United States Steel Corp. (
X)
Q4 2009 Earnings Call Transcript
January 26, 2010 3:00 p.m. ET
Executives
Dan Lesnak - Manager, Investor Relations
John P. Surma - Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Gretchen R. Haggerty - Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Analysts
Michael Gambardella - J. P. Morgan Securities
Kuni Chen - Banc of America Securities/Merrill Lynch
Anthony Rizzuto - Dahlman Rose & Company
Timna Tanners - UBS
Luke Folta - Longbow Research
David Gagliano - Credit Suisse
Brett Levy - Jefferies & Company
Brian Yu - Citigroup
Sal Tharani - Goldman Sachs
Mark Parr - KeyBanc Capital Markets
Charles A. Bradford - Affiliated Research Group, LLC
Wayne Atwell - Casimir Capital L.P.
John Tumazos - John Tumazos Very Independent Research LLC
Bob Richard - Southridge Research Group
Presentation
Operator
Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you for standing by. And welcome to the United States Steel Corporation Fourth Quarter 2009 Earnings Conference Call Webcast. Now, at this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later we will conduct a question-and-answer session. Instructions will be given at that time. If you should require operator assistance you may press star followed by zero, as a reminder today’s call is being recorded.
Starting off today your hosting speaker, Dan Lesnak. Please go ahead, sir.
Dan Lesnak
Good afternoon. And thank for you participating in the United States Steel Corporation fourth quarter 2009 earnings conference call webcast. We’ll start the call some brief introductory remarks from U.S. Steel Chairman and CEO, John Surma; next I’ll provide additional details for fourth quarter and then Gretchen Haggerty, U.S. Steel Executive Vice President and CFO will comment on the outlook for the first quarter of 2010. Following our prepared remarks we’ll be happy to take any questions.
Before we begin I must caution you today’s conference call contains forward-looking statements and that future results may differ materially from statements or projections made on today’s call.
For your convenience the forward-looking statements and risk factors that could affect those statements are referenced at the end of our release and included on our Annual Report on form 10-K and updated on our quarterly report on Form 10-Q in accordance with the Safe Harbor Provisions.
Now beginning the call, here is U.S. Steel Chairman and CEO, John Surma.
John P. Surma
Thanks, Dan. And good afternoon, everyone. Thank you all for joining us this afternoon. Earlier today for the fourth quarter, we reported a quarterly loss of $267 million or $1.86 per diluted share, an improvement from the third quarter as we reduced our losses in our North American Flat-rolled segment and our Tubular segment returned to profitability. I’ll have some more details on the figures in a moment.
First let me just reflect that 2009 was an extremely difficult year for our company and our people, but we remain focused on the continuing improvement of our employee safety performance.
For the year, we maintained our positive trend of reducing both our global rate of recordable injuries and our global days away from work rate, our fifth consecutive year of improved employee safety.
The global economic crisis that began during the fourth quarter of 2008 resulted in dramatic unprecedented reductions in demand for nearly all of our product lines.
As one measure of the severity of the crisis, domestic steel industry capacity utilization as reported by AISI averaged 51% in 2009, compared to an average of about 86% over the previous 20 years.
