Littelfuse, Inc. (LFUS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hi. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the 21st Annual Best Ideas Conference for CL King. I'm David Silver, Senior Managing Director, Director of Equity Research and an analyst covering chemicals, materials and electronics. And we're very pleased to have management of Littelfuse presenting here for a fireside chat. . Representing the company is Ms. Meenal Sethna, the Chief Financial Officer. For those in the audience, I do have a dashboard here to handle questions. The format will be that Meenal will start with some opening remarks, and I'll follow by closing a series of questions. If anyone in the audience does have a question, please use the question box on your browser page and I'll try to integrate your question as soon as possible. At this time, I'm going to turn the floor over to Meenal, who's going to provide an introduction to Littelfuse.

Great. Good morning, everyone. Thank you, David, for the kind introduction. I'm happy to be here today. So for those of you who may be less familiar with Littelfuse, I thought I'd spend a few minutes just giving you a brief overview and then happy to take questions from there. So Littelfuse. We have been around for getting close to 100 years now in the -- really covering electronic components modules and subassemblies, that's really what we are known for in the -- especially in the engineering community. You can find our products across a number of different end markets, largely across, industrial, transportation and electronics end markets. And we really work with OEM customers as well as distribution partners around all of their applications and end products that utilize electrical energy. Were $2.5 billion or so in revenue in 2022. And I can talk a little bit on the... Okay. Sorry... Is there an intro or an echo? Okay. I'll keep going here. So let me -- I'll cover some highlights of the company. I mentioned that you can find us in a broad set of end markets. And those end markets really underpinned by some structural growth themes that we've seen really over the past decade as we've continued that our strategy over that time and really thinking about these ideas of sustainability, connectivity and safety. You can see a number of different examples that we can talk about, whether that's electric vehicles, as an example, within sustainability, connectivity, if you think about areas like data centers and cloud applications and now artificial intelligence across connectivity and the safety, really some of the early elements of our portfolio, really safety from applications that utilize electrical energy, and you can also find our products in other safety and value of human life devices like medical equipment. We really drive above-market growth from a combination of content and share gain. We are the market leader in a lot of our legacy applications, especially on the circuit protection side. And so our primary focus there ends up being around content and content in growth opportunities. And as we've advanced in other newer areas over the past 10, 20 years as a company, we're also looking at advancing our leadership position in terms of share gains. Our focus as we think about investments, both organic investments as well as if M&A are really around high-growth end markets, those markets that are growing well above GDP. So really, we can advance our content and share gain opportunities there as well as high-growth geographies as well and/or increasing our presence in geographies where we may be underpenetrated. And then I mentioned organic and M&A growth. We really look at acquisitions as a way to supplement and enhance our organic growth, continuing to make investments in both areas which continue to drive above GDP -- well above GDP organic growth profile. And then lastly, our outcomes with these actions in mind, double-digit revenue growth, with best-in-class profitability, high-teens margin profile, lower 20% ranges in EBITDA profile and top-tier shareholder returns. Just moving on to the next slide briefly. I highlighted some of the earnings and the financial criteria that we follow on. The other thing I wanted to highlight 2 other areas, cash flow. Our business model drives very, very strong cash flow conversion and cash generation. So we typically target 100% free cash flow conversion as a percentage of our net income. A low capital intensity business at 4% to maybe 5% of CapEx per revenues. And all of that drives really our end goal of a mid- to high-teens return on invested capital. And then lastly, capital allocation for us. The predominant area that we end up extending our capital or our cash is really around acquisitions to supplement and drive the growth in returns that I talked about earlier. But we also have return of capital through our dividend that we're paying on a quarterly basis that we've increased double digits since its inception as well as periodic share buyback. And then moving on to our last slide, really, this is just a 15 view of the company, where we've come from '07. But as I mentioned, we're close to 100 years old at this time. When you take a look at our performance over the past 15 years, you see the model that we continue to drive with our strategy, double-digit sales growth ranging from low double digits into the -- well into the mid-teens and an earnings growth that's growing faster than our revenue growth. And with that, I will turn it now over to David to be able to answer some Q&A.

All right. Very good, Meenal. So first question, I'd like to maybe just have you reflect on the guidance you issued during your last quarterly conference call and maybe the end market outlook. So your company has reported what I consider good overall first half results, albeit they're down from the record first half 2022 comparisons. And when discussing your sequentially weaker third quarter financial guidance, you cited a number of issues, including the continued customer inventory rebalancing sluggish consumer electronics demand. And we would also cite, I guess, the persistently sluggish recovery in China. So I was just wondering, but can you help us reconcile the near-term headwinds that you've cited with your longer-term growth expectations? And I was just wondering, along with that, if you could comment on your competitive positioning? And is there anything you would change in your overall assessment of end market demand? And within key economies overall versus, let's say, 3 to 6 months ago.

Sure. So just taking a step back on, David, on your question, I'd say if you think back to what I just talked about, about the secular growth themes that we're focused on, the areas and the markets that we're focused on, there's really been no change to that strategy. That's a strategy that we updated 2 years ago, have really been following for over a decade now. And so whether it's our priority focus areas, whether that's our competitive positioning, where we are. There's really been no change. I'd say if anything, over the past couple of years as we worked through a number of different supply chain challenges we believe and we were -- have been told by many others, that we emerged fairly strong coming out of those supply chain challenges and even have captured some additional share gain in parts of our business during that time because we were able to meet customer demands during that time. What I would say, and David, you talked about a few of these areas that we're seeing today, I'd say it's a combination of some transitory environments. One, really as it relates to end market demand, and this has really been going on for a few quarters, and we reemphasized this as part of our second quarter earnings call. There continues to be, I'd say, sluggish demand in places like China, which is -- remains an important market for us. A lot of people were expecting to bounce back post that winter COVID trend that has been going on and that bounce back never came back for China, along with consumer markets. That discussion started back in the 2022 time frame. And I would say, while they've stabilized, they haven't necessarily picked up again. So a combination of some end markets that people were expecting to pick up, which haven't. That's transitory, and we're seeing the effect of those coming through our P&L and our growth trajectory. And the other thing that we've been more recently talking about has been around destocking, inventory destocking, both within our traditional electronics distribution channel, and that's pretty typical given the strategic business model we have where we partner with a number of key electronic distribution partners around the world. That destocking is pretty typical. It happens every 3, 4, 5 years, and that's ongoing today. It may be a little bit more atypical has been around the commercial vehicle destocking that we've seen within our commercial vehicle business. We've seen that in both OEM customers and distribution customers. definitely more atypical for us, and I would attribute some of that to the choppiness that came out of all the supply chain challenges back in '21 and '22. We expect to work through those in the coming quarters and then expect to continue, as I showed in my last slide around the 15-year trajectory of double-digit sales growth. the combination of organic and acquisition, and then earnings that are stronger than that. And that remains our strategy, no change to that.

Okay. Great. I'm going to pick up on one of the words you used to characterize the recent results that was transitory where demand had kind of softened. I guess I was just wondering if you could maybe highlight some of your recent new business wins that you excited, even as the current revenue trend has been a little softer, but your success with securing future business seems to continue pretty much at the same rate more or less. And then I would just comment that, to me, not all new business wins are the same or alike. I mean what would you say your trend is amongst your new business wins and capturing the more desirable, I guess, what you would call design-in wins or other tight collaborations with your key customers?

We talked actually as part of our quarterly earnings call, we talked quite a bit about a number of different design wins that we've won in a number of different areas. So I don't want to go through a repeat that. I'd encourage people to take a look at some of our earnings material there. But really, as I, again, think back to the different end markets that we serve, transportation end markets, industrial end markets, in electronics end markets. And across all 3, we've seen a number of very, very strong design wins and our conversion rate tend to be designed from products that conversion rate to not only sticking to the platform, but sticking over a long period of time tends to be pretty high, mainly because we do a lot of work to continue to stay engaged with the engineers around those different platforms. And also, our products tend to be a smaller part of the bill of materials. So once we're designed in, our products are very, very critical to the safety and or functionality of the product. And with the small amount of the bill of materials that we're a part of, we tend to have good longevity on the products. So I'd say a number of different design wins we've talked about transportation, whether that's in the automotive side of the business. We're you definitely need to get designed in today to see yourself on platforms that are sold 2, 3 years later. Same types of things happen on the commercial vehicle side. So with the combination of our design wins, we were winning on the legacy parts of the business, but then putting that together with our Carling portfolio, an acquisition that we made about 2 years ago, that's been fairly positive. Across industrial end markets, we've had a number of different wins including where we are part of the standard setting bodies. And so as we're working on helping define the standards that are used across the industry, a number of our products also then are part of those standards that are set. And so we've had a number of different design wins as we're working with several OEM customers in areas like industrial safety and renewable energy applications. And then lastly, across electronics, that's while not an outsized part of our business. We think there's still a huge number of opportunities there that we continue to focus on with customers in electronics end markets and especially where you see advances going on that are impacting cloud applications, including data centers, future artificial intelligence opportunities, we think a number of different possibilities there for us.

We agree. The next question would be about electric vehicle or hybrid vehicle growth and development progress. So demand for EV seems to have accelerated in the last few months. And of course, it will accelerate on a secular basis for the next many years. Can you talk through your overall exposure to EVs, including your more recent, I guess, Carling Technologies portfolios? And then secondly, if I could just get maybe vehicle content or content per vehicle update. So in the past, Littelfuse has kind of cited maybe a 2 to 2.5x growth rate in content per vehicle when comparing a typical internal combustion engine with a hybrid and electric hybrid. And then maybe it takes a further step up to 4 to 5x when you go to a battery EV. And I'm just wondering, but you have made a number of acquisitions that have some influence on the content per vehicle potential. So are those still the right ratios in your opinion? Or has your portfolio changed in ways or have designed results compared to projections been different. But are there still the right ratios roughly for Littelfuse? Or how do you -- how should we think about that?

Sure. So let me try to take a step back and talk about where our electric vehicle growth opportunities have been. So one, maybe I'll just start with the automotive side of the business. We've had a number of opportunities both with on vehicle and off-vehicle applications. On vehicle, you can find our products across high-voltage power distribution, battery management systems and power conversion and transmission applications as well as onboard charging. So a number of different areas for us. We work -- I think that this is a triangle where we work closely with OEM partners around the design in areas as they think about their architecture, but then are working closely with the Tier 1s in terms of sale and making sure that our products are aligned designed and spec-ed in as part of the applications that we're going into. So some great opportunities there and then similar types of efforts that we're working on in terms of EV charging infrastructure as well. You had asked about content and content growth. Their content growth has been very, very strong. and with a number of different areas that were on auto applications. I'd say our content growth opportunities for start with 2 or 3x for partially electric or maybe hybrid vehicles going up to 6, 7x when you think about battery EVs. So huge content growth opportunity. And I would refer you back to some of my earlier comments when we talk about how do we grow and where do we grow. A lot of that is through content growth that we have there. As well as around the infrastructure opportunities on EV, where we've seen growth there as well. The other place I'd add is on the commercial vehicle side. There's really a few focus areas for us on commercial vehicles where it's larger vehicles such as heavy-duty truck and bus, last mile vehicles, such as delivery vans and then smaller vehicles, material handling applications 2, 3 wheelers and you see a lot of those here a lot about or those in India. And so we've seen some EV wins coming through a number of those different areas through there. It's just a different process because with automotive, where it tends to be a bit of a higher volume, low mix this tends to be with commercial vehicles because of the number of different applications and opportunities, a bit of a lower volume, high mix. So both are focus areas, and we've seen good traction on both of them as well.

Okay. Great. I'd like to ask you about next about your recent purchase of a semiconductor facility. I could be wrong, you'll correct me, but this is kind of a little bit of an outside of the box kind of move to your company, and there's probably a number of issues that went into that decision. But in June, Littelfuse agreed to acquire 200-nanometer wafer fab from Elmos Semiconductor in Germany, you paid slightly over $100 million for their Dortmund, Germany-based facility. And the deal comes with a multiyear capacity sharing agreement. . So Littelfuse cited the purchase as an important element in your long-term growth strategy for power semiconductors. So could you just take a moment and discuss how this, again, a little bit unusual out-of-the-box move, we'll expand your internal capabilities to take advantage of the high growth inherent in power conversion applications. I mean I'm sorry, you're on mute. Sorry.

Thank you. I apologize for that.

I. Got it check. That's usually my job to speak while...

No, no problem. I just wanted to make sure that I wasn't interrupting you when you were speaking. So let me go back and start with taking a step back. Across M&A, the first priority for us when it comes to M&A is making sure that the M&A aligns to our strategy. That for us is really critical to make sure that we see that fit. And one of the things we've always talked about is focusing on high-growth end markets, through a broad array of technologies. For us, semiconductors are a big part of that strategy and really thinking about high-growth industrial end markets where it's high -- medium to high-power applications for us because we think that's where the growth opportunities are that align with our financial profile. So as an example, areas like renewables and energy storage, automation, factory automation, et cetera, and the list goes on. But for us investing in a 200-millimeter fab or an 8-inch fab was really critical to be able to expand our capabilities in those end markets. We looked at a number of different possibilities for us to really think about leveraging the growth coming from an 8-inch fab and really found that this partnership, this will end up becoming a bit of a long-term partnership as where I call it the cost-sharing element with Elmos that we're doing. But basically, what this does is it allows us to grow our business over time with talent that Elmos has already put in place with the fab that's been there for a long time. A lot of great skilled folks from a technology perspective, from a manufacturing perspective, that's really going to help advance our semiconductor development and manufacturing. And for them, it allows them to, over time, release their production out of the fab as they move out. So overall, I'm pretty happy with the way the deal is structured and very happy for us because it gives us that long-term growth trajectory as we think about those end markets, we think about long-term supply assurance and we think about the ability to scale and we have all that with the purchase of this fab. Now, David, I think you're on mute now.

All right. Got you back. Sorry about that. I'd like to just stick with this for just a little bit, but I'm thinking about kind of the underlying forces that kind of maybe move or sell your team in this direction. But First of all, how common is it for an electronic components makers such as yourself to back integrate into production? I'm not aware of too many similar arrangements, although in Asia, there may be some. But -- and then yes, anyway. Yes. And I was wondering if the pandemic area period of semiconductor supply shortages and supply chain issues. Did any of that factor into your thinking about pulling the trigger or moving forward in this area? In other words, is security of chip supply a priority in your thinking about here when figuring out your long-term growth strategy. So with the semiconductor shortage, a driver to some extent? Or was it just opportunistic and/or strategic for other reasons.

Yes, I would say it was a little bit different from all of those. So the semiconductor applications that we're involved in are really around power semiconductors. So some complex technologies that we're using. Today, we have a mix, our footprint is the mix in terms of -- I didn't here quite everything in the beginning, but I think you were talking about maybe the front end and thinking about development of our own wafers and maybe having our own fabs. We have that today. So our mix today, when we talk about front-end manufacturing is referred to in the semiconductor industry is a mix of fabs that we own today as well as what they call foundry partners, right, other third parties that are manufacturing fabs sorry, manufacturing wafers that we need for -- from a supply perspective. As we've continued to grow we've looked at opportunities of expanding our third-party partnerships with other fabs and have found just with the type of manufacturing we're doing and the type of products that we have, there are a limited number of additional foundry partners that are out there that are doing what we are doing. And so we thought, you know what, this gives us, again, the ability to manage and control our own growth by, again, finding another fab to add into our overall footprint, which will continue to still have manufacturing that's done by other third parties or by foundry partners for us.

Sorry, question on -- I have a question on China and then I would like to follow up with a question about assessing the C&K Switches acquisition maybe 1 year is a little bit more than one. But regarding China, I mean, it's been among your largest country markets for a few years now, and there are a number of more recent developments to consider. So can you discuss the rather sluggish year-to-date economic performance in China and how this plays into your short or medium-term outlook. And second, from a longer-term perspective, how does Littelfuse think about the recent shift in U.S. restrictions on technology trade and maybe foreign policy towards China as well as that the effect that may have on your key regional customers.

Sure. So your first question was really around just the general economic performance and situation in China. For us, regardless of an interim phase where we're seeing much lower growth rates in China, China remains a key part of our growth strategy, right? It's the markets and the customers that we serve are -- continue to be important to us. We've got great teams in China. We've spent years, actually decades, developing our capabilities in China. So none of that has changed. Whether where China goes in terms of its growth rates. I think the indications that we've seen from a number of different external reports is that the growth rates may be a little bit lower as we project out. But again, still believe that the growth rates are still strong and because of that remains part of our strategy. Overall, as we think about China, we have located ourselves so that we're close to our customers. And so we continue to benefit from this. We have a number of customers that continue to prioritize China. And so our focus on investing in China hasn't changed and it's especially focused on what I'd call China for China investments, where we have customers that are making in and selling in China. In other cases, we have some customers that are asking us for perhaps a China plus 1 strategy. I think business continuity is on everybody's mind, especially over the past 3, 4 years, and you think about all the supply chain challenges and that took place during COVID. And so we continue to have opportunities in the footprint outside of China. We've been in the Philippines, in Japan for several years. We have additional capabilities in Vietnam, in India and as well as across North America and Europe. So no challenges there. And I would say with the restrictions that have been going on in China, especially around semiconductor, there's been a limited impact to us technology that we produce and we sell in China, we talk about they tend to be more on the power side or passive component side. not on the high-end logic applications, which are a lot of the focus today. So there's a very limited impact to us from our ability to serve customers.

Okay, great. I'd like to move over to maybe a discussion of your recent acquisition C&K, which is -- so in July 2022, Littelfuse acquired C&K Switches in a deal that was probably your biggest in terms of purchase price since the IXYS acquisition roughly 5 years ago. C&K is a leading designer and manufacturer of high-performance electro mechanical switches and interconnect solutions with a strong global presence. So can you discuss maybe the synergy realization to date from the C&K Switches acquisition, both, I guess, cost and revenue. And is your initial forecasted adjusted EPS accretion of -- for the first 6 months ended, it was roughly $0.25 per share. Is that still kind of the right magnitude to think about its contribution to your overall results?

Sure. So just taking a step back on C&K for those of you who may be less familiar. About 1.5 years ago, we purchased a company called C&K switches. They're really known across a variety of different applications similar to our transportation, industrial and electronics end markets. So for us, with a very easy decision, a really great strategy alignment to acquire C&K Switches. We already had electromechanical switches in our portfolio through other legacy parts of our business through other parts, other acquisitions that we've made. And so what C&K has done is it's added to our capabilities for other components on what we call on the board, right, on the electronic board. So as we think about opportunities for growth for us, that's an area that we've looked at. The other piece for us is we think about where would we grow with C&K. We think there are a number of different applications that perhaps had not been a focus for C&K before because they didn't have some of the relationships. We've got a lot of OEM relationships. We have some great distribution relationships as well. So really, for us, the acquisition is very much focused around growth and growth opportunities. And at the same time, we are -- we knew that there were going to be some cost opportunities, and we've been working through those as well from a C&K perspective. Similar to other parts of our electronics segment because C&K sells into distribution channels we are seeing inventory destocking going on at present within our C&K business. And again, that wasn't a surprise. As we thought about the acquisition we were expecting that we were probably going to see some destocking going on. So in the meantime, we continue to focus around design wins, continuing to really build those bridges and build the growth coming out of the destocking with our distribution partners, continuing to expand those OEM relationships. And we'll expect the strong profitability trajectory as we come out of destocking. We talked about really C&K margins aligning with the company margins as we look a few years out, and we continue to stand by that and feel confident with that.

Sorry. Sorry, last time I'll do that again. If you don't mind, maybe I could just -- if you could indulge me and maybe just go a minute or 2 over -- but my last question would kind of be for lack of a better term, I'll use to cliche "what keeps you up at night". So in other words, your businesses face threads or challenges in a whole range of areas, cost inflation, labor, issues, international trade, et cetera. Is there something that maybe we've glossed over or that we haven't touched on here that you think either from a medium-term or longer-term aspect, we should be focusing more on reflecting how you and your management team are going about running your businesses. So which business factor or 2, do you think is growing in importance, maybe even relative to what investors currently model for your company.

What I would say in the -- what keeps us up at night is I think a lot of the complexities that have emerged in the past few years, I'd say, past 3, 4 years around end markets, maybe a little bit of geopolitical, many of the economic trends can be transitory. So it's really some of the other underlying issues there. There's not a lot that we can do about those. But what it requires from us is an indebtedness around managing through all these to continue to asked the differences across the political environment and other areas and to say how do we manage through that because our customers need us. Our customers expect it. Our customers still want us to be there regardless if we're considered an American company or a Chinese company or a French company or whatever that might be. So really trying to look past or look through some of the geopolitical environments and then working through the things that are in our control, like the supply chain challenges that we found a couple of years ago, I think we did a very strong job in working through supply chain issues, maneuvering around the logistics challenge is different things. I'd say, increasing our capabilities to be able to do that as we grow thinking about scale and what we need to put in place as we continue to grow. Those are the things that we're spending our time on. And I think so far, we've been fairly successful in as we've doubled and tripled in size of the company, and we continue to add on to the company.

So I'll summarize that as lots of tactical shorter-term adjustments, but unchanged strategic priorities. .

I think that's summarize it. So thank you, David. .

Okay. Just want to make sure I was hearing you correctly. No, that's fine. So we've reached the end of our time. And I want to thank Meenal Sethna for taking the time to participate in our conference and sharing her thoughts and insights on her company and the markets that Littelfuse serves. With that, I'll call it in to the fireside chat. Thank you to the audience for participating and have a great rest of your day. Thank you.

Have a good day.