Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator instructions) Your first question comes from the line of Gail Glazerman with UBS.
Gail Glazerman - UBS
Hi, good morning. I guess just to start; can you give maybe a little bit more color on what you are seeing in demand, maybe talking about what you are seeing in July relative to June?
John Faraci
I’ve got, Wayne Brafford runs our paper business here and Carol Roberts, who runs our packaging business. I’ll let them talk about North America and I’ll fill in on outside North America, just briefly. Wayne.
Wayne Brafford
Well very briefly, as John mentioned earlier, the pulp business has improved. Most of that is related to China. In fact I would say the rest of the world has not improved a whole lot at all, but China is up quite a bit. On the paper side Gail, shipments are solid, solid relative to where they’ve been.
We are seeing some dip in the order book and that’s kind of anticipated in July. There is a bit of a seasonal factor there. So, I feel the order levels have lightened up a bit versus June, but again, that’s not unusual for July, but still, it is a lightening.
Carol Roberts
Gail, this is Carol. In U.S. boxes, we had a good strong beginning of July, which was very encouraging, because that’s around a holiday and you could expect people to be down and that’s kind of moderated a little bit towards the second half of the month. So, I would say categorized July as kind of very similar in aggregate to June levels.
John Faraci
It feels like demands going sideways in North America. Tom Kadien, were he say xpedx sales are up, sales greater, just up a little bit. It just feels like more of the same. Asia is solid for us and that’s again, most of our business is for the Chinese domestic economy.
Europe is in a slow time of year. So, summer is not a heavy shipment month and our shipments are probably going to be not much changed from where they were in the second quarter.
Gail Glazerman - UBS
Okay. Carol, can you talk maybe specifically about exports and containerboard? Obviously, the industry data showed a very solid up-tick in June. Is that something that you think can be sustained?
Carol Roberts
Yes, Gail. I mean, the export did show an up-tick and I think there’s lots of reasons for that. I think that once again we saw the bottom on exports earlier when, that supply chain is a little bit longer. So, people have more on the floor. We kept shipping into that pipeline longer when the downturn came and so we are coming out of that.
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