Heath Mitts
Analyst · Truist Securities. Your line is open
William, this is Heath. I will take the question. Certainly, we're feeling the biggest inflation right now is on the freight side. The freight inflation has been significant as we battled through there and there's a variety of reasons for that, including higher air freight and so forth in terms of that. And that's not unique to TE. Certainly, I think that's been well publicized across the overall supply chain. We are as we move towards the second half of our year, we are seeing a little bit higher input costs, particularly with resins and some of that's pretty directly attributable to the weather issues that were in Texas here earlier, this past quarter. And then copper prices as we've continued to monitor those, we've seen those creep up. Now in some cases, we have hedges in place in terms of how we hedge our metals cost. So you don't see -- you see that kind of layering a little bit slower in and out of the P&L, as we hedge about 50% of our exposure out about 18 months for metals. So, as we get through their labor costs is not a major issue on the inflation side, but labor availability in certain places that are still being more impacted by COVID continues to drive some inefficiencies, and there's no doubt whether that's in Mexico or in Central Europe and otherwise. We still are battling through where -- COVID where we have significant operations, and that's evermore around availability than inflation. In terms of the callback, I think Terrence outlined it a couple questions ago, in some cases, we have contractual ability to do that in terms of passing through writers, as we've seen inflation come in more aggressively. In some cases, it's a broader pricing discussion with a customer and then within channel, certainly, we will utilize the ability to take prices up, tie with inflation for that piece of the business. And then, depending upon the business, there's surcharges and different types of mechanisms that are put in place. But I'd say the timing issue is a portion of it. There's no way I'm going to sit here and say, we're going to claw back 100% of what we're pounding through right now. But we also have productivity engines in place to help offset some of these things. So more to come.