Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) The first question is from Richard Gardner from Citigroup.
Richard Gardner – Citigroup
Dennis and Thomas the consensus from your competition is that there is at least some modest slowing in the US FMB business market. I think some have talked about maybe a point or two of slowing in the end markets but definitely a discernable slowing. We’ve also heard that Dell for example is having a tough time in the US corporate market. It doesn’t sound like you’ve seen anything but can you just talk about whether you’ve seen any discernable change in the market at all in this quarter that we just had? Then, as a follow on to that it looks like excluding acquisitions you may have accelerated the growth of your US distribution business at the same time that you expanded gross margins. I would just like some perspective on how you achieved that.
Dennis Polk
Sure, let me just take the first part of the question and then maybe Tom can jump in on the second part. Regarding the FMB marketplace in North America as far as Q4 is concerned we tend to have a mix shift in our business toward large deals and larger customer because of the government selling season and the fact that we have a large retail business as well. So, our FMB business tends to become a smaller component of our business in Q4. That being said, I think it is fair to say and echo the comments of our competitors that there is, I’ll call it slight change in the demand patterns of the FMB. I wouldn’t call it a weakness by any stretch but the FMB market is not as strong as it was last year at this time. As far as our growth of our core business I’ll let Thomas take that question.
Thomas
I would just comment that as you can see by the numbers our core business did indeed grow particularly as we commented in North America, the US and Canadian distribution. We talked about on the call the seasonality of the consumer electronics and retail business that we experienced this quarter and we expect to experience in the fourth quarter of each of our coming fiscal years. But, I would tell you frankly that we are executing very well in this company so our growth in the business comes from good execution on all fronts in regards to both the core distribution business as well as the recent acquisitions that we’ve made for the company. To be clear, there are no special or one time circumstances that would have drove this other than ongoing operations.
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