Michael W. Barnes
Management
Well, in both Europe and Asia, especially Asia to a larger extent, our business has been primarily watches and a little bit less jewelry. Europe now has a very large jewelry business and they are really starting to roll out some of the other categories. We are seeing leather goods in Germany, in the U.K. We’re seeing tests in other markets as well, including some of our distribution markets, such as the Middle East, that I mentioned earlier. So they are starting to grow and that’s pretty much an open field for us in the other categories of accessories out there besides watches and jewelry, to a lesser extent. In Asia, it has been primarily watches but we are seeing tests there too. Leather goods in Japan and Australia with some of our large customers in those regions and we are starting to see opportunities to continue to roll that out. I think that the store presence that we have all over Europe and all over Asia because we’re not -- you know, our stores are not located primarily in one small region. If you look at Asia, for example, we have stores ranging from Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau. We’ve opened new stores this year in Japan, our first store and also in Beijing, so we are seeing a lot of excitement in the whole category of accessories for the Fossil brand because of these stores and we are seeing the opportunities start to open up. And as we anecdotally noted over the past five, six years, every market that we’ve opened Fossil stores, we’ve seen the up-tick in our wholesale business so I expect to see that to continue. You know, the great thing when you look at Europe and you look at Asia is it really shows the diversification of our business model. You know, we talked about the fact that growth was moderated to some degree in Europe, especially in the second quarter, and we expect to see that tick up to more of a first half average of around that 9% we talked about. But you look at Asia and you see a 21%-plus increase ex currency and it just shows you the great diversity of the business model. You know, our business in Asia continues to be very strong right now and we expect to see our business continue to grow at a nice pace in that region. So we’re going to continue to look at all of these opportunities and as Kosta mentioned, we think Europe is still a huge opportunity for us and Asia certainly is, so we think we have a lot of growth in our future, including the back half of the year.