Celestica Inc. (NYSE:CLS) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Mandeep Chawla: Yeah. Hi, Thanos. I wouldn’t say that there is one-time items to call out, but what I would say is that our broader teams have done an exceptional job in this tough environment on maximizing pricing. And so there are a level of service billings that we’ve been seeing through 2022 for great service that we’re providing our customers. As the supply chain environment starts to normalize as lead times come in, there’ll be less opportunity for those types of service billings. And so we do think that there’ll be a slight moderation of CCS margins as we go into next year. But obviously the performance this year has been exceptional. So I think that could also be expected.

Thanos Moschopoulos: Great. I’ll pass the line. Congrats on the quarter.

Mandeep Chawla: Thanks, Thanos.

Rob Mionis: Thanks, Thanos.

Operator: Thank you. Your next question comes from Paul Treiber from RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Paul Treiber: Hey. Thanks very much and good morning. Just wanted to hone in on your comment about the late quarter demand shifting to some capital equipment. Could you just elaborate a bit more there? And then perhaps just indicate how to change — what led to the change versus your prior expectations going into this quarter?

Rob Mionis: Sure, Paul. Yeah. So within capital equipment early December, late November, some of our customers notified us that they had some inventory kind of built up in their supply chain as such they wanted to defer some orders from the fourth quarter into the first quarter. So given it happened late, we were unable to kind of flex our costs in the last couple of weeks of the month. So that kind of led to a little bit of pressure. That issue is now corrected, if you will. And we kind of have a beat on what we think Q1 will be and the full year will be and our supply and demand we think is relatively aligned.

Mandeep Chawla: Yeah. Paul, if you’ll recall, when the China export controls challenges came out, they came out right at the end of October while we were financing our results. And so we provided the color that our customers had at that point as the understanding of that became more through the quarter. Our customers were able to go and reassess their near term delivery schedules and that’s why we had some of that late demand churn closer to the second half of the quarter.

Paul Treiber: Okay. That’s helpful, Rob . As we think about €˜23 and the linearity of growth within capital equipment, I mean do you see a reacceleration or a return to growth steadily through the year or is it back end loaded, like, how should we think about that?

Rob Mionis: Yeah. I would say within capital equipment, broadly speaking, we think that our base business will be down on a year-over-year business, but the new program ramps will be supplementing or offsetting some of those headwinds and there will be more back end loaded than front end loaded.

Mandeep Chawla: Yeah. Paul, from a market perspective, as you would know, what we’re seeing in the overall market is that memory is down significantly. You’re aware that we have less exposure to memory, a lot more exposure to logic. And then as we go through the year, what we’re hearing from our customer base is that there is an expectation that there will be some demand strength as we exit €˜23. And so right now, we are looking 2023 based on what Rob just said, but the longer or medium term fundamentals for the semi market continue to be attractive.

Paul Treiber: And last question for me. Just non-lifecycle revenue, it was very strong Q4 and I think it was also strong Q3. What are the reasons for the growth in that piece of the business?