Wabco Earnings Call Nuggets: Vocational Truck Markets and Acceleration of Market Outgrowth

Wabco Holdings Incorporated (NYSE:WBC) recently reported its fourth quarter earnings and discussed the following topics in its earnings conference call.

Vocational Truck Markets

David Leiker – Baird: I guess just two things I want to touch on. On the China side we’re hearing some talk that some of those sub-segments of vocational truck markets doing a little bit better, the freight markets not upticking, construction is not showing any uptick. Is that consistent with what you’re seeing?

Jacques Esculier – Chairman and CEO: Yeah, actually, the market is I would say fairly confusing at this point. There are a lot of elements that would actually favor or not favor kind of a growth in the market overall. Again, David, as usual this is an incredibly complicated market to forecast. To tell the truth right now we see a flat to slight erosion. I would more than welcome obviously, but I would not be completely surprised that we see some maybe increase. So the best guess is what we share with you, but I’m not really kind of very strong on this guess. And I don’t think it would go further down below the 5%, but it could be a little bit more favorable than what we anticipate.

David Leiker – Baird: Are you seeing some of those specific end-markets (don’t) do a little bit better here recently or is it pretty consistent everywhere?

Jacques Esculier – Chairman and CEO: I don’t think we have the details that allow us to kind of drill into the sources of movements at this point, David. The only thing is obviously we have seen a strong upturn Q3 versus Q4, even though Q3 was drastically low compared to the first two quarters. So, at least we came back to that level of 270,000 trucks. We are again kind of at 270, it’s a little bit ahead of run rate that’s beyond 1,050,000 for the full year. So, that would kind of indicate we continue like this may be we could build that flattish market we are right now forecasting.