Kevin M. Murai
Analyst · quarters
Thank you, Thomas. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining our call today. I'll provide some additional color on our first quarter results, our second quarter outlook and our recently announced acquisition of Supercom Canada. Within our first quarter, the demand markets for technology products have been mixed, with some geographies and product segments growing and others decelerating. In addition, we experienced a somewhat more competitive pricing environment. Overall, however, I'm pleased with our first quarter results, which we accomplished through steady sales and a strong execution in our core Distribution business, and a continued path of driving scale in our GBS segment. Looking at the business by geography, in the first quarter, we saw a stable commercial demand environment in the U.S., including solid SMB business. Our federal business experienced some slowdown late in the quarter, likely due to the impending sequestration. And despite some softness and an ongoing shift in product sets at the retail level, our U.S. consumer business performed reasonably well on a year-over-year basis, primarily due to our ability to sign new lines over the past year. In Canada, frankly, the market was softer than anticipated, with slow retail sales as retailers reported higher inventory levels in stores due to weaker-than-expected holiday sales. The beginning of the Canadian federal year-end spend was also well below what we typically see through the end of February and coming into the March year end for the Canadian government. In our Japan business, we're pleased that, in local currency, we grew our Infotech business on a year-over-year basis. Overall demand remained subdued, which was expected given the current economic environment. But it's important to note that within that environment, we continued to move the ball forward with new products, new sales and managing the day-to-day of the business, while implementing key actions for driving efficiencies and costs we control. Overall, from a product line perspective, everything cloud and mobility-related continued to show solid growth. Tablets have been strong in the consumer segment, and connectivity into the enterprise, private or -- public or private cloud, networking, storage and security continued to show strength as well. Categories that had been soft, such as printing and PCs, continued to be soft. In our GBS segment in Q1, we saw a continued good market growth performance from Concentrix within the ongoing business, highlighted by healthy gross margins and a strong 17% sales growth. We continued to win significant contracts in the quarter from both existing and new clients. We also successfully onboarded a number of new contracts we won in prior quarters. And as discussed in the past, our objective is to aggressively grow our GBS business through incremental investments in sales and marketing. These investments, combined with expansion in various markets, will continue to mute our operating margin in the near term, but the underlying business is producing returns we had anticipated and expected. I'm pleased with our strong growth trends, as scale in this business is an important factor in enhancing our operating margins. An example of our investments is the recent opening of a Japan call center. We have won a marquee client in the Japanese market, and we expect the new center to go online in mid-April. In addition, this past quarter, we also expanded our centers in the Philippines, Costa Rica, the U.S. and Europe, all to support new business wins. Now turning to Q2. Our revenue guidance reflects steady market performance in our Distribution segment within a market environment that is, overall, stable in the U.S., but impacted by the soft economies elsewhere, in particular, Canada. We expect that the more aggressive pricing environment will continue in the short term, and that we will be defending our market share. As a result of these factors, we also believe that our ability to earn incremental incentives will be limited, as these targets take time to adjust to the market reality. Collectively, these issues will have a short-term impact on our gross margins. However, as we have done successfully in the past, we will continue to work with our customers and vendors to find growth opportunities and adjust our go-to-market programs. We also expect that the pricing environment will stabilize as the market adjusts to the demand environment, and improving more quickly as the market experiences growth later this year. Within our GBS segment, in Q2, we expect to continue our success with signing new contracts and onboarding new business. Looking beyond the current quarter headwinds, we're optimistic about our competitive position and our business strategy. We have key competitive advantages such as our low-cost model, our stable and effective ERP and our strategic relationships with key channel partners. Equally important, we continue to make progress in our business strategy, which we believe will create additional competitive advantages in key growth areas such as cloud and mobility. Our focus is creating shareholder value, and we believe we are well positioned to grow sales and profitability over the long term. I'd now like to provide additional color on the impending Supercom Canada acquisition we announced earlier this month. Supercom is a roughly CAD 440 million Broadline business and provides our Canadian business with a significant scale opportunity. The combination of customers and line card will create sales synergies and help to lower our overall costs. In addition, we expect to benefit from many of Supercom's talented employees, including founder Frank Luk, who will be staying on and will be responsible for global relationships with key customers and vendors. We expect this deal to close during the month of April, and we'll provide more detail in the coming months. So while 2012 was primarily a year of organic investment and consolidation of recent GBS acquisitions, we foresee additional investment opportunities in the future for SYNNEX. As Thomas mentioned, our strong balance sheet and cash flows, along with our modest debt-to-capitalization ratio, provides us with ample capital to fund growth and other potential financing needs. I would like to acknowledge the hard work and dedication of all of our 11,000 SYNNEX associates around the world, and also thank our vendors, customers and shareholders for their continued partnership and support. And with that, let's turn the call over to the operator for questions.