Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you. (Operator Instructions) Your first question is from the line of Arnie Ursaner with CJS Securities; please state your question.
Arnie Ursaner - CJS Securities
Good morning. Most of my questions relate to backlog. There’s several questions related to that. How much of the backlog do you anticipate shipping in Q1? What have your order rates been since year end? What sort of book-to-bill are you running; and what sort of capacity utilization does your backlog and current work enable you to operate at?
Don Brock
Arnie, in January our backlog slipped about $10 million further down. In February we expect the backlog to increase. We have started to receive a number of orders both at Roadtec and at Astec for plants and pavers and milling machines. We still have not seen much improvement in the orders at companies like Peterson and in the underground, we haven’t seen much effect on that, and they are still extremely slow.
As we go forward, everybody says they’ve got more quotes out than they’ve ever had; there’s a tremendous amount of quoting, but there’s still a lot of quite customers who want to see the effect before they spend the money.
I talked to a customer this morning; he said ?you better have a lot of finished goods, because it’s going to explode on you here about the second or third quarter, because nobody’s been spending anything and they’re going to need equipment.? I hope he’s correct and we’re not quite that optimistic but we feel pretty good that the stimulus will have a real positive effect for us.
In regard to capacity, we are able to cut back on capacity. If you take overtime, in the Astec Inc. operation, the man hours they work, January-to-January was about off 30% from year-over-year, but they really haven’t laid off anyone yet; they just cut back practically all of the overtime hours, but some of our utilization in some of the companies is very low.
In some of the aggregate and in the Peterson operation, their business is very slow and our utilization is very low. In the Asphalt side of it, if you consider the ability to throw back over time, our utilization is probably in the 70% range here and as low as 60% at Roadtec.
Arnie Ursaner - CJS Securities
If I can ask you a separate question, the CEO of Terex, yesterday indicated that his construction and road building units either have to be fixed or sold. How do you see their problems impacting your outlook for the upcoming year, and does that create some opportunities for you?
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