Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from Ben Brownlow of Morgan Keegan.
Ben Brownlow – Morgan Keegan & Company
Good morning. Congratulations. Sam, can you touch on the wholesale business? Are you seeing any change in the health of those operators?
Sam Susser
Our operators, of course everybody is an individual, but in general, I think our operators were certainly stressed by the $140 crude oil that stretched everybody's working capital requirements last summer. We weren't providing unlimited amounts of trade finance to our dealer network. That was a very challenging time.
But I would say that I feel that a lot of our dealers have gotten very healthy in recent quarters with working cap requirements down substantially and enjoyed some very strong fuel margins in the back half of the year. So I thought that's brought a lot of health to the dealer community.
Overall, our volume in our dealer network is a little soft relative to a year ago, kind of consistent with national trends. Our retail fuel volume as you saw in the numbers really bounced back and are strong here in the fourth quarter. Overall, I would describe the wholesale volumes as a touch softer than the retail volumes.
But I think the health of our dealers is very strong. We just completed a great trade show. Had record turnout in Houston. We got a number of dealers looking at growing with us in the coming year, although capital markets are certainly a challenge for them. I think we're going to overall see more strength in the dealer network in 2009.
Ben Brownlow – Morgan Keegan & Company
Do you think that, obviously the regional market is doing very well there, do you think you're picking up market share?
Sam Susser
I think so. We're steadily growing our total volumes in both the retail and wholesale side. I think there's no question that we're picking up market share here in our region. No doubt about it. Merchandise as well.
Ben Brownlow – Morgan Keegan & Company
Just trying to get a little bit better idea on what drove the fuel comp, lower fuel prices, but do you think that it was more an absolute lower fuel prices that drove that comp or do you think it had to do more with the lower relative prices to Mexico? If you could, talk about the regional fuel comps that you saw within your markets.
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