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Presentation

Littelfuse, Inc. beats earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $3.31, expectations were $2.83.

Operator: Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Littelfuse, Inc. First 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.

David Kelley: Good morning, and welcome to the Littelfuse, Inc. First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. With me today are Greg Henderson, President and CEO, and Abhishek Khandelwal, Executive Vice President and CFO. This morning, we reported results for our first quarter, and a copy of our earnings release and slide presentation is available in the Investor 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 details 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 measures is provided in our earnings release available in the Investor Relations section of our website. I will now turn the call over to Greg.

Greg Henderson: Thank you, David. Thank you to everyone for joining us today. This morning, I will start with highlights from our first quarter, then provide an update on the progress we are making on our strategic priorities. We delivered a strong start to the year, with first quarter results exceeding our expectations. Net sales were $657 million, up 19% year over year, 9% organically, and we delivered meaningful margin expansion across our segments. Our teams executed well as we capitalized on broad-based demand strength across several key markets. We continue to benefit from our leadership position in safe and efficient electrical energy transfer as our markets and applications transition toward higher power and higher energy density architectures.

Our strategic focus and customer-centric go-to-market model are enabling us to engage earlier and more deeply with our customers. Importantly, we are seeing early tangible benefits from our salesforce realignment as we solve our customers’ increasingly complex challenges with our full technology portfolio. Taking a closer look at our performance by end market in the quarter, we delivered strong double-digit growth in data centers and grid utility infrastructure, where demand continues to be fueled by the broader electrification megatrend. Across our diversified industrial market, we drove meaningful revenue growth supported by broad-based demand and strong channel execution. In construction and industrial equipment markets, we are seeing mixed demand trends as strength in construction and industrial automation was partially offset by continued soft residential HVAC demand.

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Finally, passenger vehicles sales were up high single digits, reflecting content expansion and share gains amid a soft global production environment, while commercial vehicle sales expanded mid single digits driven by solid execution. We exited the first quarter with a book-to-bill well above 1.0, while bookings were again up more than 20% versus the prior year. We expect continued growth momentum and focused execution in the second quarter. I want to recognize our global teams for delivering a strong start to the year and for positioning the company well going forward. Now let us shift to our strategic priorities, starting with our sharpened growth focus. A key pillar of this strategy is our expansion within the grid and utility infrastructure market.

Having closed the Basler acquisition this past December, we have already begun to see the transformative impact of this integration. Basler significantly strengthens our position in high power applications, and I am pleased to report that Basler outpaced our initial expectations during its first full quarter as part of the Littelfuse, Inc. portfolio. We are seeing an acceleration in demand for high power protection and excitation systems driven by the critical need for grid modernization to support the global build-out of data center infrastructure. As an example of our momentum in the quarter, we secured a strategic design win with a market leader for data center power system solutions. This customer chose our protection, automation, and control capabilities for a new 800-volt system deployment due to our advanced feature set and differentiated high-voltage DC solution.

Our integrated system ensures comprehensive high power protection while enhancing system reliability and reducing architectural complexity for the customer. We also secured a significant design win with a leading U.S. grid infrastructure utility for our high power excitation systems in the quarter. Shipments are slated to begin in 2027; this win provides meaningful long-term visibility into Basler’s growth trajectory. We are in the early stages, and the potential for Basler and Littelfuse, Inc. revenue synergies is increasingly clear. The complementary nature of Basler’s technologies and our protection capabilities allows us to move up the value chain, offering more comprehensive and higher power solutions to our customers. Now turning to our second strategic priority, which is to partner more closely with our customers to help better understand and solve their technology challenges.

We mentioned in our 4Q call we went live with a new go-to-market model at the start of 2026, where our sales teams are realigned to our customers and enabled to sell our complete portfolio. Today, I wanted to update you on recent progress we are making in our transportation market. In transportation, we are a market leader for low-, medium-, and high-voltage overcurrent and overvoltage solutions. Even though the end market is growing slowly, the rising complexity of electronic architectures is driving unique requirements for our advanced protection solutions. By partnering closely with our lead global OEM customers and demonstrating very high reliability solutions and predictable delivery, we have been able to increase our share in a number of key overcurrent and overvoltage protection platforms.

In the first quarter, share gains led to our high single-digit growth. In addition to our collaboration on next-generation platforms, we have been meaningfully expanding our pipeline and are on track for double-digit design win growth in the transportation market in 2026. Now turning to our third strategic priority, enhancing operational excellence. As we continue to scale best practices across the organization and take a more programmatic approach to measuring execution, we are seeing clear evidence that these efforts are delivering tangible results. By applying consistent operational and financial discipline across the company, we are driving meaningful margin expansion across the portfolio. Transportation is a good example of how this discipline is translating into results.

With targeted productivity initiatives and improved execution across our footprint, we are driving solid profitability expansion despite mixed underlying market conditions. The results are reflected in a strong 200-basis-point increase in transportation margins for the quarter. Turning to our semiconductor products business, we see meaningful long-term profitability enhancement opportunities. This starts with Protection, a model franchise within Littelfuse, Inc., with a demonstrated track record of execution and operating discipline. Once again in the quarter, Protection delivered significant revenue growth and attractive profitability as we capitalized on accelerating customer demand. In power semiconductors, we are applying the same disciplined approach.

As we outlined last quarter, we are increasing our focus on higher growth, higher value applications while rationalizing lower value products and optimizing our footprint. We are seeing signs of improving power semiconductor demand, but we are balancing that momentum with continued portfolio actions as we work toward long-term structural profitability improvement. We remain early in this process, and as we finalize our path forward, we will continue to update you on our regular progress. Across Littelfuse, Inc., operational excellence remains a key pillar of our long-term strategy. As we execute on this framework, we believe we are positioning Littelfuse, Inc. for sustainable and scalable long-term margin expansion. We look forward to detailing our full financial playbook at our Investor Day next week.

Taking a step back, we are encouraged by our momentum as we move into the second quarter supported by strong backlog, high customer engagement, and disciplined execution. We are looking forward to sharing additional details on our strategy, long-term growth drivers, and financial objectives at our Investor Day on May 14 in New York. With that, I will turn the call over to Abhishek to walk through the financials in more detail.

Abhishek Khandelwal: Thank you, Greg, and good morning, everyone. Today, I will walk you through our first quarter results followed by a second quarter outlook. Please turn to Slide 8 for details on our first quarter performance. All comparisons are versus the prior year, unless noted otherwise. Net sales in the first quarter were $657 million, up 19% year over year, 9% organically. The Basler acquisition contributed 6% to sales growth, while foreign exchange was a 3% tailwind. Adjusted EBITDA margin finished at 22.9%, up 180 basis points, reflecting strong volume leverage, favorable mix, and operational execution. Adjusted diluted earnings per share were $3.31, up 51% versus the prior year. We generated solid cash flow in the quarter.

Operating cash flow was $80 million, and free cash flow was $66 million, up 55% year over year. We ended the quarter with strong liquidity, a net leverage ratio of approximately 1.0x, and returned $90 million to shareholders through our dividend. Please turn to Slide 10 for our segment highlights. Starting with the Electronics Product segment, sales for the quarter increased 18% year over year, with organic growth of 15%. Passive products again delivered strong growth, up 22% organically. Semiconductor products grew 8% organically, driven by strong demand for protection semiconductors. Across the Electronics Product segment, we benefited from increased data center and diversified industrial demand. Adjusted EBITDA margin for the Electronics segment was 25.1%, up 300 basis points, reflecting strong volume leverage and execution.

Into the second quarter, we expect to deliver on broad-based demand strength and continued execution as we balance power semiconductor product rationalization. Moving to our Transportation Product segment, on Slide 11, sales increased 5% year over year. Organic growth was 1%, driven by strength in passenger vehicle content expansion, share gains, and pricing that drove passenger vehicle organic sales of +4%. This was partially offset by lower commercial vehicle volumes due to the impact of the marine business exit. Excluding the marine exit, commercial [inaudible] sales were flat versus the prior year. Adjusted EBITDA margin increased 200 basis points to 19.1%, reflecting disciplined execution and productivity initiatives. Our teams remain focused on driving operational excellence, and we expect continued progress on our transportation profitability initiatives through 2026.

Turning to Slide 12, Industrial segment sales increased 45% year over year. Organic growth was up 5%, supported by strong grid and utility infrastructure and data center demand, which was partially offset by soft residential HVAC volumes. The Basler acquisition contributed 39% of growth, outpacing our expectations. Adjusted EBITDA margin increased 340 basis points to 21.9%, driven by volume leverage and mix. We will continue to execute on our favorable industrial positioning in evolving markets to drive growth and profitability expansion. Turning to our outlook for the second quarter on Slide 13, we expect continued solid demand across several of our key markets supported by strong backlog and customer traction. Based on current market conditions, we expect second quarter net sales in the range of $690 million to $710 million, which represents 14% growth versus the prior year.

We expect 8% organic growth and a contribution of 6% to growth from the Basler acquisition. We also expect second quarter adjusted diluted EPS to be in the range of $3.65 to $3.85, with an adjusted effective tax rate of 21% to 22%. We look forward to sharing our full strategy with you next week at our Investor Day in New York. With that, operator, please open the call for Q&A.

Operator: Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you have dialed in and would like to ask a question, please press 1 on your telephone keypad to raise your hand and join the queue. We will go first to Christopher Glynn at Oppenheimer.

Christopher Glynn: Congrats on the really strong results across the board. I did want to drill into the Electronics growth a little bit. Data center side is a continuing, transparent story. I just want to double click on the comment about increasing diversified industrial demand. If we could go in a couple layers there in terms of new design wins flowing in, specific end markets driving traction?

Greg Henderson: Thanks, Chris. I will start just by saying yes, we had very strong performance across our Electronics segment. If you drill down to our market-based view, as we said, we had very good performance in the quarter in data center. Pipeline was up meaningfully again as well, so we had strong performance in data center, and we have strong growth in the pipeline. In the industrial market, we have significant momentum as well. We mentioned on the call that last quarter we were starting to see broadening. If you go back to last year, it was largely about data center. We are seeing broadening across the industrial segment, and actually all of our industrial segments, with the exception of HVAC, are doing well. We did see very strong performance in diversified industrial. Just as a reminder, our diversified industrial segment includes things like aerospace and defense and medical, so we have good, strong strength across the portfolio.

Abhishek Khandelwal: And, Chris, just to add, book-to-bill in the quarter was well above 1.0 as well. So again, this supports what Greg is talking about, which is broad-based demand and broad-based momentum supported by a strong book-to-bill.

Christopher Glynn: Thanks for that, Abhishek and Greg. I did want to ask a little further on book-to-bill. I know you are not quantifying them discreetly each quarter, but curious if the book-to-bill or the absolute orders expanded sequentially—if that kind of trend through the back half is continuing—or if there is a characterization of the overall orders growth. Any metrics there, directional or quantitative, would be great.

Abhishek Khandelwal: Absolutely, Chris. Good question. As I think about the order momentum and Q4 to Q1, we saw sequential improvement. Even within Q1, as I look at the progression of the quarter, we saw sequential improvement as we went through the quarter. Book-to-bill was north of 1.0, and bookings were higher than 20% on a year-over-year basis. So continued momentum across the board, and sequentially we saw improvement as well.

Christopher Glynn: Okay. That covers a lot of ground. And then just curious—I think I heard in the prepared comments, Greg, you spoke quickly—did I hear you expect for commercial vehicle double-digit design wins this year?

Greg Henderson: I will let Abhishek speak to the exact number, but across the Transportation business we have good momentum. As you know, production is kind of soft, but we had good performance. We are seeing content and share gains across Transportation—both passenger and commercial vehicles—and we also see good momentum in our pipeline. So I think we see strong growth. I will let Abhishek speak to the exact numbers we quoted.

Abhishek Khandelwal: Yes, Chris, your statement is absolutely correct. Greg did state that in his prepared remarks.

Operator: We will move next to Luke Junk at Baird.

Luke Junk: Greg, maybe we could start with data center but go a bit off where we usually talk about this. The growth has been quite visible in your Passives business, but hoping we could double click on the Protection portfolio where it seems like we are seeing some pretty material benefits this quarter and in the data center piece of Industrial from a segment standpoint as well. Thank you.

Greg Henderson: Yes. One of the good things about our position in data center is that all of our segments participate in the data center market, and we are seeing good strength across them. That includes our passive electronics portfolio; our semiconductor portfolio—both protection semiconductors and power semiconductors; and our Industrial portfolio, including high power fuses. In our Transportation segment, we also have circuit breakers that participate in data center applications. We have strong growth in on-rack solutions, which tend to be more onboard solutions with electronics content in both semiconductors and passives, and we also have strong growth in the infrastructure. I mentioned the design win we had in the quarter from Basler—that is part of their control and protection-related solution which goes into data center infrastructure.

We also have power semiconductor design wins in the infrastructure that go into transfer switches and UPS solutions. So we are really seeing broad-based strength in data center from all of our segments and across the ecosystem—we talk about solutions that go from grid to chip.

Abhishek Khandelwal: And, Luke, just to build on what Greg said, we grew strong double digits in data center within the quarter, and it was one of the leading contributors to Littelfuse, Inc. growth in the quarter. You should expect similar performance again from a data center end-market standpoint in the second quarter as well.

Luke Junk: That is helpful. In terms of the design award activity so far this year, especially in data center, hoping we could get some color there as well. I think in total in 2025, those design awards more than doubled year over year. What is the early momentum vector here in the beginning of 2026, and maybe the mix of those opportunities? Some are fast-moving things you could maybe turn on later this year as well as longer-dated things tied to future architectures.

Greg Henderson: Thanks, Luke. First, to reiterate what you said, in 2025 our design wins were up more than double year over year, and we were pleased with that. We attribute some of that to our new go-to-market model, which we put in place for data center last year and are now scaling across the company. Our pipeline is up meaningfully in Q1. This continues to be the fastest growth market for us; Q1 was also the fastest growth market. We continue to see momentum broadly, from solutions that go on rack all the way through the infrastructure.

Luke Junk: Maybe switching gears, Abhishek, hoping you could walk us through some of the margin dynamics this quarter. There was pretty strong breadth across each of the segments from a margin percentage, despite higher commodity costs coming into the quarter—copper, precious metals, those sorts of things. Can we talk about some of the offsets—operational or price recoveries into the channel—and really building to an incremental margin that was quite a bit better than the 25% that you had guided to underlying? Thank you.

Abhishek Khandelwal: Absolutely. At the highest level, our flow-through in the quarter was about 38%. Long term, we have said you should expect a 30% to 35% flow-through for the enterprise. For the quarter, we came in at 38%. If you look at the guide for Q2, it is at 31%, so again, in the range of 30% to 35%. On commodities—silver, copper—we are seeing pressure, similar to last year. Our teams are working diligently to offset those inflationary pressures through supply chain savings, incremental productivity, pricing, or surcharges. Our goal is to be price-cost neutral, just like we were in 2025.

Operator: We will take our next question from David Williams at Needham.

David Williams: Good morning. Thanks for taking the question, and congratulations on a really strong performance here. Abhishek, on the margin pass-through you just talked about—given where your guidance is, it looks like about 25% to 26% of the top line falling directly through to the bottom line. Is that a pace we can continue as we move through this cycle, or could it get better from a top-line-to-bottom-line pass-through?

Abhishek Khandelwal: At a high level on flow-through, it is hard to call quarter by quarter because things happen and we make investments. Long term, as we continue to grow and put organic growth in the books, a 30% to 35% flow-through on an annual basis is how I would think about it. Quarter to quarter you could have noise. Q1 was 38%. Q2, our guide contemplates 31%. But long term, think of it as a 30% to 35% flow-through business.

David Williams: Appreciate the color. On data center—not to beat this horse—but across the different areas you play in, how should we think about the magnitude? Is there a way to size that TAM or Littelfuse, Inc. exposure across the entire data center footprint?

Greg Henderson: We participate broadly across data center. We will provide a lot more color at our Investor Day next week on all of our markets, specifically focused on the high-growth markets like data center. We will share more on the SAM and our opportunities in data center at that event.

David Williams: Great. One last one. On the Electronics margin, do you think you could ultimately get back to where you were maybe in 2022 in the lower 30% range? What would it take—volume, mix from portfolio rationalization, and the self-help you are putting in?

Abhishek Khandelwal: On the Electronics margin profile, I will not commit to a specific prior number, but there are a few things going on. The segment really has two pieces. Passives is a big part—we love the business and its margin profile; it is all about growth for us. The other part is the Semiconductor business unit, which has two pieces. The Protection franchise is one of the most profitable, growing double digits with a great margin profile. The area we are working through is power semiconductors—product rationalization and footprint optimization. That work takes time given factory consolidation and whatnot. You should expect margin improvement in the Electronics segment over the mid to long term as that work comes through.

Operator: As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star 1. We will pause just a moment. We will go to Christopher Glynn at Oppenheimer.

Christopher Glynn: Thanks. You have your hands full—Investor Day coming up, working on the power semis portfolio, go-to-market strategies, and integrating Basler. How is the acquisition pipeline? Is it better to think about another day to continue pursuing attractive deals, or how do you think about bandwidth?

Greg Henderson: On the one hand, it looks like we have a lot going on; on the other hand, we have a very clear strategy with three priorities, and a strong team. We are focused on what matters and it is going well. On acquisitions, our growth strategy will continue to be both organic and inorganic. We will talk more about our model and how we are thinking about acquisitions at Investor Day. We continue to have an active pipeline and remain disciplined, focusing on acquisitions that align to our strategy. You should expect to continue to see us doing acquisitions. The integration of Basler is going extremely well—we are very pleased and are building a playbook around acquisition integration. We see momentum and are pleased with our ability to support Basler and others as they come.

Abhishek Khandelwal: And we have ample capacity for acquisitions given our balance sheet. Our net leverage is about 1.0x. It is a big part of our strategic imperative and focus area. We will lay out clear targets next week in terms of what we expect to do over the next five years. Our balance sheet supports it.

Christopher Glynn: Thanks. One more housekeeping item, then I will hold my horses until Investor Day. The residential HVAC market—anything interesting sequentially in terms of stocking or regulatory transitions? And should we assume the second half comparison there is pretty accommodating?

Greg Henderson: This market tends to have cycles. We have reasonable exposure in our Industrial segment, which is why we see some impact. There is regular seasonality and some timing effects. Medium to long term, we expect to continue to see good performance and growth, but there can be short-term noise.

Operator: That concludes our Q&A session. I will now turn the conference back over to Greg Henderson for closing remarks.

Greg Henderson: Thank you. I want to close by thanking our team. We had a very strong start to 2026. We see continued momentum across the markets and the breadth of that momentum. We feel good about our start to the year and our momentum into the second quarter, and we look forward to seeing many of you next week in New York for our Investor Day. Thank you very much.

Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.

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