Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Andrea Wirth – Robert W. Baird.
Andrea Wirth – Robert W. Baird
Can you let us know how much EDS actually contributed in revenue to the quarter? I know it was just one month but was it roughly $9 million?
Eric Pike
What we've disclosed in the past, the business was on a run rate of about $100 million a year and so we still believe that still a good current run rate, so you're estimate is in range.
Andrea Wirth – Robert W. Baird
So I guess then when you look at just the core business, when you try to X out contributions from Shaw, you're probably down about 27%. I'm just wondering how much of that, if you can estimate is down due to diverting the crews. What would the gross rate have been if you can adjust for that crew diversion?
Anthony Slater
As we've discussed before on these calls, it's very difficult for us to go back and assume a certain level of core business, but based on some general averaging we believe that the core business is down minimally. It's holding relatively stable.
Andrea Wirth – Robert W. Baird
So actually an improved growth rate from what you saw last quarter which was down 9% or so.
Anthony Slater
Improved from that, yes.
Andrea Wirth – Robert W. Baird
Going forward from that, if you look at your guidance and scrubbing the higher storm revenue, it does look like your outlook is lower for the core business. Can you talk a little bit about that? Is that more you just trying to push out where that inflection point comes into play where the maintenance spending should start coming up?
Eric Pike
I think most of it is from our fourth quarter call to now, going through the month of September the impact that the credit markets and the financial issues that took place, obviously there's been several press releases recently about some large utilities paring back some of their capital expenditure monies, or at least proposing to if credit markets don't open.
We've had discussions with many of our large customers and right now it is very unclear to them how rapidly they're going to see those markets open back up. I think what you're seeing in our revised guidance is continuing as we did in Q4 to take a conservative and practical approach to where we see the business.
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