Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions). The first question comes from the line of Jeff Hammond from KeyBanc Capital. Your line is open.
Jeff Hammond - KeyBanc Capital
Hi, good morning, guys.
Salvatore Fazzolari
Good morning, Jeff.
Jeff Hammond - KeyBanc Capital
I just wanted to zero in on infrastructure. It looks like the margins in the fourth quarter came under some pressure. Can you speak to what's driving that? Maybe talk specifically about rental rates and if you expect that to persist here on a go-forward basis?
Salvatore Fazzolari
Jeff, if you look at the fourth quarter, the majority of the margin decline was foreign exchange. If I recall right, it was about 110 basis points due to the "crisis and the economic conditions." And a lot of it is due on balance of two things. One is these export sales that we mentioned before, have pretty much dried up, because there's no credit available to lot of our customers throughout the world, so that's having somewhat of an effect.
And the other one, in certain markets there are some pressures on pricing, no question about it. Our utilization rate, by the way Jeff, is very high. We thankfully saw a lot of this coming, as you may recall, and in the early summer we did start positioning some equipment to various markets throughout the world. We are still in fact in the process of moving additional equipment to other parts of the world, where we were hoping to have some additional work in the second half of the year.
But nonetheless, I don't want to say there's none, there's some pressure on rental rates. Utilization rates are still holding very, very high, but in certain market we are seeing a little bit of pressure there. Does that answer your question?
Jeff Hammond - KeyBanc Capital
Yeah, that's helpful. Just speaking to the second half, given that construction in Infrastructure projects have a longer cycle, and I understand you have got this stimulus coming on, if maybe the credit markets get better some of that gets unlocked, but just walk me through your visibility of projects that maybe are still ongoing in the first half, and maybe start to roll off? Is there risk that there's more rolling off than coming online into the second half of the year?
Salvatore Fazzolari
The good news about our business model in our geography and the type of services we do Jeff, we are so diverse. First of all, we do thousands and thousands of projects. So I couldn't point to you in all honesty the one project, say, that's going to have any material effect. And we're still seeing very strong activity in the Gulf region of the Middle East. There's certainly a little bit of a slowdown in Dubai, but again we knew that was coming.
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