Alcoa CEO On The Company's Better-Than-Expected Fourth Quarter Results

Alcoa Inc (NYSE: AA) came out with better-than-expected fourth quarter results after markets closed on Monday.

Alcoa CEO, Klaus Kleinfeld, was recently on CNBC to discuss the performance of the company's "business trifecta."

"Well if you look at the fourth quarter, it’s really capping of a wonderful accelerated transformation," Kleinfeld said. “If you look at the numbers, revenue is up 14 percent and by the way 50 percent of that is purely by economic growth. The profitability is up and literally we have, I would almost call it a business trifecta. We have three groups and all of the three groups are performing very, very well."

He continued, "You go to the downstream business -- the downstream business now has its 19th consecutive quarter of ATOI [After Tax operating Income] improvement, that's without Firth Rixson, especially the effects that we had there in the quarter."

"You look at the midstream business -- midstream business substantially improved performance year-over-year… And then you look at the commodity business, that was clearly showing we're cutting down the cost, improving our profitability; it's the 13th consecutive quarter of improved profits there... We are really accelerating the transformation and it's showing in the fourth quarter numbers, it's showing in the year-over-year numbers."