Charles Kummeth
Management
Sure. Europe is still a mixed bag. We talked last quarter about the softness in Germany in particular, and it’s still soft for us. It’s even a little soft in France. The rest of Europe is really okay. The U.K. is doing great. So it’s a little bit mix. It is timing. Academia was stronger overall there, but timing was more just the bio-pharma. We got a lot of large accounts, and that’s kind of bouncing back. It’s very similar to last year - you know, we had a lot of negativity in our immunoassays and our [indiscernible], and it bounced back very nicely this year through timing of larger orders with these larger companies. So there is a bit of that we’re all learning here as well to deal with, so that kind of covers that. In terms of the rebound here in the academia and government, I think Fisher is a big component of that. We’re still trying to measure where it is all coming in, where it’s all landing. It’s kind of hard to measure, to be honest, processing hundreds of thousands of accounts, and I think the progress in our website--you know, we have the IT team from Novus on staff. We have the head of the company from Novus is our head of marketing now, and she is doing a brilliant job on working on our website and our ecommerce overall here, and that’s also helping. We’re getting more activity in our website, so there’s some of that. But I would have to say the biggest impact, I think, is just the incremental steady improvements in growth via Fisher. They’ve been doing a great job for us, and as we learn how to help each other more and work together, it’s been beneficial. Again, a lot of these academic institutions, they just have that big blue Fisher button for the lab stock online, and being part of that internal Fisher [indiscernible] to these universities is a major plus, and we’re at the platinum level so we get special treatment, and we’re really happy to have that. So all told, I think last year we talked about every quarter was negative double digits. Last quarter, we were negative 6, I think, and this quarter now combined we’re up 1, almost flat on just academia alone, so a pretty good move in the right direction. I don’t think it’s going to be overnight, high single digits or anything, but it’s just incremental steady progress and those are the reasons. Over time as we get more content and we have more full solutions, and I just talked about the certified antibodies, all this is going to add to the core and it’s going to help.