Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions)
And our first question is from line of Mark Wilde from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.
Mark Wilde - Deutsche Bank
Good morning.
Tom Howatt
Good morning, Mark
Scott Doescher
Good morning, Mark
Mark Wilde - Deutsche Bank
Is it possible to get a sense of what those two mill outages and Printing and Writing would have cost you in the quarter?
Scott Doescher
Yes, Mark, this is Scott. And if you take a look at the impact as compared to first quarter it approaches $2 million.
Mark Wilde - Deutsche Bank
So, without that you would have been, presumably you'd been EBIDTA positive in Printing and Writing, is that it?
Scott Doescher
Yes, that's a fair statement.
Mark Wilde - Deutsche Bank
Yeah, okay, alright. And can you just, when you talk about the profit improvement plan and you want to get the cost-of-capital returns by the end of '09. I think one of the key questions for a lot of shareholders is, when you do that is that a plan, which has you sustainably it cost-of-capital returns going forward in the business, because it’s really been a business is underperformed here for several years?
Tom Howatt
Well, Mark, I’d say that's certainly our expectation. And I think if you take a look at the improvements is occurring at that business and presuming we would be able to achieve that. We’ve in fact would have been able to accomplish it during perhaps in the most difficult of circumstances imaginable with energy costs at unprecedented levels, even since the recovery plan announcement last October, natural gas, which impact this business unit has gone up dramatically.
I think when you look at the combination of declining marketplace in the current year coupled with those energy costs, those types of headwinds, I think being able to achieve the result we've targeted at this point in time would suggest that we have a solid business model at this point.
Ultimately, I think what's important though, is to be able to continue to grow at the premium side of the business. That includes sustaining a solid position with the merchant distribution community and commercial print markets coupled with further success in some of the new channels that we are focusing on such as [end leaf]; scrap booking and various other similar type markets.
So, I think a way of gauging our progress and the sustainability, this is going to be our ability to penetrate those markets and drive that premium paper growth.
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