We are operating our businesses in a coordinated fashion. Looking for the best ideas from any business and then incorporating them throughout the company. We are operating NS Group as an operating company, not a holding company. We are balancing the need to have low cost with the need to meet customer requirements. Such corporate cultural changes never come easy, but Mr. Robichaud thinks they are being accepted within the company.
People understand it.
We're doing these changes at a reasonable, not a breakneck, pace. The moves comes as the market for the company's main product, oil and natural gas drilling pipe, known as Oil Country Tubular Goods, has rebounded from the worst market in memory thanks to the sharp rise in oil and natural gas prices. The oil and natural gas rig count, a proxy for U.S. drilling activity, fell below 500 active rigs in April a year ago. Hence we lost a lot of money. Even though we laid off nearly 600 in this company out of a peak of 1,800 employees, that wasn't enough to stem the losses.