Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ:AVGO) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Timothy Arcuri: Hock, you keep on scrubbing demand and you’re shipping to what you think is consumption. So I guess I take it to believe that there’s still a gap between what you’re shipping and what customers want in any given quarter, I guess we could call that delinquencies, some others call that delinquencies. Obviously, you haven’t changed your approach, but I would imagine that this delinquency or this gap between what you’re shipping in a quarter and what your customers want, that’s probably declining. So I guess the question is, can you quantify the gap? And is the gap getting smaller? Thanks.

Hock Tan: That’s an interesting question. And we don’t really try to quantify the gap. And a big part of it is — I don’t want to get you guys overly excited, but customer — you know backlog is — sometimes it’s very often categorized or characterized under CRD or customer request dates. Our customer requests date in this particular quarter, for instance, our last particular — last quarter was much, much higher than what we actually shipped, and it was the same way six months ago. Has it got better from six months ago? I can only guess, and in this forum is the last thing I want to do. But there’s still a big amount of CRD’s backlog in excess of what we actually ship up.

Operator: Thank you. One moment for our next question. That will come from the line of Vivek Arya with Bank of America.

Vivek Arya: Thank you. I actually have two very quick clarifications. First, Hock, have you seen the impact or you expect to see any impact of China lockdowns in your wireless business in Q2? I know there’s nothing — doesn’t seem to be anything in Q1. I was just wondering if there’s something we should be prepared for in Q2. And then on the gross margin, I thought I heard gross margin goes down sequentially in your semiconductor business in Q1. Is that really all mix-related, or is there a like-to-like impact that we should keep in mind?

Hock Tan: Okay. Let’s take your first question first and then go to a more interesting second question, which is interesting, because it connects a few dots here. On the first one, as you know, our wireless is one single customer, and the COVID shutdown and all that does slow down inter-quarter shipments. But nothing — we don’t see — Q2 is too far away for me to really give you any sense and our accuracy of what is like, but that’s obviously movements between Q4 and Q1 as our numbers does kind of reflect. But — which is why year-on-year is a pretty good measure. As you see there, Q4 year-on-year was just 13% — and I shouldn’t say just — was 13%, and Q1 was actually still 1% up, but there’s obviously some movements in between, but — and I’m sure that has something to do with COVID logistics — impact on logistics chain of our largest customer, but I can’t really tell in the bigger picture.

Now switching and certainly on Q2, I’m not positioned to give you any indication. We don’t have visibility. Now turning to the second part of your question on gross margin, it’s all product mix. And it’s all product mix because there are some — depending on the particular products we ship, as I’ve said many times before, the margin, product margin, gross margin does vary, simply because it’s the nature of the market conditions, the ecosystem that we have in each of those markets, those niche markets we participate in. But broadly, to give you a sense, perhaps that gives you more color, networking tends to have some of the highest margins collectively of our products and much higher than broadband; and of course, wireless has the lowest. And when you look at Q4 to Q1, the mix shifts away from networking somewhat and more to broadband, and wireless still remains a big chunk of it, even though it hasn’t receded as a percent.