The broadband communications market represented 4% of our sales in the quarter and 4% for the year. Sales in the fourth quarter were down 31%, in U.S. dollars and 32% organically, as broadband operators continued to moderate their procurement levels. On a sequential basis, sales did decline by 12%, which was worse than our expectations coming into the quarter when we anticipated more of a modest increase. For the full year 2023, sales were down by 7% in U.S. dollars and organically, driven by the continued pause in broadband operator spending. Looking ahead, we expect sales in the first quarter to increase modestly from these levels. Regardless of the current demand dynamics, we do remain encouraged by the company’s strengthened position in the broadband market.
We look forward to continuing to support our service provider customers around the world, all of whom are working to increase their network coverage and bandwidth to support the proliferation of high-speed data applications to homes and businesses. And finally, turning to our outlook. There’s no doubt that the current economic environment remains somewhat uncertain. Assuming the continuation of these current market conditions and also assuming constant exchange rates, for the first quarter, we expect sales in the range of $3.4 billion to $3.1 billion and adjusted diluted EPS in the range of $0.71 to $0.73. This would represent sales growth of 2% to 4% and adjusted diluted EPS growth of 3% to 6% compared to the first quarter of 2023. I remain confident in the ability of our outstanding management team to adapt to the many opportunities and challenges in the current environment and to continue to grow Amphenol’s market position, while driving sustainable and strong profitability over the long term.
And finally, I just want to take this opportunity to thank our entire global team around the world, including all of those who work across our factories, touch our products, and ultimately deliver to our customers what they need. I’m just truly grateful for all of their outstanding efforts both here in the fourth quarter, but moreover, for the entirety of 2023, without them, we wouldn’t be able to make it happen like we do. And with that, operator, we’d be very happy to take any questions.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] The first call is to Amit Daryanani with Evercore. You may go ahead.
Amit Daryanani: Thanks. Good afternoon everyone. One question for me would be, can you sense on the weakness on the industrial market space you talked about seeing softness there, a little bit of inventory sell, I’m curious, is that stable versus what you saw like do you feel like it’s getting worse as you head into 2024? And then you can talk about it, do you see the [technical difficulty]
Adam Norwitt: Yes, Amit, I didn’t perfectly hear the second part of your question. There’s a little bit of a connection issue. But I think relative to your question, which was, is industrial stable versus 90 days ago. I mean, look, I think we came into the quarter with an expectation of kind of a modest reduction in sales, our sales — we’re essentially in the line with that. So I think it was kind of what we expected it to be. I would say that the book-to-bill in industrial was a bit weaker. I mean, if we think about why our book-to-bill was 0.95:1. I mean, the real driver for that was industrial on 1 side. And we did see in the IT Datacom market a little bit of a softer book-to-bill. But that that is really just a little bit more of an equalization from very high books to build that we’ve seen over the prior couple of quarters.
So I don’t think the IT data come book-to-bill is at all representative of the demand environment. But I think — in the industrial market, we did see bookings a little softer than we had anticipated. I’m going to assume that your second question is how do we see that going forward? And where do we see that kind of cycle in industrial. And I think it’s early to tell. I mean the beauty of our industrial business is it so broad. And so we’re not levered on to one or another of the individual segments. And you know there are so many segments across the industrial market that we participate in. And we don’t have any of those that are really disproportionate to our overall business. And we continue to see some of those segments areas like marine and oil and gas, rail mass transit, medical during the course of this year.
They still had very robust demand. But no doubt about it, areas like factory automation, instrumentation, those are areas where we’ve seen more market reductions in demand and also more impact from the distribution channel. When is that going to be worked out in the distribution channel, the inventory, when does some of that demand return in some of those segments. I think it’s a little too early to tell. And as we go through the course of this year, we’ll try to give you a really good read on that. I mean as we look into here now in the first quarter, as I said in my prepared remarks, we do anticipate in the first quarter, a kind of a modest level, but really supported by the acquisitions that we’ve made. And on an organic basis, we see the first quarter, again, modestly down from our current levels.
