I am just reading the transcript; Mark Lipacis is wondering about seasonality for servers....are they actually dumber than we think though they control a large portion of money.
Hi. Thanks for taking my question. The first question, the data centre growth of 3% sequentially, I was wondering how that compared to normal seasonal growth and whether or not you could give us an indication of do you think that business in Q4 to grow above or below the corporate average?
Paul Otellini
Yes. After answering the question on the call a couple of quarters ago, I think a lot of that gets to server seasonality. I have since gone back and looked at the data, and the answer is we see wide variations in server seasonality quarter-to-quarter, and it is because we see a big IP data centre deal can really skew the results in any one quarter. And so, there is kind of no good average to compare to.
I think the best comparison for the datacenter business, it is up 30% from a year ago. So you can kind of get a sense of the kind of growth we are seeing. We have now seen several quarters of robust growth there. I expect it to be continue to be healthy in the fourth quarter, but we are not breaking it down beyond that statement.
Mark Lipacis – Morgan Stanley
Okay. Fair enough. And then regarding the consumer in the developed markets, I understand that that was weaker than what you originally expected, can you give us any color on what you are seeing in that segment, are you seeing any improvements there, and along this related line, China just finished going through its Golden Week. I was wondering if you could give us an indication there, if that was better or worse than you expected, how important is that? Thank you.
Paul Otellini
Sure. Let me try this one, Mark. I will answer the second part of your question first, I mentioned in my commentary that the strong parts of the business this quarter in consumer were in China and in our channel, which is typically the white box business that is principally in emerging markets. So that part of the business as it relates to consumers was pretty strong.
It was in the mature markets, US, Japan, Western Europe that we saw some of the softness on the consumer side. In terms of what we have seen so far, I mean the fact that we were up, our revenue for Q3 was up slightly above the mid-point of the reset, I think should give you some view that the last four weeks of the quarter were perhaps a little better than we had first thought. However, we built that kind of run rate into our view for Q4.
Mark Lipacis – Morgan Stanley
Thank you. That is helpful. |
