Christopher A. Coughlin
Analyst
Yes, Eli, let me just take a minute. I can give you the color, I think, you're looking for. On the first quarter call, we stated that the second quarter would still be challenging, but we expected some sequential improvement from the first quarter. From that perspective, it was pretty much what we expected. On the positive side, the second quarter revenue was 12% higher than first quarter. Volume was about 75% of that, acquisition was the balance. However, if you looked on it year-on-year a quarter, we were down to 6% as mentioned. All that said, we continued to see relatively softer market conditions than what we expected at the beginning of the year across many of the industries and many of the geographies. If you break it down to the 2 segments within that, let's start with distribution. Second quarter revenue was 8% up versus the first quarter. However, obviously, the first quarter was a weak quarter, as you already know. Distributors remain cautious with their inventory positions, as Jim noted, and are overrate exposure to mining, infrastructure and energy continues to be a little bit of a drag for us in the distribution space. On the original equipment side of the business, the market remains sluggish. Companies continued to be conservative around their capital investment programs and that hurts our original equipment business. So in summary of all that, I mean, the good news is we saw the sequential improvement in the revenue second quarter to the first quarter. And although we see a slower growth in the second half than what we expected going into the year, we expect to see sequential improvement in revenue across both the third and fourth quarter as we move quarter-to-quarter. The negative of that is clearly it's not at the rate that we would have expected heading into the year. On the margins, the margin moved from 15% to 17% from first quarter to second quarter. Obviously, we're not satisfied with that. And to your direct question on the 20% target, yes, we're not going to hit the 20% target for the year. However, we do, once, again expect to see sequential improvement moving through the year. We'll continue to manage the cost aggressively and positioning our infrastructure to operate at these lower-than-planned volume levels. So there's the color I had on it, Eli.