Randall L. Stephenson
Analyst · J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead
Phil, this is Randall. 'You're economic savant', I've never been called that. So it won't surprise you what we are seeing. We are seeing some softness if you look at enterprise business on anybody that has anything that touches oil and gas industry. All those companies are a little bit defensive right now as you might guess. Also anybody, big exporters, people who are exporting, who have exposure to foreign currencies, particularly the strong dollar, we're seeing weakness there. But I will tell you, we are kind of netted out. Our revenues kind of held their own on the business side because we are taking share and NetBond and Network on Demand, we're having a lot of success in the marketplace, and so we're taking share and holding our own but we are seeing some softness in those areas. The consumer continues to spend money. In fact, there's a decent holiday season in light of really aggressive competition, but the consumer continued to spend money. I might have anticipated, in fact I do anticipate a little more robust Christmas season because you're seeing energy prices at lows we haven't seen in a long time, and you didn't see the step-up in consumer spending that you might've expected in the third and fourth quarter. But the consumer did continue to spend. As we look at 2016, we've built this plan around a 2% GDP growth rate in the U.S. roughly, and there's a lot of science that goes into that but you can basically turn around and look at the last few years, you see it's been 2%, it's not really hard to forecast it these days. We've been fairly tight in terms of hitting our estimates for the last few years. What I am concerned about, I'll be honest with you, is as you look at 2015, there are a lot of things that went the consumers' way and that went the economy's way, not the least of which are energy prices. But even over the last few years, there's been some benefit from 2 million people being put back to work. And so as we get to end of 2015, those benefits that we've seen over the last couple of quarters, if you look forward, are you going to see those in the future, probably not. And so I made a comment last week that got picked up that we're assuming 2%, if you ask me to kind of handicap is there more downside or upside to that, probably downside, but it's probably within a tight range of 2% is what our estimate is right now.