Nicholas T. Pinchuk
Management
It's tough. But I'll say this. For my money, for my money, there's no correlation between new car sales and our business. We don't see that, really. I think, to the extent that new car -- I suppose you could say that to the extent new car sales go down, we may see a slight burst. But generally, the thing is, in the U.K., as in the United States, what are new cars sales in the United States? This year they're forecasted at 15.2 million or something like that, well there's -- North America, rather. There are 300 million vehicles on the road. So new car sales are kind of like a blip in the after -- I think driving our aftermarket business anyway. So we don't really see it that way. It is true though, you are right though, that the U.K. is a stronger market. We found it to be uniformly for all our businesses and this is businesses both in automotive repair and critical industries, to be a better market for us than the rest of the -- than the continent, for sure. And so, we were kind of cautiously positive about that view. And I don't know if that continues or not, I think part of it is that people in the U.K. -- I think people don't necessarily postpone repair, I think they postpone new purchases. So I don't really see a downturn in repair there so much. Now remember, in Europe, our businesses are broader-based than in the United States so we have less of the business in automotive repair and more in the industrial and other places like agriculture. So we're more broadly based in terms of vertical industries in Europe. So you got to take that into account. Now, if you say the rest of Europe and when is it going to recover and when are people going to start spending again? I'd give you two thoughts, I think the South -- in fact, I'll just say traditional Europe, Western Europe, I'm not making any predictions. On one of these calls, I said once that Spain, I thought, had hit the bottom. Well, that was wrong and that was like 2 years ago. So I don't think anybody can actually predict this. All we can say for sure is our base customer base. Our base customer base seems to be intact so we believe it comes back. Now if you talk about the periphery of Europe, if you talk about Eastern Europe, you talk about Turkey, you talk about Maghreb countries, those businesses by and large, they have their ups and downs in every quarter, by and large, they've been pretty good for us. I don't know if that helps you any but I get -- in summary, I think the U.K. is okay and reasonable. I think nobody knows what's going to happen in Continental Europe, and I think the periphery is pretty good.