Anthony Cristello, senior vice president, directs the automotive aftermarket research platform at BB&T Capital Markets. Cristello has been featured on various television programs discussing the aftermarket industry, including CNBC and Bloomberg television. Before rejoining BB&T Capital Markets Equity Research in 2000, Cristello was an associate analyst with ABN AMRO in Chicago.

In this week’s Executive Interview, Cristello gives us a look at the aftermarket’s financial health from Wall Street’s perspective. He also gives us a taste of what he’ll be talking about at the 2009 Global Automotive Aftermarket Symposium, which takes place May 6-7 in Chicago.

There is a lot of negative news out there today when it comes to the automotive industry. Will you have any good news to share with GAAS attendees this year?

In many instances, the automotive aftermarket, from a stock price performance perspective, has handily beat the performance of the broader markets. While I’m not saying things are completely prosperous, it’s a situation where I do think we’re seeing some trends that are running counter to some of the negative sentiment across other industries.

We hear a lot of people today say that when the economy is soft, that’s actually good for the aftermarket. Are you finding this to be true?

I am. We just finished the December quarterly earnings and surprisingly, a fair number of companies showed better than expected results, particularly on the distributor side where we saw better than anticipated earnings from a same store sales perspective, but even more important, it sounds like in the first part of this year, it’s gotten a little bit better than what we were seeing at the end of the year. And that’s encouraging. We believe when you talk about new car sales being down, the dealership closings, the age of the vehicles, etc. – all these things that individually aren’t enough to really move the needle materially – measuring them on a combined basis, it does start to give a nice tailwind to this group. One month or two months of better than expected results you may question, but if we start to see a sustained period of several months in a row and trends look better and the health of the aftermarket is better in spite of the economy, I think that bodes well.

I know you are going to talk at GAAS about the Wall Street’s perceptions regarding several industry issues today, but what else is on your agenda?

Right. We’re going to talk about the consumer. We believe consumer confidence is very important. It’s going to be very important to turn miles driven trends around and to get the economy going better. Consumer confidence is at a very, very low point right now and I think that, in general, it is something everyone is going to face, whether it’s through employment rates, debt or financing. We can’t just isolate the aftermarket, because there are things going on, on a global basis that are impacting it. We will look at what it means and where we are in the cycle, as well as what past recessions have shown the aftermarket.