Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Operator instructions. We’ll go ahead and take our first question from Tore Svanberg, Piper Jaffray.
Tore Svanberg - Piper Jaffray
My first question is on the channel inventories. You said they’re now at 1.8. The historical range is 1.9 to 3.2. Going forward, what do you think the new historical range will be?
Steve Sanghi
Our feeling is that distribution is continuously setting into a mode of higher returns on their own inventory, getting more cycles of inventory. I don’t think it’s ever going back to the high point of 3.3 before. Will it always stay 1.8 or could it go closer to 2 or even slightly higher? That is certainly possible but the whole average inventory distribution will carry and will be much lower on the average than ever before.
Tore Svanberg - Piper Jaffray
My follow up question is can you comment a little bit about how business has been so far in the month of April?
Steve Sanghi
The business in the month of April has continued to be very good. Bookings are very strong. April should be up well over the prior quarter so there are really no issues.
Operator
We’ll take our next question from Simona Jankowski - Goldman Sachs.
Simona Jankowski - Goldman Sachs
With Europe being up 19% for you in the quarter, is that just seasonality or are you starting to see some of the effects from signing some regional distributors there in the last couple of years?
Steve Sanghi
It’s a combination of effects. Europe is seasonally a strong quarter. You know, the March quarter, because the March quarter tends to have no holidays. The other quarters have either Easter or Summer or Christmas or some other holidays. Seasonally it’s a strong quarter but the results in Europe are absolutely tremendous. They go far beyond really what the seasonality would imply. There are significant share gains resulting from our efforts in the channel, adding regional distributors and design houses. A lot of it is adding a large number of our own people who are creating demand. In fact, a bunch of that demand is getting satisfied through the global distributors. Albeit at a slightly lower margin - our global distributors were up 9.3% sequentially, significantly more than Microchip was up in total. The total global distribution issue that has been around for a while in the minds of investors and analysts should really be put to bed here.
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