Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you. (Operator instructions) And we will take our first question from Claudia Hueston with JP Morgan. Please go ahead.
Claudia Hueston – JP Morgan
Hi, thanks, good morning.
Bob Lewis
Good morning, Claudia
Tony Allott
Good morning.
Claudia Hueston – JP Morgan
I was hoping you could just provide a little bit more color on the volume trends within your businesses maybe as they progressed over the quarter and if you’ve got any read into sort of early April here and what you’re seeing would be helpful. Thanks.
Tony Allott
Sure. I think Bob hit it a little bit. This is Tony speaking. On volume, essentially on the food can business and I'm sure we'll have lot more questions on this, so I’ll just say that we were down round about 3% in that business in the first quarter. We need to remember that we had an (inaudible) pre-buy. We were up 6% in the fourth quarter. So you really got to look over that period and we'll come back to that, because I'm sure it’ll come up.
As your question – trends – I think – let me finish with all the businesses. So the – on the plastics business, we essentially saw high single-digit volume declines. Remember, we are cycling again kind of the stronger part of last year, so no real surprise there. And pretty much comparable type levels on the closure side of the business and again that’s primarily driven by two things. One, the single-serve beverage side, which, again we had seen in the beginning last half of 2008. And then also you had on the metal side of that, you had pre-buy going on as well. So you had the negative side of the pre-buy with strong December.
I think your question is a little more to the trend in the quarter and I think probably we would just say that it’s pretty tough about month-by-month. It’s – what we would say is you kind of see choppy performance across the board, you get some good weeks and you get some off weeks. So it’s hard to read that.
I think we could tell you that March for instance was a little bit stronger than it was in the first part of the quarter. But really when you look shipping days, in our case, that could just as easily be explained by shipping days. So I don't think we would necessarily say there is a lot to read into the monthly trends at this point in time nor were we surprised by what happened in volumes. So I don’t think we are looking for them.
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