S. Paladino
Analyst · Goldman Sachs.
So just on equipment internationally, first, let me point out that when you look at the total international numbers, the equipment sales growth was only up slightly, a little less than 1%. But there's a story to that and the story is that, as Stanley said in his remarks, Australia and New Zealand had significant tax incentives in 2010, that people took advantage of to buy equipment. And excluding that, we did get -- I don't have the exact number, but low single-digit equipment sales growth on the equipment, on the international side. More broadly, when we look at our geographic split, we had during the quarter, very strong growth in the 3 large countries for us, namely, Germany, France and the U.K. Other countries also did well, including Australia and New Zealand on the consumables side. And of course, some of the Mediterranean countries are having a little bit of weakness. Italy is our biggest market there. So they're not having a stronger period. But overall, you know, I would say that internationally, right now, we're feeling like those markets also are modestly improving. Now be careful because if you're in a country where the improvement is -- the market declining less, that may be true for some of, again, the Mediterranean countries. But certainly, Germany, France and the U.K., we're getting good growth. The U.K. market is probably the softest of those big 3. But we're gaining market share so we're doing well in that market. And again, the goal in our guidance is to have a conservative bias because there is a fair amount of uncertainty as to what's happening in Europe. We hope that, that conservative bias will turn out to be more conservative than what we built in, and we'll have some upside to that. But it's still early on in the year and we felt that it was not the time to be more optimistic at this time.