Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions). Your first question comes from Taylor Harris with J.P. Morgan.
Taylor Harris - J.P. Morgan
I just wanted to start with looking at organic growth and how that has trended over the last few years. If I look at 2008 and I strip out Mayne, it was a little under 4%, the previous few years you’d been in the 5% to 6% range, so may be first just tell us big picture, what do you think happened with organic growth in 2008? And then when we look to 2009, given everything that you’re seeing on the macroeconomic front, why are you forecasting a step back up in organic growth to the 4% to 6% range?
Thomas E. Werner
In terms of the growth, your numbers are fairly correct and I think what you have to do is to look at the key franchise of SIP and MMS which are growing exactly where we said if not slightly better, and this year we’ve just had a somewhat of a drag on things from the non-strategic areas in other devices and in other pharma. So, where we’re focusing and where we’re investing our R&D resources, we’re getting the returns we’d like to see, It’s these other areas where we’ve elected to not invest that has been somewhat of a drag on the top-line.
Christopher B. Begley
And that still holds true for 2009 as well as we look at a continued strong growth in both SIP and MMS on a global basis. Clearly, we’re not going to be able to at least in this current economic environment believe that we can grow up to the same levels that we did in ’08 versus ’07 where SIP grew 8.5% globally and MMS grew over 11%, but we do think we have good growth prospects for all the reasons we raised, and again feel pretty confident about that. We do think we did put together fairly prudent forecast for 2009 for our two strategic areas, and again, as Tom alluded to, the non-strategic non-core areas will continue to be more or less flat to low growth areas for us going forward.
Taylor Harris - J.P. Morgan
May be just elaborate on the other pharma and other devices; it seems like the fourth quarter was the worst quarter for those categories than we’d seen earlier in ’08, did something specific happen in either of those categories?
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