Immucor's CEO Discusses Q3 2011 Results - Earnings Call Transcript

Turning to Echo. We had 31 Echo orders in the quarter, with 20 orders in the United States and Canada and 11 orders in rest of the world including distributors. As we have stated previously, we believe our Echo orders in the past several quarter in the United States have been negatively impacted by the economy, which has resulted in a longer sales cycle and more economic bias involved in the process with increased oversight from legal, purchasing and finance departments.

We have taken steps to compete more effectively, which we believe are paying off. We had a good March in terms of Echo orders, and we have a strong pipeline for the remainder of our fourth quarter. We expect to be near to the low end of our previous guidance range of between 140 and 180 orders for Echo in fiscal 2011.

We continue to believe there is a significant opportunity in the lower-volume labs for our product offering as Echo, which was specifically designed to meet this category’s needs, combined with our deep line of traditional reagents, allows hospital to meet the full range of testing needs and achieve the benefits of automation. At the end of the third quarter, we had an instrument order backlog of 95 Echos and a combination of 62 Galileos and NEOs.

I would like to give you an update on our Molecular business before I turn the call over to Rick to discuss our third quarter financials.

We continued to develop our molecular offering, which we believe is an important part of our future growth. As you may remember, the current semi-automated instrument and assay achieved CE Mark approval in Europe in fiscal 2010 and early fiscal 2011 and, as a result, can be used as a test of record in Europe.

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