Allegheny Technologies Incorporated Q42008 Earnings Call Transcript

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2009-01-21 17:29:14.0

Tags: Call Transcript, Ton, Earnings, UBS AG, Financial Accounting, Strategy, Finance, Management, Seeking Alpha, Allegheny Technologies Inc.

Question-and-Answer Session

Operator

(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Timna Tanners - UBS.

Timna Tanners - UBS

I wanted to know if you could give a little bit more information about the commodity stainless business just because I'm trying to understand the comments you've made in the past about the minimum levels that are required to sustain levels of margins throughout the business, if you could talk about how that might impact the company going forward or how that may or may not be as much of a factor.

L. Patrick Hassey

Well, I think the objective of our company is to first of all get to the core volumes we need to pace the operations. Obviously, coming out of December with the shutdowns of the automotive industry, the appliance manufacturers, building and construction, etc., the basic shutdown, I think, of most of the industry from the second half of December into January, we did not reach those levels for December. We had similar kind of issues going into the November timeframe.

So if you look and see, we shipped something in the range of 103,000 tons totally for this segment against a commodity side of about 51,000 - 52,000 tons. That's below what we need. We need to have 60,000 tons anyway, but we've said we'd like to have around 300,000 tons of commodity type work.

So what has to happen in our view is that we would like to see the core levels for the business reached and I think we're seeing more stability as we're going forward now. We're seeing people again buying at least at these levels and maybe a little bit improved from what we saw in the fourth quarter.

So how it affects our business is we need these volumes to pace the operations. We intend to make money on the commodity products that we sell and, when we look at the ability to produce these volumes, along with our differentiated products, we would expect the Flat-Rolled Products segment to be profitable going through the year with the exception of the first quarter, which is being hit with - if you take the $70 million and tax-impact that, we're somewhere around $0.47  $0.48 of earnings that will not be there.

Timna Tanners - UBS

And then do you have - if I missed it, forgive me; there was a lot of detail in your release  but did you have what the remaining amount is on your LIFO reserve?

 

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