Avnet, Inc. (NASDAQ:AVT) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

And as I’ve said before, this is a – in my 47-year that – it’s a different market. I mean there’s so many mixed signals. There’s still some lead times that are out there tied to certain products. There are some verticals and customers still doing really well, others not so well. So it’s definitely a bit of a mixed bag, but that’s just how we see it. We don’t press them with our regions. We get the roll up in the forecast and do a rolling four quarter, and that’s about what we see.

Ruplu Bhattacharya: Okay. Thanks for details there. If I can ask you a question on margins. I think overall, you’ve said that as long as revenues can stay above $6 billion, then the operating margin for the company can stay above 4%. When you look at the operating environment today, I think you said that you saw unwinding of pricing premiums at Farnell and you saw some competitive pricing there. Are you also seeing competitive pricing in the core business? And does that range still hold valid that as long as revenues are above $6 billion [ph] above 4%. Can you just give us your thoughts on that?

Phil Gallagher: Yes. Let me touch on the first part with Farnell, and I’ll let Ken touch on the $6 billion or 4% EC. The difference there in Farnell versus what we’re seeing in the core – and we’ve talked about this over the last several years. The catalog guys, in general, get an unnatural lift in tight times or extended lead times, where they’ll get premium pricing as well as nontraditional customers kind of swooping in large volumes and they get the lift in both margin and in revenue. So when we say the unwinding and the pricing pressure there, some of those customers have gone away. And the margins have come just normalizing, particularly in semiconductor and IP&E, okay? Right now, as we look at and we talked about in the script, we’re not seeing as much of that ASP pricing pressure on the component side on EC.

And we’ve said that before, we don’t believe we’re going to see the pressures or deflationary pricing. It’s always competitive, Ruplu. In commodity standard products, it’s always up and down. I’m just talking as an overall view. That’s our take. I’ll let Ken comment on the $6 billion and 4%.

Ken Jacobson: Yes. I think the guidance obviously is above $6 billion. And I think the 4% is really, if you dial it back to a couple of quarters ago, it was really an EC-focused kind of commentary. Clearly, with Farnell being down, let’s say, from 8% to 4% caused some pressure on the overall corporation margin. But I think the EC is very healthy implied in the guidance. And remember, when we get into the March and June quarters, we go into our seasonal mix shift where we get a little bit more out of the West and less from Asia. And the only other comment I would give is, I think we are seeing like in Asia, for example, we’d expect in the first half of FY 2024 – first half calendar 2024 to kind of start to think about year-over-year growth because of how early Asia started to seeing some of the softness.

Ruplu Bhattacharya: Okay, okay. I appreciate the details there. If I can sneak one more in. Once the warehouse in Europe is done, and I think this quarter, you said that inventories, you had expected it to be up because of certain – because of a specific program. So then how should we think about the cash conversion cycle and free cash flow over the next couple of quarters. Any thoughts on that? And will your CapEx be coming down year-on-year next year, because you already have – you’ll have that warehouse already factored in? Thank you.