PPG Chairman Says Company Expects to Deploy $750M to $1.5B of Cash in the Final Quarters of 2011

PPG Industries PPG Chairman and CEO Charles E. Bunch today reviewed the company's progress on its strategic initiatives at the Goldman Sachs Basic Materials Conference. Bunch highlighted PPG's progress over the past decade to transform itself into a leading global coatings and specialty products company. He also reviewed the company's recent financial performance, which includes quarterly earnings-per-share records for each of the past three quarters. “Our solid earnings recovery illustrates the success of our portfolio transformation and provides evidence that we are now a more resilient, focused company,” Bunch said. “In addition, PPG's ability to successfully integrate recent acquisitions, combined with our recent earnings performance, has elevated our return on capital toward pre-recession levels despite only a partial volume recovery on a much larger capital base,” he said. He noted that the company's actions also have led to sales margins that continue to position PPG as a leader among its coatings peers. Discussing current trends, Bunch indicated that additional selling price increases are already in place in all reporting segments in the second quarter, and further pricing actions are being implemented for the third quarter. Finally, Bunch said PPG expects to deploy between $750 million to $1.5 billion of cash in the final three quarters of 2011, and he anticipates that this will result in earnings accretion of 15 cents to 55 cents per share in 2012. The cash deployment includes a combination of acquisitions, share buybacks and debt repayment, according to Bunch.