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Earnings Analysis: 
Alcoa Fourth Quarter Earnings Call
Author: Rozalina Destanova
123jump.com
Last Update: 10:08 AM EST January 12 2008


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The aluminum maker''s revenue fell to $7.39 billion due to lower aluminum prices and the exclusion of a business segment which is now part of a joint venture. Excluding a favorable restructuring adjustment and a tax benefit stemming from the sale of the company''''s packaging and consumer businesses, earnings would have come in at 36 cents a share. In December, Alcoa was selling its packaging and consumer businesses for $2.7 billion cash to a private New Zealand company.

 
Charles McLane: Right now, in our refinery businesses natural gas and fuel oil, both had significant increases and had been going up. Many of our operations are in Western Australia so the Australian dollar to the US dollar was down significantly. We are talking about a deviation in this segment alone of close to $30 million on currency. If you start taking that into consideration along with higher freight costs, ocean freight being up 30% year over year, it does not take long there. The fact is we were able to mitigate most of that to increase production to only bring the deviation down to $10 million.

Alain Belda: I was in Jamaica in early December while they were recovering from the hurricane time and that was a big disaster. Not only did we lose port, but all the material froze in the pipeline given that we completely lost power, even the reserve power. It is taking longer and a lot more maintenance and repair work to get that fixed.

Charles McLane: The Pinjarra upgrade has taken longer to get to a total capacity. We are expecting an additional 90,000 tones out of Pinjarra going forward and we will get additional volume out of Jamaica as it fully recovers.

John Hill (Citi): What type of procedures are you contemplating On the share buyback and would you consider a tender for the shares, given the large size of the buyback and current valuations?

Charles McLane: No. We manage our capital structure and we are opportunistic and you can see what we paid for the shares to this point in time so we think it is a bargain now if we paid $36 leading up to this point, it is a bargain now. We are going to manage our capital structure based on all our requirements.

Oscar Cabrera (Goldman Sachs): You talked about 2008 catalyst being Icelandic production, Pinjarra at full capacity and quantified this between 40 cents to 50 cents about your 2008 catalyst. Would you be able to segment where you expect most of it?

Charles McLane: We would rather not get into a specific target for each one of those. The Iceland production, you are looking at going from a startup position where you are incurring costs, which we had on the bridge was over $100 million to a producing situation. That is going to be a significant turnaround in Iceland. If you look at the recovery from the primary curtailments - Rockdale, Tennessee, Jamaica and Guinea it is significant if you are looking at what that impacted us in 2007 and that turning around completely in 2008. We would rather leave it as you can look at those and say it is going to get us 40 to 50 cents a share in next year.

Oscar Cabrera (Goldman Sachs): What particular products in the aerospace are affected by the restocking?

Charles McLane: What we said was that all products had some build-up in the supply chain just because of some of the delays in some of the platforms, and also the distribution channel was building, going through the year. The run off in the distribution channel we thought will take a couple of quarters to move through it and it will be more accentuated in the flat rolled than it will in the fasteners and the airfoil business.

John Redstone (Desjardins Securities): You were down $78 million year over year on your flat rolled product operations. Of that $78 million, you mentioned that $37 million of that was due to your Russian and Chinese operations. That $37 million drop, is that all due to startup costs?

Charles McLane: When you look at the $37 million of the change, we were talking about a sequential change from the third to the fourth quarter. Basically the way you have to look at Russia is it is in the process of significant project management. We are trying to build-up a basis in four distinct markets. An aerospace market -and we are talking about equipment modernization and installations to serve every one of these market so aerospace is in the middle of qualifications. We have got oil and gas market that we are in the middle of building capacity for that. That has got a potential market to us of $1 billion. We have customers that are building capacity in Russia right now. We are putting in capacity to meet those customers’ needs. It is just a mass amount of projects. The project management that is going on and the issues that you run into, these were older facilities. You dig foundations; you find a lot of things in the ground that you might not anticipate being there so it has taken longer than anticipated. We expect to see significant recovery in the Russia results next year. It will gradually get better each and every quarter, so starting this quarter it should be better and then next quarter even better, et cetera.

John Redstone (Desjardins Securities): When would you expect to see a ramp up completed at Bohai?

Alain Belda: We are at 40,000 tons this year and we expect to be at full capacity in 2010 at 150,000 tons.

John Redstone (Desjardins Securities): What would you put the normal tax rate at for the fourth quarter?

Charles McLane: It is close to 29% for the year. In the fourth quarter it was about 25% in order to get us to the 29% range.

What would you look for in the form of depreciation for 2008?

Charles McLane: It is going to be in the range of about $1.3 billion.

Tony Rizzuto (Bear Stearns): Does the 2008 catalyst include any of the share buyback, the remaining shares authorized, the per share amounts that you lay out?

Charles McLane: No it does not.

Tony Rizzuto (Bear Stearns): There is some talk about a potential strike in Guinea. What is the environment there?
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