Benchmark Electronics - Earnings Call - Q2 2025

Transcript

Speaker 2

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Benchmark Electronics Second Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. At this time, all lines are in listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. If at any time during this call you require immediate assistance, please press *0 for the operator. This call is being recorded on July 30, 2025. I would now like to turn the conference over to Paul Mansky. Please go ahead.

Speaker 0

Thank you, Constantine, and thanks everyone for joining us today for Benchmark Electronics' Second Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. With us today are Jeff Benck, our CEO and President, Bryan Schumaker, our CFO, and David Moezidis, our Chief Commercial Officer. After the market closed, we issued an earnings release pertaining to our financial performance for the second quarter ending June 2025. We have prepared a presentation which we will reference on this call. Both the press release and presentation are available under the Investor Relations section of our website at bench.com. This call is being webcast live, and a replay will be available online approximately one hour after we conclude. The company has provided reconciliation of our GAAP to non-GAAP measures in the earnings release, as well as in the appendix to the presentation. Please take a minute to review the forward-looking statements disclosure on slide two in the presentation.

During our call, we will discuss forward-looking information. As a reminder, any of today's remarks, which are not statements of historical fact, are forward-looking statements, which involve the risks and uncertainties as described in our press releases and SEC filings. Actual results may differ materially from these statements. Benchmark Electronics undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. For today's call, Jeff will start with an overview, followed by Bryan's detail of our Q2 results and forward guidance. We will then turn the call over to David, who will discuss demand trends by sector and some additional color on recent wins. Jeff will conclude with some final remarks before opening the call for Q&A. If you will please turn to slide four, I'll turn the call over to our CEO, Jeff Benck.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Paul. Good afternoon, and thanks to everyone for joining today's call. Before I get started, I'd like to welcome David Moezidis to the call. Since joining Benchmark Electronics two years ago in the new role on our team as Chief Commercial Officer, David's brought a wealth of industry experience and operational knowledge to the company. Our second quarter 2025 results once again demonstrated consistent execution with revenue of $642 million and non-GAAP EPS of $0.55, both at the midpoint of our prior guidance. From a highlight perspective, this past quarter represented the seventh consecutive quarter of greater than 10% gross margins. We also experienced double-digit annual revenue growth in two sectors and grew sequentially in three of five in the quarter.

As we'll discuss more later in the call, we expect this sequential momentum to continue in Q3 and bodes well for our return to annual growth in the fourth quarter. This outlook is further bolstered by our multi-year record bookings in the quarter, led by medical and ACNC, two sectors that have been slower to recover. Turning to slide five, let's review the progress we made toward our strategic objectives in the quarter. Year-over-year sector revenue performance was again led by Semicap and A&D. We're targeting and winning the right business and delivering increasing value add to our customers, which is driving our gross margin performance. At the same time, with our globally diversified manufacturing footprint, we can offer our customers flexibility as they consider tariff implications and look to optimize their global supply chains.

Our value proposition is clearly resonating, and we are encouraged by our strong bookings and new deal pipeline. I'm also encouraged by the number of current customers that are choosing to award more programs to us, which is a testament to our operations team's strong performance. Before I wrap, I'm pleased to highlight that we also successfully refinanced our debt in the quarter at attractive rates, as well as repatriated a significant amount of cash from China and Thailand in the quarter. I'd like to now turn the call over to Bryan for more detail on the quarter and our Q3 guidance.

Speaker 0

Thank you, Jeff, and good afternoon, everyone. Please turn to slide six. Revenue in the quarter of $642 million was up 2% sequentially, in line with our prior guidance. Our non-GAAP EPS was $0.55, also at the midpoint of our prior guidance of $0.52 to $0.58. As a reminder, our non-GAAP results excluded stock-based compensation, amortization of intangible assets, restructuring, and other expenses. For Q2, our non-GAAP gross margin was 10.2%, up 10 basis points sequentially and flat year over year. Non-GAAP operating margin was 4.7%, up 10 basis points sequentially, driven by our improvement in gross margin. Our second quarter non-GAAP effective tax rate was 24%, driven by geographic mix. Please turn to slide seven for our second quarter 2025 revenue performance by sector. Semicap revenue decreased 2% quarter over quarter, but grew 11% year over year.

Industrial revenue was up 4% quarter over quarter and flat year over year. In A&D, revenue was up 4% quarter over quarter and 16% year over year. Within medical, revenue was up 6% versus the prior quarter and down low single digits year over year. Finally, ACNC revenue was flat quarter over quarter, while still down considerably year over year. Please turn to slide eight for trended non-GAAP financials. As you see, despite our flattish revenue performance over the past year, we have consistently delivered non-GAAP gross margin of 10% or more, which we expect to continue. With our anticipated revenue growth in the back half of the year, we are forecasting non-GAAP operating margin to again exceed 5%. Please refer to slides nine and ten for discussion of our balance sheet, cash flow, and working capital trends.

Our cash balance on June 30 was $265 million, a decrease of $90 million from Q1, driven by the following factors. During our Q1 earnings call, we highlighted that our Q2 free cash flow would be impacted by a couple of one-time events related to customs and transition tax payments related to prior years, the net effect of which would be a temporary pause in our free cash flow generation. These charges, combined with our other working capital items and capital expenditures, resulted in a $15 million free cash outflow during the quarter. As a reminder, we generated over $80 million in free cash flow over the trailing 12 months ended June 2025. We expect to return to positive free cash flow through the remainder of the year.

During Q2 2025, we repatriated $152 million of cash from China and Thailand, $95 million of which we used to further pay down our revolver. In connection with this repatriation, we paid foreign withholding taxes of $15 million, the majority of which we anticipate recovering in 2026. As Jeff mentioned, the company completed a debt refinancing in June, which extended the maturity of our term loan and revolver to June 2030. It also increased our term loan to $150 million from $121 million. All other terms were consistent with our prior debt agreements. As of June 30, we had $150 million outstanding on our term loan and $60 million outstanding against our revolver, from which we had $486 million available to borrow. Our Q2 2025 liquidity ratio, as calculated by our debt covenants, was 0.3, down from 0.7 in the prior year period.

We invested approximately $12 million in capital expenditures during the quarter, primarily to enhance capabilities and infrastructure at our Americas and Asia facilities, supporting long-term growth and operational efficiency. Demonstrating our ongoing commitment to return value to shareholders, we returned $6 million in cash dividends and repurchased $8 million in stock during the quarter. At the end of the quarter, we had approximately $134 million remaining in our existing share repurchase authorization. Our cash conversion cycle in the quarter was 85 days, improving one and five days sequentially and year over year, respectively. Inventory days were down six days sequentially as we continue to actively manage our inventory. Please advance to slide 11. Let me now turn to our guidance for our third quarter of 2025. We expect revenue to be within a range of $635 million to $685 million, up low single digits sequentially.

We continue to anticipate year-over-year growth of low to mid-single digits in the second half. We expect non-GAAP gross margin to be between 10.2% and 10.4%. With those assumptions, we would expect non-GAAP operating margin to be between 5% and 5.2%. On a GAAP basis, we expect expenses to include approximately $5.3 million of stock-based compensation and $6.1 million to $6.3 million of non-operating expenses, including amortization, restructuring, and other charges. Our non-GAAP diluted earnings per share is expected to be in the range of $0.56 to $0.62. Interest and other expenses are expected to be approximately $5.5 million. We expect our Q3 effective tax rate will be between 23% and 25%. Our weighted average share count is expected to be approximately $36.3 million. With that, I would like to turn the call over to David to discuss market sector performance and outlook. David?

Speaker 2

Thanks, Bryan, and hello everyone. Let's please turn to slide 12 for a discussion of our performance and outlook by sector. In the quarter, our Semicap revenue again grew double digits year over year, consistent with our expectations. This performance was driven by ramping wins and share gains that we achieved. The broader industry recovery is taking longer than expected due to continued trade restrictions and tariff uncertainties. Looking into Q3 and the back half of the year, we expect to see continued softness in this sector while still outperforming the overall market's rate of growth. That said, the mid to longer-term secular trends in the sector support our ongoing investments, and we expect to continue gaining market share given our unique vertical integration advantages. Furthermore, in speaking with customers, their conviction around a trillion-dollar Semicap industry by 2030 remains intact.

Turning to our industrial sector, revenue performance was flat year over year, but up mid-single digits sequentially. In the quarter, we saw improvements in test and measurement and controls. I was pleased by the industrial sector's bookings in the quarter, which included both a manufacturing takeaway in the instrumentation space, along with several key engineering wins. Looking forward, we would expect sequential growth throughout the balance of the year as end markets recover and new programs begin to ramp. Moving to A&D, we had another strong double-digit year-over-year revenue performance in the quarter, which we expect to remain the case throughout the balance of the year. We continue to see a stable commercial air environment, with defense demand remaining strong. At the same time, we're encouraged by our growing momentum in satellite and space applications.

Given our broad exposure in the sector, we again had a solid quarter of bookings across manufacturing, precision technology, engineering, and solutions. In medical, from a revenue perspective, we believe we have turned a corner and are anticipating sustained growth through the second half of the year. As we have shared with you on prior calls, customer inventory-related challenges impacted our growth over the last several quarters. We believe these are behind us now. To add to our positive sentiment, we have been winning new programs during this inventory correction period, and this continued in the second quarter with a very strong set of medical bookings across both manufacturing and engineering, including a competitive lift and shift takeaway program. As you can probably tell, we are excited by these results and our return to both year-over-year and sequential revenue growth.

Finally, our ACNC revenue performed largely as expected in the quarter, down year over year and flat sequentially. As we've highlighted in the past, there have been a couple of unique dynamics that have weighed on ACNC revenue over the past number of quarters. We currently anticipate a return to growth within ACNC later in 2025 and into 2026. Specifically, within compute, we're seeing increased opportunities as customers look to leverage our liquid cooling expertise. This was a key differentiator in our role as the trusted partner for Intel's Aurora Exascale supercomputer deployment, which we announced last week. I'm particularly pleased to report we're also winning in AI data center builds, which leverages the same complex computer system assembly capabilities and liquid cooling expertise that helps us win in HPC.

Over just the last couple of quarters, we have won a few opportunities that will start contributing to ACNC's performance by end of the year. We believe this gives us line of sight to a return to sequential and year-over-year revenue growth in ACNC by late this year and into 2026. With that, I'd like to turn the call back over to Jeff for his summary of thoughts.

Speaker 0

Thanks, David. In summary, please turn to slide 13. Our second quarter represents another quarter of solid performance, further reinforced by exceptionally strong bookings despite a dynamic macro environment. Looking at our revenue performance, we remain encouraged by the early signs of recovery and are more optimistic about a return to growth for the company in the second half of 2025. Throughout, we will continue to prudently manage our spending to protect profitability and free cash flow, while at the same time support our regular dividend and share repurchases. Before turning over to Q&A, let me close with this: regardless of the market environment, Benchmark Electronics will stay true to our vision and mission, which is all about partnering with customers to create leadership products and delivering solutions that matter in the world.

Our customer-first approach is central to this and is something we'll continue to hold as our core ethos. Coupled with our disciplined approach to served markets and financial management, we're confident in our ability to increasingly enable customer success while driving shareholder value for our stakeholders. I look forward to updating you on our continued progress in the quarters to come. With that, I'll now turn the call over to the operator to conduct our Q&A session.

Speaker 2

Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question-and-answer session. If you have a question, please press * followed by the number one on your touch-tone phone. You will hear a prompt that your hand has been raised. Should you wish to decline from the polling process, please press * followed by the number two. If you are using a speakerphone, please make sure to lift your handset before pressing any keys. Your first question comes from the line of Steven Bryant Fox from Fox Advisors. Please go ahead.

Speaker 1

Hi, good morning. Good afternoon. Sorry.

Speaker 0

Good afternoon.

Speaker 1

Long week. Yeah. I guess, Jeff, maybe can you start off giving us a little bit more perspective on the recovery you're seeing in ACNC from two aspects. One, you know, the liquid cooling you guys have had a lot of experience with over the years, and it seems like others are still learning the process and builds there. Maybe your advantages, the experience you bring there. Secondly, it's hard to get a sense for how big of a recovery you're talking about. You've had some massive wins in the past that have rolled off. How do we think about just sort of the timing and strength of this rebound in ACNC? I had a follow-up.

Speaker 0

Yeah, that's fine. Good to hear from you. Good question. Yeah, we talked a little bit about the liquid cooling capability and the complexity of the, you know, the HPC platform like Intel's Aurora Exascale supercomputer that we talked about. Pretty complex board build and liquid-cooled system in general. We always felt that there was an opportunity for us to be discriminating, but participate in some of the AI activity, knowing that those systems also share similar characteristics and are pretty sophisticated, but also require an infrastructure that we've already kind of built out given the large system exascale platform stuff we've done. We see that's starting to bear fruit, and we do have a couple of wins there, as David Moezidis mentioned, and we really see that starting to ramp in fourth quarter.

It's a little early to say how large that could be, but we know there's a lot of spending going on there across a whole set of the whole ecosystem. We would kind of expect that to grow into 2026. We don't think that it's, you know, necessarily a one-time deal. It will augment the HPC business nicely. The one thing on the HPC side, with the next-generation platform moving out, and we've talked about that and how that was a bit of a headwind and partly what was weighing on it. We do see some smaller platforms kind of filling in on the HPC and maybe not something that would put itself in the number of, you know, one, two, or three spot on the top 500, but we have seen some backfill there as well.

All of that is really leading us to say, you know, we really expect good year-over-year growth in the fourth quarter, and, you know, it bodes well for growth in ACNC in 2026.

Speaker 1

Great, that's very helpful. On the Semicap market, I'm trying to discern between politics and actual end market questions. How much of, sort of, versus 90 days ago is related to China restrictions versus other things you're seeing at the customers? Is there any way you could talk about that and give us a sense for how much you think you're outgrowing the markets now? Thanks a lot.

Speaker 0

Yeah, it's a little bit of both. In other words, there's certainly some fab build-out and the timing on that and folks adjusting their capital spending, which I think is weighing some on our customers selling in there. Also, with the government restrictions about not selling into China, if you watch some of the OEMs, it's been a big piece of their business for the last several years, particularly in front of some of those restrictions. I think both are combining to put pressure on that recovery that we still believe will come, but it's certainly taking longer. We have one business that had a really good year last year, and a lot of those platforms have been ramping, and that's why we continue to believe we'll see growth through 2025. It's a little early yet to say what 2026 holds.

We're hearing a little bit different indications from a variety of customers that we have in the space. I think I'm going to hold off a little on 2026, but we believe that we have a very differentiated position in the space, and we continue to invest for incremental capacity. It's what we talked about, I think David mentioned the trillion-dollar mark in 2030. We still believe that it's going to be a long-term secular growth play. We're using some of this time to move more into some vertically integrated solutions where, you know, we're not just machining metal, but obviously we've been able to do complex assembly and clean rooms for that segment. We're also bringing in-house some cleaning processes and other things. We keep leveraging this opportunity to do more vertical integration for that sector and further really differentiating us.

Speaker 1

Great, that's helpful. Thank you so much.

Speaker 0

No worries.

Speaker 2

Your next question is from the line of Melissa Ann Dailey Fairbanks from Raymond James & Associates. Please go ahead.

Speaker 3

Hey guys, thanks very much. Really great quarter. Really good to see progress on several fronts. David, welcome to the call. It's great to hear you. You said the magic words. Yeah, you said the magic words, AI data center. Get ready for that. I was maybe a little bit, just a quick question on that. Obviously, you're coming from the HPC side of things, moving into some of these applications as the systems become much more complicated on kind of traditional hyperscalers. Are you seeing also any pull-through from what we're kind of calling like the next level of AI data center builds, for some of like the enterprise AI, or is it really still the highest performance type of systems?

Speaker 0

I think it's going to be more of the former for us, right? I think you do see enterprise apps and you see that the opportunity is growing beyond just the hyperscalers. When you look at our participation, it's more in that realm.

Speaker 3

Okay, great. Thank you. You're probably going to get a million more questions about that in the future. Maybe pivoting to the medical side of things, really great to see an inflection in that business. It has been challenged for quite some time. I know that you've been winning a lot of new business there. Are you able to kind of break out how much of the sequential growth that you saw in the quarter was existing programs where the inventory overhang was maybe easing versus new programs where this is brand new business and it's all incremental for you?

Speaker 0

Yeah, I'll take that one, Melissa. I would say for the most part, it's the base business starting to come back and we're seeing it from the inventory that we said was built up in the channels to dissipate. However, that said, we've had significant bookings and I pointed out that we had a competitive lift and shift takeaway just to illustrate that on lift and shift, time to revenue is a lot shorter than the typical two and a half to three-year cycles. We've got a number of programs that are in the ramp zone and hopefully we'll start seeing those contributing by next year.

Speaker 3

That's great. Congratulations on that. I have one more question if I can sneak it in, if that's all right.

Speaker 0

Sure, yeah.

Speaker 3

Okay, Bryan, I don't want to leave you out. Really nice progress still on the cash cycle days. Can you remind us, what does each day reduction in cash cycle equal, you know, on the cash flow front?

Speaker 0

Yeah, on the cash flow front, that would be about $7 million for each day cycle. That 85 days where we're at today, you can imagine one day over the last period. It's significant progress on the inventory, which we're excited about. With the six days given.

Speaker 3

For sure. Do you have a longer-term target for the cash conversion cycle days, or is it just going to kind of depend on the macro?

Speaker 0

Yeah, if you look at our big thing is on inventory, right now we're at 4.3 turns, and we're really looking to drive that at five to five and a half is our goal, kind of what we're looking to do. Maybe on inventory, looking a little different from just the days to moving to that, because as we shift and ramp up some of these programs, it's going to cause a slower kind of days on that front, but we're going to drive the turns to get that up to the five and five and a half.

Speaker 3

Okay, perfect.

Speaker 0

I'm glad to his comment. We have done a lot of work to bring inventory down. I think we're over $100 million just quarter, year over year, in the third quarter. We are still holding quite a bit of customer advanced payments, and if you net that, our turns are actually quite a bit higher. We know over time that will dissipate as excess inventory is consumed. As Bryan said, it was absolutely the case that we're focused on the turns, but we're doing actually better than that if you consider the cash on hand.

Speaker 3

Okay, perfect. That's all for me for now. Thanks very much, guys. Appreciate it.

Speaker 0

Thanks, Melissa.

Speaker 1

Thank you.

Speaker 0

Thanks.

Speaker 2

Your next question comes from the line of Anja Marie Theresa Soderstrom from Sidoti & Company. Please go ahead.

Speaker 4

Hi, and thank you for taking my questions. I have a couple of follow-ups and then some other questions. Just on the inventory improvement here, how do you expect to achieve that? Is that through implementing better systems or what are the efforts and takes there?

Speaker 0

Yeah, I mean, there's just a lot of focus on that as we're looking at kind of the customer demand and optimizing kind of the day's inventory. We have a group of individuals that are focusing on basically driving this day's inventory down. There's a lot of focus on that. Of course, the systems will continue to improve that to do that. I know as you look at the six days we had this period, it's maintaining that and improving upon that and then moving to the days from the 4.3 inventory on hand to the 5.5 is kind of what we're targeting. Again, there's a lot of focus on that across the organization and working with our customers and demand.

Operational focus is key for us and really involving all of our, you know, general managers and looking at, you know, each site and where they are in inventory along with each customer and working with our commercial team on just making sure that we're being super disciplined on it. I think it's certainly something we established about a year and a half, two years ago when, you know, inventory was a much bigger challenge. We've just, you know, some brute force, some process, but discipline has been key to the progress we've made.

Speaker 4

Thank you. I'm also curious, in the medical, you mentioned the competitive lift and shift program you won. How did you win that?

Speaker 0

When I joined a couple of years ago, we revamped our go-to-market strategy. Fundamentally, we took a different approach with regards to servicing our base customers much more diligently and paying much more attention to them and growing those customers. What we've built is a proactive proposal team that goes out to our customers and brings forward new creative solutions.

Speaker 4

Okay, that sounds good. I know it's hard to win those over, so it's encouraging to hear that. I'm also curious within the team.

Speaker 0

As the team executes well, it's the best driver of incremental business from our existing customers. It's nice to see the balance of not only growing our wallet share or our footprint with existing customers, but also bringing on new clients.

Speaker 4

That sounds good. I'm just curious, within the Aerospace & Defense, you said commercial air is stabilizing. What are you seeing there, and how do you see that build out now with Boeing and Airbus taking off a bit?

Speaker 0

What I would say there is that, obviously coming out of the pandemic, we were waiting for the international travel to pick up quite a bit. I think you see from the airlines that just generally travel is back, right? Even business travel has recovered quite a bit. I think David was talking a bit about the stabilization we've seen. It may not be growing at the rate that it was, but certainly the demand has been pretty solid for us. We play pretty broadly across commercial in different parts of the planes. From that perspective, as that industry goes, we do as well. We have probably less exposure to Boeing, which is just where we sit and where our wins are at. From that standpoint, we have a lot of exposure across the rest of the industry.

Speaker 4

Okay, thank you. That was all for me.

Speaker 0

Thanks, Anya.

Speaker 2

Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by the number one on your touch-tone phone. Your next question is from the line of Jaeson Allen Min Schmidt from Lake Street Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Speaker 1

Hey guys, thanks for taking my questions. Just circling back to the medical segment, it sounds like the inventory digestion period seems largely complete. Just curious if this was what you had expected sort of three months ago or if that has completed faster than expected and hence why you're expecting sort of this more optimistic outlook for the second half here within medical.

Speaker 0

Yeah, I'll take that. What I would say is we started seeing things slow down in late 2023, and quite honestly, we thought it was going to clear out a lot sooner. It just took a little bit longer than we expected. We're pleased to see it dissipated now. During that whole inventory clearing period, as I mentioned in my commentary, we were really busy working to gain incremental new awards. We're in a really good position now considering the market has stabilized and has turned a corner.

Speaker 1

Gotcha. Just as a follow-up, within your A&D segment, you noted sort of the new space program ramping. I'm just curious how big that kind of space sector is within the A&D bucket these days.

Speaker 0

Yeah, we haven't really broken it out. We don't get into the, you know, necessarily to the subsector size, but I could, I would, I guess I'd go enough to say that if we're highlighting it, you know, it's not a million or two. You know what I mean? It's a meaningful contributor and has the opportunity to be tens of millions. Depending on how that segment grows is going to really dictate, you know, how large that can get. We haven't, as a subsector, said what that means to us. We find it's an interesting space because it kind of leverages our RF know-how. It leverages our experience putting complex systems up into space and satellites, I think, where David highlighted. It's a good area with significant value add.

With some of the new entrants, you've got to be nimble and be able to move quickly to the shifting needs. I think that plays to our strength as well. We're excited about our participation there.

Speaker 1

Okay, that's helpful. Thanks a lot, guys.

Speaker 0

Thank you. Thanks, Jaeson.

Speaker 2

There are no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the call over to Paul Mansky for closing comments. Sir, please go ahead.

Speaker 0

Thank you, Constantine, and thank you everyone for participating in Benchmark Electronics' Second Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. We will be participating in the Sidoti & Company Small Cap Virtual Conference on September 17. For updates to this and other upcoming investor conferences and events, please refer to the events section of our IR website at ir.bench.com. With that, we thank you all again for your support and look forward to speaking with you soon.

Speaker 2

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you very much for your participation. You may now disconnect.