Louisiana-Pacific Corporation Q2 2009 Earnings Call Transcript

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2009-08-04 13:10:43.0

Tags: Downtime, Working Capital, Call Transcript, Earnings, Volume, Managerial Accounting, Finance, Seeking Alpha, Louisiana-Pacific Corp.

Question-and-Answer Session

Operator

(Operator instructions) Our first question comes from the line of Mark Connelly from Sterne Agee.

Mark Connelly – Sterne Agee

Thank you. Rick, just a couple of things. You’ve clearly done a lot of work to get costs out, what I am wondering is, how is the cost of your downtime and the changes you have made in mill scheduling going to affect things as you start to come back out. In other words, if you are getting better at taking downtime, is there a swing back the other way as demand does come back? And related to that, is there an increasing risk of difficulty getting some of these machines back running when the longer they are out?

Rick Frost

I think in the short term, based upon what we have been able to -- let me just give you a quick example. Jeff in the OSB business now is able to start an OSB mill up and get on production in about six hours, where before that might have taken us 24 hours. So that’s the kind of improvement that we made under this kind of duress. What we have seen right now is that, if you get an additional up tick in volume, we have the ability to cover that at the current manning and cost schedules.

So in the short-term, any increases in volume will just give us a little bit more leverage over the fixed cost. So I think that’s the short term answer is that we really feel little additional volume based upon the way we are running. Longer time, I don’t think that its going to be an issue until we get to about that 19 billion square foot mark, where its my assessment as I look at the industry, there is about 19 billion feet of capacity running right now inefficiently. So the ability to either add shifts or add over time gets up to that point, and then beyond that point, when you start getting into potentially taking mills that are indefinitely closed and trying to start them back up. And as we have talked about for years on that, that requires working capital investment rehiring people, retraining people etc. So I don’t know if that answers your question completely Mark or not?

Mark Connelly – Sterne Agee

Yes, that’s helpful. Thank you. And just one more question. Can you talk a little bit more about what you are seeing in repair and remodel? You mentioned in terms of Siding, is that having any impact on sheathing traditionally at the plywood market, but just curious if you are seeing something there?

 

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