Corning Incorporated (NYSE:GLW) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Corning Incorporated (NYSE:GLW) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript April 30, 2024

Corning Incorporated beats earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $0.39, expectations were $0.36. GLW isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).

Operator: Welcome to the Corning Incorporated Quarter One 2024 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] It is my pleasure to introduce to you, Ann Nicholson, Vice President of Investor Relations.

Ann Nicholson: Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Corning’s first quarter 2024 earnings call. With me today are Wendell Weeks, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Ed Schlesinger, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. I’d like to remind you that today’s remarks contain forward-looking statements that fall within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements involve risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially. These factors are detailed in the company’s financial reports. You should also note that we’ll be discussing our consolidated results using core performance measures unless we specifically indicate our comments relate to GAAP data.

Our core performance measures are non-GAAP measures used by management to analyze the business. For the first quarter, the difference between GAAP and core EPS primarily reflected constant currency adjustments, translated earnings contracting and translation gains on Japanese yen denominated debt. As a reminder, the mark-to-market accounting has no impact on our cash flow. A reconciliation of core results to the comparable GAAP value can be found in the Investor Relations section of our website at corning.com. You may also access core results on our website with downloadable financials in the Interactive Analyst Center. Supporting slides are being shown live on our webcast. We encourage you to follow along and they’re also available on our website for downloading.

And now, I’ll turn the call over to Wendell.

Wendell Weeks: Thank you, Ann. Good morning, everyone. Today we announced first 2024 results. Sales were nearly $3.3 billion and EPS was $0.38. Year-over-year gross margin grew 160 basis points to 36.8%, and free cash flow improved by $300 million. These results were at the high end of our guidance. More importantly, while we are seeing encouraging signs of improving market conditions, we continue to expect that the first quarter will be the low quarter for the year. We are executing our plans to add more than $3 billion in annualized sales within the next three years and we already have the required capacity and capabilities in place. As a result, we’re poised to deliver powerful incremental profits and cash flow and generate substantial shareholder value.

Last quarter, we outlined a framework, under which we expect to drive stronger returns on our existing innovation and capacity investments and we shared our expectation that these returns will begin in 2024. The framework has three primary components. First, we believe that the first quarter will be the lowest quarter for the year. We will improve from here. Second, we expect to grow by more than $3 billion in annualized sales in the mid-term, which should redefine as within the next three years. The outlook in each of our markets remains positive and our market positions are quite strong. Third, as we capture this growth, we expect to deliver powerful incrementals, we already have the required production capacity, and technical capabilities in place and the cost and the capital are already reflected in our financials.

This is a tremendous opportunity for our shareholders. In the three months, since our last call, our confidence in these three components has only increased. We expect our sales to grow from here and we have reflected this in our second quarter guidance. Today, I’d like to review each component of the framework and share some of the reasons why our confidence has grown. Let me begin with the first component, our expectation that quarter one will be the lowest quarter of 2024. Near term, we expect Optical and Display to be the biggest drivers of our improvement. In Optical Communications, carrier inventory drawdowns have been the primary source of our below trend sales. Once carrier inventory starts returning to more normal levels and our customers resume purchasing to support their deployment rates, we would expect to see our order book grow.

And that’s exactly what is happening. Our order book grew nicely from fourth quarter levels. This and our regular conversations with large carrier customers indicate that the gap between our sales and customer deployments is moderating. As a result, we expect carrier sales to increase from first quarter levels. Additionally, in the Enterprise portion of our Optical business, we expect that our recent wins for AI datacenters will translate into orders and sales during the year. In Display, panel makers increased their utilization rates late in the first quarter and we expect the higher utilization to continue into the second quarter driven by expected growth in retail demand resulting from mid-year promotions. For the full year 2024, our expectations for the retail glass market remained unchanged from our January view and consistent with industry expectations.

We anticipate relatively flat television unit volume, another year of television screen size growth and some recovery in PC demand. This leads to mid-single-digit percent growth in glass volume at retail versus 2023. As a result, we expect our financial performance in display to improve significantly from our first quarter runrate and we’ll share more details on that in just a few moments. Now let’s move to the second component of our framework. Our expectation that we will add more than $3 billion in annualized sales within the next three years. Our positive outlook for each of our market opportunities results from our leadership positions and the power of the secular trends that we are addressing through innovation, and close collaboration with customers.

And there’s a lot more Corning to be had in our markets. In Optical Communications, fiber is the ascendant technology and we are the clear market leader. As I’ve covered in the last two calls, fiber shipments are more than 30% below trend. We fully expect that gap to close adding more than 40% to our overall Optical Communication sales. In conversations with our large carrier customers during the quarter, they reinforced their commitment to increasing fiber deployments in 2024 and beyond. Additionally, we expect BEAD related projects for network builds in underserved areas to add to our addressable market for the next several years. The industry expects funding approvals to begin late this year, leading to spending in 2025. Next, Generative AI is an especially attractive opportunity for us.

It creates significant demand for passive optical connectivity solutions and strengthens our value proposition and our competitive advantages. All datacenters consists of a front-end network connecting racks of CPUs. To meet the computational demands of AI, customers are building a new fiber-rich, second network to connect GPUs, which increases our market opportunity. Now we will see this in our financials as customers begin to build large GPU clusters and adopt our latest high-density innovations. Customers want fast deployment. Our pre-connectorized structured cabling solutions offer big installation time advantages. And the GPU clusters, which pack a very large amount of computing power per rack requires smaller denser cables making connector size and cable diameter important requirements.

To meet these high-density requirements, we’ve introduced new-to-the-world fiber, cable and connectivity products and honestly a weeks ago we introduced RocketRibbon cable with Flow Ribbon technology that could reduce cable diameter by 60% with fibers per cable approaching 7,000. A key part of delivering this innovation is our Contour Optical Fiber, which has a 40% smaller cross-sectional area than legacy fibers. Now our ability to integrate innovations across fiber cable and connectors to trade end-to-end solutions is a unique competitive advantage and we’re accumulating significant customer wins for upcoming AI datacenter builds. In our recent customer wins, our revenue is low-single-digit hundreds of dollars per GPU. We believe the customer density needs, combined with our technology’s superior performance will sustain these attractive sales attach rates long term.

Let’s turn to automotive. The US EPA announced new multi-pollutant standards last month. They include a strong, particular to emissions limit that will require gasoline particulate filter adoption on US gasoline vehicles including hybrids as early as 2026 for model year 2027. We are the inventor and the clear market leader in GPF and these standards increase our environmental technology’s content opportunity by two to three times per US ICE vehicle. This adoption offers hundreds of millions of dollars of growth for us in the US alone even in the phase of BEV adoption. Keep in mind, we’re also pursuing additional more Corning content opportunities in the automotive industry by introducing our Automotive Glass Solutions, which are building success and momentum and are being adopted by both ICE and BEV platforms.

In Mobile Consumer Electronics, our goal is to outpace the market by increasing the content we provide for each device. Our sales have consistently outpaced the market over the last decade and we expect that to continue to be the case going forward. We’ve done this by advancing the state-of-the-art for cover materials and adding more content per device, a classic more Corning play. We have a strong innovation portfolio in support of our close collaborations with leading OEMs and we expect to continue delivering new products that increase our value per device. In Display, we expect volume growth at retail to be driven mainly by television screen size growth. In fact, in the first quarter, sales of 85 inch TVs increased by more than 50% year-over-year.

Overall, we expect to capture growth in Display, because we are the undisputed technology leader. Our successful development of Gen 10.5 and advance capabilities aligned with the continued move to larger size TVs produced on the lowest cost platforms for large displays. Finally, we continue to build entirely new product platforms to capture opportunities in new categories. Examples include, Automotive Glass Solutions to support high autonomy systems, the growing opportunity to localize U.S solar supply, and pharmaceutical packaging. In sum, we expect the power of our market leadership positions and more Corning innovations to allow us to go faster than our markets in advance our $3 billion plus opportunity. Now I’d like to move to the third component of the framework our expectation for powerful incrementals as we add sales.

In the fourth quarter of 2022, we initiated a set of actions to restore historic productivity ratios and also to raise price to share the impact of inflation more equitably with our customers. Since we initiated these activities, we have expanded our gross margin by 320 basis points despite sales being down almost $400 million. Our actions have established a significantly stronger profitability in cash flow base, even while our P&L includes the costs and technical capabilities necessary to support $3 billion plus in additional sales. Importantly, we have put processes and governance mechanisms in place to generate operating leverage as we grow sales. So, as I close today, here’s what I’d like to leave you with. Our first quarter results show encouraging signs of improving market conditions.

We continue to expect that this quarter will be the lowest quarter for the year. Additionally, we’ve established a higher profitability and cash flow base. Finally, as our markets improve, we have the opportunity to increase our annualized sales by more than $3 billion. As we capture that growth, we expect to deliver powerful incrementals because the required capacity, the technical capabilities are already in place and the costs are already in our financials. This represents a terrific opportunity for our shareholders. Our second quarter guidance reflects higher sales and strong incremental profit. And you’ll hear more about this from Ed. We will continue making progress on this opportunity in 2024. Think of us as continuing to march up.

I look forward to updating you at investor conferences in the next few months. Now before I turn the call over to Ed, I like to take a moment to recognize Jeff Evenson, Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer, who will retire from Corning at the end of May. I want to thank Jeff for his 13 years of outstanding leadership at our company. During his tenure, he’s helped grow the company, developed frameworks that define our priorities and guide our actions and raised awareness of glass as a key enabling material. He also increased Corning’s focus on sustainability. Jeff, we wish you the very best. With that, I’ll turn things over to Ed.

Ed Schlesinger: Thank you, Wendell, and good morning, everyone. Our first quarter sales were $3.26 billion, and EPS was $0.38 at the high end of our guidance. Our actions to increase price and improve productivity ratios are paying off. In the first quarter, despite lower year-over-year sales, we grew gross margin by a 160 basis points. We also grew free cash flow by more than $300 million versus the first quarter of 2023. Overall, we have established a significantly stronger profitability and cash flow base. And we expect to grow from first quarter levels. In the second quarter, we expect sales of approximately $3.4 billion with strong incremental profit and EPS in the range of $0.42 to $0.46. Let’s take a closer look at our segment results.

In Optical Communications, sales for the first quarter were $930 million, down 17% year-over-year, reflecting temporarily lower carrier demand as customers continued to draw down inventory. Net income for the quarter was a $100 million, down 37% year-over-year reflecting the lower volume. We are seeing clear signs of improving market conditions and we think Q1 represents an inflection point. Sequentially, sales grew in both Carrier and Enterprise in the first quarter, which is more favorable than normal seasonality and our order rates are steadily increasing as some of our carrier customers are reaching the end of their inventory draw downs. We believe we’re well-positioned to take advantage of the industry’s long-term growth drivers, specifically, broadband, 5G, cloud computing and AI.

We will also benefit from public infrastructure investments to help connect the unconnected and bring broadband to a much larger share of the US population. Moving to Display Technologies, as we shared with you in January, panel makers reduced their utilization levels in the fourth quarter in response to a softer retail selling season. Additionally, as expected, panel makers’ utilization levels remained low in the first quarter to align supply to demand. Our first quarter sales were $872 million, up 14% year-over-year and net income was $201 million, up 26% year-over-year. The increase in net income was primarily driven by higher volume, and pricing actions taken in the second half of 2023. First quarter glass price was consistent with the fourth quarter of 2023 as expected.

Now it’s worth noting that first quarter net income was negatively impacted by our decision to reduce our production to align to the lower volume we experienced in the fourth and first quarters. Our profitability will be higher in the second quarter. Looking ahead to the second quarter, we expect panel makers to run at higher utilization rates, driven by growth in retail demand resulting from mid-year promotions and we will return our production volume to more normal levels. We expect the second quarter glass markets and our volume to increase sequentially as a result of higher panel maker utilization and we expect glass price to be consistent with the first quarter. For the full year, our expectations for the retail market remain unchanged from our January view and are consistent with industry expectations.

Specifically, we anticipate relatively flat television unit volume, another year of TV screen size growth and some recovery in PC demand. This adds mid-single-digit percent growth in glass volume at retail versus 2023. Overall, we expect the pricing environment to remain favorable. Before I move on, I want to take a minute to address currency exchange rates. As a reminder, we have actively hedged our foreign currency exposure over the past decade. This serves as an effective tool to reduce earnings volatility, protect our cash flow, enhance our ability to invest and protect shareholder returns. We are very pleased with our hedging program and the economic certainty it provides and we’ve received more than $2.5 billion in cash under our hedge contracts since their inception.

Our most significant hedge contracts are for the Japanese yen, which supports our Yen core rate of 107 through the end of 2024. As we look beyond 2024, our goal is to maintain an appropriate return on our display business through a combination of currency hedges and industrial solutions like price increases. First, on hedging, we are actively working to improve our hedge coverage for 2025 and into the future. The end forward curve works in our favor, so if you go out a year, the forward rate is about 8 Yen stronger than today’s spot rate. Out two years, it’s approximately 14 yen and so on. The current yen spot rate is significantly weaker than the 30 year average of approximately 110 Yen. We have made some progress on our hedges and are now partially hedged for 2025.

And we’ll continue to look for attractive opportunities to increase our hedges. Second, our customers sell panels in US dollars and they buy glass from us in Yen. They are benefiting from the current weak yen rate. We plan to share the economics more appropriately with our customers by raising glass prices in yen. We successfully took a first step in this direction in the second half of 2023. We will continue to keep you updated as we make progress. Moving to Specialty Materials. Sales in the first quarter were $454 million, up 12% year-over-year, driven by strong demand for our premium smartphone cover materials, as well as semiconductor-related products. Net income was $44 million, up 13% year-over-year, driven by higher volume. Our More Corning approach will continue to help us win as handheld and IT markets recover.

Additionally, over time, we anticipate growth from new innovations such as bendable glass and augmented reality as they are adopted more broadly. Environmental Technologies first quarter sales were $455 million, up 6% year-over-year, driven by increased GPF adoption in China, which more than offset of a decline in heavy-duty diesel in North America, an impact we expect to continue through 2024. Net income was $105 million, up 28% year-over-year, driven by higher volume and improved operating performance. In Life Sciences, sales in the first quarter were $236 million, down 8% versus the first quarter of 2023 as customers in North America and Europe continued to draw down their inventory. Net income was $13 million, up 44% year-over-year reflecting improved productivity.

Turning to Hemlock, and emerging growth businesses. Sales in the first quarter were $311 million, down 19% year-over-year reflecting lower pricing for solar-grade poly silicon and lower sales in pharmaceutical technologies from the completion of volume commitments for COVID-related products. Now let’s turn to our outlook. Last quarter, we shared our expectation that the first quarter would be the low quarter of the year and we’re even more confident that that is the case. In the second quarter, we expect sales to grow sequentially to approximately $3.4 billion with strong incremental profit and EPS in the range of $0.42 to $0.46. We also anticipate free cash flow to grow sequentially by approximately $300 million in the second quarter and we expect CapEx of approximately $1.2 billion for the year.

Wendell outlined our framework to drive strong returns on our existing innovation and capacity investments and shared our expectations for powerful incremental profit and cash flow. Given this opportunity, we’ve begun to think about our approach to the allocation of that cash going forward. As a reminder, we prioritized investing for organic growth opportunities. And as we’ve shared today, in the mid-term we have the capabilities and capacity in place to add more than $3 billion in annualized sales with minimal cash investment. You can see that reflected in our CapEx expectations for 2024. This contributes to the strong free cash flow we expect to generate. Additionally, we maintain a strong and efficient balance sheet and we are in great shape.

We have one of the longest debt tenors in the S&P 500. Our current average debt maturity is about 23 years with about only $1 billion in debt coming due over the next five years. And we have no significant debt due coming due in any given year. So, as our cash flow increases, we remain committed to providing returns to our shareholders. We have grown our dividend 40% since 2019, and our dividend yield is top quartile in the S&P 500 and we will continue to be opportunistic on share repurchases. I look forward to sharing more in the coming months as we continue to make progress building a solid foundation for durable, profitable long-term growth. Now I’ll turn things back over to Ann.

Ann Nicholson: Great. Thank you, Ed. We’re ready for our first question.

See also 15 Best Places to Retire in Minnesota and 20 Countries with the Lowest Slum Population in the World.

Q&A Session

Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Wamsi Mohan with Bank of America Your line is now open.

Wamsi Mohan: Yes, thank you so much. If I could one, one for Wendell, on for Ed. Wendell, on the commentary around the datacenter opportunity around AI, I was wondering if you could just share some color on when you think these incremental orders and revenue will flow into Corning and these hundreds of – low hundreds of dollars per GPU? Can you just break that down into maybe just a little bit more color on where exactly that’s coming from? Is this rack-to-rack connections in optical and datacenter? And how large do you think the time for that is? And I have a follow-up for Ed please.

Wendell Weeks : So the timing of when we will start to see it in our financials. So we have – we started with a pretty large business in Enterprise, all related to the sort of front-end when you think about as a front-end network which is all connecting the CPUs. So over that base, you’ll start to see sort of relatively robust revenue growth assuming the orders that we’ve closed here or shipped in the back half of this year. You’re just going to start to see that momentum begin to build. Where does it come from? Well, that the simplest way to think about this is, is let’s just start at the rack level. A typical front-end rack of filled with CPUs has about 32 fibers to sort of come in to that top of the rack switch and of 16 ports, two fibers per port.

There’s different ways to do it. But assuming one of these back-end network GPU racks will tend to have on the order of a couple of H100 servers to service those, you need more like 256 fibers on that same rack. So you’ve got about an eight times increase in the amount of fibers per rack. So, this is what leads to the demand for us to do a more Corning innovation. How do you fit eight times as many light pipes into fundamentally the same area? And that’s why you see all of our new product innovation will either working on the last few years is aimed at that. So as you start to see those large cluster GPU installations begin is when you should start to see it in our numbers, Wamsi. Was that – did that answer your question?

Wamsi Mohan: Yeah. That I wonder Wendell, if you might also comment on the B100, which seems to be a much more higher density solution than the H100 and the need for bandwidth probably order of magnitude higher between racks?

Wendell Weeks : Yes. So you – but that is a great observation. And it is in line with the sort of secular trend that we see that basically says we have plenty of innovations, much to get done, because density continues to increase, as well as the bandwidth requirements increase. And so what that does is, it reduces the amount of distance with which you can travel in an electron. And therefore, pushes the photons closer and closer sort of the beachfront of those GPUs, which is opening up an entire new set of categories for us for our flat glass, for our ability to cut the light into various formats. And so in a way what you’re describing is what’s leading to a whole new family of innovations upon which we are working diligently, Wamsi.

Wamsi Mohan: Okay. Thank you, Wendell. I appreciate the answer. And maybe quickly for Ed. Ed, I appreciate the end commentary here as we look into 2025. There seem to be a lot of moving pieces for display between the yen rate and the pricing you alluded to. How large is the partial hedge? Or where do you expect to – as you exit this year, where do you think you will be hedged for 2025? What do you think is the sort of pull rate that if we were to shift next year to a different core rate. Where would you think that would be using all the tools that you have? And if you could perhaps just roll it up at the high level, including the price changes that you spoke about, how should we think about display at sort of the top-line level given all these different changes?

Ed Schlesinger : Yeah, thanks for the question, Wamsi and I understand the desire to have all that information. I think the simplest way to think about it is, we are committed to generating an appropriate return in this business. And we think we will do that in 2024. We did that in 2023. And our goal is to get the economics to be similar as we go forward regardless of where the yen winds up and where we are able to hedge. We will be – we’re good at hedging. We’ve got a longstanding program. We will look for attractive opportunities to build our 2025 hedge portfolio and if the yen breaks our way, we’ll go out beyond that. I think it’s too early to talk about core rate or that kind of discussion. But I think you should just think about our display economics that we’ll deliver in 2024 is being the way to think about our display business.

So we’ll raise price to offset the impact of the yen and the net of those two things get you to the same place. That’s the way we’re thinking about it. We’ve made some nice progress on hedging. And we’ll continue to keep you updated as we go. I think that’s the way you all should think about it.

Wamsi Mohan: Okay, thank you, Ed.

Ann Nicholson : Operator, we are ready for the next question.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Meta Marshall with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open.

Meta Marshall : Okay, great. Thanks. Maybe a question from me. You noted that you have the capacity kind of today with capital we already built to have $3 billion of additional revenue. You noted that you expect to kind of grow over the next three years by more than that $3 billion. And so, just trying to get a sense of where you think that the biggest opportunities or investments will be over the next couple of years? And then, maybe a second question. There’s been obviously, a lot made of BEAD timing and understanding that you’re seeing kind of improving demand trends on service provider as they come out of inventory digestion, but just kind of what your latest thoughts are around kind of BEAD timing as an enhancement to the Optical business? Thanks.

Wendell Weeks : I’ll start with the second one and then maybe Ed, you can discuss the first. So on BEAD timing, we tend to be relatively conservative in our outlook of how effective the government can be in allocating resources to build networks. We’re in strong support of this that requires US content. And we think it’s aimed well and it will be done. The funds have been allocated. But the process we would tend to be a little – our expectations would be a little slower than what you see as the industry overall. We think they’ll get allocated this year and you won’t really start to see spending until next year. That’s our current point of view, Meta. Does that answer your question?

Meta Marshall : Yeah, that’s helpful.

Wendell Weeks : Okay.