Northwest Pipe Company today reported sales of $81.4 million and per share earnings of $0.28 for the first quarter ended March 31, 2009.  Net income for the quarter was $2.6 million. In the same quarter of 2008, sales were $94.0 million and net income was $5.0 million. Earnings per share in the first quarter of 2008 were $0.54.

Water Transmission Results

Revenues for the Water Transmission Group were $58.9 million in the first quarter of 2009 compared to $63.9 million in 2008. First quarter gross profit in 2009 was $11.3 million, or 19.2% of sales, compared to $14.5 million, or 22.6% of sales in 2008.

"Water Transmission revenues were generally as expected," said Brian W. Dunham, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Company. "The quarter was adversely impacted by downtime due to installation of a new mill and weather-related delays at our plants."

Tubular Products Results

The Tubular Products Group sales were $22.5 million in the first quarter of 2009, compared to $30.1 million in 2008. Gross profit for the quarter was $1.4 million, or 6.4% of sales, compared to $3.3 million, or 11.1% of sales for 2008.

"The decline in Tubular Products revenues was also expected," said Dunham. "The combination of falling demand in our difficult economy and rapidly declining selling prices led to both lower revenues and lower gross profits."

Outlook

"Looking ahead, we expect another challenging quarter before seeing improvement in the second half of the year," continued Dunham. "Our backlog grew to $205 million during the quarter and, while this is clearly a positive, we have a greater than usual amount of backlog that is not ready for current production. The backlog is also uneven across our plants. Some have substantial backlogs and others are relatively light. Accordingly, we expect our Water Transmission production will be slow in the second quarter, similar to the first quarter. We expect another good bookings quarter which should lead to a higher backlog at June 30th and stronger production schedules over the last half of the year."

"The Tubular Products business will continue to be challenged until we see some recovery in the economy in general and in natural gas exploration in particular," stated Dunham. "At this time, we do not expect to see these market improvements until at least the second half of the year."

"Our Northwest Pipe Asia subsidiary is off to a good start," said Dunham. "They delivered and installed a mill for us in our California facility and are finalizing the installation of another mill for a customer in Asia. We continue to expect positive but modest results from this group as well as insights into international projects."

Northwest Pipe is making progress on its new Bossier City, Louisiana facility. "Equipment installation is continuing at this site," said Dunham. "We are a little behind schedule but expect to be ready to produce pipe in August. Obviously, market conditions today do not support full production from this new operation but we believe that the broad mix of products -- OCTG, line pipe, and standard pipe -- plus some economic recovery, will enable a phased start up at that time."