INTERVIEW-Alcoa cash flow getting no respect -CFO

* Wall St seen reacting to Q4 results, not cash flow * Says $761 mln free cash flow highest since Q2 2003 * Stock down over 10 pct By Steve James NEW YORK, Jan 12 (Reuters) - Investors who sent Alcoa's stock down over 10 percent on Tuesday may not be giving the aluminum company enough credit for its highest free cash flow in 7 years, Chief Financial Officer Chuck McLane said. "Any time you miss an estimate there is a negative reaction, and it was a miss...but people tend to look (only) at the headline numbers," he told Reuters in an interview a day after the company's fourth-quarter results fell short of Wall Street expectations. "But we have taken back (reduced) operations and cut costs to get to a positive cash-flow position and we are not getting enough credit for that. "Alcoa generated free cash flow of $761 million in the fourth quarter, which was the highest since the second quarter of 2002," McLane said. He noted that during the recession starting in late 2008, Alcoa cut back on metal production as demand dried up for aluminum, especially for planes, automobiles and construction. "For the first two months of 2009, we had negative cash flow, so we came up with seven things we could do to put the company back on a solid footing. We were at a precarious point and the company was in crisis." On the operational side, Alcoa's goal was to cut overheads by 20 percent by 2010, a target it has already met, McLane said. It also set goals for procurement, working capital reduction and lower capital expenditure. On the financial side, Alcoa got $1.4 billion from an equity offering, saved hundreds of millions of dollars by cutting dividends and divested some assets for around $1.1 billion, McLane said. "When you look at where this company was at the beginning of '09 and where it is now, it's light years away in terms of liquidity. "We increased cash on hand from $700 million at the end of '08 to $1.5 billion at the end of '09....we brought debt down from $10.6 billion to $9.8 billion. "So we increase cash and reduce debt in the middle of the biggest recession the company ever faced...(but) we don't get enough credit for that," McLane said. (Reporting by Steve James; editing by Gunna Dickson)