AEP Industries (AEPI)’s Fourth Quarter Fiscal Year 2014 Earnings Call Transcript

Matt: Alright. I had a question on how the pass through of lower raw material, lower resin prices works in a volume growing environment because last time we saw a decline of this magnitude in resin prices, -volumes yeah at least on a Proforma basis because you made the acquisition- had been impacted so you know just how do we look at how much your pricing has to respond in light of the lower resin prices?

Brendan: Yea. It’s pretty much an impossible question to answer because in some of our businesses contractual and it goes with contractual, whatever the contract calls for some of it is transactional, a lot of it is transactional and we are in many many markets and we are probably working at 9 divisions. They all operate differently, they all operate with different competition but we see ourselves as a beneficiary as these resin prices are coming down and giving us relief that we just choked on over 2 years.

Matt: That’s great and in terms of contract, are these what? I guess an index of resin or are they for some portion of time?  How do you look at the contractual business?

Brendan: We have contracts that vary from 30 days to 60 days to 90 days and in some cases extended periods of time protection but it’s done only in like one division where we do that—- but it’s across the board it various by the customer and it varies based on the business that are in.

Matt: Alright and then the final question you know if you look at the competitive environment you know versus 2012 for example when you had a more reasonable resin price environment you know how is it changed when you say it’s more competitive and it’s harder to achieve the sort of margins that you achieved and how would you like to be competitive in terms of it?

Brendan: The way I think about our business is almost the way you look at airline business.  For years they choked on very high oil prices and gasoline prices and in fact that made those businesses very very difficult to make a profit in, but over time and after that you go through that horrible cycle which we’ve come through we are not alone we see all the competition has suffered very very similar same thing that we have.  So we expect that it’s gonna be more order in the marketplace and people just as intent on regaining margin as AEP is.

Matt: OK.

Operator:  Your next question comes from line of Scott Gessner of Barclays.

Scott: Good Morning. Just a quick follow up on a couple of those points there. You mentioned throughout the year you tried to pass through I think you said 3 price increases or number of price increases. Specifically September though that price increase went through in the space of what turned out to be some actual resin declines coming after that. Then you talked about the effectiveness of the September price increase specifically.

Brendan: It went through and then they gave it back at a later period that’s about when it all ended and in November they gave it back.

Scott: Right and if you look back at 2014, how should we think about the amount of the resin increases actually capturing pricing because I am trying to figure out what the negative impact of higher resin versus pricing that wasn’t quite as high on your end in 2014?

Paul: If you look at 2014 we were behind resin price increases in every single quarter. I don’t have in front of me the amounts that we were behind in the first and second quarter but in the third and fourth quarter we were behind an average of $6 million at the gross profit level, that’s how far we were behind. For this year we were behind about 28 million, let’s say about $28 million that’s how much. On resin price increases of $230 million that mean we were behind about 3 cents a pound something like that.