Question-and-Answer Session
[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Bob Labick with CJS Securities.
Robert Labick - CJS Securities
Good morning.
William G. Dorey - President and Chief Executive Officer
Hi Bob.
Robert Labick - CJS Securities
First I want to say congratulations to Bill Barton. It's been a pleasure working with you, and really have enjoyed and learned a lot from you as well. So, from everyone here at CJS, congratulations and we are all a little jealous for you.
William E. Barton - Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Thanks Bob.
Robert Labick - CJS Securities
Just getting over to business, I'd like to ask about Granite East. Bill, you've mentioned, for the last few months that there's been good visibility in outlook for 2008 gross profit. I was wondering if you could just give us a little more detail on that visibility. Is it because several projects are at the 60% complete and therefore that's when you usually have the best visibility or just give us a sense of your confidence in that gross profit outlook for 2008 on Granite East?
William G. Dorey - President and Chief Executive Officer
Hi Bob, I'm going to... I'll give you a brief answer to that. I think it might be appropriate to let Mike provide you with his insight as well. I mean there is no question we've gone through a really bad patch with our large projects. It took longer to get it turned around I think than any of us believed it would. But we have done a lot of hard work at Granite, particularly from the people involved in those projects to get our backlog in order to work through the projects that were providing us with the grief, to get our forecasts in order so that we would not be faced with continued write downs. And all that has occurred over the last couple of years. It took some time, it took some? I think some really tough decisions on the part of a lot of people to get us where we are. But the fact is we don't have a lot of work in our backlog that we don't think is going to be profitable. We've shared some of those numbers with you in the past relative to the amount of work that's forecast to breakeven and that number keeps going down, and the work that we have, we think has the potential to deliver very strong profitability.
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