PPG Industries Earnings Call Nuggets: M&A and Supply Costs

PPG Industries, Inc. (NYSE:PPG) recently reported its fourth quarter earnings and discussed the following topics in its earnings conference call.

M&A

David Begleiter – Deutsche Bank: Chuck, just on today’s announcement on the optical JV and then potential sale or purchase. Give us a little more detail on your thinking on this business, is it core or is it not core, if you sold it, what’s the tax basis you bought it? How much will it cost you, a little more detail would be great?

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Charles E. Bunch – Chairman and CEO: David, we’re not really going to give a lot more color on our – on the press release. We did that for our disclosure obligations and we’re not going to get into providing a lot of additional details on the press release regarding transitions.

David Begleiter – Deutsche Bank: Then just one more thing; Chuck, if you look at your Coatings margins, they were roughly 13.1% for the entire Coatings businesses. Should they be up or down next year? If up, by how much do you think?

Charles E. Bunch – Chairman and CEO: Well, we feel we have an opportunity to improve on our Coatings margins. So, we think in general economic conditions and volumes should improve globally. Depends again on the regions and markets, but we feel that that is going to be an overall benefit, plus we have as you know we’ll be calendarizing the full restructuring benefits as we go through 2013. So, those two events I think or those two conditions give us an opportunity to improve on our Coatings margins.