Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question is from the line of Tao Levy with Deutsche Bank.
Tao Levy - Deutsche Bank
Yes, good morning. Hi Marty and Cathy this is Tao.
Catherine Burzik
Hi Tao.
Martin Landon
How are you?
Tao Levy - Deutsche Bank
I am doing well, thanks. First I just wanted to touch on your V.A.C. volume growth specifically in the U.S. and Europe. I think the 6%, it seems pretty impressive and I just wanted to know if domestically or overseas if you’ve seen any slowdown thus far into the second quarter and are just based on and what’s going on with the economy?
Catherine Burzik
You said slowdown in the second quarter, Tao based on what?
Tao Levy - Deutsche Bank
Yes, just based on any competition or hospital spending pressures or just less uses.
Catherine Burzik
Okay, it’s a great question. So, I’ve really thought a lot about this. I’ve worked with obviously Mike DelVacchio in the U.S. team and TLV in the European team and I think the type of performance that you saw in the first quarter, is what we feel the year will look like in general.
I see a sustained kind of level of growth rate in the United States as we saw in Q1. I would say that as we have talked about a minimum effect of the economy on our V.A.C. business, you’ll see the effect more in the revenue because of the payer mix, but we have very few procedures that are actually elective procedures with that.
So, while there’s some amount of economic impact, I’d say as long as the economy stays relatively the way it is, I think our V.A.C business will continue to perform as you saw in the first quarter. Notably we don’t see any increased impact from competitions at all. Outside the U.S., I’ll be disappointed if you didn’t see further improvement from what you saw in the first quarter.
As Marty talked about, we got off to a very slow starts, because there were some budget issues in Germany at the end of the year, government issues and we thought that’ll spill over and take longer than we thought to come back in the first quarter, but we ended the first quarter stronger than we began it for sure. So as I said, I’d be disappointed if you didn’t see some additional growth in the international V.A.C. market as the year unfolds. Does that give you some more color?
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