Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from the line of Dan Eggers – Credit Suisse
Dan Eggers – Credit Suisse
I remember last quarter you talked about kind of a roundtable you had with your large industrial customers, have you convened such a meeting again since last quarter and the signs you are seeing of some restocking and restart in the third quarter, is that continuing on or was that a kind of a one time response to a tight inventory situation.
David Ratcliffe
Let me ask Paul to give you the latest update from that. We do, while I don’t know that we conducted a roundtable as such, we do have customer representatives that are assigned to each of our major accounts and the expectation is that we mine that data every single month just to make sure we’re doing the best job of gathering that intelligence. I’ll let Paul tell you sort of what we see and feel.
Paul Bowers
The roundtable that we had in July gave us some insight in terms of the weakness in that segment, industrial segment specifically, but when you look at this quarter we saw positive movements associated with the restocking of inventories and we also saw some positive movement associated with the exports.
When you look at our ports, primarily Mobile and Savannah, Savannah had a sequential quarter over quarter increase in exports by 10% so that is positive. However there are some indicators that says that they’ll go back to a normal level output for the remaining part of this year, not at a higher output that we saw in the third quarter.
Dan Eggers – Credit Suisse
And then on the O&M savings, the $0.06 in the quarter, in what sense of that do you see as being sustainable next year kind of assuming things get a little bit better, and how much of that is going to have to come back in employee wages and kind of things that were just avoided from a spending perspective this year.
Paul Bowers
When you look at the savings that we saw year to date, and O&M efficiencies, its really is a rate of growth that we have to look at for 2010. We think we’ll see the $100 million of reductions in our O&M costs going forward but still you’ll have some increase in O&M expenses as we go into 2010.
- To read the full transcript on Seeking Alpha, click here »
