Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you. At this time, we are ready to begin the question-and-answer session. (Operator Instructions). Our first question comes from Marshall Urist with Morgan Stanley.
Marshall Urist - Morgan Stanley
A couple of things; first one, can you kind of walk through in more detail what happened on the gross margin side in terms of how we netted the improvement that we saw in terms of headwinds on volume, how much was FX? And how much was cost control?
Douglas Berthiaume
Sure. If we look at the margin impact, FX was the biggest player of this quarter. If we look at the yen, the yen was up about 10% on a year-over-year basis, and that probably provided around us $3 million sales pickup with no corresponding increase in cost of sales. We have no manufacturing ops there. The British pound was down 25% versus the dollar, so our cost of sales was higher. And mass spec products did very well in the quarter.
It was depressed and that probably added another $3 million to $4 million of net benefit to the gross margins. And then just the mix of high-end mass spec chemistry sales versus U.S. dollar cost production, which was proportionately lower, I added a little bit more to that as well. So, you know, above that somewhere between 75% and 80%, perhaps of the overall benefit, so it is associated with these dynamics in currency mix that I'm describing. In addition to that, product mix was favorable. As I had said, we have a different proportion this quarter of chemistry, services.
There weren't a lot of costs added to those operations for the incremental margin is pretty rich, and we had some savings within the manufacturing ops world as well, there were a couple of engineering cost reductions that went into place. We had lower freight costs. We switched some of our shipments to ocean freight. We had lower warranty costs, all of which tended to offset the volume of currencies that we otherwise would have seen. In addition to all of that, we had incredibly stable pricing around the world. So while I was a little fearful [whether we on would] see some pressure on the price side, that did not materialize in the quarter whatsoever.
John Ornell
And Marshall, I just might add that 30,000-foot perspective on this currency issue. I think one of the dynamics of the Waters, the way we run our business is over the last 15 years we have added most of our incremental manufacturing capacity outside the United States. So we're manufacturing in local currencies.
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