Celestica Inc. (NYSE:CLS) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Rob Mionis: Thanks for the question. Hyperscalers typically lock down their full-year budget towards the end of October, early November. So right now I think we have pretty good visibility into the third quarter of 2024. In the next two weeks, we will probably have full visibility into all of 2024. And in our Investor Update Briefing in November 29th, we will be providing additional color on 2024 and also color for our three-year outlook as well. But right now, demand is very robust across our hyperscalers, especially in the areas of proprietary compute.

Maxim Matushansky: Just in terms of your competitiveness with those customers, have you seen any changes in competitive positioning, whether that’s competitors being more aggressive on price or new entrants or maybe supply chain conditions are better for competitors? Like anything that might impact your relationships with the hyperscaler customers in the foreseeable future?

Rob Mionis: This class of customer right now is very focused in on partners that could reliably and technically scale volume and that plays to our strengths. These compute modules, proprietary compute modules are very complex. They require water cooling, which we are very good at and we are also very good at ramping new programs. So the most important award criteria is suppliers that could reliably scale new production and that’s why we have been winning more than our fair share of work with these guys.

Maxim Matushansky: And maybe just one final one. On the Q4 guidance, it implies enterprise segment revenues to reaccelerate quarter-over-quarter, while ATS, I guess, it implies fairly flat quarter-over-quarter. Are these more timing related or is there anything to call out in terms of the changes kind of maybe in the near-term to those end markets?

Mandeep Chawla: Hey. Good morning, Maxim. It’s Mandeep here. First off, I would talk about the second half of 2023 in totality, which is we are coming in at $7,900 [ph] for the year. The outlook we had nine or three months ago for the second half is largely intact. We did see some accelerated demand that took place in the third quarter. So a little bit of revenue did shift from Q4 to Q3, but largely otherwise, Q4 is in line with what we were seeing just a few months ago. To your point, in terms of the underlying dynamics, the enterprise area is probably the area of the most growth that we are seeing right now. That’s been happening as we have gone through the year and it’s continuing into Q4, and frankly, it’s going to be continuing into next year and it’s tied in many cases specifically to the proprietary compute demand that we are in the process of fulfilling.

ATS too, if you just look at ATS in total, I mean, the growth this year has been terrific, right now it’s on track for about 13% year-over-year growth on a full year basis. And so there’s a little bit of timing delay sometimes between various quarters. But after growing strong double digits last year, it’s going to be low double digits this year and our outlook going into next year for ATS continues to be targeting that 10% number. And if you — the last thing I would also say is that, if you look at the end markets within ATS, we saw a very robust growth in three of the four markets. So we are going to be growing 13% this year, despite capital equipment being down over 30%.

Maxim Matushansky: Great. Thanks for that line.

Mandeep Chawla: Thanks, Maxim.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Daniel Chan from TD Cowen. Please go ahead.

Daniel Chan: Hi. Thanks. Mandeep, if you are talking about the ATS strength this year, next quarter you are kind of guiding it for, sorry, next quarter you are guiding it down to be up about low single digits. So a decel in that growth. Anything to call out there for that decel? Is it anything the semicap weakness or any delays like that?