Comments from the front

Over the past few weeks, I met a number of senior executives from different companies. I wanted to share some of their comments.

From a CEO of a major retailing company:

"We are definitely seeing signs of improvement. March was pretty solid and April will likely be stronger than people expect. Although comps will remain challenging for the next few quarters, the biggest (positive) surprise will likely be on the operating margin level.

From CEO of a leading software company:

Although we don't have visibility into the second half of the year, our customers have become a lot more rational. There seems to be a sense of urgency to invest now, as the spending was virtually non existent for the last few months.

From a CEO of a major Telecom Equipment company:

" The trends since April have become a lot more positive. We believe that our customers' budgets were done later than usual this year, and now they have been set, the purse strings are loosening."

What it means to me is that we are seeing some clear signs of recovery. Its interesting how everyone pointed to March, basically coincidental with the recovery in the equities markets?

I continue to believe that we have seen the worst of the decline. It will remain a very tough environment through the end of the year, but what we have seen over the past few months was a complete and utter capitulation not only by investors, nd consumers, but also by business executives who had no idea how to navigate this environment. As we are beginning to at least temporarily stabilize, we may see some semblance of normalcy return to business decision making.