But to international, they become more important. And so that milestone is ever more important. In China, they’ve been enduring lockdowns for an extended period of time, and it makes it really difficult to conduct business. So I think it’s really impressed with what they’ve done throughout this time frame, and I touched on it in my head count numbers, we’ve continued to invest in the team. I had the opportunity after not being over there for a number of years, obviously, because of COVID, I was over traveling in Europe in the fall in September, October time frame, spent time with our team in Northern Europe. I spent time with our team up in the Netherlands, really impressed with what I’m seeing from a growth perspective, not top line growth, but from the underlying customer acquisition perspective and the team I met with.
And what’s exciting about that business is you’re seeing examples of customers we’re signing and Onsites we’re signing or branches that customers that were creating relationships with that aren’t strictly an extension of North America. There are businesses we’re signing up contracts with that know nothing about our business in the U.S. or our business in Canada, or our business in Mexico. And they were introduced to Fastenal in our team because of our contact on the ground, whether it be in Europe, whether it be in China or down in Southeast Asia. That’s the exciting part because it tells me the team there has — is creating a market presence for themselves and they’re being recognized in the supplier community, which makes life a lot easier because when your supplier community is in North America and you’re operating in Europe, that’s a challenge.
The other piece is the — if you think about the economy, and I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, there’s more business outside North America than there is in North America, and we’re very conscious of that long term. So depending on what your time horizon is, if your time horizon is the next 5 or 10 years, most of the growth element of the business is going to come in North America from a pure magnitude perspective. But beyond that, what’s exciting is, I think we’re unique in our space and that we’ve found tremendous success moving beyond the traditional geography that your business operates in. And the model works. We go in these new markets. We find great people. We ask them to join. We create an environment where I think they want to be.
And I think the comment earlier about our experience with interns in India is indicative of what we’re able to do. I think people like this style of decentralized organization, where we respect people for their opinions. And we challenge everybody to be vocal about what you think can make us better. That’s how we get better as an organization, and I couldn’t be more pleased. In fact, at our April Annual Meeting, I’ve asked Jeff Watt, who leads our international business, to speak to the group this year. And he was going to do it a couple of years ago and then couldn’t make it because COVID hit in the spring of 2020. We had virtual annual meetings for the next couple of years. So it wasn’t quite the same. We just kept it to the facts, so to speak.
And last year, we had the opportunity to let Terry Owen talk about the distribution and investments we’re making on the sales side of the organization, and this year, Jeff is going to cover international. But it’s a wonderful business for us because we’re finding a whole bunch of folks that are getting exposed to the Blue Team and our supply chain capabilities.
Operator: Our next questions come from the line of Chris Snyder with UBS.
