Joshua Golden (JP Morgan): Are you willing to commit to mid-BBB rating?
Alain Belda: We are committed to being at minimum a BBB company.
David Gagliano (Credit Suisse): Could you remind us again what your policy is towards hedging, specifically with regard to currency and energy?
Charles McLane: What we said last time is a 1% change against our major currencies to the U.S. dollar would be about 2 cents a share on an annual basis. Now that''s on an economic basis. In other words, you have got a translation piece of currency that impacts you based on whatever the exposures are, but the economic basis, the actual cost or revenue during the course of the quarter, you can use that 2 cents change for every 1% change on an annual basis. As far as our policy is concerned, we don''t speculate, that''s our policy. We may do some smoothing from time to time on a percentage basis, but we don''t take speculative positions.
David Gagliano (Credit Suisse): With regard to the repurchase program, if we were to assume everything equal, share price stays flat for the next 12 months, could you give us a sense as to where we should expect that repurchase authorization to be in terms of how much you have left to go in a year?
Charles McLane: We''ll continue to look at our capital structure and our other growth opportunities, our CapEx, et cetera. Our balance sheet is in an outstanding position today, we have got cash. We alluded to the fact that we will probably have repurchased at a little higher level in the third quarter if we had not been so restricted. But with all of the variables going into what might happen six months from now, a year from now, we are not going to restrict what we''re going to do.
Jim Brown (JP Morgan): Based on the capital spending in the third quarter, which was quite high, it seems as if you might have difficulty keeping capital spending down to $3.2 billion for the year. Could you give us an idea of where capital spending will be?
Charles McLane: That''s on a cash basis to us, and there''s two different categories on our cash flow statement. One is our capital expenditures which if you just looked at that it would seem that we are going to have trouble hitting that; but the other category is the amount of capital calls we get from our minority partners. So you have to net those two to get down to a net cash impact.
Taking that into consideration, what Alain said earlier is excluding currency on our CapEx, which we think is going to impact us close to a couple hundred million this year, we would be within target. So the first part is you''ve got to net out the capital calls that we get and then take the currency into consideration of a couple hundred million that we would be within that range, a couple hundred million of our target.
Jim Brown (JP Morgan): Could you give us an idea of the Iceland ramp-up schedule?
Alain Belda: Iceland will be at about 30,000 tons at the moment and starting some time late November or mid-November, the plans at the moment are that we''ll start ramping up. The people have been training arduously now to be able to start up at an accelerated pace, so we believe that we will be at about 300,000 tons for the full year 2008. |