Michael McNamara
Analyst · Citigroup
Thanks, Paul. On the call today, I plan to give you an update on the business environment, as well as cover important market and business unit trends. I will conclude with some takeaways and our financial guidance for the first quarter ended June fiscal year 2011. Let's start with our view on the business environment before turning to the results and outlook for each of our market segments and business units. We see the business environment as healthy and fairly strong. The momentum we have experienced over the last couple of quarters appears to be continuing into June and fiscal 2011. The breadth of the economic strength will result in each of our market segments and business units experiencing sequential growth in the upcoming quarter. Please turn to Slide 9. Our largest single segment, Infrastructure, grew 1% sequentially off of strong December quarter, but would have posted stronger growth had it not been for component shortages that constrained revenue in this segment by about $75 million. Infrastructure sales were $1.76 billion for the quarter and represented 30% of total sales. Our June quarter outlook for Infrastructure remains encouraging as well as we see mid single-digit sequential revenue growth. Our growth is being supported by solid demand trends across multiple customer accounts as a result of multiple new wins and strength with existing customers focused on the emerging markets' growth opportunities. Bookings include new wireless infrastructure products, China and India 3G rollouts and new CDMA wins, most of which will begin to ramp in the mid to late fiscal 2011. While we expect to all demand from our March quarter impacted by component shortages, we still expect component shortages to exist in the June quarter within a similar range. Let me pause for a minute to address the issue of component shortages because it will come up again as I cover our other segments. As we expected, Q4 marked another quarter where supply chain shortages existed and impacted our business. Demand continues to outpace supply and, in general, semiconductor capacity is too low for today's demand environment. We would estimate that component shortages negatively impacted our revenue to the tune of $150 million to $200 million, up from the $50 million to $100 million range the prior quarter. The components we found most challenging continue to include various custom semiconductor components, custom commodity components such as connectors, capacitors, power components, LCD panels and memory, both DRAM and flash. In Computing, we posted $1.2 billion in sales, which accounted for 20% of our total sales. This segment was down 11% sequentially. For the June quarter, we are forecasting high single-digit sequential growth. The growth in this segment will accelerate in the September and December quarters when new designs get launched to the market in time for back-to-school selling season and the holidays. Our high-mix low-volume segments grew stronger during the quarter. In total, Industrial, Automotive, Medical & Other comprised 21% of total sales, up from 18% of sales last quarter. This group [ph] (17:32) remained a solid contributor to the company's profitability. Our Industrial segment displayed strong sequential growth, which was ahead of our earlier forecast. We had another very successful quarter of new program wins, with new wins totaling $250 million to $300 million across a diversified base of customers. To reinforce how diverse our Industrial customer base is, recall that over 90% of our Industrial customers account for $75 million or less in the annual sales for Flextronics. During the month of March, we announced the establishment of our Clean Tech Super Site in Port of Tanjung Pelepas, Malaysia. The site has 1 million square feet of capacity that will be dedicated to Clean Tech industry in areas such as solar, smart grid, smart appliances, lighting, power, capital equipment, wind and energy. The site has a capacity to produce one Gigawatt of solar modules. In March, new programs with Q-Cells, Enphase and SolarEdge were also announced, followed by the most recent announcement of a new program with SunPower just last week. We feel very confident about our competitive positioning within the Clean Tech supply chain and believe we'll bring the right capabilities to a marketplace; thus, becoming increasingly receptive to manufacturing optimization and value-added supply-chain solutions. Areas of strength within Industrial continues to be resurging capital equipment market, the Clean Tech products, office equipment, as well as kiosks and navigation products. Next quarter, we expect the same sequential growth from our Industrial segment to continue. Our Medical segment expanded modestly on a sequential basis in Q4 as improvements in diabetes-related products and new product ramps continued as we expected. We continue to see more large healthcare OEMs looking to outsource more, and to that point, we booked roughly $450 million in new medical programs over the past year, including one program that we believe to be the largest ever in the medical instrumentation field. Keep in mind that many medical programs have long gestation periods, and ramps can range from six to 36 months in duration. However, success like this gives us confidence in the 10% to 20% year-on-year medical growth rate for fiscal 2011 that we presented back in November. Next quarter, we expect sequential growth from our Medical segment in line with the sequential growth it had posted this quarter. Our Automotive business saw continued momentum during the March quarter and grew sequentially. The overall order and demand environment has continued to improve. In addition, we booked new wins for interior lighting and roof modules, as well as in-car connectivity solutions as ODM investments in these areas are paying off. More than half of our Automotive revenue today is considered ODM and by the end of fiscal year '12, it's forecast to be almost 2/3. Our Automotive business remains heavily focused on European premium automotive OEMs, and we do expect sequential growth over that segment in the June quarter. Mobile sales declined 18% sequentially to $1.16 billion or 19% of sales. Seasonality drove the majority of the movement within this segment, which was coming off at 29% sequential growth quarter in December. We continue to see customer diversification efforts strengthening in this segment, and we remain focused on expanding our relationship with our largest strategic customers. To that point, during the quarter, our largest Mobile customer, RIM, announced that it will be utilizing Flextronics' Sorocaba, Brazil industrial park to expand its product line further into Latin America. where it will begin production of the Blackberry Curve 8520 and expect to broaden our Brazilian product portfolio over time. For the next quarter, we see our Mobile segment rebounding with low double-digit growth forecast. Consumer Digital declined 30% sequentially in the March quarter, which is typical seasonality, and was modestly exacerbated by some component shortages, principally in the LCD panel area. The segment ended at $624 million or 10% of total sales. For the June quarter, we are currently forecasting mid double-digit revenue growth. I would now like to spend a few minutes discussing our business units. Our Component business are comprised primarily of Multek, VistaPoint and FlexPower and have been underperforming in profitability As we mentioned last quarter, these businesses were running at roughly a $2 billion annualized run rate, with breakeven profitability. We continued to add new customers and win business with existing customers, and our pipeline of new business opportunities has gained further momentum. However, these businesses that declined in aggregate during the March quarter, primarily due to seasonality, were below break even as a whole. Nevertheless, we see these three businesses on track for a 30%-plus growth in FY '11, and we believe they have the potential to achieve a normalized operating profit margin of over 5% in the medium term. In the near term, they are forecasted to turn profitable as a group beginning in our Q2 FY '11, possibly Q1, and we see improving margins over the next several quarters. Our Global Services business focus on logistics repair services and service part of logistics. Global Services had a strong finish in Q4, exceeding its revenue and operating profit forecast across all the major service offerings and geographic locations. A Retail segment of the service business provides competitive and flexible field services for customers. We are aggressively expanding our capabilities across all our services business, and we'll give more information about these strategies at our upcoming May 25 Analyst and Investor Day. Please turn to Slide 10. The slide depicts our improved customer profile and success of diversification efforts. Our top 10 customers accounted from 49% of sales, flat with the prior quarter and just about 46% from a year ago. Typically, we don't have a consistent 10%-plus customer. Last quarter, HP rose above 10% due to seasonality. This quarter, RIM was just about 10% of sales. Sales to our top three customers, RIM, HP and Cisco, were 29%. It is also worth noting that the leading Chinese OEMs, such as Huawei and Lenovo, has solidly positioned themselves amongst our top 10 customers. We expect this trend to remain as we enter into fiscal 2011. Please turn to Slide 11. In summary, our fourth quarter represents a strong end to our fiscal 2010, and we have established a solid foundation from which we will profitably grow our business. Even though we continue to experience challenging supply constraints, we are able to still improve our financial conditions and deliver improving returns. Our key takeaways for the quarter are as follows. First, we saw better than seasonal revenue decline in the March quarter of only 9% versus our historical average decline of 15%. Our Infrastructure, Industrial, Medical and Automotive segments all grew on a sequential basis. Second, our Cash Conversion Cycle remained at industry-leading levels of 11 days despite the seasonality we needed to manage this quarter. Also, our inventory turns of 7.9x marked the best inventory velocity for our March quarter for Flextronics since March 2006. Third, we are executing well on free cash flow and net debt reduction. Free cash generation over the past four quarters have exceeded $600 million, and we ended our March quarter with a very healthy cash balance of $1.9 billion despite paying down $300 million in debt during the quarter. We have reduced our net debt by $800 million in the past year to $329 million. This remains one of the lowest levels in our company's history. And lastly, ROIC in the quarter at 28.8%, well above our cost of capital and certainly one of the highest levels we've achieved in recent history. Now turning to our guidance on Slide 12. Fiscal 2010 was a strong year for new business wins across all our major business segments, many of which we expect to ramp up during fiscal 2011, contributing to a solid revenue growth. For our June quarter, we expect all our major segments and business units to show sequential revenue growth. We are expecting our revenue to be between $6.1 billion and $6.6 billion, which indicates a sequential growth of 3% to 11% and is up 7% at the midpoint. We expect our adjusted earnings per share to be in the range of $0.16 to $0.19 a share, also up sequentially at the midpoint. Quarterly GAAP earnings per diluted share are expected to be lower than the guidance provided here and by approximately $0.04 for intangible amortization expense, stock-based compensation expense and non-cash interest expense. Once again, I want to take this opportunity to thank our employees all over the world for their hard work and dedication during the March quarter. You've all had a hand in helping Flextronics finish fiscal 2010 on a strong note and position the company well for fiscal 2011. Lastly, as a reminder, on May 25, we will be hosting our annual Investor Day in New York at The Westin in Times Square. We look forward to seeing many of you there, and online registration instructions have already been sent out via e-mail. If you need more information on registering, please contact Investor Relations. We're ready to open the call for questions, so operator?