Carl Bass
You know what I would say is what we saw is the slope of the line changed right around when Lehman Brothers failed. So if you think -- you know, as the news really got out late September, early October, we saw the slope of the line change dramatically. I would say since then, we haven’t seen much change but there was clearly an inflection point right around when credit tightened. You know, I don’t need to go into the whole particulars of what happened then but that’s the point in time in which we saw a shift.
Daniel Cummins – Lime Rock Research
Okay and Al seemed to think there really aren’t any short-term tools at your disposal to help the dealers come back into line there with week-over-week linearity and you indicated that that’s really not your balance sheet at work here. That’s KeyBanc. But do you think in the short-run, there might be other things you could do to put more money to work there to help the channel?
Carl Bass
I think we are evaluating it day by day. You know, in some ways our distributors actually play that function, certainly in the parts of the world that are two-tiered distribution and I would imagine distributors and resellers are already having those conversations, you know, about extending payment terms and things like that. I mean, our ability to affect end user demand on a very short-term basis is small and as I answered Heather’s question, if you don’t have a new user or you already have laid off 20% of your workforce, you don’t need new software. So, a lot of it is really just tied to the number of people in the workforce and need to do it and I think that’s probably more accurate.
When you look at the levers we have, there are some things we can do around pricing and promotion and we’ve talked about that. I spent some time at this analyst day in New York talking about bundling and there’s things you will see from us in Q4, in Q1 around bundling that we think will actually trigger more demand.
So I think there are some things, although I don’t think there’s much to do on a weekly basis but we are in really, really close contact with our resellers and distributors, you know, watching not only our business but understanding what others are doing in this environment as well.
Operator
Your next question comes from the line of Richard Sanders with Clovis Capital. Please proceed.
Richard Sanders - Clovis Capital
I wanted to just quickly get some more information on your hedging policy. I didn’t quite understand the response to the question before -- you said you hedge the top line of your foreign revenues, is that correct? Rather than the spread between the costs and the revenue?
Carl Bass
We are hedging the revenue, not entirely all of it, and for us it’s principally in the Euro denominated and the Yen denominated currencies.
Richard Sanders - Clovis Capital
And how far out do your hedges go for 2010?
Sue Pirri
We’re in the process of implementing 2010 right now, so we’re just beginning that process.
Carl Bass
But generally speaking, ours were for the next quarter. |