Flex Ltd. (NASDAQ:FLEX) Q3 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Revathi Advaithi: Yeah. Matt, I would say that it’s in line with what we had previously expected. I would say when we took that correction, when we did, we really looked forward. We’d looked at the feedback we got from customers. We used a lot of our own intelligence and planning to understand what channel inventories look like, how these end markets are going to behave, and used a lot of our own intelligence to come up with what the forward-looking forecast was going to be and that’s playing out to be in line with what we thought. I would say in terms of markets itself, just to give you a little color of what we’re saying, I’m not — we’re not seeing any significant difference from what we saw. We had said before that cloud was fairly strong.

Automotive was — continues to be strong, but interest rates will be a watch item for that as you’ve heard several people talk about. In healthcare, we said it was mixed. It continues to be that way. I’d say industrial has been weak like we said before. And — so overall, I’d say very similar. There’s no kind of no new news to deliver. But what I am happy about is, you know, as you know it’s hard to do a good forecast in this type of environment. So I think we came pretty close to trying to predict what we thought our end markets were going to do and it’s in line with what we said.

Matt Sheerin: Okay. Thank you for that. And then on the inventory reduction and expected cash flow, Paul, how should we think about the cadence of the share repurchase program? And can you remind us how much is left on your authorization?

Paul Lundstrom: So left on the authorization, off the top of my head, I don’t know that, but I’m sure David can pull it quickly, but let me tell you what kind of what we’re thinking. So buyback this past quarter about $275 million or so. I would expect that we’ll probably do close to twice that here in Q4. The cadence definitely steps up. If I were to just put a placeholder in there, I would say, go with $500 million give or take, which would put us at for the full fiscal year, somewhere in the order of $1.3 billion, which what we’ve talked about before. I think as we moved through the better part of — the calendar year last year, a fair amount of stops and starts because we were in process for a lot of the Nextracker transaction, which means that we kind of got blacked out in some months. But we continue to believe that this is a nice value-creation opportunity in our own stock and hence the expected stepped-up cadence in our FY Q4 here.

Matt Sheerin: Okay. Thank you.

Operator: Our next question comes from Ruplu Bhattacharya with Bank of America. Please state your question.

Ruplu Bhattacharya: Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. Competitor Jabil also took down their guidance, but the strange thing there, they’ve taken down their second half more than the first half. I mean, if I look at your fiscal year 2025, the June quarter, September quarter, I mean their guidance would imply some weakness in the end markets. My question to you, Paul, is the $2.65 in earnings that you have for fiscal 2025, even without either restating that or not, can you remind us what are some of the margin improvement levers that you have? So that even if revenues are weaker in the first half of fiscal 2025, what are your thoughts as to like what you can do in terms of margin improvement to help get PPAs to where you want to get to?

Revathi Advaithi: Yeah. Ruplu, I’ll start and Paul can jump in. First, I’ll tell you is that we have shown this year, right, our ability to really manage our decrementals really well, either through a variety of different ways, whether it is through improved cost management, driving strong productivity and efficiency in our factories, and then, of course, our end-markets in terms of where we are participating and mix has also helped overall. So when I look at kind of first-half versus second half, frankly, Ruplu, I mean at this point, it’s too early to talk about FY 2025, but I don’t have in notes like second half as a huge recovery. I think in general, FY 2025 will be an interesting year. But I’d say our view is that we have tremendous room in terms of driving factory automation and productivity, and we have seen that play out this year and we’ll continue to drive that into next year.

So, fundamental operating efficiency and productivity driven by factory improvement is going to be a core part of this. Our mix will continue to improve so things like value-added services, growth coming from power and hyperscale, all those are critical areas where we will see margin improvement driven by that. So I think those are the ways that we continue to see margin improvement. And then we also have a tailwind from restructuring that we just did that will continue to flow through into next year. So those are all the ways we’re thinking continued margin improvement and I think this year and the last few years have proven that we can deliver it.