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spk00: Good afternoon and welcome to the Benchmark electronics conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please find a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touch-tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Paul Lenski, Ambassador Relations and Corporate Development. Please go ahead.
spk04: Thank you, Maria. And thanks, everyone, for joining us today for Benchmark's second quarter fiscal year 2022 earnings call. Joining me this afternoon are Jeff Bank, CEO and President, and Rup Lakharaju, CFO. After the market closed today, we issued an earnings release highlighting our financial performance for the second quarter of 2022. We prepared a presentation that we will reference on this call. The press release and presentation are available online under the investor relations section of our website at www.bench.com. This call is being webcast live and a replay will be available online following the call. The company has provided a reconciliation of our GAAP to non-GAAP measures in the earnings release as well as in the appendix of this presentation. Please take a moment to review the forward-looking statements advice on slide two of the presentation. During our call, we will discuss forward-looking information. As a reminder, any of today's remarks that are not statements of historical fact are forward-looking statements, which involve risks and uncertainties, as described in our press releases and SEC filings. Actual results may differ materially from these statements, most notably due to the ongoing impact of global supply chain constraints and COVID. Benchmark undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. For today's call, Jeff will begin by covering a summary of our first quarter results. Ruth will then discuss our detailed financial results, including a cash and balance sheet summary and our third quarter 2022 guidance. Jeff will then return to discuss more insight on our sector outlook and then close with directional commentary on how we're viewing the year relative to our midterm model before opening for questions. If you will please turn to slide three, I will turn the call over to our CEO, Jeff Bank.
spk06: Thank you, Paul. Good afternoon, and thanks to everyone for joining our call today. Hopefully by now, you've seen our press release for the second quarter of 2022, which demonstrates another strong performance for the company. Revenue of $728 million was nearly $100 million above the midpoint of our guidance range. an increase greater than $180 million versus Q2 of last year. The year-over-year 34% growth was well balanced across our market sectors, but I'm particularly pleased with the greater than 50% growth this quarter from industrials, medical, and computing sectors. Benchmark is clearly benefiting from two key drivers. First, the success of our customers whose product address high growth markets benefiting from strong secular demand trends. And second, the momentum of design wins captured over the last several years, which are now beginning to ramp in the marketplace. Our non-GAAP gross margin in the quarter was 8.1% and was impacted by 110 basis points due to pass-through revenue from supply chain premiums paid by our customers. As you now have heard from many of our EMS peers, pass-through revenue is an industry-wide phenomena during this unprecedented supply chain environment. These part premiums are temporary in nature, and we expect them to moderate in future periods. Rick will go into further detail in a moment, but excluding the effects of supply chain premiums, our June quarter non-GAAP gross margin would have been 9.2%. Turning to expenses, with the higher revenue base and prudent manage of spending, we were able to offset the inflationary wage environment and deliver non-GAAP SG&A expenses below 5% of sales, even while assuming higher variable compensation on the year. However, this did not fully offset the supply chain premium impact at the gross margin line, resulting in non-GAAP operating margin of approximately 3.1%, slightly below our guidance. As a reminder, our non-GAAP operating margins include stock-based compensation expenses. Excluding these expenses, our non-GAAP operating margin in the June quarter would have been 3.7%. Finally, non-GAAP earnings per share was 50 cents as compared to 27 cents in the year-ago period, representing 85% year-over-year growth. Looking to the second half of the year, we continue to see robust demand indicators across the majority of our market sectors. And even with our higher revenue attainment, we still left over 200 million of demand unfulfilled as orders again outpaced available supply. Although there are some signs of improvement on a selective basis within areas of the supply chain, we do not anticipate any broad-based easing in the second half of 22. Like others, we are mindful of the possibility we are entering a recession, but have confidence in our positioning within more resilient industrial and enterprise markets. In summary, before I turn it over to Rube, given the very strong first half performance and our expectation that this carries through the balance of the year, I'm pleased to say for the full year, we expect to deliver revenue growth of 20% or greater, excluding the pass-through of supply chain premiums, and non-GAAP earnings per share of $2 or better for the year, which would represent an all-time record for earnings at the company. With that, Rup, over to you.
spk05: Thank you, Jeff, and good afternoon. Please turn to slide five for our revenue by market sector. Total benchmark revenue was $728 million in Q2, which is 14% higher sequentially and 34% higher year over year. Medical revenues for the second quarter increased 42% sequentially and increased 53% year over year. The performance in medical is due to growth with existing customers and new program ramps. Semi-cap revenues decreased 5% sequentially and increased 26% year over year. Demand levels throughout 2022 remain high for our complex precision machining and large electromechanical assembly services. A&D revenues for the second quarter increased 11% sequentially and decreased 7% year-over-year. The sequential increase was driven by new program ramps. Year-over-year decrease is due to supply chain constraints with certain programs and program transitions. Industrials revenue for the second quarter were up 16% sequentially and 59% year-over-year from demand improvements from energy-related products, building infrastructure, and LIDAR solutions. Turning to our traditional markets, we continue to focus on higher value subsectors within compute and telco, such as high performance computing and next generation networking. Computing was up 25% sequentially and 73% year over year from the planned ramp of high performance computing programs. These programs will continue to ramp through the remainder of 2022. In the telco sector, Revenues were up 11% sequentially and 15% year-over-year, primarily from demand improvement for satellite programs and new broadband ramps. In the second quarter, our top 10 customers represented 53% of sales. Starting slide six, included in the second quarter revenue is approximately $91 million of pass-through revenue from customers as a result of incurring supply chain premiums. Supply chain premiums are excess component costs recovered as pass-through revenue with no margin. incur the path to revenue to protect access to available component supply in a normalized supply chain environment we would expect to incur approximately 20 million dollars annually turning to slide seven our gap earnings per share for the quarter was 49 cents our gap results included restructuring and other one-time costs totaling 1.3 million related to the closure of our previously announced sites in moore park california and angleton texas and other smaller restructuring activities throughout our global network offset by $2.4 million gain on the sale of assets held for sale related to the disposition of the Angleton, Texas facility. For Q2, our non-GAAP gross margin was 8.1%, below the midpoint of our second quarter guidance of 8.8%. We were lower than guidance entirely due to the incremental supply chain premiums incurred in the quarter. If not for these premiums being greater than expected, gross margin would have been in line with guidance. Second quarter gross margin was lower than Q1 due to 50 basis points of incremental supply chain premiums and another 50 basis points related to revenue mix and further investment in new program ramps. On a year-over-year basis, reported margins are lower by 70 basis points due to the higher supply chain premiums in Q2 2022 compared to Q2 2021, partially offset by operational efficiency gains. Our SG&A was $35.8 million. which was down 1% sequentially due primarily to lower variable compensation. Non-GAAP operating margin was 3.1%. Excluding the impact of supply chain premiums, which have $0 impact on gross or operating profit, our operating margin is 3.6, which is in line with Q1 2022. In Q2 2022, our non-GAAP effective tax rate was 19.1% because of the mix of profits between the US and foreign jurisdictions. Non-GAAP EPS was 50 cents for the quarter, which is 8 cents higher than the midpoint of our Q2 guidance. Please turn to slide 8. We've shown the effects of supply chain premiums on a trended basis over the last six quarters on the slide for comparison. In Q2 2022 alone, we incurred approximately $91 million. We believe these impacts will return to a more normalized level in 2023. Sequentially, this number grew by $34 million, and on a year-over-year basis, $81 million due to this challenging supply chain environment. The magnitude of these premiums are temporary in nature. As the supply chain environment requires less premiums to be paid, this cost recovery revenue will decrease. Excluding supply chain premiums, our revenue in the second quarter of 2022 is $637 million, a sequential increase of $58 million, or 10% growth. and a year-over-year increase of $102 million, or 19% growth. As discussed, gross and operating margins are diluted by this pass-through revenue, while gross profit, operating profit, and EPS are unaffected. Turning to slide nine. Non-GAAP ROIC in the second quarter was 9.6%, a 30 basis point increase sequentially, and a 210 basis point improvement year-over-year. In the period between Q1 2021 and Q2 2022, ROIC has grown by 50% as a result of 44% revenue growth and 97% operating income growth. Please turn to slide 10 to review our cash conversion cycle. Cash conversion cycle days were 77 in the second quarter compared to 82 days in Q1, with a decrease primarily due to the improvement in inventory days and in customer advanced deposits, which grew $44 million sequentially, or 34% growth. Customer advanced deposits cover 26% of our net inventory value. Please turn to slide 11 for an update on liquidity and capital resources. We used $25 million of cash in operations and invested $7 million in capex. We expect to use cash to support inventory and capacity expansion in 2022. And as a result, we will not generate cash flow from operations for 2022. We expect our capex spending in 2022 to be between $50 and $60 million. We expect to get back to generating cash flow from operations in our fiscal year of 2023. Our cash balance was $264 million at June 30th, with $79 million available in the U.S. Our cash balance has increased $19 million sequentially. The increase in cash is supported by our borrowings against our revolver to support the growth of revenue, capex, and proactive investment in inventory. As of June 30th, we had $131 million outstanding on our term loan, 135 million outstanding borrowings against our revolver turning to slide 12 to review our capital allocation activity in q2 we paid cash dividends of 5.8 million the total share repurchases in q2 were 3.9 million which represented approximately 126 000 shares as of june 30th 2022 we had approximately 155 million remaining in our existing share repurchase authorization we will evaluate share repurchases opportunistically while considering market conditions in the third quarter of 2022. Turning to slide 13 for a review of our third quarter 2022 guidance. We expect revenue to range from $715 million to $755 million, which at the midpoint represents a 28% year-over-year growth. Our revenue range comprehends a supply chain premiums of approximately $55 million, a reduction of $36 million sequentially. The demand environment remains strong, and in each sector, demand outpaces supply. With our investment in inventory and capacity, as this demand moves into future quarters, we will be able to fulfill it. We expect that our gross margin will be between 8.6% to 8.8% for Q3. On a sequential basis, the 8.7% midpoint assumes a 50 basis point improvement for lower supply chain premiums with a balance coming from operational efficiency gains. sdna will range between 36 and 38 million implied in our guidance is a 3.5 to 3.7 percent non-gap operating margin range for modeling purposes the guidance provided does exclude the impact of amortization of intangible assets and estimated restructuring and other costs we expect to incur restructuring and other non-recurring costs in q3 of approximately 1.6 to 2.4 million included in this range is a $800,000 one-time charge related to a currency translation adjustment due to a legal entity reorganization. The remaining costs relate to continued activities associated with previously announced site closures. Our non-GAAP diluted earnings per share is expected to be in the range of $0.49 to $0.55 or a midpoint of $0.52. Other expenses net is expected to be $4.1 million, which is primarily interest expense. We expect that for Q3, our non-GAAP effective tax rate will be between 18 and 20%. The expected weight average shares for Q3 are approximately 35.4 million. In summary, this guidance takes into consideration all known constraints for the quarter and assumes no further significant interruptions to our supply base, operations, or customers. Guidance also assumes no material impact to our results due to COVID disruptions. And with that, turn it back over to you, Jeff. Thanks, Rick.
spk06: Good update. Please turn to slide 15. Before I go into our sector outlook, I wanted to highlight some wins we secured in the June quarter. It's important to note that the breadth and balance of our wins today are a good indicator of the health of our business tomorrow. These wins also reflect the diversity and complexity of the projects that we take on to help customers realize their product vision. In SEMICAP, we continue to execute on our strategy of expanding our business with existing customers while we're adding new customers to the portfolio too. This past quarter, we secured new manufacturing wins for lithography, fill-to-print, atomic layer deposition or ALD modules, and advanced vacuum cure tools. We are excited to see that our strategic plan is enabling significant multi-year growth in the SEMICAP sector. In medical, we were awarded a new design and manufacturing program for the only DNA sequencing device to have both long and short DNA slash RNA read sequencing technologies for cancer diagnostics. We were also awarded design programs for a blood safety system and a smart wound healing platform. In industrials, we continue to expand our business with current customers with new program awards in control, measurement and test, robotics, and commercial transportation. Our engineering bookings this past quarter were strong as we support a variety of customer programs in development, testing, and proof of concepts across all the industrial subsectors. We also added a new customer related to sensory devices that enhance user experiences incorporating the manufacturing of optics, computing, and power modules. In the A&D sector, we're continuing to win new A&D manufacturing programs in the area of communications for both secure and non-secure applications. Additionally, we continue to win new design awards in the area of connected battle space, most recently for asset tracking to serve the U.S. warfighter. In computing and telco, we won an incremental broadband amplifier program and a growing next-generation telecommunications portfolio. We were awarded a first-generation product design for a handheld radio wave technology platform, which was a new logo. We also added a new logo in the SATCOM module space, which continues to see solid growth in 2022. Finally, while not a program win, I want to highlight that last month we were selected as the winner of the 2022 Manufacturing Leadership Award for Transformational Cultures, presented by the National Association of Manufacturers. This award was in recognition of an internally developed program called the Benchmark Enterprise Excellence Olympics, which brought together our global operations teams spanning seven countries to compete in an Olympics-themed event. aimed at reinvigorating Lean Six Sigma culture and continuous improvement methodologies across the enterprise in a competition-style event. Now turning to slide 16, I'll provide some color on expected demand trends by sector for the third quarter and full year. Some investors have surfaced concerns about the possible convergence of several macroeconomic risks, including inflation, interest rate increases, geopolitical tensions, supply chain challenges, and the risk of a recession. I'm proud that our team has proven to be very resilient and done an excellent job navigating the pandemic and other challenges that have come our way. We believe that our business is well positioned to overcome future challenges that might result from these macro risks. Our shifts years ago to higher-value markets with complex programs has resulted in a more diversified portfolio with a stronger long-term growth potential, healthy margins, and little exposure to consumer or commoditized markets. In Semicap, revenues have grown double-digit year-on-year for 11 consecutive quarters, and we expect Q3 to be number 12. On a sequential basis, after a slight pause due to incremental constraints from outside service providers that impacted our June quarter performance, we expect sequential growth to resume in Q3. Looking forward, we continue to believe secular drivers will provide an opportunity for continued growth in this sector, as we have several large customers that have order backlogs supporting new FABs through much of 2023. These drivers include increased silicon content across all devices, continued post-COVID demand recovery, and now the accelerated growth in new domestic semiconductor fabs to be further underpinned by the CHIPS Act, which was just approved by Congress last week. We remain well positioned in this sector with our $25 million capital investment this year to support breakthrough technologies developed by our customers with our design, precision machining, and electronics manufacturing capabilities. For the full year, we now expect revenues to grow more than 25% in this sector. In our medical sector, we saw strong growth in this business in Q2, expanding 42% sequentially and 53% year-over-year. As one of our most supply chain impacted sectors, we were pleased with the operation team's ability to meet the underlying demand in the quarter. We expect Q3 performance to reflect modest sequential growth over Q2 levels given the success we have had partnering with our customers to address some of our supply constraints and with the strong backlog of demand we have in this area. On a full year basis, we continue to benefit from increasing demand from existing programs and a large number of new program ramps now reaching volume production, which positions medical to be among our fastest growing sectors this year. In industrials, we expect revenue in September quarter to be down modestly compared to June. Our second quarter performance in industrials was stronger than expected, driven by increased demand from energy-related products. Looking into the BACCAP's new program ramps in advanced LIDAR applications, energy management systems, and IoT-enabled smart devices positioned the sector to grow above the corporate average. Moving to the A&D sector outlook, we continue to see indication of improved end demand from both the aerospace and defense sectors. For the June quarter, we were pleased with the rebound from a challenging March quarter. As you've likely heard from some of our peers, the defense sector in particular continues to suffer from significant supply chain constraints as increasing demand has hit within the extended lead time environment. As this improves and our recent design wins begin to ramp in the coming quarters, we expect further recovery next year. Within telco, The June quarter performed better than our expectations for flat versus March, which we expect to normalize in Q3. On a full-year basis and into 2023, we remain optimistic on double-digit growth prospects driven by ramping next-generation broadband infrastructure wins, government programs aimed to enable broadband from anywhere, and increased FATCOM adoption around the world. Finally, in computing, we continue to help build some of the largest and most sophisticated supercomputers in the world, including a large high-performance computing program ramping in the second half. Even with the strong performance in the first half, we expect sequential and year-over-year growth in computing throughout the rest of the year. Let's now turn to slide 17. Back in the fall of 2020, we laid out our midterm model for the company, which we committed to achieving by the time we exit 2022. In 2021, we made steady progress against these goals, putting up milestones that clearly demonstrated we were tracking these targets. Excluding the effect of pass-through revenue, our Q3 guidance reflects a gross margin of 9.4% and non-GAAP operating margin of over 4%. which would enable us to achieve all four of the performance metrics of our mid-term target model in the quarter. Taken further, if we were to exclude stock-based compensation, like many of our peers, our non-GAAP operating margin is expected to be greater than 4.5% in the quarter. There is always room for improvement, but overall, I'm pleased with our performance particularly amidst all the challenges we endured in the quarter related to supply chain efficiencies, continued COVID disruptions, and inflationary impacts. In summary, if you'll please turn to slide 18. Demand trends among our target sectors continues to be robust. This is coming from growth within existing programs and the ramp of new program wins that we secured over the last few years. It's a bit early to provide a full perspective on the market's rate of growth in 2023, but we believe the markets we serve are well positioned to weather a potential recession. Of course, this depends on the duration and severity of a market downturn. However, based on the conversations we've had, our customers are not seeing a slowing of demand. Indeed, several customers have share gain plans or they're still committed to addressing unmet customer demand due to supply constraints. Turning to operations, we're continuously improving efficiency and our team, working in partnership with our customers, has done a remarkable job securing key supplies. But even with our accelerating growth, we're still unable to meet all customer demand in the near term. We now expect our business even excluding supply chain premium revenue, to grow greater than 20% on the full year. We also expect earnings growth will more than double revenue growth as we see further leverage from our higher revenue levels. This is enabling us to feel confident about achieving non-GAAP EPS of $2 per share or more in 2022. And we're expecting that our ROIC growth will exceed 10% as we exit the year. It's encouraging for our team to see the fruits of their labors over the last several years coming through our results, and I'm appreciative of their commitment and dedication to our customers. We remain confident in our strategy and are excited about the incremental leverage in our model. We are hosting an analyst day in New York on November 8th and look forward to discussing this further along with our long-term objectives. With that, I'll now turn the call over to the operator to conduct our Q&A session.
spk00: Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touchtone phone. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press fire, don't shoot. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roaster. Our first question comes from Stefan Guillaume with CIDODI. Please go ahead.
spk01: Hi. This is, you know, good afternoon. This is Stefan Guillaume for Anya Soderstrom. Thank you for taking my questions. Sure. My first question is, which end market do you think is least resistant to an economic slowdown?
spk06: Yeah, that's a good question. I think really the traditional market of compute and telco would be one that might be more sensitive to a data center enterprise slowdown. But the subsegments we're supporting for really in the high-performance computing area, which are very project-driven, and we've got a pretty good line of sight that things continue there. And in telco, we're working on some very large rollout of next-gen broadband solutions. So even though those market segments might be a little more sensitive, I think that we feel pretty good if that's really our weakest position. We don't really have... really any meaningful exposure to consumers. So from that standpoint, um, you know, what we see right now is a lot of discussion about consumer purchasing behavior, but, uh, certainly from our talks with customers, demand feels pretty resilient elsewhere.
spk01: All right. Thank you. And I have another question. So for the new program wins, um, how were they balanced between new logos and existing customers?
spk06: It's interesting because it depends a little bit by sector, but one of our goals certainly over the last several years has been we've got a great marquee list of blue-chip customers, and we knew that we could go deeper across that customer base. And so we've been really pleased that we've continued to get incremental wins. Frankly, that's where we have relationships and we have teams in place, so it just really supports customers. that we're doing a good job for them. But at the same time, we also recognize organic growth from new customers is also important. So I'd say it's really pretty evenly balanced where, you know, we certainly are winning incrementally, but we're also bringing on, you know, new clients. We haven't really put a metric on it. I'll give you one example, though, for Semicap, for example. We actually support, you know, some of the top wafer fab equipment capital suppliers in the industry that the industry leaders and we've continued to win next generation platforms there which is exciting but we've also started to win some back-end solutions where we hadn't had much exposure in the past so it's great to see us starting to play in the test area some of the things that aren't you know necessarily about the creation of the wafer in the semiconductor space it's one example where we've kind of diversified while we've gone deeper with the key customers we've had. Well, good question.
spk03: All right, thank you so much, and I'll jump back in the queue. Good luck. Thank you.
spk02: Again, if you wish to ask a question, please press the star, then 1. Please hold. This concludes our question and answer session.
spk00: I would like to turn the conference back over to Paul Manske for any closing remarks. Please go ahead.
spk04: Thank you, Maria, and thank you, everyone, for participating in Benchmark's second quarter 2022 earnings call. Before we go, I'd like to remind listeners of a couple upcoming events. This Friday, August 5th, we'll be attending the 11th Annual Needham Virtual Industry Industrial Tech, Robotics, and Clean Tech one-on-one conference. That will follow on August 10th with our participation in the Oppenheimer 25th Annual Technology, Internet, and Communications Conference. Lastly, as Jeff mentioned, please hold the date for Benchmark's Analyst Day event, set to be held November 8th at the New York Stock Exchange, commemorating our 25th year of being listed on the NYSE.
spk03: With that, we look forward to speaking with you soon and wish you all a good evening.
spk02: The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.
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