Flex Ltd. (FLEX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Kicking off the day with our tech track, our own tech track. I am Melissa Fairbanks. I cover analog semis and IT supply chain. And we are really excited to have Rob Campbell from Flex this morning. He's the President of what they call their CEC business, the Communications Enterprise and Cloud business. Nothing exciting going on there, I'm sure, these days. And then we've also got Michelle Simmons here in the audience, who handles IR for the company. So good morning, Rob. Thank you so much for coming.

Good morning. Thank you for having me here. Excited.

I think you've got a couple of introductory slides, which I think would be very helpful. And then if you -- after that, we'll kick off the Q&A.

Okay. Great. So good morning, everybody, and thanks for taking the time to come. I've done a number of investor conferences that are almost always 100% focused on tech. So this is kind of -- you have a little tech track, I heard and so forth. I did take the time to kind of give just a very brief overview of Flex at a high level, right, to say, who is Flex, what is Flex and so forth. I'll go through it pretty quickly, which I normally wouldn't do. And before I get there, I'll give you just a little bit of my background, and thank you, Melissa. As she mentioned, I'm the President of our Communications, Enterprise and Cloud business unit. My background realistic before I came into Flex is in semiconductors, right? So it's good that you have semiconductor background. So I'm an electrical engineer by training, started my career at Texas Instruments and then went over to Advanced Micro Devices and over into distribution before coming to Flex. And then I've been with Flex now for about 11 years. So let me give you just a quick overview about Flex, what does Flex do? So Flex at the heart is an EMS company, electronic manufacturing services company. But we try and make sure that everybody understands that we really have different components of it. We're EMS plus products, right, plus services. EMS companies at their very basis are just EMS. They build things that their customers ask them to do. So we do that. We also do the actual design of that as well. But then we have another sector, as I mentioned, called Products. So this is our own branded line of products. And we do this in the number of spaces; the critical power space, embedded power space, liquid cooling space, I could go on. The neat things about Products, ultimately from a financial perspective is they typically drive quite more significant margins to them and so forth. So we have a quite extensive and growing Products business. And then services is that final piece. And services are things that you would think of service, everything from forward logistics, reverse logistics, doing repairs or RMA authorizations, doing commissioning. There may be products that we build that would go into a data center and you go commission and so forth. And we do all of those things. I could go on from there. And once again, these are things that are quite accretive from a margin perspective to us. So Overall, when I -- when you ask and say, what about Flex, Flex is an EMS plus products plus services company. It's a nice way to kind of remember it. So just very quickly, you can see Flex is broken up into 2, what we call, segments, large segments. You can see reliability and agility. Reliability is our -- is made up of our Automotive, Health Solutions and Industrial businesses. So these are things that are all very regulated, right, have a lot of regulation to them and so forth. I'll just tell you really quick, and then I probably won't go back to this just to give an overview of this as a whole, right? The Automotive business is a business that Flex has a very strong position in. The Automotive business hasn't been a great business the last couple of years. We're finally seeing that level out and start to get some sort of nice path back on it. So when that market does actually turn, Flex is in a really wonderful position there. The Health Solutions business has been really resilient for us. It's broken into 2 pieces, Medical Equipment and Medical Devices. So Medical Equipment, think of in your hospital room and you're looking around in a surgery center, we build a lot of that stuff. That business has been pretty good, and it's actually starting to come back pretty well. The second half of the year coming up, we have some pretty big plans for that. The Devices business, though, has been really, really strong. So think about people that are walking around doing the glucose monitors and things like that; super, super strong business for us there. And then Industrial. Industrial is broken into a few pieces. Critical Power that I mentioned before in Industrial and Embedded Power, and I'll talk a little bit more about those. Capital equipment, think semiconductor equipment, really strong business these days. Renewables as well. So think anything in the solar space, that's been a good business. And then what you also don't see on there is things like warehouse automation that's been really, really strong as well. So that's the Reliability segment. And then we move over into the Agility segment. So the Agility segment is my segment, CEC that I talked about. I'll talk about that a little bit more. And then the Lifestyle and Consumer Devices segment. So these are -- in a way, they're almost kind of coming together. And I'll just kind of probably refer this as the Consumer Lifestyle type business. The Consumer Lifestyle business hasn't been right as strongly. I'd kind of almost put that in the automotive sector and so forth. But as a whole, one of the things that we realize is that in the world, there's the ying and the yang when something is going up, something is going down and so forth. So it's a very diversified portfolio that does this very well. So Flex is a big company. I'll let you read the stats over here. I'll give you a little bit of background on the footprint over there. You can see Flex has a little over 50 million square feet of manufacturing capacity, and it's all over the world. We're in over 100 locations throughout the world. You can see in Asia and the Americas, we have almost 20 million square feet in both of those, 12 million in Europe. It's a footprint that's really unequaled in the industry. There's a number of large EMS companies who have footprints this size or almost this size, but no one has a footprint that's across the world like this. It's really a unique trade and hallmark of Flex. There are seats up here on the sides, if you want to come on in. I swear I won't go through every one of these. We put this in here for the reason I said at the beginning, right? A number of folks don't know what is Flex, what does Flex do and so forth. And I just kind of showed you, here's our groups, our business units that we have. These are just some of the customer names that we have. You'll probably see a number of them are familiar. I'll point out, there's quite a few very significant customers we have that don't have their logo up here unless we have expressed written approval from these companies to share their logo. We don't have them up here. I'll give you, for instance, one of the things Flex has come and we'll talk a little bit more about data center. We have engagements with multiple hyperscalers, right, very significant engage. You don't see those up there, and there's a number of others that you won't see up there. But this just gives you a little bit of an idea. Just very quickly to go through, Flex has come a long way just in the last, let's call it, 6 or 7 years. It kind of was your father's EMS company, kind of pre '19. And what I mean by that is the business that was there was really one almost of being able to manufacture things very well and then to take advantage of what we call labor arbitrage. If you're building a product in Germany and you have your own factory and then Flex could come and say, I can build you that product with just as good a quality, but I could build it quite a bit cheaper by building it in Romania, right, or building it in Malaysia or something like that. That was the traditional labor arbitrage that really was the rise of the EMS companies. In 2020, right, we had new leadership come in at Flex. So we have new CEO, Revathi Advaithi came in. And we took a pretty significant movement in our strategy on how to move forward. You can see some of the things that we did. But one of the things that we really did is like, look, let's focus on where we want to be, let's not just focus on labor arbitrage. Where we want to -- what are the industries that are growing? What are the growing industries that really require a special unique skill set? Not everybody can do it. And let's focus on that. And by the way, the other hand on that is the business that we're doing that isn't necessarily all that hard to build, doesn't really make good margins. Let's -- I'm trying to think of the correct word to say, let's trim it, right? Let's trim it. So we've done some very significant trimming of businesses that weren't core to our businesses through this time and really shifted towards these high-growth, high-margin sectors. And we did that not only with focus, but we even did some acquisitions and so forth. We'll talk a little bit more about that. And that gets us to where we are today, boy, something that's really driving a lot of our business, driving a lot of press in the financial sectors more is the data center AI space. So it's a major, major space for us. Obviously, for me, it's a major, major space for me individually. And so we'll talk a little bit more about that, but Flex is really focused on that. We've really become focused on cash flow, predictability, margin expansion, all the things that make investors feel good and comfortable. So it's been a really demonstrative focus for us in the recent years. So I mentioned data center. One of the things in the data center space, we really do it all. I'll talk a little bit more about that. But as I go back to those segments we talked about, in the Reliability segment, right, there is Critical Power and Embedded Power that feed into the data center. So from a Critical Power space, think of the grid power, the giant power lines you see, you've got to get that into an actual data center. So you've got medium voltage switchgear and low-voltage switchgear and power distribution units and things like that. And these are really major critical pieces that Flex has been engaged in. We got in there early on through an acquisition of Anord Mardix and so forth and built on that with a new acquisition of Crown Technical. Then you go into the -- all the way through now you've got power going to the data center. Now you've got to get into the rack, right? That's embedded power. So embedded power, think about what you're actually doing to take that power and put it down to today, 48 volts, right, put it into the rack and inside the rack. It then has to get down all the way to the level where it gets to the individual chips. So you hear about all these NVIDIA chips, GPUs, TPUs and so forth. Those all individually have to be powered individually, right, with their own power module. It's an embedded power module. Flex does that as well. It's called Flex Power. We're one of the largest, I think the second largest provider of that as well. And all that is in the embedded power space. And then from our Agility segment, which is my segment I belong with, we do IT hardware. So think if you walk into a data center and everything that you're seeing, we do all of that. And I say all of that, we do everything. So you're seeing the metal racks that are sitting there. We actually manufacture metal racks, right? I think we're the only EMS out there that's actually manufacturing custom metal racks. And then we build everything that goes into those racks. So whether it's a GPU, whether it's a switch, whether it's a server, whether it's a storage device, Flex builds all of that, right, and it goes in there. And then the process of actually integrating all that into a rack called rack integration, very, very major business. That is a very significant business for that. We integrate all that in there. And then everything that's in there, not everything today, it's moving very quickly. Everything needs to be cooled and liquid cooled, right? So we have liquid cooling. We acquired a company called JetCool a little over a year ago, and they have cold plates, very unique cold plates, IP technology and CDUs, right, or coolant distribution units, all that are in there. The only slide I think I have that's on my business unit as a whole, so this is the only time I'll talk about it. So the communication requires a cloud space. So the Communications business unit is -- think about data moving around, whether it's wirelessly or wired. If we were talking 6 years ago, we'd be talking about 5G, right, and so forth. And we still do. We build 5G radios for the big players that need that. But then this is also where we put optical networking. That's a business that is really growing quite strongly. High-speed switching, right? And so to put this through, if you think about high-speed switching, some of the products that are out there, like NVIDIA, their NVLink type stuff, right? That is high-speed switching of a sort. So all the high-speed switching, that's a business that's really growing quite. And then SatCom, satellite communication has become a really significant business for us. We're engaged with almost every single major SatCom player out there, and that's a really growing business for us as well. The enterprise space, so -- and here, you can think about if you're just building a server or a storage device, cybersecurity, so everything from a cybersecurity space. I think of the top 4 cybersecurity providers we build for every one of them, actually, we build 100% of the product for 2 of the 4 out there. And this is also where just general networking. So if you think just a NIC card, which is very prevalent across and now that market is moving to what they call SmartNICs or AI NICs. It's a really fast-growing market and an area where Flex has been kind of the provider of choice just like a number of these other areas. And then finally, Cloud. Cloud, I won't go into that, self-explanatory. That's the data center business. This is where we deal with the hyperscalers and so forth. If we were to do anything beyond with a colo or a Tier 2, that's where it would also show as well. I put this slide up just because it's my favorite slide to talk about, and I actually have gotten up and given 45-minute talks just on this slide. I swear I only spend like 30 seconds on this thing. But this kind of brings into your visual view what I just talked about before from a data center. This -- when we're talking about the data center space is what makes Flex unique. We are the only company out there that has the full chain on bringing stuff. You start off at the data center to the rack -- from the grid and the data center, everything that you see in the magenta across the top, that's that critical power space. So you think about companies like Eaton or Schneider or Vertiv, that's what they do. That's what we do. We're really good at it. We've got some unique piece over there. You see this little utility control building. And then right in front of it, it's hard to see is a power pod. Power pods is now where you take these pods, think of shipping containers. And now those things are full of and ready to go with equipment, whether it's low-voltage switchgear, medium-voltage switchgear, we're even doing things in the IT space and so forth. That is a huge push. You're going to hear a lot more about it as people and companies like a hyperscaler want to get a data center set up, boy, to be able to just bring in a truck, drop the pod down and get going and you'll have hundreds of these things, it makes a big difference. We have the ability to do all that, and we're doing all that at scale today. These green or this is that critical power that I talked about. This is now that the power is into the data center. How do you get it into the rack and then into the chip that we do that. I talked about all the IT work, all my group, server, storage, racks, enclosures, all optical transceivers. We do all those things, everything that goes into a rack and then the rack itself, all that needs to be cooled, which is the orange portion of it. So bottom line, if you look at it, over 80% of what goes into a data center Flex provides, right? And people say, well, what don't you provide? And the joke is, well, we don't pour the concrete, right? And that's there. The other thing someone said, no, seriously. The other thing I'd say that's probably -- is the fiber optic cabling, think about a corning or something like that, we don't do fiber optic cabling. Other than that, we do just about everything in a data center. Our Data Center business, just so you can see the revenue from 2 years ago to now, our revenue as a percentage of Flex revenue has more than doubled. And there, it's becoming a very significant piece. And then if you look at the revenue itself, the dark blue is that cloud compute what I'm talking, all that IT work, everything else. The light blue is the power that goes in there. So both of them, as you can see, are growing at a pretty rapid pace. Actually, I will say this because it's come up before, the data center is such a big piece. We don't break up -- you saw our segments are broken out, and you can see the data centers across both our Reliability segment and our Agility segment and so forth. What we have said about our Data Center business is the margins on this data center are accretive to Flex's overall business. And we've also stated that this year -- and by the way, our fiscal year ends March 31 -- we've stated that our Data Center business will grow 35% or more, and it certainly will. Last year, it grew 50%, and it's continuing to do very well for us. So last thing I'll cover just from what I've told you about Flex, what is it about Flex that makes us different as a company and successful? Where I started with this EMS plus products plus services, it's a very unique model, adds a lot of value to our customers and also adds a lot of value to our investors. The global scale and regional reach, I also showed you that, it's a really unique aspect of Flex, 50 million square feet all over the world and anywhere you need to go. As tariffs come up and geopolitical things come up, it's really very straightforward us to take a customer and move them into a different place. The end-to-end capabilities, I talked how we can always do these services for the whole circular economy that we talk -- I joke with my team, it's like all these customers are -- I mean, they give awards and you win Supplier of the Year or whatever. And we get lots of those. I love those. We also win all these Sustainable Supplier of the Year. I joke and say, oh my god, I get it, it feels Miss Congeniality, but we are really good at sustainability, right? We do some amazing things. We run this whole circular economy and enable that, the vertically integrated model that I just showed you, the ability to supply everything, and I haven't covered all of it, right? I mean, we actually make individual components, right, that go into these different things, whether it's active ICs or passive ICs or even mechanical products. I mean, one of the things to think about that rack, we make the rivets, right, and things like that. It's a really neat vertical model that we have. Our customer base, I kind of showed you. Other EMS will get up here and we'll say, well, this customer is 30% of our business, and this one is 20% of our business, we have a very diverse customer base. I showed you the 6 business units that we have and so forth, it's been very strong. So that makes us really resilient. And then the Data Center business, which we'll talk more about, right, has really enabled us to just take off and accelerate even more. So with that, that's kind of my overview.

That was a great intro, and I'm glad you briefly talked about the business transformation since the current management team joined and since '19 because that's a very important piece of the story. But we know everyone just wants to talk about hyperscale data center today. So that tends to be one of the biggest themes. So along those lines, you did have a very interesting press announcement this morning. And to your point, you don't talk about specific customers, and there are certain customers that you're not allowed to put their logos on that sheet. But I'd love to go over what that press announcement was about this morning.

Yes. And thanks, Melissa. I will say it's -- one of the things people say, well, your competitor here talked about this hyperscale and talked about this -- well, if they represent more than 10% of your business, you look at and so forth. So boy, I would love to -- and I think both of these things will come together, and we'll have these and we will talk more about them. But if there's been a press release, I mean, one of the things we did a press release, I don't know, 6 months ago or so with Amazon, right, we did a warrant deal with them. So now people know that we do a significant amount of business with Amazon. And then this morning, to your point, there's an announcement with AMD. So I've mentioned part of this thing is that we do everything and we do GPUs and TPUs and whatever there. I think in the GPU space, the one guy that's going to try and give NVIDIA run for their money is AMD. They're doing really, really well as a company. And there's an announcement this morning that Flex will be building -- is building. Actually, we're actually building their GPUs in the United States. We're building them in our Austin, Texas plant. So their MI355 series, we are in production today on that. The announcement goes on to say that we'll be building their next-generation products, the 455 so forth. AMD last week announced a $60 billion deal with Meta to provide them. So they got to build them somewhere. So we're going to be building those in Austin. So...

Awesome. And I just want to preview, you are going to be hosting an investor event in Austin in May. Maybe we'll get a peek at some of that production?

Yes. I mean, there's production ongoing now. So I know there's going to be some things where you'll see some production. So for sure, that investor conference in May is a big deal. Part of it, I mentioned before, our fiscal year doesn't end until March. So we'll have our earnings the week before the investor conference. And I think we're going to give you a lot more data and detail on -- it's May 13. Thank you for that, Michelle. May 13 is the Investor Conference. There's going to be a lot more data and detail on what we're doing in the data center specifically there as well.

That's excellent. And I have to say I love that slide, your favorite slide of the diagram of the data center because that really helps kind of clarify where things are. I did have one question about the Power business. You brought up a few of -- kind of the dominant guys when we think of critical power, we think of more industrial-type applications like Eaton, Schneider, Vertiv. And that's where that's played. How has your ability to address that end-to-end within the data center, you can do the critical power, bring it into the rack, build the racks and then do some of the embedded power. How has that helped you either win new business or maybe kind of grow your business?

Yes. Great, great question. If you think back 5 years ago, I mean, data centers were here, but they were just kind of afterthought and so forth. So to your point, right, that critical power space wasn't really there that much of it to supply data centers. It was, hey, I'm building a new factory and I need to have the power there or I'm building whatever. And it's been there. So those guys that you just mentioned and us in that critical power space, they were focused just on that piece. Today, though, right, because we have that critical power space, but now that embedded power and so forth and even the cooling and so forth, what is happening is a convergence of, right, all these things into a single -- so before -- let's just say you're a hyperscaler and you're getting your next-generation data center. Well, you know that you needed to provide whatever, 50 megawatts of power to this building and then in the building, right, you needed to get power to the rack and then so forth, and that was about it and have some air cooling. Today -- and so by the way, the folks that pick your hyperscaler that did the critical power, they sat in a room over here. The folks that did -- getting it from the power room to the rack room, they sat in maybe a different building, maybe in a different state. And then within the rack, same type thing. There was no talking, everything else. It's now all converging to the point where as you are planning for the next-generation data center and the racks in there and they're talking about racks being 1 megawatt racks, a full megawatt in a single rack. You're now having to do the design, the guys that are designing the processor, whether it be a GPU, TPU, whatever, and now it has to be cooled. And oh, by the way, that has so much power and that power has to get there. Racks today are at 48 volts. They're going to 400 and 800 volts. We're actively engaged in projects today. We've made announcements with NVIDIA and others about what we're doing there. And then everything through -- to get it all the way through -- from the grid all the way, it starts -- it's all collaborative. They're all working together. So it's really for a -- and I'll just say for a hyperscaler, for a company like Flex that has every part of every piece of everything I mentioned, we're unique there. They can sit down with Flex and design their entire next-generation data center in rack, and they are doing that. We're really heavily involved with a number of hyperscalers. And even the -- there's new chip guys coming in as well, and we're a unique place for them to be able to do that entire stack. So it's a big advantage for us and a big advantage for our customers.

I'm curious how -- we all know we can track the CapEx spending of the big hyperscalers, but I'm curious how that rounded portfolio allows you to address maybe AI at the edge as we move into -- we've got the big hyperscalers, we've got enterprise AI. And then now a lot of like the chip guys are talking about AI at the edge. Is that an area where -- I imagine that's something that is exciting to you...

Yes. It really is exciting, and we're doing a lot of it because today, when you -- more of the edge, if you think about the edge, we think more of our enterprise customers and things like that and what I'm providing to them as far as IT equipment and so forth. And now we're talking even more edge, to your point, like it may be a mobile phone or something like that. And now it's getting more back to the chip. And as I said before, and we haven't talked -- but we're actively working with a number, if not every chip company out there on their next-generation chips because they have to be cooled. And they have to be cooled in a way that they've never been cooled before. We've got some really unique technology that I didn't really get into that much with JetCool. So we are really heavily involved in it, and it's exciting to know where it's going. You read all this thing about how fast AI is moving and everything else. And if you see it from what I see, it's like, it's actually quite a bit faster than anyone has even seen out there. It's a really exciting space.

It is amazing. All of a sudden, EMS and analog semis are sexy again. I love it. So we're kind of running out of time for Q&A, but I do want to point out, we do have a breakout session downstairs where we can get into some more detail. I know that this is a very hot topic, but maybe just give you a few seconds to wrap up the -- some closing comments.

Sure. So again, it's an incredibly exciting time to be an EMS manufacturer out there, but to be an EMS that has the breadth that we have, the vertical we have, to be as heavily invested and involved in the data center and AI space, incredibly exciting time. It's been a very successful period for us. And like I say, when you see -- what I see and the wins that we have that we haven't talked about yet, well, it's certainly really exciting for us.

Excellent. That was a great overview. Thank you so much, Rob. We really appreciate you being here, and we will see people downstairs.

Great. Thank you.