Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from Kevin Doherty - Banc of America Securities.
Kevin Doherty - Banc of America Securities
I know there continues to be concerns there just about the lag affect from the job losses, the cost-cutting efforts with your customer base. I’m just trying to get a sense of how much of that impact you think has really worked its way already with your business and how much catch-up is left? I’m just trying to get a sense of how you get comfortable in this environment.
Philip A. Hadley
I guess there are a couple different ways to answer the question. You can look at our business over the last cycle or you can look at it over the different parts of our business.
In the last cycle, depending on where you pick the start date but it doesn’t really matter, we were negative a couple thousand seats in the first 12 months of that cycle. So far we’ve actually been positive a couple thousand seats in this cycle. I think that’s certainly a testament to the fact that our product is positioned differently and provides a different solution than it did in the last cycle.
If you look at the sell side of our business, they’ve been really in a challenging environment for more than a year now and with the exception of mergers, which is something that is really a macro effect that we don’t have any control over, the population’s really been quite stable over that period of time.
If you look at the buy side, I think that as we look at that population there have been a lot of headlines where similar major firms have laid off a significant number of employees. From what we can tell it doesn’t seem to affect our user count as much and I think that has to do with the fact that our user count is with the financial professionals who are actually tied to the assets in those firms so that if those professionals are laid off that those assets with those firms become at risk. I think that our positive user count over the last 12 months is a sign of our strength as well as what we see coming forward as well.
Kevin Doherty - Banc of America Securities
How do you think about the revenue per user trends going forward? I know just by definition if your new users slow, they’re not coming in at those lower price points and that metric should continue to kind of tick up. But what are some of the other drivers there? I know when we just think generically about Marquee it seems like a product that customers can easily switch into, there’s not a lot of incremental cost but maybe that could eliminate a cost from one of your competitors. I’m just trying to get a sense of drivers of revenue per user and what products are actually contributing to that increase?
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