John Faraci
Chief Executive Officer
Thanks Tom, and good morning.This morning as usual Marianne and I are going to do a couple of things. We'llreview our third quarter 2007 earnings results and the performance of ourindividual businesses. We'll discuss the fourth quarter outlook, we'll talkabout where International Paper is and its transformation plans. And then,we'll take your questions. We had a solid third quarter, infact our best absolute quarter since the second quarter of 2000. For the thirdconsecutive quarter, we posted the best absolute earnings in the last sevenyears. North America printing papers, posted its best quarter since 1995,benefiting from average prices, reduced maintenance outage cost and good costperformance all around the system. Brazil's EBIT improvedsignificantly driven by higher average prices, improved volume and mix. Onceagain, xpedx reported solid quarterly earnings benefiting from higher prices,increased volumes and market share, and the addition of some Central Lewmar earnings which we bought into the company in the thirdquarter. Product pricing improved versussecond quarter and uncoated papers, pulp and packaging grades has realized someor all of the announced price increases. Overall operations were fair, butI think we can do better. We began producing lightweight linerboard inSeptember, at Pensacola.I was there on Monday, and were already ahead of our ramp plan. Raw material cost particularly inNorth America continue to be somewhat higher driven by increasing chemical,wood and waste cost, a little bit offset by favorable energy cost. I think it'svery important and we feel good about the fact we were able to offset thesecost increases with increased realizations. In volume, land sales and tax ratewas flat quarter-to-quarter. Slide 5 shows our dilutedearnings per share from continuing operations before special items. We reportedthird quarter earnings of $0.57, 10% higher than the second quarter of $0.52and 26% above our last years third quarter of $0.45. We are pleased with our progresson increasing earnings and improving our global paper and packaging businesses.We said two years ago that a key element of our transformation plan wasimproving margins and improving earnings in our existing businesses, and overthe last two years as you can see from the slide, we've done just that. But wewant you to know we are not finished yet, we still have more earnings runwayand even as our forestland sales tell-off over the next few years. Next, turn to slide 6, some highlighthow we performed in each global region in the third quarter versus the secondquarter. As I said earlier, we had strong performance in the US andBrazilian printing papers and that drove our earnings improvement over thesecond quarter. We did not expect a strong third quarter in Europe, even havingsaid that, we still expect very good earnings for Europeversus 2006, when it's all set and done. I'll now ask Marianne to commenton our third quarter results by business in little more detail.