Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from Al Kabili with Goldman Sachs.
Al Kabili - Goldman Sachs
Good morning, guys.
Grant Beard
Hi, Al.
Bob Zalupski
Good morning, Al.
Al Kabili - Goldman Sachs
I guess a first question is on the outlook. Are you assuming -- I know you expect the Cequent businesses to remain weak throughout the year, but are you expecting in your outlook an improvement versus the trends we saw in the first quarter? It seems like you'd have to kind of get to your guidance. And if so, where are the major sources of improvement going to be driven by as we go forward?
Grant Beard
Sure. It's a great question. I think in North America, we are not assuming that the market provides us any incremental strength. I just think that leisure spend for the consumer is going to have a lot of pressure on it. That said, we think the combination of our customer initiatives, our product introductions for content, our pricing, and our cost initiatives clearly provide us the ability to sort of work through the bottom here and provide us a foundation to support our guidance. On the other side of the aisle, we're seeing really nice strengthening in order backlogs in areas that, frankly, are the most profitable inside of TriMas. So we think the combination of those two allow us, as a company, to deliver solid performance as we look across '08.
Al Kabili - Goldman Sachs
Okay. And any way you could quantify in terms of the cost reductions, the incremental opportunities versus the first quarter and when they might hit and as well as pricing? If you could comment on that, not only for Cequent, but all the segments.
Grant Beard
Sure. We can sort of do it at a macro level. You don't have to -- as we came across the first quarter, we really saw our material margins remain flat. And, so said differently, we did not really see a great deal of pressure or material increase across our portfolio. Certainly, read about it, hear a lot about it. It's a very different story as we look forward into the year and are expecting coming into the back part of this quarter and certainly into the third quarter that we will have exposure to steel increasing. And it's increasing in varying degrees across different types of alloys and different types of fabricated steel. And we are pricing in advance of that. Don't expect that necessarily to provide us a benefit, but do expect it to allow us to maintain our material margins really across the board.
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