I did not think it would be this bad. If you remove the Utility's $3M net income improvement for Q3 over last year, the company would have only made $6.5M in net income for the entire qtr. on $257M in sales!

Here's another way to put it...take out the Utility altogether...and the remaining $184M of non-utility revenues (that the COO is responsible for!) produced less than $2.5M of net income. That will not even pay for capex re-investment for those businesses; hell, it won't even pay for the CEO + COO compensation for the year! They effectively are losing money, not because of lower sales, but because of poor execution.

The press release blames everything on economic conditions, yet I see (and own shares of) other businesses executing much better and yielding strong returns on lower sales. Blaming the economy is purely LAZY. This company's poor performance is all about poor COO leadership for the non-utility operating companies. The Board needs to wake up.

Other than the food ingredient results, which are starting to pay off 4 years too late, I won't comment on my thoughts of the rest of the segments' terrible performance. Just too much ground to cover there...and all bad.

Postscript: The amount of covering language and spin in the Q3 PR was quite sickening to read...much more than usual. It seemed like nearly every paragraph had some sort of "blame the economy" tone...get over it! Start making the tough decisions and execute! This could be the new economy for the next 5-10 years...are we really going to have to read this PR crap all that time?