Paul Lundstrom
Chief Financial Officer
So, Ruplu, let me, let me start with margin, and then we can talk about the backlog in just a moment. So, on the margin front, so what we originally said, going back to April was we figured we’d finish the year and this was at, 25 billion to 26 billion top line, somewhere between 4.4% and 4.6%. That margin rate is intact. It’s a little bit light of what we talked about in July, but at 4.4% to 4.6%, I would say, nice strong margins above last year’s margins with a $100 million of operating profit growth. If you look at the EPS, which to your point, we held versus our prior guide, we’re quite confident that we’re going to end up in that $1.70 to $1.85 range, based on a couple of things. One, as you saw last quarter, we bought back a meaningful amount of stock. And so, we’re going to get a little bit of tailwind from the weighted average shares outstanding. You’ve seen our count go from 507 million, to 499 million to 487 million. So, share counts coming down, that helps. A little bit of tailwind from interest and other, from some FX and then a couple of minor things over the last couple of quarters, that were essentially dropping through, but again, highly confident in that $1.70 to $1.85 range. In terms of backlog, there’s talk in the industry about double ordering and all that. But, what I can say is, Flex has a tremendous amount of end market insight, because in most of our industries, we have numerous customers that service those industries. And so, the read through that we have and our deal analytics is quite strong. And so, just to give you one example, Revathi mentioned a couple of minutes ago, channel replenishment, case in point would be automotive. If you look at inventory sitting on the lot in dealers worldwide, it is at two-year lows. That ultimately has to be replenished. And we’re seeing that same channel replenishment need across our end markets. So, we feel quite good about the sequential improvement and then looking forward, frankly, I think top line expectations will be high as we move into 2023.