Bertrand Loy
Analyst · Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead. Your line is open
Yes, good morning, Melissa, and good question. And, let me put actually this Q2 guidance in the right context and I may provide a little bit more details than I usually do, but I think the circumstances wants that. So, let’s start with a few facts. I mean, entering Q2, our business is strong. The fill rate is steady. Quarter-to-date, our book-to-bill ratio is strong. It’s actually approaching 1.2. So, that’s good. That’s actually very good. Another important fact, ex-China, our second quarter forecast is also solid. Actually, we expect the ex-China business to be up sequentially in-line with the industry trends that we expect in Q2. Specifically, we expect sequential growth in our consumable product lines consistent with the expected sequential improvement in wafer starts. That’s going to be offset slightly by the sequential contraction in our CapEx product lines and that’s also consistent with the expected sequential contraction in the industry CapEx. But again, net-net, our ex-China business is solid and is expected to be up sequentially. So, that’s good as well. So, and then to your question, I mean, we certainly have this China tariff situation to deal with. China introduced new tariffs on imports from the U.S. Our products unfortunately do not qualify for the temporary exemptions granted by the Chinese government. And as a result, as of right now, Chinese customers have put inbound shipments from U.S. on hold. So, the impact for us, just for Q2, worst case could be up to $50 million again just for Q2. And, that’s the bad news. Now, the good news, as Linda stated multiple times in her prepared comments, is that we have alternate Entegris manufacturing sites across Asia that our China customers could use. Actually they have started qualifying them and we are ourselves in the process of hiring and training additional staff, ramping up our local supply-chain. So realistically, we expect to be able to mitigate some of that impact in Q2 and that gets you somewhere at the midpoint of that guidance range for Q2. And of course, we expect to make more progress in Q3, Q4. And at high-level, we expect these initiatives to have substantially mitigated the China tariff headwinds by the end of the year. So, hopefully, Melissa, that provides the context you were looking for when thinking about the overall business trends and going into Q2.