Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from Jeff Klinefelter - Piper Jaffray & Co.
Jeff Klinefelter - Piper Jaffray & Co.
First on Europe. Fantastic results here in the first half of the year. A couple of points I wanted to follow up on. One is, can we get any more color on country performance through the first half of the year and where you identify Paul some countries - UK, Germany, Sweden, Holland - where you see opportunities going forward, but could you give us also sort of trends to date given that there seems to be concerns about certain countries within Western Europe? A little bit more color on trends to date and how you see that playing out the balance of the year?
And then in terms of Carlos your guidance for the back half, understanding that you’re attempting to spread the orders across seasons rather than in one quarter, it makes sense that you’ve pushed some orders into Q2 from Q3, but wouldn’t you also see a smoothing in the back half meaning that you’d see a stepped up level of reorders in Q4 as well? Maybe just a little bit more color on that?
Paul Marciano
To start with Europe, as you well know we really started when we took over our licensee in Europe three years ago, three and a half years ago now, and so basically we’re pretty new on all these countries while in full development. Of course Italy is well developed. France we just are in the middle of it. Spain we are really starting now to put quite a few stores on the map and the same for UK we plan to have eight to 15 stores in the next 18 months. So we start from scratch in a lot of countries except France and Italy. Do we see a slow down on our end? Not really on the sense that you heard the numbers about the retail. Retail was up on a comp basis of our owned stores 66% and 71% for the half of the year. We are acting cautiously to look at where we open our own stores and where we grant the right of partners to open our stores, but we are not at all developed in Europe so that’s why we don’t perceive yet a major slow down on anything that we’ve done here, especially in Spain and England where the credit crunch is coming the same as in US.
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