Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from the line of Helane Becker – Jesup & Lamont
Helane Becker – Jesup & Lamont
I have a question about the cash position quite frankly because its about 5% of revenue and I know that historically you like to keep that number higher and could you just maybe talk about how you feel about the cash position and what you’re thinking about in terms of raising additional money if that’s possible. Now you’re going to have quite a lot of shares outstanding so if that’s, obviously selling equity isn’t an option, but you have to be a little concerned about the cash.
Jonathan Ornstein
Well clearly in the airline business that it goes without saying that everyone is always concerned about cash. Mesa for a long time prior to issuing the bond ran the company on very little cash because we have been cash flow positive for most of our existence, the exception being when we’ve had to make the big payments to Hawaiian, and I think that our view is even with these cash levels and they do move up and down based on our payment schedule on our lessors, we feel confident that while it will be tight no doubt, assuming that our partnerships remain in tact which we think they will, I think we feel pretty confident we can work our way through this.
We also have been in discussions with some vendors about providing some cash in case for some reason it becomes necessary. There are a lot of folks with invested interest in seeing us continue to operate successfully and we feel that if we had to there could be some non-traditional options to generate additional cash.
As we mentioned last quarter we ended up with about $5 million of additional cash. We think that next year will be cash flow positive and we could end up with more cash. The big issue though is that we do have lumpy payments to our lessors and so what we always have to basically size everything to is not the high points which is where we may be today, but the low points which occur after some big payments.
But we actually feel reasonably comfortable at these levels that we’re going to be fine moving forward and we will start to build some cash and that there are some other, if we had to, we could look at some other types of non-traditional manner that we could raise some cash if it got down to the wire.
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