Harris Teeter 2001 Annual Report Download - page 14

In order to maintain our
competitive position, we
have moved along with
our customers.
building overseas relationships | We have
been developing relationships overseas for
years, and last year we completed a licens-
ing agreement with the second-largest
thread company in India and added another
licensee in Oman. We continue to broaden
our Signature®embroidery thread offering
and expand our industrial threads with
the development and introduction of new
filament products.
As we recognize the importance of
following our customer base as it moves
overseas, and as we develop production
capacity and distribution capabilities there,
we have also sized our domestic operations
to correspond to the business environment.
This geographic shift in production was only
one of the challenges that we addressed this
year. The second was the shift in end-user
demand. Because of the slowdown in the
consumer economy we have seen a decline
in sales in many of the industries that use
our threads.
positioning for the future | While we
are disappointed with the declining level
of sales and profits at A&E, we believe this
should be viewed in the context of adverse
industry conditions. We are working dili-
gently to position ourselves to benefit
when general economic conditions improve.
Unfortunately we cannot state when that
improvement will occur, so we have taken
what we consider to be the appropriate steps
to equate domestic production capacity with
domestic demand. We have permanently
closed one of A&E’s six spinning plants in