Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you. (Operator Instructions). Our first question is from the line Mark Wilde from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.
Mark Wilde - Deutsche Bank
Good morning, Tom. Good morning, Scott, Perry.
Thomas Howatt
Good morning, Mark.
Scott Doescher
Hi Mark.
Mark Wilde - Deutsche Bank
Tom, I wondered, can you, just starting off, can you talk a little bit about the year-over-year decline in the tissue volumes, whether that's the market, something with you guys or whether you kind of -- you made a decision to move away from some parts of the market there?
Thomas Howatt
I thank your latter comment is really fairly accurate in terms of the action that we've taken. We ultimately made the decision in the latter portion of the year to hold price and we chose not to pursue some business that ultimately was in the more commoditized segments of that marketplace, deteriorating from a price standpoint. If you look at the performance for the quarter, you would see that our higher margin value-added grades grew business high single digit percentages. At the same time, the standard or commoditized grades fell off significantly. So that ultimately was what drove the decline in overall volume for the quarter.
Mark Wilde - Deutsche Bank
Tom, can you talk at all about sort of what type of reductions you are seeing in price in some of those commoditized grades?
Thomas Howatt
Well I think what's happened here is as parent roll pricing escalated through 2008, it put us quite frankly in a position where we just felt there wasn't sufficient margin left. So I don't know that it was so much that there was a significant decline in absolute pricing as it was cost pressures as parent rolls moved up, put us in a position where margins were insufficient to pursue the volume.
Mark Wilde - Deutsche Bank
Okay. And then if we can just switch over to the two paper businesses, can give us an estimate of sort of what you see going on in the niche markets that you are in? Because sometimes it's kind of hard from the outside to get a real good sense of what exactly your niches look like from a volume perspective. And maybe you could overlay that by kind of breaking apart what you view as cyclical and what you view as structural in terms of generating those numbers.
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