Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from James West – Barclay’s Capital.
James West – Barclay’s Capital
Bob, clearly 2009 is going to be more challenging than we thought couple of months back, North America is going to be certainly difficult and definitely under pressure and so I would say your customer base likely to be able to spend less next year. But on the international side, I think the only country or customer base you have mentioned where you see a downturn is Russia at this point. So I wondered if you could talk a little bit more about the international business in this environment. Do you think that your international operations can continue to grow next year?
Robert P. Peebler
With respect to the environment, Russia is the only place today that we have seen issues and frankly, Russia is a bit of puzzle for us. We do not know exactly how event will turnout as we ended 2009. What we are seeing as you would expect is at the lower commodity prices certainly have put pressure on the government and what we do not know is how it is going to find its way into the NOCs which are a dominant part of the Russian market. The Russian dilemma is that about the time this happened, their production has peak in fact, speculated now to production is now in decline and there is pretty good evidence of that. So, I think to have a real dilemma and it is going to be curious to see how that plays out work. We are assuming and we certainly have seen that in the short term, we are assuming that Russia is not going to be as good a robust market as it was in the last couple of years, and we will just have to sort of play that one as it unfolds in 2009 and a remainder of the international markets we really have not seen much effect at all. In fact, as much as we can tell most of the companies we are talking to whether it is NOCs or the large IOCs that are major players are all pretty much seem to be holding to their capital spend. There is a little bit of wait and see attitude but as you know, many of those projects are already locked-in and fairly significant. And then you have countries like China and India that very much have an energy policy that is driving a lot of their activity and we just have not seen any signs of reduction in those markets. So, less Russia, we are still looking at our 2009 plan. We will speak more of that in December but at the moment I would still expect that we will see some growth in international markets.
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