WESCO’s conference call on its Q1 results included an analyst question about how the company’s datacom sales did in the first quarter. Steve Van Oss, senior vice president, COO and interim CFO, answered, “When we had our last earnings call, we told you we’d start off soft in January, the soft has continued in February and March. It was down mid-single digits in the first quarter.”
Van Oss continued, “It did grow sequentially though versus Q4 low single-digits. It was fundamentally driven for us. So I am not going to say this will be true for everyone else in the market, it remains to be seen. But it was fundamentally driven for us to government. The datacom sales, the government customers really drove our declines.”
Later in the call, Van Oss said, “Overall, our government sales were up 9% which is very nice results, but the Datacom piece is where we are experiencing the softness. At the recent international security conference in Las Vegas in late March and from a variety of other sources, I think people are really kind of confirm(ing) weaker demand than expected for Datacom in the first quarter.”
Overall Van Oss said WESCO remained “bullish” on datacom, and made reference to the closing (by 2015) by the U.S. government of 1,200 data centers, in an energy-efficiency consolidation effort.
All of Van Oss’s remarks are in the Q&A piece of the online transcript of WESCO’s recent conference call with analysts.
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