Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) And your first question will come from the line of Troy Lahr – Stifel Nicolaus.
Troy Lahr – Stifel Nicolaus
Just a little bit on the last comment that you made about the business in the regional coming down. Can you maybe frame that for us? I know commercial’s 35% of your business, but how much of that is regional in business versus large commercial Boeing Airbus type work?
Joseph Berenato
The majority of it is Boeing type work. We’ve got some regional work on a variety of aircraft like Cessna, like the Embraer 171-90, like the Eclipse. But many of these programs are building or were building, so that the majority of our commercial work was still primarily with the large commercial jets.
Troy Lahr – Stifel Nicolaus
Okay. So I mean regional business, is that maybe 10% of your sales?
Joseph Berenato
Maybe 10 to 15%.
Troy Lahr – Stifel Nicolaus
Okay and then what are your expectations for Boeing production in 2009? I mean, it looks like pretty stable first part and then maybe back part is called into question? Or how are you thinking about that?
Joseph Berenato
I’ll let Tony Reardon tackle that one.
Anthony Reardon
First of all, we’re still – I think Boeing and most of the operations are still recovering from the strike so we would anticipate that Boeing is going to, first of all they’ve projected 480 aircraft for the year, so that’s about a 40 aircraft per month, which we would assume that the 737 would be the largest contributor there.
Now before the strike, they were running at between 31 and 34 aircraft. So we anticipate that we’ll be slow through the first quarter, pick up in the second quarter and then be solid for the rest of the year. We think that what’s happening at Boeing is the backlog’s being filled in for those that are pushing out with other customers. As late as July of last year, they were talking about having the aircraft in some sectors over sold. So we think that should be relatively solid.
Joseph Berenato
Troy, one additional comment: Airbus announced this past week that they were reducing their A-320 build rate by two aircraft a month and that would start up in about October of ’09. So that leads us to believe that the Boeing 737 build rate, as Tony suggested, is going to be pretty solid through ’09, and the first quarter slow period that he made reference to ties to the after effects of the strike where Boeing is building back their build rate.
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