Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question at this time, please press the 1 key on your touch key telephone. If your question has been answered and you wish to remove yourself from the queue, please press the # key. Our first question comes from John Healy from FTN Midwest.
John Healy - FTN Midwest Securities Corp.
Good morning guys. I wanted to ask you a question about pricing. You made a point to tell us all that pricing has been positive for you guys in the quarter, I want to hear your thoughts on how long you think that can continue and if you begin to see any sort of price degradation as the quarter went on or if you saw anything take place in the first month of 2QN1?
Jeffrey L. Wright
Well, we obviously see the market still being very competitive and new business pricing seems to be as competitive as it has been for some time. Again, because a lot of these decisions are made on a decentralized local level, I don’t have total disability to all the pricing that goes on but by contract we are allowed to be able to price and pass on our increases and that is part of the benefit of having the contract in place and so we fully expect to be able to price although it won’t be easy. We would expect to be able to continue to price on our existing business and we just have to be sensible and watch how we price our new business.
John Healy - FTN Midwest Securities Corp.
It seems like you guys are ahead of the curve this time with your actions on reducing facility and head counts, I’m trying to better understand what’s in your crystal ball there. You are making these changes and I am trying to understand in your mind how tough the environment gets, the changes you are making, what kind of organic growth are you thinking the industry or yourself are going to see maybe over the next 12 months or so?
Richard L. Marcantonio
This is Rick again, you know, I came in right in the middle, almost at the high point. There was a low point of our negative organic growth so I didn’t have much opportunity to influence ahead of plan or ahead of time what was going on four or five years ago. We basically have seen this coming for some time. We talked earlier in the previous calls about trends we saw in the automotive industry.
- To read the full transcript on Seeking Alpha, click here »
