Additionally, we also saw softer than expected demand from our Lab and core industrial customers in the quarter. We remain cautious on the outlook for Europe due to low PMI readings in the region, the continuing war in the Ukraine, and the potential for additional impacts for the economy from the conflict in the Middle East. Turning now to the Americas, our results for the quarter, excluding estimated logistic headwinds, were slightly better than we had expected due to static core industrial demand and robust food retail growth. Going forward, we are well positioned to capture increased demand from emerging growth industries and onshoring activities. Finally, Asia and the rest of the world results were slightly better than we had expected, as our core industrial sales declines in China were less than we had anticipated.
Pharma and biopharma demand in China has remained very weak, and we continue to expect reduced demand for the first half of the year. Our team is doing an excellent job adjusting to the current market conditions. We are confident in the long term growth opportunity for our business in the region. That concludes my comments on the fourth quarter results. Now I’d like to share with you some deeper insights on the next wave of sales and marketing initiatives we have introduced to our Spinnaker program and a few examples of enhancements that are on the way. To start, and as a reminder, the significant diversity of our business and the fragmented customer base means we need to set a set of sophisticated tools, analytics and processes to identify, prioritize and pursue the most attractive and profitable growth opportunities for our sales teams, with a specific focus on new customer opportunities and cross-selling opportunities within our existing customers.
Spinnaker is our global excellence program in sales, service and marketing that enables us to drive sales growth and gain market share. Continuous improvement is an important part of our strategy and culture, and it is very much at the heart of our Spinnaker program. We constantly enhance and refine our initiatives, releasing new waves of enhancements to the program periodically that build on previous waves of initiatives, reinforcing our strong foundation and increasing our competitive advantages. We are currently launching the sixth wave of Spinnaker, which is focused on leveraging new possibilities offered by digitalization of processes and further enhancing the customer experience. I’d like to share with you some tangible examples of the initiatives we have on the way, starting with our digitalization efforts.
This year, we are making multiple improvements to our top K and [ph] salesforce guidance programs. As a reminder, in addition to generating sales leads for various marketing activities, our top K program provides our field teams with tailored and actionable investment alerts about specific sales opportunities that are generated by proprietary data analytics and deep learning software solutions, leveraging external data sources and our own internal databases. These sales opportunity alerts are created fully automatically, qualified and are fed into our CRM. In addition to expanding our top K program to more areas of our business, this next wave of Spinnaker features a significant expansion of data sources to feed our big data warehouse, enabling Spinnaker to provide intelligent prioritization of target sites for our field sales teams.
This also enables real time smart profile reports to ensure timely follow up and the most accurate background of potential customers, including data on the digital engagements with us. Other improvements include expanded capabilities to Other improvements include expanded capabilities to optimize and prioritize our marketing activities, including campaigns for replacing aging equipment across our install base. This wave of Spinnaker also features additional big data capabilities to support our sales team cross-selling efforts. With each of our product categories having their own dedicated sales specialists, cross-selling is a very important growth opportunity for us because leads generated by colleagues in other product areas have high conversion rates.
Today, our cross-selling penetration to existing customers is still rather low, but big data analytics across our CRM and various processes is helping us unlock sales leads across our businesses, including from our service teams, and Spinnaker is an excellent tool to help provide additional transparency on these sales opportunities. Now, from a customer perspective, we are also advancing several important enhancements to Spinnaker to improve our customer experience. We have previously focused on increasing our digital connectivity with our customers. However, we now see additional opportunities to provide advanced platforms that will create impactful experiences that further strengthen our customer relationship and overall value proposition.
Examples include offering customers the ability to gain deep insights across the install base of Mettler-Toledo instruments, be it access to calibration certificates or known last service dates, or contract coverage or renewal agreements. We have also enhanced our integration to do customer systems to streamline the entire procure-to-pay process. By offering various levels and types of integration, from punch out to order and invoice integration, we aim to increase productivity and drive process efficiencies for our customers. We already receive about 40% of product orders, mainly consumables and less complex products, through digital interfaces today, providing a seamless and efficient buying experience for our customers. Our customer portal allows customers to browse personalized product catalogs, review real-time inventory levels, and manage orders all in one place.
Our end-to-end order management systems include efficient tracking and management of both online and offline orders, and includes an intuitive product selection and configuration process. For less complex products that do not require support from our specialists, customers can easily find specific products and use our smart configuration tool to simplify their ordering. One element of the next wave of Spinnaker includes improving the order process by leveraging new technologies to facilitate assisted experience with a Mettler-Toledo expert. This includes enhanced chat functionality, click to book a meeting, the Toledo sales representative, or digital sales rooms that automatically guide customers through the product selection process, and provide them all the information they need at any time to make an informed decision.
For more complex solutions, in addition to providing on-site demonstrations of our instruments, we also provide virtual demonstrations to customers that are very effective. As part of our continuous improvement, we have revamped the studio setups of our virtual demos, making it more efficient and focused, significantly reducing preparation time by curating a series of demonstration menus based on customers’ most frequently asked questions. This helps to a comprehensive demo that addresses customers’ questions in a very concise way. Customers have already reported an enhanced experience, gaining a deeper, more intuitive understanding of our instruments and our representatives find it easier to showcase our product features, and it makes technical details more accessible and adjustable with this new approach.
Lastly, to ensure we are meeting and exceeding our customers’ expectations through every step of their journey with our sales teams, we have also begun to implement customer feedback loops and net promoter scores for product sales, in addition to what we are already doing, or what we already do for our service teams. This has proven to be a very effective source of opportunities for process improvements, and we expect improved results with our expanded program. So, I hope these few examples give you a flavour for the much broader set of new initiatives that are underway with our new Spinnaker program. We believe they will continue to expand our sales and marketing lead over our competition and ensure our teams are spending their time with the most attractive opportunities and optimize our win rates, while further strengthening our customer relationship.
So, that is the conclusion of our prepared remarks. Operator, I’d like now to open the line for questions.
Operator: [Operator instructions] We’ll go first to Jack Meehan at Nephron Research.
Jack Meehan: Thank you. Good morning. Shawn, just wanted to start. It would be great to get your forecast by segment for the first quarter and for the year.
Shawn Vadala: Yeah, sure. So, let me start with the lab business. So, we expect lab in Q4, I’m sorry, in Q1 2024 to be down low to mid-single digit, and for the full year, we expect it to be up low single digit. For core industrial, we expect Q1 to be down mid-single digit, and for the full year to be flattish. Product inspection, we expect to be down mid-single digit for Q1, and for the full year, flattish and then retail, we expect to be down about 10% in Q1, and for the full year, down mid-to-high single digit. And then if we look at the geographies, we expect the Americas to be down low single digit in Q1, and then for the full year, up low single digit. We expect Europe to be up low single digit in Q1, but in up low to mid-single digit for the full year. We expect China to be down low to mid-20s in Q1, and down high single digit for the full year.
Jack Meehan: Excellent. And then just as a follow-up, what does your first quarter guidance assume for EBIT margins, and can you just walk us through the pacing throughout the year, what kind of bridges to the full year forecast?
