Earnings Labs

Owens Corning (OC)

Q1 2012 Earnings Call· Wed, Apr 25, 2012

$121.26

-2.19%

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Transcript

Thierry Denis

Management

Good morning, everybody. I'm Thierry Denis, Director of Investor Relations, and I'd like to welcome you to Owens Corning 2012 Investor Day. For those of you who are in the room at the World Headquarter location here with us, thanks for making the trip. I think you won't regret it. And then we also have a live webcast at the same time. And for those people who are actually following us on the web, thanks for your interest in the company. This is going to be a great day. I'm very excited about the program we've put together. I'm very excited about having the opportunity to meet with you again. We've had a chance yesterday night to actually chat with a number of you. So I enjoy the fact that we get to see each other again, meet new faces as well but also very excited about the program we've put together. And the program was designed with you in mind. So we've considered your concerns, issues, the questions that I tend to get, and we try to incorporate that as much as possible in the content that we will deliver today. I'm hoping by the end of the session today, you feel like you have a better understanding of the drivers of our businesses, a better understanding of the outlook of our businesses and then as result, are in a better position to model and make financial investment decisions. You'll see that we will actually go beyond what we've done before in a number of areas in terms of helping you understand some of the specifics of our businesses, and that's intentional. And the intent there is to help you make these decisions with better information. Now how is the day going to unfold? We -- you should have…

Michael H. Thaman

Management

Thanks, Thierry, I appreciate it. I hope that's about the right volume level. Welcome, everyone. We certainly appreciate you coming into Toledo, and also those who have joined us on the webcast, thank you for joining us on the webcast. We think we have a great Investor Day scheduled for today. This is our second year now of doing this event here in Toledo. And hopefully, last night, those of you who had a chance to join us for dinner and those of you who've been with us this morning, going to see the pride that we as a company have in being able to show off our people and our products. I thought we had a very nice product display last night with some of our innovations. I think you had a chance to talk to some of our people who do that. And certainly, one of our key objectives for today is to let you get to know our management team. So as Duncan and I go out and travel on the road, I think many of you have gotten to spend time either with me or with Duncan or with our investor team, but that's not really where the earnings engine of Owens Corning comes from. It's more our businesses and our people who work in our businesses. And today, I think you'll have a chance to see a very, very good Composites team and a very, very good Building Materials team talking about their business and the outlook that we have for their business. I'm just going to make some fairly short opening remarks, go through a few of the headlines of our last couple of years of performance, some of the headlines of the things that we're going to share with you today. As Thierry…

Arnaud Genis

President

Good morning, everybody. Can you hear me? Yes? Good. Well, first of all, I'd like to say that I'm very happy to be here. It's my second participation to the Investor Day. Can you hear me? I come here. Okay. I need to move my microphone. Okay. Sorry about that. I always enjoy the interactions with you because, well, you ask a lot of questions, a lot of clever questions. Yesterday, one of you made a comment, which was well, Composites is really the black box of Owens Corning. And you know that glass is transparent. Glass fiber is used in translucent applications, so my mission today is that you no longer say that and that you leave this room understanding very well 4 things. The first thing is that Composites are growing faster than the economy, growing faster than traditional materials, and we would share with you how we model this market. The second thing that I'm going to share with you is how much China has changed our industry structure over the past decade. China has become a major consumer of glass fiber, obviously, with its massive industry growth. China has also become a major glass fiber producer. That's the number two. The number three is that the next decade is going to be very different from the previous decade, because the very fundamentals of the Chinese glass fiber industry are changing with the strengthening of the renminbi with industry -- energy availability constraints. With inflation, the game is changing. And the fourth one is that this is going to be our decade. We have a winning model. We have a winning model, which is based on, as Mike shared, a growing share of low-delivered cost assets. We have a winning model, which is based on a global…

Marcio Sandri

Management

Thank you, Arnaud. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. For me, it's certainly a great morning to be here in front of you and to have a chance to talk about our business makes of this a great morning. Arnaud said that in his team, he has a French. He has Welsh. He has Brazilians and he has American Chinese. It is clear that I'm the American-Chinese guy here. At least on the sense that I lived 4 years in Toledo, Ohio, and I've been living in Shanghai in the last 6 months. You have just heard a great story about Composites. Arnaud very well explained how this market plays, how much this market has been growing and what are the drivers for the growth of this market. It is my objective in here to show you how our business, the Composites business of Owens Corning, is positioned in this market. I will do that through telling a little bit of today's story, a little bit of the industry structure, and I'll talk a little bit about our strategy going forward that we think and we know that will make of our business a global winning business, not just today but tomorrow. Let me start by showing you a picture of this global business and how we are positioning in this global business. Just to give you some explanation first, we are -- in this presentation, we are organizing our business in 4 different regional segments. And we'll talk about the key ones during the presentation. The first one is Americas, and Americas comprise North and Latin America. Then, we have EMEA. EMEA stands for Europe, Middle East and Africa. And for now on, I'll -- for -- to facilitate our conversation, I will refer to it as Europe only. And…

Julian Francis

Management

Thank you, Marcio. I've got just a couple of slides to make 2 key points. The first is about what Marcio just talked about, our repositioning of our assets in the Americas. And second, how we are capitalizing on our competitive advantages to win with our customers in the future. In 2007, we undertook a repositioning of our assets in the Americas. There were 3 primary actions that we took to establish a strong, low-delivered cost position. First, we invested in scale assets to fully leverage them, expanding furnace production capacity in key products to support market growth. Second, where it made sense, we consolidated underperforming assets and shrank them to establish a base on which to build. Getting the size of the assets right is a necessary but not sufficient condition for success. We also needed to reduce complexity in our operations. In order to do this, we took a third step and decided to go to a focused factory model, making only 1 or 2 products at each facility. This creates operating efficiencies, it reduces product and equipment changeovers that limit output and we carry fewer raw materials, such as chemicals needed in our process which in turn reduces the silos that we store them in and reduces our overall capital requirements. This focus also helps our operators become experts in their areas, understanding the entire process rather than specializing in forming or packet [ph]. This expertise has an impact on quality and efficiency, driving out errors from our production process. But perhaps most importantly, it is much easier to duplicate best practices across a standard production platform than it is on a uniquely configured asset. That's what makes us confident we can replicate this model. These actions delivered the results we expected, moving 75% of our assets…

Marcio Sandri

Management

Thank you, Julian. We certainly have created a model in the -- this successful story of Americas. I mean if you paid attention in what Julian said and I hope you have not made any notes, so that you cannot share with our competitors. There's a very specific model in there. And we want to implement this model around the globe so that we create a sustainable business. Europe is the large, attractive business for us. It generates 32% of the global composites revenue as per the first slide that I shared with you. We love our leading position in that market, and went to make -- to take advantage of the ongoing downcycle to accelerate the implementation of the model that we learned in the Americas. We have started with the expansion of our existing low-cost platform in Russia due to start up in the second quarter of 2012. In February, as you heard, we announced the consolidation of our Western Europe assets that will lead to a 5% reduction of our high cost capacity around the globe. As announced in our earnings calls, it will have a total cost of $130 million, half of which is cash that will be largely offset by sales of land and precious metal that will be freed in the operation. The remaining assets will then have higher capacity utilization, which helps to reduce cost. Besides product-dedicated facilities as much as we did in Americas, will have better quality, more consistency and higher productivity, making our customers happier. You can see in the graph, in the right-hand side, that we're going to cause in Europe a thing that is very similar to what we did in Americas. Our low delivery cost asset basis will increase from the current 10% to 70%, when everything is said and done. Any additional demand that cannot be covered by the local assets will then be served from our low-cost global network, which will be increased by 8% with the addition of Russia and Mexico. We are proliferating the successful model proved in Americas to Western Europe, in order to create a sustainable and profitable business. I would like now to hand it over to Paul Wei, our General Manager of Owens Corning China. Paul will share with you the exciting opportunities that we have in China and how we are succeeding. By the way, he is the next Chinese-American of the organization.

Paul Wei

Management

I was going to say thank you, Marcio, but I guess I'm going to be the Brazilian presenting China today, so let me know how I do. Good morning, everybody. I'd like to take the next few minutes to share with you our story in China, and why I think it presents a unique opportunity for investment and significant growth and how we are positioning our businesses to grow in China. Quite simply said, China today is the largest market in the world for glass fiber, and it represents 24% of the global demand and industrial production will remain in the high-single digits for the next 10 years. As you look at the chart to the left, you'll see that growth has been rapid in the last 10 years and primarily fueled by low cost of production, exports and the heavy investment in infrastructure. However, as we look forward to the next 10 years, what we are seeing is a significant shift with a focus to investment on domestic growth. Driving this is going to be continued investment in power and energy, infrastructure away from the coastal regions and to meet a growing consumer demand for an increasingly wealthy society. And those of you who have been to Shanghai or China know what I'm talking about. To achieve this, what the government has really recently announced for performance materials in its 12th Five-Year Plan, a renewed effort to grow and triple these materials to more than RMB 2 trillion annually by 2015. And in the glass composites market, we are seeing a similar growth structure in trend. Today, we estimate that about 30% of the market is performance based. And what that means is that applications and composites must meet, in conjunction with local and government institutes, strict standards in…

Arnaud Genis

President

Thank you, Paul. Okay, I'm just going to wrap up here and go back to my opening comments, which are again, global trends do favor the growth of composites materials faster than industrial production, 1.6x. That leads us into, well, a 5% to 7% CAGR growth for composite materials. This is an industry structure which is changing, you've seen the evolution of China, the fact that the growth of the domestic market in China is going to outpace the incremental capacities that they will be building. Also the fact that, well, the cost factors will be much less favorable moving forward. And -- well, lastly, this low delivered cost model that we have successfully developed in the Americas will be proliferated. We are on track on the execution of our plan in Europe. Obviously, this is always a difficult exercise but the entire team is mobilized and acting very responsibly. But this will enable us to go back next year to the double digits EBIT margin that was mentioned in our fourth quarter call and will put us on track also for our guidance for this -- the middle of this decade of the mid-teen EBIT margin. Okay? So I hope that at the end of these presentations, things are clearer for you about the bright future of composite material, the very unique position we have in this market. Again, this is a market where you have 3 kinds of actors. You have Asian actors that are just in Asia, you have regional actors, industry containment [ph], that obviously are suffering from the lack of tide [ph] and you have seen that, well, some of them are pulling the plug, this was the case last year with one European producer and we are the unique global supplier, leading the market. We have been leading this market for the past 60 years, and we have a winning model for the next decade. Now with that, I'm going to open the Q&A session together with Thierry.

Thierry Denis

Management

Good. So you've heard from our key business leaders, I guess, in composite business. And with Arnaud, you actually have access to probably one of the most expert business person in the industry. Arnaud has spent a considerable amount of time in that industry and I know you're all dying to ask questions about the composite business. So what we're going to do is we're going to spend the next 15 minutes or so taking questions. Because we want to give as many of you an opportunity to ask a question, what I'd like, that I would ask you to do is actually limit your time to one single question, so we can cover more people. And if you can -- don’t do that all at the same time. But if you want to raise your hand, if you have a question, then we will bring the microphone to you and then I'll direct the operations. And I guess, Mike Rehaut, he's the first one already. If you want to state your name and the name of your firm as you go and then your question for the transcript, thank you. Michael Rehaut - JP Morgan Chase & Co, Research Division: It's Mike Rehaut, JPMorgan. First question, well, I guess, my own, my single question then I'll get back in queue. We're used to the conference calls. The end market global breakdown was very helpful in giving a better picture of how the demand flows across the different industries. I was wondering if you could give us a sense relative to those different buckets where Owens Corning's own breakdown is relative to the global share if possible, at minimum, to just give above and below, for example, I remember seeing on the wind side a higher share, like around the 15% type of number, I remember that. So I was wondering if you can kind of give a sense, per industry where OC is above or below the global share.

Arnaud Genis

President

Right. So we've grown with this market. Over the past 60 years, we have developed a lot of applications. So you have markets that we have contributed to develop, where specification is a very long process and obviously in these markets, we have a stronger position than our competitors. Mike mentioned regularly in conference call that, well, the time required by customers to move from one producer to the other is quite lengthy. I mean you have high-tech applications like automotive, like electronic, where obviously the time to -- for our competitors to catch up with us is quite significant. So to answer your question is a bit difficult, you have 40,000 applications. But I would say, you can really consider that in those markets that are highly-specification driven, we are relatively strong and that in more commoditized markets, well, obviously we will -- we are competing given the low cost structure that we have, but these are not a big area of focus. Our capacities are flexible. We can go from one market to the other, and that's the way we manage both our manufacturing network and our sales network. Michael Rehaut - JP Morgan Chase & Co, Research Division: [indiscernible] are you above or below?

Arnaud Genis

President

We don't talk about share by end market but we are very strong wind. I mean, I would like to mention one thing we talked about, the Chinese wind market. Paul mentioned the special glass that we have developed for wind application. Only yesterday, I was talking about the shift of the evolution in the Chinese wind market. A lot of the evolutions are really favoring us. When you think about, well, China wind, I don't know if you've ever seen a map on where the wind turbines are being built. They were built in Inner Mongolia, and part of the difficulties in the 2011 market were the grid connection to bring all this electricity to the coastal areas. Moving forward, in China, you will have the growth of wind farms in low wind areas, close to the coast. And where you use a low wind turbine, you use a bigger blade. And to use a bigger blade, you need to use a thicker glass, and that's why we have a proprietary glass, okay? So just to answer in a nutshell your question. Well, we do have a strong position in wind, but we are strong in all these markets, and the market share that we have shared with you is the result of strong market share in all these markets. Wow, we have a lot of questions.

Kenneth R. Zener - KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc., Research Division

Management

Ken Zener, KeyBanc. Arnaud, could you discuss the impact of the aging Chinese capacity as their first-generation furnaces have to be rebuilt, how that impacts your view on their capital allocation, both domestically and how they're looking to invest abroad, as well as, does that rebuilding of the furnaces enable them to compete in the specialty area where you have far higher share than they do?

Arnaud Genis

President

Okay. I'm glad that you asked me that question. Actually, I could have paid you to make that question, because we talk a lot of the capacities. You have a lot of communication that happened around the new capacities that are being built in China, right? But what no one talks of, are the capacities that are being taken out. I've been living in Japan, I used to be a sales man for a glass fiber in Asia. At that time, there were 500 glass fiber producers in China. Whoever would use glass fiber, we would be forming from models, the glass fiber that he was using, okay. So in the chart that we are showing to you, well, we use our onstream, well-rounded 3 big Chinese competitors and also the more regional players, but there are so many people that are going out of business in China that are not mentioned. So I think it's important to highlight that. That's number one, we don't talk of the capacities that are being put -- taken out. Number two, you've seen on the graph that most of the capacities have been built in 2007 and 2008. 25% of the world capacities were added in 2007, 2008 by our competitor. And obviously, they don't have our technology, their furnaces last less than ours and then they need to put a lot of capital on the table to rebuild these furnaces. So I think the appetite also for incremental capacity will be impacted by the cost of the maintenance of the fleet of furnace that they put during that time frame. Okay?

Thierry Denis

Management

Okay. We've got a question from -- Okay. Go ahead, Keith

Keith B. Hughes - SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, Inc., Research Division

Management

It's Keith Hughes from Suntrust Robinson Humphrey. Can you give us some sort of idea of where your capacity is by geography now, and what it will look like post the restructuring you referred to earlier?

Arnaud Genis

President

Well, we've given you a breakdown of our sales by region. As Mike mentioned, our strategy is really to produce regionally and serve regionally. We do have some flow of products from one continent to the other. For example, well, you know that before starting our Chinese plants, we have been seeding the market from the United States. Right now, as we are growing in Russia, we have been seeding the Russian market also from our global network. But in general, I think, if you take the map that we showed to you, it would be fair to assume that there's not much difference between the sales split and the manufacturing split. Well, obviously, the goal in Europe is that part of the turnaround in the profitability in Europe, will be the thing that we will be consistently, permanently operating at that very high capacity utilization over there.

Thierry Denis

Management

Okay. We have the next question from Garik. Garik, you want to state your name and the name of your firm?

Garik S. Shmois - Longbow Research LLC

Management

Sure. Garik Shmois from Longbow Research. In the past, we've seen supply chain disruptions. I was just wondering if you could talk about your visibility with respect to supply chain bottlenecks and maybe characterize it with respect to the end market dynamics that you've outlined, perhaps bottlenecks that could come up in construction or wind or industrial, and where the risks are?

Arnaud Genis

President

You mean bottlenecks at the end market level? Like, can you be more specific?

Garik S. Shmois - Longbow Research LLC

Management

Yes, exactly. Maybe if you could talk about the steps within the supply chain particularly in the end markets.

Arnaud Genis

President

Okay. Well, actually, one of the most known bottleneck by you guys is the grid capacity in the China wind energy market. I would say, outside of that, what can be the bottleneck? It can be the product that go with our glass fiber. Take, for example, the big thermal plastics guys. Back in 2010, the entire industry was in a very short position, there was a shortage of glass, there was a shortage of resin also. So you can have a bottleneck in the resin supply, availability. Outside of that, I think, well, laminating glass fiber is pretty light in terms of capital expenditure, and I don't see really impact on the -- in terms of that growth, that CAGR that we showed, the 5% to 7%, I don't see bottlenecks being a threat. I mean, you may have 3 months, 6 months of difficulties because -- when you look back in 2010, our market grew 23%, this is massive. When you look at steel or aluminum, they had a similar situation but they didn't have that explosive growth just like we had in 2010. So it takes time for people to -- rehire people to build the capabilities. But I don't see any structural bottleneck that could be a threat. Julia [ph]?

Thierry Denis

Management

I'll bring down the mic to Andy down there? Andy, you want to state your name and the firm?

Andrew Fineman

Management

Andy Fineman, Iridian Asset Management. I would like to understand, I would talk a little bit about visibility in composites. And what I mean by that is, it's a business where you have a long period of time from conception to startup of new capacity and pretty significant capital costs involved in those. And yet it seems, at least from the last couple of years, like it's a business where you have had some difficulty with visibility of demand and the examples are: not knowing that there was 30% of the constructed base of wind turbines in China were orphaned and not connected to the power grid, so there was -- this excess that was going to disrupt the market and then, I'm not really sure I understand why everybody in Europe produced excess capacity in 2011. So I'd like you to just address the visibility of your markets and whether you can improve that going forward.

Arnaud Genis

President

Well, visibility, when you look at over a long time period, I think the slide is very clear, right? You take industrial production times 1.6 and you get it. If you look over a long period of time, this market has grown 5%, and we are telling you, it's going to grow 5% to 7%. Over a short period of time, I mean, we are emerging from a major economic crisis that has created a lot of volatility in several areas, in several industries. Who could have predicted that the United States would go through such an awful crisis? Who could -- I mean, I could take all these examples. When you look again at steel or aluminum, they're in the same situation we are. And we emerged from the crisis in 2010, our market grew 20-plus percent and everybody restarted capacity, thinking that 2011 would be a second year of very strong recovery and that's the situation. Now it's a year where everybody is adjusting, and where you will emerge from 2012, with a balanced situation. So this is my answer. When you talk of wind in China, I think that China is a huge market. If you look at the earnings call of the big wind producers that have -- that are further down in the value chain, they have an even more intimate knowledge of the market, they did not see that grid connectivity issue either, right? So it's being addressed, I think while we are learning from this kind of situation. But to us, I don't think it would have changed anything. We were a very significant player in the Chinese wind energy market. We were supporting this market from the United States. We have a very clear resolve to grow our market share in China, not only in wind, but in many other applications, so we need local capacity, right?

Thierry Denis

Management

So you want to bring the mic to Bob? He's actually the handsome gentleman on the back row there. Bob, in the back.

Arnaud Genis

President

Bob is going to go through numbers.

Robert C. Wetenhall - RBC Capital Markets, LLC, Research Division

Management

Thanks for the terrific detail this morning, it's really helpful in getting a better understanding of what's going. I just wanted to see if we could tie the operational initiatives that you've highlighted today to financial performance. And in your prepared remarks, you said next year you're looking to get back to a 10%-plus or a double-digit low teens EBIT margin and for a long-term multiyear goal, you were targeting a mid-teens and perhaps 15% EBIT margin by 2015 or 2016. And I was hoping you could shed some clarity on the breakdown in terms of, maybe walking us through how you're going to find those 500 basis points of margin improvement, and I just wanted to see if you could put it into a bucket between the gross -- the operating benefit you get financially from increased sales in tandem with the growth of the market, and put that into contrast with the benefit you get from the substitution of high-cost assets for low-cost assets in the portfolio.

Arnaud Genis

President

Right. Well, clearly, well, 2012 is a transition year, where we need to address inventory. And we have said that, well, we are reducing our manufacturing activity or the output versus the capacity by 7%. This is a very significant cost that we are not going to have next year. The second that we mentioned is the pricing headwind, and assuming that's, well, at the end of 2012 or maybe also second half of 2012, once the market is a more balanced situation, pricing will have stabilized. Actually, they're stable right now, but we can envision to look at the recovery in that field, and then restart capacity. So it's mostly driven, really, on 2 topics: one is operating leverage, by the fact we have new capacities on the ground, Mexico, Russia, and then with the increased portion of our low delivered cost assets. And then, well, Europe. Europe plan is totally executed and delivering the benefits of the adjustments that we are taking there, not only in manufacturing but also in the back-office functions over there.

Robert C. Wetenhall - RBC Capital Markets, LLC, Research Division

Management

[indiscernible]

Arnaud Genis

President

We don't disclose -- we don't go to that level of detail but be sure that we will be there.

Thierry Denis

Management

We've got time for one more question. And then when the question is over, actually, I'd like you to stay in your seat, because we're going to be distributing the Building Materials material before the break. So I think you want to have that for when we begin. Let's take the gentleman here, on the second row. Julia [ph]? Dennis McGill - Zelman & Associates, Research Division: Maybe this question is best for Paul...

Thierry Denis

Management

State your name and the firm. Dennis McGill - Zelman & Associates, Research Division: Yes. Dennis McGill from Zalman. I'm trying to understand how you view the Chinese competitors because on one hand...

Arnaud Genis

President

How we what? Sorry... Dennis McGill - Zelman & Associates, Research Division: How you view the Chinese competitors? What you're trying to convey? Are you viewing competitors that are more rational today and going forward, or are you seeing the benefits of some cyclical headwinds to them that will help you in the near term, but there's still uncertainty longer term?

Arnaud Genis

President

Well, you know -- okay, some of our Chinese competitors are listed on the stock market, they raise funds through IPOs and they have to be rational, right? The reality is, at the end of the day, you can look at your P&L based on an EBIT or based on the cash. Very much in the past, they were just looking at the cash they generate, forgetting about the depreciation of all the massive investments they had put together that will need to be rebuild as I mentioned earlier. So for me, there's a natural evolution in the way they approach the business. Actually, we see it even in the technology, in their approach to the market, they are indeed maturing. So we are pretty optimistic. They are maturing. And the second point is the fundamentals, the delivery cost, just evolving as we showed. We are a producer in China. So we know exactly what the cost structure is in China. We also know that the Chinese government is also pushing this industry to mature, to consolidate, to create more value for the overall Chinese economy, okay? So yes, we are optimistic about the long-term behavior of our Chinese competitor.

Thierry Denis

Management

Great. Thanks, Arnaud. Great questions. So we're going to distribute now the materials for the next session, which takes place after the break. So please pick up your packet before you leave, that are being distributed now. And there will be more opportunities toward at the end of the session to ask general questions again and then Arnaud will be there at lunch. It's now 9:52, and we're going to break as soon as you have your packets here. And I'd like everybody to be back here for 10 past 10, at which time we will resume with the Building Materials Group. [Break]

Thierry Denis

Management

Okay. If you please would like to take a seat now, we're just about to resume. Thank you. [Presentation]

Michael H. Thaman

Management

Well, welcome back, everyone. I hope everyone enjoyed the morning with our Composites team. We're going to switch gears now and move to our Building Materials team. I want to take this opportunity to again introduce our team. I think one of, probably my favorite parts of our Investor Day and one of my favorite parts of having the team come here to Toledo, the investors come here to Toledo is letting you get to know our team. I'm awfully proud of the talent that we've assembled and the leaders that we have. I think that you saw that with Arnaud and Julian and Marcio and Paul. This team's probably a bit more familiar to you, although you haven't seen them in some of their roles. So today you'll see Chuck Dana, who I think you've seen at every Investor Day. And Chuck and I have worked together now for 15 years at the company in a variety of roles. A year ago, I asked him to come over and lead our Building Materials group. Chuck has brought his same exuberance and enthusiasm to Building Materials that you always knew him for in Composites. I think he and his team have made really nice progress in moving our Building Materials businesses forward. Michael McMurray, who you've known in our Investor Relations and treasury function, who is now working with Chuck as his Head of Finance, will talk to us about insulation. Frank O'Brien-Bernini, who you've seen at virtually every Investor Day, is going to through some of the Building Science, that we think underpins our optimistic outlook for the business and then of course, Sheree, who is typically the highlight of Investor Day, will talk about her great business which is Roofing. So with that, I'll bring Chuck up on stage and we'll get into Building Materials. Thanks, Chuck.

Charles E. Dana

Management

Well, as you know, this has been a year in Building Materials for me. My team here is very experienced in this space from a variety of perspectives. But what I'm going to talk about today is -- first 3 things about Building Materials. I think we executed well in a pretty tough 2011 market. We definitely see an improving market in the next few years and I think we'll be able to get back to a more traditional Owens Corning theme of growth. We will deliver profitability improvement as we're well prepared to service the demand that we do believe will be a reality in the next couple of years. Now to describe the insulation business, Michael and Frank are going to talk to you. Michael, VP of Finance for BMG for, really, only the last 4 or 5 months but knows the business very well from his prior role. Frank O'Brien-Bernini, who's the Chief Sustainability Officer, but for us, he is talking today about Building Science, and let me explain that a little bit. Sustainability is important to Owens Corning, how we manage our plants, how we manage our materials responsibly as we manufacture our product. But also, we wanted to think about, and we spent a lot of time in the big group of guys that think about Building Science and how are customers use their products or our products in buildings using green, energy-efficient products to make houses more comfortable, to make houses more energy-efficient are examples. And you're going to hear some very specific new products that comes out of Building Science. And Frank will be talking about that. And Sheree Bargabos, who has been a good leader of our Roofing business for the last 10 years, and as you saw the little bullets going…

Michael McMurray

Management

Thanks, Chuck. Good morning. It's good to see everyone. I remember many of you from my Investor Relations and Treasury role. It's interesting, funny story last night at the cocktail hour, I was talking to one of our sell-side analysts who was asking me how I was enjoying my new role and actually what I was involved in. Then he kind of stepped back for a minute and said, "Well, maybe you know something now." All right. So listen, I'm going to talk to you about our Insulation business today. I'm very excited to be here today. I wanted to establish a couple of facts that we all know are true about our Insulation business. The first one is that we are the undisputed market leader in North American residential, commercial and industrial fiberglass insulation, undisputed market leader. Second, PINK Insulation and the Pink Panther are both enduring brands, very recognizable in the marketplace. Owens Corning has a rich history of innovation. The fact is we invented fiberglass insulation in the late 1930s and just recently, launched the largest platform change, our EcoTouch product in 2011. Also it's a fact that this business has a history of strong earnings. During the period 1985 to 2008, this business delivered average EBIT margins of 15%, and we're confident this type of earning performance will return. I think we can all agree that this is a great business in a well-structured industry. Today, my partner Frank and I are going to demonstrate a number of things. First, we're going to demonstrate that this business is poised for growth and that we face some wonderful macros. The big 3 macros that we face are positive demographics, growing U.S. housing starts and energy-efficiency policies. Now I'm not going to spend a bunch of time today…

Frank C. O'Brien-Bernini

Management

Thanks, Michael. We're going to go through a few slides that are going to kind of frame what you've heard several times referred to this morning around energy efficiency and what's going on in that space. You certainly can't cover the building materials marketplace without seeing and running into every day conversations around green building, around energy efficiency. There are some very dynamic green building programs. You might hear terms like net zero-energy building, passive house building. So those are all on sort of the beyond code, leading marketplace, really proving that energy efficiency all the way to zero-energy building have a role to play inside the built environment. Kind of behind all of that, the unsung hero in this, in driving reduced energy consumption are the progressing energy-efficiency building codes that provide the floor of energy efficiency. That is, provide specifications for the minimum energy performance that is acceptable for a new building, whether it's a residential or a commercial building. So those codes come to be about by a 3-part or 3-step mechanism. The first of which is the codes have to be developed. And that's developed by a consensus process, where a bunch of people throughout the industry work together to have a consensus decision on where the next energy efficiency code should be. Then it has to be voted on and passed by this consensus organization. So that's step number two. Step number three is then they have to be adopted, in many cases, adopted by a state. In some home rule states, they have to be adopted by municipalities, like is the case in Texas, one of the largest building environments, so a very, very important one. So they have to be developed, passed and then adopted, so this 3-step process. And what's very interesting…

Michael McMurray

Management

Thanks, Frank. Before I move on, 2 things I wanted to make sure were in the transcript just one more time. The first one is codes matter and the Zellman housing start this year is forecasted at 765,000 units. All right. So now I'm going to talk a little bit about capacity utilization. This is a view for 2012 based on an expected 700,000 housing starts of what we think the current industry, not OC, the industry, is operating at. A couple of things that I point out. Since the downturn in 2007, there have been 8 major plant closings. 3 of them have been led by OC, 1 in Québec, 1 in Arizona, 1 in Utah. Guardian has closed 2 plants, 1 in Ontario, Canada, and 1 in South Carolina. Johns Manville has closed 1 plant in New Jersey. CertainTeed has closed 1 plant in Pennsylvania. And more recently, kind of late last year, Knauf closed a plant in Alabama. So looking at this chart overall, looking on your left side, looking at total capacity, we expect the overall industry to be operating at about 50% capacity this year. So moving to the right. This is operating plant capacity. So this would be single-line plants or multiline plants that are operating or multiline plants that have lines down. So we estimate that this year, the industry is going to be operating at roughly 60% capacity. And then again moving to the right, which is operating lines, this would be hot lines in active plants that are running. And we think the industry's going to be operating at roughly 70% this year. And I think you can rest assured that for all 3 categories, Owens Corning is operating at higher utilization, although I'm not going to disclose what we're operating…

Sheree L. Bargabos

Management

Well, thank you, Michael. Good morning, everyone. I want to thank you again for taking time to be here. We genuinely appreciate it. I'm pleased to have the opportunity this morning to update you on our Roofing business. And we have a great business in a great industry, and we're certainly poised for growth. And I'm delighted to share our continued success and our outlook for the future. We have a strong brand and a leading market position in a very stable and attractive industry. We have the wind in our back as the economy recovers and housing improves, driving growth in roofing demand. And we continue to invest in innovation with a focus on enhancing profitability and productivity in our business. As you can see from this summary of our financial performance, we've delivered 4 consecutive years of double-digit operating margins and a cumulative $1.5 billion of EBIT. And we did this in the face of the weakest roofing market in more than 2 decades. And I'm very grateful to my team for such strong execution performance. Now what I'd like to do is I like to walk through the industry and marketing dynamics and review the key drivers of our business performance in both the near- and the long-term. Let's start with the U.S. steep-slope roof covering market, a $9 billion-plus market in today's economy, which is comprised of an estimated 70% asphalt shingles. The graph on the right shows the installed cost of various roofing systems. You can clearly see that asphalt shingles have an installed cost advantage. And with materials representing roughly 30% to 50% of the installed cost, the risk of substitution is low, even in a higher-priced asphalt shingle market. Given its beauty, durability and low installed cost, asphalt shingles will continue to be…

Charles E. Dana

Management

Thank you very much, Sheree. That's a great story. Thierry, how would you like to...

Thierry Denis

Management

Sure, thanks, Sheree. Same format as before. So we have about 15 minutes now of questions. I'd like you to stick to one question again, no follow up, so we can get back on schedule hopefully. And we have mics, right? We have mics ready, okay? So we'll take one from Herb on the right-hand side. Herbert Hardt - Monness, Crespi, Hardt & Co., Inc., Research Division: Herb Hardt, Monness, Crespi, Hardt. A year ago, I think you were fairly firm in 20-plus percent operating margins in the Roofing division. Now you're fairly firm in mid-teens. Basically, what happened? Is it more cost pressure or competitive pressure on end-market pricing?

Charles E. Dana

Management

Well, I don't think we've ever been firm over the long term to say 20% margins. I think what you heard Sheree say was that was her personal goal. I think our guidance has remained mid-teens or higher, and we’re always pleased when it's higher as it was last year.

Thierry Denis

Management

Next question, we have Steve in the back. I think it's Steve.

Stephen Kim - Barclays Capital, Research Division

Management

Steve Kim, Barclays. Just a sort of a longer-term question, just touching on foam. I know that you talked about the fact that there's a significant cost differential between foam and fiberglass insulation. And I'm not here to talk about the next 3 to 4 years. But I am curious about how you're positioning the company for 10 years out. You talked about surgically applying foam in certain areas where it matters most. But my experience in the construction industry suggests that contractors aren't very interested in being surgical about their insulation needs. So I was curious as to whether you could talk about why you don't think it's a good idea to actively engage in some sort of a branded PINK, maybe with fiber -- glass fiber strands in it, some sort of proprietary thing that you can get out there and actually position yourself at a time when the market is really nascent and yet-to-develop so that you're not chasing this maybe 5 to 10 years down the road.

Michael McMurray

Management

Okay. Well, I'm going to start this, but I'm going to ask Frank to come up because I think there's 2 ways, I think, to talk about that. First, I would challenge whether the spray foam business is nascent. I think it is -- perhaps we have a better solution that I think will actually substitute for those applications. As we pointed out the economics of it, it's very -- it's expensive, it's a boutique product. And we're not that confident that it performs all that well. And we've invested quite a bit in building science to say we do think we have a product that does perform well. And I think Frank can amplify that a bit. We've been in business for 80 years. We know our product performs essentially a substantial length of time. This is not what we understand yet about spray foam.

Frank C. O'Brien-Bernini

Management

Yes. Let me provide a little bit of perspective. Spray foam, if you followed this industry back for the last 10 years or so, kind of began to grow through its use of what I talked about earlier of because it's sealed and insulated. So there was a time where there was no sealing standard at all. So when you filled a cavity or a stud bay in a home where you build a wall, you fill that with some kind of insulator, when there was no sealing requirement and people didn't know much about sealing, when you spray the foam in there and it's sealed and insulated, it provided a pretty good improvement in the energy efficiency of the home. So legitimately, there became a strong interest in this idea of spray foam, sealing and insulating. Now it's always been extremely expensive. So it was an expensive way to do that, but it had a legitimate energy-efficiency improvement. Now fast-forward to now, where there are many sealing solutions, and people are sealing by outside, like our FOAMULAR extruded polystyrene foams, putting them on the outside of buildings and taping that, like you saw in the room, and providing very good sealing technology. To now if you then put something that's really expensive into a wall cavity, it has this redundant sealing capability for just that area you put it, it's a very expensive, totally nonvalue-added application. So in my view and certainly my company's view, spray foam is a product whose time had come and now has gone as a result of advancing understanding of building science and how to more effectively seal and insulate buildings. So that's our view and why we're not anxious to head down that path into a niche-declining application.

Michael H. Thaman

Management

And, I think, whether we bring value by having a PINK spray foam product that we aren't particularly enamored of, I just don't think the value would be with us. And that's where we try to do our acquisitions. It's where we think we can a better owner.

Thierry Denis

Management

Okay. Next question we have Will over here.

Will Randow - Citigroup Inc, Research Division

Management

Will Randow of Citi. Just a follow-on with Steve's question. In terms of spray foam, when you think about it big picture, a lot of builders are still using it. In particular, think about a few of the public ones. Have you had conversations with them? And have they discussed why they prefer that product over yours? And then as a second part to that, is there any value in being a producer of spray foam outside of the chemical companies?

Michael H. Thaman

Management

Okay, I'll take your second one. First, which is sort of quick, which is -- no, I think, first of all, I think the chemical producers are probably more the winner in this space, which I think is pretty clear. But with regard to big builders, really, through our Masco partnership, I can't say all of the big builders. But we have announced pretty substantial programs with Lennar, Horton, KB. So we are in conversation with all, largely through Masco. And our EnergyComplete offering over the past 12 months is massively moved into a different space where it's easier to install, it's more cost effective, and it's really quite impressive. At IBS show, we showed -- we had a lot of builders over for demos, and it’s good, very well received by them. So I think you'll see it in many more homes, largely through National Builders. Now someone -- maybe the question was about surgically applied. I do want to address that this -- we have -- if you look at the machine that we had in the past versus the machine that we have today, and I do not think we had the machine over there, it's kind of a misnomer. What surgically applied is -- intended to do was very low material application efficiency. And the machine that we have to do this is very lightweight. It made it simple for the contractor and, actually, at a reasonable price point. We think this is good for contractors. It's another way to make money that's simple. It doesn't involve suits, clearing out the house, big trucks. It's a really -- we think it's going to be a pretty slick application.

Thierry Denis

Management

Jim? On the left-hand side there? Julia [ph]? James Barrett - CL King & Associates, Inc.: Chuck, Jim Barrett, CL King. Given the 60% capacity utilization, what are your -- can you tell us generally what are your plans versus depreciation for capital expenditures over the next several years in insulation?

Charles E. Dana

Management

Okay. I think the place I would go there is first, I think -- remember there's plant capacity. Many plants are shutdown. When you talk about hot capacity utilization, that's currently at the 70%. We're very confident that with our current hot capacity, we can serve up to 1 million housing starts, okay, which -- so no -- there's maintenance capital, but no capacity additions. We think within our hot -- currently hot plants, we can get up to 1.5 million starts. So again, no significant capital, other than maintenance capital. And the one variable on that, which would be good news, actually, would be Frank's story on code adoption. If you ever get into that PINK space at 1.5 million starts, we're probably going to need something. And the industry -- I think the story, probably, is mirrored in the industry, although I don't know for sure how competitors might proceed in that, in those environments. But otherwise, our capital expenditures are at or below depreciation for sure. Thanks, Jim.

Thierry Denis

Management

Very good. Moving back to the other side -- on the second row, the gentleman there?

Paul Galat

Management

Paul Galat from Skylands Capital. A quick question on the insulation price increase effective March 31. In language, I saw no job quote security going forward. Could you help me attempt to quantify how that could impact profitability for insulation?

Charles E. Dana

Management

Yes. Okay. Well, the price increase that was announced for March 30, April 1, in that space, talked about no job quotes. And I think the simplest way I think about that is all shipments after April -- did I say March? I meant April 1. But all shipments after April 1 would be at the now higher price, and there wouldn't be price protection for a job quote. Someone is going to build 30 houses in Mississippi, and we give them a quote in February. And we learned a lot. I think that's a question that's probably in some of your minds in terms of the gypsum price increase, which talked about a cessation of job quotes. And that's kind of something that's taking some learning in the marketplace and applying it to our price increase, which was subsequently followed by everybody with that language as well. And the impact on the business, we certainly hope it's substantial. 12% would be a good start.

Thierry Denis

Management

Okay. Thank you. On this side? John A. Baugh - Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., Inc., Research Division: John Baugh with Stifel, Nicolaus. In that guidance of 1 million starts to make $100 million in insulation, does that assume existing home sales stay where they are? Or some rate of growth there and/or a change in re-roofing?

Charles E. Dana

Management

$100 million is insulation only. So now we haven't really -- we haven't put out a similar target as to how much we make in Roofing at 1 million housing starts. Certainly, at 1 million -- I don't know how that exactly correlates to existing home sales. I think it would be consistent -- depends on when the 1 million starts happens. What we believe is that our Roofing business market would grow as housing -- as existing home sales grows. To the extent that it follows it -- we do believe that the curve more or less follows new housing starts, that there would be growth also in the market, and we presumably keep our share and grow roof -- had volume growth in roof... John A. Baugh - Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., Inc., Research Division: And commercial as well. I mean, would that, we assume, be flat? Or that grows...

Charles E. Dana

Management

Oh, commercial. I don't think commercial necessarily moves in that space. But on the -- in our commercial and industrial business, which we call engineered insulation systems, the piece that's HVAC, certainly would grow commensurate with that, exactly, and the same proportion as our res business.

Thierry Denis

Management

Okay. We're going to take one more question and, as we do that, we're actually going to start distributing the package for the next session. And then -- so that when Duncan Palmer is on stage, we're ready to go. Andy, you want to take the last question?

Andrew Fineman

Management

Andy Fineman. So for 2012, it's pretty important that -- given the outlook for Composites earnings to be down and Roofing to be about flat, it's pretty important that insulation has a pretty big improvement. So given your current outlook for housing starts for 2012 relative to losing $97 million last year, do you think you can -- how close can you get to breakeven? Can you cut it by half? Can you cut the loss but 3/4? Any kind of range you can give, I'd take.

Charles E. Dana

Management

Well, I think we said substantial. And Mike -- and we're going to substantially improve our insulation business. And I might be able to help it by how. I mean, one of the things that we have going for us is we're -- into 2012, apart from a better market, we spent -- largely we spent the money for EcoTouch conversions last year. We won't have that this year. We'll have the full year impact of Masco volumes and leverage this year as opposed to last year. We have the full year impact of FiberTEK. And those are all reasonably good-sized positives that, year-over-year, are going to help us. I would also argue that the mood on price increases last year versus what the mood is this year is quite different. And I think that's the level if, 3 months from now, I was exceedingly confident on the strength of -- and the price increase absolute was holding in the market, we'd have a -- we'd probably have a more aggressive scenario. But those are a few of the factors, and we certainly want to -- we're tired of being a red dot.

Thierry Denis

Management

Good. Thank you, Chuck. Well, this actually concludes the business section of the program. And now we're going to move to the financial review and then corporate comments. I'd like to invite Duncan Palmer on stage. Duncan is our Chief Financial Officer.

Duncan J. Palmer

Management

Thank you, Thierry. Good morning, everybody. I'm pleased to see you all here. In many cases, some familiar faces. In some cases, some new faces. This is my fourth Investor Day. So short-term guidance for you who are on the East Coast. The weather here moves to you a day later. So you've been enjoying 60 degrees last couple of days, this is coming your way. I'm not a weather forecaster, I don’t really want to be one, but I just thought I'd pass that on. Anyway, I'd like to start off talking about our financial strategy, and that's what I'm going to spend the next few slides talking about, and then reiterating some of our guidance points. And the first thing I'd like to say is, you're probably going to notice some strong similarity to what I said at the last Investor Day. In fact, those of you who've been around a while will notice some strong similarity to what I've said the previous Investor Day and the Investor Day before that. And I make no apologies for that. Our fundamental financial strategy and approach to capital deployments has not changed, and it remains a very disciplined one and one that's very focused on adding value to investors, to shareholders and creating shareholder value. As you've heard, there's a lot of good reason to believe that we will see growth in our end markets, grow our top line and see strong earnings power in all of our businesses, which will drive us to produce a lot of cash flow. And as Mike said, we sustain a strong balance sheet that enables us to continue to invest in our businesses and to support growth in our businesses. And we also balance that with returning cash to shareholders over the long…

Thierry Denis

Management

I guess you're used to the format by now, so we'll have about 20 minutes of Q&As. And I see hands in the air already. Ken, you have a question?

Kenneth R. Zener - KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc., Research Division

Management

Ken Zener, KeyBanc. If I can, 2 questions. One, if someone could just comment on the margin in insulation relative to prices that you expect as demand occurs? In historical context, was it historically 2%? 3%?

Michael H. Thaman

Management

Historically 2%. Oh, I mean, if you view where prices are today relative to where prices were at their peak in 2005, 2006, I mean, we've seen, through sequential quarters, really early in the downturn in housing, we saw a fair amount of price loss. So we would say we make a very valuable product. I mean, a product that goes into a house and saves energy for 50, 60, 70 years. And in some ways, this capacity utilization cycle and this housing cycle devalued our insulation products. So we're not really embarrassed to believe that our insulation should sell for higher prices because it's a more valuable part of the house than the way it's currently being valued. Our near-term outlook, and I think Chuck touched on this very, very well, is, with utilization levels where they are right now, we will continue to look for opportunities to try to move pricing, but that over the long term, our ability to really get back to historical price levels is probably going to built off of a pretty good recovery in the housing market. So when we give our guidance on $100 million of earnings on $1 million of starts, we're not building in recovery all the way back to pricing levels that we would have seen in 2006, 2007 -- or 2005, 2006. I think as you get back to 1.5 million with the story we told today around codes, what that would do to increase demand or what that would therefore do to utilization, I think we're a little less comfortable saying that we would expect to see historical pricing levels as we got to kind of that level of starts activity.

Michael McMurray

Management

Thierry, you're calling them out?

Thierry Denis

Management

Okay, we've got somebody on the right-hand side there.

Mike Wood - Macquarie Research

Management

Mike Wood at Macquarie Capital. Can you just go through, back in the '08 period where you reset Roofing margins higher? Essentially how much of that was driven by restructuring? How much -- just industry getting more disciplined on price. Help us understand how to think about Roofing margins going forward. And that was also during a period of pretty high asphalt price appreciation with the repaving work that was done. So can you just put that in context?

Michael H. Thaman

Management

Yes. I mean, when you look at that time period, and really 4 things happened kind of simultaneously in that 2007 to 2009 time frame as we look at kind of the reset in the performance of our business, I mean, first, absolutely, we just created a better business. So we've had, in some of our previous investor decks, the whole program we had for about $150 million worth of performance improvements in our business. It was product line, design, it was marketing mix, it was facility personalization, it was lean and cost reductions. And on a $2 billion business, that represents about 8 points of improvement on a business that had always earned kind of in the mid-single digits, some years a little bit better than that. So we had pretty good line of sight on how we could do things to our business that we thought were proprietary improvements. Things we could do that weren't necessarily obvious things that our competition would do. In some cases, it was because our competition had already done it, and we were a little bit in catch-up mode. So we saw about 8 points of improvement that got us into the teams, just from things we could do to our business. Then if you go to the 2008, 2009 time frame, I think 3 big things happened. One is new construction had really declined as a percent of the mix of the roofing market, and new construction had been a part of the market where there was more price competition, where some of the new construction pricing was spilling over into reroof markets. And there's really no good reason when you look at an $8,000 reroof job that the roofing manufacturer should be giving their product away into an $8,000 reroof job.…

Thierry Denis

Management

Good. Next question. Mike? Michael Rehaut - JP Morgan Chase & Co, Research Division: Michael Rehaut, JPMorgan. Duncan, you kind of laid out the broad criteria for the M&A. And I think that, on the margin, it's kind of an incremental -- potential incremental driver to the story. So I was wondering, among yourself and Mike and the team, where do you see the pipeline today in terms of activity and focus, maybe today versus a year ago? Are there, perhaps, more targets on the radar screen today? And if we can expect over time, maybe compared to the last couple of years which have been relatively quiet, an increased portion of free cash flow going towards this area?

Michael H. Thaman

Management

Yes, maybe I'll talk a little bit about our track record, and then I'll ask Duncan to talk a little bit, maybe organizationally, in terms of the resources that we've put against this. But if you look at the time period 2007 to 2011, so if you take those 5 years, we've actually been more active, I think, than is really apparent, based on our top line, because we were both acquiring and divesting. So if you go back to 2007, we divested nearly $1 billion worth of revenue. I guess it's not quite that much. $600 million to $700 million worth of revenue when we sold out of our siding business. At the same time, we were buying in Vetrotex. So we did a significant swap, we think, in the quality of the earnings engine of our company. We think we did a significant swap in terms of having assets that we could add a lot of value to. But in terms of growing the business or actually applying free cash flow because we had proceeds from one divestiture that helped pay for the acquisition. In fact, it looked like we didn't have a lot of activity. I think if you then look at what we've done over the course of the last 18 months, at the end of 2010, we divested our manufactured stone veneer business which operated under the name Cultured Stone; very much of a new construction-driven business. In Canada, we had business that probably did better in high-end, high-price-point construction. We didn't feel like we had enough levers left to pull in terms of restructuring that business. We just didn't have enough synergies to continue to drive down our cost base. We sold that to Boral. Boral obviously has brick operations. They have distribution operations. They had a lot more levers that they could bring to bear in making that a better business. And around that same time, we got involved with the FiberTEK acquisition, which was a tuck-in on the insulation side. So again, not a lot of top line growth and not a lot of free cash flow deployment because we had a source of cash and a use of cash. I think, going forward, you've probably gleaned from today's presentations, we like all the businesses that are left. I mean, we're very, very happy with our Roofing business, our composites business, our insulation business in terms of those earning engines. So the next round of activity in the corporate development area is much more likely to be a use of cash flow and growth in the company. We've put resources against that to get ourselves positioned to be able to do that well. And I'll let Duncan talk a little bit about that.

Duncan J. Palmer

Management

Yes. So when we formed really capability around corporate development back, I think, in 2009, the early part of 2009, we started to staff up a little bit more in terms of this area, hired resources from the outside who had experience in this area, both on the corporate side and also on the investment banking side and formed a group. That's been very helpful in driving 2 or 3 big things for us. I mean, one is getting transactions done. So the Masonry Products, Cultured Stone transaction, for example. The sale of our asset in Brazil, the Capivari sale that we did in composites this year. That was heavily led by that team. And also, the acquisition that we did with the FiberTEK assets that we did and completed in 2011. Those were all heavily worked on by that team. So I think we have a proven track record of capability in that area. I would say that, that team has also helped us in terms of putting rigorous screening processes in place, rigorous process around how we develop proprietary situations so that we're not going to auctions, for example. So I think that's been very helpful to us too. And also, continuing an ongoing dialogue of what does the pipeline look like, how is the pipeline evolving, what's the external marketplace, how is that evolving? And so I think we have good capability in that area and good resources against it, and we have a track record of actually being more active than you might originally think.

Michael H. Thaman

Management

Yes, and I'd say one last thing in this area, which is I think the stuff we've done over the last 3 or 4 years is pretty non-obvious. So going and finding FiberTEK, I don't think that was a company many of our investors were aware of because it was private. Going and getting Vetrotex out of Saint-Gobain was something that our investors are probably aware of, but it required work in development to go do that. Likely that the most interesting transactions for us are going to have that kind of flavor. I mean, we get a lot of banking books, obviously, as you might all imagine, of not great building materials businesses with lousy balance sheets. And we don't think we're a great buyer of not great businesses with lousy balance sheets. So if you just screen what's kind of coming across the transom today, most of what's for sale at good prices are just not very good businesses or have big financial problems. We're looking for great businesses. I mean, we think, as a company, what we're good at is building, growing and creating fiercely competitive businesses that are great businesses in great industries. That's what we're interested in.

Thierry Denis

Management

The next question comes from Bob.

Robert C. Wetenhall - RBC Capital Markets, LLC, Research Division

Management

It's Bob Wetenhall from RBC. If you're not going to pursue any transformational acquisitions just because they don't appear in front of you and you're continuing to execute against your plan, it sounds like you're going to generate a lot of free cash flow out of net income, given your tax shield. What do you expect to do if you're clinging to that $1 billion of EBITDA by 1 million housing starts? And I assume -- are you also reiterating free cash flow guidance of $1 billion cumulatively when you get to the point?

Michael H. Thaman

Management

Yes. I mean, I think we've been very consistent in our approach to talking about free cash flow on our balance sheet. I mean, we do like having an investment grade profile. We don't believe it makes sense to overdo that. So I mean, we're BBB minus. I don't think you'll hear us stand in front and talk about how we'd like to see a big improvement in our credit rating. I think we'd like to maintain ourselves at low investment grades. We generally found that the investment grade markets are open when companies like that need money. And the investment -- and the non-investment grade market is often not open when companies that are a bit cyclical in their earnings capability need money. So we've always believed that the right place for us as a company to position ourselves is kind of in the low rungs of the investment grade to make sure that we always have access to the capital markets. We manage maturities very carefully. I think Duncan talked about that. We like to have long dated maturities so that we have good visibility to when we owe money. Because, again, we know that there can be fairly rapid changes in our market conditions. But your conclusion from today's presentation, which is with the right kind of market environment, which we continue to describe as a growing, global, industrial production market albeit, in some parts of the world, slow. But we do need to see continued global industrial production growth. And with a recovering housing market, we would generate a lot of cash, we'd invest in our operations first beyond that if we didn't find great M&A that we wanted to do. We’d use share buybacks in the near term to use that -- return that cash back to our shareholders. And then as Duncan said, as insulation returns to profitability, as housing gets more decidedly into a recovery, I think the nature of our review of a dividend would probably to become more pointed.

Thierry Denis

Management

Okay. Got one more question from Will, and then we'll go to Andy.

Will Randow - Citigroup Inc, Research Division

Management

Mike, in terms of -- when I think about minority players within an industry, I'd always have a tendency to pursue a share at the healthiest-margin businesses and typically compress lucrative pricing. So how are you thinking about innovation in businesses like Roofing, hopefully to offset some of these new entrants that's coming in and scaling up to your technology -- or minority, sorry?

Michael H. Thaman

Management

Yes. I mean, I assume by minority you mean kind of the lower-market-share players. Right? I mean -- so you've got -- in all of our businesses -- and I think we reviewed that, kind of today, and how we think about the share of the top players in the industry in composites, I mean, Marcio went through a chart that showed, interestingly, the top 5 players had changed fairly dramatically, the share of the market from the top 5 players actually hasn't changed that dramatically. So we think it's the nature of our businesses, both Insulation, Roofing and Composite, that having a group of premier players that have scale operations, that have low cost, that have innovation and technology capability that allow them to serve sophisticated customers that want to rely on big, committed partners in the supply side, that is the nature of our markets, because we also have pretty consolidated customers. So I think big customers want to do big business with big suppliers. In all of our markets, there's always a risk of the marginal player trying to move market share positions based on price. I guess the first word that jumps to my mind is better. The way you stop that is you're better. Right? You have better cost, you have better products, you have better people, you have a better history, you have better relationships with your customers, and I think that's what you would see as you look at what have been pretty tough market conditions. I mean, even Sheree's business, which is fabulous, she's at 20-year lows in terms of new construction and reroof demand, and that business is still doing great. Our Composites business has not had 3 or 4 years of great, continuous global industrial production growth and yet has put up some good numbers and a bright green dot last year, right? Now we're going to go backwards a little bit off that this year, but we had gotten finally back to what we've known as historical performance in that business in the 90s. We'll take a step back, but we're very confident we will get back to where that business has demonstrated. I think, clearly, today, you saw that same competence in Insulation. So we challenge our people to be better than the competition. We want our customers to buy from us because they make more money when they buy from us. And if that's the case and someone comes in with a lower price and says, "How about giving me some of your business?" You'd hope your customer answers the question, "Well, how do I make more money by buying from you, because not everything is about the first-buy price?" So we're pretty confident in the way our industries are structured, the focus of our people, the focus of our technology, the quality of our asset base, that we're well positioned in our markets.

Will Randow - Citigroup Inc, Research Division

Management

If I could tuck in one bookkeeping, how much do you think D&A will be down, Duncan, in 2013, plus the Europe charges?

Duncan J. Palmer

Management

We haven't specifically provided guidance on D&A for '13. I think we said, for '12, around about 320, I think, we said. Obviously, it's going to be a factor of how much capital investment we'd be making, how that factors in, and the netting out -- some of the accelerated depreciation we'd expect to see and some of the charges that we would adjust out. But we haven't provided specific guidance on 2013.

Michael H. Thaman

Management

Yes. And going outside of that is the guidance question. I mean, one thing I would say, and I think it came through in today's presentation, is we saw the global composites market grow in 2011. We believe it will grow in 2012. We believe industrial production will grow in 2013, and the market will grow again next year. So we are continuing to invest, even though there's some disinvestment in Europe. We are continuing to invest in the low-delivered cost assets in other parts of the world. So that investment is, in effect, offsetting whatever asset we're taking out of Europe. So I don't know that we would expect that we can run our company on a lot smaller asset base going forward, just a lower cost and more focused asset base.

Thierry Denis

Management

Good. I don't see a lot of hands in the air anymore, which I'm thinking is a sign that we've actually answered more -- most of your questions, not a lack of interest. But we'll take one last question from Andy. I think you had your hand up.

Michael H. Thaman

Management

Andy, we're going to give you the last word. Yes, not really. I'll close after this.

Andrew Fineman

Management

You're never going to get to be [indiscernible]

Michael H. Thaman

Management

Yes, I don't want to get you too enthusiastic.

Andrew Fineman

Management

I just wanted to ask, you talked about acquisitions. So if you just improve earnings a little bit, and I know you're expecting to do more than that, over the next 5 years, you'll have about $1.5 billion of free cash flow after paying, because you've got D&A equals CapEx or approximately. So what size -- if you had your druthers and you could do what you want, how much of that would you spend on acquisitions?

Michael H. Thaman

Management

I'm going to ask Duncan to ask -- answer the question about size a little bit, of what size acquisition we'd feel comfortable doing. I think the acquisition opportunities for our company are going to be pretty specific, and it's very hard for us to manage that in terms of an asset accumulator who might stand up and say, "I'd like 1/3 of my free cash flow to go to dividends, 1/3 of my free cash flow to go to acquisitions and 1/3 of my free cash flow to go to investment above depreciation." I think the businesses that we study, that tend to talk about free cash flow that way, have looked at their business more in an asset accumulation mode than they have in terms of building and developing market-leading businesses in well-structured industries. And if your real approach to business is to have market-leading businesses in well-structured industries, you're going to have to be prepared to have the balance sheet capacity to act when you see the opportunity to further advance that strategy. So I wouldn't say that we have an allocation mindset. I think we have a mindset of managing our balance sheet and our operations in such a way that we don't find ourselves locked out of an opportunity when the opportunity presents itself, but that we don't also create financial inflexibility, always waiting around for the right deal. So that's a balancing act. And I think if you look at our track record, we've been pretty successful doing that. The deals that came to us didn't necessarily come to us at the exact moment we wanted to do it. We knew housing was declining in 2007, and we saw the ability to do Vetrotex. We had given ourselves enough gun powder to go do that, and we liked getting more global at that moment. And so we committed a lot of capital, $675 million to go do that deal. So it was a deal of size. FiberTEK, we put ourselves in a position where our Insulation business was losing money, and yet we had enough financial wherewithal out of Composites and Roofing to really advance the cause in Insulation and give us more upside leverage in a recovery. So creating a balance sheet strategy that gives us the ability to act when the opportunity presents itself is probably more the way we think about it. Duncan, maybe you'd talk a little bit about size.

Duncan J. Palmer

Management

Yes. So I think as Mike kind of briefly talked about there, I mean, we've done acquisitions in recent years. FiberTEK is probably $100 million or thereabouts. We've probably say that was kind of a small-ish acquisition. I think the Vetrotex acquisition, which is around about a $640 million kind of acquisition, I think I would call that a large-ish acquisition, right? And that kind of bookends what we mean by small-ish and large-ish, and I think most of the things that are on our pipeline kind of fall in that sort of range. I'm not saying there couldn't be opportunities that could be different than that but, generally speaking, that's sort of the opportunities we see, and they tend to be fairly clumpy, right? So it's not like there are 10 opportunities a year. It's going to be of that nature. Now as Mike also said, the nature of the acquisitions we would do would be we would buy something, but then invest through what that gave us the opportunity to do. So take Vetrotex, where we bought some assets now which we've been able to build out; we're expanding our platform in Russia; we've taken the asset we have in Mexico, we're expanding that; we've got a bigger platform in China. It gives us kind of flexibility to do things. And same with the FiberTEK asset, we're converting those assets to loose fill production, right? So it's also about buying businesses and then investing in them, and investing in them with the ability to create value for our shareholders, rather than just buying something and kind of leaving it alone and trying clipping coupons from it. So fundamentally, it's about buying things that augment our business portfolio so we can then bring value through our channel, through our products, through our markets and also through investments. Okay?

Thierry Denis

Management

Thank you. This meeting is about us sharing information, but also about these dialogs. So I appreciate the quality of the question. So we'll let Mike close the meeting now with a few remarks.

Michael H. Thaman

Management

Okay, thank you. Well, first of all, I want to thank our team. Everyone worked very, very hard to prepare for this day and, in a lot of ways, internal reviews are kind of like if you're a golfer hitting balls on the range but, at some point, you've got to take to the first tee and come out here and play. And I think our team played very, very well today. I was very pleased with some of the new analyses that we shared with you today. These are analyses that we've used in our internal management reporting and our internal evaluation of our businesses. We listen carefully when we go on the road, and we talk to investors about what are the kinds of things that you're using to evaluate, both the attractiveness of Owens Corning as an investment and also evaluate the performance and the execution of management. And I think we laid out some things today in terms of how we think our markets work and the drivers for our markets work, but also some of our goals in terms of where we'd like to get to in terms of our asset base, low-delivered cost positions, market growth from codes and code adoption. I think that gives you some good benchmarks over the next 3 to 5 years to say, "Are we able to make the things that's we see, as big opportunities for our company and big opportunities for our investors, come true inside our businesses?" I have one last chart, I'm going to ask Jen to bring that up, and I'll just kind of walk through. A good -- communication practice is always to start at the beginning and say, "Here's what you're going to hear," and then hopefully come back at the end…