Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) We'll take our first question from Celeste Santangelo – Bank of America-Merrill Lynch.
Celeste Santangelo – Bank of America-Merrill Lynch
Thanks, good morning. Question on the outlook, when you talk about over the next few quarters seeing limited sales growth, if any, how should we look at that? Is that for Q4 levels or a run rate exiting the quarter? And if so, could you just talk about maybe the linearity between October, November and December?
Robert J. Eck
Well, Celeste, I'll start, and Dennis will jump in.
What we're really intending to say there is looking at late in 2008, meaning kind of November and December run rates, which were down from October, as Dennis mentioned, we think as we look into 2009 our visibility is probably as imperfect as anyone else's. But we think that those kind of trends, if they stay consistent, will lead to a fairly challenged opportunity for growth in the coming year.
In terms of linearity I'm not exactly sure what you're looking for. But that's roughly our feel. And I don't know that I can highlight it in any more detail than what we said in the release.
Celeste Santangelo – Bank of America-Merrill Lynch
And then, regarding cash flow, I've seen some drags at the end of Q4. Can you talk about maybe a little more detail around what you expect in Q1? And then, regarding funding the convert that's putable in July? And then, maybe for the full year, how you look at it either by dollar amount, or even just directionally, the cash flow from operations in excess of '08 levels? If you could just provide a little more detail around that?
Dennis J. Letham
Of course cash flow is about what's happening sequentially, not year-on-year in the business. If we look at what happened from Q3 to Q4, we had less than a 3% reduction in sales and most of that came in, I'll say in the last six weeks of the year. As a result of that, you kind of get real-time impact of receivables coming through. But certainly the inventory corrections would lag because of how late sales drop off came.
So there's probably a little bit of mismatch in the cash flow number for the quarter versus the volume numbers. As we look forward to the first quarter we would expect those inventory corrections to fall into place and we pick up some additional cash flow from inventory, in addition to kind of the remaining real-time impact on receivables.
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