Arista Networks, Inc. (NYSE:ANET) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Alex Henderson: Great. Thanks. And congrats on super quarter. I wanted to push a little bit more on the supply chain issue that €“ just talking about. I get the point that the gross margins are the worst in the first quarter, but when do you think the balance between availability and your backlog starts to come into balance so that you can actually ship what orders come in and the duration on your backlog, which I know you don’t talk about, but conceptually starts to come in line so that we’re back to a fairly normal book and ship environment?

Jayshree Ullal: Paul, I’ll let Ita answer this, but I wouldn’t call our current environment approaching normality for some time. So we hope it will be second half that the supply and the demand catch up. But I hope it catches up because we improve our supply, not that demand goes down. So we wanted to also improve for the right reasons.

Ita Brennan: Alex, I think the goal, obviously, is to improve €“ have supply improve and then improve manufacturing and improve efficiencies, and we will be working on that as we go through the year. I don’t know what the final normal will be. We will have to see. I think just given everything that we’ve been through from a supply chain perspective, it’s probably €“ maybe there is a little bit more lead time visibility that will end up in the system at the end, but we will have to see.

Jayshree Ullal: I think what we can safely say is we are getting comfortable that lead times will improve throughout the year. Will we get to normal lead times? I think that will still take time because we’ve got to work through our demand.

Alex Henderson: If I could just one clarification. Did you say you had a decommitted in the fourth quarter? I thought I heard that in the presentation. Thanks.

Ita Brennan: No. Decommits on the supply side. I mean. We’ve had a some thousand starts on the supply side, for sure, if that’s the question.

Jayshree Ullal: . It had to do with our supply constraints. Component vendors are constantly decommitting.

Alex Henderson: Okay, thank you.

Jayshree Ullal: Thank you, Alex.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Matt Niknam with Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Matt Niknam: Hey, thanks for taking the question. I just want to follow-up on the question on macro that was asked earlier. Are there any regions, verticals where you’ve seen any maybe greater-than-usual slowness in ordering because of macro? And then maybe if I can sneak one in for Ita. On the free cash flow trajectory, broadly speaking, just curious if there is any broad color you can provide around working capital and primarily asking around inventory and whether that’s still a drag or whether you expect to maybe convert some more of that to cash this year? Thanks.

Ita Brennan: Yes. I mean, I’ll take the cash piece of it first. Yes, I’m not sure that we start to see it kind of come down just yet. I think probably, at least for the first half, we will probably still be building inventory. I mean we do have some kind of key components that are still long lead time. And we wanted to build buffers, so we will continue to do that. And then hopefully, in the second half, it’s probably at least kind of flattened out. But again, we will update that as we go quarter-by-quarter. But I think there is definitely a piece that’s still going to be a long lead time that will kind of hold inventory a little bit higher than what we might like for the time being.

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