Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ:AVGO) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Toshiya Hari: Hock, I was hoping you could talk a little bit about your business in China, not so much from a ship to perspective from — end consumption perspective. I know you don’t have perfect visibility into being what’s consumed at the end customer level. But if you can kind of talk about what you’re seeing in terms of trends across enterprise, cloud and service providers, that would be helpful. How significant of a headwind was China in fiscal €˜22? And what are your expectations going forward? And what are you hearing from your end customers? Thank you.

Hock Tan: Well, to answer your question directly is China has slowed down in terms of consumption of products across industrial, across even infrastructure. It has slowed down, and we see that. They’re still not totally collapsed, but they have slowed down compared to what they were taking a year ago. But that’s — and we see that particularly in our industrial business, which as we — I indicated in my prepared remarks, strength in Europe, strength in North America especially in automotive, but weakness in China, which is a big part of our industrial business slowed it down. But beyond that, in the IT side, yes, we have seen a slowdown. But keep in mind, China represents just less than 10% of our total revenues today. So, while it obviously has some level of offsetting effect, it’s not sufficiently launch to have that much impact on our overall growth trend for the entire company.

Toshiya Hari: And any signs of improvement going forward, Hock, on the IT side, or is it too early to tell?

Hock Tan: I think it’s too early at this point for me to make a call. It’s — there’s a sense of some reopening. But if I make a call, good chance I could be wrong in a month’s time when things might shut down again.

Operator: One moment for our next question. That will come from the line of Christopher Rolland with Susquehanna.

Christopher Rolland: Congrats on bucking the trend on semis here, Hock. So, my question, it was kind of addressed on the last one, but I wanted to talk about the divergence, particularly between storage and maybe China enterprise networking. You had — there’s a lot — your other competitor in, call it, core hard disk drive, talked about a downturn in demand, in storage, a large inventory build, and something similar happening in China networking as well, and you guys have seemingly such a big divergence there. And I was wondering if perhaps you had an explanation for some of that and why the difference.

Hock Tan: The only explanation to an earlier question was our portfolio in service storage is pretty broad-based. Now, with a couple of areas that are very large areas like RAID, MegaRAID, particularly pretty much, but they are more than MegaRAID we have. You’re correct. It’s pretty broad-based. And there are some puts and takes, obviously. But overall, we see what we tell you.

Operator: One moment for our next question. That will come from the line of Edward Snyder with Charter Equity Research.

Edward Snyder: Hock, I’d like to talk a little bit about your wireless business, which is more retail-focused and probably will be the first one to see any recessionary pressures if you him them. I know you guide this really solid. First, give us some idea of your firm order book. I know you get a projection when the model year starts on what the total number would be for the year, but you don’t get a firm order for that for some time. So just kind of what is — what would you — how would you characterize firm order book for that or orders per se? Is it a 30-day, 60-day? So help anticipate if you see a change when would that be. And then maybe if you could touch on how we should think about overall content at your largest customer in the next year or so because there’s obviously increased competition in some of your core areas, and I was wondering if you’re looking to shift more of your focus there into some of the mixed signal custom stuff and maybe wait for some of the RF.

Thanks.