Fleetwood Enterprises, Inc. F2Q09 (Qtr End 10/26/08) Earnings Call Transcript

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2008-11-25 12:53:15.0

Tags: General Electric Co., Call Transcript, Earnings, Fleetwood Enterprises Inc., Strategy, Financial Accounting, Management, Finance, Seeking Alpha

Question-and-Answer Session

Operator

(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from the line of Kathryn Thompson – Avondale Partners

Kathryn Thompson – Avondale Partners

On the RV side, I know that GE has been scaling back its floor plan financing for the remainder of 2008, how much of your business or end customers’ business are with GE for floor plan financing and what is your perspective on that and how can you make up the shortfall?

Paul Eskritt

I don’t have the numbers in front of me as far as a GE breakout. They’re obviously a fairly large wholesale floor plan lender. It seems to me that they are scaling back. I think from what we’ve gathered so far they’re just being very focused in on each dealer as units get shipped or before units get shipped whether they floor them or not. Obviously everybody is in a situation where they want to cut their risks and so we’ve seen that tighten up significantly and not necessarily only with GE but other floor plan lenders.

I don’t think there’s really a way to make that up. I think its across all of the other OEMs in the business and its really with most lenders that we’ve seen a tightening up of credit lending.

Kathryn Thompson – Avondale Partners

I had heard that between GE, B of A, and Textron, GE is maybe a third of total floor planning dollars for the industry, is that ballpark sound right to you?

Paul Eskritt

Its probably across the industry probably closer to 20% to 25%, but still a significant player.

Andrew Griffiths

And we probably have a greater leaning towards B of A in our particular case given our FFS relationship and obviously the evolution of the lending business over at Banc of America.

Kathryn Thompson – Avondale Partners

How is that relationship going and can you attribute any improvement and [towables] due to that new relationship?

Paul Eskritt

Overall our relationship is really good. We’ve had a lot of past standing relationships with Banc of America. We’ve worked really well together. I think the deals with the dealers that we’ve put together, so its been a good method for I think both of us to do a lot of information sharing and working together to improve the overall bottom line of our and their business. It hasn’t on the trailer side of the business. I would say very little of that is attributed to the FFS relationship, virtually all of it, if not all of it is I think due to a lot of the changes we’ve made in our products over the last 12 to 18 months and I think our dealers are starting to see us impact the marketplace.

 

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