Q3 2022 Greif Inc Earnings Call
for us. People like to play out 20 and 30 year curves and you modify one assumption an eighth of a percent and it changes the answer. We will continue to examine it and we will spend money to the extent needed to make sure that the plants continue to operate well and we will continue to explore whether something of the nature you mentioned makes sense but so far it hasn't.
Okay, sounds good. Thanks. Good luck in the fourth quarter guys. Thanks, Mark.
Our next question comes from Michael Hoffman from Steve. Please go ahead, your line is open. Thank you for the follow up. A lot of questions with regards to the economy and supply demand. How do you think of... I don't know if it shows up on pause, we're just looking at abirds your line, the question
your own channels and what's in your sort of channels as far as inventory, what your customer channel looks like, and then what your competitor channels look like. That ultimately will be...
It's a major shock if we're overstuffed.
Yeah, I mean, you know, we have some places in the world, Michael, where we had some excess inventory related to concerns about supply chain. We have been working that down and will continue to do so. That obviously was one of the big drivers of cash flow in this quarter year over year was a dramatic improvement in working capital. That focus will continue.
In terms of inventories of our product in customers, we don't have that many customers who actually keep much of our inventory because you're basically storing air. When you think about it, empty steel drums, empty plastic drums, we do have some customers who actually store them in semi-trailers.
And some of them, they pay us rent for them, actually, while they keep them. But that's a small portion of what we have. And I'd say the same thing relative to our competitors in that space. You just don't store that much. And the same goes on the container board side. I mean, the boxplants don't store a lot of paper waiting to use it. It's more real time.
So the channels aren't overstuffed. So this really comes down plainly to what your perception is about an economic cycle.
Yeah, we only mentioned that we did have some impact of some supply destocking in the limited group of customers that I mentioned that do store some of our inventory. But we think that's coming to the end. So we would expect order patterns to pick back up, offset by any further drop in the economy. Those inventories are safe to start, Michael, so they're not huge, so they'll come to an end.