Gregory J. Hayes: It is striking to see some follow on to the credit crises in commercial construction, that''s up 20% and that is really going around the world with the exception of Southern Europe i.e. Spain primarily where we saw a little bit of the weakness for the year. But other than that, really have not seen much of an impact.
Nicole Parent (Credit Suisse): Have you seen any slowdown in the regions, specifically China?
Gregory J. Hayes: In China, there has not been any slowdown, we still see very strong growth out of China. There has been a glow up on China, fixed asset investments up about 24%, real estate investments up about 33%, large construction projects up about 22%.
Heidi Wood (Morgan Stanley): In aerospace, can you give us a sense of bandwidth to a high-low range of what you think this means for commercial aftermarket for Pratt as far if we get some retirements strictly on the Northwest Airlines fleet?
Gregory J. Hayes: On the Bangkok Airlines, we have all seen that there was not really an impact to Pratt & Whitney or to UTC more specifically. In the small airlines, we did not have real exposure per se in terms of receivables or anything.
And the Northwest-Delta merger, of course, those are two very important customers to Pratt & Whitney, the Pratt & Whitney power fleets. The good news as we look at this potential merger and also the potential because it''s not done yet, is the fact that they do not have a lot of overlap on their route structure. As a result, we do not see this as really a client to take a lot of capacity out of the combined two airlines.
Long term, it makes for a stronger industry to have a consolidation, and if oil is at a $110 or a $115 a barrel, there is going to be lots and lots of pressure on combined airlines to push for a new, more fuel-efficient fleet.
Ronald Epstein (Merrill Lynch): Can you comment about commercial construction in the other regions of the world?
Gregory J. Hayes: Commercial construction in Europe was very strong, but regionally strong in Eastern Europe. Russia and Ukraine, Poland remain very robust though Southern Europe, not so good. A little bit of over building as we had expected in Spain, and also the UK has been softening now.
|