Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you. The question and answer session will be conducted electronically. (Operator Instructions). We will take our first question from Jonathan Schildkraut with Jefferies.
Jonathan Schildkraut - Jefferies & Co.
Great, thank you. Just a couple of questions here. First, Sunit, on the CapEx side of the equation, now this year was a fairly low number as you mentioned 10.5% of revenues; on the third quarter call you said the long-term kind of CapEx trends would be somewhere in the 12 to 14% range. So you pointing to the CapEx being down meaningfully year-over-year. Can you talk to us about where you're going to hold-off on spending and where the company will continue to spend over the next 12 months?
Sunit Patel
Sure. I mean as you know a lot of our CapEx driven by revenue growth so is clear linkage between revenue growth and CapEx expense. So as revenue growth slows down our CapEx comes down along. We do have a certain level of maintenance CapEx as we've mentioned in the past about $200 million.
And then some CapEx even at lower revenue growth just because your churn in your business so it takes some time to reposition the capital that gets churned out or as revenues get churned out or reposition. And so given that you've seen that the revenue growth has slowed down especially in the second half of the year and -- both from a sales perspective and a revenue perspective, we think that again we won't spend as much capital even in the first half for example because the revenue picture from a growth perspective is different from where we were same period last year.
So, we think that because of that, because of revenue growth and because of a lot of our CapEx is success based capital driven by revenue, it should come down quite a bit again in 2009.
James Crowe
Yeah. I'd point out too, we do continue to invest on a third category project capital. One example that we've noted is the great opportunity supported by great results we have in Europe and we continue to tell our European operations take the capital, but you need to continue to expand in areas where opportunity is the greatest. Similarly in the U.S. we continue to expand networks and add buildings where those create additional opportunity.
Operator, next question?
Operator
We'll take our next question from Frank Louthan with Raymond James.
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