Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from David Driscoll – Citi Investment Research.
David Driscoll – Citi Investment Research
A couple of questions here just wanted to start off with North America and then go over to South Korea. In North America the sequential volume, it didn't improve quite perhaps as much I thought it would. My belief here would be that the improvement in industrial production combined with I believe it was on the first couple of conference calls you guys called out inventory destocking.
So with the redemption of industrial production inventory restocking seemed like it should have happened, yet when I just look at the year-over-year changes in the volume numbers on a sequential basis you can't see anything it doesn't look like there is any change there. Can you give me some thoughts around this and maybe a bit more color as to what's happening within the volume side in North America?
Ilene Gordon
Yes, David, it's Ilene. I think there are a couple of trends going on here and we've studied as an example the corrugated trends. And it's interesting when we looked back in June we thought that we saw some trends that that was turning around in terms of the shipment of corrugated boxes, and certainly we ship our products to both paper and the corrugators.
But if you look at the data that's comes out form the Fibre Box Association, volumes continue to decline year-over-year and that even year-to-date box shipments are down 9.8%, though I will say that September was down 4.8% year-over-year, though I understand September 2008 was a particularly low year. So while in the summer we thought we saw some glimmer of those shipments coming up, I continue to see weakness in that whole industrial area.
If you look at the beverage and food area, of course we're seeing some improvements in high fructose corn syrup as you know, especially with shipments down into Mexico because of high sugar prices. But when I look at shipments of our other products into the food industry, I still see not a lot of improvement.
And if you read the reports of the food companies, it's still a little bit lackluster and I do think that people are still in the mode of trading down, going to private label and maybe we'll see a move to mid price restaurants away from fast food, but a lot of that has not happened yet.
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