Good day ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the Fourth Quarter 2007 Huntsman Corporation Earnings Conference Call. My name is Melanie and I'll be your coordinator today. All participants are in listen-only-mode. [Operator Instructions]. As a reminder this call is being recorded for replay purposes. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. John Heskett. Please proceed sir.

Thank you, Melanie and good morning to every one. My name is John Heskett and I am Vice President, Corporate Development and Investor Relations for Huntsman Corporation. Welcome to Huntsman investor conference call for the fourth quarter of 2007. Joining us on the call today are John Huntsman, our Chairman and Founder, Peter Huntsman, our President and CEO and Kimo Esplin, our Executive Vice President and CFO. The recorded playback of this call will be available until midnight February 29, 2008. The recorded playback maybe accessed from the U.S. by dialing 1-888-286-8010 and from outside the U.S. by dialing 1-617-801-6888. The access code for both dial in numbers is, 57468327. The recording of this call may also be accessed through our website. Before, we begin the discussion of our earnings, I would like to say a few words about forward-looking statements. Statements made during this conference call that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements. Such statements are considered to be predictions or expectations and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties. Our actual results could differ materially based on a number of factors including, but not limited to the consummation and timing of our proposed merger with Hexion, future global economic conditions, changes in the prices of our raw materials and the energy we consume in our production processes, access to capital markets, industry production capacity and operating rates, the supply demand balance for our products and that of competing products, pricing pressures, technological developments, changes in government regulations, geo-political events and other risk factors. Please refer to our most recent 10-Q... 10-K and our other public filings for a more complete discussion of the risk factors applicable to our company and our announced plans to merge with Hexion. Before, I walk through a summary of our…

Thanks John. Let me start off by updating you on the completion of the disposition of our U.S. Polymers and base chemicals businesses to Flint Hills. As you know, during the fourth quarter, we successfully completed the restart and commissioning of our Port Arthur olefins facility. As a result, we were able to complete the sale of our U.S. base chemicals business to Flint Hills on November 5th, and transfer the plant and related business across to them in exchange for $415 million in cash. Beginning, this quarter the entire base chemical business is reflected as a discontinued operation and we recorded a pre-tax impairment charge of $143.4 million in discontinued operations related to the sale. We also received the final $70 million in proceeds related to the sale of our U.S. butadiene and MTBE business to Texas petrochemicals in the fourth quarter and we recorded a pre-tax gain of approximately $69 million. This gain is included in continuing operations, but it has been excluded from our calculations of adjusted EBITDA and adjusted income from continuing operations. On February 16, 2008, in accordance with the terms of our 5% mandatory convertible preferred stock, we converted all of the outstanding shares into 12,82,475 shares of common stock. On February 19, 2008, we paid our final preferred dividend to stockholders of... and trading of our preferred stock is being effectively suspended. This brings our total issued in outstanding common share count to approximately 234.1 million. Now let me update you on the status of our merger with Hexion. As a reminder on July 12, 2007 we entered into an agreement with Hexion specialty chemicals where in they will acquire all of the issued and outstanding shares of common stock of Huntsman for $28 per share. Including the assumption of debt this values…

Thank you very much Kimo. Good morning everybody. With adjusted EBITDA from continuing operations of $193 million, fourth quarter represented another period of improvement for us as a result increased about 13% as compared to the fourth quarter of last year. Excluding Pigments, where margins continue to be constrained due to a soft North American residential construction market and they continued slide in the value of the U.S. dollar relative to the primary European currencies, results of each of our Polyurethanes, Performance Products and Material and Effects division recorded very solid increases in adjusted EBITDA as compared to the fourth quarter of last year. The adjusted EBITDA of our Polyurethanes division increased 32%, Materials and Effects increased 18% and Performance Products improved 16%. In fact, the total adjusted EBITDA for these three divisions was up $48 million or 26% as compared to the fourth quarter of last year. This is also the first quarter that reported results from continuing operations that did not include any impact from the divested commodity businesses. As you know, this series of sales transactions as well as the impact of the outage of the Port Arthur facility has resulted in quiet a lot of noise in our reported results. With the completion of the sale of our North American base chemicals business to Flint Hills Resources in November, these one time changes should now be behind us. Also, we need to keep in mind that these results were achieved in spite of sharply higher raw material and feedstock cost as compared to the fourth quarter of last year and the third quarter of this year. Our Polyurethanes business performed very well during the fourth quarter with volumes up 5%, as compared to the fourth quarter of last year. As expected, our volumes sold into the…

Thank you Peter. Operator that concludes our call for today. Thank you, everyone for joining.

Ladies and gentlemen thank you for participation in today's conference. That does conclude the presentation. You may disconnect. Have a wonderful day.