Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions). Your first question comes from the line of Mike Weinstein.
Taylor Harris - JPMorgan
Thanks a lot. My first question is just on the V.A.C. landscape in the US. Would like to get your latest thoughts on the impact of competition. So what you’re seeing now most recently in the third quarter, still free trialing from the competitors versus what percentage of the modest share losses that you've had do you think is just there is a new lower end of the market that's been carved out for gauze-based therapy?
Cathy Burzik
I am happy to talk about that. You know, I had an opportunity during the course of this quarter to spend a lot of time in the field traveling with reps and really trying to get my own first-hand understanding of what's going on in the US market. I would say that the trialing is definitely still more of a free trialing nature and I would say that however there are certain types of wounds that are more on the drainage side, wound drainage kind of wounds that you do see these competitive product being adopted for. I would say that primarily what we are still seeing is free trialing and we are still seeing conversion of customers, back-to-back therapy post the trial.
Taylor Harris - JPMorgan
Okay. So as you are looking ahead to 2009 and you gave updated guidance for V.A.C. of mid to upper single-digit. Are you assuming there that, you just have persistent free trialing in the market or what are the other factors that would influence that outlook?
Cathy Burzik
I really wanted to be prudent here in how we look at V.A.C. going forward. As I said, I personally studied this a lot during the course of the last several months and tried to understand what's going on internally, as well as externally in the US. As I said in my call, we are seeing a stability of trials within the US. We've seen more players coming in, in the gauze-based systems, but not really anymore, what I would call, competitive pressure.
Internationally, we are seeing increased trialing in certain countries within Europe and that's a fairly recent event and so part of what I want to reflect here is we want to make sure we do our best to take that into account, while we predict the overall the global back number for next year because I want more and more. I like to encourage everyone to look at our business globally, because it is the global business and it will become even more global as we move into 2010 with back therapy.
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