, or faster, but there is less crop to ship, so some of them are nearly finished. And you can see that in our inventory reduction.
Ann Gurkin – Davenport & Co.
So it’s more the crop size than customers pulling volume forward, because are they nervous?
Karen M.L. Whelan
I would never characterize our customers as nervous.
Ann Gurkin – Davenport & Co.
Okay. Sales were up 12%. Can you give us the percentage of that 12% that was due to timing of shipments? That’s another way of asking.
Hartwell Roper
Again we just don’t look at it that way; we don’t spend any time to try to figure that out. Maybe we should, but we don’t.
Ann Gurkin – Davenport & Co.
Okay.
Harwell Roper
I would suspect that good chunk of it is, though.
Ann Gurkin – Davenport & Co.
The chunk would be 50%?
Karen M.L. Whelan
Maybe even more than that. A very large part of the change in Other Tobacco Operations is shipment timing.
Ann Gurkin – Davenport & Co.
Okay. Can give me the amount of the gains from the sale of the investment in the oriental joint venture?
Hartwell Roper
I don’t know if we’ve disclosed that before or not. Our share of it was less then $2 million.
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