Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you, sir. (Operator instructions) Our first question is George Staphos with Bank of America-Merrill Lynch. Please go ahead.
George Staphos – Bank of America-Merrill Lynch
Thanks. Hi, everyone, good morning to you. I guess the first question I had within Wood Products is, if you think about the next two to three quarters and eliminate the impact of seasonality and whatever trend we may see in the market per se, what kind of incremental benefit do you think is possible to be seen from your own efforts within the business from an earnings power standpoint, not necessarily next quarter, but say over the next two or three quarters?
Tom Gideon
Well, George, we have seen sustained progress as we rescaled our business over the course of the last six months. And we did see significantly improved earnings from operation as well as cash usage throughout the second quarter. And in fact, I would note that for the month of June, we were still slightly negative from an earnings point of view, but with working capital reductions, we were cash positive. Now, we are the first to admit that one month is not a trend mate and that there is a lot of uncertainties still going forward. But July at this point looks similar to June, and we expect that we’re going to continue to move forward across all the actions that we’ve taken and what we need to do additional as market conditions warrant.
We are not waiting as others have mentioned for market conditions to improve or counting on that improvement, so we are going to adjust all of the levers that we have available to us to make this improvement occur. As we all know, sustainability at this level is going to be a function of what price is, what we do with respect to demand and volume, and of course, what we can do to continue to reduce our costs. So we continue to do the levers that we have, including deferring harvest, including further curtailments on our operations. We announced the closure of our Taylor, Louisiana sawmill, and of course we’ve taken additional staffing reductions, as I mentioned in the remarks, of about another 300 individuals throughout our organization. So our focus is going to remain on improving our cash usage, and we believe (inaudible) going to be on the basis of continued low levels of demand.
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