IPG Photonics Corporation (NASDAQ:IPGP) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Timothy Mammen: Yes. So we’re still well above 20% of went above 20% of sales in Q2.

Eugene Scherbakov: And also we’ll see in Europe trend to achieve this production, shift production or better it to the final production of cars. And you see it indefinitely for a few of our customers in Europe and also in the United States.

James Ricchiuti: Got it. And my follow-up question is on the bookings trends. You mentioned book-to-bill below 1, and I’m wondering if you could provide any more granularity on that. And how it may be varying by region and including what you’re seeing perhaps in the consumer electronics market, which I don’t think you mentioned at all in your prepared text?

Timothy Mammen: Yes. We said that it was softer, of course, all of our major industrial geographies that would be Europe, U.S. and China. We actually had some pretty positive order flow out of Japan, which is holding up quite well. And South Korea also performed pretty well too. That’s sort of the — sort of married up to what you’re seeing on some of the PMI data out there. Sorry, James, what was the second part of your question?

James Ricchiuti: Well, just on some of the end markets, I mean, I assume that the legacy automotive is slower. I didn’t hear any comments about some of the other end markets, including consumer electronics, which in the past, you’ve seen some seasonality in terms of orders. What does that market look like for you?

Timothy Mammen: Yes. I mean that will be reflected mostly in the QCW sales, which were down slightly year-over-year. So there’s no great traction in consumer electronics. The other positive areas on applications were really cleaning and then additive manufacturing was actually — cleaning was very strong globally. Additive manufacturing is okay in Europe and was actually very strong in China with a couple of the OEMs that we work very closely with there, and additive there, we’ve been qualified because of the quality and the reliability of the lasers.

Eugene Scherbakov: And cleaning application for us is very important because we are shipping not only pump laser or CW laser for the size kind of applications, but final systems for cleaning.

Operator: [Operator Instructions]. Our next question comes from Michael Feniger with Bank of America.

Michael Feniger: The inventories came down 3% quarter-on-quarter. I know that’s been a target for you guys to make improvements there. But with book-to-bill less than 1x and some of the PMIs low, I’m just curious to how you’re thinking about inventories in the back half? Do we need to take out more? Are you trying to position to get to a certain level to get — just to position yourself for 2024, any ways to kind of think about that in the back half?

Timothy Mammen: Yes, we continue to be very focused on managing inventory. And we’re not seeing some of the same supply chain issues that we had experienced for the last couple of years. So we continue to target bringing inventory down during the second half of the year and generating cash out of that. In the medium term, let’s say, we want to get down to less than 200 days inventory on hand and ultimately get back to a more normalized inventory level, which would be somewhere around 180 days, but that may take a bit longer to get to. But we’re definitely looking to take some additional cash out of inventory and are pleased with the progress that we’ve made to date this year. And certainly, it’s a significant change as compared to the investment in inventory we felt that was necessary last year.

Michael Feniger: Great. And Tim, just following up on the question around the production footprint. It sounds like what’s weighing on the gross margin, among other things, is the under-absorption that you kind of talked about the volumes. Are you still confident with the change with the Poland and raising production in the U.S. that — with your cost base as we think about those gross margin targets, maybe not for obviously Q3 or Q4, just maybe longer term?