Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from the line of Meredith Taylor - Barclays Capital.
Meredith Taylor - Barclays Capital
I am hoping you can talk a little bit more about what you saw in the UK and the Middle East in the power gen business. If you could kind of talk about how that evolved over the course of the quarter on a month-to-month basis and then if you could give us a little bit more color on where you think that that channel is right now in the way of reducing inventory and how much there is still is to go?
T. M. (Tim) Solso
Okay, in Middle East and Europe; Middle East was the biggest one. There was quite a very large growth in power gen over the last several years there and the market was one where, there was quite a bit of stocking in the channel because you not only do they mark a lot of goes or a lot of growth but they wanted it on short lead of time. So, we added up significant stocking position in the Middle East and our business demand was just buying that for some time.
Then over the course of the first and second quarter demand fell off, what we said in our remarks was that demand fell out significantly in the second quarter even over the first which is right and then our distribution channel began to react. We did some cancellations and reductions in the demand in the first quarter. We did quite a bit more in the second quarter as a result, our inventory positions in both places are down to much more normal levels.
I will say to you though that still our view is we have more inventory in the channel than demand would suggest today and particularly in the Middle East but we will have that corrected within this quarter as our review, by the time we get done with this quarter, we will be at normal inventory levels is what we expect. But again, our view now is we are in much more, while there is a little bit left to go, we are in much more normalized position feeling much more comfortable for where we are. We took most of the productions in the second quarter that we needed to take.
Meredith Taylor - Barclays Capital
Can you talk a little bit about what kind of price action you saw in the inventory that you reduced? I mean, you did a great job in terms of working the inventory through the system.
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