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Flex Ltd.
10/30/2024
Thank you for standing by. Welcome to Flex's second quarter fiscal 2025 earnings conference call. Presently, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's remarks, there'll be a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw your question, please press star two. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to Mr. David Rubin. Mr. Rubin, please begin.
Thank you. Good morning and welcome to FLEX's second quarter fiscal 2025 earnings conference call. With me today is our chief executive officer, Revathy Advaiti, and interim chief financial officer, Jaime Martinez. We will give brief remarks followed by Q&A. Slides for today's call, as well as a copy of the earnings press release and summary financials, are available on the investor relations section at flex.com. This call has been recorded and will be available for replay on our corporate website. As a reminder, today's call contains forward-looking statements, which are based on our current expectations and assumptions. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. For a full discussion of these risks and uncertainties, please see the cautionary statements in our presentation, press release, or in the risk factor section in our most recent filings with the SEC. Note this information is subject to change and we undertake no obligation to update these forward-looking statements. Please note, unless otherwise stated, all results provided will be in non-GAAP measures and all growth metrics will be on a year-over-year basis. The full non-GAAP to GAAP reconciliations can be found in the appendix slides of today's presentation, as well as in the summary financials posted on the Investor Relations website. Lastly, on October 17th, we announced we had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Crown Technical Systems. The guidance we provide on this call excludes any impact from the pending acquisition. Now I'd like to turn the call over to our CEO, Revati.
Thank you, David. Good morning and thank you for joining us today. Starting off with our results on slide four, we had a solid Q2 with revenue of $6.5 billion. End market trends in the quarter were largely in line with our prior expectations with strength in cloud, power, and medical devices. Our adjusted operating margin came in at a record 5.5% based on the strong mix and effective cost management. And we delivered 64 cents of adjusted EPS, also a quarterly record for Flex. As mentioned last quarter, we have multiple large program ramps across Flex, including Cloud, Power, and Auto. These ramps are progressing well, which contributed to our margin improvement, and we expect this to continue in the back half of the fiscal year. I'm proud of our strong execution this quarter as the team continues to operate in a dynamic macro. Now turning to slide five. At our investor day back in May, we laid out a longer term strategy to expand our unique portfolio of advanced manufacturing capabilities, innovative power and compute products, and lifecycle services with an ongoing focus towards higher value markets with strong secular trends. We call this our EMS plus product plus services strategy. We continue to make progress on the strategy across our diverse portfolio. Within each of our six business units, our teams are focused on improving the mix and driving operational productivity of their core manufacturing businesses. Each business unit is also looking for opportunities to add value to our customers through additional services. Our lifestyle business was where we initially proved the value we can create through vertical integration and circular economy solutions. The result is deeper customer relations and improved margins even through the down cycle in durable goods. From this experience, we extended the strategy to CEC with similar results, including the strong growth in our cloud business. In some end markets, such as auto and of course cloud, we have built out our own product portfolio. This creates even more value in our relationships. There's been a lot of interest in how our EMS plus products plus services strategy applies specifically to the transformation in the data center. So let me briefly explain. Flex is the only provider that delivers customized, fully integrated data center rack solutions and power infrastructure solutions. Our data center power portfolio spans from the facility power all the way down to components that power the server boards. So our power portfolio is truly grid to chip. You're already seeing the impact of this strategy in our results. For example, in Q2, our data center portfolio, which is a combination of cloud and data center power business, grew 40% year over year versus our expected 20% long-term CAGR. And we were also up against a more difficult comp this quarter. Of course, we're constantly working to improve our capabilities, develop innovative products, and expand our services. It's been a busy quarter, so I want to talk about some of our progress. We announced our partnership with Musashi Energy Solutions to enhance our flex design capacitive energy storage solution, or CESS. Our solution now the leading technology to mitigate the massive power spikes that are disrupting data centers as they add new AI clusters. At this year's Open Compute Summit, we had a few critical announcements highlighting how Flex enables cloud service providers to address power, heat, and scale challenges. We allowed our next generation compute reference design for AI and high performance compute applications. We announced our partnership with JetCool to expand our direct-to-chip liquid cooling capabilities which is able to handle the most advanced AI server specs. Lastly, we showed our liquid cool flex rack solution integrated with our PowerShell. Power supply and bus bars, all designed for the higher demands of emerging workloads. This demonstrates a truly vertically integrated solution for our cloud customers that we can manufacture at speed and scale. Now there's a deeper takeaway from these product and capability announcements. Because of our expertise in both power and compute, we are working with our customers earlier in the technology roadmap. Because of that, Flex has the opportunity to drive leading edge innovation, and in this case, help solve some of the most critical power issues in the evolving data center. As I mentioned, our EMS plus product plus services strategy is about finding higher value opportunities in diverse end markets, and every team at Flex has a role to play in this strategy. Along those lines, we recently announced the acquisition of Crown Technical Systems. There is a strong synergistic effect here. First, Crown has a significant position in the North American power distribution market, which is being driven by grid modernization and data center power trends. Their expertise in medium voltage switchgear also enhances our data center power portfolio, and we believe it will support growth in our modular power part business, particularly in the U.S. market. This acquisition is another great example of our strategy to grow in higher value markets tied to our core competencies and ultimately create long-term shareholder value through margin expansion, EPS growth, and cash generation. With that, I'll pass the call over to Jaime Martinez to take you through our financial update. Jaime?
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