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Owens Corning (OC)

Q4 2008 Earnings Call· Wed, Feb 18, 2009

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Fourth Quarter 2008 Owens Corning earnings conference call. My name is Shaquana, and I will be your coordinator for today. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. We will facilitate a question-and-answer session towards the end of this conference. (Operator instructions). I would now like to turn the call over to your host for today, Mr. Scott Deitz, Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications. Please proceed, sir.

Scott Deitz

Management

Thank you, Shaquana. How are you this morning? And good morning, everyone. Thank you for taking the time to join us today for our conference call in review of our business results for the fourth quarter of 2008. Joining us today are Mike Thaman, Owens Corning’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Duncan Palmer, Chief Financial Officer. Following our presentation this morning, we will open this one-hour call to your questions. Please limit yourselves to one question and one follow-up, so we can answer as many of your questions as possible during the 60 minutes we have together. Earlier this morning, we issued a news release that detailed our results for the quarter and the full year of 2008. Form 10-K further detailing our results was also filed this morning. For the purposes of our discussion today, we’ve prepared presentation slides that summarize our performance and our results for the fourth quarter and the year. We will refer to the slides during this call. For those of you listening to this call via the Internet or if you are on the telephone and near a computer, you can access the slides at owenscorning.com. You’ll find a link on our homepage. There is also a link on the Investor Section of our website. This call and the supporting slides will be archived, and available on our website for future reference. This call is being recorded. Before we begin, we offer a few reminders. Today’s presentation will include forward-looking statements based on our current forecasts and estimates of future events. These statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially. Please refer to the cautionary statements and risk factors identified in our SEC filings for a more detailed explanation of the inherent limitations of such forward-looking statements. Now, Mike, let’s turn it to you.

Michael Thaman

Management

Thanks, Scott. Good morning, everyone, and thank you to joining us today. Owens Corning completed a successful 2008 in a difficult global market. Full year revenue came in at $5.8 billion, up 17% compared with 2007. Sales were up because of solid performance and acquisition related revenues on our composites business. In our roofing business, we enhanced our product mix, increased selling prices and improved volumes. Excluding items affecting comparability, adjusted EBIT from continuing operations was $290 million. This result was in line with the guidance that we had sustained throughout 2008. Our cash performance was good. We finished the year with net debt below $2 billion, consistent with expectations. We have ample liquidity and cash to meet our financial obligations and support our growth. Duncan will provide a complete reconciliation of our fourth quarter and full-year results in his comments. We said that we would achieve a number of important objectives during the year. We said that we will continue our journey to create an injury free workplace. Our safety performance improved for the seventh consecutive year. Owens Corning has reduced the number of employee injuries by more than 87% in this timeframe. We said that we will reduce our cost by $100 million in 2008, we surpassed that mark. We said that composites operating margins will approach double digits for 2008. Through the first three quarters, the business demonstrated this level performance. Obviously, we saw significant weakening of volume in the fourth quarter. I will address this further when I discuss our outlook for the composites business. We said that we would achieve $30 million in acquisition related synergies. We are pleased to report that we surpassed this goal with 50 million of synergies in 2008. We said that we will reduce the size of our acquired precious-metals…

Duncan Palmer

Management

Thanks, Mike. Let's start on slide five where we detail key financial figures for fiscal 2008 and for the fourth quarter. You'll find more detail financial information in the tables of today's news release and the form 10K that was filed earlier. Today, we reported 2008 consolidated net sales of $5.8 billion, a 17% increase compared to 2007. For the fourth quarter, consolidated net sales were $1.3 billion, which is flat compared to quarterly sales one year ago. For full year 2008, the growth was driven by two of our business segments, the roofing and asphalt segment delivered record annual sales of 35% increase over 2007 as a result of higher selling prices and higher sales volume. Composites sales increased by 39% during the year, largely because of the company's fourth quarter 2007 acquisition. As a reminder, when we look at period over period comparability, a primary measure is adjusted earnings before interest and tax, adjusted EBIT. In a moment, I will review our reconciliation of items affecting comparability to get to adjusted EBIT. These items totaled $94 million in 2008 compared to $196 million in 2007. For the fourth quarter of 2008, these items totaled $33 million compared to $134 million during the same period in 2007. Our adjusted EBIT from continuing operations for 2008 was $290 million. This is in line with the guidance of $265 million, with upside of up to 10% given on the third quarter earnings call. Given the market environment, we are very proud to meet our guidance. Adjusted earnings for 2008 were $124 million or $0.95 per diluted share. For the fourth quarter of 2008, our adjusted EBIT was $48 million compared to $88 million for the same period in 2007. The adjusted earnings from continuing operations for the fourth quarter 2008 were…

Scott Deitz

Management

Thank you Mike. Thank you Duncan. Before we moved to the Q&A, we offer a reminder and ask that our listeners understand that our slide presentation today, our prepared remarks and our Q&A discussion may contain non-GAAP financial measures. Also note that the GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliation are found within the financial tables of our earnings release and our form 10-K.. Again please limit yourselves to one question and one follow-up so that we can get to as many questions as possible. So, Shaquana, let's turn to the Q&A session.

Operator

Operator

Yes, sir. Thank you. (Operator instructions). And your first question comes from the line of Michael Rehaut with JP Morgan. Please proceed. Michael Rehaut – JP Morgan: Hi, thanks. Good morning everyone.

Michael Thaman

Management

Good morning, Michael. Michael Rehaut – JP Morgan: First question just on roofing, you know certainly you're still getting the benefits of the re-roofing demand and the price increases put in place in mid ‘08, you know I just wanted to ask I guess more of a longer-term question, you know the results here are obviously record results and you know historically I believe roofing has always generated more of the high single digit, mid to high single digits type of margin. Over the next two or three years, I mean – what are your expectations, are there things that structurally have changed or – how do you I guess guide our thinking in terms of either on a competitive or structural standpoint in terms of industry players and cost structure? I mean is that mid teens margin sustainable or over longer term should we think more in terms of something closer to what has been achieved historically?

Michael Thaman

Management

Michael, let me take a shot at that. It is a very, very good question, and I think if you look at the slide we presented today, which was slide 11, we do graph the operating margins on there, and I think is probably a good backdrop to maybe some of the comments that I would make. The big change in the roofing market for certain was that the GAF acquisition of Elk Corporation in late 2006. And I think if you have been following these calls, since we have been public now, in late ‘06, what we saw during that period of time was a significant storm activity in ‘05 and ‘06, that was kind of followed a boom followed by a bust at about the same time that Elk and GAF were going together. And there was a fair amount of dislocation in the marketplace and as a result in 2006 and 2007 I think show that from an operating margin point of view where we were low single digit. We had said during that time that we always thought the industry structure, our position in the market, our capabilities and our product line show allow that business to be a high single digit or maybe even a double-digit operating margin business. And if you go back to the first quarter 2008 when we made a loss, we said that we thought that better times were coming, the asphalt prices have been coming through the market, that we were able to recapture that in terms of pricing to our customers, that our customers were having success passing through to contractors. And we got into a bit of a virtuous cycle in 2008, where the pricing environment and industry structure, our productivity programs and our mix all come together…

Michael Thaman

Management

No, we're not. The competitive profile is pretty stable and I guess one of the things and I will say it again, we don't think it is unreasonable for roofing manufacturers to earn these types of margins. So to a certain extent, while these are not the margins you have seen over the last couple of years in the business, we don't think these are the kinds of margins that would necessarily encourage a bunch of new entrants. It is a relatively capital intensive business, it is important that you have access to strategic supply of raw materials. The product lines are pretty broad and are he managed across distributions, so there are some fairly natural barriers that create a market that we believe should be stable and should allow roofing manufacturers to make reasonable and acceptable returns which we think we now are. Michael Rehaut – JP Morgan: Okay. Second question, during the presentation, you mentioned that you will be taking some restructuring actions with regard to the masonry business which I guess you said was the core driver to the downturn in profitability in other building materials and services. I was wondering if it is possible to give a little bit more granularity there in terms of what those restructuring actions might be, to quantify it potentially in terms of cost and potential, cost savings and benefits in ’09, and similarly for insulation as well given how that margin profit level continues to slide, if there are any incremental actions that you might be taking and what benefits that might be for ‘09?

Michael Thaman

Management

Okay. Let me start with masonry, which is a business that we operate under the market name Cultured Stone. That business I think probably has the strongest exposure inside of Owens Corning to both new construction and I would describe it as kind of new construction production builder. It was a very strong market in the southwest and on the West Coast where you had kind of stucco type construction where masonry is a wonderful accent and improves the value of the home. Those markets really have been the hardest hit with the downturn in new construction and that business continues to bear the brunt of that. We operate that business with two facilities, one on the West Coast, one on the East coast, because it is freight cost sensitive. We did shutdown a facility at the end of ’07, in early only ‘08 to get to a two point network. It is pretty hard in our analysis to go from a two-point network to a one network because of the freight issues. So we're moving more aggressively to reduce our ship levels and reduce our headcount in the plans in order to their production level consistent with what we have see in terms of near term and. We don't typically give any guidance by segment, so I wouldn't get into specific details or expectations with that segment. Suffice it to say that we understand that it is probably a market that is not going to recover in 2009 and that the game plan in that business is going to be cost containment and managing the cash flow. On the insulation side of the business, we have taken strong action up to now. On this call, we talked about the fact that we now have eight lines shut down. I…

Michael Thaman

Management

Thank you Michael.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Ken Zener with Macquarie. Please proceed. Ken Zener – Macquarie: Good morning.

Michael Thaman

Management

Good morning, ken. Ken Zener – Macquarie: I guess it is actually a follow question on your last comments about the operating leverage of the business, it looked like it was for the year around 60%, kind of 40% in 4Q. Is there any real reason you think that your guys operating leverage or sales contribution would change?

Michael Thaman

Management

Yes, Ken. I went into that a little bit. Let me maybe develop those comments a bit further. I mean obviously early on in the downturn when we were losing volume, we were not only losing the leverage associated with that volume, but that volume was also very, very profitable. So we were shedding both the profits associated with the trucks we weren’t shipping as well as the leverage associated with those trucks. The business on a cash cost basis is still fairly profitable. It is a high fixed cost business, a high asset business, and we shall continue to make positive cash when we sell product, but clearly not at the kinds of margin rates that we were in the past. So you would expect to see that the operating leverage would flatten because of the margin rate of the business and I think you would expect to see that the operating leverage would also start to flatten because of the management’s action – the management actions that we have taken in order to pull cost and capacity out of the business. Ken Zener – Macquarie: Okay. And I guess just a follow up to that, the three plants in composite and the eight plans in insulation, you guys have shut down or idled, what is that respectively (inaudible)?

Michael Thaman

Management

Ken, you broke up at the very end. Maybe you can just repeat the last sentence of your question? Ken Zener – Macquarie: Right. The three plants in composite that you’ve idled or shut and the eight plants in insulation, what is that actually as a percentage of each segment capacity?

Michael Thaman

Management

Okay. On the insulation side, we have given broad outline of how we think the marketplace works and in broad terms we had said that we believe the market is about 40 melters in total, that we would have somewhere around 40 to 50% of those melters. So if we were to have eight melters now, we would estimate that is probably 20% of the overall market in broad terms, and that might be as much as 40% of our overall capacity. Ken Zener – Macquarie: Okay. Then I guess when you think about the 550 to 650 starts that you outlined and obviously I think generally the risk is on the downside not be upside, how do you think about bringing those plants back on line or actually just kind of shutting them, and what are the costs – what’s the cost process that you think about? I know you have done a kind of a slowdown (inaudible) where they weren’t getting paid, can you just kind of explain how those idled plants might be actually shuttered in the event that starts stay where they are?

Michael Thaman

Management

Yes. I mean we have a lot of levers here beyond just shutting off lines. So we manage our capacity as you can imagine kind of in fine brush strokes as well as broad brushstrokes. The broadest thing we can do is to take a line out of the system and even beyond that is to take a plant out of the system. So as we sit right now, we have one plant that is totally idle, which is our plant outside of Montreal. We have lines that are idled in most of our other plants, so we continue to maintain a national network, we continue to maintain a national workforce, we continue to maintain the technical resources and the labor experience that we need in our plants in order to be able to bring them up quickly. As we get into further curtailments, we also have the ability to shut lines for a week during each during each month, we have the ability to run long weekends, we have the ability to run at lower shift levels or lower throughput levels. So we will also be turning those knobs in order to make sure that we keep some capacity available to ramp up relatively quickly. The next tranche of capacity is that we can ramp up we believe quite quickly within a month or so of deciding to bring capacity on would be to bring a line-up in an existing plant where we still have a workforce, where we still have technical resources, where we have an asset-base, and we just need to heat up and make glass. And then obviously the longest startup would be if we were decide to go and bring up the plants right now that is down cold, which is our plant outside of Montreal. We are well positioned we believe if we can get the market to get a little bounce from the stimulus plan that we have all the capacity online and available and ready to go if the market presented us with that challenge. Ken Zener – Macquarie: Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Mary Gilbert with Imperial Capital, please proceed. Mary Gilbert – Imperial Capital: Yes, good morning.

Michael Thaman

Management

Good morning Mary. Mary Gilbert – Imperial Capital: I wondered if you could talk about specifically the markets in composites that are being affected, where you are seeing the weakness, where you are seeing the excess capacity and also geographically? And then it sounded like you thought that you would see a rationalization of that capacity by mid year, is that kind of what you are thinking or could you clarify that please?

Michael Thaman

Management

Sure Mary. I appreciate you giving us opportunity to clarify that. We have always said that we think over longer periods of time the composites business grows at about 1.5 times to two times global GDP. And we have not lost our confidence in those estimates. So we come up with those estimates by looking at 40 years and 50 years worth of data for the composites industry. We also know that when expectations of growth in an economy change, and the global economy probably six months ago was expected to grow about 3% in 2009, and today you see estimates anywhere from flat to even negative half or negative 1%. When you see that kind of change in growth expectations, you see various levels of supply chains starting to jump on the brakes in terms of wanting to curtail their orders of materials and wanting to curtail their production to start to get their inventories back in the line with new expectations. We talked in our third quarter call back in October that we have seen some weakness in Europe coming out of the traditional August holidays in Europe but that we have not yet seen that in the rest of the world. What I would say is really on the heels of that call starting in November, we saw, pronounced weakness in the Americas, we saw it in Asia, particularly in Japan, we saw continued weakness in Europe. And I would not say it is not dissimilar from what you have heard a lot of the big chemical guys talk about, or what you have heard a lot of the big metals guys talk about, you know the aluminum guys or the steel guys as well as kind of the Dows and the Duponts of the world. Those…

Michael Thaman

Management

We said reading of other companies who are positioned in similar markets, we are seeing declines in order activity in that range from all the other people who are announcing earnings. Mary Gilbert – Imperial Capital: Okay. And are you experiencing that same level of activity?

Michael Thaman

Management

Yes. In my prepared comments, we said that we saw as much as 45% decline in the month of December. Mary Gilbert – Imperial Capital: Yes.

Michael Thaman

Management

I think the overall top line for composites in the fourth quarter was more like down 17%, so it was high teens. So I guess obviously you are seeing some timing issues and we would probably expect kind of month on month that we start to see our demands build as different ones of our customers come back on the line as they work through their inventory issues, ultimately allowing us to be back in full production. Our internal analysis and we're very clear in my comments, it is just our internal analysis, would suggest that really by about the middle of this year, we should be able to work through this inventory situation which speaks to some amount of optimism for the second half, but obviously the timing on that is very, very hard to call. Mary Gilbert – Imperial Capital: Okay. That's very helpful in clarifying that. Also, when you talked about being free cash flow positive in 2009, and you give us some metrics like for example CapEx, cash taxes, but it sounds like where we're going to see some of the benefits include potential cash generation from working capital, is that true?

Duncan Palmer

Management

Yes. Mary, this is Duncan. Yes, I think it would be reasonable to expect that you’d see some benefit from working capital and obviously in an environment such as we are in, we're looking for efficiencies across all of our businesses. But also in an environment where we would expect top line to be declining year over year, we would also expect our working capital to also decline year over year. So I think it is reasonable to expect that we see cash generation from working capital in 2009. Mary Gilbert – Imperial Capital: And what kind of magnitude would it be, will it be the same magnitude as on a percentage basis as the decline on the top line? Is that kind of an estimate that we should use in trying to model this out?

Duncan Palmer

Management

I mean broadly speaking I think that would be a good place to start modeling, yes, because I think overall if you model our working capital as a percentage of sales, it has been reasonably stable over time, and you could take a look at that and model that out as how much free cash flow, how much cash flow might come out of working capital during the year. Mary Gilbert – Imperial Capital: Okay, great. That's most helpful. Thank you very much.

Michael Thaman

Management

Thank you Mary.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Ivy Zelman with Zelman and Associates. Please proceed. Dennis McGill – Zelman and Associates: Hello. It is actually Dennis McGill on for Ivy.

Michael Thaman

Management

Good morning Dennis. Dennis McGill – Zelman and Associates: Good morning. One question having to do with the composites inventory situation, can you put into perspective either from your guess of the industry or you guys position where you sit with the inventory on a week’s basis, or how do you want to quantify it relative to where you would like to be just to put this in perspective?

Michael Thaman

Management

Well, there is really two issues in your question. One is where we from an inventory point of view and then where is the industry from an inventory point of view. From our perspective, our inventories are a little bit higher than we would want them to be because the market changed very, very rapidly in November and December and we can respond but it typically takes us 60 to 90 days between employee notification and technical issues and product qualification issues for us to decide and be able to take melters out of the network. We had rationalization in our business plan for ‘08. We had taken down some facilities as a part of us trying to rationalize and restructure Asia. Those are helping us today that we have done those actions and then we're working on additional actions, but we think getting our inventories where we would like them, probably wouldn't expect to see a big change or improvement for us in the first quarter. But we would expect by the second quarter, we will be under producing demand and be able to get our inventories under control, bringing capacity back online, when we see the order book demanding us to bring capacity online. From an industry point of view, these are fairly long supply chains. So we would often sell glass to someone who might compound it or process it somehow with some type of resin who then may sell it to a molder or someone else who further processes it, who would then turn around and sell it to some type of OEM, who would then sell it to some distribution or consumer. So there is this opportunity here for there to be inventory piles, three or four levels in the supply chain, and I think that is why we are seeing a 3% change in expectations of global economic growth, resulting in the kinds of significant changes in volume we are seeing in the near term. Each one of those chains are working their way through the inventory issues at different rates and that is why we have some optimism that our business will just kind of build monthly until we finally get back to some amount of equilibrium. Dennis McGill – Zelman and Associates: Do you have assumptions as far as the composite manufacturers are going, what will happen to pricing in the first half of this year?

Michael Thaman

Management

We haven't given any guidance or expectations around pricing. What I would say and we have said is throughout ‘08 is it was neither a tremendously positive pricing environment in ‘08, but it is not a negative pricing environment. Most of the manufacturers experienced a fair amount of inflation in ‘08 and our improvement in ’08 was entirely driven by productivity, synergies, integration benefits that was not driven by price. So I don't think we faced any type of pricing bubble in composites that weaker demand would some how cause us to get into an aggressive price down scenario. So we think we can manage the price and the cost side of this, we are really not managing the volume side of it, and that’s been the bigger challenge. Dennis McGill – Zelman and Associates: Okay. And then my follow-up on your comments you just made about end where composites would be a proxy for the global economy, I think over a longer-term we would agree with that, but I would like to understand it from an end product standpoint, how you guys are thinking about it, because when I look at your exposure, whether it is construction, automotive, consumers, electronics, those all seem like areas that are going to remain under more pressure, significantly more pressure than the global economy at least in the near term, and particularly 2009. So could we see a situation where the global economy and the composites proxy for that deviate more so in the near term as some of these markets are adjusting?

Michael Thaman

Management

Certainly we could. I mean when we’ve looked at this historically and we’ve looked at this through various recessions going back on our data, we have tended not to see that. So while it is a big broad economy and I can understand it from your perspective, a fairly broad assumption, I think if you look at kind of the plastics industry, which is a pretty good proxy for composites demand, historically the plastics industry has had enough new applications and other things that are going on, that they (inaudible) where there is weakness. I think the specific example we talked on today's call was wind. You can see where wind because of credit issues and other things could have gotten decidedly weaker in the United States, although that’s certainly not the biggest wind market in the world, Europe would be. But now you are seeing stimulus focused specifically on trying to get cash into the hands of wind developers to make sure that we continue to make progress against renewable power. So I think there is an argument, a counterargument almost market by market. And we try to do our internal analysis customer by customer that it tends to be a fairly customers intimate business and that is how we would go about trying to understand what our customers are currently seeing, and that's really the basis that caused us to be able to say we think we could get through a large part or all of this inventory correction through the first half, but the timing remains to be seen. Dennis McGill – Zelman and Associates: Okay, that's very helpful. Thanks a lot guys.

Michael Thaman

Management

Thanks Dennis.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Jim Barrett with CL King and Associates. Please proceed. Jim Barrett – CL King and Associates: Good morning everyone.

Michael Thaman

Management

Good morning Jim. Jim Barrett – CL King and Associates: Good morning Mike. Duncan, can you take us through your pension fund contribution in ‘08 and give us your thoughts on how we should look at the cash flow and earnings impact of what I assume is the drop in pension assets at year-end?

Duncan Palmer

Management

Yes, thanks. As you know, we have roundabout $800 million, $900 million pension liability in the US and also some liabilities overseas, but by far the largest obligation is in the US. We invest our assets in a portfolio which you will see in our 10-K if you look. It is reasonably conservative in comparison to the medium pension fund, so while obviously our asset returns were negative during the year, we feel that when we benchmark that with other pension funds, we did pretty well in terms of being probably in the top quartile versus most of the other pension funds that we have seen. So from the point of view, we somewhat sort of smooth out some of the impact. And when you look, actually the impact that it's going to have in both our earnings and our cash flow in 2009, I think those impacts will be relatively moderate. So the impact for EBIT is going to be quite small and the impacting cash flow, I think we disclosed that our pension contribution in 2009 will be in total in globally will be of the order of $62 million. Just from ,memory I think in 2008 that number was roundabout similar level. Jim Barrett – CL King and Associates: Great, okay. Very good. I appreciate that, thank you.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Keith Hughes with SunTrust. Please proceed. Keith Hughes – SunTrust: Yes. On the composites business, you mentioned that you had three furnaces down, what are the total number of furnaces that you have post the transaction a couple of years ago?

Michael Thaman

Management

Keith, we don't disclose specifically on number of furnaces for competitive reasons as you could imagine. What we have done is we have taken three furnaces down in ‘08 and a lot of that was permanent. We had a facility in Thailand and another facility in Asia that we wanted to rationalize and load production into the facilities we currently have in China as well as load our facilities in Japan. So some of that was a migration to try to get more productive and more cost-effective. Today the facilities or the lines that we are talking about bringing down and focused on bringing down is more to adjust our production levels to demand levels. It is not a easily modeled industry as insulation because the product lines are unique and they are unique to end use applications and tooling that you use to produce those product lines are unique need to individual facilities. So it is not as kind of a uniform market as maybe what you would see for the fiberglass insulation market where we're more comfortable talking about the total market and the total number of melters as being somewhat interchangeable. I think this business, the asset base is a little more end user specific. We think we benefit because we had the largest fleet and the most diverse asset base, but that gives us the ability to get cost and production out of our environment in a much lower cost way than maybe some of our competition that would be less scale and therefore less ability – less able to turn knobs. Keith Hughes – SunTrust: Okay. The – as you point out, the insulation business had a pretty significant negative contribution margin when we first went into this downturn and it has come back up. If we got to composites, the way you produce your composite products versus the insulation, are there similar dynamics, is there something that makes it less cyclical, what is your view there?

Michael Thaman

Management

Well I think that if you look at our fourth quarter, we did see revenue down 17% versus the prior fourth quarter, which is a pretty significant drop. It was on the order of magnitude of $100 million. And we were still obviously positive in terms of our operating performance in the quarter. So you clearly see some amount of negative leverage in the business when you lose $100 million of revenue, but I think year over year we were showing something like a decline in EBIT of about $27 million. That feels to me kind of the order of magnitude of the leverage that we would see in that business. Keith Hughes – SunTrust: But the fact that it so backend loaded, it sounds like you really had to pull down production in December, it wasn’t really through the full quarter, does that not adjust the calculation?

Michael Thaman

Management

That would adjust it a little bit, but we did see – I mean it did come through the whole top line. So you know the top line number which is probably a strong October, a weakening November, and a very weak December, we would hope that as we start to talk about the first quarter and the second quarter, we would talk about a weak January and an improving February and an improving March and an improving April. So as we really do see the market reacting, I think year end is a particularly difficult time. Most companies are trying to take actions by year-end, so I think that probably put an exclamation point for most companies in terms of taking action to try to get out from underneath inventory positions and it backed up on us. I think probably we're starting the year a little bit weaker than the fourth quarter on average, but we would hope by the end of the first and the end of the second, we are getting back to where we started before. Keith Hughes – SunTrust: Okay. And final question is unfortunately an accounting question, but on the goodwill and the intangibles, there was no impairment, and I had seen multiple industrial companies have taken impairments to the stock price and whatever else the auditors have dreamed up, I guess I'd get your comment on that, why did you not see that, is that something that might become an issue in the future as we look to be in a pretty severe downturn, at least for the rest of this year?

Duncan Palmer

Management

Yes, thanks. This is Duncan again. Well, we obviously took a hard look at all our impairment testing on an annual basis. We did so again this year. And when we do that, we take a very rigorous view of all our assumptions and as you would have seen we have filed our 10-K. We have taken no impairments and our auditors are fully comfortable with that. If you look at where most of our goodwill is, we took most of it on in the context of our fresh start accounting after we emerged from bankruptcy, and most of that good will I think you will see is in our insulation business, and we remain very confident and comfortable that our insulation businesses will operate and will make a lot more money through the cycle as we look at more normalized level of housing starts. So when we come to value that business and think about that in the context of impairment testing, we are not applying values that would typically come out of a 600,000 housing start type number. We are using much more through the cycle time valuations and therefore taking a much more long-term view. So as you would have seen, because we have filed, we have taken no impairment charges and that remains our view. Keith Hughes – SunTrust: Okay. Thanks a lot, Duncan.

Scott Deitz

Management

Shaquana, I think we'll take one more question, and then we will go to closing remarks.

Operator

Operator

Yes, sir. Your last question comes from the line of Garik Shmois with Longbow Research. Please proceed. Garik Shmois – Longbow Research: Hi. Thanks taking my call. Just on the CapEx figure, is it essentially maintenance CapEx that you have in the guidance?

Duncan Palmer

Management

I will take that. I mean our CapEx is a blend of some – of maintenance CapEx in order to maintain assets. It is also got some CapEx to energy savings projects and some growth, some limited growth projects around our business. Obviously, we have taken a very hard look this year at what we can do in terms of deferring some of the projects that we had announced. You would have seen that we have announced deferral of our expansion project that we had announced for Russia. I think that's something in these markets circumstances and taking a look at the Russian market, we feel that that is something that we felt comfortable deferring in terms of managing our CapEx for 2009. So we have taken examples like that through our business. We have been going through it line by line, all the items in our CapEx budget, making sure that we are being as prudent as we can be in balancing maintenance of our current assets and taking advantage of reducing it where there are some growth opportunities, but obviously we have cut that back. Garik Shmois – Longbow Research: Sure. And just secondly on share buyback, you still have about 1.9 million shares remaining under the program, could you just review the share – the use of cash potentially to buy back some of the offerings?

Duncan Palmer

Management

Yes, thanks. I mean in the past we have said that where we see clear line of sight to free cash flow that we would maintain the option of repurchasing shares as part of the treasury tool kit in terms of how we would see application of free cash flow. I think it would be fair to say that in 2009, we see value of liquidity to us to be very high. We are obviously managing that very carefully and keeping under review all our uses of potential cash. So I think it would be fair to say that we keep it in our arsenal, but we value liquidity very highly this year. Garik Shmois – Longbow Research: Sound good, thanks a lot.

Scott Deitz

Management

Mike, any closing comments?

Michael Thaman

Management

Yes. You know I think the bottom line for us for 2008 as we look backwards is we really did complete a successful year. When we went into 2008, we knew that we had won business that had always been admired and respected by investors, and that was our insulation business. It’s a business that has consistently delivered 15% operating margin through cycles, it has years below that, it is years above that, but we have always felt comfortable telling investors that we think over the long-term that is a business that can earn 15% or better margins. We went into the year saying that we thought we could do better in roofing and we went into the year with a lot of promise associated with our composites business. And I think as we come out of 2008, we are very comfortable talking about the fact that we really believe Owens Corning has now created three very strong business franchises in our roofing business, our insulation business and our composites business. Obviously in the near term, those three great businesses are being impacted by the market environment that we see. Most notably our insulation business because of its exposure in new construction and our composites business as it works through the issues that we talked about on this call. We do think our roofing business will carry us through the first half of the year and provide us good strength and profitability. We're hoping that someone here soon we will find a bottom to the global economy, we’ll find a bottom to new construction, and that we can begin to build off of those bottoms. We think the company is very, very well positioned, that when that happens, we have a lot of positive earnings leveraged that would continue to…

Operator

Operator

Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This concludes the presentation. You may now disconnect and have a good day.