Good day, ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the Second Quarter 2008 Huntsman Corporation Earnings Conference Call. My name is Nikita and I'll be your coordinator for today. And at this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. We will facilitate a question-and-answer session towards the end of the today's conference [Operator Instructions]. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded for replay purposes. I will now like to introduce your host for today's call, John Heskett. Please proceed.

Thank you, Operator and good morning to everyone. My name is John Heskett. I am the Vice President of Corporate Development and Investor Relations for Huntsman Corporation. Welcome to Huntsman's Investor Call for the second quarter of 2008. Joining us on the call today are John Huntsman, our Founder and Chairman; Peter Huntsman, our President and CEO; and Kimo Esplin, our Executive Vice President and CFO. As a reminder, a recorded playback of this call will be available until midnight August 6, 2008. The recorded playback maybe accessed from the US by dialing 1-888-286-8010 and from outside the US by dialing 1-617-801-6888. The access code for both dial-in numbers is 90758926. A 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, the impact of the ongoing litigation related to the merger future global economic conditions, changes in the price 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 computing products, pricing pressures, technological developments, changes in geopolitical events and government regulations and other risk factors. Please refer to our most recent 10-K and our other public filings for more complete discussion of the factors applicable to our company and our announced plans to merge with…

Thanks John. Our CapEx in the quarter was $115 million. Consistent with our prior guidance in this area, we expect total spending for this year to be approximately $440 million. As we've discussed before when the process are completing several strategic expansion projects, let me briefly remind you the few of these. We are near completion on a new 100 million pound maleic anhydride facility at our Geismar, Louisiana site. We expect this to be among the lowest and most efficient facilities in the world and will solidify our market leadership in this product. Our investment will be approximately $165 million, over half of which will be spent this year and startup as scheduled for the first quarter 2009. This is a very profitable product line for us. In fact, EBIDTA margins for our existing business and facility in Pensacola are about 25%, which is among the highest in our portfolio. So, we expect this expansion to make a meaningful addition to performance products, profitability beginning in 2009. In addition, we're moving forward with our expansion of our maleic anhydride joint venture with Sasol in Moers, Germany intending to add 100 million pounds of additional capacity to our existing $135 million capacity presently. It's presently expected to be completed in 2011. We also just completed the 70 million pound or 20% expansion of our ethyleneamines capacity at our Port Neches, Texas plant at a cost of $32 million. This is another very profitable product for us and we've already seen the results of this on the bottomline, as volumes in the first six months were 24% higher than the last year with a corresponding increase in EBIDTA. Our 50,000 ton expansion of our Greatham UK Chloride... Titanium Dioxide plant will physically be completed in September of this year and operating…

Kimo, thank you very much. And thank you all of you that have joined us this morning. With adjusted EBITDA from continuing operations of approximately $210 million, second quarter results improved compared to the first quarter of 2008 by over $21 million over 10%. This improvement was despite headwinds from rising raw materials and energy cost, and the further weakening of the US dollar. These factors added nearly $100 million of cost to our second quarter results versus our first quarter. We are pleased with the performance of our industry leading businesses relative to our peers. Just give you some prospective, the price for most of our key raw material were up not only year-over-year, but also sequentially. By way of example, the two key benchmarks; crude oil and natural gas, were up 27% and 52% respectively as compared to first quarter alone. The good news is that the prices of these benchmarks have recently come out sharply from their recent peaks. But the average, thus far, in July remain above the second quarter average prices. So we are keeping a close eye on direct costs and are no way backing away from our aggressive stats on pricing initiatives that we have around the world. As I mentioned, the continued decline in the value of the US dollar relative to the primary European currencies have also impacted our results as US dollar depreciated by 6% and 8% respectively against the Euro and the Swiss Franc during the quarter. This has been particularly apparent in certain of businesses such as Advance Materials, Textile Effects and Pigment with majority of our manufacturing and overhead costs are in European currencies. There were, however, some very positive trends in our businesses. As I mentioned in our release this morning volumes were very strong, up…

Thank you, Peter. And operator, this concludes the call. Thank you everyone for joining this quarter.

Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This concludes the presentation. You may now disconnect. Have a great day.