Celestica Inc. (NYSE:CLS) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Rob Mionis: Good morning, Todd. That’s a very good question. I would say, we’re still in the early innings of the upgrade cycle. I mean, and I say that by the fact that it just started about a year or so ago, and given the amount of compute, which makes up about 50% of any data center that needs to kind of get upgraded, I think we’re still in the very early innings of that upgrade cycle.

Todd Coupland: Yeah. And the customers in terms of their cycles to get that upgraded a little bit longer than the quarter-to-quarter discussions is, I mean it’s obviously going to be demand dependent, but is that a two-year process or five-year process what’s the mindset towards getting that upgrade complete?

Rob Mionis: My sense is, it’s a multi-year process. It’s certainly five plus years. And again, across each of the hyperscalers that we’re dealing with, each has different appetites and different phases for deployment so that they won’t necessarily all overlap at once, which for at least for Celestica should give us many years of growth.

Mandeep Chawla: Yeah. I would add to that Todd. Again we support the top five hyperscalers, but not all the top five hyperscalers spend CapEx the same way and there’s a couple in particular that sometimes are leading with the more complex technologies, and then the other hyperscalers sometimes follow. What we’re really encouraged about is, where we’re seeing a lot of our new winds come in and our demand outlook is with some of the hyperscalers that are at the leading edge of the more complex technologies. Hence, we’re seeing the demand strengthen AI/ML computes, and we’re seeing the wins come in on the 800G switches, some of which are starting to be shipped in ‘24, and then a lot more which will be shipped in 2025. And as we see some of the other hyperscalers that follow behind that, it gives demands, it gives us an idea of the fact that this does have an opportunity to be a multi-year opportunity for us.

And so when we — and to Rob’s point, we’re really in the early stages right now of the AI/ML CapEx investment cycle. Of course nobody has visibility 10 years out on what things are going to look like, but we are seeing demand signals at least for the next two or three years.

Rob Mionis: And I would just close with, the adoption of some custom silicon is going to drive compute programs, and that’s going to accelerate in the future. And then investments in AI is also going to drive advanced networking and that’s going to be a driver in the future. And then also with our enterprise customers, we expect to see the Internet traffic is going to drive improvements in data center interconnect as well. So this whole upgrade cycle I think has a long life to it.

Todd Coupland: Appreciate the color. Thanks a lot.

Rob Mionis: Thanks.

Operator: Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I’d now like to turn the call back over to Mr. Rob Mionis for final closing comments.

Rob Mionis: Thank you. I’m pleased that we posted another solid quarter and the momentum is carrying through into the first quarter of 2024 and all through 2024. I’m also pleased by a continued strong execution and courage with a strong market position and growing markets. Thank you again for joining today’s call and I look forward to updating you next quarter.

Operator: Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call for today. We thank you for participating and ask that you please disconnect your lines. Have a lovely day.

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