Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator instructions) Your first question comes from Peter Lawson with Thomas Weisel Partners.
Peter Lawson – Thomas Weisel Partners
Hi Lukas.
Lukas Braunschweiler
Hi Peter.
Peter Lawson – Thomas Weisel Partners
I'm wondering if you could just talk through the investments in 1Q and how they break down and how they impact EPS or the kind of scale of those investments and how it's changed?
Lukas Braunschweiler
Okay, Craig?
Craig McCollam
Sure, no problem. I can do that. Peter, really what we're looking at are continuing to expand the capabilities of our Asia-Pacific region from both a sales and a service standpoint. We think that we have some rare opportunities now seeing the fast growth that we're seeing in that region to really take advantage of that and maybe get a little ahead of the curve rather than being behind the curve always in personnel and infrastructure in that part of the globe. So we're going to be investing quite a bit on the operating expense side with a carryover from what we've invested in Q3 and Q4 where we've had some higher growth percentages. And then we see that we think we'll get ahead of that by Q1 and those expenses will come down as a percentage of sales throughout the rest of the year. So we're going to see some downward pressure on our EPS for Q1, but then in Q2 through Q4, we'll start to see benefit from those investments that we've made for the last three to four quarters.
Peter Lawson – Thomas Weisel Partners
Okay, that's understandable. Thank you. And then just on the organic growth in Europe, what was that and what drove the recovery so quickly?
Craig McCollam
Well, if you remember, we talked about last time that there were a number of orders that had been delayed that when we'd gone through and analyzed them, some of them were clearly orders that were delayed due to sluggishness and/or uncertainty in economic conditions, but that we thought there were a number of them that would still come in, in the quarter and we saw that they did recover pretty quickly. And many of those orders that were postponed in Q1 came back into Q2, so we were able to see a recovery. I think many times it's focus as well. We get an opportunity to really refocus our whole organization on how do we grow, what are the key aspects and the innovations that Dionex has and getting them out in front of the customer. So, sometimes these sort of lulls give us the opportunity to get back in front of people we haven't in a while and I think that also helped us in the fourth quarter. But it seems that we feel pretty good in what we've seen so far even into fiscal 2009.
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