Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions)
Your first question comes from the line of John Bright – Avondale Partners.
John Bright – Avondale Partners
Ken, on the front page you’re talking about the U.S. portion of the Office and Contact Center group growing, but declining from the September to the December quarter. Can you give us any more color about that decline? Did it take place at the end of the quarter, beginning of the quarter; was it linear? Any signs that you could pick up from that to extrapolate forward?
Ken Kannappan
John, it’s hard to do and we wanted to highlight it given the potential risk factor in the environment and the concerns about the recession so that we were fully disclosing the data. The truth is, it is fairly difficult for us to provide on too granular a level; the reality is that while the sell-through is fairly smooth, in general, we only get that data on a monthly basis from most of the business channels, and the sell-on tends to be much more lumpy by nature relative to the actual size of that number.
So it is possible to over-read into that data. We always have a seasonal pattern in the December quarter, in which October is strongest and December is weakest. I would say that we have experienced – and this is, again, not a perfect data given the two-step nature of our business, although we have good relationships with both end-customers as well as our distributor partners, so we think our information is accurate, but it is not perfectly, scientific in terms of collection – we do believe that we were hit most heavily within financial services, which is a market that has been historically been very, very strong for us, both in terms of the Contact Center as well as in terms of office wireless adoption.
John Bright – Avondale Partners
Do you think with GN reporting poor U.S. results and citing the U.S. market particularly as well in this category, do you have concerns that their competitive response not be on the pricing side?
Ken Kannappan
We always have that concern of course that there is going to be a stepped-up pricing effort on their part and that’s something that we can see. Having said that, I think what we are dealing with in this case, and particularly when you see some effect for both companies, there has been a cutback in purchases from the market, which is primarily not a pricing issue but primarily a market demand issue.
- To read the full transcript on Seeking Alpha, click here »
