Benchmark Electronics, Inc. (NYSE:BHE) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Jeffrey Benck: I think it’s some of both. I mean, I’ve certainly seen people are watching expense closely. And I think we’ve seen some rants move to the right. But I — but really when you consider the bulk of our revenues with existing programs, and these are multiyear programs, I think we’ve just seen that overall demand modulate, and I don’t know that we’ve actually measured both, I’m just giving you a little my gut feel from what we’re seeing that that it’s probably I would pour it probably lean more towards the base business. And then some of the new stuff coming in is some of that’s in flight, but not fully ramped yet. And it’s not always the best environmental launch new stuff. But I don’t think that stops, I just think that we’re seeing that — that folks are being careful about their development expense. And so that has an impact sometimes on timelines.

Jaeson Schmidt: Okay, that’s helpful. And then are you seeing any change in the tax rates for your design and engineering services, just given the changing macro?

Jeffrey Benck: We almost — we are almost at 80%, not quite to what the target we had said. So we have net of tax rates been pretty, pretty, pretty good. I’m pretty happy with that. Obviously, we had a couple of wins, we referenced even one where we’ve done the engineering on an AGV product and now it’s moving into manufacturing. So that’s that we love that, the whole product realization and how do we help customers get to market faster with their OEM designs or design that we might help develop or develop the whole thing? And we’ve got a couple of great proof points there. So still an important metric for us and really hasn’t shift materially from how we did last quarter. And I don’t really see that that being a trend or anything.

Jaeson Schmidt: Got you. And then just the last one for me. I know it’s mix dependent [indiscernible] program dependent, but can you remind us what capacity is for the Mexico facility? And then what current utilization is today?

Roop Lakkaraju: Hey, Jason, that’s — I can give you a general, we don’t give specific utilization and these sort of things. With that said, what I would reinforce is our continued investment in Mexico. As you would imagine, there’s been quite a bit of reshoring and with existing OEMs, who want to expand new programs in Mexico, and so we’ve seen the benefit of that. So we’ve been aggressively investing over the last couple of years in our capacity and availability there, and we’re seeing that capacity get used up as we — as we’ve gone over the last few periods and into ’24 and into ’25.

Jeffrey Benck: Yes, it’s funny, we’ve seen growth in Mexico, but we’ve also added — we continue to add capacity and it’s been investment areas. So we’re not — it’s not like we’re seeing the fact that we’ve invested as long as to sort of stay in front of that, so we’re not like add capacity by any means.

Jaeson Schmidt: Okay, perfect. Thanks a lot, guys.

Jeffrey Benck: Thanks, Jason.

Operator: This concludes our question-and-answer session, I would like to turn the conference back over to Paul Mansky for any closing remarks.

Paul Mansky: Thank you, Andrea. And thank you, everyone for participating in Benchmark’s fourth quarter 2023 earnings call. Before we go, I’d like to remind listeners, we will be attending the Sidoti Small-Cap Virtual Conference on March 13. Please remember to check the events section of the IR website at bench.com/investors for updates to the schedule. With that, thank you again for your support and we look forward to speaking with you soon.

Operator: The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation and you may now disconnect.

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