Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you. (Operator Instructions). Your first question comes from the line of Jim Ricchiuti with Needham & Company. Please proceed.
Jim Ricchiuti - Needham & Company
It looks like you guys got some particular improvement in profitability in the commercial business and I’m not clear on how much of that is sustainable. Maybe you could talk a little bit of the improvement that you saw on the margins there and going forward would you assume a similar level of operating profit in the commercial business that you’ve seen in the prior two quarters, that is the first and second?
Scott Hildebrandt
Well, I think we have continued to evolve our strategy in that business to continue to put more and more of our energy and focus on higher margin products and to continue to make sure we are not fighting for every piece of market share that’s not profitable, but rather focus our efforts on generating profitable revenue.
I think this last quarter, we did see a very strong set of factors combined to create very strong gross profits in that business and ultimately very strong profit contribution. I don’t expect that we’ll see that kind of combination happen again in this next quarter going forward. But, I do think we are seeing very much stronger gross profits than we did say a year ago at this time. So, much better than say a year ago, maybe not quite as good as we saw just in this last quarter, Jim.
Jim Ricchiuti - Needham & Company
Okay. Gerry, on the other business units, it sounds like you really getting some traction in the industrial business and it's surprising just given the economy, was this a quarter where you began to convert some of these design wins that you've talked about in previous calls, the revenue.
Gerry Perkel
Well, I think what we have seen is that as the economic slowdown hit hard, projects that we have been working with customers and opportunities we have been working also were slowed down. Some were delayed, in some cases even cancelled, but often times people just said, well, we have a new product we are developing, we are just going to put that on a hold for a while.
What we began to see in this last quarter is some of that starting to reenergize and starting to move forward and getting all the way to completion on some of these. So that we maybe even begun to deliver some revenues or at least have orders or commitments from people to deliver revenues as we complete the product development for them.
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