James M. Rutledge
Analyst · Wunderlich Securities
Yes, that's a great point, Alan, because that is usually by now, you'd see some events occurring in the business. I think, Michael, I don't know if it's, some of it's a little unexpected. I mean, the, that we could not have predicted obviously, going back to the Q1 call, how severe all that wet weather was going to be in Western Canada. It almost seems like the drought conditions that we have in the U.S., it was all the moisture was being pushed north and it was so wet up in Canada. So clearly, there, that, if you want to call that a mess [ph], I mean, that's really what happened, weather-wise. I do think in the repositioning of assets, we probably underestimated the length of time that would take. We thought we were in the middle of it by then. We thought that some of our customers were just going to make that transition. And as Alan pointed out, we had a couple of customers who went back to conventional, back to California and pulled out, even out of the Bakken when -- during that period of time. So there was some -- I think had those events not happened, we would've been a heck of a lot -- we would've been very close, I think, to where the consensus is. And certainly, if any events, as Alan pointed out, that would have helped as well. I think looking at the last half of the year, if you look at the margins, we're confident that in the last half of the year, that we're going to have 19% margins in that region. And that's what gets us to the over 18%. We're running it -- for the first 6 months, 17.3% margin in EBITDA. And last year, just by reference, we were 16.8%. So there's growth of 0.5% in March and if you look at the first 6 months and take out the seasonality of the Oil and Gas, even with the current results. So I'm not sure -- I hope those points help what you're saying there, Michael.