Paul Read
Analyst · Citi group
Yes. Free cash flow or cash flow, in general, is just a very strong feature of our business model and driven by, first of all, quality of earnings and really strong working capital management and control, et cetera. So -- but it's underpinned, I think, a lot of the good things that we do here, a very strong quarter for us. I think good linearity of sales during the quarter helped that with the receivables coming down 3 days. But to address the question, really, what do we would do with it? I mean, we expect to continue to generate it now through the rest of the year, so $500 million or so. We've always said that buybacks are almost like fourth in line for us, but we do them quite a lot. I mean, we really invest in the networking capital business with our customers. And Mike's thought about a lot of new programs for the next year, and so we want to make sure that we can organically pay for that. You're working capital runs about 6% to 8% of sales, that's a very good model for us. CapEx, we've stepped up this year. We'll probably spent $50 million to $100 million more than we normally would, and that's going in place right now. So that's pretty heavy compared to previous years. M&A, we've done some small tuck-ins. We'll continue to do that. We have some nice opportunities on the horizon for us, and we're looking at them very carefully, but they're not large. But very different technologies and also some different customer bases. The buybacks, you've seen us be very active, and it gives us definitely a step-up in EPS, a permanent one, as the WASO has reduced permanently, which has been very accretive for us at the prices that we've been buying at. And it's spending head and shoulders above many other things we could spend our money on, so we'll continue to do that. In regards to the debt comment that you had, we have about $1 billion due almost 2 years away now. October 14th, I think, is the date. We're very comfortable with the debt levels that we're at. We're at 1.9 debt-to-EBITDA right now, and we think with the EBITDA growing some, so we really have a very comfortable position with regards to liquidity and the debt profile that we have. And we're just going to really re-up that debt at some time to replace that with some longer-term debt at very favorable interest rates, of course, that we're seeing today. So I really like the position we're in or have been in. We said back in June to the investors that we'd generate $3 billion to $4 billion over the next 5 years. And I think this is evident of how this works, albeit an exceptional quarter at $340 million, but a good year nevertheless.