Question-and-Answer Session
One moment for the first question, please. The first question comes from Mark Rupe. Please state your company name followed by your question.
Mark Rupe - Longbow Research
Karl, question for you. You’ve been in this business for a long time on the bedding side. Have you ever experienced anything like this on a brief or extended period of time? Just trying to get your take on where the industry is and if you’re seeing any kind of stabilization on the bedding side.
Karl Glassman
Mark, the answer is unequivocally, no. I’ve never seen it. As a matter of fact, I’m kind of the by product of four generations in the bedding industry, and in talking to my father that he’s never experienced anything like this.
So the depth and the duration of this, we haven’t seen in the past. As to where are we from a trend standpoint and where are we in the cycle, we have not seen much of a change. We believe that the bedding industry in the fourth quarter from a macro standpoint, certainly not like from a macro standpoint was off in the 25 to 30% range. We believe that those statistics continue as we speak.
Mark Rupe - Longbow Research
Okay, because I know that it seems like you took a step down, stabilized, and took another step down. But now that we’re going against some easier comparisons, it doesn’t sound like what you’re saying is things are changing at all?
Karl Glassman
That’s correct. And we really from what we see today, our guidance is showing that we see a demand environment that is really unchanged through all of this year. We’re not forecasting the proverbial strong back calf, from a bedding specific perspective; we don’t really start to bump up against those easier comps until into the mid-third quarter.
Mark Rupe - Longbow Research
And you cited improved performance related (inaudible) that happened last week. I was under the assumption that you had been benefiting from most of the countries that this relates to. Is that not the case?
Karl Glassman
No, you are correct. We have been benefiting, but we continue to benefit. Really the way to look at that, Mark, is that we didn’t really see any benefit through the first quarter of last year. We started to incrementally benefit in second and third quarter, and probably started to feel the full extent of that late third and early fourth quarter.
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