CMP
#This is <UNK>.
It applies to both, and the dynamics are little bit different in both segments, because you get a lot of big box retail stores take their initial fill and get ready in Q4, so whether it snows or not, you don't see as much of an impact in Q4.
And then when you get to Q1 and it hasn't snowed, you get a lot of not refilling because there's no pull-through.
So we tend to see, if it's a mild winter, a bigger impact on the C&I deicing side in Q1 than we do in Q4.
We look at 10 year averages as [asar we get] for where we are compared to normal, and the 10 year average for Q1 on the salt side, I think it's about 4.8 million tons, and [20]16 was down at about 4.2 million tons.
There's lots of moving parts within that because as we mentioned we did like the bid season results and the commitments were up a little.
But again that was put against winter mildness in Q1.
So we think we were down about 600,000 tons from a normal average winter.
If you look at 2015, I think the 10 year average is somewhere around 4.2 million tons.
I would characterize the business as significantly geared towards the fixed cost.
We try to variableize what we can, but these large unique assets tend to have more fixed costs than variable, and our competition, I would guess is they're very similar to us in terms of that.
So we all have fixed cost to cover.
And as to the approach through the bid season, I won't speak for our competitors, but we certainly will take that into account as we go through the season.
There's been no shift in strategy.
There may be more timing than anything else, but no shift in our pricing strategy that would drive additional volume into the second quarter from the first.
I think we will have some states or municipalities that may fall just below the minimums, and part of our bidding strategy would be to roll as many contracts over as we can, so that is a work in progress.
In terms of the volume in the quarter, <UNK>, is anything else that stands out.
I don't think so.
I think the market size is just likely to be a little smaller as we go into this year when we look at remaining inventories.
So I think we're just thinking across the board, slightly lower volumes.
We're talking relatively small numbers and the percentages that you're talking about when you say huge, the tons aren't that significant, <UNK>.
I think if you look at the numbers that we have through the first quarter, through March, there's only about a 1,500 ton difference between first quarter of this year, slightly higher than first quarter of last year.
And that's the timing of when vessels or shipments land, more than anything else.
A slight tick up in March, right.
<UNK>, this is <UNK>.
As we mentioned, we're going to be reporting this on a quarter lag, so in Q2 we'll be reporting the Q1 results.
I think we mentioned on the last call that we expected the full year result from this to be a single digit number, so in total not large.
And there's certainly will be some seasonality to it.
The start of the year tends to be very slow there, and a lot of the volume is weighted towards the back end.
So one of the things that you will see is that their fourth quarter is going to fall over into the first quarter of next year.
So we should be sitting here in a year, hopefully looking at a very strong fourth quarter, where we've picked up the whole quarter, not just a few days.
I think it is still a bit to be determined.
As we've mentioned, both my comments and <UNK>'s, that with the price of MOP still trying to find a bottom, some of the action that we've seen in the pricing in the first quarter in the US on MOP, even as we've lowered the price of SOP, that pricing relationship hasn't changed significantly.
And so we probably haven't picked up as many tons from the more less chloride sensitive crops than we would have hoped.
We're just continuing to watch that and manage it and stay close to our customer base, and we'll just have to see how the quarter plays out ahead of us, before we would make any pricing decisions.
Picking up those additional volumes and additional share was definitely part of our strategy, our longer term strategy, and last year the timing was right to do that for a variety of factors.
And we've signaled that we expect the size of the bids this year to be smaller.
We would expect to hold our share, we aren't looking to grow share beyond this level that we're at, and we'll just have to see how it plays out.
