Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Jason Armstrong - Goldman Sachs
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Jason Armstrong - Goldman Sachs
Just a question on the outlook and maybe two parts to the question. First Crown yesterday issued guidance for the first quarter that really implies a strong pick up in 1Q trend rates based on activity that they saw last fall. Just wondering if you guys are seeing same thing in your business. And then the second part of the question, just on the incremental revenue stat you gave us, two-thirds of net new Tower revenue for ?09 already contractually committed at this point. If you take us back to last year, the same point in time, was that two-thirds higher or lower versus what it is this year? Thanks.
Jim Taiclet
Jason. It’s Jim. Let me just get the second one out of the way first. Those orders of magnitude are pretty similar. In a typical year, we’re expecting $95 million or so gross new business, $55 million to $60 million of escalations, and then this year as an example, $25 million or so from new sites.
We net the churn out, which is about $35 million and so very little of what we need to make our revenue target is in the sort of to be sold, signed and then commenced category and so you are going to see similar trends, two-thirds, and one-third, probably year-over-year roughly.
On the first quarter trend rates, we don’t necessarily provide quarterly guidance. Of course, we do update the annual each quarter with you, but I think that the notion that we’ve got a strong pipeline that carried from Q4 into Q1 is appropriate. There is a typical sort of lull period in January almost every year where wireless carriers are getting their budgets settled and defined and rolled out to their regions.
We’ll probably sprint to that again this year, but it will be modest as far as impacting the positive trend that’s going on out there and as Jean already said, we expect 2009 new business levels to be about the same as 2008 and I’ve said in the past that if some of the things come together that we don’t have in the guidance like any business from Sprint to Clearwire, it could be a little bit of upside if everything else happens too.
Jason Armstrong - Goldman Sachs
And then the decision to leave the year-end guidance rather than formally adjust for the FX headwinds, just wondering, is your best estimate at this point just one minus the other, i.e. would take your official guidance and subtract out the FX headwinds that you stated in the release in terms of what the impact would be? Or, I guess I’m wondering here if, what you’re implying by leaving the guidance where it is, is sort of a calculated decision that some sort of combination of fundamental improvements in the business and maybe some relief on the FX side later in the year may be enough to offset some of the early FX headwinds?
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