Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator instructions) And we will take our first question from Terry Tillman with Raymond James.
Terry Tillman – Raymond James
Hi guys, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions. You know, John in terms of the softness, I was hoping we could touch on restaurants, which is – that is still the flagship part of your business. It has been growing at 20% type plus year-over-year. Can you give us a character sketch in terms of softness in that business specifically? Is it more on the direct side or indirect side or just a better sense, it is broad based across all the different parts of that business or is it more isolated in some areas?
John Heyman
Right, Andy is here, so let me just turn it over to Andy and then I will make some comments as well.
Terry Tillman – Raymond James
Okay.
Andy Heyman
We had really strong growth Terry, in the quarter, well north of 20%. So, if you are looking at that as a kind of a marker, we are well north of that. So, I think that is the first part of your question. The second part is just to kind of characterize what we are seeing. First of all, from an overall perspective, I would say we are feeling very good about the future in the restaurant business in the three areas as we look at, kind of the channel, the international, and the direct United States business.
In the direct United States business, the pipeline continues to grow. The contracted backlog continues to grow and we are feeling really good overall there, a lot based on the demand of new products that are helping operators make more money on existing sites either through increased revenues or controlling costs better. In terms of – what the other thing we are seeing on the direct side is site openings are down and that will obviously have an impact to our business and we have taken into account very conservative plans based on discussions with direct customers about what this impacts would be.
On the channel side, it is a little bit of the same here in the United States. It is – we continue to do very well. We had a very good quarter. We are being cautious as the site openings have slowed a bit, and we believe going into next year it is prudent for us to consider continued reduction of site growth, and that is the kind of plans we have built in, but the sales people, obviously 15 of them, two days ago in the channel, they are feeing darn good. They have got a lot of deals that they are working on.
- To read the full transcript on Seeking Alpha, click here »
