Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Mark May - Needham & Company.
Mark May – Needham & Company
If you exclude the Pharma business, can you tell us what the growth would have been, both total and in the US market? And then the second question is what is your best guess at what the industry growth is in terms of the Pharma/Market Research sector?
Ronald E. Salluzzo
In North America without Healthcare we would have been organically up 2%.
Gregory T. Novak
Mark, the most recent information we have, we have not seen a new update other than the 23% down and then more recently IMS had cut their spending in the business by about 10% because of business changes to their business.
Remember, we are unnecessarily narrowly focused on a very narrow sector of the Pharma space, and in fact, I’m aware of other businesses who are focusing in other areas of the overall healthcare space that are actually growing.
And so realistically the changes we have made are in a large part driven by we have assets that we can use if we’re willing to turn those assets and use them. So, that’s about all the market information. But big Pharma spending on new product introduction will refocus, has been down pretty dramatically for a bit now in the US.
Operator
Your next question comes from Jim Boyle - CLK.
James Boyle – CL King & Associates, Inc.
Could you speak about the CostEx in the second half of the calendar 2008 for some of the other verticals that are important to you? And second, could you tell us any status update on the pricing pressure that has afflicted you in the past. Has it gotten any worse or better as recessionary times hit?
Gregory T. Novak
A couple of things for the remainder of the calendar year, if you turn to Page 4 of the press release we give you the metrics on sales to revenue ratio so you see us with a little bit of a backlog build in the quarterly numbers, the 1.07 and you see us with a 4-quarter look which we think is a stable one that says at 1.0 you can expect flat growth for the next couple of quarters.
As we get more sales ahead of revenue in incoming quarters we will see that turn back up. So we might expect to be flat for a couple of quarters. It really depends. That Healthcare is a big nut and the guys are in there doing their thing. How quickly they turn that around and how fast the other guys can go. We don’t expect that the other teams, we’re pretty comfortable with those other teams leadership and what they’ve accomplished and how they’re moving their businesses.
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