Roger Read (Natexis Bleichroeder): On B&W your concerns have been with TXU cancellation, the CO2 decision of Supreme Court impacting new bills, new boilers et cetera. Have you seen any slowdown from your customers in terms of new boilers as a result of any of that or if TXU would never happened this business would look good on a year-over-year comparison basis?
Bruce Wilkinson: The business is good year-over-year and it is robust and it is growing. There is a season in Washington that is destructive where everybody is flailing away to right legislation when in fact none of the companies which are in the business are yet able to catch up with. 50% of the power in the country is generated by electricity and will be for the indefinite future, there is no scenario where it can be replaced or added enough nuclear in the next 50 years.
You are going to announce a boiler later today. Is that potentially one of the TXU boilers going to another customer or is just the different build out together?
Bruce Wilkinson: This would be a whole completely new.
Joe Agular (Johnson Rice): You expanded your capacity at your yards in the Middle-East and Southeast Asia a while back. Are you at that full expanded capacity in terms of amount of man hours working in those yards or is there still further expansion?
Bruce Wilkinson: There is still further. Only a part of the expenditures that the company faced in Jebel Ali and Dubai is actually in place and reflected into today’s productivity. For instance there is a Massey paying facility that will be a state-of-the-art facility that is not yet up in running. There is more to get out of what has been talked about but it is not yet fully operational. Likewise in Bhutan in Southeast Asia, some of the larger numbers reflect adding a couple of these skid ways that are large in order to be able to build these 18-20,000 ton decks. On a day-to-day basis it does not look like much because it is a giant skid way but in every other respect fabrication is taking place in a conventional method.
Joe Agular (Johnson Rice): You are adding physical capacity but you are also making investments in productivity enhancing either equipment or facilities that will potentially increase the efficiency of these yards as well. Is that correct?
Bruce Wilkinson: The company is trying to take the best facilities and put the best possible physical facilities. There are physical constraints when the company gets 5 or 6,000 people, no matter how many shifts a day and how many days a week, running that many people in and out of the facility and keeping a span of control over there so that their productivity stays high is a challenge. What the company is trying to do is come up with a better mix of man and machines on the screen.
Joe Agular (Johnson Rice): How much of a role if any did pricing play in your results in the quarter?
Bruce Wilkinson: The company is not typically selling a lot and then generating at the same quarter. There is change order factor, there is some scope addition but the company is executing work that has been sold sometime ago.
Stephen Gengaro (Jefferies): Could you give the quarterly roll-off or backlog for the next couple of quarters in 2007 on the B&W side?
Bruce Wilkinson: The company is estimating the roll-off to be about 340 million in the second quarter, 360 in the third quarter, and 280 in the fourth one. That excludes the 120 million or whatever the revenue is from the 50 million issues.
Stephen Gengaro (Jefferies): Are the payments that you receive going to fall on the revenue line in the second quarter for B&W?
Michael Taff: The total revenue related to the termination agreement on 4 through 8 would be a 120 million that the company has recorded in the second quarter. The $79 million was just the cash received.
Stephen Gengaro (Jefferies): Will that $120 million have sort of normal associated margins with it or greater?
Michael Taff: Normal margins would be appropriate.
Stephen Gengaro (Jefferies): When the vessels are down what kind of costs occur?
Bruce Wilkinson: There is significant head count in the cruise. There is entire team that manages the project. There is an ongoing direct operating expense that continues during a down turn. That should be mitigated to some extent because when the company moves a vessel from one part of the world to another the staff have vacation but still there are loses.
Stephen Gengaro (Jefferies): The oxyfuel or oxycombustion process is applicable as a retrofit opportunity which would be the only one that has retrofit capabilities potentially. Is that correct?
Bruce Wilkinson: The answer would be yes, if McDermott succeeds. To achieve mitigation from the standing start to a reduced absolute number of CO2 in the air the company can not deal it all with the 50% of today’s generating capacity. It has got probably 30 to 40 years before it goes out of service before the new things would begin to take over. |