Analog Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ:ADI) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Toshiya Hari: Hi, good morning. Thank you for taking the question. I had two quick ones, if I may. One on pricing. Vince, you mentioned that in the near term, it’s more of a unit correction as opposed to a correction in pricing, which makes sense. To the extent foundry pricing improves into 2024, would you be in a position to share that sort of cost down, if you will, with customers the same way you’ve sort of passed on higher costs over the past couple of years? And then a second quick one for Prashanth. DOI 179, I think that’s up, call it, 50, 60 days vis-a-vis pre-pandemic. How should we think about the new normal going forward? And how quickly can you get there?

Vincent Roche: Sure. Let me answer the pricing piece first, Toshiya. There are really two parts to it. One is we have 75,000 product SKUs that are established and are the bedrock of the franchise of the ADI. They’re very sticky. The product life cycles tend to be very, very strong. And they tend to be once they’re designed and fairly price insensitive. And we’re actually — we’re also, by the way, increasing the value of our products each year. We’re managing the portfolio in terms of pricing. We’re looking for elasticity, which is just a normal part of portfolio management. But — we’re also adding more value to the products that we’re introducing to customers, the new products. I think the benefit of lower costs will come at the design-in phase if we do get lower cost, which from our third-party which, by the way, I think, is very, very unlikely. So I think the message is pricing is stable and very, very franchise is very durable.

Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah: And I’ll do the DOI one very quickly here, Toshi. So 179 days, balance sheet inventory grew call it, low single digits sequentially on a dollar basis. We have high confidence that we will exit Q1, taking out at least $100 million of inventory value. and the production plans are being oriented to allow us to do that. The days target, we have a model, but we’ve agreed that it is appropriate for the next CFO really to bless that model because they’re going to own that and they need to kind of go through that map. So I can tell you that it’s not going to be at 180 days, but I don’t think we get back to 120 days. So we’ll come back to you at some point on what that looks like.

Toshiya Hari: That’s very helpful. Thank you, both.

Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah: Thanks Toshi. Take last question, please.

Operator: Thank you. Our last question comes from Josh Buchalter with TD Cowen. Your line is open.

Josh Buchalter: Hi, guys, thanks for squeezing me in. And Prashanth, congratulations on the great run. You mentioned a few times under shipping in the print and the guidance. I was hoping you could maybe quantify the extent or maybe provide any sort of guidance to the amount that you’re under shipping? And then given it sounds like seasonal fiscal first quarter isn’t off the table. Does that mean we kind of expect you could be shipping to end demand exiting the October quarter? Thank you.

Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah: I’ll let Mike take the second part of that question because I’m not sure I fully comprehended it. But on the first one, so we have our business that goes through the channel and the business that goes direct. Business through the channel, we have the demand forecast from our distribution guys, and we are under shipping into the channel to help them pull inventory levels in the channel down. We said that in the second quarter earnings call that we were going to do that for China. This quarter, we’re going to do it across the globe for all distis. Your second question on how to think about the under shipment into end demand that Vince referenced to. All I can really do is refer back to sort of the data analysis that we do.