Donald E. Washkewicz
Analyst · J.P
Well, Europe is still doing fine. Asia, as you know, is trending down and we anticipated that last quarter. But again, when we talk about Asia going down and China in particular, we're talking about from a 12% GDP down to maybe a 9% or 10% GDP. And we'll see how long that sustains. Typically, what we've seen over there, it's been a short-lived thing and typically activity picks up again. But even at 9% or 10%, we're happy with those kind of numbers, we can deal with that. Incrementals over in Asia are a little bit lower than what we would like to see. But keep in mind that we're putting a lot of infrastructure in Asia to support future growth there. So I mean, both in India and China and elsewhere, we've got a lot of investment going on in Asia to participate in the high growth rates that we're seeing from that region. Europe, kind of the same thing. What we see is -- not the same thing, I shouldn't say, as far as trends. Europe, if we look at the pressure curves in Europe, we would see strong 3/12s, which is indicative of what we're going to see coming up here in the future months as far as the trend of the 12/12. And the 12/12 pressure curves, this would be last 12 months over the previous year, is hanging in there very strong. They're both declining slightly, which can be expected for this part in the business cycle. But I would say right now, Europe looks very good for us. All of the major countries there, being Germany, France, U.K., Italy, are all looking good. So we're not as concerned about the smaller countries. Of course, we want to see strength across the board but the major ones are all doing very well and remain strong for us. So that's the reason we're pretty optimistic about Europe going forward. In spite of the fact that, of course, everybody's been reading the newspapers and I'd just make one other comment, if we haven't talked ourselves into a double-dip by now, we probably won't because we've been talking about it for better part of 2 quarters here. And Europe with the Greece problem and the debt problem hanging over us and the $14 trillion debt in the United States, if we haven't talked ourselves into it yet, I don't think it's probably going to happen anytime soon. So having said that, that's the reason why we're kind of bullish going forward through the balance of our fiscal year. Hopefully, that helps you, Ann.