Belden Inc. (NYSE:BDC) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Ashish Chand: Sure, Mark. So our POS for example industrial automation was up 8% in the first half of 2023. We expect for the full year that to be flattish, right? So in some sense, basically there was more confidence it went down and I think as it went down and it became flat, essentially there was this channel adjustment based on the kind of turns we expect in that particular market. So I think as we emerge from 2023, we’ve essentially — that market as a whole at the end user level has just stayed flat, right? I think that’s how I would model industrial. I think smart buildings is further down driven by commercial real estate. I think broadband end markets remain as expected slightly up, but with this change in terms of how people buy because of lead times reducing.

Mark Delaney: Understood. Thank you for the additional color on that. Then as you think about your 2025 target model and trying to get to $8, I mean how do you think you’re tracking there? Are there other changes you may need to implement in order to get there given the incremental demand weakness that you’re seeing at least in the near term? Thank you.

Ashish Chand: Sure. So yeah, so I think when we articulated the target for 2025, we had a certain expectation of growth over the cycle and that already anticipated some — over the cycle of three, four years there would be some changes in how the business grew. So I think our long-term fundamentals remain fine. We are well we still feel very good about that target. But I’m going to request Jeremy to add some more color to that in terms of the mechanics.

Jeremy Parks: Yeah. Hey Mark. Good morning. So I would say first of all and just in terms of the EPS trend versus what we expected when we gave the target, we had been running far ahead. I think right now based upon this revised guidance we’re more or less on track. So we’re on the path exiting 2023. We will require growth over the next couple of years. Our expectation is that some of the slowness that we’re seeing is temporary and that things will recover over the next couple of years. At the same time, we’ll manage cost structure appropriately. I feel like we’re still in pretty good shape relative to that 2025 target. I think we have a lot of flexibility with respect to how we manage the cost structure, I think we’ll still see growth between here and 2025 obviously and I think the balance sheet is in great shape. So I think we still have a lot of options to get to that $8 target for 2025. So we feel good.

Mark Delaney: Thank you.

Jeremy Parks: Sure.

Operator: Our next question or comment comes from the line of Reuben Garner with Benchmark Company. Please go ahead.

Reuben Garner : Thank you. Good morning everybody. Ashish maybe if you could talk about any similarities or differences in this environment versus what you guys saw back in 2015 early 2016. I ask that because it sounds like you think this is the worst of the demand in the industrial piece specifically and it seemed to kind of get progressively worse back then in that environment. So any thoughts on what might be different this go around?

Ashish Chand: Sure. Yes. So we’ve discussed that a lot, Reuben. I think, first of all, the prior contraction was driven by demand-side factors. We’re going under this environment more driven by supply side practice, right? We’ve had this spike in demand there’s been inflation. I think what remains different is the shortage of labor, especially in the OECD markets. You can see that in the U.S. quite a bit. We think that as people deal with this particular slowdown they have to keep working on productivity and they have to keep investing in new technology. There’s a lot of talk about using AI for example in manufacturing as co-pilots, so that you can elevate how each worker performs, right? This is a different environment versus what we saw previously where there was less investment underpinning that whole phenomenon, because people were just unclear about how the future is going to look.