Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operators Instructions). Your first question comes from Dan Leonard - First Analysis.
Dan Leonard - First Analysis
My first question is on your research business. I realize that performance was in line with your expectation, but the growth rate actually weakened a bit from the first-half 2009 growth rate, which isn't consistent with the results we're seeing from other companies. So is there anything specific going on in your research business do you believe?
Jai Nagarkatti
Well, Dan fundamentally there is no change in the research end markets. Some segments within the research markets are growing at a faster rate than others. We are also seeing some shift has worked from the large pharma gets moved from the West to the East.
So there is no question in the first nine months of the year in certain segments of the research markets the volumes have actually declined.
Dan Leonard - First Analysis
Okay and then, the research models business, you've been talking lot about it. How large do you think the addressable market opportunity is for you in research models?
Jai Nagarkatti
Again, its early days Ben, we have started off and focused only on targeted models involving rats. We are going to leverage our ZFN technology to build a few models, which are going to be off the shelf and focus primarily on making custom models for the large and this medium pharma companies.
At this point, before we have a very definite idea of the type interest in these new models, it will be completely speculative to estimate market that don’t exist.
Dan Leonard - First Analysis
For example, are you targeting a trail for every type of market opportunity ultimately or you looking at approaching it in more of niche fashion?
Jai Nagarkatti
We are going to start off in the niche fashion and then let's see where it takes us.
Operator
Your next question from Quintin Lai - Robert W Baird.
Quintin Lai - Robert W Baird
With respect to kind of maybe a pacing question. Can you talk a little bit about how sales progressed through the July, August, summer month and then to September?
Rakesh Sachdev
We started the quarter of reasonably strong, July was okay, it was indulging. August, frankly was little weaker than we thought, and but then September ended up quite strong.
And Europe always had shutdown in vacations in August but it was little weaker than we had seen earlier but September again both on the research side as well as in the SAFC, we saw some strength that we haven’t seen before. So one month doesn’t make trend. But we were encouraged with we saw in September.
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