Earnings Call Excerpt
Oil-Dri Corporation of America (ODC)
F1Q09 Earnings Call
December 10, 2008 11:00 am ET
Executives
Daniel S. Jaffee – President, Chief Executive Officer & Director
Andrew N. Peterson – Chief Financial Officer & Vice President
Charles P. Brissman – Vice President, General Counsel & Secretary
Rhonda Williams – Director of Investor Relations
Analysts
John [Barr]
Ethan Star – Private Investor
Brad Evans – Heartland Advisors
James Schwartz – Harvey Partners
Presentation
Operator
Welcome to the first quarter 2009 Oil-Dri Corporation of America conference call. (Operator Instructions) I would now like to turn the call over to Daniel Jaffee, President and CEO.
Daniel Jaffee
Welcome everyone to our first quarter teleconference. Joining me today are Andy Peterson our CFO; Charlie Brissman, our General Counsel and Rhonda Williams our Director of Investor Relations. Rhonda, do you want to do a Safe Harbor?
Rhonda Williams
Absolutely. Thanks Dan. Welcome everyone and thank you for joining us today. On today’s call comments may contain forward-looking statements regarding the company’s performance in future periods. Actual results in those periods may materially differ. In our press release and our SEC filings we highlight a number of important risk factors, trends and uncertainties that may affect our future performance.
We urge you to review and consider those factors in evaluating the company’s comments and in evaluating any investment in Oil-Dri stock.
Daniel Jaffee
Thank you Rhonda. As always we will have some introductory comments and opening comments by me but then we want to dedicate the majority of our 30 minutes responding to any questions and concerns you might have. At that time we will open it up. Please prioritize your most important question first and then get back into the queue so we can be sure everybody has a chance to at least have one or two questions.
I think I will turn it over to Andy and let him go through the play-by-play for the quarter and then I have some 50,000 foot comments I’d like to make.
Andy?
Andrew Peterson
Thanks Dan. We had a strong first quarter revenue growth in both the retail and wholesale products group and the business to business products group. We had record sales of $63.1 million for the quarter, up 14% from last year’s $55.3 million. The increase was due to higher average selling prices and increased volume.
We were disappointed in the 19.6% gross profit margin in the quarter down from last year’s 22.5%. Margins were negatively impacted by higher fuel, packaging and transportation costs. The cost of kiln fuel to Dri our products was up almost 50% or $2 million from the prior year.
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