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

Rob Mionis: Yeah. Hi, Rob. As we exited Q4, we’re now at call it pre-incident levels from a production point of view. So yeah, we feel really good that we remained on plan to our original plan with respect to getting back to pre-incident levels as we exited the year.

Robert Young: Thanks.

Operator: Thank you. Your next question comes from Todd Coupland from CIBC. Please go ahead.

Todd Coupland: Hi. Yes. Good morning, everyone. I wanted to ask a couple of questions. I’ll first start out on capital allocation. You’ve had a good experience with the PCI acquisition. It’s now integrated and you’re surpassing synergy targets. Is there — are there any other M&A opportunities you’re considering and could you give us a general idea what might fit with your footprint at the moment?

Mandeep Chawla: Sure. I’ll start off and I’ll leave Rob add on as he wishes. So we’re pleased with the overall strength of the balance sheet. Gross leverage now is at 1.3 times, which is, gives us a lot of flexibility. We’re pleased with the free cash flow that we were able to generate Todd this year, $94 million. We’re targeting over $100 million next year as well. And we want to continue to be opportunistic along the way. So our long term strategy is to return half of our free cash flow to our shareholders. We were active in 2022 on buying back stock when the stock wasn’t trading at levels that really made sense and I say that from a multiples perspective. So we continue that flexibility going into 2023. In terms of M&A, so first off, we’re extremely pleased with the performance of PCI.

The business has been doing very well. They surpassed our first year synergy targets as was mentioned in the script and that business continues to have a very robust outlook as well. We have a very active funnel. We’re continuing to look for primarily capability based acquisitions largely tied to our Lifecycle Solutions portfolio. So looking at targets in most of the end markets in ATS, with the exception of capital equipment, it’s not really an area that we’re looking to lean into from an M&A perspective, but now also looking at targets in the HPS side. We haven’t pulled the trigger in 12 months. And the reason for that is just because we continue to have a very robust filter. The very first thing is it doesn’t line up with our strategic roadmaps and then we want to ensure that its meeting our other financial filters and so we continue to be open to it.

We have the balance of flexibility to do it, but we’re going to be disciplined.

Todd Coupland: Okay. That’s helpful. Thank you. And then if we could just step back from 2023 and if we think about the business in sort of a three-year timeframe, what type of production shifts do you expect to take place from Asia-Pac to North America? And how would you anticipate Celestica participating with that? Thanks a lot.

Rob Mionis: Yeah. Thanks. I think over a period of time, we’ll see China looking to serve China, so China for Chinese markets. And that might be multinationals in China that are selling products into China or Chinese customers in China serving China requirements. I think the production that has been in China multinationals are looking to either move those Southeast Asia or into North America or into — whether that’s Mexico or other requirements in North America. So the broad shift I think is China going down, Southeast Asia growing, Mexico and North America is certainly growing. And based on our footprint, we have very little exposure to China, which bodes well for us. I think about less than 10% of our sales are coming from China. And we have expansions going on in Malaysia and we certainly been expanding our Mexico facility. And last year, we opened up a new facility in Richardson, Texas and that is growing up very nicely with a very strong pipeline.