Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from the line of Frank Mitsch of BB&T Capital Markets. Please proceed.
Frank Mitsch - BB&T Capital Markets
Hey good morning guys.
Joseph Rupp
Good morning.
Frank Mitsch - BB&T Capital Markets
Joe, back on March 17th, you put out some guidance for the first quarter of a range of $0.60 to $0.65, which included $0.03 unusual in terms of land sale. So that would make in on an operational basis, 57 to 62 and you posed $0.56 on an operational basis. What accounts for the decline versus that mid March update?
Joseph Rupp
We can give it to you here, Frank.
John Fischer
Frank, this is John. There's three things that happened right at the end of the quarter. First we had an, a second asset disposal that was $1.3 million that happened right at the end of quarter, that we didn't think was going to be in the quarter. Second, we experienced significantly weaker box sales of caustic during the last 10 days of the quarter, and that reduced earnings between 3 and 3.5 million. And finally one of the bad debts that we discussed actually occurred after the quarter ended and we were forced to bring the effective debt back into the third quarter, and that was about $1 million. So if you net those three things, that's somewhere in the neighborhood of $3 million of pre-tax. That's really the difference.
Frank Mitsch - BB&T Capital Markets
I don't recall your bad debts being this high. Am I mistaken -- is this an unusual high level of bad debt expense?
Joseph Rupp
It is unusual.
Frank Mitsch - BB&T Capital Markets
And any thoughts on whether or not given the economy that we should anticipate this order of magnitude for a 2Q and beyond?
John Fischer
I have no reason to believe we'll see this level of magnitude in Q2. I think it would be safe to say that in this economy we're going to see more of bad debts going forward than we've seen in the last couple of years where essentially we haven't had any.
Frank Mitsch - BB&T Capital Markets
Okay, all right fair enough. Mr. McIntosh can you talk a little bit about the input situation to the West Coast coming up from Asia in terms of where's pricing in Asia and talk about a little bit about the shipping costs and I know that there was a discussion about some of the factors that you did not anticipate, the level of imports to remain at high levels; can you add some granularity to that?
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