Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions). Your first question comes from the line of Ross Muken of Deutsche Bank. Please proceed.
Ross Muken - Deutsche Bank
I want to start off by saying congrats, Marc on the new position. I speak for broad audience given the e-mail flow; you did pretty well on your first official conference call. In terms of the commentary, it seems like the general theme is stability to improvement across most of the end market.
So, I guess certainly these were good numbers and the consumables being up, where they were. It is pretty encouraging going forward. So, I guess the key point at least that I'm focused on is the trajectory of more of the equipment and instrumentation businesses. If we look to other reports across the third quarter, it seems like a lot of the early cycle companies are starting to see some general interest.
How far do you think you lag across the different businesses and wherever you start to see activity first? So that the commentary on some of the industrial market isn't very, very slow or slight improvement as opposed to more significant and in turn how do you the activity you’re seeing of the order rates or whatever the sales force is saying. How is that comparing to the last cycle we came out of, I know its tough because this was a much deeper decline, but I'm just trying to get a sense for, where you think we are and when you think we'll have more visibility to an improvement and what business units we'll see at first?
Marc Casper
As I think about the industrial end markets and the focus on the capital equipment side of things, clearly these are segments from an economic cycle that are going to lag by at least a couple of quarters. So, you need to be in a strengthening economy and then you start to see the effects of capital flow into these types of products in our instrumentation and then especially both instrumentation that are related to capacity expansion.
So, they definitely a lagging general economic cycle and that we've known over the many, many years in one of these businesses. When we look at that today, clearly we see the fourth quarter looking very similar to the third quarter in terms of low levels of activity. The comparisons get easier in 2010, but right now we are not forecasting a very robust economy.
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