Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Jason Armstrong – Goldman Sachs
Jason Armstrong – Goldman Sachs
You talked about balance sheet positioning and wanting to be below the low end of the historical range at least for the near future. Maybe just take the other side, why wouldn’t you come out and be a little bit more aggressive at this point? This seems to be what the company’s been positioning for, for a long time, conservative balance sheet, take advantage of opportunities when potentially credit markets dislocate and maybe get devaluation of other assets. Step us through the logic there.
Second, on the revenue guidance as you think about ’09 you went into really good detail around the granularity behind those forecasts and how you do the bottoms up approach. Can you help us think about the phase in through ’09 is this something that should be lumpy in the first half of the year given the visibility you have or is this something the type of revenue up tick you’re thinking about is sort of smooth up tick throughout the year?
Jim Taiclet
You said the key word in your first part of your question which was asset availability and the prices thereof. In difficult times we might have the good fortune of seeing assets move into our price range versus the quality that we see in them. When and if that happens we want to be able to act. No one really knows how long the credit markets are going to be in their dislocated position as far as access to capital and so we want to make sure we’ve got the capability in this current time to make sure that we’ve got an ability to go after those assets if they come available.
We will, as I said very specifically in the call, we’re going to monitor the access to credit that’s out there, the pricing of assets and strategic opportunities that we have been cultivating. We’re going to do the same thing we’ve always done which is keep our options open and if repurchasing shares is the best activity at that given point in time we’re going to do that too.
The second part of your question which was the ’09 forecast, we think it will be very level spread through the course of the four quarters of 2009. This year was pretty level spread as well so I think we’re going to see that continue in 2009.
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