Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Michael Gallo - C.L. King & Associates, Inc.
Michael Gallo - C.L. King & Associates, Inc.
I wanted to drill into the profitability target for the second half of the year in a little more detail. One, do you think you could start to get there in Q3 or is that more of a target for just to hit that at some point in Q4? And sort of as a second part of that question, do you expect that the recent run up in lead could help given you likely have some lower cost inventory certainly given you know $1.10, $1.11 where lead is trading today?
Dr. Jeffrey A. Graves
Well, the pace at which we get there, Mike, is strictly determined by volume and mix. So you know we’ve obviously got our model and expectations going forward and you know we’re confident in hitting the objective in the second half. The exact timing will be seen based on those variables. You know, lead run up certainly with our hedging strategy we’ve got all of our backlog covered and any large projects going out are covered at lock-in margins. We have to be aggressive in passing on pricing in terms of new ?activity? because it’s potentially an impact on the business. So for the half of our business that’s not under contract we need to go out and get that pricing.
The part that is under contract, the only real risk there is any time lags in recovery. It’s a very smooth working mechanisms with everybody that operates under contract for that half of our business, and the flow through happens automatically. So there’s again a small risk on timing. You know, you could argue it either way. Maybe there’s some upside on part of it, there’s some downside on others that we price every day but fundamentally you know we’ve got our risk covered from hedging of orders we’ve taken, and big projects outstanding and future business is just depending on managing the quoting period and the pricing we go to market at.
Michael Gallo - C.L. King & Associates, Inc.
Perhaps I missed it, did you comment at all on what the bookings were in the quarter or the book to bill?
Dr. Jeffrey A. Graves
We didn’t comment, but bookings were up. Book to bill was greater than one for the quarter and so we came into Q3 with a higher backlog than we came into Q2 with.
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