World Fuel Services Corporation Q3 2008 Earnings Call Transcript

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2008-11-24 09:34:13.0

Tags: Risk, Call Transcript, Customer, Earnings, Market, Balance Sheets, Marketing Research, Strategy, Security, Financial Statements, Financial Accounting, Finance, Marketing, Management, Seeking Alpha, World Fuel Services Corp.

Question-and-Answer Session

Operator

(Operator instructions) Your first question comes from the line of Jon Chappell from JP Morgan.

Jon Chappell – JP Morgan

Thank you, good afternoon guys. Paul, you gave some color at the beginning. I was just looking for a little bit more detail. The way I understood it, your higher risk customers were your higher margin customers, needed to charge them more to take on that risk. In this quarter, your margins are through the roof, and you’ve improved your counter-party risk or your exposure towards quality customers, how are you able to kind of get the best-case scenario out of both of them?

Paul Stebbins

Focus, I mean you’ve got an entire marketing team that’s trying to navigate one of the most extraordinary operating environments in the history, certainly unprecedented, and I would say that we are, we take a lot of comfort as I mentioned in my opening remarks about having made a strategic decision a couple of years ago to really concentrate our sales and marketing efforts on a best-in-class sort of part of the market.

So we never made a migration deeper into the pool because we decided that really our value-added services were going to be appreciated by these large global fleets, that that should be the focus of our effort, and I think that by more deeply entangling ourselves with those customers by our better understanding of the markets, we were able to basically deliver a good result, and also add competitive value to those customers and allow them a great deal of comfort navigating a difficult market.

So I think it’s just a combination of all of these factors coming together, a complex and volatile market, a fact that the competitive landscape has changed because in a market where there’s a tremendous amount of focus on counter-party risk and liquidity and balance sheet and visibility and transparency, some of the more, some of the privately-held groups that perhaps don’t have that same visibility were being challenged. Certainly, everybody is concerned about credit and counter-party risk in this market, which is a huge competitive differentiator for us given our transparency and the strength of our position.

So there is a value to what we provide, and I think it’s a matter of just understanding that we can deliver that service, we can add the value to both customers and suppliers, and deliver a good result at the same time.

 

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