USPL Posts Drop in Revenues for Quarter

U.S. Plastic Lumber Corp. announced its operating results for the three and six months ended June 30. The results pertain solely to the company's continuing Plastic Lumber operations, as USPL completed the previously announced sale of its environmental recycling and remediation business, Clean Earth, Inc., this past September..

Revenues for the second quarter were $9.7 million compared with $14.9 million for the same quarter in 2002, a decrease of 35 percent. The decrease was mainly due to lower sales of the company's building products and the sale of the cornerboard operations this past May.

Income from continuing operations was $1.9 million, compared to loss from continuing operations of $4.1 million in the second quarter of 2002. In the second quarter of 2003, the Company recorded a gain on the sale of the cornerboard operation of $4.3 million.

Excluding this one-time item, loss from continuing operations would have been approximately $2.4 million. Net income for the second quarter was $2.2 million, compared to a net loss of $3.7 million for the second quarter of 2002.

Revenues for the first six months of 2003 were $20.9 million compared with $29.1 million for the same period in 2002, a decrease of 28 percent. The company attributed part of this decrease to not having sufficient inventory to meet the demand for its building products during the first six months of 2003, mainly due to cash constraints and slower production rates of some of its newly formulated decking products.

Mark Alsentzer, Chairman, CEO and president of USPL said, "While USPL has made substantial progress to improve its balance sheet over the last two quarters, the focus for the remainder of 2003 is to increase sales across all of our product lines, which in turn should improve our gross margins. Over the past two quarters, we have reduced our Selling, General and Administrative Expense and significantly lowered our interest expense as a result of paying down debt. We believe that the strengthening demand for alternative wood products combined with our improved balance sheet and reduced cost structure, position the Company well to improve sales and enable the company to re-gain profitability."