Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you. (Operator instructions) Our first question comes from the line of Matt Dolan with Roth Capitals. Please go ahead sir.
Matt Dolan – Roth Capital Partners
Hey, Don, good morning.
Don Earhart
Good morning, Matt.
Matt Dolan – Roth Capital Partners
Good morning. First question is really on these procedural trends. We’re hearing similar outcomes as you are from companies, hospitals and even doctors that procedures are getting slower and they have been since mid-year. Hospital spending in October has been very tight and so forth. So, given the reach of where your reps sit in the hospital across multiple procedures, can you help us, on maybe a month-to-month basis, how the quarter played out and how that trend has gone into the first month of the fourth quarter?
Don Earhart
Well, Matt, as we always do in the third quarter, which is our summer quarter and therefore normally our weakest quarter, we had actually a pretty good July and August and was doing pretty good until the hurricane hit and took out Houston and took out parts of Louisiana and Mississippi. That really did hurt us.
In fact, we couldn’t even ship into Houston. UPS, for several weeks, couldn’t get product in there, etc. So, we were actually tracking pretty good, but we did experience a slowdown because of the summer, as compared to other quarters, but I think, without the hurricane effect we probably would have done as well in the third quarter as we did in the second. That’s about what we lost, from Houston shutting down, parts of Mississippi and of course, parts of Louisiana.
I don’t want to give any indication on going forward. However, we do believe we’re making the right moves in the fourth quarter as we’ve retrained the sales force and changed some of our call points and again, we don’t know what the effect is going to be in December when a lot of individuals have got these healthcare savings programs where if they don’t spend the money they lose it, but we have not really built that into our numbers, but if that actually happens, as it’s happened in the past, we might do a little bit better.
So that’s kind of how we look at the fourth quarter, but we’re being very careful in the fourth quarter, because we don’t know how the economy is going to continue to go and it doesn’t look positive right now.
- To read the full transcript on Seeking Alpha, click here »
