Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first call comes from George Staphos – Banc of America.
George Staphos – Banc of America
As we look to the fourth quarter to try to make sure that we're all on the same playing field, you enumerated foreign exchange; you enumerated the effect of the production reduction, the down time in terms of a sequential further negative. Are there any other things that we need to be mindful of as we try to calibrate our fourth quarter forecasts to the likely reality?
Albert Stroucker
In line with what we have been discussing and the general comments and what we have been talking about in September when we made our adjustment, I think those are the two major variables and we've tried to put them into perspective today.
George Staphos – Banc of America
As we look out to next year, presuming that most of the volume impact from your pricing actions is over and assuming that pricing as of this year offsets inflation, would you anticipate that any of the regions given what you see right now, do you see any regions that would be down either in dollars or percentage margins in 2009 versus 2008. If you could share some color on that, that would be great.
Albert Stroucker
It's very difficult of course to make predictions for 2009, and in fact because of the uncertainty, we've pushed back our budgeting process for next year to a bit later in this quarter to get a better perspective. I think it's very easy to become influenced by all the hyper-ventilation that's going on about what's going to happen to the economy next year.
We still, as we look back long term at our business and how this business has behaved, and typical economic down turns, we have seen volume impacts that have generally been fairly mild. Between 2%, 2 1/2%, 1 1/2% depending on the region and I don't think that on an ongoing basis this recession is going to be much different from that. So I think as far as a bottom is concerned of overall consumption patterns, I think we're still in pretty good shape.
I'm very confident with the productivity improvements that we're working on and that we're getting through the operation that that too, will help us in maintaining the margins that we have been achieving in the course of this year and we of course will take great caution as we go into the next year to make sure that we preserve what we have achieved and try to go forward.
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