Datasets:

gtfintechlab

/

SubjECTive-QA

like 0

Follow

Financial Services Innovation Lab, Georgia Tech 19

TGX

Q4

Christine Jacobs

Okay. And I just have one last question. As far as the seeds - themselves, any progress on the development of iodine seeds?

Joseph Munda - Sidoti & Company

And we do have an iodine seed for sale, it is a small portion Joe.

POWL

Q4

Craig Bell SMH Capital:

Pat McDonald:

I wanted to circle back on the backlog and the new orders. Just wondering between the hurricane, obviously, you guys were shut down, you couldn't take orders and many clients were also impacted. Do you think that had a significant impact on new orders and backlog in the quarter or is it more just regular lumpiness?

There was some impact. There's no way we can quantify it. Again, we were down, we were not able to take orders and we know all of our customers, especially in the oil area around Houston, were working to get their facilities back up online.

RHT

Q3

Ross MacMillan

James M. Whitehurst

Charlie, I just wanted to drill in to the current backlog number. Am I right, you said $180 million? I think that's up from $120 million at the end of last year. And so effective with the -- effectively, if I took your billings proxy and I added in that $60 million, which wasn't billed but effectively will be recognized to revenue in the next 12 months, that seems to me to be a higher growth rate, more like 18% on that sort of bookings proxy, if you will. Am I going about that math in the right way? Is that the right delta, $180 million versus $120 million on the current backlog?

So, but just one note on your math, that $80 million growth in total we said from over $200 million to over $280 million is over the course of 4 quarters, right? It's not all in the last quarter. Obviously, the vast majority of that comes in the last quarter because that's when these big deals happen. But I wouldn't just add that in total in one quarter.

CTIC

Q4

I guess just related to that, Jim -- sorry, just before we get to Steve, what are -- any thoughts regarding securing a marketing partner in Europe? And I guess this is another way of asking, has Novartis sort of just backed out of their option for taking over Pixuvri in Europe?

Let me put it in this way. We know that Novartis has, internally, a threshold for a product to have to have at least $500 million in sales before they would consider it a product that they would take to market. So clearly, we've never considered Pixuvri in the EU to be a $500 million marketed product, so it would not be surprising that Novartis would not want to take it forward in the EU. And then obviously, with respect to other partners, as I've mentioned in the script, we have been forming and will continue to form channel partners. In Turkey, we have an existing one, and we'll have one in Israel. There are mid- to large-sized pharma that have interest in taking Pixuvri in rest of world. So into Eastern Europe, China, the Pac Rim, India, South America, et cetera. And so those are the things that can -- I'll turn it over to Matt and give you a little bit more color on that since it's been his primary driver for the first half of the year, that and the PIX deal -- the PAC deal.

ENTR

Q4

Tore Svanberg

Dave Lyle

Very good. And then just lastly on the outdoor satellite business, it has been pretty strong in the last couple of quarters. How do you expect that business to track going forward? Is it going to be some potential lumpy growth or do you expect that business to show more steady growth there in 2010?

I mean, we're – (inaudible) we have a few planes going over, that's why I keep passing everyone. So, I guess we are in the flight pattern today. The satellite business generally, seasonally strong period in Q4 and Q1, usually a little bit seasonally softer in Q2 and that would be especially the case for our run rate business at EchoStar. And the case for the DIRECTV business, we are ramping there into – from kind of the high-end HD market to all HD. So, we are going to continue to see expansion in that in Q1. Unclear exactly how that's going to look in Q2 at this point, but we also see international satellite service providers starting to deploy CSS later this year as well. So I'd say generally throughout the year that should be a growing business for us. We might see a little bit of softness in that business in Q2 though, because that is a seasonal soft quarter especially for the big tier-one guys.

NWSA

Q2

Georg Szalai:

Chase Carey:

Thank you. Chase, I was just wondering if you can give us some color on the expected timing on the Myspace decision and on the premium VOD movie launch. Is it both something that we should expect by mid-year or, can you give us some color there?

I think on MySpace we're actively engaged in pursuing those strategic options now. And I think as I said, I think, I think the, you know, early went [out], I think guess you something you see in the first half there.

TGX

Q4

Joseph Munda - Sidoti & Company

Okay. And I just have one last question. As far as the seeds - themselves, any progress on the development of iodine seeds?

Joe, I think that iodine is an area that we have a very small presence in right now and it is an area that obviously we would have an interest in expanding our presence in but I don't really have anything further to report right now.

UNVR

Q1

Karen Lau

Carl Lukach

Okay, great. So it sounds like there's more happening overseas, but U.S. is still very early in the process and more on to come, okay. Could you give us an update on the sales force churn since you started the new comp structure and implemented the realignment in February? And how does it compare versus historical?

Well, historically we've had pretty high turnover in our sales force, too high. I know the prior two years we had 22% - 23% turnover. That's entirely too high. Generally where we want this to land is probably around 10% - 12%. You are always going to some -- you have some people that voluntarily leave. You are going to have some that just don't make it. So, it's been too high. Some of the actions we have taken are really exciting and motivating to those who like to get rewarded and are competitive and have the goal orientation and the drive to succeed because we're going to rewarding and recognizing them more. Some of those who don't have the skill set, the versatility, the adaptability to call outside the boundaries of just procurement and call through the organization and sell our value prop versus just sell our chemical, they are struggling. And so, there's turnover in those ranks on both ends whether it's our choice or theirs. So, specifics, David, I will leave that for you to discuss.

RH

Q4

Curtis Nagle

Gary Friedman

Gary, perhaps a bit of a piggyback question on Adrienne's, perhaps just a little bit more specific just thinking about the ecosystem that you guys are - you must have rolling out. I just go two questions. How meaningful do you think that could be as a brand enhancer for RH over, say, the next three to five years? And as a standalone business, how important that - as a revenue and profit contributor or as - I guess kind of the former points more important, how should we think about that?

Yes. Well, I think it's going to be a meaningful brand enhancer. And I think if - it's funny I - if you would ask me five or seven years ago, we started work upon this, I would have told you it's going to be a meaningful brand enhancer. Now, I look back, and I go, that wasn't even any good at all. We were working five, seven years ago because we keep - tend to keep making things better. And that's the great thing about kind of only having a vision about something versus kind of start working on something, right? You really learn when you start doing. And that's when you can really start accelerating your education and connect more dots to see around more corners. I think what we're about to unveil in New York and Aspen - I don't think anybody has any idea what it is. I really - I don't. It's - I've been fortunate enough in my life that - I've been traveling since I was a relatively young man and traveling all over the world. And I've been in a design business whether it be at my former - the former company I worked at or today where we search the world for the best stuff, the best design, the best hotels, the best places, where are we going to get inspired, what are we going to see? So I've seen a lot, right. I've been to most of the Aman Resorts in the world. I've been to so many so many places both personally and professionally. And someone asked me, how long have you been working on the Guesthouse? And I told them about 30 years because that's how long you've been thinking about it. That's how long you've been traveling to really great places and asking myself questions like, why don't they have this? And why isn't anybody thought of that? And why does it have to be like this? And I think when you see what we've done with the Guesthouse, there's just things that no one has ever done in hospitality. And why they say a lot of the - most of the innovation in the world happens outside. It comes from outside of industries not inside of industries, right? Like, again I go back to Tesla. The guy never built a car ever, ever. And it's massively turned over the car industry. And now every car company in the world is racing, racing to catch up, racing to have electric cars, right? We've never opened a hotel before and we're not going to now because it's not a hotel, it's a guesthouse and it's importantly said that. And when you see our website launch in the west - on the - the website launch when we open, the first thing you're going to read on the website, it says this is not a hotel, right, because it's not. It's a completely new way to think about an experience like that. And so I think when you do work like that, one, it has a great chance of having people at the top of the mountain tip their hat because they haven't seen it. I mean think about this. Like if we want - if you go to the top of the luxury mountain and say okay, who lives there? Who has the biggest house? Bernard Arnault, right, runs the biggest luxury platform in the world. I'd say internally I joke around and say look, Bernard Arnault just bought Belmond for $3 billion, right? So like nobody thinks we're impressing Bernard Arnault. I guarantee you, when he sees this guest house. He's going to be forced to tip his hat, because nobody's seen anything like this in the world. And that is what is going to create the conversation, right? That is what's going to change the perception of the brand. A brand that started underground had to dig its way out of the grave and start climbing a mountain that's never been climbed before. You just have to do things that people can't imagine. And I think this is all about - it's all about brand building. It's all about truth and respect, right? The work is our truth and I believe our work will be respected. And our truth then will be respected, and people will listen closer. They'll pay more attention to us. And then out of that, you know, out of that and same thing with the homes that we're doing, the residences that we're doing and other things you'll hear about. I mean, let me just go back for seconds to start here. We never knew anything about restaurants, right? A few years ago, everybody will tell you, you're going to open a restaurant like, what are you going to do? Who's going to run it? It's just that we had a partner to start now we run the whole thing ourselves. We have - we're vertically integrated to hospitality organization. We have 10 restaurants today. Our restaurant volumes and how they're tracking, because we keep innovating and evolving. And the things we've done in the last 18 months - 12, 18 months, you can't even see them yet because of the pandemic. But our restaurant volumes will rival the highest volume of restaurants anywhere besides the one or two great ones. But when people - when we reopen and really reopen, when we can seat all our restaurants our volumes are going to be among the best. People used to talk forever about mall developers really wanted a cheesecake factory because they did $10 million on average on restaurant. It's very likely very soon our restaurant will be at that kind of volume and it has to do with not just the number of customers coming through but the average ticket of the customer coming through which then influences who's coming through which makes sure we have an audience that is aligned with the target consumer and who we want to impress. But we're going to be a pretty good restaurant company if you looked at the numbers and the returns and the margins on our restaurants today, they're three times better than they were three years ago. And so we're pretty good at that and I think what happens is with things that you really care about, right? We talk in our company about three lenses. We look at every decision base and we choose based on what is the emotional value of an idea, what is the strategic value of an idea or what is the financial value of idea in that order, right? Because if you just focus on the financial value but idea if nobody really believes in it, if nobody's going to die trying to bring it to life, the financial value is never going to manifest itself. But if you've got ideas that have really high emotional value that the people in the organization really give a shit they really care about it. They're going to get knocked down 10 times and get up 11. The effort and the passion and the learnings that happened just change the outcome. I've seen things that have really high financial value - really high strategic value, really high emotional value, relatively high strategic value, but moderate financial value that have turned out to be the biggest financial ideas in the company because the work turns out to be so good. And on the opposite hand, I've seen just the opposite. I've seen things with moderate emotional value, relatively high strategic value, and super high financial value. Somebody thought it's worth - the $500 million idea wind up being a $5 million idea because nobody cared enough about it. And to do great work, the effort has to be - you want extraordinary outcome, you have to put an extraordinary effort. There's no shortcuts, right? Elon Musk was asked, you run three different companies. You run Tesla and SolarCity and SpaceX. How do you do that? He said, look, it's simple. It's just physics because the average executive might be working 40, 50 hours a week. And he said I work about 150 or 160 hours a week. So I work three times - I work three times more hours than the average person so I could do three times more. And he goes, it's very simple math. If you hung out with the people in our organization, you find out that we really love what we do. You cannot stop us. We are going to figure it out or die trying because it's more than just a job to us. It's our life. And when you work on stuff like that, the outcome tends to be much greater than you could even imagine in your original vision, you meaning us, right? And so that gives me - like somebody said, hey, do you think you'll ever make money in the Guesthouses? Well, I said, yes, if it - I said, look, if I don't lose a lot of money, it's going to be a really good thing for the brand. I actually think we - now, when I look at it, I think this is going to work. I mean I - we haven't sold a room, not yet. But let me tell you something, I sure want to stay there not just because we - I built it. And - but like we have thought so deeply about it that we're going to do things that no one in hospitality has ever done and they're really good ideas. And the same thing with our residences like there, we've designed the one on Red Mountain. Like it's shocking, it's so good. And so, and it's because this is, we're passionate about it. It is - these ideas have huge emotional value. And when it has high emotional value, people, they don't put in a day's work. They put in a week's worth than a day and the outcome reflects that. So I think these will at a high-level, these will massively, massively elevate and render the brand more valuable. And I'm hopeful today that they'll also have really good financial models. I feel more clear about the homes by the way. I think I think that the homes is easier math for me because I own homes and bought homes and like, I'm the consumer and I know what we can build and what we can sell them for and how much we can make, and I think will create an extraordinary product that I think we'll make a lot of money in the home business. Whether it's single family homes, condominiums, things like that, we do luxury apartments which is a really interesting market. It's like there's no great apartments in the world. They're just not designed well you know. But think about it, if we do fully furnished luxury apartments, right and how many people need to go into a market, live somewhere for a year or two, don't want to buy a home but they got a lot of money and they want to live in a really beautiful place. I mean, we think that could be a fantastic idea. The Guesthouse thing, I don't know, like it's - we're doing things no one's ever done. Like we got no meeting rooms, we've got no weddings, no nothing, no celebrations, very private. It does a few things better than anybody else in the world but it doesn't do all the thing. So it all depends what kind of room rate can we get for this extraordinary rooms and this unbelievable sense of privacy and luxury we created we'll know soon, yes, we'll know soon but we're excited about it.

GERN

Q3

Unknown Analyst

Stephen M. Kelsey

The question about where the trials are running and regarding the measurement, or pre-measurement as it were, of telomere length. It seems that some variability in the telomere length may influence the outcomes of various patients in the trials that could influence the final result. I'm wondering what you've learned about that and how that might be influencing the design for imetelstat.

Just to frame your question. I think you're alluding to the fact that we have previously disclosed that one of the subgroup analyses in the lung cancer study and the breast cancer study was the analysis of outcome by pre-existing telomere length -- tumor telomere length. And so if I understand your question correctly, you're asking about the robustness with which we can actually measure that?

SMCI

Q3

Mark Kelleher

Howard Hideshima

So there's really 3.5 points that could come back in a stable pricing environment plus the shift back to Romley, the products back to, not necessarily Romley, but the servers, ship back to servers should help that gross margin?

Yeah, certainly that's the impact that we saw coming back from that steady – let's say that state about six months ago.

AAPL

Q2

Richard Gardner

Tim Cook

But you do expect Tim, the aggregate building materials to be down sequentially in the June quarter?

I expect it to be within a similar range as last quarter.

NMRX

Q3

Ross Licero

Richard A. Flynt

So in order to get to that, you have to have 20-plus gross margins in the fourth quarter given the midpoint of the hardware revenue. Is that sort of where we should be?

Yes. And I think that's exactly right, Stratton. Yes.

BGS

Q2

David Palmer

David Wenner

Good afternoon guys. A few questions, and I will just round them off. The first one is, you're not the first -- there has been a few lately that have been talking about the surprising lack of promotion response, and I know you ruled out Ortega and perhaps set that aside; but concerning with the threat that connects that lack of responses or some types of promotions I am assuming not working, its how you determine to [indiscernible] for that, it’s a relatively new phenomena, any sort of color around that would be helpful, because it seems to be something that's not just B&G related? And then secondly, any numbers you could put to your inefficiencies that you've had related to your rapid growth in acquisitions lately, such that we could think about, how much of this year's pain might be reversed in next year? Thank you.

Well as far as the first question goes, we are trying to figure out -- I think an awful lot of it, as far as promotional efficiency goes, it really is performance at the retailer level in terms of getting those displays -- additional price promotion in and of itself is not as powerful as the price promotion with display activity, and to the extent we don't succeed in doing that at retail, I think you're just not going to get the performance and the multiplier effect out of the promotional money that you want. So as everybody is trying to promote, it gets harder and harder to win those displays, because there is only a finite amount of room for that display activity. That's something I am always looking for, when we do promotions is can we get a display, and if we can't get a display and its just a promotion off of the shelf price, if its successful, all you're going to have is an empty shelf. You won't have enough product to support the promotion. So it’s a self-limiting thing in that sense. So I think that's a factor, and I think there is a great deal of competition for that display activity as people try and promote their way to higher volume. Bob, you want to speak to the second half?

HSY

Q3

Nik Modi

Michele Buck

Great. And last question, just from an innovation standpoint, can you just provide any context on kind of what's remaining in terms of innovation this year and how things are going to work in 2021, if there is any clarity you can provide on the launch timing?

Yeah. So we feel very good about our innovation, some of the innovations that we are excited about that are new to the market, includes the Reese pretzel product, a Reese cup with pretzels in it. We've had a range of Kit-Kat flavors. We know on a global basis, a big part of the Kit-Kat portfolio are flavors, they tend to do quite well. We are, on a very small level launching Snack Cakes under our Reese's trademark, which delivers that Reese experience in a slightly different type of product form and we feel good on that versus basis some of the early test results. And we will have more coming, some items on our take-home side of our business that won't get announced till early next year, which is typically the time we announce those things just given resent windows. No major change in our innovation strategy. We think it's working very well for us. We think it's right sized and we think it's delivering much more sustainable results.

BGFV

Q2

David G. Magee

Steven G. Miller

The pace of macroeconomic recovery out there.

Yes, we think it's been generally positive. I think there's still lots of issues that remain in some of our markets and particularly in California. But I think the year-over-year improvement has been positive. We still believe there's a segment of our consumer base that is affected by issues of payroll tax and unemployment benefits running out and the like, but overall, we see the environment being recently stable and hopefully getting better.

PLNR

Q2

Steve Spence

Scott Hildebrandt

Can you give us a little bit of kind of looking backwards sometimes (inaudible) but the decision made about a year ago to take the portion of the balance sheet, and to strategically spend and if I recall the scenario correctly to help to build the end markets and your ability to meet them. What’s the best way to characterize the shortfall in terms of a return on the investment, is it a competitive problem, is a pricing problem in end markets. The answer is probably some of each but if you give a light there be helpful?

Well I’d say couple of things, one is that a lot of what we are trying to build is in fact showing improvement which is a little hard to see through some of the challenging news that we have here but the what I will call the standard digital signage product sales while they were only up 15% this quarter they were up great deal in this last quarter. And I think by the time we get to the end of the year. I don’t know exactly what that number will be, but it's going to be up at least 40% or something along those lines maybe 50%. And that’s exactly what we were trying to do. The difficult challenge is some of the places that we worked looking to grow but we were counting on holding steady or maybe having some modest growth from the markets they are in have not done as well. So, in our EL product and in some of the custom digital signage which e didn’t expect to grow and in some of the other product lines that high end home etcetera, where we were looking to kind of stay flat, we have seen declines there. We weren’t upping the investment in those areas but we were expecting those businesses to continue to provide the kind of value they were. So, we have made some good progress. Now I’d say that just in the last few months, we have seen a little bit of a slowdown to what was a rather torrid growth pace in some of the digital signage areas. And we have seen a few analyst reports saying that yes Q1 calendar was a little slower and step down from what people have been seeing at the torrid pace there. So, there is a little bit of market timing and pause issues you will but our indications and the step we see going forward is there continues to be a robust set of opportunities and customers beginning to look at deploying more in a digital signage area. So, I think it's a combination of some good progress maybe not quite as much as we had hope to in some of the areas we were investing in coupled with some declines that we had not been anticipating in the areas that we were not really investing in. So, make sure if that answers your questions as precisely as you like, but that’s a picture I’d draw.

VRTV

Q4

Daniel Jacome

Stephen J. Smith

That's a yes, OK. I think, last one, not to give -- expected tailwind you said?

It is.

HPE

Q4

Sherri Scribner

Meg Whitman

Hi, thank you. I just wanted to dig a little bit into the different segments if you look at the storage business it decelerated a little bit and I guess I would’ve thought that storage might have grown a little bit more sequentially. Was that primarily related to some of the issues at 3PAR because it sounds like the all-flash array and the Nimble business are doing well?

Yes, so – it’s Meg, the storage revenue was up 5% driven by the Nimble acquisition and as you said the all flash arrays grew 16% with Nimble was up over 80%. So a good performance overall, but as Tim mentioned 3PAR performance was soft due to I think a very tough competitive environment in the – in the mid-range and then some sales challenges in the United States. So we are taking action. We are combining the Nimble and 3PAR storage sales teams which is going to give us more critical mass there and that’s going to be led by Keegan Riley, who led sales at Nimble. And we are also going to aggressively add some more specialists to the field. So I think you hit it right on the head a little weakness in the U.S. and we are fixing it.

SYK

Q2

Joshua Jennings

Kevin Lobo

I was hoping to just follow up on some of the commentary on the spine business. And can you just review your outlook on the value proposition, the current robots out in the market and maybe help us better understand the enabling technologies under Stryker’s rule had done, don't get a lot of airtime? And how you believe Stryker’s spine franchise can be competitive and in front of the Mako spine launch?

Yes, thanks. Listen, we are big believers in enabling technologies. We obviously have that with Mako. We did the Mobius acquisition and we're very excited about the imaging aspect of that. We do have a gap in spine robotics and we do believe that the first foray, the two competitive systems on the market today are really - are really good guidance systems for the placement of pedicle screws, and but it's providing value to surgeons, and we definitely want to have something like that on the market, which was what Mobius was working on. And then beyond that, we think with Mako, we could get into other procedures and other applications. But robotics is difficult, so it's going to take time for us to develop those applications and we'll keep you posted. But we do, we are big believers in enabling technology and we're going to continue to invest in that space.

VCEL

Q3

Chad Messer

Gerard Michel

Great. Thanks for taking my question and congrats on another good quarter. Appreciate the added color that you gave on expenses both margins and where SG&A and R&D can go. Is it possible maybe to expand on that a little bit more? Is there some rule of thumb for a sales force expansion, I know you expanded it in the past. Is that a good sort of rule of thumb to look at how cost went up before as you expanded the sales force as you're doing it again?

Hey Chad, it’s Gerard. I think for the sales force itself, yes that's a good rule of thumb. However, we are putting additional investment in hub services to really smooth the process of a patient from the doctor deciding that they want some MACI implant to getting insurance approval, so it will be a bit higher than when you saw in the past and that's why we gave a fairly specific numbers saying, hey, I think what we did this quarter and over a couple quarters ramp it up until we get about $2 million higher a quarter. That would pay perform within the sales force and the bulk of that is from the hub services.

DOV

Q2

Steve Tusa

Ronald L. Hoffman

Okay. And then one more question just on the 12% plus growth guidance. That's on the new continuing ops number, correct? So as Crenlo comes back into the fold, that adds a few pennies?

Steve, one other clarification. You should anticipate that the third and fourth quarters will be more balanced as opposed to what you are talked about the sourcing on the seasonality.

PTEC

Q1

Joe Maxa - Dougherty & Co.

Woody Hobbs

All PCs, okay. Can you talk a little bit more about where you perceive the HyperSpace being used? Is it traditional higher end PCs or Netbooks? I’m certainly it’s probably both, but what do you think is going to be the first area to have success?

Yes, I think there is kind of four different use cases in a general sense without getting into consumer types. The hybrid that is kind of a high end laptop for somebody and as a laptop it’s virtualized and supports both Windows and HyperSpace simultaneously and bounce back freely, so that’s kind of the high end. To go to the other stream, the low end, the Netbook, it’s something that only has HyperSpace installed in it and there’s probably no Windows and so in that context, on a Netbook, we might be competitive.Then you get into the dual options kind of in the middle where somebody is primarily using HyperSpace because they use, like my daughter, Facebook all day and rarely need to bounce over to Windows, where somebody else maybe 50-50 or a little more uses Windows and uses the dual option much more frequently to get into Windows. So, that’s kind of the range. It’s the full range from the really low end inexpensive Netbooks, all the way up to the top where full Windows Vista is installed and we’re there just as a productivity tool.

SYKE

Q1

Shlomo Rosenbaum

John Chapman

Okay. And is this the highest level of revenue AT&T has ever been for the company?

Yes.

DELL

Q3

Deepak Sitaraman

David I. Goulden

Joe and David, on VNX, relative to the 1,300 new customers that you've noted for VNXe, what were the comparable number be if you were to just look at VNX? And in terms of share gains in the midrange, specifically for VNX and Isilon, can you share some thoughts on where you think the share gains for each of these product families is coming from?

And Deepak, let me just add to that. Obviously, VNX is a huge part of the mid-tier. But also in mid-tier, you got Isilon, which we said basically doubled on a year-on-year basis, and you've got Backup Recovery and the systems that are also kind of in the 20% plus growth range as well. So you'll look at all and it's a really strong portfolio, and I think we're definitely gaining share in the mid-tier.

SYK

Q2

David

Kevin Lobo

Okay, great. And then, I guess on Mako, I think, J&J talked about the [indiscernible] launch in the U.S., so just expectations over the next call it 12 to 18 months? And thanks for taking the questions.

Yes, well, expectations for us, I would say we expect Mako to continue to do very, very well. As you've seen, with other competitive entrants into the market, it only validates that robotics is here to stay in orthopedics and so we'd like our chances. We know we have an outstanding solution that delivers great results, which is why hospitals are buying their second and third and fourth Makos. And so we welcome the comparison. It's early days for them. And we just like the fact that robotics is going to continue to grow within orthopedics.

POWL

Q4

John Franzreb Sidoti and Company:

Pat McDonald:

I was not aware of that. Just my followup, and I will get back into queue. Remind me, did you expand your North Canton facility to kind of capitalize on transportationrelated projects?

We are in the process of expanding that right now. That should be completed in our fiscal second quarter.

BLDR

Q3

Allen Baugh

Peter Jackson

Correct. And then my last question then, and this sort of came up earlier, but if we had a no-inflation scenario that's not impacting your revenues, what kind of organic growth, real growth, does it take to leverage SG&A even just a little bit?

Well, I think our guide historically has been that we think that there's about a 70% variable component of SG&A. I think that's fairly true. I think that – we're still very confident in the market. We think there's still a lot of opportunity there for us to grow. So we definitely don't see the existing market or the market we're looking at day-in day-out is a cause for concern, a cause for aggressive action to make sure we're getting in front of it. I realize that folks on the Street look at a decline of growth from 9% to mid-single digits as something well-nigh the apocalypse, but it still feels like a pretty healthy market for us. We're still feeling pretty good about our opportunities. So I think that we will continue to deliver along the lines of what we've been talking about over the past few quarters in terms of incrementals on working capital, commodities, SG&A. I think all those things are still holding true.

NMBL

Q3

Jason Ader

Suresh Vasudevan

Okay. Not having all-flash probably maybe had an impact too?

I would say in our competitive engagements pricing action by the large vendors is by far the most dominant factor that impacted us. All-flash just this last quarter went over double-digit percentage in terms of how frequently we compete against all-flash arrays. So while it's been increasing every quarter, it's not the most material factor that impacted us, Jason.

RRD

Q4

Patrick Wang

Thomas J Quinlan

This is Patrick Wang for Dan Leben this morning. So most of my questions have been addressed already, but going back to the topic of margins, could you just talk a little about how you view the balance between margin improvement, but at the same time investing in innovation and the IT spend, as you touched on earlier, relating to NFC and the digital initiatives as you look to replace some of the print revenues?

Yes, sure. I mean, we, as you know and those of you who have been around us for a while, we've got a group up in Grand Island, New York that does a tremendous job as it relates to R&D and innovation in our industry. We've talked to you in the past about how we have developed the ProteusJet press, which, again, we're not going to manufacture those presses. We've got people that will manufacture for us. But we've got that type of jewels that are out there that allow us to go ahead and make our productivity that much better. From an IT standpoint, again, as you look at our CapEx number, we're significantly investing in IT. Ken O'Brien and his team are going ahead and looking for and making sure that we can go ahead and serve our customers' needs as it relates to their Information Technology. Everything's about data, how can you get the data, how can you make it more efficient. We'll build where we have to build. We'll buy where it makes more sense to buy. All of those things together allow us to go ahead and have the productivity to improve our margins.

SWN

Q3

Charles A. Meade

Steven L. Mueller

And that's using what you've learned from the Dean wells?

Yes, +D22what we’ve learned regard from Dean and Johnson and any other wells before.

PDLI

Q2

Roy Buchanan

John McLaughlin

Okay. And then a couple quick questions on the Merus transaction or agreement. How long did you do due diligence on that and I guess what were the major gaining factors that drove you to agree to that agreement? Thank you.

So I'm not going to discuss how long we did due diligence on it. Suffice it to say, we [due diligence] on it long enough that we got comfortable with it. But to the point in your question and it's a good question. I think the thing we focus on are the quality assets, as I mentioned, the likelihood that we can be repaid and the likelihood we can get a nice return for our shareholders. That's really a focus. And the point I was trying to make earlier, and thanks for asking this question is, is we're a little indifferent as to whether it's a royalty structure, a loan structure or some combination of the two. It's really a focus on the quality assets and the likelihood of returns for our shareholders been the focus.

PLXS

Q1

Adam Tindle:

Steve Frisch:

Okay. And just maybe a longer-term question, you talked about the record over $3 billion funnel, you talked about committed to the 9% to 12% long-term revenue growth. Just trying to understand, does that imply potentially a supersized growth year in fiscal 2022, such that the average of 2021 and 2022 can be in the 9% to 12% range. So maybe just help with the expectations on timing and magnitude of what seems like a pretty big growth uptick upcoming.

Sure. This is Steve. I’ll try to handle that one. Obviously, trying to give guidance for 2022 would be a bit challenging. But looking at the market dynamics of where we’re at, which gives us some optimism is, we look at commercial aerospace and we’re strong in there, we’ve gain market share. We’ve talked about the fact that we’ve been bounce around the bottom and we see this down. And so we see that as a catalyst for growth in terms of what could happen in the 2022 as things are start to recover. We’ve talked about the elective procedures in Healthcare/Life Sciences. We believe we’re continuing to take market share, we’re winning new logos. And we think catalyst there to help accelerate some growth as we – as things start to recover post-COVID. And then, we’ve talked for the last couple of calls talking about industrial team in semi-cap – with semiconductor capital equipment, the signals are out there. The demand for semiconductor equipment and devices is only going to increase over time. And looking at our forecast and Todd’s kind of comments is, we see this flattish kind of forecast and then we see the short-term drop-ins. And I think at some point there’s a potential for that to turn into real forecast demand. And so, the optimism of the 9% to 12% is driven by those types of factors combined with the fact that we continue to win decent amounts of new business. And so I think – why we’re optimistic about the growth, could it outperform, I think, if the economy takes off and all these things start to recover post-COVID, I think there’s a real chance that demand from our customers continues to increase at a pretty good clip with it.

GME

Q3

Brian W. Nagel

Tony D. Bartel

So my first question, just want to dive a little deeper into the used margin in the quarter. you gave some commentary in your prepared remarks, but just want to understand the mechanics. Is the pressure of the margin, does that come as you're making -- as you're actually taking these trade-ins? Or does it come when you subsequently sell that product? And then the decision to get more aggressive on, I guess, on the trade-in effort, was that planned ahead of time? Or was it potentially a response to maybe something you've seen in the competitive environment?

No, I would clearly say that this was a calculated effort for us to go and to get market share ahead of a launch period, which is exactly what we did.

UNVR

Q1

Laurence Alexander

David Jukes

Good. To improve relations with your suppliers, are you looking to be going to like more self-sourcing for your larger product?

Thank you, Steve. I think there's two parts to the answer. One is very different for the undifferentiated products than for the differentiated products. But I think the consistent scene that we have is really changing the conversation with our suppliers, changing to conversation really with our partners, because that's what they are. These are long-term partners who have been with us for many years. And we choose our partners very carefully, and we work hard to earn the right to stay their partner. And we partner with people who are long-term winners in their space. So, it's not necessarily about sole arrangements. For some of the differentiated products it will be sole arrangements because it's difficult to invest the time in promoting someone's molecule, only to have it undercut by someone else, or it's difficult to have the degree of transparency that we'll need with our partners when developing in a specialty space if you have a crowded territory with other distributes. For the larger products, it's much more about changing that conversation, understanding the ebbs and flows of the partners' supply, and working with them and collaborating with them. So I'd think much more about changing the conversation. This is not an adversarial conversation, Steve mentioned that earlier on. This is really a conversation between partners. Many of those partnerships predate me, and many of them will go on longer after me. And that's the way we have to view it. We have to view ourselves as good stewards of that partnership while we're in place.

NVDA

Q2

Mark Lipacis

Jen-Hsun Huang

Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. First question on the datacenter business. Can you help us understand to what extent is the demand being driven by the deep learning applications, versus the classic computationally intense design applications?

Sure, Mark. Our datacenter business is comprised of three basic markets, as you're alluding to; one is high-performance computing, and one could say that or characterize it as a traditional supercomputing market, and very computationally intensive. Our second market is GRID, which is our datacenter virtualization, basically graphics application virtualization. You could stream and serve any PC or any PC application from datacenter to any client device. And the third application is deep learning, and this is largely our hyperscale datacenters applying deep learning to enhance their applications to make them much smarter, much more delightful. The vast majority of the growth comes from deep learning by far, and the reason for that is because high-performance computing is a relatively stable business, it's still growing business, and I expect the high-performance computing to do quite well over the coming years. GRID is a fast-growing business. I think Colette said that it was growing 100% year over-year, but it's from a much smaller base. And deep learning is not only significant in size, it's also growing quite substantially.

BLDR

Q2

Steven Ramsey

Peter Jackson

Yes, I guess I'm saying the newly acquired assets, does it, as it lays a base for the CapEx on to those plants? Is there a need for more CapEx that you want to put in, in the Netherlands?

In those specific facilities, we'll assess but I think that they're already in pretty good shape. They're already well automated from what we've seen. But we're looking for ways to improve them but not a significant source of incremental investment.

SMCI

Q3

Brian Freed

Charles Liang

Okay and then my last follow-up on the hard disc drive inventory, understanding it had gotten up to seven weeks. Are you down three to four weeks at this point of time where you're still somewhere between three and seven weeks?

I guess about four weeks at this moment.

WBA

Q4

Ricky Goldwasser

Alex Gourlay

Yeah. Hi. Good morning. I'd start it with the direct savings. I think in the past you said that the long-term plan is to save 50% to 60% of reimbursement pressure or to be offset by generic savings. So when you think about that long-term goal where are you at now into 2020?

I would just say that we've got good line of sight into these savings as well. We've been working on this pretty hard to make sure we protect our customers and we drive efficiency. And again the volume increase that we spoke to earlier in the call, which will improve as the year develops is another important component of driving a more efficient pharmacy.

SWN

Q3

Charles A. Meade

Steven L. Mueller

I had a question on one of the wells that you talked about in your prepared remarks. I think it was the Dean well in the Brown Dense that you said. Did I get these numbers right? 200 barrels a day, and 1.2 million out of 12 feet of perfs?

That's correct.

SMCI

Q3

Aaron Rakers

Howard Hideshima

Yeah, thanks. A real quick one. The Internet Data Center vertical, just looking at the numbers you were down about 43% sequentially by my math. Can you talk a little bit about what you're seeing in that vertical and I think you alluded to deals pushing out, was that specific to that vertical, and if such, was there any large deals that possibly pushed out in the quarter?

And Aaron, before ourselves, yeah, we did push out I mean there were some customers that, as you know, data centers are looking at the latest technologies, so they were evaluating the Sandy Bridge, and so they didn't quite finish their evaluation at the end but we still believe that they're going to be coming in so. Again it's the transition to the new technology, we're seeing that they like our new product, especially the Sandy Bridge, and they just need to get to the testing process.

CTAS

Q1

Michael Schneider:

Michael L. Thompson:

First, I guess, you had mentioned you are suspending the share repurchase program as a result of the strategic review. I guess that’s news to me. Can you tell us what you were exploring and indeed what you concluded?

Mike as we have stated in the past, I really can’t get into any details or any specifics. What I can tell you is that we did spend time looking at various alternatives and now that we have finished that. We are ready to reenter the market in our own open purchases like we under the authorization that we have.

RAIL

Q4

Sal Vitale:

Joseph E. McNeely:

Okay, that’s fair. And then, just the last thing is looking at your guidance so, if I look at the other backlog of 6,800 cars I assume that’s all are slated for 2014 delivery at this point?

Sal, yes, the majority of it is.

FISV

Q4

David Koning

Thomas Hirsch

And then two real quick ones, just term fees in the quarter and will StoneRiver continue to generate about the same affiliate income for you even now that they paid out the $89 million? I guess just those two quick ones.

Yes. Dave, on the first one, yes, we had about $4 million of term fees, which is up, I think, $2 million to $3 million over the fourth quarter of last year. Our license fees were still down slightly over last year. Though also in the quarter, they were down about $4 million to $5 million. But we still had a good quarter sequentially in license revenue over the third quarter. And so good there, but term fees were up very small again in the current year from that standpoint. Regarding the StoneRiver question, to highlight what you said, is we did get a dividend and loan lower repayment of about $89 million, $90 million. We did back that out of our free cash flow, but that should not impact their equity earnings going forward. So as far as their level going into next year, it should be right around the same level or so.

NTCT

Q4

Eric Martinuzzi

Jean A. Bua

Okay. All right. And then, shifting over to the Vodafone win. By the way, congratulations to (47

Hi, Eric, this is Jean. Just to add on, Vodafone is a architectural decision that's coupled with our functionality and ease of management. And it is an example of the product suite that we have where we can go in the case of a service provider from the RAN, which should help us in 5G all the way to the data center which – where our service assurance products have been heavily invested and also in analytics and to the cloud when it comes to enterprise. So, we see the Vodafone win as being able to standardize on vendors also and being able to consolidate the tool (49

RHT

Q3

Steven M. Ashley

Charles E. Peters

Terrific. And then Charlie, you've guided revenue for the full year up maybe 14% to 16%. You guided cash flow growth around 8% to 12%, a little less. Can you maybe give us some color on why cash flow might be growing slower than revenue in the coming year?

Obviously, one of the driver there is going to be the operating profit in the net income numbers, and with a higher tax rate next year and with a lower operating margin overall next year. And obviously, that -- both of those things impact that number. There's a lot of other balance sheet assumptions that go into it, but I'd say -- I'd start with your net income growth number.

BJRI

Q2

William Slabaugh

Gregory Levin

Yes, thanks guys. First I had a question on value. Curious how the Brewhouse Specials mixed versus what you've seen in prior periods and is there any sense that the customer is either gravitating toward or away from value in your menu at this point?

Well, when we look at our Brewhouse Specials they've continued to perform well for us and I think when we look at the number, in fact I was just looking like at our Pizookie incident rate and frankly that number was flat with a year ago that tells you that our guests are still liking it, obviously, but it's not necessarily increasing in this quarter from that standpoint which means that we're not necessarily seeing people just gravitate towards that specific day. I think when we look at our other specials in regards to our Brewhouse Specials, they continue to do really well for us but at the same time, as Greg Trojan mentioned in some of his formal remarks, our prime rib continues to do well which is kind of -- we -- we still think it's of value even though it's a higher check item, our -- and light entrees continue to do really well with the zoodles that we put on, so those are all higher items. I don't think we're seeing a movement just towards Brewhouse Specials if that's kind of the --

NMBL

Q3

Alex Kurtz

Suresh Vasudevan

And just last question for the January guide, are you dialing back the assumption on enterprise execution or is it roughly the same where you had it for October?

Well, so our belief is that the competitive intensity is which is what drove the lower than anticipated productivity in our enterprise side is going to stay in place for the next several quarters particularly as the larger incumbents are defending not just slow growth, but declining revenue we anticipate that, that will stay in place and that's really what we factored into how we think about Q4 guide.

GIS

Q1

John Baumgartner

Ken Powell

Thanks for the question. Ken, you mentioned the slowdown in China, but the economic news out of Brazil and Europe hasn’t really been to hot recently either? So, I guess, given that, what’s your confident in terms of your guidance and maybe this consumer frugality we are seeing here in North America doesn't take root more deeply in these geographies we are still seeing growth?

Yeah. So the situation in China, I think, is partly macroeconomic and partly, and I think very specifically related to government policies around gifting and entertainment and these sorts of things that has a very direct impact on some of our channels, our gifting programs through our Häagen-Dazs cafes for an example. So there is sort of a very specific impact. In Brazil even with the sort of the economic slowdown, we are seeing consumer food sales not just in our categories, but broadly across the industry continue to be a pretty solid. And obviously, we’re participating in that. And also, I would say, John, that our products are very well targeted to, if you will, the solid working and middle class in Brazil. So our price points are good. These are very much everyday products for most consumers. And so we think that they are very well-positioned to be resilient even during a period of some slowdown in Brazil.

EXPE

Q2

James Lee

Peter Kern

Thanks for taking my question. Can you talk about with the new CTO coming in, maybe talk about some of the top priorities that you will be undertaking. And also secondly, I think last quarter you guys talked about the success of integrating the marketing platform, something like 75% on that platform. Can you give us an update? And maybe a little bit implication on the efficiency of the marketing in the back half? Thanks.

Yeah. So, thanks, James. In terms of the CGS top priorities, it's really, as we move to one unified technology team and one unified architecture, the will -- the CTO is to define where we're going, how we're doing it, what the, what the rules of the road are, and how we do this integration from going to many stocks to few. And we created this multi-tenant extensible kind of set of capabilities. And I think that's an -- it's a broad process. it cuts across all the technology in our enterprise. And we're at this hard at work driving that. There's also, as we get to the backend, there's also the customer-facing side, which is all about the UI and UX. We want to be the first Company, and while driving progress to be that we want to be designed, focused and we have a focus on a new head of design, building out that capability and enterprise. So, it cuts across many things. And it's really about bringing excellence to all those disciplines so that we can just give the best customer experience we can and drive improvements across all the pieces, conversion, engagement, all the things we want to have. As far as the marketing question goes, and bringing our performance marketing together, I would say that number's up from 75 to probably closer to 85 to 90. But again, more than sort of a benchmark, which is to say it's how we're getting everything on common tools, common datasets, common algorithms, but it isn't -- what's exciting now is the opportunity to begin to test new algorithms, test opportunities across brands, test the opportunity to gain efficiencies and how we market multiple brands and performance marketing, et cetera. We're in the early days of that, but that is what these achievements of getting through this state have given us. And I would say, we're in a funny time where traffic patterns are unusual because of COVID. So, you're sort of testing into new algorithms and doing a lot of new performance marketing against the backdrop that's a little bit unusual and confusing. So, we don't always have the volumes to test everything, but there's a lot of exciting work going on there. And as I've said all along, we believe that we'll generate meaningful efficiencies and better operation in terms of performance marketing. But it is hard to benchmark because we don't have normal traffic levels and normal patterns. So, it's hard to say. It's going to give us an X percent more efficiency or why we have to see it as an action against the more typical backdrop. So more to come on that, but we are making steady and strong progress, and we're a long way down their consolidation of tools and data and all the things that those percentages reference.

ABC

Q4

Eric W. Coldwell

Tim G. Guttman

Thanks very much, and a whole lot of mine have been covered, but I was hoping we could just get a data point that I think a lot of people have recently scrambled for, which is could Amerisource provide an update on the number of independent pharmacies that you work with, and maybe where that is today versus the past? And perhaps provide some definition around how you would include an independent GPO in that count. Just trying to get a sense on where independents are as a percent of your total revenue, or number of stores, or some additional metrics. Thank you.

No, I just go back to what we've said in the past, that our first focus is to – we're just big believers in prime vendor. That's the foundation. We want to do more with existing customers. That's our focus, to make sure there's no leakage and we get more of that wallet. That's the first focus, get closer and have a win-win for existing customers.

ASEI

Q2

Stephen E. Levenson

Charles P. Dougherty

I was just going to ask a little bit more about the BOT outlook in the leasing and how that might impact your cash balance. How much cash do you think you'll have to use there? Will it impede in any way the dividend or buyback programs?

And, Steve, we've -- Ken and the team have established, I think, a well-defined business model for these types of activities that aligns with our current business model and in terms of a risk profile, financial profile that I think certainly supports what Ken just conveyed.

SMCI

Q3

Brian Freed

Charles Liang

Good afternoon. Just drilling down a little bit more on Hard disc drives. Can you talk a little bit about what specific steps you are able take to alleviate the impact of future erratic prices, both on hard drives and memory? Are there any ways to one access the long-term pricing contracts, or to increase the frequency of the re-pricing? And then secondly, could you give us any additional color around the current utilization rate of your new manufacturing facility and how that transition is going?

Okay I mean for the hard drive inventory question again. Usually we keep us three to four weeks inventory for hard drive and memory but again during the hard drive big shortage timeframe for safety, we'd raise the inventory level to seven weeks so that kind of a clear – a big trouble when price had a big drop and again basically we keep about three-four week's inventory. As through the facility utilization, I mean Asia facility for sure is a big incremental to us and last quarter we have a 65% growth compared with one year ago, so that dramatically improved our utilization. And today I would like to say we have maybe 30% capacity use, so there has to be a 70% room to grow and we feel very positive for that capacity available.

UHS

Q2

Kevin Campbell

Steve Filton

Okay. And then last question on the non-controlling interest, how should we think about that sort of from a modeling perspective going forward? Is that on a pure dollars basis?

Yeah, as everybody I think knows, the most significant item on that non-controlling interest line is the minority interest in the Vegas market. And, as Darren I think and others have asked about, that’s a market that’s been soft, I think that part of our reason for revising guidance is an expectation that at least in the short run it remains so. To me, the current run rate in that market, and therefore the impact on that line is probably as good a guide to at least the next couple of quarters than anything else.

POWL

Q4

John Franzreb Sidoti and Company:

Pat McDonald:

You don't participate in tar sands work do you?

Sure, we have a number of projects that we have supplied into the tar sands area, the pipelines, and coming back into the U.S.

HSY

Q3

Ken Goldman

Michele Buck

Hi, thank you. Along the same lines of 2021, if I can, Michele, you pulled back a little bit on advertising this quarter. It's been a little up and down this year, for understandable reasons. I'm just curious what your thoughts are in general on what the Company's plan is for advertising and marketing in general, as you get into what hopefully will be a more normal year in 2021?

Sure. So we definitely believe in investing in our brands. That is a critical piece of our growth model on the business. So clearly, as we mentioned to you, we had pulled back on some spend in areas where we just thought given the pandemic, it didn't make sense. For example, in refreshments, where we knew consumer usage was down significantly. But as we look to 2021 and as we've started to see the momentum that we're seeing and some of the recoveries, we definitely plan on taking our investment levels to where we would like them to be and more in line with where they have been historically. So you'll see us really gleaning into drive the consumer and to leverage some of the behaviors that we're seeing.

GVNC

Q2

Debjit Chattopadhyay

Paul Fischer

Okay. And the other promising data that we have from the esophageal and the head and neck at what point does that those two -- I mean, what point do you move those programs forward, I understand I mean, you are basically conserving cash and putting everything in the pancreatic program. But, at the expense of not moving couple of other pretty promising data in some other areas?

And then, Mark I think we are also in a unfortunate position to have NCI funded study with the head/neck program because that does allow all the development ongoing to be done on someone else’s time and we can just sort of see how the data is emerging and to be clear, we are finding time to be thinking about head/neck even as are aggressively pursuing pancreas and we’re definitely having a lot of plans on the drawing board for the contingency so that all talked about.

ASEI

Q2

Edward Marshall

Charles P. Dougherty

Pretty comparable from, say, the DoD type?

From our norms, yes.

UHS

Q2

Kevin Fischbeck

Steve Filton

Okay I don’t know, maybe I missed it. But you guys are booking high tech revenue differently than your peers. I guess it’s in the revenue number for you. Where does that show up in your same-store metrics? Is that excluded from same-store? Does it show up in other revenue on your supplementals?

It’s excluded from same-store which – and you guys know this better than I do but I think maybe a reason why sometimes our revenue data compares unfavorably to our peer is because I think they do include it in their same-store numbers.

EXPE

Q3

Justin Post

Michael Adler

So just to confirm, the OIBA guidance is for 15% or roughly in the fourth quarter?

Yes, revenue OIBA similar to Q3, yes.

RAIL

Q4

Matt Brooklier:

Charles F. Avery:

Okay, so – it’s I guess a follow-up on that. Where are we from the staffing perspective and then it sounds like we’re going to see some startup costs in the first half of 2014, but may be not to the same degree that we saw in the second half of 2013, is that a fair way of thinking about it?

Yes, so I’ll take the first half on the costs we do expect a tapering of those and also a reduction in Danville as well because of the write-down.

BMY

Q1

Andrew Baum

Giovanni Caforio

Thank you. So questions for Samit please. In terms of attending 9LA data at ASCO, what is the follow up of that data for both OSN for PFS? My question is all physicians going to come after that presentation and rethink that strategy for first line non-small cell lung on the back of that data, is there enough follow-up there? Second, in terms of the 9ER trial, could you talk to cover that too? I remember that when you ran the Phase 2, there was a question about toxicity and making sure and be use the low dose. So given it's a much more promiscuous TTI, should we assume a favorable or comparable tops profile? Anything you could share that would be interesting. And then finally on TIGIT, Roche's pushing forward very aggressively with that TIGIT antagonist. Merck clearly is interested and active with as your program seems not to been very much. Is that a function of resource allocation or is it a function of what you're seeing with this particular molecule? Thank you.

Thank you, Andrew. So Samit I believe all three elements of the questions are for you.

UNVR

Q1

Kevin McCarthy

Carl Lukach

That's helpful. And then second one if I may, Steve, on Slide 4, you call it 120 basis points of improvement in your conversion ratio. How focused are you on that, do you manage to it, and how high can it go, maybe a little context here will be helpful?

Hi, Kevin. It's Carl. As a distributor, conversion ratio is a metric that we look at monthly if not more frequently. And how much of the gross profits are pulled out to EBITDA. And 32-ish% is I would say okay, but we should -- and it moves around quarter by quarter. But on an annual basis, we see ourselves creeping up to 34%, 35%, 36%. If you look at industrial distributors, you will see those kinds of conversion ratios as pretty much at the mean. The only thing I'll add to that is the added benefit of e-commerce and digitization that we're brining into our portfolio as we reduce backroom [ph] cost and cost of transaction, and that can help elevate that conversion ratio even higher, but that's yet -- like a prediction on that yet, but that's another dynamic in the equation.

TTE

Q4

Christopher Kuplent

Patrick Pouyanne

And just a quick one. That probably means you've not budgeted a huge amount in your CapEx guidance for '22 as far as Mozambique is concerned.

No, you don't have. And by the way, you don't have for another reason is that, as you know, we have a project financing in place. We stopped if we just -- a day before, it was frozen. The day after we declared the force majeure. We gave the money back. We stopped the letters. We didn't want to get the financing. So we know that the project financing is in place. And it's easy for us if we reactivate the project to activate the project financing. So in terms of impacting the CapEx, we had more CapEx than expected in '21, in fact. It's why we went a little above the 13 [ph] by the way, on the Upstream part but no in '22. I have no problem to have -- if gearing is going down, it's good for us. We'll have a reserve of cash for benefit -- to be countercycle when we have to be countercycles. So but again, on the answer is more for me it's not one, again, the other is shareholder distribution. We showed -- I think I told you we were at 33%. I guided you towards the 40%. So you can see the range of it. And if there's more to come. At this stage, we consider it will be to deleverage the company. And that's another maybe -- I'm sure, mistake we should not do is believing that we are entering into a long high cycle. Each time we have said that the year after, it's a catastrophe. So I'm very prudent on this part. Because it's obvious if price remain high, you will have more investors and more oil coming and it takes 2, 3 years but then you have the impact. In the meantime, the best is to strengthen the company and to be ready then to use the balance sheet because opportunities will come in the different energies. And it might be a way, by the way, opportunities come to accelerate the transition.

LBRANDS

Q2

Matthew McClintock

Sharen Jester Turney

I was just wondering if we could focus a little bit on the market simplification efforts that you're doing in Victoria's Secret. It sounds like the investments that you're making in customer service are driving improved results there. And then I was wondering if you could actually talk a little bit about, I believe, the test for similar efforts in Bath & Body Works that I believe that you said you've been testing that for at least a year now and in, potentially, Chicago.

Matthew, this is Sharen. Thank you for the question. We are very pleased with what's happening with market intensification. We are in 6 markets today, and the performance in these markets continue to be above the company average. We are very optimistic about the increases we're getting in sales, the increases that we're getting in productivity and in our customer service score and in the conversions within that -- those markets.

SWN

Q3

David W. Kistler

William J. Way

Great. I appreciate that. And then as a follow-up, IPs -- initial IPs in the Fayetteville based on kind of picking your best quality wells off the charts kind of record number for you guys, but the 30th and 60th day are kind of lagging that same kind of change. Can you walk us through when we would expect to see that reflected into the 30th and 60th day?

The 30, 60 day lags are in fact lags. Some of our best wells came on in September in our optimization program, and they're now just moving into those averages. You’ll recall we had a little bit of weather impact in July that we reported last quarter, but the main reason is really just the lag effect of rolling them into the averages, and we expect those averages will come up as we move in through the fourth quarter.

SWN

Q3

Brian Singer

William J. Way

That's helpful. And then a couple of questions on the Marcellus. I think you highlighted the backlog or the wells that are uncompleted in your release. Can you just talk to a couple things? One, it really looks like your Ewertz are at or above the 10 Bcf-type group. Would you agree with that? And does that translate into bookings when it comes to the end of this year? And then second, how do you expect to meet the – to get up to the 300 million a day? Do your existing wells have a lot of additional production potential, or does some of that backlog come on to meet the Midstream constraints at East?

Our expectations on wells are meeting or exceeding what we thought they would be. So we have no change really in that. It's looking very good so far. The majority of our production obviously comes out of the Greenzweig area, and so we've seen some very solid, strong performance in that area. That will translate through to reserves bookings. The bigger feature is the commencement of production out of the range area. The Bluestone pipeline is well under construction. We expect to have that pipeline in service and operating around the end of November. There was no setback except for just days waiting for rain to stop. We didn't lose any forward progress on that from the storm. So we expect to get that on, and once we can get some production history associated with those wells, we will be able to move forward. We are seeing an improvement from compression out of the Greenzweig area, about 25 million to 30 million a day. That, combined with some wells waiting to be completed this quarter and the startup of the Bluestone and the Lycoming area of production also around the end of November, is the formula for getting us to 300 million a day out of -- exit rate out of Marcellus in total. Let me add some to that. Our puds that we booked this last year in the Marcellus were about 7.5 Bcf puds. Those were all in the Bradford area, I think what we call the Greenzweig area. I expect that we will see some puds revisions on those. When you start looking at that range area that we just now are beginning to hook wells up into, a lot of what you can book depends on what you see in those wells. So what could happen to us at year end, we may not get as many puds booked as you would normally expect us because we haven't seen much production from the range area. But I fully expect from all the tests that we've seen, that will be a good area and that will grow as we go out onto the future.

TGX

Q4

Joseph Munda - Sidoti & Company

Just real quick, how much was on the books with Core at termination? Yes how many sales.

We are in sort of the middle of the quarter, I don't know that I can give exact numbers but I can tell you that 14% of our break-even revenue last year is what core was which was about $3.2 million and so that can probably give you an idea of what might have been on the books one month then. As far as the exact numbers I cannot really disclose in the middle of the quarter.

RHT

Q3

Heather Bellini

Charles E. Peters

I had 2 questions, Charlie. I guess I was wondering I mean you guys disclosed in your filings how much of a -- how much revenue the U.S. federal government does. I was just wondering how much of an impact was federal in the quarter that just ended. We've been hearing that from a lot of companies obviously. And then when you think about how the quarter progressed, we obviously all know that your quarters and every software companies are back-end loaded in terms of deal signings. I'm trying to get a sense of, do you think the environment improved as the quarter went on? Meaning, was the weakness more pronounced in January or was it more pronounced in February? So that's the second question. And then, what have you seen in terms of the deal signing environment and willing to sign deals thus far in March?

And Heather, in terms of time dynamic, I didn't notice a particular change over the course of January, February or March. I think it's been pretty consistent.

ODP

Q3

Bradley Thomas:

Michael Newman:

Just a quick follow up on the business solutions. In the first quarter that operating margin has increased year-over-year and in several years, obviously, the revenue backdrop is getting better. Do you think we're at that tipping point, where we should continue to see margins improve in the division, or do we really need to get sales back into positive territory?

I prefer not to really give any guidance relative to future just because of the uncertainty around the economy. What I would say though is when you look at the first half of the year, we did invest. We had anticipated an economic turnaround. We invested in sales costs. We added additional resources. We invested behind marketing. We invested behind a number of areas. And at the end of the day, given the lack of an economic turnaround, obviously, that impacted our margins in the first half of the year. What we have done in the second half is really focused around cost reduction, mix, pricing and really driving the fundamentals of the business. And that's why you're seeing the improvement in the overall margins structure. Obviously, what happens from a competitive standpoint, what's happened from the economy are things that we can't predict. So obviously, again, my commitment, and we believe it's attainable, is to return this business to the mid-single-digit margin range overtime, and we'll obviously be committed to delivering that, but how fast and at what rate, yet to be determined.

PM

Q3

Bonnie Herzog:

Hermann G. Waldemer:

All right. Will you have an update on the fourth quarter call?

Well, we will, of course, when we do -- when we come to the guidance for 2012, which will be on the fourth quarter call in February of 2012. There, of course, we will give the updates on what currency assumptions will be the basis of our guidance then.

UIS

Q1

Jonathan Tanwanteng

Peter Altabef

My first question is what when can we see the margins of the large products that you've taken on start to normalize and start to be accretive instead of to dilutive to your Service margin profile?

That's a great question. I would say, one, these are staggering, right? So these new comp - contracts are coming in over time. The first ones really came in very, very late in 2017. They came in throughout 2018, as you can see from our contracts, this quarter, we signed almost $990 million of new stuff this quarter. So one way to look at this and I think a more effective way is actually looking at it in that staggered way based of when the contract is signed. Often you will have contracts that in the first 12 months are frankly dilutive. They don't add anything to profitability. And then sometime in the 12 to 15 to 24 months they get more and more profitable. You would expect to close to profitable run rate by 24 months. And that's not scientific for every one of these. But you'd expect two years into this to be operating close to what you would expect to see at least as an average profitability over the term. And then, toward the end of the term, it would go above average. But that would counterbalance the below average in the beginning. So it's really more of a contract by contract approach rather than it is for - to look at the whole thing as a blob. Now, that is ameliorated in the U.S. Federal market, where you don't have as much of a negative in the front or as much of a positive in the back. The U.S. Federal profitability has some variability, but not nearly the amount we see in the non-U.S. work. Mike?

ROST

Q3

Matthew Boss

Michael O'Sullivan

Thanks. Congrats on a nice quarter. So, just on the 7% comp was performance pretty consistent throughout the quarter. And then just as you dig into the performance versus the choppy macro backdrop that you call out, are you seeing a broadening of the customer base, new customers shopping the store, just the best way that you track it, I’m curious what you are seeing?

And then what’s driving that 7% comp, it’s hard for us to tell, Matthew, but it’s almost certainly a combination of certainly some new customers and then some existing customers who are just shopping us more, looking for values and happy with what we’re able to offer them.

NTCT

Q4

Mark Kelleher

Jean A. Bua

Great. Thanks for taking the questions. I wanted to look at Arbor a little closer. You mentioned there was a large deal – I think you mentioned there was a large deal in the enterprise area. Is there a way you can give us an idea of what percent of Arbor right now is enterprise versus service provider?

It's about – enterprise versus service provider in Arbor's revenue is about 65% service provider and 35% enterprise.

FISV

Q4

John Williams

Jeffery Yabuki

Just to go back to one of the earlier questions on PIN debit specifically. I know historically, you guys really haven't been all that active at the point-of-sale. It seems like most of the cards are ATM network-oriented cards. I guess, what specifically can you do if indeed Durbin does disaggregate some of the volumes away from the bigger networks on PIN debit? What can you do specifically to try and capture some more point-of-sale volumes? Because that seems like the biggest way that you guys could actually and maybe make a dent in the industry if you can grab some more of those volumes.

I would say, John, over the last several years -- and when you were making that comment, it made me think we probably hadn't done a good job talking about this. We've actually spent a lot of energy and effort over the last few years in expanding our presence at point-of-sale. I think we're about a 98% or 99% acceptance at this point through the U.S. through our direct efforts and some partnerships that we formed. So we're out there. It's one of the reasons why the ACCEL/Exchange network has been growing rapidly, and it's one of the reasons why we're involved in a lot of the conversations that are occurring around industry right now in kind of what I would call the second network conversation. So I agree with you. There's a lot of opportunity there, and we hope that we will be a benefactor of that as the rules become final and as people make choices, if in fact the rules require that.

BLDR

Q2

Trey Morrish

Peter Jackson

Hey, Chad and Peter, thanks for the time and yes, great quarter. I want to first touch on the gross margin. I'm wondering, if you could just put in buckets of the year-over-year improvement of try and dimensionalize new improvement in mix, the decline from lumber costs relative to pricing, and then your price disappointed that that you highlighted?

Sure, yes, as you can imagine, we spend a lot of time making sure we understand that. From our analysis, we would say more than 50% of is an direct result of both the decline in commodities and the -- in the period as well as compared to prior year, so there's sort of two components. One is last year at this time we were seeing pretty significant headwinds, obviously from the rapid inflation. So with that normalizing there's clearly a normal tail in there. In addition is as we pointed out there was a modest decline during the quarter in the value of commodities. So those components together leading to a little more than half of the total change, probably about 20% to 30% of the remainder of the total changes is attributable to mix and that goes to the investments that we've made and the sort of continued growth and our performance of the value at portion of the business. And the balance is really across the rest of the business, but with a focus on the work that we've done in operational excellence. So pricing discipline, special order margin, those areas of the business where we feel like we can refine our ability to manage price effectively is the bounce.

EXPE

Q3

Herman Leung

Dara Khosrowshahi

First, ADR trends looks like it's in a pretty good position right now, increasing 4% year-over-year right now. It looks like it's stabilizing there. Can you give us a bit of a breakout in terms of how it trended in domestic versus international markets? And second question is, you guys raised some money on the debt and you guys used it for some buybacks. And there's been some speculation about some potential expansion into Europe through acquisitions. Curious on what your thoughts there are from an acquisition standpoint.

And I think in general, Herman, whenever we look at acquisitions, cash acquisitions, we compare the long-term return of those acquisitions to the long-term return of buyback on stock. And just to remind you, since our spin-out, we've bought back around 91 million shares for around $2 billion in cash. And if you look at our capital allocation this year, this year we've been buying back more in stock and returning more capital to shareholders versus acquisition. So far this year, we found that a better use of our capital and the opportunity had certainly been there. We think over time as that cash flow generation of the business is good enough and our balance sheet is certainly good enough with additional cash that we have raised, that we'll be able to do both, with the balance of smart acquisitions and we'll continue to return cash to our shareholders over time.

DOV

Q2

Matt

Robert G. Kuhbach

Right, yes. And so of the portion that was in the quarter, how much of that would have been protected through longer term supply agreements?

A number of our companies have long-term hedging agreements to try to minimize their price increases. I will say those have been much more difficult to enforce as we [ph] progress through the course of the year. But again, we're very comfortable in the second quarter that we did recover the majority of the price increases, whether they be through pricing or through internal improvement initiatives. So there was a significant impact in the second quarter. I think that will become a steeper challenge as we move throughout the remainder of the year.

OCX

Q1

Keay Nakae:

Ronald Andrews:

Great. And then just a final question on sales force headcount. Where are you now and where might you be around the beginning of the year with perhaps a commercial IO as well as DX?

Yes. So because IO today is really focused in pharma, we have a small team including myself that actually – and Doug that are going after the pharma opportunities based on our history and knowledge of the people there and we’ve got a lot of experience there. Our commercial team selling RX today is six folks with a leader. We chose the high incident rate areas that we believe we could reach that would give us some immediate upswing. The idea has always been that once we grow those current territories to a certain level, we would add another round of reps. And the goal is to responsibly add reps without impacting cash burn. So the idea would be to try to build reps up until they’re covering their cost and adding to the accretion to the business. And then we would go use that accretion to go build out the next round of sales force. Should we get an early immune-oncology CMS approval which we aren’t committing to, but should that happen, I reserve the right to come back and change that. But right now, that’s the plan.

BGFV

Q2

Sean P. McGowan

Steven G. Miller

I also have a couple of questions. I'm going to start with any comments you might offer about the ammunition supply chain, it's been something that's come up on recent calls. Do we take it from the fact you didn't comment on it that it's gotten a lot better?

Well, I think there's still some issues in terms of the supply chain. I think it has gotten better, but we're still not receiving all the ammunition, all the calibers that we would like to see in the quantities we would -- ideally our consumers would like to see them.

POWL

Q4

Tim Chatard:

Pat McDonald:

On steel, are you seeing any real decline in your steel buys in terms of prices right now?

We have seen some decline, but nothing to the extent of what copper has done here recently.

NMBL

Q3

Richard Kugele

Suresh Vasudevan

Thank you. Good afternoon. I want to take a bigger question here. Suresh if you had to look back over the past calls, even just four quarters, how much do you think you've forsaken on growth at the expense of keeping the costs down to hit this breakeven for next quarter. How much growth do you think it cost you? And then looking at it another way, with the investment that you are making what do you think the company should be growing at? Because clearly you must have a target in mind in order to invest properly.

Yes. Good question. So, let me go back to the first part of your question, Rich. When I talk about -- I want to underscore one comment, which is the competitive intensity we are seeing and some of the comments I made about large deals taking longer and impacting our pipeline conversion while that’s going on the commercial segment overall our win rates did not change much as a company. In the commercial segment we have a very proven model that generates a very well understood pattern of return and the shift in investment is really what caused us to actually lose some steam on the commercial segment. And so as I go back to the first part of your question, this idea of managing our operating expense envelope within a certain guideline did cause that shift and that's really what cost us our growth because fundamentally our investment in commercial are still bearing fruit with the same pattern and we know that making those investments will get that growth back for us. That is not a place where we are seeing all of the competitive intensity that I've been describing. So that’s the first comment I would make. That's also what's guiding our next steps which is making the investments back in commercial will return us to growth, it will take a couple of quarters for those investments to take to bear fruit, but second half of next year we do expect to reaccelerate growth. Now, in terms of a specific target for growth for a specific long-term number, I'm not going to give you more specific than that which other than to say we always offer it with certain growth aspirations, which shows this quarter because of the investment correcting that we believe will return us back to being able to have those same aspirations.

BKYI

Q3

Brian Kinstlinger

Mike DePasquale

And so that is you selling to one of your partners that sell bicycles or is that the shift – do you expect significant shipments for that spread out to multiple vendors.

All the above, everything you mentioned. We've been associated with a number of bicycle companies. In fact, we designed the lock in particular for a large bicycle company in Japan. And that was, in essence, the brainchild of this product and also with CES in January, we’ll have some, I’ll call it, follow-on or new or additional type products in different form factors in configurations that will be available.

PLXS

Q1

Matt Sheerin:

Pat Jermain:

Yes, thanks. Good morning, everyone. Just a question regarding the product or the component on the supply chain environment right now, I mean, you talked about inventory days up, Pat. We’re hearing across the board of supply constraints in certain semiconductors, in some passive components. Are you seeing that yet? And are your customers asking you to build inventory?

Matt, this is Pat. On the balance sheet, I just want to comment for the second quarter, we do expect a slight build in inventory dollars to the tune of about $20 million. But I had guided the midpoint of our cash cycle being down compared to the fiscal first quarter. And some of that’s driven by inventory days, just because of the increase in revenue we expect in the second quarter.

PTEC

Q1

Joe Maxa - Dougherty & Co.

Woody Hobbs

Okay. Then I just want to talk about pricing of it, because to me and I could be way off, but if someone was looking at a low end Netbook for $300 or less, I mean are they going to be willing to pay $40 a year? What kind of studies have you done to come up with that pricing I guess I would look at?

Well, we know that the value of a Netbook is instant on and instantly connected and easily connected and therefore we believe we’re providing significant values. There’ve been studies done that show that consumers are willing to pay at least $100 a year to have those features and then in addition, it depends on the Netbook and the development of it, how it was developed, but we would also expect to have significant power savings. So we just feel like we’ve got some of the key features that people want in a Netbook when they are browsing. If they need Windows primarily, then that is a different use case but we believe we’ve got the right product and we’re going to be doing a lot of updating to the environment and increasing the capabilities, so our price is more a target price for a product you don’t yet see. We’re going to be adding things to it that enhance the ability and make it more of a stand alone product. We didn’t want to keep changing the price or forcing users to pay for updates or any of those kinds of things. So the price may seem a little high; we don’t think it is. We think that individual productivity will justify it, but as we start to complete the product over the next quarter and maybe even two quarters, you’ll start to see that the price is more reasonable than you originally thought.

SYK

Q2

Richard Newitter

Kevin Lobo

Thanks for taking the questions. Kevin, you mentioned several times that how impressed you’re with Wright Medical now that you've kind of had it under your operating belt for a few quarters now. I’m just curious, is there other than just, the integration going better than planned, is there anything specifically either in the pipeline or embedded in that comment? It just, really, is surprising you to the upside or making you more excited about the future? You mentioned BLUEPRINT a few times, is something with BLUEPRINT. Just I'm curious if there's something that you're foreshadowing there, or physician general execution comment? Thanks.

Yes, so it was, we knew they had a good business. And we knew that their culture was similar to Strykers. But there's been some pleasant surprises along the way. Their talent is really excellent. And a lot of times when we buy companies, we buy them for their products. But then we have to infuse a lot of our management. They are a leader for upper extremities. They are a leader for lower extremities, are leading our businesses. Our head of knees came from Wright Medical. And so we've had an infusion of talent that for me has been a positive surprise. I mean, really outstanding leaders, their sales leader for upper extremities is outstanding and so that's been one positive. The second I would say is their key opinion leaders. They absolutely work with fabulous key opinion leaders on both upper and lower extremities. And I would say that they are better key opinion leaders than we had within Stryker. And so those are two really, to me pleasant surprises. And just the pipelines, we thought they were good, they turned out to be a little better than we thought and that really applies across the board. So there are certain things that you know, when you do a public deal, you don't get to do the same amount of due diligence as you do with a private acquisition. And so those instincts, we had instincts that things were going to be good, they are proving to be even better than we first thought.

GIS

Q1

John Baumgartner

Don Mulligan

Thanks for the question. Ken, you mentioned the slowdown in China, but the economic news out of Brazil and Europe hasn’t really been to hot recently either? So, I guess, given that, what’s your confident in terms of your guidance and maybe this consumer frugality we are seeing here in North America doesn't take root more deeply in these geographies we are still seeing growth?

The other thing, John, I’d add in Brazil is that one of the consumer behaviors we’ve seen is the shift to the smaller mom-and-pop stores. And one of the real strong capabilities that we acquired with Yoki was a national sales force that was deeply ingrained in those channels. And we think that’s play into our advantage today as well.

NMBL

Q3

Maynard Um

Anup Singh

Hi. Thanks. I'm a little puzzled about your competitive intensity and pricing comment. You got two large competitors, if you look at their gross margins this quarter they have been fairly stable quarter-over-quarter. So I'm wondering if this intensity is something that's more recent, is it just now you decided to be more reactionary this quarter versus last quarter? And then separately last year your sales and marketing spends grew 4.7 million sequentially and it sounds like you're going to be investing more. So should we use that as a benchmark to look at a growth north of that for this quarter or is that not a good benchmark to look at? Thanks.

And the question around the increase in sales and marketing, the guidance we’ve given for Q4 that accounts for the increase in expenses that we see across the board. So hopefully it’ll give you an idea to the OpEx trends there.

EXPE

Q3

Michael Millman

Dara Khosrowshahi

A couple of questions. One is you, apparently with a few others, are joining to battle the ITA approval -- FTC approval, and maybe you can talk to that in light of previous comments when they didn't see it necessarily as a big problem. Secondly, at the Choice today, Hotels, one of your favorites I guess, was talking about how it's pushing its loyalty programs because they're much more profitable, for example, than OTAs. I was wondering if you're seeing the hotel industry being better equipped to do that than they have in the past. And then could you talk about car revenues? Are fleets still tight, or is it much more that some of the companies are getting smarter at least from their standpoint in making cars available for the opaque market?

Sure, Michael. I'll try to take of each of them. As far as ITA Google goes, we've been pretty consistent in our view that, first of all, Google was a great partner of ours and we're going to be working more closely together with them on a CPC basis certainly than we ever have. So we certainly don't object to Google as a partner as they are now. We do think that it's just a bad idea to put together the dominant kind of search engine on a worldwide basis with a dominant airline search technology. We just think it squeezes out competition or has the potential of squeezing out competition in the marketplace. It's bad for advertisers. And ultimately, we think that it could be very bad for consumers. So we're a member of this coalition. We think that the coalition will certainly make its case. And we think that the case is, hopefully, will be well received by the government. In the meantime, we're going to work with Google. We're a big spender there, and on a ground level, on a tactical basis, we have a good relationship with them. We just think that this transaction is a bad idea. As far as Choice goes and loyalty programs there, we have a very good relationship with Choice. The CEO there came from Marriott, and Marriott has one of the best loyalty programs there. So it's not a surprise that they are pushing loyalty. I think it makes sense to them. I think any player out there knows that repeat customers are the most profitable customers out there. And I think to try to build out a repeat base is good business, whether you're an airline, whether you're a hotel or whether you're an OTA. And we, along with Choice, see the wisdom of this. And we've made fairly significant investments and we think differentiated investments in the OTA field, both with hotels.com, WelcomeRewards, which is quite differentiated from what anyone else has and the new Expedia royalty program coming in next year, which I think will be quite differentiated from any other OTA out there. So we believe in loyalty, and we think that there are customers who are going to be Expedia loyal customers and Hotels loyal customers, and they are fundamentally and typically different from, call it, a Choice brand loyal customers. So I don't think that one addition to us is a subtraction to any of the brands out there like Choice. They tend to be more, call it, business customers, et cetera, where we tend to be more leisure-specific.

NVDA

Q2

Rajvindra S. Gill

Jen-Hsun Huang

Sir, exactly. Good. A question, Jen-Hsun, on the DRIVE PX 2, so my understanding as you described it, it's one scalable architecture from the cockpit to ADAS, to mapping, to autonomous driving. But I'm curious to see how that kind of compares to the approach that some of your competitors are taking with respect to providing, I guess, different solutions for different levels of the ADAS systems, whether it's level 1, level 2, level 3, specifically with the V2X communication where for level 4 autonomous driving you're going to need six to 20 different radar units, three to six different cameras, LiDAR. I'm just trying to square how your approach is different from some of your competitors in the semiconductor space.

Yeah. Good question. There's no way to square and there's no reason to square, and you're not going to find one answer. And the reason why you're not going to find one answer is because nobody knows exactly how to get it done. We all have intuitions and we all have beliefs about how we're going to be able to ultimately solve the long-term, fully autonomous vehicle, that wherever I am, the car I step into, the automobile we step into is completely autonomous, and it has AI inside and out. And it's just an incredible experience. But we're not there yet. And all of these companies have slightly – not all but many companies have slightly different visions of the future. Some people believe that the path to the future is fully autonomous right away in a geofenced area that has been fully mapped in advance. Some people believe that you can use it just for highway autopilot as a first starting point, and work quickly towards fully autonomy. Some people believe that the best way to do that is through shuttles and trucks. So you see a lot of different visions out there. And I think all of those visions are coming from smart people doing smart things, and they're targeting different aspects of transportation. I think there's a fallacy that transportation in every single country, in every single form is exactly the same. It just doesn't work that way. And so there's technology insight and then there's market insight, and there's a technology vision versus your entry point. And I think that's where all of the squaring doesn't happen. And so you're solving for problems that – you're solving for a simple equation that won't happen. However, there's one thing that we believe absolutely will happen. We are absolutely certain that AI is going to be involved in this endeavor, that finally with deep learning and finally with AI that we believe we have the secret sauce necessary to break these puzzles, and to solve these puzzles over the period of time; number one. Number two, we believe unquestionably that depending on the problem you want to solve, you need a different amount of computational capability. We believe unambiguously this is a software problem, and that for the largest of transportation companies, they need to own their own – they're going to need – own their own software in collaboration with you, but they're not going to let you do it and keep it as a black box. We believe unambiguously that this is a computing problem, that this is a real-time supercomputing problem; that it's not just about a special widget, but computation is necessary. Processors, a computer system, system software, enormous amount of operating system capability, is necessary to build something like this. It is a massive software problem. Otherwise, we would have done it already. And so I think that you're going to see this year the beginnings of a lot of those, of some very visionary and really quite exciting introductions. But in the next year and the year after that, I think you're going to see more and more and more. I think this is the beginning, and we're working with some really, really amazing people to get this done.

BJRI

Q2

Nick Setyan

Kevin Mayer

Thank you. You know, there was some TV advertising I think that was planned for Q2, can you kind of maybe talk about, you know, the plans around Q3 and Q4, maybe whether you can maybe put some TV advertising in some of the softer California markets to help out?

Yes, I guess just from a media perspective, you know, we have a lot of levers to pull. We've got both on and off premise marketing. We have digital marketing really that's targeted around all of our restaurants that we're able to adjust at times and then from a mix perspective, you know, we're always able to play with reaching newer guests as well as retargeting existing guests. So we still need adjustments with California, we have considered both a media mix adjustment to maybe targeting more of our -- you know people that have visited our Website in the past as well as maybe heading up more towards California at the expense of some other markets. We're still evaluating some of those opportunities right now.

SWN

Q3

Charles A. Meade

Steven L. Mueller

And that's using what you've learned from the Dean wells?

Yes, what we’ve learned regard from Dean and Johnson and any other wells before.

ROLL

Q4

Kristine Liwag

Dr. Michael J. Hartnett

Sure. So is Boeing trying to move, I mean, I understand that a lot of your commercial aerospace builds are to the suppliers. Is there a desire for them to move to some sort of Boeing master contract where then your negotiated price with Boeing is what the supply chain would buy?

There is an attempt to do that. They have done that with fasteners with some success and there is an attempt to do that for other commodities, which are sort of more highly engineered products that they buy for their planes. Whether they can actually do that or not effectively is anybody's guess.

BMY

Q1

Steve Scala

Samit Hirawat

Thank you. A couple of questions. Based on everything that has been said, it sounds as though the relatlimab data is not competitive with Opdivo plus Yervoy on efficacy. It might be on safety or am I misinterpreting? For instance, you mentioned adding to the armament area but not advancing it. You referred to many patients on monotherapy are not receiving I-O, but you didn't really refer to those on I-O, I-O. So I'm just curious what we should interpret and what full data be in the abstract on May 19? Second question on slide -- on Page 6. Of the 90% of products in the continuing business, should we think about Opdivo plus Yervoy comprising about 50% of that 90%? Thank you.

And Steve, the point I would add is, look, we did not do a study of nivolumab plus relatlimab versus nivolumab plus ipilimumab. So it would be unfair to start comparing the data for the two trials. Secondly, nivolumab plus ipilimumab, as Chris has said earlier, as Giovanni just said, has been established for a long time, so we have long-term data, overall survival data, response rate data. For relatlimab, we do not have the overall survival data, as well as the response rate data. But we are excited to see where we stand with our overall progression-free survival data as compared to single-agent nivolumab. And you'll see that data very soon. And certainly, we can have a dialogue after that. But as Giovanni said, very pleased where we are and certainly looking forward to the evolution of the data as we go forward.

GLW

Q2

Ehud Gelblum

James Flaws

On LCD, obviously screen sizes have been growing for the last almost 18 months or so. To what extent do you think the significant fall-offs in glass pricing that we’ve seen over the last 18, 24 months, how much do you think that has contributed to people just buying larger TVs because the price points have come down, primarily because glass pricing has come down. And we’re now, in 2013, in an era of moderate price declines as we get into 2014 and beyond, do you think that maybe we’ll see an end to the larger screen sizes? You see what I’m saying? Maybe the larger sizes will link to the lower prices? When you [unintelligible] lower prices, you [unintelligible] larger screen sizes a little later too?

I don’t think the glass price declines have been the primary reason why pricing at retail has gone down. Obviously it contributed and for panel makers, also the fact that the yen has helped them on their profitability has gone up. I just think that the price points and the quality of televisions are so incredible that it’s hard to imagine people buying a small television now. I got up early this morning and read a whole bunch of retail television ads for the past month, and I just remain stunned by how low the price points are. So I’m not expecting price points to go back up on large televisions next year, and I think we’ll begin to see sometime next year 2k/4k showing up. Obviously that would be more expensive initially, but I don’t think there’s any going back on this size phenomenon.

NMRX

Q3

Richard Valera

Stratton J. Nicolaides

And what would the gross margin have been x that change? I'm sorry, is it 56 point...

And that was -- but even with that, Rich, it was an improvement of, I think, 140 basis points over the comparable quarter.

SMCI

Q3

Michael Bertz

Howard Hideshima

So this is – just go back to the timing question then, so what's the cycle time basically? I know I am obviously – can tell what your days inventory is, but what's the cycle times, when you actually buy it to when you actually turn it and put it in a system and sell it, I mean how quickly can that happen internally versus how quickly the price changes externally?

Well the price changes have been happening fairly quickly recently. I mean I think in this previous pricing quarter we actually saw against the strength and then at the end of the quarter we saw a pretty steep drop in the pricing happen per se. I think as some customers were basically trying to get rid of some of their inventory, we saw some pricing pressure at the end of the quarter. So again, it, the timing wise can happen fairly quickly, obviously quicker than when we can turn the inventory.

CTAS

Q1

Gary Bisbee:

Michael L. Thompson:

Hi guys. Mike, in the segment detail commentary you gave… you specifically mentioned the desire to make acquisitions in first day in Document, but didn’t say that in Uniforms, is that a signal of everything or is that just--?

I think as we have mentioned in the past. We are being a little more conservative in the Uniform Rental space. I think we still look at all opportunities that are in that space. But again, we have a full geographic coverage in U.S. and Canada for Uniform models, so we can be a little more selective. But as we have shown about a year and a half ago, we bought Van Dyne Crotty. We saw a great opportunity and went after it and we still do make acquisitions in that space. But I tell you there our focus right now is on those emerging businesses, especially, Fire and Document Shredding. But again, we have a team that looks at all opportunities in all of our business lines and we will continue to make acquisitions one that can meet the thresholds with our rate of returns.

TTC

Q3

Michael Wherley

Blake Grams

Okay, and then just last, I was just wondering what you can tell us about the freight cost, was that an unexpected thing or was that worst than last quarter as far as the impact on margins?

Mike, this is Blake Grams, so I’ll talk to that. So, we had a kind of double-whammy on the freight, so obviously with diesel prices increasing during the year, that’s obviously hit us worse in the back half of the year. And then also as we export products overseas, this cost of shipping those products overseas has also seen a very significant increase over this year as the export economy has continued to grow in the US and imports coming in and such. Then obviously, with the rework issue we had, we had moving a lot of products multiple times, unfortunately, which also caused some freight challenges with us. So, with the moderation of gas and diesel prices as of late, we hope we’ll see a little bit of positive impact as we go forward, but it was definitely a real challenge for us, and probably little bit worse than we expected as we came into the year.

GIS

Q1

Robert Moskow

Don Mulligan

Hi. I guess two questions. I guess, I was a little unclear as to why U.S. retail profits will get better during the course of the year. I think Don you said that it's taking some time to adjust your promotional spending tactics. So maybe just a little more detail on why was the spending so high in first quarter. You mentioned frequency, I mean, were you just having very frequent deals and now you won't for the rest of the year and therefore the profits will be stronger, just a little more clarity there. And then secondly on the restructuring programs, I haven't seen anywhere how much the programs is going to cost in terms of cash costs or hit the P&L. Could you give us some help there?

So let me start with the USRO profit first and then I’ll frame up the Q1 if you thinking about the profit decline in the first quarter for USRO. You know about half of that was because of the trade phasing and the merchandising effectiveness we talked about. There was another, probably third from negative mix, product mix and then a bit from volume. As I said, we didn’t -- we held our media investment behind, some of the good ideas that Ken took us through. So as the year unfolds, we expect a couple of things to happen. First, our price mix will improve as the merchandising effectiveness evens out and our trade spends phasing rebalances versus last year again as we -- as we try to highlight. Not only is there a merchandise effectiveness opportunity for us, we also set absolutely lower trade spend in our first quarter last year versus balance of that year and this year the phasing is really reverse of that. So that will be the first thing. Second is we do expect volumes to improve. We look at the phasing of last year’s volume growth. The comps get easier as the year unfolds. And so we expect that to improve. And then we expect the mix as well not to be as negative in the first quarter as it was in the first quarter. So that -- and again strong overhead control and some of the benefit of that $40 million in overhead savings will accrue to our U.S. retail business. Those are the factors that give us confidence. So we’re going to see better profit as the year unfolds. In terms of the restructuring charges, as I hope you understand, we want to make sure that we inform everybody internally on what those changes are before we start talking about numbers either in terms of positions or dollars. What I will tell you is that there will be some severance of fixed asset write-offs, probably about half of it will be non-cash when we do give you the figures.