George Judd
Chief Executive Officer
Thank you, Russ, and thank you everyone for joining us this morning for the BlueLinx Fourth Quarter Earnings Conference Call. The housing and building products markets continue to be very difficult in the fourth quarter; however as I stated in our earnings prerelease last month, we continue to focus on those items which we can control, operating expenses, working capital, margin and serving the needs of our customers. BlueLinx fourth quarter performance reflects the challenging environment we are operating in today, as well as our focus on cash management. For the fourth quarter we reported a net loss of $0.81 per diluted share, which includes restructuring and other charges, which Doug will discuss later in the call. Our results for the first quarter were impacted by the continued weakening demand environment with housing starts declining by 44% from the prior year period. Underlying wood based product prices decreased 24% from the end of the third quarter of 2008 and structural metal prices, which had increased earlier in the year, declined rapidly during the quarter. We continue to be highly focused on managing cash flow by aggressively managing inventories, receivables, and spending, while always focusing on serving the needs of our customers, suppliers, and shareholders. We ended the fourth quarter with a cash balance of $150 million and reduced our net debt. We are working with many strategic customers, not only to expand our product penetration and provide reliable just in time service, but also to develop new and additional ways to enhance our services to them. And, we are working with key vendors to become their distributor of choice. I am excited by our new and extended supplier agreement with Georgia Pacific on Georgia Pacific brand engineered lumbar products. We continue to work on the other key Georgia Pacific product lines, plywood, and OSB, regarding our supply agreement also. Even in these difficult market conditions, there are many opportunities to grow our share. BlueLinx is focused on doing just that in 2009. While it is difficult to predict when the market will rebound, I am confident that we’ll emerge from this downturn in a much stronger competitive position than we were when the downturn began almost three years ago. Now I would like to turn the call over to Doug Goforth, our Chief Financial Officer, who will walk you through our financial results for the quarter and for the full year periods.