Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Our first question comes from the line of Tycho Peterson with JP Morgan. Please proceed.
Tycho Peterson - JP Morgan
Hi, good morning, and thanks for taking the call. Wanted to dive a little bit more into some of the comments made about the international markets. In particular, Japan sounds like things have got a little bit worse there. So maybe, Tony, if you can give us a sense of how you view the outlook there for the coming year? And then also, Waters had talked about some softness in Eastern Europe earlier this week. So, I’m just wondering if you’re seeing anything there too.
Tony L. White
Let me take those backwards. I guess I’m just not up-to-date on Eastern Europe, I don’t know if Mark or Laura can comment on that. Our business in Eastern Europe is not huge, so I’ll be surprised if it was something that would make much difference overall. I was in Russia recently and was impressed with how things seem to be starting to lift off over there, although it’s a tough market and it’s going to take a lot of positioning. I guess I sensed there was potential there that probably for the first time in a long time looks like it’s realizable in my lifetime.
Japan has always been a tough market and I think lately we’ve seen always?the last five years have been a tough market, and lately we’ve seen?I think the most acute thing has been in the pharma markets over there, which has affected our mass spec demand. They seem to be moving out of Japan and into the China markets and other places for some of their CRO work and other things, and I think that dislocation has caused us some weakness in Japan. We’re seeing some of the corresponding pickup on the other side, as it goes to the other markets, which explains some of our growth rates but I think we’ve also had some self-inflicted wounds in Japan. We’ve retooled our own operation over there and replaced a number of key people, I think people that are more savvy to the technology curve that we’re on.
I think you no longer can have people that are just good generic managers in a market like that. You got to have people that really have the technical knowledge in addition to that, and so we’ve upgraded that. Hopefully that will help us, but Japan is a tough market, and probably, as bad as conditions right now and I would say? I think this is fairly temporary that we’ve seen in a while in terms of just raw demand for products. Having said that, I think the management over there is pretty optimistic that things are going to come back. We’ll see, hope that’s helpful.
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