Mr. Asbjornson: AAON was founded in 1988, and it bought out another manufacturer of heating and air-conditioning equipment. AAON started out in the unitary product of the commercial and industrial heating and air-conditioning industry in what is called "rooftop units." AAON has over the years broadened into additional commercial and industrial heating and air-conditioning equipment, but our main thrust, and most of our business, is still in the rooftop portion of the business. We began our business focused on a niche marketing approach to the industry. At the time AAON began, there were basically two distinctly different types of rooftop manufacturers - a production line company, which made simple heating/cooling units with few options available, and semi-custom companies, which would do whatever was technically possible. However, there was a vast difference in the pricing levels of these two types of companies because the semi-custom did not run on a production line basis and thereby had an inherently higher cost to their product. The difference in cost was up to 300% for a comparable amount of cooling. We started out with the idea of taking some of the more popular things, which were only available from the semi-custom manufacturers, and making them available to a production line product. The challenge here was not one of designing a product to accomplish that, because there were numerous companies and people in the industry who could have accomplished that; the challenge was in the manufacturing because it was inherently a different manufacturing methodology than was in the heating and air-conditioning industry. It is, however, not an unknown technology because it is used by the automotive industry. So it was not a new technology, it was only something that was not available in the heating/air-conditioning industry. So 22 years ago, we designed and put into production a rooftop product with the ability to run on a production line and have a number of options available to be installed on them during the production process. We've become more competitive, offering a product which has more capabilities and that many customers want, but was only available at a huge premium price for semi-custom people. We have, over that time period, consistently made money and become competitive with other production line companies. From 1989 until the end of 2009, we had a 10.8% compounded annual growth.
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