Imperial Sugar's CEO Highlights AIHce Program
John C. Sheptor, the June 20 general session keynote speaker, will discuss the company's safety transformation after the February 2008 dust explosion at its Port Wentworth, Ga., refinery.
The most recent quarterly financial report from Imperial Sugar Co. was a disappointing $32.5 million loss, and its release of FY2012 first quarter results on Feb. 9 will show whether the losses have continued. But safety problems and OSHA fines aren't the causes –- high raw sugar prices are.
The Sugar Land, Texas-based company's president and CEO, John C. Sheptor, will join CFO Hal Mechler to discuss first quarter results and their outlook. Sheptor also has an important date on his calendar to speak to the assembled professionals at this year's American Industrial Hygiene Conference & Expo in Indianapolis.
AIHA (co-sponsoring the conference with the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists) announced Sheptor will deliver the June 20 general session keynote and will discuss his company's safety transformation after the February 2008 dust explosion at its Port Wentworth, Ga., refinery. That incident killed 14 people, injured dozens more, and resulted in $8.8 million in proposed OSHA fines that Imperial Sugar settled in July 2010 for a total of $6.05 million. The settlement covered violations found at Port Wentworth and another company facility in Gramercy, La.
Sheptor's speech should be a high point of the AIHce educational program. NIOSH Director Dr. John Howard, M.D., MPH, is scheduled to deliver the June 19 keynote on the theme "Redefining Our Future," and the June 18 keynote, "The Future: Life Sciences and the Knowledge Economy," will be delivered by Juan Enriquez, co-founder of Synthetic Genomics Inc. and managing director of Excel Venture Management in Boston. All three keynotes will begin at 8 a.m.
Imperial Sugar's quarterly results are being presented Feb. 9 at 11 a.m. EST in a webcast at http://www.imperialsugarcompany.com/investor-relations. To access it, click on the "Q1 2012 Imperial Sugar Earnings Conference Call" icon under Investor Relations.