Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from John Healy – North Coast Research.
John Healy – North Coast Research
I wanted to get your guys’ thoughts kind of on the long term goals for the company. Last quarter your goal was a 4% return on asset at some point in the future. I was hoping you could just kind of update us on those goals and maybe from a time frame standpoint, how we should think about the progress towards that goal and maybe understand in what time frame that might be achievable.
Scott L. Thompson
I think as you know originally we set a goal of 4% return on assets, $350 per car per month were kind of the two main goals, and then a lesser goal but also certainly on the page to be the lowest operating cost entity in the business, at least from the public companies, we can monitor those.
In talking about those three goals, we’re moving more rapidly towards the 4% return on asset goal than we thought we quite frankly would and we’re feeling very comfortable with that goal and may have to look at that goal sometime in the future. But I think that goal is achievable within a reasonable period of time. The $350 per car per month again we set that goal when our car costs were $400 plus a month. It’s clear to us that $350 per car per month, we’re at that goal obviously at $315 for the quarter, and we expect to be under that goal in 2010. So we feel very good about that goal.
From an operating cost standpoint, we work on that every day. There are a lot of cost initiatives that are in works and that’s an ongoing cultural issue that we’re going to continue to have to work on our cost structure to keep it very competitive.
Operator
Your next question comes from Michael Millman – Millman Research Associates.
Michael Millman – Millman Research Associates
Could you talk about what your revenue per day looks like on a spot basis and in particular, give us some color on where the contract business is and what renegotiations are coming up in the near and maybe not so near term and what we can expect from those.
H. Clifford Buster III
In the third quarter the spot price RPD has been very strong. The contract piece has been flat to I’d say slightly negative. Going forward we continue to see the spot price is positive and we expect the contracted RPD to be a positive starting in the fourth quarter. I think as you know from our presentation about 31% of our business is contracted business and we’re beginning to see some firmness in pricing in that area.
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