Question-and-Answer Session
John Brooklier
Thank you Ron, we are prepared now to take questions. I will remind everybody we ask everybody to please honor our one question one follow up question.
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Dean Dray - FBR Capital Markets.
Dean Dray - FBR Capital Markets
Dave you knew the day would finally come where you would be on the call saying that North American Auto and North American Rezzi would be the brighter spots to call out in that quarter, didn’t you?
David Speer
I did know that, that would happen some day, I wasn’t sure when.
Dean Dray - FBR Capital Markets
All right, but that doesn’t count as my question. So I really like to drill down a bit on auto if we could, because I know we had a Cash for Clunkers impact here, but just give us a sense of what has changed competitively during the downturn. I mean, you made comments a couple of quarters back that some of your competitors, because of their liquidity issues that you were getting increased share and customers were coming to you.
So, after the dust settles here how has ITW’s auto business improved market share, may be geographic mix, may be some new products or new platforms, but just give us the state of the union in auto as you come out of this.
David Speer
Yes, well certainly, you know the build in North America in the quarter up over 30%; obviously that’s the biggest variable in Q3 versus Q2. The European auto bill was actually relatively flat from Q2 to Q3, so not much impact there.
Clearly, the mix of vehicles and our penetration rates in the North America have continued to improve which allowed us to outperform the market and we are seeing obviously the leverage that we talked about. In earlier calls when we get any volume in these businesses, there’s significant leverage on the margin side.
So, in our penetration as we’ve talked about for the last several years in North America it has been primarily focused on the new domestics has continued to serve us well. We’ve got good growth content, both in the current bill schedules and in the year ahead as we look at new platforms coming on with new content for us.
So, we continue to be optimistic as we see these bill rates now begin to improve. Much of our market penetration gains over the last year had been lost in the direct decline in the bill numbers themselves. So as these bills begin improve you’ll see the benefit of our increased content per vehicle overall are going up.
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