While this will reduce sales’ growth in the near term, we expect to reduce and refocus our resources to amplify profitability. We anticipate these actions will sustain our progress toward our mid-teens segment margin target. Across our industrial segment on Slide 13, sales were up 8% and up 5% organically. We continue to drive wins across growth areas in solar, clean tech manufacturing and EV fast charging infrastructure. Sales were a bit softer than we expected as we started seeing market softness in some industrial end markets such as mining, residential HVAC and capital equipment as well as some customers working through excess inventory. We’ve maintained strong profitability with operating margins over 15% and adjusted EBITDA margins just over 20%.
Turning to the forecast on Slide 14. We expect fourth quarter sales in the range of $520 million to $550 million. At the midpoint, that’s a decline of 13% versus last year, and 12% sequentially. As a reminder, our sales are typically down sequentially across all of our segments going into the fourth quarter. We do expect a more pronounced decline across our Electronics Products segment with some of the softness we are seeing in some industrial end markets. Additionally, we’ve assumed about a 1% sales decline relating to the product line pruning in our commercial vehicle business. We’ve also factored in continued inventory destocking which we expect to continue into 2024. We expect adjusted EPS to be in the range of $1.90 to $2.10, which assumes an 18% tax rate in the quarter.
The sequential decline in earnings is largely driven by the sales volume decline. Slide 15 includes some additional full year 2023 color. At current rates, we expect foreign exchange to have about a $0.35 unfavorable impact on our EPS and a 50 basis point headwind to operating margins, but no material impact to sales. We’re projecting amortization expense of $66 million and interest expense of $40 million. Based on our fourth quarter forecasted rate, we expect a full year tax rate around 18.6%, and we’re projecting full year capital expenditures of $90 million to $100 million. Before I turn it back to Dave, I want to reiterate, we remain confident in the strength of the long-term fundamentals of our business. We’ve laid the foundation with our structural growth teams, combining that with ongoing portfolio diversification and operational execution.
We’re well positioned to drive upper teens operating margin for the year, stronger than our historical performance during past market cycles. We’ll continue to focus on the areas we control, investing for both organic and inorganic growth opportunities and bolstering our cash generation. We’re confident these core building blocks position us well to deliver on our long-term growth strategy. I’d like to thank our team members for their unwavering hard work and dedication as they deliver for our customers everywhere and every day. And with that, I’ll turn it back to Dave for some final comments.
David Heinzmann : Thanks, Meenal. Before we wrap, I wanted to highlight some additions to the Littelfuse Board of Directors as we continue to refresh our Board, adding diverse, talented and capable business leaders. Dr. Greg Henderson joined the Board earlier this year. Greg is Senior Vice President of the Automotive and Energy, Communications and Aerospace Group for Analog Devices. He’s a seasoned global public company leader with extensive technology experience across the broad range of end markets we serve. His comprehensive technical expertise, management experience will make him a great addition to our Board. Gayla Delly also recently joined our Board. Gayla was CEO and member of the Board of Directors of Benchmark Electronics before retiring in 2016.
Gayla’s Board leadership and broad management experience across companies operating in a diverse set of end markets, will complement our Board. Her track record of driving growth with market expansion while delivering financial performance will be beneficial as we execute our growth strategy. We’re pleased to add both Greg and Gayla to our Board. In summary, on Slide 16, our solid year-to-date performance and the challenging macro environment reflects our resilient and increasingly diversified business model. While our financial results will be impacted in the near term from continued market challenges, we expect to return to growth during 2024. We remain confident in our ability to deliver long-term shareholder value. As we continue to target double-digit sales and EPS growth, we believe our projected 15-year sales and EPS CAGRs of 10% and 18% exemplify our execution track record through multiple cycles.
And with that, I’ll now turn the call back to the operator for Q&A.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] We’ll go first this morning to Luke Junk at Baird.
Luke Junk : First question, Dave, just wanted to gear off the comment that you ended with — you expect to return to growth in 2024. And I just want to align that with the destocking you’re seeing in the business right now. I guess in our survey work, we’re picking up on the fact that shorter lead times are hurting distributor order placements right now, maybe a little mixed inventory end customers as well. Just curious how that lines up with your world view, and how long or maybe short these newer dynamics could take to digest if you’re also seeing them.
David Heinzmann : Thanks, Luke. It’s — as always, the challenge and the question as we look at — kind of the destocking, particularly in electronics, certainly for Littelfuse products, lead times have been down and come back down to normal for most product lines, for quite some time now. Some of our power semiconductor products are really just reaching that stage now, to coming to more normal lead time in the environment. What we’ve seen is our distribution partners, we look at their inventory and where they’re carrying, month-to-month, we’re seeing declining inventory and dollar inventory values at the distribution partners. So it’s making steady progress. We just got to reach that stage where end customers adjust their ordering lead times to distributors, distributors get their inventories where they need them to be and then things start matching up again.
And when we start matching up again, of course, then that will actually drive that return to growth, even if the end markets are reasonably flat, which we’re hopeful that we’ll begin to see some momentum in some of the end markets later next year. So that’s kind of our best view of it.
Luke Junk : Okay. Great. And then in your remarks, you mentioned that working on actions in transportation, in the commercial vehicle portion of that business specifically to reduce costs and optimize your product and customer mix going forward. Can you just comment specifically on what products and customers you’re looking at there? And I appreciate the 1% sales headwind that you provided as well.
Meenal Sethna : Sure. Yes. Just taking a step back, this is not necessarily anything new that we’ve done. This is something we do regularly within our portfolio and especially taking a look at acquisitions and making sure that we’re focusing our resources and driving the value from the right areas of the portfolio. So we are focusing on the recently acquired Carling business, even though it’s been a couple of years, this is an area where you recall back in 2022, we were really focusing on the customer backlog and really delivering and trying to meet expectations of customers out there. And now that we’ve gotten pass through some of that, we’re really taking a look at really the entire portfolio we have through that acquisition, both from a product perspective and a customer perspective.
And I’ll just say there are select areas that we’re starting with that are — have come forward a little bit, and there’s an opportunity for us to really improve the profitability of the portfolio. I remind you, this is stuff we’ve done in the past, as I mentioned, as an example, we talked about this a few years back when we looked at our automotive sensor portfolio, same type of thing. So this is just part of our playbook as we think about running the company.
Luke Junk : And if I could just sneak one last question in — Dave, if you could just comment on the — sort of the backlog that you’ve been working through in terms of the semiconductor business in electronics and just how you see the backlog for the company compared to just point of sales demand and the fact that you’d highlighted maybe just some pockets of weakness in industrial.
