Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions). Our first question comes from Gregg Gilbert with Merrill Lynch.
Gregg Gilbert - Merrill Lynch
Good morning. Dean and Jeff, hopefully you can provide some color, if not the specifics around your new outlook for Animal Health sales and margins for '08 and longer term goals there?
Dean Mitchell
Good morning, Greg. Thanks for the question. Obviously we're just focusing on 2008 today. And in keeping with our regular practice, we don't give specific guidance on components of the business. What we're doing is we're recommitting to our overall 2008 goals and at some more appropriate point probably as we think about our guidance for 2009; we'll give our view of the longer-term impact.
I think I would say that when you listen to the calls from some of our customers earlier this week, as I'm sure many of you have, there's a tremendous amount of pressure on the food-producing organizations and there's a fair degree of uncertainty around exactly how these things may play out. So we're continuing to monitor this very carefully. We're managing everything that we can internally, but there are a number of things in the macro environment which it is hard to predict.
Gregg Gilbert - Merrill Lynch
Fair enough. Then maybe more generally, Dean, as you're thinking about the importance of this business to how Alpharma evolved over the past several months as the environment has changed?
Dean Mitchell
It really hasn't. I mean the Animal Health business continues to be a well-run business, has sound financials. We believe it's going through a temporary adjustment of input costs, which you know the scale of which we've never seen historically. So it really is a dramatic change in the business, but we believe that that will work its way through in terms of protein prices in the end market.
And the question is how long does that take for that balance to work out? We have seen some fairly significant changes in terms of, particularly the livestock producers focus on the volume of their business, which is probably the biggest lever to being able to drive price in the end markets. And, you know, the uncertainty is how many quarters it takes for that to work itself through the system, but strategically the business is just as attractive as it was. We don't really see any difference in its contribution to the overall Alpharma story.
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