Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Steve O’Rourke – Deutsche bank.
Steve O’ Rourke – Deutsche Bank
I think about a month ago you had talked about EPOC potentially being EPS neutral in fiscal ’09. How are you looking at this business as you integrate it into the overall fold here in the present environment when you look out through ?09?
Bill Noglows
This is Bill Noglows. We think EPOC is just a terrific strategic acquisition for our company. As you’re well aware EPOC operates in Taiwan, which is today the world’s largest single global market for CMP slurries. For many years we’ve had in our long range planning we’ve always felt that we needed a manufacturing facility somewhere in the Taiwan China mainland area.
The EPOC gives us the opportunity to quickly move into Taiwan and get that footprint on the ground and get people there that are very well connected to the semiconductor industry as well as the LCD industry, and more broadly, the electronics industry. So we continue to think it’s just a terrific strategic acquisition.
The market today and the global economic situation that we’re all faced with clearly came into play as we were working with EPOC to sort of put this deal together, and we think we ended up in a great place. We think we made what we believe is a very smart acquisition to strengthen and grow our business when we come out of this downturn.
Until we close and we expect to close this quarter. Until we close this deal we are operating as two separate independent companies, but we are putting our plans in place as we speak to as quickly as we can begin to integrate the two companies and strive to get those synergies as quickly as we can with the focus on making sure that we’re staying in front of our customers and doing all we can to support our customers in Taiwan and around the world.
Steve O’ Rourke – Deutsche Bank
Will EPOC help you in positing pad business and pads with customers?
Bill Noglows
Maybe, Steve. I think we’re out there with pads. If there’s a silver lining in the cloud today about our business it’s pad business. In my comments I mentioned we gained three new customers this quarter taking us from 15 to 18. I think equally important is our number of applications with those 18 customers has grown from 20 to 30, which is a great example of once we get in and on one application the customer quickly looks for ways to extend our pad across their factories, which I think is another validation of our value proposition.
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