Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first call comes from Ghansham Panjabi – Wachovia.
Ghansham Panjabi – Wachovia
Just judging by some of the reports out there on the map it looks like September was a pretty tough month overall. Can you talk about volume trajectories across some of your end markets that you see specific to your business both in the U.S. and Europe?
Steve Hagge
I think if you look at it on a broad basis, certainly as we got into the quarter some of the personal care part of the business started to weaken as we got towards the end of the quarter and also some of the fragrance cosmetics. What we saw happening though largely was pushing out of orders rather than cancellations, so we saw our customers get a conservative edge as it relates to the upcoming Christmas season and long term, they haven't cancelled the order but more pushed them out.
So today I think we've seen the biggest drop off coming in the personal care and the fragrance cosmetic sectors. And again, that's being offset by the strength we've seen at Pharma and the food and beverage markets for us.
Ghansham Panjabi – Wachovia
Do you think this has anything to do with just working capital being sort of adjusted along the supply chain as the credit markets have tightened or is it just end market weakness? Personal care has a little bit more stickiness on the volume side.
Peter Pfeiffer
This has really to do with some inventory adjustment. We are seeing our customers looking into a more weak holiday season so they are preparing for that. In our mind it's really a lot of natural readjustment going on.
Steve Hagge
What we've seen even publicly is that WalMart's announced that they're cutting back on inventory so that's affecting our customers, and as you say, in the personal care, most of our products are usable on a day to day basis so most of these tend to be temporary fall backs.
Operator
Your next question comes from Claudia Hueston – J.P. Morgan.
Claudia Hueston – J.P. Morgan
I was hoping you could comment on resins in terms of where you are coming out of the quarter. Are you pretty much all caught up on the increases you've seen? And how are you thinking about resins for the remainder of this year?
Steve Hagge
I think we have to break resins between the U.S. and Europe. We saw pretty significant increase in the U.S. in the third quarter, probably an estimate of 20%. That went up through September and it started to come down, so we were still catching up once we got into the quarter and expect to be caught up pretty much as we go through the fourth quarter.
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