Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from the line of Analyst - KeyBanc Capital Markets
Analyst - KeyBanc Capital Markets
International market was pretty strong on your industrial side during the first quarter, are you seeing any weakness in business in Europe and is that implied in your guidance now and could you tell us what your guys are telling you they’re seeing in Europe?
Frank Sullivan
At this stage with the markets that we serve, we are not seeing any real weakness in our international markets. Again a lot of that is heavy industry, oil and gas, power generation, basic maintenance. We have also benefited from acquisitions in Europe, both good acquisitions that fit within RPM and acquisitions that we’ve been able to leverage revenues with some of our existing businesses.
So all those have been strong. We are acutely aware of concerns particularly in the UK and also in Western Europe but to date in the markets we serve, we’re continuing to see decent strength.
Analyst - KeyBanc Capital Markets
When do you anticipate you’ll see some contribution or margin improvement from your new products? Do you think due to the lightness in consumer it’ll probably be longer then expected or do you expect to see that next quarter or going forward?
Frank Sullivan
It took us longer then we thought related to the new DAP and Rust-Oleum products to get full distribution. Unfortunately that happened by the end of the first quarter so we didn’t have the impact in the first quarter that we had anticipated. The take away particularly for the Rust-Oleum universal product is meeting expectations. Having said that the weak retail environment in general and just lighter foot traffic at a lot of our major accounts is having an impact across all of our product lines.
But from a product mix perspective and a distribution perspective along with the impact of price increases that we were able to affect at the end of the first quarter we would expect to see better results out of our core consumer product lines in the second quarter and for the balance of the year.
Analyst - KeyBanc Capital Markets
The M&A activity, I know you just go after a certain size and type of business which tend to be smaller, with the credit markets being as they are have you seen even that pipeline sort of freeze up or is it pretty active still?
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