Genuine Parts Company Q2 2009 Earnings Call Transcript

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2009-07-16 14:22:18.0

Tags: Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc., Call Transcript, Earnings, Pricing Strategy, Automotive Group, Chassis Product, Unit Sale, Pricing, Marketing Research, Marketing, Seeking Alpha, Genuine Parts Co.

Question-and-Answer Session

Operator

(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from John Murphy - Merrill Lynch.

John Murphy - Merrill Lynch

The auto operating margins were obviously a lot better than we were expecting and pretty impressive in the quarter given that the weakness. I was just wondering if you could break out, I mean actually, I look back and they haven’t been this good since the second quarter of 2004.

If you could sort of just breakout how much of this is cost cutting, how much of it is pricing and how much of it may be sort of a reemphasis your relationships with accounts and maybe product positioning. If you could just kind of bucket the magnitude between those three factors. I just really trying to understand if this is a sustainable level going forward.

Jerry Nix

John, this is Jerry. I’ll take that. The Automotive Group’s got started cutting their expenses earlier than the other businesses because their revenue was slowing prior to the slowdown in the industrial and the electrical side. So some of that is they had taken some severance and all that earlier than the others.

Another part of that is we sold our rotating electrical business last year in the second half of the year and that was a lower margin business, benefits thus the reason for getting out of it and so it’s a combination of those factors, but we have always been in the automotive sector, been able to operate much more efficiently there and slowdown revenue and I think this is just a reflection of that.

John Murphy - Merrill Lynch

When we think as the pricing adjustments that are being made in that segment, where is that? I remember in the last call, you were seeing some pricing pressure from competition in some larger items like rotors and stuff like that. Is that the still the case? The pricing adjustment that you've made, have you seen any type of competitive response there?

Tom Gallagher

I’ll try to answer that one John. Rotors was one example, ride control is another where we made some adjustments. Chassis products is another, some chemical product as well as some temperature control and what we've seen in terms of the results is that our unit sales on these product categories are now starting to really pickup and to get up to some pretty impressive levels.

We implemented ride control at the end of April and our June unit sales were up in the mid teens. We did chassis at the end of May and we saw impressive results in our June unit sales for chassis and the same can be said for the other two, the temp control and the chemical.

 

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