Celestica Inc. (CLS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the Celestica Investor Day Conference Call. I would like to turn the call over to Craig Oberg. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us on today's conference call. On the call today are Rob Mionis, President and Chief Executive Officer; Mandeep Chawla, Chief Financial Officer; and Jason Phillips, President of Celestica's Connectivity and Cloud Solutions business. As a reminder, during this call, we will make forward-looking statements within the meanings of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and applicable Canadian securities laws. Such forward-looking statements are based on management's current expectations, forecasts and assumptions, which are subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual outcomes and results to differ materially from conclusions, forecasts or projections expressed in such statements. For identification and discussion of such factors and assumptions as well as further information concerning forward-looking statements, please refer to today's press release and the presentation accompanying this call, including the cautionary note regarding forward-looking statements therein, our most recent annual report on Form 20-F and our other public filings, which can be accessed at sec.gov and sedar.com. We assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required by law. In addition, during this call, we will refer to the following non-IFRS financial measures, including non-IFRS ratios, operating margin, free cash flow, adjusted earnings per share and Lifecycle Solutions revenue. Listeners should be cautioned that references to any of the foregoing measures or ratios during this call denote non-IFRS financial measures, whether or not specifically designated as such. These non-IFRS financial measures do not have any standardized meanings prescribed by IFRS and may not be comparable to similar measures presented by other public companies that use IFRS or who report under U.S. GAAP and use non-GAAP financial measures to describe similar operating metrics. We do not provide reconciliations for forward-looking non-IFRS financial measures as we are unable to provide a meaningful or accurate calculation or estimation of reconciling items, and the information is not available without unreasonable effort. We refer you to today's press release and the presentation that accompanies this call, which are available at celestica.com under the Investor Relations tab for more information about these and certain other non-IFRS financial measures. Unless otherwise specified, all references to dollars on this call are to U.S. dollars and per share information is based on diluted shares outstanding. On this call, we will also refer to growth expectations for various markets in which we operate. Such expectations were derived from third-party sources. We refer you to Slide 2 of the presentation accompanying this call under the selected market information for a discussion regarding information from third-party sources. Let me now turn the call over to Rob.

Thank you, Craig. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us on today's conference call. Over the last few years, Celestica has undergone a significant transformation and the company is quite different than when I became CEO in 2015. On today's call, we would like to walk you through the key elements of our transformation. More specifically, what changes we have made, why we have made them and how we believe those changes will position us for success in the years to come. During the call, I will walk you through our transformational journey and our strategy for continued success. Mandeep will discuss the financial impact of the transformation and our financial framework as we look ahead. And finally, given that our Hardware Platform Solutions business has been an important part of Celestica's transformation and is expected to be an integral part of our future growth, we've invited Jason Phillips, President of CCS, to discuss the business in more detail. Now for those of you who are new to Celestica, I would like to provide a brief overview of our company. Celestica and it's over 23,000 employees provide end-to-end product life cycle solutions to many of the world's leading companies. In 2021, we achieved $5.6 billion in revenue, and we are on pace to achieve $6.3 billion or more in 2022. We align our company by market within 2 segments, Connectivity & Cloud Solutions, or CCS; and Advanced Technology Solutions, or ATS. Later in the presentation, I will discuss our Lifecycle Solutions business, which is comprised of our ATS business and a portion of our CCS business. Now Celestica began its journey as a spin-off of IBM back in 1996, and the EMS industry has undergone significant changes since then. As contract manufacturing services started to commoditize, most players began diversifying into new end markets and expanding their capabilities across the product life cycle. Admittedly, Celestica began its transformation efforts later than some of our peers. And as a result, we found ourselves operating in difficult markets that were subject to cyclicality and other uncertainties. In 2016, we developed and deployed a transformational plan. At the foundation of this plan was the diversification of our portfolio and investments in new capabilities across the value chain. The objective was clear: to drive consistency and resiliency across our portfolio by offering a broad range of solutions to our customers in very specific markets where we felt we could be successful due to a number of competitive advantages. Over the last 5 years, we have driven a thorough transformation and are pleased with our results. First, we revitalized our portfolio. We invested in expanding a broad set of solutions. And today, our customers are involving Celestica early in the product life cycle, leading to stickier, longer-term relationships. As a result, we had our highest level of bookings on record in 2021 with half of these new wins being engineering led on a large improvement from 5 years ago. Second, we reshaped our portfolio to establish a more resilient business. We disengaged from over $1 billion of nonstrategic revenue and quickly backfill that revenue with higher margin, longer product life cycle programs. Good examples of our focus on more strategic revenue is our Hardware Platform Solutions business, which delivered over $1 billion of revenue last year, and our strategic investments in aerospace and defense, capital equipment and industrial markets. Finally, we reengineered our operating model through productivity initiatives and by deploying the Celestica operating system, which consists of global standard processes applicable to all critical aspects of our operations. Celestica has always been a leader in operations and well respected by our customers for our superior quality and timely performance. By deploying the Celestica operating system across our network, we are able to consistently define and implement best-in-class processes and ingrain operational excellence as a cornerstone of our culture and way of doing business to ensure we maintain this leadership position. The Celestica operating system has been a key contributor to our non-IFRS operating margin expansion over the last few years. Although this transformation phase of our journey is complete, we have no intention of resting on our laurels. And we have shifted gears from transformation to growth. In doing so, we have established a goal to become the undisputed industry leader in our high-value markets. How do we intend to do this? First, we will continue to focus on growing where we are market leaders or have specific competitive advantages. We call this our Lifecycle Solutions portfolio, which is comprised of our ATS and Hardware Platform Solutions businesses. Second, we will invest for growth by continuing to enhance our capabilities across the value chain and develop new capabilities to further expand our set of solutions for our customers. These new capabilities, coupled with strong projected secular growth driven by electrification, green energy, commercial aerospace recovery and data center expansion, to name a few, are expected to drive growth across our Lifecycle Solutions markets in the years to come. And finally, we will continue to advance the Celestica operating system. Given the challenges in the supply chain environment, operational excellence is more important than it has ever been. This strategic framework is intended to establish the foundation to maximize shareholder returns which Mandeep will discuss in more detail shortly. Now I would like to spend some time discussing how we intend to execute against the strategic framework we just discussed. Our Lifecycle Solutions business, a combination of our ATS and HPS businesses, is expected to be a critical driver to our future success. These markets have favorable fundamentals, including growing demand, high barriers to entry and longer program life cycles. We serve many of these markets by applying our intellectual property and tailor-made ecosystems that result in stickier relationships with our customers, accelerated growth and accretive margins. Our Lifecycle Solutions portfolio represents a high-growth high-margin businesses and therefore, is a proxy for Celestica's overall diversification. In 2021, Lifecycle Solutions revenue was $3.5 billion, and 61% of our total company revenue. Looking forward, our goal is to grow Lifecycle Solutions revenue at an annual rate of 10% or more and we anticipate this growth will further diversify our business and drive continued earnings expansion. Now let's take a moment to discuss the various businesses that make up Lifecycle Solutions and why we believe we are positioned to grow in these markets. Our aerospace and defense business generated over $500 million of revenue in 2021, down almost 40% from pre-pandemic levels, and is comprised of commercial aerospace, defense, space, unmanned aerial vehicles or UAV. As you know, COVID significantly impacted our commercial aerospace business. However, we believe we had trough levels in late 2021 and commercial aerospace has begun its recovery. The recovery is expected to be ongoing and a significant driver of growth for our A&D business over the next few years. In addition to the commercial aerospace recovery, new wins and logos in our defense, space and UAV businesses are expected to drive further growth in A&D. Given A&D was the largest component of our ATS segment prior to the pandemic, we believe there is significant runway for growth. Our capital equipment business was one of our fastest-growing businesses last year, up over 30% year-over-year, generating approximately $750 million of revenue. We are encouraged by the growth outlook for 2022 and beyond. We have made purposeful investments in this business to both vertically integrate and expand into high-growth geographies like South Korea. Because of our increased capabilities and footprint, we have taken market share, our primary contributor to our outsized growth in recent periods. Additionally, as regionalization trends continue, we believe we are well positioned to take on additional market share given our highly strategic footprint. In addition to expected semi-cap growth over the next few years, we anticipate growth in other markets, such as in the areas of display and robotics. Our industrial business, now one of our largest businesses after the acquisition of PCI, has undergone a transformation of its own. Celestica's 2021 industrial revenues plus PCI's revenues for the full year equates to over $1 billion of revenue. Our industrial portfolio today leverages an extensive set of capabilities to drive increased share in high-growth markets, such as electrification, renewable energy and telematics. We are currently well positioned with 6 leading EV charger OEMs and are also building a strong presence in the energy storage market. We're also pleased that PCI is now part of the Celestica family. The business is off to a hot start and we are starting to see commercial cross-selling synergies bear fruit. We expect our industrial business growth to continue as we deploy our capabilities in fast-growing markets. Our HealthTech business with approximately $250 million of revenue in 2021 is in a highly attractive business with good growth opportunities and a strong margin profile. We have expertise across a wide array of end markets from surgical instruments to in vitro diagnostics. Our extensive certifications and automated HealthTech facilities allow Celestica to design and manufacture exceptionally complex products. Our site sophistication and capabilities are enabling us to expand into new markets. These new markets, coupled with our core HealthTech business are expected to be a growth engine moving forward. I will not spend too much time on HPS, as Jason will be providing a thorough overview in a few minutes. What I will say, though, is that HPS has been and is expected to continue to be a growth engine for Lifecycle Solutions. A leader in networking, we have also carved out niche high-value storage and compute applications. Underlying secular growth remains strong as network CapEx spend from some of our largest companies in the world continues. [indiscernible] demand on data centers like artificial intelligence and machine learning, are driving changes to data center architecture, increasing demand in disaggregated storage and edge compute, two of Celestica's core competencies. Like other Lifecycle Solutions businesses, HPS demand strength is expected to continue. Our Lifecycle Solutions businesses are enabled by an extensive and capable network as powered by a Celestica team. With an aligned vision and goal, with over 40 sites in our network spread across 15 countries, our diversified footprint is a key to our success. Not only are we able to serve our customers' requirements across the globe, whether that is with high-touch design or low-cost manufacturing, our diversification has helped partially mitigate geopolitical concerns and COVID impacts over the last few years. 50% of our capacity is in Southeast Asia, a highly sought after geography, and we also have strong presence in North America and Europe to capitalize on increasing levels of regionalization. Operational excellence is not just about having the right number of sites in the right locations, you need a system for ensuring consistent execution and continuous improvement across safety, quality, cost and delivery. The Celestica operating system was deployed to drive global standards in operations, while at the same time, empowering site leaders to ensure consistent, predictable results. We are pleased that the Celestica operating system is driving strong results for our customers. Within Celestica, our motto is to bring our best to our customers every day, and it's working. Today, Celestica is ranked #1 or #2 on 100% of our strategic customer scorecards. Environmental, social and governance or ESG matters are a relatively new discussion topic but have been at the center of Celestica's operations for many years. We realized long ago that Celestica needs to strive for operational excellence in a responsible manner, and has been a leader in various elements of ESG, most notably sustainability. We were the first of our peers to have sustainability goals approved by the science-based target initiatives, and aligned by the top 1% by EcoVadis. Although the accolades are appreciated, the real success can be measured by the reduction in our greenhouse gas emissions, waste diversion rates and employee involvement in our communities. I would now like to turn the call over to Mandeep who will discuss how our transformation has impacted us financially and discuss our outlook for Celestica. Over to you, Mandeep.

Thanks, Rob. Like Rob said, Celestica undertook a number of transformational activities over the last 5 years. The intended benefit of this effort was to drive financial improvement, stability and consistency. Some of our transformational initiatives did have adverse impact to our financials in the short term, but we knew that these were important actions to position us for long-term success. With a focus on driving accretive revenue growth, we made the decision to disengage from $1.25 billion in nonstrategic revenue over the course of 3 years. We made this decision knowing that we have the opportunity to backfill the majority of this business with higher-margin Lifecycle Solutions revenue, which we did. As a result, I'm pleased that we returned to absolute revenue growth last quarter. By growing our Lifecycle Solutions revenue, which has grown from approximately 40% of our revenue 3 years ago to over 60% in 2021, we have been able to also drive a greater level of revenue and profit diversification in our portfolio. This is a key objective of our transformation as we seek to drive consistent earnings growth going forward. We are pleased that through the transformation, we have seen 8 consecutive quarters of non-IFRS operating margin growth, allowing Celestica to achieve its highest non-IFRS operating margin ever in 2021. And finally, throughout the transformation, we have been focused on generating strong non-IFRS free cash flow with a target of generating $100 million or more annually. Looking back over the last 5 years, we are pleased to have been able to generate $478 million of non-IFRS free cash flow. As we look to 2022, I'd like to reiterate our goals we have set out over the last few quarters. Looking at revenue, we anticipate growing the business to $6.3 billion or more. This is intended to be accomplished by driving 10% or more organic growth in our Lifecycle Solutions portfolio, plus the addition of a full year of PCI in 2022. Given that our customer backlogs are robust and demand remains strong, should the supply environment improve, so will our outlook. We expect the breadth and strength of our portfolio to help us deliver non-IFRS operating margin between 4% and 5% in 2022. We are pleased that we were able to deliver record non-IFRS operating margin in 2021 of 4.2%. And we believe the strength of our portfolio positions us well for even stronger non-IFRS operating margin this year. Driven by strong revenue and non-IFRS operating margin, we are pleased with the improvement we have seen in our non-IFRS adjusted EPS generation in recent years. In 2021, we achieved $1.30 of non-IFRS adjusted EPS, the highest in 5 years. Looking forward to 2022, we anticipate adjusted EPS to be between $1.55 and $1.75. If achieved, this will be the highest level of non-IFRS adjusted EPS the company has achieved since our IPO. Lastly, as a result of strong operational execution, we have delivered more than $100 million of non-IFRS free cash flow each year for the last 3 years. While the supply environment continues to be highly dynamic, we are targeting to achieve $100 million or more of non-IFRS free cash flow in 2022. Turning to capital allocation. Celestica's priorities remain consistent. We intend to return 50% of our non-IFRS free cash flow to our shareholders, while investing 50% in our business over the long term. We are pleased with our progress on returning cash to shareholders. Since 2016, we have deployed approximately $300 million to share repurchases and have deployed over $1 billion to share repurchases over the last 10 years. As a result, our share count has dropped by an annual average of 2% over the last 5 years and a reduction of over 42% over the last 10 years. One of the key elements of our strategic framework is to invest in existing and new capabilities. We intend to make these investments inorganically through thoughtful M&A and organically through targeted capital expenditures. Regarding M&A. We are pleased that we continue to have a strong balance sheet that affords us the flexibility to make inorganic investments in the business. While our M&A funnel is robust, we continue to apply a very tight strategic and financial filter when evaluating targets. Acquisitions need to align to our overall strategic road map. In addition, we target that acquisitions should be non-IFRS, adjusted EPS accretive in year 1, and IRR should exceed our cost of capital by year 2 or sooner. Lastly, we evaluate inorganic investments against other comparable use of cash to ensure maximum shareholder value creation over the long term. These hurdles mean that we expect a lot of potential transactions that execute a select few. Finally, we aim to invest 1.5% to 2% of our revenue in the business through CapEx with a focus on investing in areas that can bolster existing capabilities or to develop new ones. Over the last decade, Celestica's non-IFRS adjusted EPS has typically been in a tight range, profitability was largely influenced by customer and market concentration with minimal levels of exposure to Lifecycle Solutions. A key area of focus during the transformation over the last 5 years has been to grow our profit pools in strategic areas of the business in order to drive sustainable non-IFRS adjusted EPS growth. Our focus in 2022 is to deliver record non-IFRS adjusted EPS and to grow it at an annual rate of 10% or more over the next few years, with a goal of delivering $2 or more of adjusted EPS in 2025. We intend to achieve this goal by driving 10% or more annual revenue growth in our Lifecycle Solutions portfolio supported by strong non-IFRS operating margins of at least 4.0%. It has been exciting to be a part of the Celestica transformation over the last 5 years, and I'm encouraged by what the next 5 years will hold for the company. An important part of Celestica's success is our HPS business, and we are pleased to have Jason Phillips join us today to walk us through the evolution of our business and what he believes the growth drivers will be over the next 2 years. Jason, over to you.

Thanks, Mandeep. As Rob and Mandeep indicated, our HPS journey has been a success story for Celestica. Over 10 years ago, we decided to build upon our decades of EMS expertise by making R&D investments in various data center technologies to further enable our customers. The objective was to provide additional value and differentiation by moving up the product value chain in a product engineering and design. Initially, a Joint Design and Manufacturing or JDM business, we developed a portfolio of reference designs to help customers reduce cost, speed time to market and expand intellectual property. These design efforts were largely customer-funded and based on customer specifications. Over the years, however, this business evolved further into a Hardware Platform Solutions business. Customers now benefit from Celestica's innovation, design and scale. Rather than designing products solely based on customer specifications, Celestica has invested in its own networking, storage and compute platform designs that we can customize for our customers, optimizing for their specific applications. Moreover, we have developed an ecosystem of supply partners intended to ensure that we stay on the leading edge of data center technology, road maps and competitiveness. Our evolution is not over, however, we've made additional investments to further enable and complement our hardware by standing up a software design center of excellence in Chennai, India, further increasing the breadth of solutions we offer our customers. Additionally, we're moving across the value chain by deploying IT asset disposition, or ITAD services, to help customers decommission and dispose of aging hardware responsibly. Our ITAD business, along with adding value up to rack-level solutions and beyond, are the key reasons behind adding the Richardson, Texas, facility to our footprint. By providing ITAD services, we can now offer cradle-to-grave products and services to our data center customers. Our evolution has been well received by our customers. And as you can see by the impressive HPS growth over the last few years, we were pleased to announce that 2021 was a record year for HPS, achieving $1.15 billion in sales. And given our differentiated position in the market, we expect to continue to gain share and outpace anticipated market growth in the coming years. We have over 500 engineers around the world in 5 geographically diverse HPS centers of excellence with over 280 patents protecting our IP, and we continue to invest in R&D to advance our product road maps and HPS capabilities. We work with 8 of the top 10 hyperscalers, 4 of the top 5 enterprise storage OEMs, many of the proprietary compute leaders and our customer roster continues to grow on both the hyperscaler and enterprise side of the business. The competitive landscape for HPS may be different than what you might be expecting. Our primary competitors are not our Tier 1 EMS peers, but rather original design and manufacturing companies or ODMs. We've gone at great length to differentiate ourselves from ODMs. First, Celestica has developed hardware platforms across all core data center technologies, providing customers with a comprehensive portfolio of solutions to enable their strategies. Moreover, we have focused our efforts on the higher value, more complex and differentiated technologies within networking, storage and compute. Second, we have a purpose-built global network of sites that allow us to provide our customers with the products and life cycle services they require in the geographies they prefer. Our multi-node supply chain solutions provide tremendous flexibility and resilience for our customers, providing the business continuity and performance they need and rely on. Next, our customer interfaces and collaboration are engineering and solutions led. We focus on becoming an extension of our customers' engineering, business and supply chain teams. We endeavor to develop long-term partnerships with our customers rather than transactional relationships with point solutions. This is intended to create stickier relationships and establish an incumbency advantage when customers build out or upgrade their data centers with the latest technologies. Finally, we have partnered with a network of industry-leading technology suppliers, developing deep engagements that have been building over the last 10-plus years. This is a mutually beneficial relationship as we drive significant demand creation for their offerings and they ensure we have timely supply of their leading-edge silicon and components and strong technical support across the product life cycle. HPS has grown significantly over the last 2 years, and we anticipate strong growth to continue. There are 3 primary drivers fueling our anticipated HBS expansion over the coming years. First, secular tailwinds in the data center market are expected to continue. Second, data center technologies are expected to continue to evolve, enabling new solutions and applications driving expanded infrastructure requirements. Finally, we believe that there are new opportunities within the existing data center markets that Celestica has only begun to tap into. Let's take a moment to discuss these growth drivers in a little more detail. COVID accelerated data center expansion with the world working and learning from home, along with cloud, streaming and online commerce solutions driving explosive growth in data center requirements. Secular growth does not appear to be slowing down as companies like Google and Meta have announced large CapEx programs over the next few years to support applications such as cloud and augmented reality. Additionally, there is a large data center installed base with aging infrastructure that will require refreshes and upgrades. With our data center capabilities, coupled with an expanding ITAD service offering, which I will discuss in more detail shortly, we believe we are well positioned to participate in the refresh cycle. Our growth drivers enabled by new technologies, our new solutions and applications driving increased value, end uses and solutions like artificial intelligence, machine learning, edge computing and virtual and augmented reality demand a different data center, therefore, driving a shifting data center architecture. The new technologies required for the new architectures fall squarely within Celestica's product road maps for networking, disaggregated storage and compute. Evolving technology underpins these new, more efficient and optimized data centers, 800G switches, 5G, software-defined storage, evolving silicon, and the latest optical and flash technologies are all driving a new wave of innovation in the data center. We believe that Celestica's legacy and networking storage and compute, coupled with our reputation for hardware and supply chain innovation in these technologies, puts us in a great position to capitalize on this data center evolution. Moreover, we believe that our entrenched customer and supplier relationships provide an incumbency advantage to partner with customers on the next-generation solutions, powering their specific data center requirements. Hyperscalers deploy leading-edge technology in their data centers due to their scale and performance requirements, and Celestica works with these leading hyperscalers to help drive that innovation. As these cutting-edge technologies begin to mature, their market viability does not degrade. Enterprise customers, for example, are more likely to deploy more mature technologies as they often have different capability and scale requirements. Over the last several periods, our HPS business has favored the hyperscaler market. We see further growth opportunity by leveraging our legacy in the enterprise market to further engage with enterprise customers, including those adopting disaggregated solutions. We're now applying the HPS model to a market that is 4.5x larger than our current focus area. I'm happy to answer any questions you may have regarding the HPS business. But first, let me turn the call over to Rob to wrap things up.

Thank you, Jason, and thank you, Mandeep. Celestica's transformation was at times difficult, but a necessary step in becoming a more resilient company. And I am proud to say we have accomplished the objectives of our transformation. We have made significant investments in new capabilities that we believe have differentiated us from our peers. These investments have driven increased market share, attracted new customers and set new records of engineering-led booking. We are making concerted efforts to grow our Lifecycle Solutions portfolio. Already 60% plus of the overall revenues as these markets within these portfolios possess favorable characteristics like high barriers to entry and richer margins. Moreover, as our Lifecycle Solutions portfolio grows, so does Celestica's diversification leading to more consistent results. We also have a strong balance sheet to help fuel investments in the business while giving back to shareholders. We continue to target strong non-IFRS free cash flow generation, and we will strive for maximum flexibility in our balance sheet, allowing us to make the right decisions for the business and our shareholders. Finally, the Celestica operating system has proven to be an exceptionally successful approach for managing operations. It ensures we maintain our leadership position in operation and continues to guide us through a difficult supply environment. When I look back at our accomplishments and the foundation we have established for success, I am excited for what the future holds at Celestica. We are a new company with an impressive team, and we are built to win. Thank you for attending the conference call today. We would like to turn the call over to the operator for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Ruplu Bhattacharya from Bank of America.

I have a couple of questions on revenue and one question on margins. Specifically, the first question is on the Lifecycle Solutions revenues. You're guiding that to grow at 10% plus. If we look over the last couple of years, it looks like the mix of revenue within Lifecycle Solutions is trending more towards the ATS side versus from HPS. So as you look out into fiscal '25, how should we see the mix of revenues within Lifecycle Solutions? How much do you think comes from ATS? And how fast within that, over these next couple of years, do you think HPS revenues can grow?

Ruplu, thanks for the question, and the detailed question at that. The way I would answer it is we have had consistently a growth target rate of about 10% in the ATS business. And the reason for that is because we believe that we were able to grow slightly faster than the markets that we were targeting. And in the HPS business, as you've seen over the last few years, we have grown clearly in excess of 10%. That being said, as you look at where we're going from 2022 to 2025, we think a blended growth rate of 10% or more is applicable to both the ATS business and the HPS business. The drivers, of course, are clearly going to be slightly different. Our demand outlook in 2022, if I can start there, is in excess of 10% in both ATS and in HPS. And right now, we're really curtailing some of that demand in the supply chain environment. But if the supply chain environment eases up, we do believe that we have the ability to actually exceed the 10% growth rate this year, in particular. When we go beyond 2022, it's -- the fundamentals are there to support a 10% growth rate, but it's going to be very specific on each individual market. But I'd right now apply the 10% or more rate to both ATS and HPS.

Okay. Okay. And Mandeep, if I can just follow up on what you said and what Rob presented in terms of the end market growth rates for things -- for markets such as aerospace and defense and capital equipment, can you specify -- where do you think you can outgrow the market? Which end markets do you think you grow at the market rate over the next couple of years as you look out into fiscal '25?

Sure. Yes, I'll start it off and I'll let Rob maybe talk a little bit more about some of the fundamentals behind those markets. A&D has been a market that we historically have been our largest segment, frankly. But as you know, we are operating well below pre-pandemic levels right now, almost 40% below where we were prior to the pandemic. We are starting to see growth return in A&D. And we do have every expectation that we will be able to get back to pre-pandemic levels at some point. That being said, it's not going to happen in 2022. We see that recovery extending into 2023 and maybe even perhaps after that. But there are very good fundamentals that are in place for the A&D business. The capital equipment growth that we have been seeing over the last couple of years is firmly in place for 2022 and we are anticipating to have very strong growth, and that's being driven by the semiconductor business. And that is expected to continue into 2023 right now as well. And then lastly, on the industrial side, as Rob had talked about, the PCI business is performing very well and is off to a hot start. And the specific areas in industrial where we are focusing in, around EV charging and battery storage, have double-digit growth rates going through 2022 and 2023. So the markets that we are choosing to participate in are growing very nicely. And I'll let Rob take -- ask if you'd like to expand on that.

Yes. I think Mandeep covered it. I would say we're clearly positioned to outgrow the market in Capital Equipment. And industrial, I think we're pleased, however, we'd be at market or slightly better than market in A&D. We're going to probably dive through the aerospace -- commercial aerospace recovery, a little bit bolstered by some of our defense wins. And with HealthTech, I would think growth moderates a little bit in '22 as some of the COVID-related programs trail off, and it takes time to some of our new wins that we won last year to kind of pick up towards the back half of the year and into '23.

Okay. Appreciate it. For my last question, if I can just ask on margins. I mean if we look at your past performance, I mean, corporate operating margins have grown from 2.7% in fiscal '19 to about -- let's say, 4.5% in fiscal '22. So looking at your long-term guidance for operating margin of 4%, I mean, would you say there's somewhat -- that's somewhat conservative? Or is there something that you expect to moderate off in terms of margins? And are you updating any of the individual segment, ATS long-term margins and CCS long-term margin ranges?

Yes, Ruplu, thanks for asking that question. And it gives me an opportunity to maybe clarify that if it wasn't made clear earlier. The -- We are pleased with the margin expansion that we've had over the last few years. And as you mentioned, we achieved 4.2% last year, which was our highest margins in our history. We have just recently raised the target margin range for the company in 2022 to 4% -- to 5%. And as a reminder, and I know you know this, our target margin range before that was 3.75% to 4.5%. So we have [ raised ] the margin rate for the entire company in 2022. When we have stated that we are targeting 4% or better margins going forward, what we were really intending to do there is to let the community know what our floor is. We clearly are aiming to do above 4%, just like we are in 2022, 4% to 5%. And -- but the measurement that we think is going to be -- what we really want to hang our head on is going to be long-term EPS growth through a combination of revenue growth, which, again, Lifecycle Solutions will be 10% or better. And with margins being strong and at a minimum of 4%, we think that we can deliver 10% or more of EPS growth. But clearly, as Lifecycle Solutions continues to grow as a percentage of the overall company and knowing that Lifecycle Solutions margins are accretive to the current company's margins, clearly, we would have momentum on our side to be able to start seeing some better mix and better margin contribution. But really the 4% was intended to just be the floor and we intend to do better than that.

Your next question comes from Thanos Moschopoulos from BMO Capital Markets.

With respect to the hyperscaler business, can you speak to the sourcing dynamic? I mean, typically, are these fuel sourced or how many vendors tend to be in the mix for your larger customers?

Thanos, in terms of sourcing with the hyperscalers, we see a couple of different models. So there's areas where we have exclusive positions and there's areas where they will have multiple sources. And in the areas where there are multiple sources, we focus ultimately on innovating -- out innovating our competition in that space and leveraging the key differentiators that has allowed us to build our, what I call, an industry-leading position with 8 of the top 10 hyperscalers.

And this -- these past few months, in particular, I think you seem to have been executing especially well in supply chain. I mean, so as you think about your market share gains, has your supply chain execution been a big part of that in recent months? Or would you say it's kind of more focused on your engineering capabilities?

Yes. I would say it's actually both. From an engineering capabilities perspective, when we do run into challenges, the ability to design and alternate components and supply has been a big piece of it. But going into this constrained environment, there's been, I think, a number of drivers behind why I'd say we are able to get more than our fair share. And part of it is our tools and our processes combined with this growing position that we have in HPS. I mean, we're now demand generators for our suppliers that we've been working with now for 10 years. Towards the end of last year, as we were in this tightly constrained environment and remain in it, we brought our HPS supply base together, and we had over 150 people join us both in person and virtually as we laid out the HPS business, the strategy that we have, the growth opportunity in front of us. And we actually brought 2 of our leading hyperscaler customers into that review with us to reinforce the importance of the hardware innovation that we are driving for them. And I think it's things like that, that are allowing us to drive leverage with our supply base and our partners and work through this challenging environment.

And then finally, how would you say the environment on the supply side has been evolving in recent weeks? I mean, just given order lead times, given your scale, I mean -- do you feel like you have good visibility on supply chain for the coming months at this point? Or are there still unperceived risks that might materialize? Has there been any improvement, I guess, is what I'm asking, over the last while.

Thanos, it's Rob. I would say Q1 relative to Q4 is very similar dynamics. On the positive side, we see semiconductor lead times slightly down now second month in a row. We've seen decommits from the supply base being less prevalent. But frankly, they do occur. And as you know, it takes all the components to kind of complete a build. So broadly speaking, while it's modestly better, we still -- it's still a very challenging environment. And we're expecting this challenging environment to continue throughout 2022. I think the optimists are saying they expect some modest improvement towards the end of the year. We're playing it conservative and keeping our guard up and assuming that it's going to be a constrained environment throughout 2022, and maybe we'll be pleasantly surprised as the year gets long.

Your next question comes from Matt Sheerin from Stifel.

Yes. I have a couple of questions for Jason just on the [indiscernible] of that business. In terms of the ITAD, the asset disposition business, I just wanted to get your take on the economics there because we've seen over the years other EMS companies coming into that business, and now same thing with the IT distributors. So I want to better understand the economics of that business.

Sure. Matt, I would say your comment around other providers that have come in and out of this space in the past, I'd say a lot of those focus areas have been more on the consumer side of things. When we talk about ITAD and building our capabilities and services in this space, it's very much focused around the data center and the circular economy and the opportunity that resides in that data center. And the economics are good. And that's one of the main reasons we're looking at it in addition to extending the value across the product life cycle, and enabling our customers. When you look at the economics of that business, they're very positive. And I would describe them as accretive to some of the current HPS business. So it's clearly an area of focus for us. We've been building out our capabilities there, and we've got some exciting new wins that we're going to be ramping in the second half around ITAD that we believe we'll continue to see strong growth in that space, particularly as companies focus more on ESG and the circular economy here moving forward.

Okay. And then regarding the expansion opportunity within the enterprise customer, basically replicating what you're doing for the big hyperscale data center guys, exactly what customer are we talking about? Are we talking about the OEMs that are serving big enterprise customers? Or are you targeting some of these big enterprises and doing sort of custom work for them?

Yes. So I would say the short answer, it's both. When you look at where we're currently positioned in enterprise today, we've got an industry-leading position on the storage side with the leading OEMs and the opportunity for us to take the strong networking capability and position we've established with the hyperscalers and leverage that into the current enterprise OEMs, that's a significant opportunity in itself. But it can span beyond the OEMs when you look at large enterprises that are adopting disaggregated solutions, that is a significant opportunity for us, and it's one, frankly, that is largely untapped. And it's an area that we'll be organizing and focusing around more in the future.

Okay. Great. And are you, in some respects, actually competing with some of the -- you talked about the ODMs, but in terms of your own OEM suppliers, is there some sort of inherent conflict there?

Ultimately, we've been -- so the answer is we always aim to enable our customers. So we're not aiming here to compete with our OEM customers, but enable them in those various channels. When you look at some of our ODM competitors, they have a formal sales channel. They have a brand. They have OS software. We leave that to our customers, and we look to enable them on those fronts.

Your next question comes from Valery Heckel from CIBC World Markets.

Yes. I'm on for Todd Coupland. I wanted to ask you about Celestica's M&A priorities. Now that the company's transformation is complete, can you talk about what your appetite is like for future M&A? And if there are any particular end markets you may be prioritizing as potential targets?

Yes, it's great, Valery, nice to hear you. Yes. So we're pleased with the M&A track record we've been having, and I'll go through maybe our priorities a little bit and then talk about the end markets. Our primary focus right now is on free cash flow generation in, what we've already mentioned, at the very dynamic environment. As we generate that free cash flow, we will be focused on paying down debt. That being said, our balance sheet remains very strong. We do have the ability, both the balance sheet capabilities as well as management capacity to execute another transaction if the right target emerges. We talked a little bit about the very tight filter that we apply. So we will evaluate a lot and we'll execute a select few. We want to make sure that the targets that we're looking at are aligned with our strategic road maps, and where we are comfortable investing in organically is in Lifecycle Solutions. So within our ATS end market and within HPS. And we do have targets within our funnel that span across ATS and HPS. And so we'll continue to evaluate against other alternatives. But I'd say in the immediate term, we would likely be looking to apply extra free cash flow toward debt paydown, but we will continue to evaluate target for it as they come up.

Your next question comes from Paul Steep from Scotia Capital.

Great. Maybe, I guess, for Jason. Jason, could you talk a little bit about -- I think it's clear, but it may not be fully out there in terms of the evolution of HPS, the shift in terms of how we want to think about the mix between storage, networking and compute and maybe how you'd see that shifting over time in terms of where we're maybe heading based on the bookings that have been secured in the past year?

Sure. Paul, when you look at -- from our particular history, where we started 10-plus years ago, we called it a JDM business. And it started in storage for us because of where we could differentiate, where we could focus on higher complexity technologies. And it was back to enabling customers. That moved into the networking space. So storage and networking have been big opportunities. That's where we've been building our business over the 10, 11 years or so. And then it's now moved into the compute side of things. And while we can compete on a, what I would call, a scaled server level, we've chosen to focus more on the niche applications on the compute side where there's more differentiation. And as we look forward, when you look at the traditional data center more than, call it, 50% of the spend or so, it's likely going to be on the compute side and then the balance is going to be split between networking and storage. And -- moving forward, I'm not sure that the splits are going to change a lot, but where the opportunities are, particularly the large-scale data centers, networking is going to remain a big piece of that as we move from 400 to 800G. We've got a very strong incumbency position and that's something we plan to defend and win in, and we think we're well positioned to do that. We do see storage being a big opportunity for us. I mean external storage has largely been more in the enterprise side. But as storage requirements continue to grow with all of the streaming, the photos, the music, cloud adoption, storage requirements are growing. And so the hyperscalers are looking for ways to more efficiently manage storage in the data center, and we think that's a significant opportunity for us, in particular, leveraging the strong enterprise storage capability that we've developed now over the last 10 years. And then just some commentary around the compute side of the equation. x86 has been the primary driver for the large-scale data centers for many years now. But with the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning, and complex and growing requirements for these workloads, we think proprietary compute is going to grow in support of those growing requirements. And proprietary compute bodes well for our value proposition and our offering because there's a lot of customization and optimization that goes into those types of solutions where they're aiming to solve for specific workloads within the data center. So again, another strong area that we believe that will exist to differentiate, and it will be an area of focus for us in the future as well.

Great. Just maybe one other clarification for you, Jason as well. Just to help people differentiate from the traditional CCS business, obviously, the solution nature is the part that differentiates. Is there anything else unique in these commercial agreements or arrangements that whether they're may be longer term, different terms, different payments. Anything like that, that you'd want to call out that those of us that aren't running the business would want to be maybe aware of that makes you even more durable?

Yes. So I would say -- the -- one of the things we focus on is customizing our engagements, right? So some of our engagements will have unique elements based on the customer that it is. That's one of the things that has helped us frankly, grow in the HPS space. As it relates to -- versus an EMS type of solution, I mean, we're driving more of the innovation. We talked about our evolution from JDM to HPS. When we made that shift, that was the point at which our customers are looking to us now to drive hardware innovation. So when you're driving the hardware innovation, the depth of the engagement and the partnerships is significant because our customers are focusing more on software, services, their applications and they're relying on us to drive that hardware innovation as well as the ecosystem behind it. So there's deeper engagement, it's stickier and we're collaborating extensively on looking forward. I mean, the rate and pace of technology evolution is rapid. And so as we're working with these industry leaders and we have this incumbency position, we really started to build processes that allow us to operate successfully with these customers at the rate and pace in which they move, which is quite quick. So I would say in summary, the engagement, it's a deeper engagement that requires more strategic interlock and more forward planning as we execute current programs and plan for the future. And we believe that that's an area of differentiation for us remains thought leadership, innovation, coupled with, call it, our enterprise class execution that bodes well for, I think, our HPS business moving forward.

Jason, one other thing I would add to that, just a thing to add on is because it's our innovation, our designs, it's our supply base, and we have [indiscernible] control, which creates leverage of the suppliers. We're actually designing these suppliers in. And Jason talked about, during his presentation, the ecosystem of suppliers that we have is largely enabled because of our design relationships that we've established with them, which gives us some leverage in terms of availability and pricing.

Great. And then just a clarification for yourself, Rob or Mandeep, the 10% 2025 objective, does that assume M&A? Or is M&A -- should we think M&A is additive to these targets?

Paul, we believe that we can get to the $2 of EPS organically. That being said, if we were going to be looking at M&A, it would be EPS accretive and that would be after paying for the debt and incurring that interest expense. But we do believe we can get to the $2 on an organic basis.

Great. Last one, and I'll pass the line. Just Rob, how would we think about if you guys were to look at something in the area of power or cooling as it relates to data center in terms of adding maybe even yet another leg to the HPS stool? Or is that maybe a bridge too far?

That's a great question. I'm going to ask Jason to address that one.

Yes. And Paul, if I understand your question correctly, I mean, in terms of -- are you talking about the data center holistically or -- because one of the areas...

I'm talking about -- Yes, acquiring like an existing producer of power cooling assets that would feed you right into the data center market and further build that out in HPS.

Yes. I would -- so an area of focus for us remains more on -- less on the data center as an infrastructure unit itself, and our power packaging and cooling areas of opportunity and differentiation are focused on the rack level solutions and the subsystems inside those racks that power the data center. That is a growing area of opportunity and differentiation with these next-generation technologies that are coming along. Cooling these systems is going to become more challenging through traditional air cooling methods. And we're exploring areas around liquid cooling and optimal ways to cool the racks and the subsystems within. So that is a big area of focus and I think differentiation and opportunity for us in the future state. But nothing I would say beyond that.

Paul -- only thing I would add, Paul, to that is while we have looked at various areas of power, we are looking at areas that have the largest available TAM and available market. And so while supporting directly the data center is an opportunity, there are other areas of larger TAM beyond the data center that we would look to.

Your next question comes from Paul Treiber from RBC Capital Markets.

Just wanted to follow up on a previous question about the Capital Equipment business. And you mentioned that you have good visibility through '22 and '23. Overall, how should we think about the cycle within the Capital Equipment business in regards to your outlook to 2025? I mean, have you taken that into account? Do you see it as not a material factor for your longer-term outlook?

Paul, so we've been looking at the UBS reports. As you know, the UBS just increased their growth expectations for 2022. They brought it from 14% to 19%. When reading the reports and also talking to our customers, more importantly, they're seeing that these advanced process nodes, [indiscernible] and 10 [ nanometer ], they expect that to drive some expected CapEx strength from 2022 through 2023 strong. And then maintain that at those levels with some modest growth from 23% to 25%. So we're seeing some strong growth, I think, right now for the next several years and then we think some modest growth thereafter. So I think we're going to have some robust markets. I would also remind you that we have been growing faster than the market over the last several years and plan on doing so moving forward. That has been driven by market share gains and higher levels we've invested a lot of vertical integration. So we have machining capability. We have a very extensive footprint as we mentioned on the call, South Korea being one that's growing very quickly for us. And we're also growing in multiple different verticals such as robotics and other broad capabilities within our Capital Equipment business. So we expect that we'll be growing at market or [indiscernible] market rates over the next several years.

Okay. That's helpful. A couple of questions on the outlook for $2 in EPS in 2025. One is, are you assuming share buybacks or not? And would you see share buybacks as an upside to that number? And then how should we think about overall revenue growth to achieve that $2 in EPS? I mean, obviously, we can all do the math to try to get the amount that's inferred, but I'd rather just hear it from you in terms of how do we think about total revenue growth.

Yes. Paul, Mandeep here. Well, I'll start with the revenue, actually. So as Lifecycle Solutions is about 60% of the overall revenue, and we're looking to grow it at 10% or more. For the remainder of the portfolio, we're growing in the targeted areas that we want to. But I would assume for now a relatively flat non-Lifecycle Solutions portfolio. And so that would imply about 6% growth in 2022. And then, of course, that number would grow with Lifecycle Solutions growth as well. We believe that we can do the $2 of EPS organically, as I mentioned earlier, but also without the need for share buybacks. But of course, we're going to take these things into account along the way. So would we ever borrow money to do a share buyback? Of course, it would have to be accretive and we'd have to be able to pay for the interest expense. But we don't need share buybacks, and we don't need M&A necessarily to get to the $2. But we're going to be open to looking at different things along the way as well.

And lastly -- and just on the outlook through 2025, how do we think about free cash flow? And obviously, you didn't guide to it, but how do you think about free cash flow conversion changing from historically over the last couple of years versus out several years?

Yes. So we've been pleased with the free cash flow generation that we've had over the last number of years, almost $500 million in the last 3 years alone, 12 straight quarters of positive free cash flow. I know you know our industry very well. And so it's interesting that as we're growing, of course, we're consuming cash because we're building up working capital. And so we may be comfortable generating just the target levels that we have if we're showing good top line growth. And then in years where that top line growth will moderate a little bit, we would expect some of that inventory to unwind and turn into excess free cash flow. But I think the way to think about it right now is that we would continue to target a base level of $100 million each year in the next 3 to 4 years. And that would be tempered a little bit depending on if it's a high growth year or a more moderated growth year.

Your next question comes from Rob Young from Canaccord.

I was curious if you could talk about some of the areas of the business which remain a drag on margins relative to that 4% to 5% range? I think, of the A&D business, I think is subscale and probably a drag and then perhaps display also subscale and a drag. And then CCS more beyond the HPS components, I think would also still be low 4%. Would that be a good summary? And then if you could maybe talk about those 3 and where they might go over the next couple of years towards 2025 in your targets?

Yes. Rob, yes, you're not too far off. So as we mentioned, let's start with CCS. The HPS portfolio is accretive to the company's average and therefore the non-HPS portfolio is not. Within ATS, Capital Equipment is performing above its target margin range right now because of the very high level of volume leverage that we're seeing, and that's above 6%. And A&D, because it is performing at a prepandemic levels right now -- or excuse me, 40% below pre-pandemic levels right now. And we've made the conscious decision to maintain the investment is operating below our target margin range of 5% to 6%. But what I would say is that as A&D continues to grow, we would expect it to return back into the target margin range. As Capital Equipment starts to maybe normalize from a growth perspective and not show very high double-digit growth rate, we expect in time it would come back into the target margin range. And we do believe that every business within ATS can operate within its target margin range. The one thing I will say though, and I think it's important to know is we performed very well as a company because of the diversification of the portfolio that we have. And so while we may have some businesses that perform less than the company's average, they perform a -- they benefit the company tremendously, whether from a utilization perspective, allowing us to drive good levels of productivity, having higher levels of build material control with our suppliers and driving productivity from a materials perspective, they benefit the other businesses in other ways. And so we are very pleased with the global diversification of our footprint, and we're very pleased that we have these various types of businesses which allow us to gain leverage both within a site, but also with our suppliers.

Okay. That's very helpful. And maybe just a broad question on the distinction between the strategy over the next couple of years and your ODM competitors. In the discussion, you highlighted some areas where you're adopting some of their methods and some areas where you're differentiated? Is there an easy way to differentiate where Celestica is going from the ODMs? And maybe within that, explain why it is that some of this business couldn't be taken by the ODM competitors if you're shifting more in that direction rather than some of the EMS competitors.

Rob, as we look at continuing to grow and scale of the business, I would describe -- we're refining our operating model around HPS to include, what I'd call -- what we would consider best-in-class on the ODM side, and what we consider best-in-class on the EMS side. I mean remember, on EMS, very customer-focused, customer-centric, customer enabled. And then on the ODM side, it's going to be around scaling. It's going to be around the portfolio. It's going to be around driving innovation with next-generation technologies. And in terms of sustaining competitive advantage and differentiation, we talked about the IP portfolio growing. We're approaching 300 [indiscernible] in that space. And frankly, the strong leadership positions we've established with hyperscalers and with the OEMs, this incumbency position, I think, positions us well as we together look at next-generation technologies and specifically how they want to adopt those technologies to support their specific workloads. Scale ODMs are very good at developing a platform that can be adopted by multiple parties. Where we're focused is demonstrating proficiency in a technology at a core level, and we'll do that with a platform, but then taking that platform and customizing it for a specific workload leveraging this ecosystem that we've been developing over the 10-plus years we've been doing the HPS business and driving that level of innovation with our customers. And as that -- as the business grows and our engagements grow, I think there's more and more trust that develops over time. And with that trust comes more responsibility and opportunities to grow. And it -- I think that's one of the -- some of the key elements that will leverage -- we lean on to sustain our differentiation and competitive advantage.

Okay. That's really helpful. And one more question -- go ahead, sorry, Rob.

Yes. So Rob, one thing I would add to Jason's comment is we have a very expansive footprint when it comes to being able to produce our HPS products. ODMs tend to be quite concentrated in various parts of Asia. And as our customers look to kind of mitigate risk, geopolitical risks and create supply chain resiliency, we can offer them those solutions, and that's been a very successful offering for us.

Yes. That's a great point, Rob. And just to build that out a little bit more, Rob, for you. In '21, we stood up 3 new HPS engineering locations. So we now have 5 globally. So the 3 we stood were Chennai, India, Santa Clara, and then Richardson, Texas. And in addition to that, from a manufacturing network perspective, we added Richardson, Texas in '21, which is just under 1 million square feet. So between the strong global footprint we had, the additions we made in '21, we are well positioned to create the resilience our customers are looking for. And that is an advantage. A lot of our customers are looking for multi-node solutions where you'll take the same program and you will do certain elements of the design in certain areas, and you might support the manufacturing in multiple nodes to create the business continuity and resilience that they're looking for.

Okay. Last question for me would be around this evolution of the data center business beyond the hyperscaler. I'm just curious about the evolution, how that's come to be. Is that the adoption of hyperscaler methods that you have a unique position to offer into the broader enterprise market? Or is that something that's happening in the enterprise market that you see as a widening of your own total addressable market? And then the second part of that question would be around the sales and go-to-market. Does that require -- obviously, you've given operating margin targets, but I mean does it require a build-out of a different sales sort of go-to-market? And then I'll pass the line.

Yes. So I'll just comment on the -- it was more the latter of the 2 that you had commented on. I mean there's -- in terms of the enterprise opportunity, it's really expanding and leveraging the current motion that we already know well and have had success with our hyperscalers into different technologies. And what we're seeing with some of the OEMs, there's more focus on software and services. If you look at storage as an example, more and more of the storage leaders are focusing on software-defined solutions. They still need hardware to underpin and enable those, and that's where we would come in into play there. On the networking side and enterprise, there's not too many enterprises out there that are going to leverage a 400G or an 800G next-generation switch the way a hyperscaler would. But when you look at the 10G, the 25G to 100G type switching solutions, they're leveraging more and more of those, and we have a full suite of those switching solutions that we've been building over time that stemmed from everything from 1G all the way to 400G and beyond as we get into 800G now. And then on the compute side, it remains more focused on edge computing is going to be a big opportunity, and that would play on both the hyperscaler and the enterprise customer portfolios that we have and that we're targeting as the world and standards start to develop around taking advantage of the edge opportunity. And basically, think of it as almost data centers in a box on the edge. So we have and we are developing our teams in the go-to-markets to tap into what's been a largely untapped market for us, and that will be an opportunity for us to develop moving forward.

Your next question comes from Daniel Chan from TD Securities.

Mandeep, you talked about growth being somewhat inhibited by the supply constraints you're seeing now. How should we think about your investments, both OpEx and CapEx? As you get line of sight to an improving supply environment, should we expect a period of time where you start investing aggressively to reach those growth targets as you get better comfort around the supply environment?

Yes. Dan. Thanks for the question. I'll highlight a couple of things. One is that Rob had mentioned, we had record bookings last year. And also that we have shared that our growth demand profile for 2022 is well in excess of $6.3 billion. With that backdrop, we are investing right now to support those ramps. And so we do expect that our CapEx spend this year is going to be higher than what you've seen in the last couple of years as we put in more capacity for those customers. Demand that we are not able to fulfill right now because of the supply chain environment, to this point, has not been perishable. And we have been seeing a push at rate. And so as we invest in those programs, we do continue to -- we'll refresh our business case and whether or not those revenues happen as we would like or if it's going to push out by 3 or 4 quarters, we'll make sure that the business case still makes sense. And in most cases, when it does, we will make that investment. And so I would say that we're going to be investing regardless of the supply chain environment and we have the balance sheet to do that.

Okay. That's helpful. And then switching gears a little bit. Good to hear that the PCI cross-sell discussions are going really well. I just want to get a little bit of color on that. Where have your customers expressed the most interest in PCI capabilities? Maybe talk about the competitive dynamics for those capabilities and the economics associated with them?

Dan, good timing actually. We just, I think, 2 days ago, posted our first synergy win between Celestica and PCI. This was an instance and we see this moving forward, where PCI was able to support a Celestica customer, but by supporting their design and also supporting some manufacturing within the footprint in Indonesia and that provided them the lowest landed cost. So moving forward, that's what we're seeing a lot of. We're seeing the design platforms that PCI has and the capabilities that PCI has plus their low-cost footprint being directly relatable to many of our customers in the Celestica base. Similarly, on the flip side, we're helping PCI reach customers where they don't have footprint or don't have relationships, specifically in North America and Europe. And we have a very lengthy and long sales pipeline pursuing -- that we're pursuing right now.

And your next question comes from James Suva from Citigroup.

Congratulations so much on the details. I wanted to say also, real quick, when you mentioned that your EPS is looking so good and kind of the best it's been in about a decade, does that make you shift your capital allocation more and more to, say, M&A and shifting the portfolio to the higher profit margin items as opposed to, say, stock buybacks or things like that? It just seems like your higher-value stuff is really starting to catch some early endings of great growth here and into investor minds.

Jim, nice to hear from you. I'll mention a few things. The margins that we hit last year of 4.2% were the highest in the company's history, which has been great. And then the EPS that we are lining for this year between $1.55 and $1.75, when achieved, will be the highest EPS in the company's history. And so to your point, we are very pleased on how the business has been performing. We're focused on continuing to invest into capabilities to support the growth that we have been seeing and we believe is continuing to be in front of us. And we have the balance sheet to do that. From a share buyback perspective, we have been active in the market over the last couple of years, primarily because of the undervaluation of the stock. You know better than anybody that it's really a combination of EPS in our multiple, and our multiple has been severely depressed over the last 3 years or so as we have been undergoing this transformation. We have the balance sheet, and we believe that we should be able to generate the cash flow that allows us to have optionality. If we see that the stock is disconnected from the fundamentals, and actually primarily that means the multiple is significantly depressed relative to our historical performance or relative to our peer group despite our performance, we will come in and act and buy back shares. And we think it's a good way of getting cash back to shareholders. But we also think that shareholders, the feedback that we are getting, want us to continue to invest for the future. And because we have a strong track record of returning cash to shareholders over the last 10 years, probably $1 billion or more, we think that we're going to continue to be balanced even if we hold off on buybacks over the next few years so that we can invest. So we want to maintain optionality, but our focus is primarily on investing in the business.

And there are no further questions at this time. I will turn the call back over to Rob for closing remarks.

Thank you all for joining today, and thank you for your thoughtful questions. We successfully completed the transformation phase of our journey. And as you can see, we're clearly focused on profitable growth enabled by a diversified and more resilient portfolio bolstered by a talented management team. We are on track to meet or exceed our commitments for the first quarter, and we are excited about our future. Thank you again for joining us today, and we'll talk to you in a few weeks when we post our Q1 results.

This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.