Diodes reports Q4 EPS 51c, consensus 49c

Reports Q4 revenue $322.7M, consensus $324.8M. Gary Yu, President of Diodes, stated, “This past year proved to be challenging as the consumer, computing and communications markets experienced an extended slowdown, coupled with inventory rebalancing in the industrial market late in the year as well as softness in certain areas of the automotive market. Despite this global weakness, we made notable progress on improving the quality and mix of our product portfolio as we continued to focus on the automotive and industrial markets through expanding design wins and increased investment in new product development, which resulted in over 350 new automotive-compliant products. The combined revenue from these two markets expanded to 46% of product revenue in 2023 compared to 42% last year. Our product mix improvements were especially evident in our ability to maintain full year gross margin near 40%, meeting our target model despite the lower annual revenue. Throughout the year, we continued to drive manufacturing cost reductions and operating efficiencies, while also further developing our process technology for expansion of our internal facility utilization. Overall, we maintained strong cash generation in 2023 that enabled us to reduce total debt by $124 million to $62 million, maintain a solid cash position over $315 million and increase total cash less debt by 67% to approximately $253 million. Additionally, we renewed and expanded our lines of credit to approximately $315 million to provide added financial flexibility. As we look to 2024, we remain focused on driving further improvements in the quality and mix of our portfolio with our analog and power discrete products, including our newly introduced SiC product family, especially targeted at the automotive and industrial markets. We believe our total solutions sales approach that has been successful in the past, along with further emphasis placed on key account development, will continue to deliver increasing content opportunities, design wins and profitable growth in the future.”