Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions). Your first question comes from Paul Sankey – Deutsche Bank Securities
Paul Sankey – Deutsche Bank Securities
Uzi, you said a bit about your strategy there but can you just talk a little bit more about what you're planning for Delek in the past? You've talked about some fairly specific growth ideas you've had in terms of earnings growth and everything else. Can you just update us on how you see the current environment and how you want to play it? Thanks.
Ezra Uzi Yemin
Thanks for the question. Let me divide the answer to two parts if you will. First one, as we all know, current conditions are pretty rough. And the cracks are pretty depressed and we all feel the pain here. However, if we are at the bottom, we're somewhere around the bottom. And we feel that this is the right time for us to start thinking about making a move to acquire more refining assets. We don't want to stay a single asset or 1.3 – well, right now we have 30%, 35% supply and we don't want to stay like that.
And we think that similar to this situation when we bought Tyler in 2005 when the market wasn't so good, it's pretty similar now. And we're planning to be more aggressive than we were in the past to acquire assets. As you well know, there are several assets on the market and we intend to look at them seriously.
On the retail side, since we now are behind last year's great margins or fuel margins, prices are coming down as well, so we look at that as well. You probably know that on our balance sheet there are more than $100 million cash. The purpose of that loan from Delek Group and we really appreciate their help with not only to create liquidity but to create a situation that we can move fast into an acquisition mode if we decided that this is the right time.
Paul Sankey – Deutsche Bank Securities
Uzi, remind me what you're prepared to do in terms of leverage last time and how much leverage you'd be prepared to take on this time?
Ezra Uzi Yemin
We didn't change our long-term strategy, not more than 2.5 times EBITDA at any given time. So it won't be more than 2.5 times EBITDA.
Paul Sankey – Deutsche Bank Securities
- To read the full transcript on Seeking Alpha, click here »



