Arrow Electronics boss sees encouraging market portents
Summary
Our book-to-bill rates, though below parity, continued to hold steady.” Kerin is also encouraged that Arrow’s design-related activity grew substantially in Q2, and there is continued adoption of the company’s supply chain services offering.” Looking at performance in each of Arrow’s operating regions, Kerins revealed, “In Europe, we saw a slight sequential decline in revenue, but that was better than normal seasonality, and we achieved robust year-over-year growth from a resilient industrial market along with strength in automotive as well as aerospace and defence. In addition, our focus on the market for interconnect, passive and electromechanical devices is helping to offset a more challenging semiconductor operating environment.” Turning to Asia, Kerins saw continued softness in the Chinese market across both verticals, adding, “We did grow sequentially in the region with relative strength in sales from networking and communications infrastructure, along with modest improvement in parts of both the industrial and consumer segments. Profitability in our global components business remained above historic levels in the second quarter.” “We continue to believe our value-added offerings, including demand creation, design services and supply chain management are contributing to our structural margin health and remain committed to our long-term profitability outlook for this business,” said Kerins. You consider just a few key trends: the electrification and connectivity of everything; the accelerated adoption of new technologies such as electric vehicles, renewable energy and artificial intelligence, just to name a few; and in the IT space, the growing relevance of hybrid and multi-cloud solutions all delivered on an as-a-service basis. And second, while the current market trajectories are challenging and a little bit uncertain, were confident in our ability to generate cash in the near term, providing us the flexibility we need to serve our capital allocation priorities very effectively.”