Analog Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ:ADI) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

So given the combination of orders stabilizing and the backlog coverage that we have out, we feel pretty good about the near term. There is uncertainty out there, and things could change fast, but that’s sort of what’s driving our sort of cautious optimism.

Vincent Roche : Yes. One other thing, C.J., to note. We’ve said before, the signal we watch most carefully in terms of really trying to understand demand is sell-through rather than sell-in. So that, I think, gives us a deeper degree of reality and the match between true demand and supply.

Operator: The next question comes from Vivek Arya with Bank of America.

Vivek Arya : I actually wanted to follow up on that question. Vince or Prashanth, are you surprised why your orders and bookings are holding up better, even though all the headlines we see from a macro perspective seem to be getting tougher? So what is helping you? And then specifically within your Industrial business, is it fair to think that factory automation is perhaps the most macro exposed part? And if yes, how should we think about that specific part of your most macro exposed segment within the Industrial business going into next year?

Vincent Roche : Yes. So, well, let me start with the automation question. I’ve talked about a lot of the automation customers over the last while. And there continues to be, I would say, bullish expectation. I mean they’re not immune from the macro. I think some of our customers are experiencing some soft cancellations in their business. But if you look at what’s happening, we’re going to see the life sciences transform. We’re in the early stages of small batch processing in life sciences for manufacturing, for example. The energy sector is another area where, particularly the American, the U.S.-based automation customers, a lot of their businesses are — they have a very large portion in the energy sector, oil and gas, for example, and that is likely to remain strong.

So if that’s a bedrock. I think that will remain strong for for several years to come. We are seeing onshoring, reshoring. We’re seeing movement of manufacturing, first time in India for the first time in a serious way. So my sense is, the industry won’t outrun the macroeconomic conditions. But overall, I think the landing in terms of where demand will be softer than probably normal.

Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah : Yes. Maybe, Vivek, just — first, just to emphasize something that we said in the prepared remarks, all subsegments in Industrial grew in the fourth quarter, and we feel pretty good about where we are. From a strength in Industrial versus the other markets, I’d look at it two ways. First, from a supply standpoint as we were seeing demand softening in other markets, we have the ability to use our hybrid model to get more wafers from our external partners, and we are biasing this additional supply into the industrial market, which has remained resilient and strong. At the same time, recall, we made a decision early in the supply disruption to make sure that we were taking care of our broad market and our smaller customers who tend to be more on the Industrial side.

From a demand standpoint, the strength and resilience in the Industrial kind of speaks to where we play. We have extremely high share in those markets. And maybe to note versus our peers, some of our peers have cited weakness in — I think they’re calling it consumer industrial. We, on the other hand, put that business into our consumer. We call it the prosumer business, professional audio, video, et cetera. So when comparing us to peers, you’ll see that our Industrial may be more pure Industrial.