Plexus Corp. (NASDAQ:PLXS) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Anja Soderstrom: Okay, thank you. And in terms of inventory I think Pat you noted you expect that to improve throughout fiscal 2024. Do you think you’re going to get back to historical levels ever in terms of inventory or is there sort of a new normal we should expect there longer term?

Pat Jermain: Yes, there’s – I think it’s going to be tough to get back to the pre-pandemic levels. But I just think with some of the new processes we put in place and as we see lead times coming down, I mean we can make some really significant efforts and improvements. Keep in mind Anja too, with the company growing at the rate it’s growing, we’re just going to see more working capital investments required. So from a dollars perspective, I don’t think we’ll get back to those levels. From a day’s perspective, I think we’ll see improvement whether it’s to the pre-pandemic level, we’ll wait and see. That could be a little further out to see that type of level.

Oliver Mihm: Specifically this is Oliver, Anja, talking to what we’re seeing in our commodities, weighted average lead times are coming down. So if you look at it across our entire commodity base, we’re just under 15% lead time coming back reducing quarter-over-quarter. Specific to semiconductors, which has historically been a stickier spot for us. We saw lead times come down just over –sorry, just under 20% quarter-over-quarter, moving from about nine months to move in the out seven months. But the point here, getting back to your question is at seven months, that’s still 2.5x what we would have historically considered a normal lead time for semiconductor commodity. So as Pat noted, as that comes down, we expect to see inventory reduced, but we’re still quite a bit of ways from what we would consider normal lead times.

Anja Soderstrom: Thank you. And I think you and your peers have in the past said that due to the uncertainty in terms of the supply chain challenges and whatnot, some potential customers have had been reluctant to ship some outsourcing model. What do you see there now given the current economic conditions?

Steve Frisch: Yes. I think the concept there, what we talked about historically is if you go back to, say, COVID period, there is a general hesitancy maybe to make some decisions? Do we want to outsource – there is reduced travel. We want to be able to go and see the facility that we will be moving our product to. And certainly, I think over the past few quarters, we’ve seen that reverse. And so I think that the tendency to make decisions has come back. I think the larger deals that Todd talked to earlier also is representative of that dynamic in that shift.

Anja Soderstrom: Okay, that was all from me.

Operator: I would now like to turn it back to Todd Kelsey for closing remarks.

Todd Kelsey: All right. Thank you, Felicia. Well, I thought in closing, I would spend just a bit of time talking about our fiscal 2024 outlook and how we see that playing out. And I guess, I would start by saying it looks much the same as we thought 90 days ago. So we expected we’d be in a bit of a revenue through where over Q3 and Q4 of fiscal 2023 into Q1 of 2024, playing out as we expected, but then driving into strong growth in Q2, Q3 and Q4 of fiscal 2024 as we saw stabilization in markets, acceleration of new program ramps, some lessening of supply chain constraints. So that’s still playing out. And I’d also note that in spite of the strong margin performance of 2023, we believe we can continue to expand margins as revenue increases and we gain better leverage with maybe the only caveat being our fiscal Q2, where we have the seasonal headwinds due to compensation adjustments and such, which come into play.