His numbers for the third quarter are totally meaningless anyway since he came in at the tail end and it takes a little while to really “ramp up”. Let’s see what they are at the end of the FOURTH quarter.
As you say. He’s been running for less than one third of the third quarter, a fact that was somehow omitted from the article.
As for the criticism that the Thompson spokesman’s comment sounds weak, what can one expect, when CBS got to choose the sound bite? I imagine they probably talked for 15 minutes, and these are the particular words that CBS chose to extract from it.