Question-and-Answer Session
[Operator Instructions]. And the first question comes from the line of Andrew Fones from UBS. You may proceed, sir.
Andrew Fones - UBS
Thanks. Yes, I'd like to add my best wishes to Carl.
Carl D. Mautz - Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Thank you, Andrew.
Andrew Fones - UBS
On the technology business, could you help us understand how long it will take you to work through your current backlog of projects that you are currently implementing? Thanks.
Carl D. Mautz - Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Okay. Let me talk to that and I'd like to talk to both the North American and the European businesses because they're both in some growth situations from [inaudible]. As you note in North America the number of projects in the implementation is down a little bit year-over-year. We are finding the marketplace increasingly price competitive and feel that taking on unprofitable projects is not something in the company's best interest so we've not pursued that. I mentioned that simply to note that the level of activity still seems to be holding pretty well. Those 50 projects will probably drive us... deliver revenue growth through the bulk of 2009 and perhaps a little bit into early the following year.
We will continue of course to watch the marketplace closely and be bidding on projects where we believe we have an opportunity for profitable revenue growth. In the UK and this is the interesting one, we see some significant growth, there were a number of very significant wins in Europe this year. Ten major clients and some smaller ones, the preparation for that... for those taking those new clients on and bringing them in house has already started and you'll see a little bit of margin pressure in the early quarters of '09, but we will start to see revenue growth coming from them also in the back half of the year. So you should see a slight reduction in the growth rate in the early part of the year. A little bit of compression in the margins and then that opening back up again in the back half of the year.
John J. Haley - President and Chief Executive Officer
Well just to be clear, I mean these 10 major clients that new clients that we have in the UK as Carl says, the way the model works there when we are doing the implementation we can't charge for all of that works. So we'll be doing? we'll be having some people working hard on getting all these things ready and then they'll be... then they'll be running profitably. These ten are all really big name clients, one of them is the largest such project we've ever sold. So we're really excited about the prospects forward. It just means our margins will be down a little bit in 2009.
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