Earnings Call Excerpt
MeadWestvaco Corp. (MWV)
Q4 2008 Earnings Call
January 28, 2009 10:00 am ET
Executives
Jason Thompson – Director of Investor Relations
John A. Luke, Jr. – Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
James Buzzard – President
Mark Rajkowski – Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Analysts
George Staphos – Banc of America Securities
Claudia Hueston – JP Morgan
Gail Glazerman – UBS
Peter Ruschmeier – Barclays Capital
Mark Weintraub – Buckingham Research
Richard Skidmore – Goldman Sachs
Presentation
Operator
Welcome to the MeadWestvaco fourth quarter 2008 results conference call. (Operator Instructions) I would like to turn the conference over to your host Director of Investor Relations, Mr. Jason Thompson. Please go ahead, sir.
Jason Thompson
This morning we announced our results before the market opened. The notification of this morning’s call was broadly disclosed. Further, this morning’s call is being webcast at mwv.com and slides that accompany this call are available there as well. I’ll briefly remind you that certain statements we make may be forward-looking and are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties described in our public filings. Furthermore, contents contain time sensitive information that, although correct today, may change with the passage of time.
First, a brief recap of the results we reported this morning. For the fourth quarter, we reported a loss from continuing operations of $16 million or $0.09 per share. This included after tax restructuring charges of $33 million or $0.19 per share, and those charges related to facility closures, asset write downs and employee separation costs. For the full year, income from continuing operations was $80 million or $0.46 per share and included after tax restructuring charges of $44 million or $0.26 per share.
Now here to tell you more about our results for the fourth quarter and full year are John Luke, Chairman and CEO, Jim Buzzard, our President, and Mark Rajkowski, CFO. I’ll now turn the call over to John.
John A. Luke, Jr.
The weak global economy and resulting difficult operating environment continue to have an impact on MWV’s earnings performance during the fourth quarter, and for that matter the results for the entire year. Throughout 2008, seeing clear changes in the macro environment we took a number of portative steps to strengthen our financial position and improve our performance. For that reason, we entered 2009 on sound footing. While the environment remains difficult, we are confident in our ability to endure the challenges of this period and outperform when economic conditions improve.
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