An article in today’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that Alcoa had a big quarterly profit surge. I found the CEO’s quote a little ambiguous as to the reason.

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He said: “We battled substantially higher material input and energy costs, and currency impacts while simultaneously continuing to execute on the largest capital investment program in our history.”

So, with sales declining and profits increasing, costs obviously went down. But because three of their business units reported lower earnings, the fact that “Alcoa blamed [those units’] slide on higher freight and energy costs,” and the CEO saying they “battled substantially higher” procurement-related costs, it is unclear whether reductions in other costs more than offset higher procurement-related costs.

I searched the Internet for their 4Q filing to see if the cost of goods sold decreased, but didn’t find one yet.

So did they “successfully” battle those costs or not?

I’m confused.