David Farr
Analyst · Steven Winoker with Sanford Bernstein
I think that from the U.S. standpoint, the economic stability is there from the industrial world as we had cut back so deeply for so long. And now as the companies decided, okay, we need to invest in productivity. We need to invest in some incremental capacity. We need to do certain things for new products. That momentum is going to continue, and we have the cash to be able to do that. If you open the balance sheet of most of our customers in this space, they're very strong. And many of these customers have global businesses, which are now improving and they're starting to export. So that is changed in the last, I would say, the last 90 days, that has continued. I expect that modest momentum to continue. I'm not looking for sharp, sharp numbers recovery, but a modest type of recovery. And it's clearly concerned at all times is something that is going to hiccup that. But at this point in time, just looking at my own investments that we're doing internally, which we held off. We now are to the point that as we restructured, repositioned, we need to make incremental investments both from a technology, from new products and capacity standpoint. In Europe, they've gone through very difficult two-year time period. The governments are attacking. I think there are issues relative to some of their cost positions, their debt positions. And with the weaker euro, even at the $1.30, $1.35 level, they have become a stronger export engine around the world and we will benefit from that as we look at the order pace. And so I would anticipate Europe to have a very nice recovery, even though the economic numbers may not be that robust. So that's my view of this right now. And I think that companies feel comfortable, our customers feel comfortable and they're starting to invest. If there's a change, we'll see that in the next 60 to 90 days. But if you look at our order pace, our order pace on a month-by-month basis has continued to sequentially get better. I anticipate within the next two months, this month here or the next month, that pace will start slowing down. But I still think it's going to move down towards that 8%, 9% level, as we look at where things are going at this point in time. It's a modest recovery but a recovery that is supported by companies that have the cash and the investment needs to be made.