Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Your first question comes from Ivy Zelman of Zelman and Associates.
Alan Ratner - Zelman and Associates
It’s actually Alan on for Ivy. My first question; I was hoping to get a little bit of detail on what you’re seeing from your customers in the home segment, specifically with respect to receivable collections and any type of distress you might be seeing either from the builder component of your business or wholesalers?
Bruce Carbonari
In the Home side we have multiple channels as you said with builders and we do sell some directly to builders but most of our products do go through the wholesale channels or two-step approach to the builder.
In all those cases we really haven’t seen much change at all there as well; on the retail side same thing, not much change. We do have business with the dealers in the Cabinetry side there. We’ve seen some of the smaller dealers come under pressure. We’ve actually seen a couple close.
But again, if you look at how we’ve defined our mix of customers over the year in the dealer channels we have what we call the A and B dealers. So a lot of the C and D’s who are lower volume and historically had not strong positions are ones that are really under pressure now and we don’t have a great portfolio of those. We’re stronger in the A and B dealers.
Craig Omtvedt
Alan, I’d jump in an add too this is an area that we’ve been extremely watchful of over the last year and we’ve made sure that we’ve stayed on top of things and kept the aging of receivables where one would expect it to be.
The good news at this point while there’s clearly some stress out there we continue to have timely payments and we’re continuing to stay on top of it.
Alan Ratner - Zelman and Associates
That’s definitely some good news there. My second question also on the Home segment in 2008 you guys were pretty successful in passing along the commodity cost increases that were very prevalent in the market and now that we’ve seen a little bit of a pullback there I’m just interested what you’re seeing on the pricing side? Obviously it’s competitive but I’m curious if you’re getting some pushback now that the commodity costs are pulling back a big.
Craig Omtvedt
First of all, let me jump in here a little bit because in the first quarter we actually year over year had a bit of a hit on commodities and that was particularly in the particle board area. As you outlined, we do at the present time expect we should see some improvement over the course of the year but we’ve seen an uptick in copper. We obviously at this point are kind of watching what’s going on with the price of oil and so on and so forth.
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