Diamond Management & Technology Consultants, Inc. Q4 2008 Earnings Call Transcript

  • download
  • Print
  • Recommend
  • 0

2008-05-21 13:45:14.0

Tags: DiamondCluster International Inc.

Question-and-Answer Session

Operator

Thank you. (Operator instructions). And our first question comes from the line of George Price from Stifel Nicolaus. Please proceed with your question.

George Price

Good morning everyone. George Price from Stifel. I wanted to dig into what’s happening in the demand environment. In the last call, which I think was in late February, you said you are seeing the economy tighten, clients spend a bit more cautiously. The commentary now obviously has deteriorated a bit. Maybe you can walk us through how demand is kind of progressed over the last few months and what’s driving the incrementally cautious spending environment?

Adam Gutstein

Hey, George. Adam speaking. I am not sure that there is anything new out there. I think you guys are aware of all the -- probably the same news that we see and read. It's clear that there is some softness, in particular, in the US economy. Our businesses as you know, predominantly in the US and about 50% of that business is focused in financial services and insurance. So, we see continued weakness in both those sectors. I suspect, you know, as well as I do that the former is driven largely by the credit issues and the latter is driven by some of the softness in pricing in insurance. As far as what's given rise to a sequentially lower forecast for us, we actually saw some project cancellations in our fourth fiscal quarter amounting to about 7 or 8% of our revenue, and as we look forward we have seen some cancellations already in our first quarter about the same amount and we are only about halfway through the quarter.

Now, I would say it’s a dynamic environment, so as much as we have seen some things on the down side, I have to admit we are seeing some interesting activity and interesting discussions. We are getting a sense that perhaps in financial services, things are beginning to firm up a bit. We’ll see. Time will tell. Our projects, as you know, tend to be relatively short in nature, which is both to the good and to the bad. To the bad, when it allows folks to cancel, but to the good it allows you to get started relatively quickly. So, we've got a lot of good activity going on right now, but it is a dynamic environment, and we see some puts and takes and so given that, our point of view is just to focus on the quarterly guidance rather than the long-term guidance.

 

BNET TalkbackShare your ideas and expertise on this topic

Please add your comment:

  1. You are currently: a Guest |
  2.  

Basic HTML tags that work in comments are: bold (<b></b>), italic (<i></i>), underline (<u></u>), and hyperlink (<a href></a)

advertisement
advertisement
  • Click Here
  • Click Here
  • Click Here
advertisement
Click Here