Gray G. Benoist - Chief Financial Officer and Vice President, Finance
Analyst
Well, when you look at the trends going backwards, you actually have seasonal benefit because the fourth quarter if you look backwards is always your highest quarter. So it helps the metrics. If you look at our internal metric, of course now we go into our seasonally lower quarter, especially with LTK, right. LTK shifts the Christmas volume and the first quarter volume is down. So, on a going… on a looking-forward basis there actually is headwind, right, that we’ve got to go address associated with the ending balance. I will note the following. Last year, we got surprised in 2006 year-end and we stopped production when orders reached a certain point and we thought we have plenty of inventory. At the end of the year, well, we just got knocked for a loop, right, associated with the pull-down of our inventory position. So when we sat down with the management team in November, Matt, we said we are not going to let that happen again. So we did instruct most notably Belden Americas business, right, to build extra inventory. So we've got two pieces of headwinds, so that the seasonality that we are going into in the first quarter and the fact that we did systematically decide to build about $10 million $15 million with extra inventory so that we could assure ourselves that we wouldn't be surprised again with respect to some phenomenon in December. And we're happy to say, it was good that we had that inventory and we're really happy with the topline number that we generated in the quarter, and I think some portion of that was available, maybe as much as $5 million of that was available, associated with our decision to build a little extra inventory in the fourth quarter, right. But again, those are non-systemic sort of periodic events, but it does create a little headwind for us as we head into the first quarter.