Benchmark Electronics, Inc. (NYSE:BHE) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Steven Fox: Great. That’s helpful. And if I could just squeeze one more in on the semi-cap bottoming process. I’m just curious if that’s a — you’ve had a bunch of expansion plans in place to address all the wins you have. Has that been impacted as sort of the bottoming delays? Are you delaying your own equipment orders or anything like that?

Jeffrey Benck: That’s good. I didn’t touch on it earlier, but that was an area where we were maybe seeing some more pushouts a few quarters ago. I would say it’s stabilized a lot over the last two quarters as we sort of think about our own bottoming of the business or what we saw. You see from our results where we still think we’re outperforming the market even in a downturn because we’re down 10%, the market is down 20%. So we feel pretty good about our competitive position. We also saw some programs delayed and pushed to the right, not lost, still feel good about the new product introduction work, and there’s a lot of that going on. So that gives us a lot of confidence around our capital investments, but we have invested pretty significantly here.

We’ve got two new buildings, one that’s online and one that’s in process in a low-cost region. It’s supporting that industry. And we still feel like that makes 100% sense. And not everyone has weathered in the same area and able to kind of keep the pedal to the metal. We think that this is going to serve us extremely well as we come out through the other side of this down cycle.

Roop Lakkaraju: Yes. And Steve, I’ll just add. The timing of our investments are geared towards aligning with kind of production. So if you look at our Mesa facility, which we invested in coming into the year, it’s online, it’s producing for our customers. The others were also timing out such that they time to when revenue comes. So we’re able to manage through that effectively and align it to the demand that’s going on.

Operator: The next question comes from Chris Grenga with Needham & Co. Please go ahead.

Chris Grenga: Hi, this is Chris on for Jim. It sounds like the defence — the supply is loosening up a little bit and that was a bit of a tailwind for you. Is that supply resolution where you’d like to see it? Or is there still some more activity that you like — or some more improvement that you’d like to see there; if you could talk about that?

Jeffrey Benck: Yes. Certainly, it’s gotten a lot better, and it’s freed up our ability to increase the ramp of products that we’ve been building. That’s a market that I would say we saw maybe slower recovery, right, with commercial aero was really down. Obviously, people weren’t flying, particularly on the wide-body jets. And obviously, that market has kind of come back with a vengeance. And then the defence space, we’re seeing incremental demand as you might expect just given what’s going on around the world. We have seen improvement in some of that. What I would say is some of the demand came in late in the cycle when things were pretty constrained. And plugging an alternative parts, re-qualifying, that is a really challenging proposition in A&D.

So in some cases, we had to wait 40 weeks to be able to get material and do all that. And that started over a year ago. So we are seeing pretty good improvement in ability to close on supply gaps to support the growth. I would say in the last few quarters, we could have produced more if we could have gotten more. And at this point, we’re looking — the outlook is much better in terms of aligning to what the needs are.

Chris Grenga: Great. And then just you had mentioned the uncertain economic environment. And I’m curious, how does that impact the pace of discussions with either new or existing customers who are looking to outsource? Has that had any impact on their thought process or maybe catalyzing the decision to outsource manufacturing? Or anything — any trend that you’ve noticed?