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Strategies & Market Trends : YEEHAW CANDIDATES -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JoeinIowa who wrote (799)	12/31/2002 11:00:11 AM
From: Crossy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23958

Joe, the "pension liability" is a deferred compensation plan not a "defined benefit" plan. So I don't worry. This is longterm money and a tax efficient way to do this. I assume that a "compounding" structure is used for the calculation and that the quarterly implicit interest is going right into COG or SG&A (rather the former). I also assume that with all asset sales, pro-rata deferred compensation liabilities will be "sold" with it as this seems to have been the case in past quarters (look at quarterly changes in the figure and the asset sales that accompanied it) The union severance pay argument I saw but concluded that the company will prevail here, as they indicated in their reply to newspaper questioning, even if they didn't shouldn't be that problematic. And the deal doesn't look unfair to me. Funny that Texas has unionized labour. I thoght that's quite unusual in the South.. Joe, this is a post-BK company that needed to adress its leverage first, so asset sales are an integral part of this early stage. Now that they sold off and closed most peripheral and unprofitable operations they seem to be able to exploit lower prices for cane vs. beet sugar with their asset structure. Also market opening to sugar imports (Mexico) in the future shouldn't be that problematic to them, now that they sold upstream operations and strengthened downstream sugar operations but at the same time being able to resort to autonomous production just in case.. (tapered integration strategy) rgrds CROSSY