Eric Vaillancourt: I think the key word is just uncertain, Jeff. When we talk to customers, the inventory destocking has been taking longer than we thought and longer than they anticipated. So things just continue to seem to move to the right a little bit. But at the same time, the long-term risk prospects haven’t changed. When you look at what’s going to happen over the next decade, we’re still looking at doubling in the industry, and we’re still positioned extremely well between the onshoring the North American focus and the leading-edge nodes. Our businesses now overall are performing very well, and we’re still excited about the future. Our customers are working with us to make sure that we’re ready for the recovery. The concern recently has switched, we are ready when things change.
And so making sure that even though we’ve adjusted costs here or there that we’re positioned to grow quickly as this thing rebounds. And so that’s where spending a lot of time with customers now is how quickly can you ramp up.
Jeff Hammond: Okay. Very helpful. And then just on Sealing, maybe just update us on kind of this margin resiliency even as you get maybe some seasonal step down in 4Q. And then just expand on general industrial, is that destocking? Or is that real demand weakness. And I guess last in Sealing, how long do you think this food, pharma destock takes?
Eric Vaillancourt: I’ll take that first. The food and pharma destocking, we think will continue into ’24, but we don’t have much more visibility than that. If you look at our margins, I expect them to hold pretty tight. There’s a few things happening. So when you look at the FTR, which I always look at as a leading indicator of freight ton miles, ton miles are relatively flat according to the latest projection. I think it’s down a couple less than a few tenths of a point this year and up a few tenths of point next year or something like that. But plus or minus one, so I’ll call that flat. And so when you look at that, our aftermarket business have performed very well at STEMCO and it is. Our OEM business, when you look at that, a trucking or trailer builds is projected to be down double digits, but it also improves our mix and our margin profile.
Lastly, we’ll get some price increase as we always do. We’ll have some January 1st price increases that will be strategic and, let’s say, surgical. And then in addition to that, the supply chain is really in balance now from my point of view in Sealing, and we’re starting to see more cost down in the supply chain. So our prices in some commodities have dropped, and so we’re picking up some margin there as well. We don’t intend to give most of that price back. So overall, I expect our margins to remain robust in Sealing.
Jeff Hammond: Okay. Thanks guys.
Operator: Thank you. Our next questions come from the line of Steve Ferazani with Sidoti & Company. Please proceed with your questions.
Steve Ferazani: Good morning, everyone. Appreciate all the detail on the call this morning. I wanted to ask a little bit about AST margins, which now are declining some more, and you noted that weakness has extended. It also sounded like you made some comments about you’d look at some further cost cuts. I know you took pretty substantial ones beginning of the year. So the question is, are we bumping along — is your expectation that we’re bumping along the bottom of AST margins? And are there any meaningful cost cuts you can make knowing that the outlook is the timing of the recovery now is uncertain, so maybe it comes back faster.
