Carl Bass
Chief Executive Officer
Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. We received great feedback on our new process of posting the prepared remarks with our press release, so like last quarter I am just going to say a few quick comments on the quarter and then we’ll jump into Q&A. Let me start with the economy, because I know that’s the first thing you will want to talk about. We have all seen the decidedly mixed U.S. economic reports that have been published recently. Some are simply less bad relative to expectations, so I think it’s unclear that a sustainable global recovery is underway. That said, relative to what we experienced late last year and early this year, our business was less volatile as we exited the second quarter. The environment is still challenging but it feels like global demand for our products is showing signs of stabilizing. Revenue in the quarter was consistent with our expectations at $415 million, which was a decrease of just 3% sequentially. Within total revenue, it was encouraging that we delivered sequential revenue growth in several parts of our business, including emerging economies, manufacturing, Asia-Pacific, model-based 3D design solutions, 3D animation software, and government sales. We also made strong progress reducing costs. Through our restructuring activities, we have significantly reduced operating expenses. Everyone at Autodesk has really embraced these saving initiatives. Last quarter we said that our goal was to reduce our pretax spend by $250 million year over year. However, based upon the success we’ve had in reducing costs the first half of the fiscal year, we now anticipate reaching nearly $300 million in pretax cost-savings in fiscal 2010 versus fiscal 2009. Of course we’ll continue to examine our business on an ongoing basis for more ways to improve our long-term efficiency. You should keep in mind that while the vast majority of the anticipated savings or costs that have been eliminated, there is a component we would classify as cost suppression. These costs would naturally come back in fiscal ’11 and beyond, and relate to such things as payroll, employee incentives, travel and entertainment, and mandatory vacations, among other things. Even with some of these costs coming back in fiscal ’11, we have made substantial reductions in our cost base and improved our efficiency. So it feels like business is regaining some stability and our business visibility has improved. The caveat is that our business has been reset at a lower level, so whether this economic cycle is going to be U-shaped or L-shaped or any letter or number or hieroglyphic, our financial condition is solid with over $1 billion in cash and no debt. We are going into the third quarter confident that Autodesk is well-positioned for the market’s eventual recovery. Operator, we’d now like to open the call up for questions.