Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from the line of Irene Nattel - RBC Capital Markets
Irene Nattel - RBC Capital Markets
On the end demand for the product, you mentioned that you saw the strongest performance in the above $500,000 segment but can you give us any other color on what you’re seeing in terms of demand both at price point, product type and by region?
Thomas O’Neill
By price point, as I mentioned we saw a nice bump in the business above $500,000, the rest is kind of scattered across the different clusters. In terms of merchandise we continue to see the ring business is quite strong for us.
Irene Nattel - RBC Capital Markets
In terms of regional demand, again, one of the things that’s interesting is you have a highly mobile customer base as you’ve noted many time, can you talk a bit about what you’re seeing in terms of, you said the BRIC doing very well but in terms of private sales where are those orders going into and sort of the nature there?
Thomas O’Neill
I think in my comments, the customer base—we track our customers two ways, where we consummate the sale which really doesn’t tell us very much other then somebody walked into the store and bought in that store. What’s more important for us and we’re a company that does this and we share it with the public, we track very carefully who the customers are—what passport they’re holding. And for us this is almost more important in many ways then where they are buying.
So as I had mentioned our US customers, our US passport holders, buying in the world, last year for the same period were about 30% of our business. This year they went down to 26% and correspondingly there was a very large jump in our business from Asian customers who are Asian passport holders from 14% last year to 17% for example and then Russia which is an important segment for us and any luxury goods business in the world these days, it jumped from 10% last year to 15% this year.
And again where I said Japan pretty much stayed flat at about 30%. So that gives you an idea of where the strength is by economies and where the purchasing power is.
Irene Nattel - RBC Capital Markets
If I take that and I marry it with the result as reported, is it safe to conclude therefore for example that significant portion of the Russian passport holding buyers are purchasing in New York for example because of course you have very good strength in your US reported business and so I guess what I’m really trying to get at is, is that where for example, the Russian customer or the Asian customer is buying?
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