Republic Services, Inc. Q2 2009 Earnings Call Transcript

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2009-07-30 11:21:11.0

Tags: Call Transcript, Earnings, Debt, Credit Suisse Group AG, Republic Services Inc., Personal Finance, Operational Accounting, Investment, Financial Services, Financial Accounting, Finance, Seeking Alpha

Question-and-Answer Session

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question-and-answer session. (Operator Instructions). The first question is from Hamzah Mazari from Credit Suisse.

Hamzah Mazari - Credit Suisse

Just, could you touch on, given synergies and cost saves and your proceeds from asset sales and free cash flow guidance going up, you likely expect the faster deleveraging. You touched on how much debt you're going to pay down this year. Would you comment a little more on capital allocation going forward, specifically in 2010 and 2011, how to think about that?

Jim O'Connor

Right now, I think as the investment community realizes, we're committed to paying down debt. And our commitment is to pay down $2 billion over the next three to four years. And you know that is where we're currently at.

As any good business, as we meet quarterly, we continue to review our cash allocation, to debt and to our equity holders. But today we are committed, all the divestiture proceeds have been used, to pay down debt, a significant portion of the cash flows other than that are already committed to dividend, will be used, that's the balance of the $600 million that we are anticipating in '09. And, again, we're going to continue to reevaluate and revisit that, with the Board over the next year-and-a-half.

Hamzah Mazari - Credit Suisse

And just a follow-up question. Could you touch on volume declines a little more specifically, on whether you're seeing volume stablization, you didn't talk about that in the press release; also, on your commercial business.

And could you give us a sense of, you talked about residential being down low-single digits. Would you give us a sense of what commercial is down, what industrial is down right now? How that compares to last year, and what you're seeing in July, in those business lines.

Jim O'Connor

Sure. Sequentially, I think we're seeing the business to be relatively flat. Okay? Year-over-year, second quarter, we're looking at increasing volume losses due to service declines in commercial, continued weakness in the industrial collection business, which is predominantly construction-related of about 18%. Commercial is now running at about 5.5% to 6%.

Residential is low-single digit as you mentioned, but escalating over the first quarter, we are looking at about 2.5% to 3% of volume decline there. Disposal, obviously related to weakness in the collection business, and volumes in general in the construction market, down about 16% to 17%. And the (inaudible) is roughly flat.

 

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