Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions). The first question is from the line of David Lewis - Morgan Stanley.
David Lewis - Morgan Stanley
I’ll try to limit this to just a few questions; first of all, may be just if you could talk us through thematically the decision to suspend guidance, were these the things you learned incrementally into the first quarter with the difficulty in filling boxes in the first quarter that led you to this or simply the operating environment got less physical materially in the last 6 weeks, so there’s too many factors to control for and so suspension of guidance seems most prudent?
Marshall L. Mohr
I think you’re on to it David. Given the current environment, our visibility in the system sales is not very good, and this was evidenced in the first quarter where we missed our system forecast by about 10%; so rather than give you guidance that has a high degree of uncertainty, we’re just going to suspend guidance at this time, and when visibility improves, we plan to resume giving you guidance.
David Lewis - Morgan Stanley
Would you say this means that your visibility from 3 months ago is better, worse, or the same?
Marshall L. Mohr
It’s probably relatively the same.
Aleks Cukic
I actually think it might be a little bit better. Actually, in terms of just the range of what could have happened, I think that we performed quite well, but if we were to give guidance, it would be such a wide range it might not be very meaningful, so we decided let’s see what happens, and as we get further down this path where we will be more confident in our ability to forecast, we will be willing to do so.
Benjamin Gong
Just to add one point, David, is that, as you know we manage a pipeline and we work on a lot of different deals which become difficult as not knowing what deals you’re working on but trying to predict the demand and reconciling it to when it is going to close, and predicting that within 90-day windows became very hard, but again, working on a lot of systems is something that we continue to do.
David Lewis - Morgan Stanley
Okay, just a couple more questions; just on instruments specifically, would you say that more of the variability is tied to the pricing and mix issues than we talked about last year or is this more not understanding the inventory in that channel with customers today?
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