Arkansas Best Corp., Q4 2008 Earnings Call Transcript

  • download
  • Print
  • Recommend
  • 0

2009-01-29 13:52:22.0

Tags: Call Transcript, Weather, Earnings, Arkansas Best Corp., January, December, Transportation, Pricing, Supply Chain, Marketing Research, Marketing, Business Operations, Seeking Alpha

Question-and-Answer Session

Operator

(Operator Instructions). Your first question comes from the line of Jason Fedo.

Robert Davidson

Good morning, Jason.

Jason Fedo

Good morning. Good morning, everyone. Sorry about that, I had to switch on over to pickup the headset there. Let me go to one of your comments on the acquisitions. You guys talk about it for a little bit, but this is first time I think you have announced that you engaged somebody. Are you strictly looking at LTL assets or might you go beyond the LTL universal look at brokerage operations and what not?

Robert Davidson

We are looking at the broad field of transportation distribution and logistics. We are going try to stay in industries with some adjacencies something that where we can add value. But we have widened at this point.

Jason Fedo

Okay. That’s fair enough. And I apologize because I missed been in your call because another one ran overlapping. Can you give us an update on the tonnage trends to the quarter? And also what you are seeing in January?

Judy McReynolds

Jason, our comments indicated that in October when we first saw the drop it was about a 7% drop. And then November there was an additional drop and December was weaker than November. What we are seeing so far in January, I think we would characterize the slightly weaker than what we saw in December.

Jason Fedo

Slightly weaker than December, okay. But the offset between weather impacts and also proper use your comps in January does that make it about to equal December then?

Robert Davidson

Certainly there have been some weather impacts in January but it's really too soon to see how much. I don’t expect them to be actually material difference in what we were in January of last year. In the fourth quarter weather really didn’t effect this much about the same as towards previous year.

Jason Fedo

So, you are saying net January is underlying just a little bit worse in December?

Robert Davidson

Certainly the tonnage levels are little worse. It might be affected by weather but it's really [efficiently low].

Jason Fedo

Okay, that’s fair enough. Also on the pricing side, have you got any plus in the market type pricing is deteriorated as we move throughout the quarter especially given the tonnage declines that you are seeing?

Robert Davidson

I think it's fair to say that it did deteriorate some during the quarter. There were some positive signs. We were able to get 2.5% in the full quarter on a substantial number of expiring contracts before crossing agreements. As I indicated earlier, the general rate increase affect is about 45% of our business. Went into effect on January 5 and the initial results were good, but outside of those it's competitive class in environment.

 

BNET TalkbackShare your ideas and expertise on this topic

Please add your comment:

  1. You are currently: a Guest |
  2.  

Basic HTML tags that work in comments are: bold (<b></b>), italic (<i></i>), underline (<u></u>), and hyperlink (<a href></a)

advertisement
advertisement
  • Click Here
  • Click Here
  • Click Here