Question-and-Answer Session
Thank You. [Operator Instructions]. Our first question comes from Jason Kupferberg with UBS.
Jason Kupferberg - UBS
Hi, good morning guys.
David F. Dougherty - President and Chief Executive Officer
Hi Jason.
Jason Kupferberg - UBS
I just want to start out going through some of these? the non-recurring items, the P&L and the balance sheet and wanted to get a sense of which of these that you guys did versus did not contemplate when you originally gave '08 guidance? Because obviously there is a lot of things moving around above the operating line, below the operating line, or may be you can give us a little bit of a... of a walk through there, just so we have a sense of kind of what is surprised you versus not since the start of the year?
Earl C. Shanks -
Chief Financial Officer
Well, I think Jason, as you focused on the period items that we called out that are there, we had at least conceptually thought about most of those as possibilities as we walked into the year, obviously so we had thought about...no, we didn't know exactly where the amounts were going to come out in terms of what could happen with all of that but in general those were broadly all contemplated inside our guidance.
Jason Kupferberg - UBS
Okay. And in the customer care margins, can you help us kind of do the walk from Q1 to Q4 and help us understand what you think of full year reasonable target is? I mean, it sounds like you won’t be able to do 10% through the full year anymore but you are going to exit the year in north of that level. And if you can give us a sense of order of magnitude, you laid out some of the factors that will drive higher margins later in the year but may be rank orders those in terms of which one should most positively impact margins as we move through 2008?
Earl C. Shanks -
Chief Financial Officer
Sure, I will be happy to do that. Obviously, I think you got the message exactly right Jason in terms of where we are and where we’d hoped to be in that regard. But, as we look at the balance of the year, certainly the key driver for the balance of the year is to ramp on revenue increases over time and that will contribute quite substantially to our improvement in operating performance both the margin percentage and obviously the absolute dollars. There are clearly some opportunities when we look at the business road, also make it more efficient and we talked a bit about labor cost being a bit high in the first quarter, there was an opportunity to reduce our cost and in particular our labor and become more efficient on that as we look at it and then there are some other broader opportunities in terms of efficiency that we are pursuing around training, asset utilization etcetera. Obviously the management changes in quarter are important to driving the outcome and getting to that outcome as well and so we expect that to help in the balance of year also.
- To read the full transcript on Seeking Alpha, click here »
