Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions). And your first question comes from the line of Greg McGowan of Sidoti & Company. Please proceed.
Gregory McGowan - Sidoti & Company
Hello. Good morning everybody.
Russ Strobel
Good morning.
Gregory McGowan - Sidoti & Company
Very quickly before I get to utility, I just want to ask about, Tropical. A lot stronger than anticipated given the tough economic environment that we're in, can you kind of give a little bit more color as to what's happening there operationally. Is it kind of any kind of mix issues. Is it primarily the acquisition for Caribtrans that really helped the margins there?
Richard Hawley
Yeah, thanks. Good morning Greg. The -- a couple of things. Tropical did finish stronger. I mean its 2 to $3 million probably better than we thought at the time of the third quarter call. But we -- a couple of things. We indicated that volumes have been soft. They continue to be soft.
While we're retaining our market share, just the over all market is down given the economics in the area and that has not gone away. I mentioned a couple of times that Tropical had taken actions on the personnel side, looking at ways of trimming cost, adjusting shipping schedules, trying to get rate increases; although those are difficult trying to get those in markets where it made sense et cetera. And what we saw is the impact of those actions and some softening in the fuel costs, in the fourth quarter more than we had anticipated. Those factors combined to let Tropical have a better finish to the year than we anticipated. But again those -- the efforts to manage margins will continue into '09, but we also expect the volume issues to continue into '09.
Gregory McGowan - Sidoti & Company
Okay, but it sounds like for most parts though its picking out operational costs. Its not just fuel necessarily, but it's really a lot of the overhead operating costs out of businesses, is that right?
Richard Hawley
Yeah, it's all of those things together.
Gregory McGowan - Sidoti & Company
Okay, and with that in mind, if you kind of go the guidance and talk about, maybe what you're expecting for the utility versus Tropical versus OEV?
Richard Hawley
Sure, I think as we said of the businesses OEV is the one we're expecting to be up. The retail should be pretty close to prior year, interchange should do a little better as I indicated. We pushed some income from '08 into '09 in later year's with the mark-to-market accounting that goes on. Retail, write around maybe a little bit down from the prior year.
- To read the full transcript on Seeking Alpha, click here »
