Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Matt Duncan with Stephens Inc.
Matt Duncan – Stephens Inc.
Yes, the first question I’ve got, Mike, I’m just maybe looking for a little bit more discussion around the AST business. You know, the business obviously was down on the construction side this quarter. I’m curious if maybe you can give us a little bit of insight to some of the projects that were delayed out of calendar ’08 and into calendar 2009. If I look at sort of the quarterly revenue run rate for that business on the construction side, is it sort of a new phase that you put in this quarter? Could we maybe see further deterioration of that revenue stream?
Michael J. Bradley
Well, I think maybe - let me talk about the AST market in general, Matt. Fourth quarter obviously was a difficult period for the financial markets and credit markets. And essentially what we began to see is that some projects that we had expected to be rewarded were put on hold and essentially deferred into calendar 2009. What we see today in the bid flow for AST is still very positive.
What we think has really happened here is there was just a deferral as we got through the end of the year and companies re-evaluated their capital spending plans. So I think that, you know, we view it right now as a period that will recover. To the extent, it’s hard to predict right now. Again, I think a lot of it depends on what happens in the economy going forward.
But there are some very interesting store projects still on the books and being planned. So I would not necessary take this as a new level. I think what we saw is the deferral and generally we would have expected material revenues to show up first. And because of the deferrals those material revenues did not show up. And, again, as we have stated before, the revenues in our AST business have always been lumpy.
One, you get awarded projects, you see a bump up in revenues because of material purchases and then, you know, you may see a quarter where there are no material purchases. So it’s always been relatively lumpy.
Matt Duncan – Stephens Inc.
Okay. Appreciate the commentary there. Looking at the downstream repair and maintenance business a little bit I was surprised that those revenues were flat sequentially on what is typically a seasonally strong quarter with the fall turnaround season. You know, maybe if you could talk about the impact of the hurricanes on the fall turnaround season and if there’s something else in addition to that that influenced those revenues, you know, to be flat sequentially, if you could talk about that, that’d be great.
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