Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you. (Operator instructions) We'll take our first question from Joshua Zable with Natixis.
Joshua Zable – Natixis Bleichroeder
Hey, guys, congrats on a good quarter here in a tough environment and thanks for taking my questions here.
Just kind of general ones, I know, obviously, you're talking about the environment in the U.S. Can you just give us a little bit of color? I know you said you had about 30 opportunities frozen. Can you give us a little bit more color to the extent that you know, maybe December versus January, A, and then B, sort of if things are being delayed, and they're eventually going to do them, or they're saying, "Hey we're not going to upgrade the beds right now. We'll do it later, or we'll sort of revisit it"? Or is it really a function of, "We just want to wait for the budget to kind of come through?"
Peter Soderberg
Well, Josh, this is Peter. And first let me thank you for initiating on us this week. I hope you feel your timing was appropriate.
We are looking at the situation from a variety of angles. So let's talk about, first, the backlog. Now, we entered the quarter, quarter two, with a backlog of almost identical to what we had the prior year. So that's good news.
We track order trends as a leading indicator, of course, closely an indicator. And order trends continued to deteriorate through mid-January, but have now stabilized. So we're reaching, I think, relatively consistent valley here. So we're not getting the kind of dramatic swings that we saw during the last you know late part of December.
We are seeing a level of quota activity that has began to increase significantly in January. If we look at the last 13 weeks of dollars quoted, we are seeing a slight decline versus 2008, but a significant improvement versus 2007.
Having said that, we certainly saw it took a while for pessimism in the C Suite to trickle down into behaviors in the purchasing office. So we don't take anything for granted at this point.
We continue to track those 30 orders, and as I mentioned that are frozen. And I mentioned in my script, we think we've come with a way to incent those hospitals to unlock those orders. We don't see these disappearing forever. They're just clearly in a capital freeze.
- To read the full transcript on Seeking Alpha, click here »
