Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from David Begleiter - Deutsche Bank.
David Begleiter - Deutsche Bank
Myles, just on Q3 looking ahead given the continued trends on raws and volume, a couple of the benefits from these improvement initiatives, can you make - should earnings in Q3 be below those of Q2 given the current trends we're seeing?
Myles S. Odaniell
We haven't given a forecast out for Q3 and I'm not going to do so today. We've got as I indicated some competing activities. One is a big slug of increased, cost increases that are coming through kind of June 1 timeframe, raw material cost increases, and we're working to pass those through diligently. As I said, I think we're getting much better at that, I think there's a point where we may fall a little bit behind but there will certainly be times when we get ahead. So that's on the negative. On the positive side, we're starting to get the real traction from a lot of these initiatives kicking in and cost reduction coming out of the system. I think the biggest overhang and uncertainty continues to be volume and our challenge is trying to forecast what the volume picture looks like. So without giving a number out, we've got a lot of things coming together and we're working through to make sure we do the best job we can and passing through the price increases so those do not impact us overall. But I would say the biggest issue right now is volume.
David Begleiter - Deutsche Bank
And Myles, just on the pricing, what's the time lag now? Is it within 30 days? How quickly can you pass through these new price increases?
Myles S. Odaniell
We continue to have some arrangements that are kind of legacy contracts that are sort of quarterly would be the best way to put it. We've gone back to our customer base, asked for some relief given the extraordinary situation that we're currently trying to manage through. We're getting that in many places; we're not in some. But as a general statement, the way it works at Spartech right now is when we receive an announcement from our vendors about increased costs. Within a day or so we go out and we announce price increases of our own with an objective of passing that through on a real time basis. Now that means we get some of it real time and it probably means a little bit of it falls weak but maybe there's some that falls into the month lag timeframe. But we are absolutely shortening down on what we've been kind of impacted by historically.
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