David Cote
Analyst · Barclays
Well, the two are interconnected, but I look at it differently. And if you go back to the beginning of my tenure here, I’ve always said growth and productivity go together that as you grow, you become more productive, because you have more volume leverage, you’re able to leverage your fixed cost better. By the same token the more productive you become, the more money that gives you to reinvest in the thing you’d like to do. And as you know, I’ve always been big on this concept of seed planting. And that was pretty costly in the early years, because we pretty much had an empty pipeline on everything whether it was high-growth regions, new products, new strategies or technologies, we really had to fill the pipeline, so margin expansion was a little more muted back then, because we had to fill the pipeline on everything, and it took us five or six years to do, which unfortunately took us right into the recession when, yes, we were getting benefiting from some of that, but it was just a hell of a lot less visible. Well, now that we’re able to get some of the sales growth that we do, we’re much better we’re able to have get that sales leverage as minimal as it might seem in today’s environment, we’re still able to get leverage from that. And we’re able to, I’d say finally, start seeing the benefits of HOS and some of our other initiatives on the gross margin side. And that’s where we’re seeing the real leverage here. The two go together and I can promise you we’re certainly not under investing whether you look at R&D or CapEx, or new product programs or commitment to Huey is certainly not a case under investment, because we want to make sure we make not just this quarter, but this same quarter three years from now and six years from now.