Xylem Inc. (NYSE:XYL) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Scott Davis : All right. Helpful. And then I think about 2022, so much of the year, not just you guys, but most companies were held hostage by the chip makers. And how — where do you guys see yourselves going forward and kind of redundancy or flexibility or whatever other words that we want to use to kind of describe it just to make sure that this chip issue doesn’t come back every time there’s some sort of dislocation that design is more perspective in the future?

Patrick Decker: Sure. Scott, this is Patrick. So I’d say, first of all, we, by no means, are out of the woods on this yet, even though we’ve seen sequential improvement. I would say that the health, all the discussions that we have with both the chip suppliers themselves and our intermediaries all have stabilized and strengthened. Clearly, I know people are looking at auto right now and hearing about weakness there and wondering whether or not all of a sudden, we’re going to get a boat load of chips that show up. It just doesn’t work that way in terms of the allocation. We continue — the substitutes aren’t easy in this space. And so the main thing we did, as Matthew alluded to earlier, was we spent a lot of time and energy and quite frankly, money this past year, redesigning our offerings to get to the next generation.

So we could be best in line. I do think that as other sectors perhaps show slowness that will simply further strengthen the recovery for us, but we’re not counting on that right now or baking that into our outlook for the year.

Scott Davis : That’s helpful, Patrick. Just to be clear, so when you talk about redesigning, are you talking about going to a chip design that’s more ubiquitous and more commonly used in consumer electronics? Or is there some sort of level in between where you’re at from that next-gen chip?

A €“Patrick Decker: It’s just really getting to next-gen chips, where the capacity is being allocated are being built so we have more capacity for the future, yes, because we’re on legacy designs that they’re bringing down the capacity on those chips.

Operator: And we’ll take our next question from Andy Kaplowitz with Citigroup.

Andy Kaplowitz: Patrick or Matt, I know you’ve talked about forecasting a slower second half in Applied Water, especially as new construction potentially sows in commercial. But have you begun to see any evidence of channel destocking or other customer behavior that concerns you in commercial markets? And then separately, have you put in any contingency in your guide for China reopening related noise? It looks like China was still strong for you in Q4?

Matthew Pine: Yes. So Andy, on the first one on channel inventory. We have really good visibility into the inventory given our relationship with our channel partners. The teams we meet monthly and actually quarterly with counsel meetings in addition to weekly sales calls in contact. So we have really good insight into the inventory. The levels are healthy and normalizing and they’re not sitting on any excess inventory, which is reported back to us. There are some pockets that have not fully recovered. Commercial is not back to kind of prepandemic levels in terms of inventory. But resi, I would say, is normalized due to the improved supply chain and softening from the pandemic investments. On the industrial front, that’s really more of an engineer-to-order product. There’s not a lot of build to stock. And so that’s where I’d leave it on the channel inventory there.