Richard Fontaine: It was an extremely strong quarter for all of our business segments. Specifically dealing with Europe, I believe the comp we experienced in Europe was much higher than the overall comp. It''s a more immature market. It grew faster. We were extremely satisfied with the results. We are in a position where what we are seeing there is continued growth literally in every country that we do business.
Edward Williams: Can you comment about the used opportunity outside of the US market and rank Canada, Australia, and Europe in terms of expansion opportunity and how they compare to the US market?
Richard Fontaine: Our used business, coming again from a lower base, grew faster than our US used business. The model is again more immature there, which gives us much more growth and upside opportunity, and indeed we are experiencing that. As that continues to grow and we think will follow the course as we were building the business in the US, we would anticipate the strengthening of the model and, therefore, the strengthening of the margin relative to the mix in the European countries. Net-net, we are extremely satisfied with Europe and indeed with the entire international operations for the quarter.
Tony Wible (Citi): Is there any opportunity to gain market share in the UK in light of the issues Game Group is having with the Game Station merger?
Richard Fontaine: Relative to somewhat our use of cash is that we want to stay flexible if any opportunities come up for us to make any sizable move in any of the markets that we have looked at. You are referring to the fact that the Game acquisition of Game Station has been referred to the competition committee from the OFT. We don''t know where that is going to go. As we understand, that will take a number of months to play out. We would certainly state that if an opportunity arose, we would definitely have an interest, but it will be up to the regulatory authorities in the United Kingdom to determine if we, or anybody else, has an option to pick up that should it be a forced dissolution of the merger. We have offices in the United Kingdom and we believe that the model that we have applies in every country and we think we will be better at applying it. With the next generation of systems that have just launched in Europe, we believe from a system standpoint, we are ready to enter any new country that we do business. Should an opportunity arise there, we would be interested. |