Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from the line of George Notter with Jeffries and Company.
George Notter – Jeffries & Co.
My question has to do with bookings. I calculate your bookings in the December quarter at about $71 million. I go back and look at the year ago quarter. You did about $96 million in bookings in December. I was trying to figure out how you guys are thinking about seasonality right now. Obviously, the bookings number was down a ton here in December. Even on a sequential basis and certainly year-on-year, how are you thinking about seasonality? Is it that the orders are coming in softer now in Q4 than they were in the past? Do you expect orders to come back in Q1? What’s the thought process?
Patrick Harshman
First, a couple things, going back to Q4, I think it’s important also to remember the bookings were hugely up in Q3. So there is an inherent ebb and flow to projects and orders. In this particular year, we saw a real burst of activity. In fact, we had a record bookings quarter in the third quarter; and that was actually driven by a huge amount of activity late in the quarter that we frankly had expected to take place in Q4.
When we look at the back end of the year, it was really in line with what we expected, although I would agree it was a little bit more in Q3 and a little less in Q4 than we had expected. That was some of what drove an upside in the results relative to our initial expectations in the back half of the year.
All of that being said, heading into this year, it remains true that the visibility is not too great. We don’t read too much into what happened in Q4. We do know from those customers who have made some decisions that, as Robin stated, we do expect CapEx among many of our customers to be flat to down. In many other cases, however, those CapEx discussions are still very much under way and not yet resolved.
So we find ourselves in a position where we’re in a historically slow quarter for capital expenditures, the first quarter of the year, and I would say the visibility is incrementally worse than what it normally is. We’re confident in the guidance we’ve given in the first quarter, but I think we still want to wait and see a little bit more what our customers have to say about the rest of the year before we get a better feel for what the remaining quarters will look like.
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