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Pastimes : Clown-Free Zone... sorry, no clowns allowed -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Earlie who wrote (125821)	9/26/2001 4:33:17 PM
From: reaper	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 436258

Earlie (and all) I know you guys obsess (like everyone else) about tech, but a few interesting tidbits from the Tidewater conference call this PM. (for those that don't know, TDW is an exceptionally well managed provider of supply, crew, and anchor-handling vessels to the international offshore drilling industry) (i) deferring capital spending scaling back $100-$200mm a year in upgrading their fleet; according to O'Malley (CEO) its because of 11 Sept., not because of recent weakness in the GOM. he just thinks there's going to be more fallout, and won't invest that money til he's sure there won't be. so that's a lot of shipyard workers in Singapore and China standing around next spring. (ii) higher insurance costs TDW has a few boats in not-so-secure areas in mid-east and SE Asia. a lot of insurance was cancelled post 11 Sept; they have gone back and re-instated it all at higher prices. net cost to TDW about $200-300k per quarter, but they also said that they passed the vast majority of the increases onto their clients (via contractual provision); no idea what the gross increase was. just another small and non-obvious example of the increased cost of doing business in a post-WTC world. (iii) Caspian Sea deferral TDW won a contract w/ BP to provide boats for their Caspian Sea development (big win for TDW). That project now looks like it is on hold for at least a year. This is not meant to slam on Tidewater in any way; in fact, at these prices the stock is likely worth sniffing around (Patron -- any opinions?). More just an example of some of the non-obvious economic fall-out from the WTC disaster. Cheers