Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from [Matt Van Fleet] for Steve West - Stifel Nicolaus & Company, Inc.
[Matt Van Fleet] for Steve West - Stifel Nicolaus & Company, Inc.
I was just wondering if you could give us any more color on maybe Germany and Mexico in terms of comps since the end of the year and what’s being done I guess going forward if consumer sentiment and unemployment aren’t improving in the near term, are there any programs in place specifically to continue to improve on these.
John W. Chidsey
I’ll jump in and then Russ can add any other color he would like. You know in Mexico, we’ll take them in reverse order there. In Mexico I think the economy is continuing to improve. I think you’re starting to see progress there whether it’s obviously the flu pandemic has settled down. You know oil has rebounded somewhat. I think the Mexican consumer is somewhat more confident. I think you still have the same issues around remittances back into the country, but we have seen month over month continued improvement in our sales. And so I don’t really think there’s anything we need to do differently there. We’re very value focused, affordability focused in Mexico. I think it’s really just letting the economy continue to improve with time and I think we’ll benefit as we move along. Certainly Vis a vie competition, I think we match up very nicely there.
In Germany I would say again a challenging economic environment there. We continue to move more towards affordability and I would say there’s more we can go on that front. I wouldn’t say we’re as far along as we are in Mexico. We’ve certainly moved in that direction but I think we can go further. And again I believe we’ve seen improvement over the last two or three months. We just had this brand re-launch that I talked about in my comments and I also believe you know the economy has started to rebound. You saw positive GDP in Germany and France were the first two European countries to go positive, so I think that’s also the passage of time for the most part.
Russ Klein
Both Mexico and Germany are strong markets for us. They both have the scale that we need to get those businesses on track and they both have the competitive advantages that we feature to drive the business. So in the case of Germany we are focused on taste superiority with a new [Geschmack] is King campaign. It’s very early in the debut of that work but we think that coupled with continued value for the money strategies are going to get us where we need to be with a little help from the economy.
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