Littelfuse, Inc. (LFUS) Earnings Call Transcript

Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Littelfuse Third Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time, I will turn the call over to the Vice President of Investor Relations, David Kelley. Please proceed.

Good morning, and welcome to the Littelfuse Third Quarter 2026 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 third quarter, and a copy of our earnings release and slide presentation is available on 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 2 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 in our earnings release available in the Investor Relations section of our website. I will now turn the call over to Greg.

Thank you, David, and thank you to everyone for joining us today. This morning, I'll provide details on our third quarter results, including performance highlights across our end markets. I'll then share progress against our strategic priorities before turning the call over to Abhi to review our segment financials and fourth quarter outlook. Turning to the quarter. We delivered record net sales of $767 million. Our Q3 results were impacted by a onetime Dortmund contract amendment fee that reduced semiconductor sales by $28.5 million, which we will discuss in more detail shortly. Organic revenue growth accelerated to 22% year-over-year, driven by execution on our strategic priorities and demand strength across our markets. We also delivered significant margin expansion and 96% year-over-year earnings growth in the third quarter. This culminated in an adjusted earnings of $5.79, a record for the company. Finally, I wanted to highlight our free cash flow performance, which is up 66% year-to-date, reinforcing our strong execution. Turning to performance across our end market exposures. Computing, Communications and Diversified Industrials, or CCDI, delivered another quarter of strong growth. Data center was again a leading contributor as we continue to capitalize on our unique grid-to-chip capability and customer-focused go-to-market model. Our data center backlog is expanding, and we see traction in our opportunity pipeline and design wins. Across diversified industrials, we delivered broad-based growth, led by demand for medical and aerospace and defense applications. We also continue to execute on strong orders from our broad market channel partners as end customer POS remains very healthy across geographies and applications. Turning to Energy and Industrial Infrastructure, or EII, we saw broad-based demand momentum and Basler Electric continues to perform well. Within Industrial Infrastructure, growth was led by industrial automation, heavy construction and HVAC demand recovery. Within energy infrastructure, grid modernization and utility investment drove increased demand for our market-leading protection solutions. Battery energy storage served as another key growth engine where we are developing market-leading protection architectures to support rapid power scaling. In Transportation and Logistics, or T&L, commercial vehicle demand strengthened in the quarter. This was driven by our proactive go-to-market engagement and a market recovery across heavy truck, agriculture and material handling equipment. In passenger vehicles, revenue increased driven by strong execution as our teams are delivering content and market share gains despite lower global vehicle production. Overall, our third quarter performance reinforces the strength of our end market diversity and technology positioning. Our growth also reflects our sharpened focus on high-growth opportunities and our go-to-market shift as we continue to outperform our end markets. Heading into the fourth quarter, we are well positioned to maintain our operational momentum. Bookings were again a record in Q3, driven by growth across our businesses, and our book-to-bill remained well north of 1.0. Now let me update you on the progress we're making across our strategic priorities. Starting with go-to-market, we continue to see strong customer engagement translate into a larger, higher-value new business funnel. By engaging customers earlier in the design cycle with more of our multi-technology solutions, we are increasing both the breadth and value of our opportunity pipeline. As evidence of our traction year-to-date, the average dollar value per new business opportunity has increased by more than 20%, while third quarter design wins again grew double digits year-over-year. Together, these results reinforce our confidence in our long-term organic growth targets. Now let's turn to our high-growth opportunities or HGOs. While early, we also believe our sharpened focus on our 3 HGOs, data center, grid and utility infrastructure and aerospace and defense is beginning to deliver tangible returns. Today, I wanted to specifically highlight our expanding aerospace and defense or A&D opportunity. While this high-growth market represents a small portion of revenue today, sales growth outpaced company average in Q3. A&D is an ideal market for our technology, given its mission-critical requirements and rapid transition towards high-voltage DC architectures. During the quarter, we secured several key A&D design wins, including high reliability power semiconductor modules for defense flight control system and specialized switching solutions for a commercial space customer. Long term, we believe a focused A&D growth strategy will diversify our market exposure while providing strong and resilient profit contribution. Finally, turning to operational excellence. At our May Investor Day, we highlighted semiconductor products and transportation, where we see opportunities to enhance our long-term growth while optimizing our portfolio and driving long-term profitability enhancements. While early, we're seeing evidence of our progress towards our 2030 goals. Starting with semiconductors. We delivered significant revenue growth and improved profitability in the quarter. This was led by our protection franchise, which delivered record revenue and profitability, while we see continued strong bookings momentum into year-end. Long term, protection remains well positioned as a market leader and key enabler of the long-term electrification megatrend across our markets. In power semiconductors, organic growth accelerated alongside improved margins. While early, we are executing our more focused power semiconductor strategy around higher power and higher value opportunities. We are delivering for our customers as our orders have accelerated. We remain disciplined in balancing power semi growth opportunities with active portfolio rationalization and footprint optimization. During the third quarter, we executed an amendment to a commercial supply agreement for our Dortmund facility. In exchange for a onetime payment, this amendment accelerates the delivery of contracted volumes while eliminating restrictive covenants. This step materially improves the underlying economics of the Dortmund asset and grants us significant strategic flexibility and optionality as we evaluate our broader power semiconductor footprint. Over time, we remain committed to better positioning our power semiconductor franchise for sustainable growth, structural margin expansion and enhanced long-term returns. Turning to Transportation. Our sharpened focus on our market-leading customers, efficiencies and scale is driving solid growth, while we're seeing continued margin expansion as we scale our operations and simplify our cost structure. We believe our enhancements position us well to drive structural margin expansion in a muted underlying market environment. Taking a step back, we are encouraged by our third quarter results. Our teams are executing against attractive market demand, converting and expanding customer opportunity pipeline and driving profitability enhancements across the portfolio. I want to thank our teams for their dedication to serving our customers and delivering value. With that, I'll turn the call over to Abhi.

Thank you, Greg, and good morning, everyone. Today, I will walk you through our third quarter financial performance before reviewing our fourth quarter outlook. Please turn to Slide 6 for details on our third quarter performance. All comparisons are versus the prior year unless noted otherwise. Reported net sales in the third quarter were a record $767 million, reflecting the $28.5 million onetime Dortmund customer amendment fee, which was not contemplated in our previous guidance. Organic growth contributed 22%. The Basler acquisition contributed approximately 6% and foreign exchange was neutral. Adjusted EBITDA was $226 million, while adjusted EBITDA margin finished at 28.4%, up 690 basis points. Adjusted diluted earnings per share were $5.79, up 96% versus the prior year and a record for the company. The improvement reflects strong volume leverage, favorable mix, pricing and operational execution. As a result of our operational excellence initiative, we expect to realize approximately $5 million in 2026 run rate savings. We continue to deliver progress towards our 2030 optimization goal of $50 million and see further opportunities into 2027. Operating cash flow was $230 million and free cash flow was $216 million, up 64%. Year-to-date, free cash flow was $409 million, up 66% as we continue to drive strong conversion. We ended the quarter with $825 million of cash on hand and a consolidated net leverage ratio of 0.7x. We also returned $20 million to shareholders through our third quarter dividend. Please turn to Slide 8 for our segment highlights, starting with the Electronics Products segment. Reported electronics sales were $426 million, reflecting the $28.5 million onetime Dortmund customer amendment fee. Organic sales increased 27%, with passive products up 30% and semiconductor products up 24%. Growth was broad-based across data center, diversified industrial and transportation applications. Within semiconductor products, we observed continued strong protection demand and improved power demand. Excluding the onetime amendment fee, adjusted EBITDA margin for the Electronics segment was 33.1%, up 910 basis points versus the prior year, reflecting volume leverage, favorable price, product mix and operational execution. While early, we are seeing the benefits of our more focused power semiconductor strategy. Looking ahead, we will continue to pair healthy end market demand with disciplined portfolio and footprint actions in our power semiconductor franchise with the goal of driving improved long-term profitability and returns. Moving to our Transportation Products segment on Slide 9. Sales were $183 million, up 7%, both on a reported basis and organically. Commercial vehicle organic sales expanded 20%, fueled by strong demand in heavy truck, data center and agricultural equipment. Passenger vehicle organic sales declined 5%, reflecting lower global auto production and planned exits of legacy lower-margin sensor lines. Adjusted EBITDA margin was 19.6%, up 280 basis points. Strong commercial vehicle volume leverage and operational execution more than offset the impact of softer passenger vehicle demand. Turning to Slide 10. Industrial segment sales were $158 million, up 65%. Organic growth was 27%, supported by strong data center and grid infrastructure, HVAC and industrial automation demand. The Basler acquisition contributed approximately 38% to growth. Adjusted EBITDA margin was 25.2%, up 450 basis points, reflecting favorable volume leverage, operational efficiencies, price and mix. Turning to our outlook for the fourth quarter on Slide 11. We expect continued healthy demand across several of our key markets supported by strong backlog and customer engagement. Based on current market conditions, we expect fourth quarter net sales in the range of $750 million to $770 million. At the midpoint, this represents approximately 28% growth versus the prior year and better than typical seasonal sales. We expect fourth quarter adjusted diluted EPS to be in the range of $5.05 to $5.25 per share. Our guidance assumes an adjusted effective tax rate of approximately 24%. We remain focused on executing the value creation playbook we outlined at Investor Day, driving 7% to 9% organic growth over time, expanding adjusted EBITDA margin towards 24% to 26%, generating strong free cash flow and deploying capital with discipline. Our third quarter performance reinforces our confidence in the strategic path toward our 2030 targets of $4.5 billion in revenue, $1.1 billion in adjusted EBITDA and more than $600 million of annual free cash flow. Thank you to the Littelfuse teams for their continued execution and commitment to our customers. With that, operator, please open the call for Q&A.

Your first question comes from the line of David Williams with Needham.

So maybe first, just kind of thinking about the mechanics of the semi growth and you kind of walked through some of that. But can you help us understand how much of this is maybe cyclical versus demand and perhaps maybe the repositioning of what you've done within those power semis? I'm just trying to understand how much of this is really demand versus the operational changes that you've made within that business.

Yes. Thank you, David. Yes. So look, semiconductors as part of our Electronics segment had strong performance in the quarter. You start with our protection semiconductor franchise. We had record revenue and profitability from this segment, and this is a very model profitability segment for us in general. And I would say 2 things. One, we do have good market momentum. We actually had broad-based growth in our protection semiconductor business across our markets. And second, I would say we also are taking share. So we have some opportunities to take share. For example, in transportation, we outperformed the market in the passenger car, and a lot of that was driven by some of that anyway significant part of it was driven by our protection semiconductor business. We have other franchises like our passives as well that we're doing well in that business. So I would say that's the thing about protection semiconductor. And then in power semiconductors, we had also good performance. We do have volume growth. So we do see volume growth and momentum. And that is driving, obviously, volume in this business with a high fixed cost is driving good profitability improvement. But we're also starting to see benefits from our manufacturing optimization and our portfolio optimization. So it's early, but we have more focus. Like we've said, we're focused much more now on high-voltage, high-power, high-value applications, and we're deemphasizing parts of the portfolio where we have less value and differentiation. And it's early in the progress, but we are seeing some of that momentum. So power semiconductor revenue and profitability growth did deliver also materially to the Electronics segment profitability growth in the quarter.

Yes. And David, just to add to a couple of things. So if you think about it at the highest level and kind of think about the year and the way the year played out, for Q1, we saw an organic growth of 9% in Q2 was 14%. And in Q3, we just posted 22% organic, okay? So that's point one. Point two, I'd say is if I just think about our semiconductor business or semiconductor products, right, if I think about the organic progression throughout the year, in Q1, we posted 8%, Q2 was 15% and then Q3 is 24%. So you're seeing sequential improvement based on kind of what Greg was saying, which is the demand has improved and has improved sequentially throughout the year.

And one other thing because you asked a little bit about the cycle, just to add that. We see broad-based demand across our markets. We talked about diversified industrials, industrials. We're seeing broad-based demand across our markets. And also, we're very focused on making sure that channel inventory is normal. We have strong POS growth in our channel as well. So we feel that there is still just broad-based strength across the markets.

Okay. Fantastic. And then maybe just secondly, on the kind of the pricing and the lead times. Any color there on what you're seeing in terms of being able to raise pricing? And how are your lead times as we kind of seem to be getting into a more constrained environment here?

Yes, sure. Thank you. So look, we continue to be in an inflationary environment. I think we all know that where commodities, freight, fuel costs, et cetera. So we continue to be in an inflationary environment. And we're working to manage that as best as we can. It is an environment where we are passing price increases along to our customers as we need to based on that so that we can maintain our business conditions. We also have a lot of productivity activities to improve our cost structure as well. So I would say that that's the environment that we continue to be in from that perspective.

And David, I'll just say this, we said this in '25, we made a commitment. We delivered on our commitment, same thing in '26, which is our intent is to be price/cost neutral, okay? At the end of the day, I mean, to Greg's point, we're in an inflationary environment, whether you think about pricing, whether you do it through surcharges, driving productivity in the factory, but our intent for 2026 is to be price/cost neutral in an effort to manage inflation.

And then to the second part of your question on lead times, I would say our lead times are pretty normal across our business. But one thing we are seeing is customers booking further out. So it's -- they're now booking outside of lead time. And so we have more bookings into next year, for example, at this time than we would normally. So we see customers booking further out. But as of now, lead times are materially normal, I would say, in our business.

Your next question comes from the line of Christopher Glynn with Oppenheimer.

I wanted to ask -- build off the comment on sort of kind of customer dictated lead times there booking a little further out. Just in terms of them being more proactive about securing supply, is there any view they need to -- on their part, you think they need to get in line before others?

Yes. Thank you, Chris. Look, I think from our perspective, our lead times are broadly normal. So we don't have a challenge, right, that they're needing to get in line, and we have this backlog. But I will say we're just seeing a customer behavior where they're tending to book farther out. I think the whole ecosystem is planning a little more now because there's been a lot of growth, and they continue to see a lot of growth. I think we do all hear about in the supply chain, some constraints here and there. We're not largely having constraints in our supply chain, but I think there are some constraints in the supply chain that's making people book out. So from our perspective, it's not for our business, we don't have people needing to get in line, but they are tending to book further out. And I think that's just maybe a little bit of a different customer behavior. The other thing I'll say is that where bookings are good across our markets. So we are seeing broad strength across our markets and all of our markets have kind of a strong kind of bookings. That's the other thing I would add.

Yes, that makes sense. And I realize you have very crisp book-to-bill visibility at the distributor level. But maybe it's a little more [ opaque ] as you kind of think about the end customers' inventories and what they're pulling through distribution. So I think that's a little more of an art as you try to evaluate that dynamic. Just curious how you think about that, just given the fact that we're just stacking quarter after quarter of really robust and expanding book-to-bill.