Flex Ltd. (FLEX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

My name is Ruplu Bhattacharya, and I cover EMS companies, electronics manufacturing services companies as part of Bank of America's IT hardware and supply chain equity research team. Today, we have the team from Flex, and I'm honored to have CEO, Revathi Advaithi here. Revathi, as you know, has joined the company. I think she joined in 2019, and she's done a phenomenal job on 2 fronts. One is like amazing job on margins, which have really, really gone from the low end of the spectrum to the high end of the spectrum but she's also created a lot of value for shareholders. You may remember the NEXTracker acquisition and then divestiture. So Revathi, thank you so much for coming today.

No problem. Thanks for having us.

I think a key topic today will be the CEC business, and we're honored to have Rob Campbell, who leads that segment here. CEC, for those of you who don't know, is the Communications, Enterprise and Cloud. Even I have to look at the acronyms. So thanks so much for coming. I think we're going to have a lot of discussion on that. And then we also have Michelle Simmons, who has just joined the company as Head of IR. So Michelle, thanks for coming today.

So Revathi, we have a lot of -- a lot of things to talk about, but I want to ask you about your vision for the data center business. Like how are you positioning Flex to compete in this market? What is your strategy in data center? And where do you think -- what are some of the competitive advantages that Flex has?

Yes. Maybe I'll start, Ruplu, with kind of just talking about our vision for data centers where we started with a few years ago and kind of where we are today. So we are one of the only suppliers today in the data center space that does both IT integration and power products, both. Usually, people will do one or the other, but not both together. And what put us in this position was this was well before power became a thing for data centers and NVIDIA became a thing and all that, and AI was a topic. Flex had an embedded power business that was basically designing and building the power that powers the chip. And having come from the energy space myself and companies like Eaton, I'm very intrigued by the fact that, hey, that was not done by any of the electrical folks and this vision that someday, power intensity in data centers is going to become a big thing, and the people who are building that power and then finding a way to integrate that more seamlessly will become critical. Because when you think about data center customers, the folks who design the IT infrastructure are different than the folks who design the power infrastructure and the 2 almost never meet, right? And so the view was hey, imagine the person who's going to put all this together because as power becomes more intense, cooling becomes more intense, how you build this and scale this is going to become really important. So our business really is uniquely positioned with the sense that we build the IT infrastructure and we build the -- design and build the cooling associated with it. We design all the power that powers the chip, and then we design and build all the power that's coming into the data center itself. And today, hyperscalers are putting that technology more and more together. They weren't doing that 4 years ago, by the way. They weren't thinking about this. But now they are because when you're going from a 30-kilowatt rack to a 1-megawatt rack, the complexities of it is pretty significant. You have to bring in people who are understanding power, how to cool it all of that to build this infrastructure out. And so that's how our thesis started. And today, it's playing out because we're in those technology conversations and then we build that end-to-end. It's around a $5 billion business for us, and we have kind of -- we have said that before that in our earnings call that it's growing 35% this year, so really well ahead of everything that you're hearing from the space itself and then is very beneficial from a margin standpoint as an accretive to Flex overall. So that's a little snapshot for what Flex does in power -- from data centers itself, very, very unique positioning today that is becoming more of a reality from a technology interplay.

Yes. No, that's a great overview. So let's build on that. So you talked about some staggering growth rates. I think you -- for the data center business last year, you grew 50% year-on-year. Like you said, you've guided 35% year-on-year. Help investors get comfortable with the long-term high growth rate in these segments. Like what are the secular drivers in compute and power -- in cloud and power that are actually going to sustain these levels of growth?

I'd say the most important thing is look at what's happening with AI, right? I mean, we have barely kind of touched the tip of that in terms of the growth that you're seeing from AI and what the potential could be. I would say we believe in that macro pretty significantly. We believe that what the world is going to see from an AI infrastructure build-out over the next decade is going to be fairly significant, and that is going to be compute hungry and power hungry. And I would say nobody is going to debate that macro. I was in a CEO conference last week, and everybody unanimously says how we use AI, we've barely started, right? You see that in our own lives. And so we believe in the macro of the AI infrastructure build-out. And we also believe in the fact that hey, power density is going to be super critical and is going to be a part of this build-out that's going to be pretty significant. I'd say that's why you should get comfortable with it. When we gave our long-term guidance a couple of years ago -- last year, sorry, we said 20% growth through the cycle. That's because, in general, we are conservative. And then we did 50% last year and then we did -- we're going to do 35% this year. But the view is a long term, even if this is a 20% growth business, that's fairly fantastic, I would say, in terms of what you're seeing in this space.

So let's talk about the relative growth rates between power and compute. I think this year, you guided compute to be a little bit -- or cloud to be a little bit lower than 35% and power to be higher. When you think on these 2 end markets long term, do you think power outgrows cloud or vice versa?

I don't think it will be a one versus the -- I think the power growth is going to be related to capacity additions. And power could have grown significantly last year also, but we were flat out of capacity. This year, some of those capacity additions are coming on board, which enables us to drive the growth. So it would be all related to how much capacity at what pace can you add in to deliver that power. So it's not one versus the other. And then Rob's business is bigger. So it's also the larger numbers, right, in terms of growth rate.

Okay. So we're going to go as deep as we can into the power business and definitely into the cloud business. But I want to talk on one higher-level item, which is everybody is talking about tariffs now. Can you give us your thoughts on what you're seeing in terms of pull-ins or end market demand impact from tariffs? And how much of your manufacturing is in the U.S. versus in Mexico versus in China? And how is Flex being impacted because of tariffs?

Yes. I would say that if you think about tariffs, in the last cycle of tariffs that came up 5, 6 years ago and everything that happened with COVID and supply chain resiliency, the world started migrating from a supply chain manufacturing perspective. So there has been a tremendous amount of transition over the last 5, 6 years. And you can see that in Flex's numbers, whether it's in terms of our square footage and footprint, right? We have moved more towards North America. We've reduced our Asia footprint, whether it's from our revenue growth, you've seen that. So what is happening in this cycle is that continuation, but some acceleration in customers who have been slower in that transition. So we are getting a lot of customer calls. I would say, who want to go faster than they were going or who want to -- who weren't thinking about it are now thinking. And our challenge is, we have added a lot of North American footprint. We have to be picky in terms of where we want to grow and why we want to grow. So we're looking for complex products, long-term stickiness, better financial results for Flex overall. Those are the kinds of customers we like to grow with. So tariffs and unfortunately, may be a bad thing for a lot of people, but the supply chain resiliency conversation, it creates turns out to be a good thing for folks like us. But in general, I would say, our view on this is continue with the footprint build-out that we've been doing in North America and help our customers accelerate that transition.

Maybe just a quick follow-up on that. I mean, do you think everyone is focused on manufacturing in the U.S. How realistic is that? I mean are you seeing customers trying to move into the U.S.? And what needs to happen to really enable that shift in manufacturing?

I'd say definitely in complex products that are difficult to make and hard to transport, you do see that migration happening in the U.S. that may not be that labor-intensive, right? Consumer products, all of those things that make it in the news cycle, I would say, less so, right? That's really harder to do because labor is constrained in the U.S. But Rob's business, yes, lots of conversations happening around continuing to build out the U.S. footprint. Power business, the same thing, but my belief is on consumer business and all -- it's more the hype cycle than reality.

Okay. Well, that's a great segment. So let's talk about the CEC business. Rob, for those of us in the audience who don't know this business, talk about like what exactly does this segment do? What do you manufacture? Who do you manufacture for? And if you can talk about like different segments within this, the cloud business versus networking versus enterprise?

Sure. I think it's a great place to start. So as you mentioned, CEC stands for Communications, Enterprise and Cloud. And I think Revathi mentioned it's the largest business unit in Flex. So we'll take each one of them. The communications piece of ours. And by the way, we've also said that's the largest of these 3 business line is the communication piece. That is really comprised of 2 major segments. One I would say is the, call it, the networking piece. And by networking, I mean optical networking, IP networking, fixed networking and those things. So think servers -- or excuse me, think switches, think routers, think optical switches and things like that. So that's one piece of the business that's there. The other major piece of the communications piece is the wireless piece. So I think telecommunications, think RAN, think open RAN, radios and so forth. So that's the other piece. And then the final piece on that is kind of an up-and-coming segment, and I'd even call it what, but satellite communications. So SATCOM is becoming quite important to us. We have a number of customers in that SATCOM space. So that all falls under the communication piece, those pieces of the business. The enterprise piece, for us, it's a combination of -- it's the main server storage. So think your basic servers, think basic storage, that's probably the bread and butter in the enterprise space. It also includes the silicon providers out there. So as they have -- go to more and more board-level products instead of chips, right, we service them out of the enterprise segment. And also, if they're doing NIC cards, usually the low-end NIC cards, most of it's the silicon providers that do that. We don't really do a lot of that, but as they're coming up with the newer, right, AI-enabled NIC cards that have the bigger processors on there, taking the load off the CPUs that falls in there. And then the final piece that's in there is the cybersecurity. So we provide the hardware to just about all the top cybersecurity companies out there. So it's enterprise. And then that takes us to cloud. So cloud for us consists of the hyperscalers. That's where we put most of our focus on. And with that, it's the U.S. or Western hyperscalers. And we also deal with what we call it Tier 2, sorry, maybe just a level below the hyperscaler as well. That falls into our cloud business. And the other thing I'd say is we -- about 6 months ago, acquired a liquid cooling company called JetCool. So JetCool, their liquid cooling, direct-to-chip liquid cooling and CDUs, that falls into CEC. And it actually applies -- you think for sure, right, the silicon guys use it, the hyperscaler guys, and now even write those enterprise, the high-end switches, routers and so forth, they're all going liquid cooling as well.

Okay. So let's focus on the cloud business a little, and I think there's some confusion maybe with investors. I know most investors know that you have one large hyperscaler. But how broad is your business in this hyperscale community? And can you talk about exactly what are you guys building in that cloud business? Are you building individual servers? Are you building boards? Are you building full racks? Give us a sense for the type of business you're doing?

It's interesting. We had a number of meetings today and so forth, and there's this conception that we've got one large. So we don't. I think that's pretty true in the EMS space. Most of my EMS competitors have one large. That's not true with us, right? We have of the 4 U.S. hyperscalers, we have engagements with all 4 of them. We have very, very deep engagements with 2 of them. So we've got probably a unique position in the way that we've engaged with them. So that's what I say is number one. What do we provide for them? It is evolving. By evolving, I mean as we provide different vertical integration opportunities for them, the hyperscalers are basically integrating more and more of our vertical options for them. So we may just have started off building a server board for them. And we may end up just doing or start off just doing rack integration for another, which, by the way, for I think a lot of folks in the EMA space -- EMS space that's what they're doing, one or the other. But we will take that server board, for instance, and it actually goes into enclosure or a tray, and we'll actually build that enclosure tray bare metal, right? That may go into a rack, we actually build the racks that go in there. And then there's various components in there, mechanical components that go into the rack and the board. We provide those through a company that we have called Coreworks. And all the way, if you continue up the scale, right, we'll take a rack and do a payload configured rack, which is configuring with all the power that's required to do it. And then we'll do, in some cases, a full L11 rack build integration and so forth. And then I mentioned before, cooling, right, so we could provide the cooling, not only the cooling, the direct-to-chip going in there, not only the CDUs of that, but the actual racks, right? So we'll manufacture these racks and so forth, handle liquid cooling. And then there's a number of services that we'll provide with these things as well. So we might be building a power distribution cabinet and then you have to do the commission of that cabinet and so forth. And I'm just kind of going through some of the various things that we offer, the hyperscalers. And what I can tell you is every quarter, every year that goes by, the relationship we have, they tend to engage in more and more of our products and our services in addition to the EMS work that we do for them.

So a couple of months back, there were some media articles that hyperscalers are reassessing their data center plans or maybe holding off on new leases. So how should we think about Flex' CEC segment revenues. Are you directly related to CapEx spend? I mean, how correlated is your revenue to that? And then the second part of the question is GPUs versus custom ASICs. So a lot of hyperscalers are now focused on their own ASIC, their own silicon. How is your business trending? I mean, do you see opportunities to do both standard GPU servers as well as custom ASIC services? How do you see that evolving?

Sure. I'll take both of us. So the first one, you mentioned how does CapEx, right, affect us. I can tell you there's definitely a correlation, right? If the hyperscaler is going to spend more in CapEx, there's probably a pretty good chance that they're going to spend more with us. That said, we certainly don't get a vote on what their CapEx is going to be. But as I mentioned, the type of products and services that we provide, most of what they're going to do from a CapEx perspective is going to somehow entail Flex. So we definitely see a correlation there. What I can tell you is just from what we're seeing. You referred to some of the stories and so forth and I think those stories were followed up by a few of them trying to give some clarification, is we're not seeing any slowdown, right, in demand, in forecast and so forth. So we're not seeing that for any of these folks. As far as why some of those things came out, I'll let them address that. As far as the second question on custom silicon versus OEM GPUs and so forth, we're heavily involved with the hyperscalers on both. And we're actually quite agnostic as to do we do or do we prefer doing custom silicon or off-the-shelf silicon. We get engaged with both. We're involved with the silicon providers and provided the embedded power that is needed to power those from there. We're engaged with them as far as the cooling that's required from there. And if it's custom silicon coming, it's been developed from one of the hyperscalers themselves, the exact same thing. We'll build the board for them, but we'll also talk to them about the embedded power. And I can tell you that we have, from the power side, very heavy engagement with all 4 hyperscalers, right, on power products that we're providing for them. So the net-net of all that is we are very engaged and very happy to work with them on both custom silicon as well as off-the-shelf silicon.

Okay. Let's transition to talking on margins. And one of the things that I was surprised and pleasantly surprised was that you guys are guiding to 6% operating margin a year ahead of time. It's strange, Revathi, I always thought of reliability as the end markets that have higher margins, but agility has been producing higher margins than reliability. So how should we think about the long-term margin potential for these 2 segments? And then Rob, if you can talk about within agility, how should we think about the relative margins for this cloud business versus networking and versus enterprise?

I'd say just in terms of the margin story across Flex and across each of the 6 business units, we are really focused on kind of fixing the mix of the portfolio within each of the business units, which definitely drives a margin improvement. And then there's relentless focus on disciplined execution and operational excellence that drives margin improvement, right? So how I think about margin long term is that those 2 factors won't change because we'll continue to shift mix. You see that how we've done that in data centers. Within health, we continue to shift mix. We won more med devices, less med equipment. So in almost every business segment, we're trying to shift mix in terms of which customers we go after and why. So overall, the margin story should continue to, I would say, evolve the way it's evolved for Flex overall. The reliability versus agility story, I'd say, is the way you should think about it is that, yes, reliability should have better margins longer term. I think it's had its challenges, right? I mean when you think everything is going well, the automotive segment kind of starts to move around, which is higher fixed cost so it drives kind of margin challenges. And then I would say our health story has been fantastic from a margin perspective. And then our renewables business, which is also in reliability, has seen a pretty significant impact over the last few years. So there are some fundamental drivers that are compressing margin for reliability that as you overcome those challenges, it should have tailwind for reliability margins. And then agility margins, I would say, driven by 2 significant things. One is Rob's data center business and how that's growing not just in terms of accretive margins, but the things he's doing for integration and vertical integration and bringing things like racks and cooling in. But even in areas like consumer products and lifestyle, we try to only address customers who will give us services because that drives end-to-end margins. So we're really driving this idea of how do you service a customer and who gives you value in all our business units. So I say that our margin story has just started, at least in my view, and it has a long ways to go, but you can talk about data center margins for CEC and kind of how that's going.

Sure. I think it's important to note that it's very basic when you say it, but the more complex a product is, right, the more value Flex is going to bring to the customer, and more value typically equals more margin. So you can just go from that to say, in the data center space, that is a product that is typically pretty complex, pretty leading edge and so forth. We're providing a lot of value. And therefore, the margins that we get in the data center, as Revathi mentioned, are accretive, right, to our margins as a whole. Part of what helps drive that in addition to the complexity of the products is some of the things that Revathi just mentioned in our consumer and lifestyle products, things like that, is when you can take those complex products and now start adding services to it. So in services, we might be doing direct fulfillment, we might be doing configure to order, we might be building a product for and doing commissioning, we might be doing decommissioning and repair and warranty. And these services all are, again, significantly accretive. So as we do more and more which all of those, right, are opportunities for us, which we're capitalizing on in the data center space. And then you can also start layering in the actual product portion where it's branded product with IP from Flex. So whether that's in the liquid cooling space, whether that's in the embedded power space, whether that's in the critical power space, all that helps add, right, accretive margin.

So that's a good transition. Let's talk about the power business. Like when you say you have a product portfolio, typically, EMS companies have shied away from having their own products because they don't want to compete against OEMs, but this is different. I mean, so what exactly -- can you talk to us about what are the products that you're providing in terms of this power business? What is the target customer set? And how do you plan to grow this power business?

Do you want to take it?

Sure. I'll take it. So I would say the customer set is pretty broad, but we really have focused a lot into the data center space. So whether that's the hyperscalers, the colos, the Tier 2s, that really is the space that's there. And your comment earlier about trying not to compete and so forth your customers, I mean that's probably a reason why don't we build and brand our own switches, right? Well, let me tell you, I think I probably build the majority of the switches in the world today for just about every switch, I would absolutely be competing against my biggest and best customers out there. In the power space, while some of the major players are customers to Flex, they're also supplier to Flex, it's not that deep relationship in there so the competition is not as head on, if it makes sense to say that. So in that space, one of the things that we've seen is, as we've really gone up and we've used this little phrase, from grid to chip, and we really are. So when you're coming off the grid and using mid-voltage switch gear and then low-voltage switchgear and the data center with busways and then power distribution cabinets and metering and all the way until you get to the rack and using power distribution cabinets, power shelves and then the embedded power, just that entire flow from the grid of the chip, it really puts Flex in a unique position. And when you then couple it, as Revathi started off talking to you, Ruplu with oh, by the way, we also do all the IT portion as well, right, which is what all falls under me. And as power density is going up, and therefore, heat is going up and everything else, all of a sudden now, the electrical portion is having to talk to the IT portion and it's really all flowing together so that the customers, whether it be the hyperscalers or the Tier 2s, they're now having from the time they start deciding what they're going to be doing 2 years from now, they're having to get their power folks together with their IT folks. And oh, by the way, there's really only one company out there that you can call in the room to talk to both pieces. So it's been a big advantage for us.

So we have about 2 minutes left, and I want to cover 2 topics. One is, Rob, talk to us about this consignment business and how does that impact revenues? And then I want to end by, Revathi, you talking to us about what is your vision for Flex? And why should investors invest in Flex now? Is there anything that the market is missing? And how do you plan to create value, whether it's in terms of share buybacks or M&A? What is your view on shareholder returns, capital allocation, how you plan to do that?

So just very quickly on consignment, what I'll say is, look, we meet customers where they want to be. So we have customers that we do full turnkey and all we do is turnkey. We have other customers where we do consignment, a lot of consignment and so forth. And either model works for us, right? We've structured it so that it works for us. What we have stated is that the percentage of our revenue that is being affected by consignment is going up. We've talked about that. It's gone from 11% 2 years ago to, I think, 14% or 20% now. So it's definitely growing. But when we talk about the growth numbers that we have, 50% last year in data center -- by the way, data center is driving the bulk of that, and then 35% this year, those are the numbers after we take out all that consignment revenue, right? So we're able to still have that type of growth even putting in the fact that those consigned revenue is not counted in that.

I'd say my answer would be that if you think about Flex in the manufacturing services space, which is most of contract manufacturing, our goal is to do complex things, charge a premium for it, attach services to it and continue to grow margins and then our productivity journey has just started. On the data center space, the technology migration is unique from a power standpoint, from a cooling standpoint and an IT integration standpoint. We're a $5 billion business today that's growing at 35%. Our goal is to be the technology player in that, that brings those unique products together to solve these kind of heat and power problems that we are seeing today. So we expect that in both areas we want to excel. And in many ways, like I said before, I feel like our margin journey has just started, and we have long ways to go.

And in terms of capital allocation, M&A versus...

I would say it wouldn't change. We have done a really good job of balancing M&A investments with a pretty good share buyback strategy. And we look for value in M&A, and we've done a good job of balancing both, and we'll continue to do that, including a very nice kind of organic CapEx investment that we have built. So I'd say no change in that strategy. And it's delivered great shareholder returns in the last kind of 6 years, and we expect to follow that same playbook.

All right. Great. Well, I mean, look forward to great things from Flex. So Revathi, thank you so much for joining us today. Rob, thanks for all the details. Michelle, thanks for joining. Thank you for being here.

Thanks. Thank you.