Arrow Electronics, Inc. (NYSE:ARW) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

William Stein: Okay. Thank you. As a follow-up, Arrow has a well-known significant supplier that went through a consolidation process with distribution partners, I think, a couple of years ago now. But they’ve been pretty aggressively deploying some features in their sort of supply chain, if you will, for example, a new distribution center in Europe, where they’re doing same-day delivery. They’ve developed these APIs for customers to hook directly into their website. I wonder, it seems relatively clear that this is targeted at the types of services that you have provided to their customers and to your customers over the years. I wonder if you see this as a threat that’s sort of materializing to that portion of your revenue today or if it’s something in the future? Or if you just don’t think that this is going to have a meaningful impact on your business? Thank you.

Sean Kerins: Yes. Well, look, I’m not going to claim makers here. But I think you can appreciate, we would never talk about any of our suppliers in particular. So I can’t really help you a whole lot with that one. I can say that overwhelmingly, as I said earlier, most of our conversations with most of our suppliers are all about how we can help them do more. So I feel pretty good about what that means for us, not just now but into the future.

William Stein: Thank you.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Joe Quatrochi from Wells Fargo. Your line is open.

Joe Quatrochi: Yes, thanks for taking the question. In the past, you guys have talked about kind of a customer survey on the number of customers that don’t have enough inventory or have too much inventory. Is there any color you can provide on where we stand in the kind of results of that survey?

Sean Kerins: Sure, Joe. I guess the short answer is mixed. We continue to perform the survey of late, it’s been really hard to see any consistent patterns. You’ll see the numbers move around a little bit 1 quarter to the next for those that say they have too much versus those they have — say they have too little. And then you’ll see it move again in the other direction in Q4. So I would not place a whole lot of stock in what that’s telling us in this environment because this is such an abnormal supply environment. So it’s a little less predictable for us. We’re the line on lots of other vectors that we have access to, including our backlog and including our inventory turns, et cetera.

Joe Quatrochi: Okay. That’s helpful. And then on the share repurchase program that you guys announced. Is there an expiration to that authorization? And then how do you think about balancing that activity relative to your working capital need just given the increase in short-term borrowing rates that we’ve seen kind of flow through your interest expense line?

Rajesh Agrawal: Joe, this is Raj. There is no expiration to that share buyback authorization, which is similar to what we’ve done in the past. So no change there. And our capital priorities continue to be the same. And so if we have a need to invest in the business, that will be our first priority. And then we always are looking for the right kind of M&A opportunity at good returns. And then — to the extent we have excess capacity, we’ll buy back our stock, and that’s really what we’ve been doing. And in terms of short-term rates, we’ve taken that into account. That’s certainly driven up interest expense in the fourth quarter, but the things that we’re doing more than pay for that incremental cost. So I think we’re positioned well.