MeadWestvaco Corp. Q3 2009 Earnings Call Transcript

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2009-10-28 12:35:17.0

Tags: MeadWestvaco Corp., J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Call Transcript, Earnings, Supply Chain Management (SCM), Six Sigma, Benefits, Enterprise Software, Software, Quality, Business Operations, Human Resources, Seeking Alpha

Question-and-Answer Session

Operator

Thank you ladies and gentlemen. (Operator Instructions) And the first question we go to the line of Claudia Hueston from JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Claudia Hueston – JPMorgan

Thanks very much, good morning and congratulations on the quarter.

John A. Luke, Jr.

Thank you.

Claudia Hueston – JPMorgan

I was hoping if you could provide just a little bit more detail on what drove the margin improvement in the consumer solutions business. And then Jim you are commented on how you expect the improvement to continue, what’s going to drive further improvement and how should we think about the pace of that going forward. Thanks.

John A. Luke, Jr.

Jim you want to take that up

James A. Buzzard

Sure. Claudia, we really have had that we said there is disciplined cost approach and margins were driven by stolid progressional areas so our fixed costs and SG&A was down in the business we saw some benefits from our sourcing and supply chain activities. We’ve made some moves to reduce capacity and closed some facilities, and we’ve got a rigorous operating excellence program, which brings forward the some of the basic [genets] of Lean and Six Sigma in each of these facilities. So all those are contributing to the strong performance and margin growth. Clearly, we will continue to focus in each of those areas, we will see less gain from some of them, so the capacity closures are largely behind this. We will get the benefits of those in 2010 to the full year. And the operating excellence program is a discipline that we will continue to drive and that will continue to produce results as we go forward.

John A. Luke, Jr.

Yeah and I would only emphasize just to punctuate what Jim has said because I think he has articulated it well that as our prepared remarks commented whereas in other places we’ve made some very disciplined market participation choices and we have either improved the profile of business that we could in certain areas that was less than satisfactory or we have eliminated those sales all together. So it’s been a combination of those factors. Mark you want to add.

Mark Rajkowski

I think you guys said it well. Through the third quarter we either closed or significantly restructured 10 facilities and that’s a significant amount of capacity either excess or unprofitable capacity that we have taken out of system. So that is a big part.

 

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