Good morning, everyone. Still the morning part of day 2 of Citi's Technology Conference. Hope everyone's awake and excited. I have the pleasure here to have Amphenol's management, Adam Norwitt here, Craig Lampo. Adam's CEO, Craig's CFO. We also have IR here in the audience with us. This is a fireside. For those who have seen me host Amphenol before, we have a bunch of questions here. We are going to run through them. I will give an opportunity to investors towards the end. If you have any questions, please do raise your hand. We will make sure we get the mic to you. Welcome. Thank you.
Thank you, Asiya.
It's a great time to be at Amphenol. Clearly, record sales, I think, up 55% year-on-year. Organically, of course, up 30% year-on-year, which phenomenal. Every, I think, end market for you guys showed a positive book-to-bill when you guys reported Q2 results. Adam, as you are thinking about some of your end markets out here, where do you think things have really been surprising to the upside, and where do you think there's still room for improvement here? Maybe demand didn't live up to your expectations. Clearly, very strong results, but just help investors understand how demand's shaping up.
Well, first of all, Asiya, thank you so much for hosting us. Thanks to Citi for having us, and thanks to all of you for being here today. Some longtime familiar faces in the crowd. Look, with one exception across our end markets, and that exception was communication networks, which was actually slightly down organically. I would tell you that we were very pleased with the performance across all of our end markets. What we see in general is more money being devoted to next-generation electronics, and those next-generation electronics, in turn, having increasing content of interconnect.
The last piece of the puzzle, which is unique to Amphenol, is, I think, our success over the years and our unique operating model, that approach of relying on entrepreneurial general managers who can be agile and focused in the moment, has allowed us to take a disproportionate share of that increasing content. So you stack up a generally favorable environment, more money being devoted to electronics, more interconnect content, and then us taking more than our fair share of that content, and I think that translates into the 30% organic growth that we realized last quarter and, in particular, the positive momentum that we see really across all of our end markets.
We just see so much innovation happening in areas that maybe aren't necessarily talked about, things like medical technology, things like factory automation, defense technology, where you're seeing a blossoming of innovation, kind of unlike anything that we've seen in a generation. Even automotive, which is not, today at least, the market that's so much in favor. We grew 6% organically in a market where there's not unit growth, and we're doing that not because we're just taking share out of someone else's pocket, but rather because we're taking a disproportionate share of the new electronic content that's being embedded inside these next-generation cars. So I think it is an exciting time to be part of Amphenol. I think it's an exciting time to be part of our industry, and I think it's an exciting time to be in the electronics industry more broadly.
Orders, again, book-to-bill, again, exceeding one. You've been doing that for a few quarters now. The question I've been asking everyone, and you talked about exciting in a lot of different spaces, not just AI, IT Datacom, but how much of this demand that you see exceeding revenues, orders exceeding revenues now, how much of that's durable? How do you think about the durability of this demand?
Look, time will tell on durability, so it's not for me to say what we expect, and as we come through this quarter, we'll try to give an outlook on what we see the next quarter. But I will tell you that the trends that we're enabling with our customers, those do seem to be not necessarily flash in the pan trends. Take defense as that example. We have a very robust book-to-bill in our defense market. We see with our customers an open aperture of their plans, maybe a little bit more open than you see in other markets because they get a little bit more guidance from their customers, who tend to be governments around the world. There's no doubt about it that we see a robust spending and a robust innovation cycle that's going to be not a one or two-quarter situation.
The same across our industrial market, where we had very strong bookings in the quarter, where our customers are coming to us, giving us more orders, not because we cannot support what they gave us before and thus they are opening their lead times or something like that, but rather they see an acceleration in their space. There is some of industrial, which is not unrelated to AI.
You can imagine construction equipment, things like HVAC systems, earth moving. There is probably a little bit of that that is getting a positive knock-on effect from AI. But there is other aspects of our industrial market which are totally unrelated to AI, like medical, where we also continue to see an acceleration in demand from our customers. I do not know. I think that the resiliency of the demand today, it feels like it is a robust and not short-term demand, but time will tell.
Okay. All right. When we talk about demand, of course everybody is super focused on AI here. Your own AI segment was up 89% year-on-year. Again, organically up in the 60s.
63.
Yeah.
It is IT Datac om, not just AI.
Right. AI, IT Datacom . Yes. As you think about, again, the durability here of Amphenol's AI content opportunity, right? The GPUs are growing, the XPUs are growing, there's copper, there's optics. You're also playing power interconnects. Again, just trying to reframe about the durability of this content opportunity and actually expanding content opportunity as you're expanding into optics as well. Just help investors understand how do you think about that relative to, let's say, when you guys started on this IT Datacom AI journey a couple of years ago.
Yeah. So, I actually think about it from a macro perspective, very similar to how I described the totality, but just maybe a little bit more acute. So there's a lot of money being devoted to this. In this case, it's an extraordinary amount of money.
Yes.
In many ways, without historical precedent, the amount of capital that's being drawn into this build-out of AI. And the content of interconnect in AI, just like we see expanding content across all of our markets, here, it's more acutely expanding, because the nature of AI and the nature of what our customers are trying to achieve with AI, which is creating something that creates an ROI to their customers, means that AI has to be accurate. And to make it accurate, to make it functional, to make it useful, you need to do more computations and compare more things to more things.
To do that, the central nervous system of AI is the interconnect that takes the processors and compares the various factors to each other to ultimately make this thing useful so that you can use it to analyze companies, so drug companies can use it to develop new compounds and the like. And then within that, we have taken a disproportionate position for a few reasons. One is the breadth of our products. Two is the depth of our technologies, our leadership position across those technologies. And three, and of real fundamental importance, is our ability to execute and a proven ability to execute on behalf of our customers when they need it the most.
It wouldn't be so great if you're making racks that sell for $3 million and you can't deliver them to your customers because some connectors didn't show up on your dock. That ability to execute in this extraordinary growth period amidst those other dynamics that we talked about, the total spending, the content, that ability to execute while having the breadth and depth of the product technologies has put us in a very unique position. I think that's why we see the growth that we have. Our IT Datacom business, which includes traditional IT Datacom , and obviously a growing portion of AI specific, that business is four times the size it was two years ago.
Growing a business at that scale is also not a trivial task. I'm really proud of the general managers who work across Amphenol, who own those products, who own the task of scaling up their capabilities to have done this in a way that puts our position with our customers in a stronger fashion than it ever has been before as they go forward into their next generation.
Architectures are changing, right? We hear about whether one architecture is gaining dominance or maybe things are delayed for a certain reason. When you think about just the transition that's happening, I'm not talking about any one specific one, but obviously across the GPU, across the ASIC space, lots of stuff that's happening. Just if you can help us understand that algorithm of growth where it's not just units, but rising content growth for you guys. How are you thinking about the content growth expansion for interconnects?
In general, just as we've seen over these last four years since GPT-1 came out—
Yeah.
we have seen a dramatic expansion of content. Based on the roadmaps of our customers, that continues. It's all about converting electrons into tokens and doing it in a way where those tokens are useful, i.e. accurate, which means they just have to do a lot more computations, and those computations need more interconnect. That's kind of the fundamental thing that's happened with AI, is this intensity of the central nervous system of these systems, which is the interconnect. Regardless of what type of interconnect it is-
Yep.
there's just a lot more of all of it. As the one company who sits across all those technologies in our industry, I think we stood to benefit the most, and then we executed, and thereby have benefited the most-
Yep.
from that potential.
Is there some split between copper, optical, power, just on the interconnect side that you want investors to think about as we are transitioning to the next generation?
Yeah. Look, I think we have a very significant position across all three of them.
Right.
Obviously, with CommScope, our optics position is more significant today, and we've talked about the fact that we now expect the CommScope acquisition, which when we bought it for $10.5 billion, we thought it would be a roughly $3.5 billion business. Now we expect it this year to be more than $4.5 billion in sales with higher margins and thereby better accretion. We've talked about the fact that more than three-quarters of their business is optics. We've had a prior optics business. We've had both passive and active. I think you and others have put certain parameters around that, and it's a significant business. Puts us as one of the world leaders in optical interconnect. Our power business, we are the leader in power interconnect. That's part of the legacy of Amphenol.
It goes back all the way generations ago when we developed power interconnect technology for the defense market. These ultra-high voltage, ultra-high power systems require a degree of technology in the power interconnect from the connectors, the cable assemblies, the busbars, and the like that are really unique and have a lot of risk to these systems. I can tell you what you don't want to do in life is catch a $3 million GPU rack on fire.
Right.
That's bad. Our customers are careful about the type of power interconnect that they use in those systems, and with our proven ability there. That's a significant business as well. I haven't put decimal point kind of specificity around that, but these are all very significant parts of our IT Datacom business. High-speed copper is a big piece, for sure, but I think there's good balance across all of those.
Yeah. On the CommScope you just referenced, it has gone up from 3.6 when you decided to acquire, to more than 4.5 now. What has gone better? What has resulted in sort of those expectations ratcheting up pretty significantly from the time you acquired it to now when it is part of Amphenol?
I would say there are two things that have happened. One of those was going to happen regardless, and that was they are now part of a company called Amphenol, who has a fortress of a balance sheet, who has a global position, who has deep relationships with all of the customers in that area, as opposed to being part of a public company called CommScope, who had 7.5 times leverage, who was close to being current on their long-term debt, who was close to getting a qualified opinion from their accountants. Where the CFO had to go meet customers all the time to make sure that they were not worried about the company going bankrupt.
When you are designing systems that are going to be in place, billion-dollar data centers, you want to work with companies who are going to be around for a long time to stand behind those systems. There was definitely a switch that was flipped on the day of closing on January 9th, which says, "You are now part of Amphenol. Breathe a sigh of relief, customers. Craig does not have to go talk to a bunch of customers to tell them about our balance sheet." They just open up the door more broadly to you. There is another piece, and that other piece is that being part of Amphenol, with the breadth of what we have and with our unique organizational structure, has already enabled the team at CommScope to adopt a different mindset.
A mindset, in Amphenol, we talk about the humility and the hunger of our company. There is an aggressiveness inside of Amphenol. There is an ownership that to just go out and make it happen, as opposed to in a centralized, functional organization where there is a bunch of finger-pointing about whose responsibility is what. They now understand inside CommScope that you look in the mirror to know whose responsibility it is. We have already embarked on that journey, which we are patient about, but persistent, of pushing down authority into lower levels of the company, calling those people general managers, giving them the authority to make the decisions on behalf of their customers, helping them, supporting them with investments that they pull from us, not we push upon them, and turning them into Amphenolians.
What I'm just so grateful to the CommScope team is that they were not only not resistant to that transformation, but they embraced it on the first day. They were enthusiastic about being part of a company where they could become owners of what they were doing.
Right.
We do see that translating into performance already. An aggressiveness of pursuing orders, like a make-it-happen mindset towards executing on the demands of the customers that I don't think necessarily was there before. So there's this sort of balance sheet switch that's flipped, but there's also a mindset-
Right.
that has already started to leach across the organization, which I think is having already great benefits.
Right. Just on the margin side as well, because it's not just the top line that's obviously accelerating. You guys are doing better on margins and the EPS accretion that you did expect from this acquisition. Just what's changed there?
Yeah, it's again a great story here. I think it's again a byproduct of a lot of the things that Adam already talked about. I'd say that it's not like all of a sudden they're just buying things cheaper because they're part of Amphenol. This is not the case. We're certainly in an inflationary environment.
Right
Certainly costs are not going down. So it's really more execution and in leveraging some of this growth into just really strong margin by the company. As being part of Amphenol, just looking within and just looking around from sometimes just, it's again, Adam used the word mindset. You're looking from side to side and seeing what other companies are doing within Amphenol in terms of their profitability and ultimately in a very similar market with not so significantly different products. Then saying, "Okay, how can we do things better?" And looking deep within their organization, and tasking themselves to ultimately see what they can do better in the face of a rising cost environment, by the way.
Right.
They've again, I think really the baseline is what Adam talked about, which is the mindset, which is ownership, which is accountability, and they've really done a great job. Honestly, I think our again, we certainly guide for the third quarter and embedded in that is the continued improvement in that business from the second quarter.
Should have a boot camp for my kids. Amphenol every summer and learn to own.
They're more than welcome. I don't know if the compliance would allow that.
Well, let's talk about just margin expansion in general, not even just the CommScope acquisition. Craig, I know every quarter you get hounded by, "Oh my God, your incremental operating margins are so amazing," and how much more room is there to grow? Maybe you can just talk about what do you see out there that gives you confidence that there is durability here, there's room for more expansion on the margin side?
Yeah. No, listen, I think you kind of need to step back and say, "Why are we at the margins we're at today?
Right.
The baseline of that. I think we've talked about this a little bit before, in that I think the baseline is there's no doubt that electronics are becoming more embedded, more important in terms of to our customers' architectures, in terms of applications. We've talked about AI, but you kind of go across all of our markets and kind of see that very clearly. As part of that, interconnect products to enable those electronic architectures are also becoming more important. They're adding more value, they're more complex, they're more dense, there's higher power, there's higher speed, all of these things. They're in harsher environments. As part of that, ultimately, that's value we're creating for our customers.
As part of that value, we ultimately are able to share some of that value through pricing and otherwise, ultimately to ensure that we keep some of that through margin. You just don't keep it by definition. You keep it because we, as a company and our general managers specifically, have a lot of cost discipline. They think about everything in terms of their factory. We talk about the automation capabilities we have, and ultimately, that's driven a lot of value in terms of cost efficiencies within the company as we've grown. Ultimately, you look at the growth, and you take the fact that we're adding a lot of value with our customers. We're ultimately leveraging that into great margin expansion because, number one, their growth has been significant.
Number two, the cost discipline, and even in light of inflation and tariffs and other things that we've had, and then ultimately through automation capabilities and other things. We're also more important with our vendors. I mean, we're a larger company. We're ultimately able to have stronger relationships with our vendors to ensure that we're getting the best pricing, the best service from our vendors to do all that. Lastly, coming full circle, we just talked about CommScope. We're also seeing improvements in the acquisition, ultimately, margins that we've had. CommScope is not the only one that we're actually seeing margin improvement from. That is ultimately adding to the margin expansion that we've seen over the last couple of years here. With all that said, I absolutely see opportunity in the future as we continue to grow to be able to expand that margin.
I think that we're certainly not at certainly the highest level we'll be in as we continue to grow, and I think that there is certainly opportunity. As the products become more important to our customers over time, which I think this will be a continued trend, so we're certainly confident of that.
Great. Then switching back just to on the IT Datacom AI side of things, you often hear about other constraints that may sort of make the customer readiness, the hyperscaler readiness to accept product a little bit more lumpy. Right? These are, again, big investments, big dollars, big revenue numbers for you guys as well. How do you manage that risk where there is customer readiness, potential delays, not due to your product, but some other constraints that are out there?
Yeah. We just manage through it. This is kind of what an Amphenol general manager does, is deal with volatility. Volatility can be to the downside. Volatility can also be to the upside. Both of them can be equally challenging. I think that our team has dealt with that, is dealing with it, and will deal with it by just every day making sure that they understand what they need and they align their resources accordingly. Part of aligning your resources means when you add resources, you also think about what it means and may mean when you don't need those resources in the future. This concept we talk about, we talked about it last night, driving with one foot on the gas-
Yep.
and one on the brake. I think every Amphenol general manager, regardless of whether their foot is deep on the gas or they're slamming on the brake, they always are touching both of them and thinking about, "If I'm going to buy this machine today, what if I don't need that machine two years from now?" Well, you're going to make slightly different decisions about how you do that. In many companies, the decision is taken away from you because they just have this cycle of writing off and restructuring and writing off and restructuring. Many companies, they go through this. They just pedal to the metal, and then when they hit a wall, they take a big write-down, then a new CEO comes along, and then they start from scratch again. That's kind of the cycle that many go in. That's not how we operate.
Our average general manager has a tenure of 17 years. They've lived through these various cycles in very impactful ways. When you're buying a new machine or hiring a new team of people or signing a lease for a new facility, all the sort of nuts and bolts that it takes to grow a business, when you're working with your customers to share the risk of investments, you're doing all that with the mindset knowing that you're going to benefit on the upside, but you're also going to be the one who has to clean it up if it goes in the wrong direction.
Right.
You just embed everything you do with as much flexibility as possible, while still not sacrificing the opportunity to take that upside when it is there.
Yeah.
That is just a mindset.
Very amazing. Let us just talk a little bit about the fact that some of your peers, specifically in the optical space, NVIDIA has made some big announcements where they have been giving some of the participants a lot of money to ramp up the scale of this optical TAM that could be expanding pretty meaningfully here. How are you looking at the spend? Clearly on one side it benefits, given now that you are a very strong player in the optical side of things as well. But then just given the level of investments, are we overbuilding? Are you concerned about the fact that there might just be a lot of overbuilding that is going on here?
Look, I will let others answer as to whether these long-term contracts and the investments are going to be a good or a bad idea long term. We work very closely with our customers. We get a lot of commitments from our customers. We also make zero announcements about it, as you know. We are going to continue to make zero announcements about it, I know much to your frustration. That is how we have always been, and that is just kind of who we are. We let our customers get the media attention, and we try to stay pretty low-key, which to be honest, in today's environment, political and otherwise, I think being low-key is a pretty good principle in running a company. We stay ultra low-key. I apologize in advance, you will not see me on CNBC. You will not see me getting interviewed.
Gary is really good at saying, "Adam does not do interviews" when she gets called. I am here today with you, of course. But we are working very intensively with our customers on making sure that to the extent that we make investments, that they are sharing in the risk of that, and they share in the risk of those investments in a variety of ways. That includes giving us long-term non-cancellable orders, which you could reframe as a big strategic agreement if you wanted to. It includes giving us participation in investments when we make significant investments that are tailor-made for certain customers. We have had all of that happening, but in Amphenol, it is going to always happen in a very quiet fashion.
If we can switch, it is a big day for Apple. We are going to be hearing announcements hopefully here very shortly. Mobile Devices, that is an interesting segment for you guys as well. I think you talked about Q3 rising here 20% sequentially. You have some new programs launching, but it has been a little bit of a dour market for smartphones in general, and for laptops and PCs as well, just given the memory inflation that we are seeing. Just as you sit here, what are you thinking about the opportunities for mobile devices, the content opportunity for you guys, and just that segment, like the growth drivers in that segment?
We are really excited about it. Dour, we did grow 14% organically last quarter.
Okay, yeah.
That is before any big announcements that folks are talking about. I think our team in mobile devices has demonstrated for a very long time period the ability to outperform in this space, regardless of what the overall market is doing. We have taken a very simple principle in mobile devices from the beginning, which is we love this business, and we will continue to participate in this business so long as there is a premium on the hardware. We are not a software company. I remember when I first became CEO, gosh, 18 years ago, there was all this talk about, well, these are basically becoming commodities, and it is all about the software, and what does that mean for your business long term? Well, during that time period, our business has roughly grown by about 8% organically on an annualized basis during that exact same time period.
It has done that because, number one, there has been continued innovation in hardware, and maybe that is even accelerating today because it turns out customers want this thing to not just be an empty vessel for some software. They want it to actually create functionality. You are paying a lot of money for these things. They should delight you. I think we work with a lot of different customers who are really good at delighting their end customers. The second, again, gets back to kind of the same principle we talked about with AI, is our team has shown the wherewithal to execute on these very critical next-generation ramps with our customers, which a lot of folks in our industry struggle with.
Why have we pretty consistently outperformed our expectations, or why have we achieved that level of high single-digit organic growth over a very long time period is really because we have executed when we needed to, when our customers needed us the most, and thus took a little more than our fair share of that business. Our business is really a business that is interconnect products, it is antennas, and it is mechanisms, and the mechanisms include, of course, things like complex hinges. We have been making hinges for a very long time. I think we made an acquisition of a company who made hinges, gosh, 23 years ago.
Yeah, 2005.
Yeah, 22 years ago.
Yeah.
We have been in that business forever, and there have been lots of evolutions of what these kind of mechanisms can do, from phones that slide up and down to phones that do this, to different devices that do lots of different things. You will find our products on eyeglasses. You will find our products on people's wrists, in their ears. You will find our products in weird pendants, and security cameras, and everything that is kind of a mobile device. I think these devices are becoming more varied, more complicated, and actually more exciting over the time. Then what does AI mean for the evolution of mobile devices, I think is another interesting thing over the long term.
Because having that ubiquity of accelerated compute present in your hands, on your wrist, on your pocket, on a pendant, in your ears, on your eyes, it can be pretty cool and can also drive some innovation long term.
Great. Just going to ask the audience questions, please raise your hand. Oh, we have a question here.
Thank you. Can you please chat up a bit about your China manufacturing footprint, the evolution there in the past couple of years, and looking forward, any de-risking, anything else you're doing?
Yeah. No, look, we have a very global footprint. We operate in 45 countries around the world. Over the last 25 years, as you can imagine, as the whole world was moving to China and other places in Asia, but in particular China, and as the China domestic market was growing, we did a great job of building up an organization there of general managers, local general managers, like we have in every country. If you go to an Amphenol factory in India, you're going to meet Indian general managers. You go in China, you're going to meet Chinese general managers. Our team in China's been phenomenal at creating innovations, in particular around automation. I have to say, doing automation in China has been a phenomenal asset.
It wasn't that we made that decision, it's just our team organically created that, actually supporting teams around the world and building up automation capabilities outside of China as well. But we've also seen a lot of growth recently in places like Southeast Asia, where we've got customers. We have customers who have a wide array of different desires of where we manufacture. We are not making any blanket headquarters decisions about where we manufacture stuff. We will follow our customers. If our customers want us to support them in Thailand or India, we support them in Thailand and India. We have the largest footprint in our industry in India. We have an enormous footprint in Southeast Asia. We have an enormous footprint in Mexico and Eastern Europe, in the U.S. I think we have 50 facilities in the United States with 25,000 people domestically here in the United States.
China remains a very significant place for us to manufacture, both for the local market as well as for customers who are doing their contract manufacturing in and around China. But we're expanding all over the world.
One more question from the audience.
I have to say, every year I come to this presentation, it's always a highlight. Thank you for your execution.
You're too kind. Well, you're too kind.
Even if I don't see you on TV. I thought maybe you could just talk about, you have so many opportunities in front of you, and it's like we love all our children.
Yeah.
But if you think about where the biggest opportunities over the next across the company, what would you highlight as things that our eyes on?
Well, look, there's no doubt that this AI remains a huge opportunity, and I am sure it will continue to be a significant opportunity in the years to come. Let's take that as a given. I mentioned before the defense industry, where I think we are seeing a blossoming of defense innovation, really unlike anything in a generation or two. Look, if you go all the way back to World War II, when we were building our defense interconnect business, working in partnership with the Allied forces, there was a lot of innovation then, too. When you go back to the beginning of the space race, there was a lot of innovation.
I would put today in a similar category of defense innovation, similar to like World War II and the space race of the late '60s, where you are seeing just extraordinary innovation and demands put on electronics in the defense market. We talked about mobile devices. I do not want to repeat myself there. I am going to eventually result in telling you I love all my children equally, by the way. There is the punchline for you. I am super excited about what AI ultimately means for the industrial market. What it means for robotics, what it means for the medical industry, what it means for resource extraction, what it means for energy generation, what it means for factory automation, what it means for rail transit and the like. The commercial air market, our team is doing phenomenal in.
The Carlisle Interconnect Technologies acquisition was a real quantum leap for us there in broadening and deepening our capabilities. I would be remiss without mentioning that I think the communications and networks market long-term is also going to be a great space to be as the world leader, both in wireless and wireline. Again, having AI means we are going to have to connect to AI, and we are going to do it in a multiplicity of fashions through interesting devices that connect to advanced next-generation networks. So I love all my children equally.
Coming back to Craig, given he wants to spend for all his children, you have free cash generation. How do you guys decide? You obviously did an acquisition in military right now as well. How are you thinking about free cash flow generation and dividing it amongst your various priorities, including acquisitions and CapEx?
Yeah, no, thanks. I'll be quick here because I think we're out of time.
Yep.
I think the free cash flow generation of the company continues to be extremely strong, and M&A will continue to be our priority in terms of using our free cash flow. 50% or so of free cash flow over time is what we talk about. Ultimately, the pipeline is strong, and we're going to weight that free cash flow because it just creates a great return on investment.
Yep.
For a number of reasons. Obviously, our dividend program that we have, and we will continue certainly committed to that. Our share repurchase program, we have a $2 billion program that ends at the end of this year. As you can imagine, we'll probably renew that at some level, and we'll continue to use that as our last lever. The leverage of the company continues to be extremely healthy and strong, and we'll continue to generate a lot of free cash flow and try to deploy that in a way that makes us leverage that into more growth.
Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you. That was fantastic.
Yeah. Thank you all very much.