William A. Furman
Analyst · Susquehanna
Sure. The tank car boom seems to have legs of its own despite some of those of us who have predicted, in 2015, 2016, it might taper off. It seems to be there are many who think that this is going to go on for a longer period of time. However, we're not counting on it, obviously. And our mix is important because some of the broader car types don't have the higher margins that have been enjoyed in the tank car business. So that's one market-driven aspect of your question. Number two, I would say most of our margin-enhancement opportunity comes from 2 major things: hitting our operating stride. What many of you guys would be calling operating leverage. Why haven't we had it before? Because we have been constantly ramping in tanks, we have been changing our mix, we have been adding new products. And as you do that, your efficiencies aren't as attractive. We are hitting our stride in Manufacturing, particularly GIMSA. The results there are very, very welcome and they're very impressive. And so we will expect the same from our other facilities in Mexico. The second major driver, though, of operating leverage will be the investment we've made in the technical side with -- that Alejandro Centurion, who heads our Manufacturing Group, has put in place with Martin Graham: value engineering, the reengineering of assets or cost efficiency, attractiveness to customers, and a number of those things involving pretty mundane aspects, like jigs fixturing, process management and supply management, supply chain management. There's a lot of value that can be added simply by now that we are more on stable production basis and we're not ramping as we had been from those -- the combination of all those factors. So there's plenty of opportunity, and then some investments and replacement of the less efficient plant that we have in Mexico. And I should remind everybody that we built a state-of-the-art plant adjacent to the Bombardier lease facility. That's our -- that was a very good move that we took a number of years ago. That plant is very efficient, very attractive. So once we replace the lease facility, we'll have lower -- the rent will go away and we'll have lower labor costs. So all of those are items that would contribute. Lorie, can you think of any others? Well, intermodal, we talked about we're very efficient and we're continuing, in our Portland facility, to reduce the hours on intermodal. We're reinvesting in the -- through automation and getting our labor cost, labor hours down there. So when that market comes back, which we expect it to do, we should be in a really good position to participate in it.