Littelfuse - Earnings Call - Q2 2025

Executive Summary

• Littelfuse delivered a clean beat: revenue $613.4M (+9.8% y/y) vs S&P Global consensus ~$572.2M, and adjusted EPS $2.85 vs ~$2.33, with broad-based strength and margin expansion across segments. Q2 beats reflect volume leverage, improved operations, and a tariff timing benefit that will reverse in Q3.
• Transportation and Industrial margins inflected sharply (Transportation operating margin 15.6% vs 9.0% y/y; Industrial 19.2% vs 11.4% y/y) on execution and mix; Electronics grew 10% with passives +14% organically and power semis still soft (-5% organic).
• Q3 guide: revenue $610–$630M and adjusted EPS $2.65–$2.85; management cited strong backlog, book-to-bill >1, and the highest bookings run-rate since 1H’22; dividend raised 7% to $0.75/qtr ($3.00 annualized).
• Strategic narrative strengthening: accelerating design wins in data center, grid storage, and high-voltage applications; new global ops team driving “best-in-class” practices; net leverage 1.1x, FCF conversion 114% YTD supports capital deployment .

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

What Went Well

• Broad beat on the P&L: revenue $613.4M (+9.8% y/y) and adjusted EPS $2.85 (+45% y/y), with adjusted EBITDA margin up 280 bps to 21.4%. CFO: “Adjusted EBITDA margin finished at 21.4%, up 280 basis points... reflecting strong conversion on higher sales growth [and] improved operational performance”.
• Transportation and Industrial margin step-up: Transportation operating margin 15.6% (+660 bps y/y) and Industrial 19.2% (+780 bps y/y), with data center, grid storage, industrial safety and HVAC driving Industrial; volume leverage and ops initiatives lifted Transportation.
• Demand indicators improved: “book-to-bill again tracked above one,” and “bookings exited the quarter at the highest run rate since the first half of 2022” (CEO). Dividend raised 7% to $0.75/share, reinforcing cash return discipline.

What Went Wrong

• Power semiconductors remained a drag: Electronics passives +14% organically and protection improved, but power semis declined 5% organically, holding Electronics margins flat y/y (Adj. EBITDA 21.6%).
• Non-operating FX hit GAAP: $10.4M non-operating FX loss in Q2 (part of $0.55 EPS of non-GAAP adjustments), tempering GAAP profit despite strong operations.
• Tariff timing: ~$0.15 EPS benefit in Q2 expected to reverse as a sequential headwind in Q3 (CFO). Management also flagged ongoing macro/trade uncertainty despite improved near-term visibility.

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Littelfuse second quarter 2025 earnings conference call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time, I will turn the call over to the Head of Investor Relations, David Kelley. Please proceed.

David Kelley (Head of Investor Relations)

Good morning and welcome to the Littelfuse second quarter 2025 earnings conference call. With me today are Greg Henderson, President and CEO, and Abhi Khandelwal, Executive Vice President and CFO. This morning, we reported results for our second quarter, and a copy of our earnings release and slide presentation is available in the investor relations section of our website. A webcast of today's conference call will also be available on our website. Please advance to slide two for our disclaimers. Our discussions today will include forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements may involve significant risks and uncertainties. Please review today's press release and our Forms 10-K and 10-Q for more detail about important risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations. We assume no obligation to update any of this forward-looking information. Also, our remarks today refer to non-GAAP financial measures.

A reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP measure is provided on our earnings release available in the investor relations section of our website. I will now turn the call over to Greg.

Greg Henderson (CEO)

Thank you, David, and thank you to everyone for joining us today. I wanted to start this morning with highlights of our second quarter and then provide an update on the progress we made on our strategic priorities. We're in the early process of capitalizing on our newest growth and operational enhancement opportunities. An important milestone in this process was the hiring of our new CFO, Abhi Khandelwal, to the quarter. Abhi joins us from IRIS Corporation, and he brings more than two decades of financial and operational leadership. He has significant experience in driving strategic growth, both organic and acquisitions, as well as in scaling operations. Abhi has already had a significant impact in his first month at Littelfuse. I look forward to continuing our partnership as we focus on scaling our business for long-term growth, enhanced profitability, and best-in-class shareholder returns.

In the second quarter, we demonstrated broad-based strength across our businesses, delivering revenue growth of 10% relative to the prior year. Our performance reflects our leadership position in safe and efficient electrical energy transfer. The ongoing meaningful technology evolution is in front of us, and the fact that our customers deeply value our trusted and essential capabilities. Across our segments, we observed continued momentum in the second quarter. Our electronics segment benefited from improved demand for passive electronics and protection products. In our transportation segment, we delivered broad-based growth, while our strong industrial segment performance reflects our unique market and customer positioning. Our end markets continue to move to higher power and higher energy density, and we are leveraging our market leadership and unique product portfolio to help our customers solve increasingly complex challenges.

Supporting this, our second quarter book-to-build again tracked above one, while our bookings exited the quarter at the highest run rate since the first half of 2022. We expect our solid growth performance to continue into the third quarter. Our second quarter earnings results also exceeded the high end of our prior guidance range, reflecting strong execution. Abhi will discuss specific results in more detail shortly. I want to thank our teams for their hard work and dedication. With that, I wanted to update everyone on the specific progress we're making on each of our strategic priorities that I highlighted last quarter. Our first strategic priority is to enhance our focus to better capitalize on future growth opportunities. Our teams are sharpening their focus on higher voltage and higher energy density applications, as our customers are pushing for higher power next-gen solutions.

This evolution is leading to complex safety and efficiency challenges, and our products are increasingly important to solving these challenges at the architecture level. Importantly, this transition is happening across all of our end markets, and we are seeing the benefits of our heightened focus on these expanding opportunities real-time. Let me provide you with an example in enterprise computing, where the industry is transitioning from 5V to higher power 48V capabilities for single-cable combined power connectivity interfaces. This evolution requires more advanced and unique safety and protection solutions, while meeting the increasingly demanding data rate and electromagnetic compatibility requirements. In the second quarter, we worked with a market leader to develop a next-gen semiconductor protection solution. Our solution supports higher power and data rates at faster charging speeds and will begin shipping in the third quarter.

Broadly, our heightened focus on the secular trends across our end markets will continue to drive expanded new business opportunities. We are seeing meaningful traction in our pipeline, and year to date, our new business opportunity funnel is up double digits. Our second strategic priority is to provide more complete solutions for a broader set of our customers. Customers deeply value our capabilities and our scale is a significant advantage. Yet, we can further harness our unique and market-leading product portfolio to help more of our customers solve complex challenges around safe and efficient power transfer. To support this opportunity, we are further aligning our technology capabilities and our sales structure to better serve our customers with our full product portfolio. We are also leveraging on collaborative product development, engineering, and testing processes to better support our broad customers as they drive ongoing product innovations.

As an example, last quarter we discussed the meaningful role we play in data center advancements. We are seeing an accelerating pipeline opportunity as we expand our go-to-market strategy. I am pleased to announce several new data center design wins in the second quarter, with market leaders ranging from a global digital infrastructure provider to a leading compute platform player. Our second quarter wins range from liquid cooling to on the board and power distribution applications and position us well for continued strong data center sales growth. Last quarter, we also discussed our opportunities in the rapidly growing grid storage market. Today, I wanted to discuss the broader sustainable grid ecosystem, where we are building momentum globally. In the second quarter, we won a design with a leading player in green hydrogen, where we will provide high-speed, high-voltage industrial fuses.

Our solution enables pairing to the grid and plays a critical role in reliable renewable energy transfer. We also worked with a solar supplier to develop a next-gen microinverter. Our solution enables compatibility with higher power solar panels and improved battery integration. Broadly, we observed strong renewables and grid storage sales growth in the second quarter, and we see continued momentum as these markets transition to higher power solutions. Turning to our third strategic priority, we see an opportunity to drive further operational excellence while enhancing long-term profitability as we grow. We can better leverage areas of best-in-class operating practices and apply those across our businesses. We can also further optimize our operating structure to support our growth opportunities and enhance long-term performance. In the second quarter, we established a new global operations team that will focus on driving best-in-class operational capabilities across our global sites.

Led by this team, we are in the process of establishing and driving best practices with a heightened emphasis on safety, quality, delivery, cost, and inventory. While this is a long journey, we have begun applying this enhanced focus to some of our North American factories. We saw early benefits of these efforts in the quarter, reflected in our second quarter transportation operational performance. Taking a step back, we delivered a strong second quarter, and we are well positioned to drive continued growth into the third quarter. We are seeing the benefits of our flexible operating model and global footprint that is closely aligned to our customers and their supply chains. We will continue to work closely with our customers and partners during the evolving environment to deliver on the meaningful opportunities in front of us.

Finally, while we have made significant progress to date, we remain focused on our strategic priorities as we aim to position and ultimately scale our company with the goal of delivering long-term best-in-class performance. With that, I will hand the call over to Abhi.

Abhi Khandelwal (EVP and CFO)

Thank you, Greg, and to everyone joining us today. I'm excited to have joined this great organization as we scale our business with the next growth phase of Littelfuse. One month into the role, I've been working with Greg and our leadership team as we build on our strategic products. I see opportunities to enhance our secular growth momentum, further optimize our portfolio, and strengthen our talent as we drive meaningful long-term returns. With that, please turn to slide seven to start with details on our second quarter results. As Greg mentioned, we exceeded the high end of our guidance range for revenue and adjusted EPS. Going forward, comparisons I will discuss will be relative to the prior year, unless stated otherwise. Revenue in the quarter was $613 million, up 10% in total, and up 6% organic.

The Dortmund acquisition contributed 2% to sales growth, while FX was a 1% tailwind. Adjusted EBITDA margin finished at 21.4%, up 280 basis points. Our solid margin expansion reflects strong conversion on higher sales growth, improved operational performance, as well as the benefit due to timing of tariff collections and payments. The second quarter adjusted delivery earnings was $2.85, up 45%, and exceeded the high end of our guidance range. This reflects solid sales growth across our segments, as well as margin expansion across our transportation and industrial segments. Please note, our second quarter adjusted effective tax rate was 23%, in line with our expectations. Please turn to slide eight for updates on capital allocation. We delivered strong cash generation in the second quarter. Operating cash flow was $82 million, and we generated $73 million in free cash flow.

Year to date, we have generated $150 million in free cash flow, yielding a strong 114% conversion rate. We ended the quarter with $685 million of cash in hand and net debt to EBITDA leverage of 1.1 times. In the quarter, we returned $17 million to shareholders via our cash dividend. We will continue to prioritize our cash flow for organic investments and strategic acquisitions. We will also continue to return capital to our shareholders through our dividend, as well as strategic share buyback. Please turn to slide nine for a segment highlight. Starting with the electronics product segment, sales for the segment were up 10% versus last year and up 4% organically. The Dortmund acquisition contributed 4%, while FX contributed 1 point to growth. Sales across passive products were up 14% organically, while semiconductor products declined 5% in the quarter.

Our strong passive product sales growth in the quarter reflects improved orders from channel partners and increased demand from OEM customers. Within our semiconductor products exposure, we observed continued soft power semiconductor demand that offset improved protection product volumes. Adjusted EBITDA margin of 21.6% was flat versus the prior year. Favorable year-over-year volume leverage on our passive and protection product sales growth was offset by lower power semiconductor volumes. Moving to our transportation product segment on slide 10, segment sales increased 6% as organic sales increased 4% for the quarter, while FX contributed 2 points to growth. In the passenger car business, sales increased 3% organically. Passenger car sales increased across North America, Europe, and China as we benefited from share gains and growth in global car builds. Commercial vehicle sales for the quarter increased 5% organically and benefited from market share gains despite ongoing soft in-market conditions.

For the segment, adjusted EBITDA margin of 30.5% was up 610 basis points. In the quarter, we benefited from volume leverage, while our focus on profitability initiatives continued to drive improved operational performance. On slide 11, industrial product segment sales grew 17% organically for the quarter. The second quarter sales benefited from strong grid storage, renewable, data center, industrial safety, and HVAC growth. Adjusted EBITDA margin was 22.1% in the quarter, up 610 basis points. Our strong margin performance reflects improved volume leverage and solid operational execution. Please move to slide 12 for the forecast. We ended the third quarter with a strong backlog and remain well positioned to deliver continued growth as we focus on driving operational excellence. With that in mind, our third quarter guidance incorporates current market conditions, trade policies, and FX rates as of today.

We expect third quarter sales in the range of $610 million-$630 million, which assumes 6% organic growth at the midpoint and 2 points of growth stemming from our Dortmund acquisition. We are projecting third quarter EPS to be in the range of $2.65-$2.85, which assumes a 38% flow-through at the midpoint. Third quarter guidance also assumes an unfavorable impact from stock and variable comp of $0.21, and a $0.12 headwind from a prior year favorable mark-to-market and a higher adjusted effective tax rate. At current FX and commodity rates, we're expecting an $0.08 headwind to EPS versus the prior year. Moving to slide 14, let me add some additional details on our full year 2025. We continue to expect 2% total sales growth stemming from our Dortmund acquisition with a neutral impact to EPS.

At current rates, we expect FX and commodities will represent a 1% tailwind to sales and a $0.14 benefit to EPS. On other modeling items, we're assuming $58 million in amortization spends and $35 million in interest expense, about two-thirds of which we expect to offset through interest income from our cash and investment strategies. We're estimating a full year tax rate between 23% and 25%. We also expect to spend $90 million-$95 million in capital expenditures. In closing, our second quarter results reflect a unique technology positioning, flexible operating model, and solid execution. As we look forward, we have a strong business model and balance sheet, and we will maintain our financial discipline and focus on shareholder returns. We will continue to build on our strategic priorities to scale our business and drive long-term value. With that, operator, please open the call for Q&A.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, simply press star one again. Please ensure your phone is not on mute when called upon. Thank you. Your first question comes from Luke Junk of Baird. Your line is open.

Luke Junk (Senior Research Analyst)

Good morning. Thanks for taking the questions. Greg or Abhi, maybe to start, if you could just help us to put the margin upside in both transportation and industrial, just in context relative to history, both recent history and some of the longer-term targets that have been out there. Transportation in particular, the company's had a long-held 15% margin target. You're right there this quarter. Just how should we square current trends with what the historical context has been for that business operating-wise? Abhi, I think you mentioned some tariff timing impacts to margins. If you could just clarify what that was. Thank you.

Greg Henderson (CEO)

Sure. Thanks, Luke. Good morning. This is Greg. I'll just start. Maybe I'll take them one at a time. Starting with our transportation segment, as we mentioned in the prepared remarks, one of the key areas that we're focusing on is scaling our operational excellence. We've been working on focusing on that inside of our transportation business. Strategically, we have two initiatives in transportation. One is that we're strategically focused on diversifying our portfolio, so diversifying our market exposure. We have a strong exposure, as you know, to passenger car and maybe traditional transportation like heavy trucks. We have a strategy to try to diversify. We're winning new designs in more diversified areas, things like agriculture and other customers that we don't penetrate today. We also have a focus on scaling our operational excellence.

This is one of the areas that is still in early innings for us, but we're working on optimizing our factory performance, taking some of our best-in-class capabilities and scaling them across our factories. We saw meaningful improvement in our transportation margin in the quarter because of that. Abhi can give some more color to that. In industrial, I would say that we continue to have positive revenue growth and margin. A lot of the performance in industrial is related to the markets we're playing in. We're continuing to play in focus of energy storage, data center, industrial safety, we have strong growth in HVAC. In our industrial business, our top-line growth and our focus on high-value markets is also driving the performance there. Maybe I'll hand it to Abhi to see if he has more color on that.

Abhi Khandelwal (EVP and CFO)

Yeah. So, Luke, first of all, a pleasure to meet you. A pleasure to talk to you. I look forward to our partnership here. Starting with transportation, building on what Greg said, there's a couple of things I'll point out. First of all, if you look at the performance in the quarter and look at 4% organic growth, I think what that margin reflects is the power of leverage, operating leverage. You see that play itself out in the quarter. Secondly, as Greg mentioned, we've done a lot of work around operational execution. We continue to focus on that. That's one of our strategic priorities. As we move forward, we will continue to build on that. Now, keep in mind, transportation margins are not going to be linear because there are sales that move over time by quarter given seasonality.

I do expect over the longer haul, transportation as a segment has more margin upside. We'll work the details out as we go to the back half of the year and solidify our strategy. Talking about industrial, we're really, really pleased with the performance that we saw in the quarter, both on the top line and the bottom line. Again, this is pretty much the same story, which is around organic growth translating into powerful operating leverage, which you see play itself out in the margin line. Transportation exited the quarter and, or sorry, industrial exited the quarter at about 19% margin, right? Now, keep in mind, one of the things to consider here is as we start to see our organic growth at 17%, some of the margin dropped through. We're going to invest back in the business to continue to fuel growth as we move forward.

Again, we're pretty pleased with our performance. You can see the work that we're doing around our third strategic priority on operational execution really play itself out in the quarter across the company.

Luke Junk (Senior Research Analyst)

Thank you for that. It'd be great to meet you in this context as well. Just on the tariff timing impacts, could you just clarify what you mentioned in the script as well?

Abhi Khandelwal (EVP and CFO)

Yeah, absolutely. What I said in the script is something that basically comes down to the timing of the realization of price versus when we incurred the cost in the quarter. What that means is if you think about it sequentially, in Q2, we had about a $0.15 benefit or tailwind that will become a headwind in Q2. All it is, it's timing between the quarters in terms of the timing of price realization versus cost that we incur on the P&L. That's what I meant by that. There's about a $0.15 good guy in Q2 that's going to reverse itself out in Q3 and be a bad guy sequentially.

Luke Junk (Senior Research Analyst)

Okay. Understood. That's helpful. Thank you. Second, maybe just a little bigger picture, Greg, but you know really strong results within industrial quarter. You know historically, this has been a smaller just because of the size of the business, you know somewhat an uneven segment for the company historically. As you come into the company, is your perception of the business different? I guess I'm thinking especially you know your priority around aligning the company's technology capabilities and sales structures. Could that have a sort of outsized impact on the industrial segment specifically, Greg?

Greg Henderson (CEO)

Yeah, I think what I'll say is I think we're actually really excited about the industrial segment. When we think about our bigger picture strategy of focusing on safe and efficient transfer of electrical energy and about our customers' transition to higher power, high voltage, high current, this plays really well. This is a big megatrend in that industrial sector. I think you know we focused in our industrial segment on some of these markets that are maybe leading in this transition. We built technology. For example, solar, grid storage, these are some of the areas that are leading in this transition. We built technology. Actually, now some of the technology from our industrial business is now a big part of our data center solutions. As we talked about data center, some of the data center customers, and actually, we sell to two sides of that.

We sell to what we would call maybe industrial infrastructure customers that do maybe the grid side, bringing the power into the data center, doing the cooling for the data center. That's part of our industrial business. Also, products for our industrial business are playing straight to the hyperscalers directly that are going to the next generation high-voltage architecture. Broadly, we feel that industrial is a growth sector for us. You heard Abhi say that it's actually, it's a high growth, but also a good margin, but we're going to continue to invest in this. Industrial segment is one that aligns well to our strategy, and you will continue to see, in my opinion, both top line and bottom line positive outcomes from this.

Luke Junk (Senior Research Analyst)

Got it. Jumping off on that, on the data center piece specifically, Greg, maybe a multi-part question here. You touched on some of the infrastructure side. Can you remind us from an electronics standpoint where data center exposure is? I think historically for the company in total, it's been a good exposure, but not necesSareely one of the company's largest. Kind of just where is that today? I get the sense that it's growing. As you lean into new engagements and opportunities on next-gen, higher-power type applications, sounds like some of those things are maybe coming to fruition earlier than expected. Can you just help us understand the magnitude of that tailwind? Thank you.

Greg Henderson (CEO)

Yeah, thanks, Luke. I think data center we consider as inside of our electronics segment. The products in our electronics segment are also having strong traction in data center. We mentioned design wins we had this time in liquid cooling, but also in onboard. We have a lot of products from our electronics segment that are onboard power protection products and actually our semiconductor protection products actually going to data center onboard. I think, interestingly, like one of the trends that's happening in this, you know, you all hear about the data center market and the data center's gigawatts of power, etc. Every step of the chain in the data center is going to higher energy density. Our solutions, a lot of our electronics products are about, you know, they tend to be slightly smaller than, say, the industrial products.

Again, you're trying to put more energy into a small area and still have that protection. We have some surface maps, for example, of our surface mount fuses, our overvoltage devices, our semiconductor protection devices are playing well in that space. What was the second half of the question, Luke?

Luke Junk (Senior Research Analyst)

Yeah. Just maybe sizing the data center exposure, like I said, I think it's been a good exposure historically, but not one of the largest. It feels like that's growing right now.

Greg Henderson (CEO)

I think what I would say is that data center is materially important to Littelfuse, but I also think it's going to be more important as time goes on. I think the thing to understand about this, we talked about our second strategic priority about selling more of our complete solutions. This is really about also how we align our go-to-market so that we're more leveraging our broad capabilities. Interestingly, I talked about some of our industrial products selling straight into data center. The go-to-market for our data center is right now focusing in our electronics segment, but we're trying to better scale that go-to-market. Data center is a key kind of early area where we're focusing this scaling of go-to-market to bring more of our portfolio to our customers. This is an area where we're building pipeline. We have good design wins, but we also have growing pipeline.

We will continue to see momentum in that area.

Luke Junk (Senior Research Analyst)

All very helpful. I'll leave it there. Thank you.

Greg Henderson (CEO)

Thanks, Luke.

Abhi Khandelwal (EVP and CFO)

Thanks for the question, Luke.

Operator (participant)

The next question comes from Christopher Glynn of Oppenheimer. Your line is open.

Christopher Glynn (Equity Analyst)

Yeah, thanks. Just would like to dive into the passenger vehicle share gains, you know, kind of point in time. I don't think you called it out last quarter. Obviously, it's looked a positive organic, but is this kind of a midstream activity that's just kind of hitting past the starting line presently?

Greg Henderson (CEO)

Yeah. Thanks, Chris. I think, you know, when we look at passenger vehicle, I think the thing that I'll say is that we have a very strong market position and good exposure globally. We participate in the North American market, in the China market, and the European market. We participate strongly, actually, in EV and also traditional IC vehicles as well. We have a pretty good market exposure. I would say we have good, strong exposure and share. We talked about before that on average, EVs tend to have higher content. Therefore, when they have higher content, we tend to have more dollar share that goes with that. We have good share across. I would say from my perspective, the share gains here is really about kind of where our market exposure is and how our position is. That's going to go up and down.

I would also say just emphasizing, I think, you know, when we talk about our transportation segment, passenger vehicles are an important part of that. I think you'll continue to see our strategy is to try to continue to diversify. Passenger vehicle is an important part of our transportation segment. Our strategy is to continue to diversify with some key design wins in the quarter in areas like agriculture that is diversifying out from our traditional customer base. We consider those to be high growth and SAM opportunities for us as well.

Christopher Glynn (Equity Analyst)

Okay, great. You know, we just talked about the share gain in transportation and industrial. You have good market targeting and penetration. Electronics is a little bigger, more diversified. It's tougher to discern how it ties into better capitalizing on future growth and more complete solutions. You've talked about BMS and medical in the past. Just wondering how the kind of momentum is playing behind the scenes there overall at electronics relative to the kind of more visible at the two smaller segments.

Greg Henderson (CEO)

Yeah, I think what's important to understand about this strategy, and I think, you know, from my perspective, we're in the early innings of this strategy right now. What's important is that in all of our segments, in electronics, in industrials, and transportation, we're trying to get more disciplined and deliberate about, okay, what are the growth drivers in the segment? What are the parts of the market that are growing? Where do we want to focus? Then how do what's our position there? We're focused on these areas where they're focused on transition to higher voltage, higher current. I gave an example, actually, in the script that comes from the electronics segment, which is actually in enterprise computing. That example, what's interesting about that to me is, you know, we talk about transition to high voltage on high current.

We've talked in the past about data center going to 400 or 800 volts. People think, oh, very high voltage. Actually, this enterprise computing market for this application of connectivity is transitioning from 5 volt to 48 volt. Now, 48 volt is not high in the context of 800 volt. In the context of the application, it's a high voltage. We've actually developed completely new solutions around semiconductor protection because it's a very demanding requirement in terms of power density and electromagnetic compatibility. That's a good example. What we're trying to do is find where in these markets and in the subsegments, whether it be building automation and electronics or medical or aerospace and defense, where do we have opportunities where we can leverage those megatrends on electrification with our technology. You'll be hearing more about that as we build out this strategy over the next quarter.

Christopher Glynn (Equity Analyst)

Okay. Last for me was just curious, the electronics margin slightly down sequentially on 9% sequential sales growth. I don't know if stock and variable comp plays in there. It looks like that's a 21% year-over-year drag in the third quarter. Maybe we could level set the context of that third quarter timing as well as the electronics sequential margins.

Abhi Khandelwal (EVP and CFO)

Yeah. Chris, this is Abhi. What I'll say is this. If you look at the electronics margin profile, what you see in there in the second quarter is a really strong drop through in our passive products and our protection business within our semiconductor product business, which is partially getting offset by de-leveraging our power semi business and the acquisition of Dortmund. All that said, what we are seeing is improved orders in our power semis. As we start to see the volume recover over time, what you can see is rescaling and solid margin performance coming out of the electronics segment. Just so we're clear, one more time on the electronics side, we did see a strong drop through on passive products protection business within our semiconductor product business, which got offset by power semis.

On the Q3 question, what I'll tell you is, I think if you look at a guide for Q3 and look at what we've laid out from a true operational execution standpoint, what you're seeing is year-over-year a flow through of 38% on EBITDA conversion, which is getting offset by two things really. Number one is stock and variable comp. Within that, there's two pieces. If you recall, on the stock-based compensation for retirement-eligible employees, instead of taking the hit all in Q2, we spread it between Q2 and Q3. Part of the impact in that $0.21 that you see on the page is tied to that. The second piece is the AIP. If you recall last year, given where the company's performance was, we had to lower the bonus accrual. This year, what you see in here is the bonus being accrued at 100% or at target.

That's why year-over-year you see an impact. The other bucket is nothing more than two things. There was a mark-to-market good guy last year that won't repeat this year. There's the differential in tax rate that's playing a bit of a role on a year-over-year basis. Again, true operational performance is really strong if you look at it on a year-over-year basis at a 38% conversion on the EBITDA line.

Christopher Glynn (Equity Analyst)

Great. Thanks for all that.

Abhi Khandelwal (EVP and CFO)

Thanks for your questions, Chris.

Operator (participant)

The next question comes from Saree Boroditsky with Jefferies. Your line is open.

Saree Boroditsky (Equity Research Analyst)

Hi. Thanks for taking the questions. I think we've talked a lot on the call about companies focused on growth opportunities. I know it's early days, but I was just curious if you had any thoughts on what this could add to the top line. Are these opportunities accretive to margins or do they need higher investments?

Greg Henderson (CEO)

Yeah, thanks, Saree. I'll just start. I mean, I think, you know, it's a big picture. We believe that we have significant opportunity to grow and scale the company. I think we're focusing our strategy. We're focusing around the safe and efficient transfer of electrical energy in all three of our markets. We see opportunity there. Big picture, we believe our top line growth. We're building our long-term models now that we're going to be rolling out as we go forward. We'll be able to talk more in future quarters about kind of the details of our growth model. I think early indicators that I could say, we mentioned in the call that we have double-digit growth in our pipeline. I do believe that we're seeing traction already from a customer engagement perspective on how we're aligning our go-to-market. We're building these long-term models as we go.

We'll be talking about that more in future quarters. We do believe that we will be driving top line growth. We also want to drive bottom line growth as well. That's part of the second half. We do believe we have untapped opportunity from an operational perspective. That's part of our scaling operational excellence. We saw some early results on that as well. We believe that we can grow both top line and bottom line. Obviously, the top line will require some investments, but that's kind of the scale I would say. Abhi, you're a month in here, maybe you can give your views to how you see that as well.

Abhi Khandelwal (EVP and CFO)

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, first of all, thanks for the question. Pleasure to meet you. Here's what I'll tell you. As Greg, we have other strategic priorities. What's really exciting about the journey that we are on is a couple of things. First of all, as we sharpen our focus and go after opportunities, that's really going to help us grow our top line. That's the work we're doing right now. As Greg mentioned, we're going to reveal that in the fall. In classic fashion, if you kind of think about our portfolio and think about our business model, right, when you see organic growth, just the way you saw it in Q2, when you start to move that organic needle, what that translates into is bottom line margin expansion and bottom line growth, right? That's what we're really excited about.

I think Greg's point in his page three on the slide deck around focusing and capitalizing on future growth opportunities, really providing more broader solutions for our customer, and following that with operational execution is what I'm really excited about. I think that will translate into top line growth, bottom line growth over the longer haul. To Greg's point, in February of next year, we plan to lay that out as part of our three-year target in terms of what we believe the organic, the inorganic piece is going to convert into over the next three years and what that means from the bottom line standpoint.

Saree Boroditsky (Equity Research Analyst)

I look forward to having those targets. Maybe just sticking on the subject, you talked in the beginning about some higher voltage solutions, data centers. Maybe just any sense of the competitive environment there and maybe your market share today versus what you think it can be.

Greg Henderson (CEO)

Yeah, thanks, Saree. I mean, listen, we feel very comfortable with our technology position. In general, I would say our position is that as the markets move to these higher voltage, higher current, higher power, we are more differentiated. I've met with some of these customers, even the data center customers myself, and they really value Littelfuse's capability there. I think there's a big part of our capability and brand that plays for our strength there because we have experience and people know, okay, they can count on Littelfuse working in that model. Of course, we have competition. We have competition in all of the markets and places that we play. I would say in general, we feel good about our technology and capability. In general, as we move to these higher energy density applications, our products are more differentiated.

Also, the problems that the customers are facing are more challenging, and therefore, we are a bigger part of the solution. In general, that's a good trend for us and for our market position.

Saree Boroditsky (Equity Research Analyst)

Thanks for the questions. Congrats on the quarter.

Greg Henderson (CEO)

Thanks.

Abhi Khandelwal (EVP and CFO)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Once again, if you have a question, it is star one on your telephone keypad. Your next question comes from David Williams with Benchmark. Your line is open.

David Williams (Equity Research Analyst)

Hey, good morning. Thanks for letting me ask a question, and congrats on the really solid execution here.

Greg Henderson (CEO)

Thank you, David.

David Williams (Equity Research Analyst)

I guess maybe first is just kind of thinking about the power semi segment. You've talked about the orders improving there. When do you think we can see that leverage really return and begin to see some real impact from the power semi side?

Greg Henderson (CEO)

Yeah, thanks, David. Just to start, maybe zoom on to Ankur and Abhi Khandelwal referred to this a little bit in his remarks earlier. We zoom out and look at our semiconductor business. About 50% of our semiconductor business is our semiconductor protection business. That was actually the example we gave on the call here of under enterprise computing. That business has actually been doing very well, very strong, and actually been following our kind of path in electronics business. The other half of our semiconductor business is our power semiconductor business. The market for the power semiconductor business has been soft, as you know. We've had a soft market position. We also will be transparent that we've had some of our own execution challenges in the power semiconductor business. I would say the good news is that we are starting to see areas of improvement in power semi.

Two things. First, I would say that in general, our market position in power semi, when you get to higher power and higher energy density solutions, just like we are in our fastest business, we are more differentiated. We have more value to our customers. Also from a market perspective, we're starting to see signs of stabilization or is it improving? We do expect positive momentum sequentially in the power semiconductor business. That's areas where we're going to continue as well to focus on improving our execution and things that we can talk about more in future quarters.

David Williams (Equity Research Analyst)

Great. Secondly, just on the visibility and maybe how you see the in-demand here, do you feel like what we're seeing in terms of the improvement across your segments, does this feel like an inflection maybe on the in-demand side, or do you think there's some tariff, maybe uncertainty that's pulling things forward? Anything that you see that's maybe outside of just that normal inflection in demand that you think is driving this? Thank you.

Greg Henderson (CEO)

I think what I just said in the call, right, we had solid momentum in the quarter, strong backlog in bookings. We are, I would say, from our perspective, seeing improved stability in our end markets. We're still in a dynamic macro environment. One thing I think we would say is that if we compare this to maybe three to six months ago, we have more visibility. We have better visibility. We feel better about our kind of medium to near-term visibility than we did three to six months ago, given the environment that we're in.

Abhi Khandelwal (EVP and CFO)

Yeah, David. Even if I take a step back and kind of think about a Q3 guide, if you look at it on a year-over-year basis, we are talking about a 9% reported, 6% organic. If you just look at Q3 performance, back to your question, we are expecting a pretty nice 6% organic for the quarter on a year-over-year basis. All three segments, as I think about all three segments, 2Q to 3Q, I expect electronics and industrial to go up sequentially. Transportation seasonally is down 2%-% due to shutdowns. On a year-over-year basis, as I kind of look at our performance, that's a part of this guide. Across all three segments, you should expect growth.

David Williams (Equity Research Analyst)

Thanks so much.

Abhi Khandelwal (EVP and CFO)

Thanks for your questions, David.

Operator (participant)

This concludes the question-and-answer session. I'll turn the call to Greg Henderson for closing remarks.

Greg Henderson (CEO)

Thank you. I appreciate all of you coming and asking questions and supporting Littelfuse. It's early innings here for us in our strategy, but we are really excited about the future we're building in this safe and efficient energy transfer. I look forward to future quarters where we can update you on the progress on our strategy. Thank you very much.

Operator (participant)

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect.