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Q4 2008 Sherritt International Corporation Earnings Conference Call - Final.

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OPERATOR: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Sherritt International Corporation year end results conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. Instructions will be provided at that time for you to queue up for questions. (Operator Instructions) I would like to remind everyone that this conference call is being recorded today, Wednesday, February 25, 2009 at 2:00 Eastern time.

I will now turn the conference over to Ms. Paula Myson, Managing Director, Investor Relations and External Communications. Please go ahead.

PAULA MYSON, MANAGING DIRECTOR, IR, EXTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS, SHERRITT INTERNATIONAL CORPORATION: Thank you and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Sherritt International Corporation's fourth quarter 2008 earnings conference call. Our call is also being broadcast live on the Internet using the webcast link on our website home page at www.sherritt.com. With me today are Ian W. Delaney, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Dean Chambers, Senior Vice President Finance and Chief Financial Officer. In addition to investors and analysts the media and the general public have been invited to participate in this call on a listen-only mode basis. A replay of the call will also be available by accessing our website.

Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that certain of our comments on this call may include forward-looking statements. Please refer to the cautionary language included in our press release that was released this morning and to our risk factors described in our SEDAR filings. In this afternoon's call, Ian Delaney will open with comments followed by Dean Chambers who will briefly summarize the financial results, followed by a review of operations and outlook. At the conclusion of Dean's comments we will open the lines to investor and analyst questions. So to begin, I will turn the call over to Mr. Ian Delaney.

IAN DELANEY, CHAIRMAN, CEO, SHERRITT INTERNATIONAL CORPORATION: Thank you, Paula and good afternoon. Thanks for joining us. Interesting times in which we live. We released our year end numbers this morning, press release. I will assume that everybody on the phone has seen that. We had a couple of speed bumps, hit a couple of speed bumps in the fourth quarter, most of which we're managing to deal with fairly well. We ended the quarter with a very strong cash position, we're managing to conserve cash quite well.

I suppose the outstanding -- the large outstanding thing in the fourth quarter results would have been the write-down of goodwill in the amount of $460 million odd relating to our Ambatovy investment. Goodwill is what it is. It's always a thing on the balance sheet that you would like to get rid of and frankly I'm glad we're writing it off and getting rid of it.

We've got a fair amount of cash on the balance sheet. Still got good bank lines. The thing which is probably catching our shareholders' attention in addition to the write-down of the goodwill is the increased capital estimate for the Ambatovy project, $4.52 billion on 100% basis. We had been advising the market that we thought this number was probably going to be higher than the number we had been working with through most of last year and I think this now is a good number. I think all of the partners are comfortable with this number.

We still think this is an excellent project. It's still going to be a very low cost producer. The issue for Sherritt is how can we finance our portion of that and our partners have offered to assist us in that so we are in fact in negotiations with them to ensure that we can carry on with this project in a way that doesn't jeopardize our balance sheet. It's a good project, looks like it will be a low cost project still with the increased capital that we're putting into the project. We're gearing up to carry on construction and we'll probably have more to report on the financing at the -- during the coming quarter or certainly by the end of the quarter.

We have dealt with our Cuba receivables rather neatly. We have, as you may know, the world's getting kind of stressed these days everywhere with respect to cash flows, commodity prices and one thing and another and Cuba is certainly not exempt from all those stresses and strains. However, we have reached a very solid, good and solid arrangement with them whereby we get all of our receivables are cashed up to the level of the National Bank which guarantees an amortized amount on a very regular basis. It's a good arrangement for us, it approximately equals the capital that we'll be investing in the country. We secured our receivables for the -- anticipated receivables for the coming year in the same fashion and we're very pleased with that outcome.

There's still an open...

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