Oil-Dri F3Q09 (Qtr End 4/30/09) Earnings Call Transcript

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2009-06-08 11:43:35.0

Tags: Call Transcript, Quarter, Earnings, Aerospace & Defense, Manufacturing, Seeking Alpha, Oil-Dri Corp. of America

Question-and-Answer Session

Operator

(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from the line of Ethan Star, Private Investor.

Ethan Star - Private Investor

Good morning and congratulations on a nice quarter.

Daniel S. Jaffee

Thank you, Ethan. You ought to go on Jeopardy -- you’re always buzzing right in there. You’re awesome. I knew you would be the first question. What’s on your radar screen?

Ethan Star - Private Investor

Well, you’ve been investing a lot of money in the Calibrin rollout and while you may not wish to quantify it, could you please comment on how that investment in the Calibrin rollout has masked the true earnings power of the rest of Oil-Dri's business this fiscal year?

Daniel S. Jaffee

Let me answer part of it and then see if that positively answers your question -- I think in the last quarter, I gave you a sense of the trend and while it’s certainly not material at this point because the snowball, while growing, is still not big enough to leap into materiality land.

You know, in the first quarter of this fiscal year, which was the first quarter of the rollout, we sold $88,000 worth of the new products. We sold $204,000 of them in the second quarter and I am happy to say we sold $325,000 in the third quarter. So clearly the snowball is growing and building.

However, when you put that in light of a couple of factors, it really is remarkable and very positive. One factor would be the general economic malaise launching new high value-added products in this environment is the equivalent to running against the wind but as you can see, we are still gaining ground. Additionally, things that were completely unforeseen, i.e. swine flue, has certainly not helped the launch. Half of the product line is targeted right at the swine market, our Calibrin Z product, which binds a [relonone] in swine and obviously swine production globally took a hit when everyone frankly from what I understand erroneously linked swine production to the swine flu. They are unrelated, from what I understand. It’s not like you can go and catch swine flu from pigs and certainly pig production, when they are slaughtered and processed, there is zero -- nothing survives that process. But having said that, they got caught up in that hysteria.

So given the fact that we’ve had some negative macro trends, we’re pretty positive with the micro trends that we have seen.

 

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