Mr. Wells: We focus on the equipment side of things. So primarily the heavy equipment used in construction, not necessarily in car or aircraft or anything like that. It's more the yellow-iron side of things.
TWST: How was 2011 for the space given the tough economy?
Mr. Wells: Sure. It's actually been an exciting year in a lot of ways for this space. Really what we had seen start to happen in the late 2010 time frame, really setting itself up for 2011, certainly as you well know with the visibility-constrained environment like we're operating in, businesses and in particular contractors really starting to do some deep dives of assessing what is the right capital strategy for my business. Do I want to own a lot of equipment or are there other ways to meet the needs that I have? And so we've started to do a lot our kind of digging in the channel talking to large contractors and firms involved in the construction space. And really what you've seen this year is a lot of people have made a shift away from owning things to renting.
We call it the variabilization of their cost structure. But looking at ways of you having less fixed costs, less fixed assets on the books and using rental equipment is a great way to do that. And so really what you've seen up to this point is you've seen these businesses report revenue growth rates in the high-teens- and low-20s-type range. So a very robust year despite the well-publicized, still-kind-of-nasty market for construction here in the U.S.
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