Thank you for joining Ingram Micro's third quarter 2025 earnings call. I'll now hand the call over to Willow McMahon, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Thank you, operator. I'm here today with Paul Bay, Ingram Micro CEO, and Mike Zylus, our CFO. Before I turn the call over to Paul, let me remind you that today's discussion contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws, including predictions, estimates, projections, or other statements about future events, statements about our strategy, demand plans, and positioning, growth, cash flow, capital allocation, and stockholder return, as well as our expectations for future fiscal periods. Actual results may differ materially from those mentioned in these forward-looking statements because of risks and uncertainties discussed in today's earnings release and in our filings with the SEC. We do not intend to update any forward-looking statements. During this call, we will reference certain non-GAAP financial information. Reconciliations of non-GAAP results to GAAP results are included in our earnings press release and the related Form 8-K available on the SEC website or on our investor relations website. With that, I'll turn the call over to Paul.
Good afternoon and thank you for joining today's call. The third quarter was strong with revenues of $12.6 billion, up 7.2% year-over-year and above the high end of our guidance. Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share was 72 cents at the high end of our guidance despite a small impact from the ransomware incident in July. As I shared last quarter, our team responded quickly and effectively to the incident, restoring operations with minimal business disruption, which is reflected in our results. In terms of market dynamics, we believe we're gaining market share across most regions in the businesses we serve and are encouraged by the growing momentum of our Xvantage digital platform as we deploy it globally. Looking forward, we enter the fourth quarter with confidence in our roadmap and our guidance, which Mike will detail shortly. During the third quarter, we saw continued momentum across our core business lines and geographies. Enterprise sales remained strong and our SMB customer category achieved a third straight quarter of sequential growth, which is encouraging. Client and endpoint solutions delivered yet another solid quarter while advanced solutions was down slightly year-over-year, though both server and storage posted strong double-digit gains. Networking grew modestly, driven by an increase in AI proof of concept activity in enterprise, partially offset by tough comparisons to last year's strong virtualization sales. As we all know, enterprise companies and technology vendors alike are navigating the unchartered territory of AI transformation.
In the third quarter, the pace of change accelerated rapidly with a wave of new partnerships and investments across the industry. Today, we're seeing enterprise customers at varying stages of their AI proof of concepts, mostly on-prem and still primarily focused on the compute layer, often in conjunction with open models. The ultimate goal for these enterprises is to create purpose-built end-to-end solutions using agentic AI solutions that will redefine their operations, elevate customer engagement, and deliver strong returns. We are well positioned to support this customer journey, particularly as it moves from early adopters to the broader market. To do this, we've invested ahead of the curve as we did in the early days of the internet, advanced solutions, and cloud. Following the same playbook over the past three years, we've been executing a multi-year plan to build an AI ecosystem. We stand at the center of the $5 trillion global technology landscape. With more than four decades of experience helping customers embrace technology disruption, this, in conjunction with our proprietary AI innovation, puts us in a unique position to lead our customers on their AI journeys. We are doing this with our internal expertise through our Xvantage platform alongside our external customer-facing Enable AI program that educates and equips partners to assess, sell, and deploy AI.
With Xvantage, we're driving real business outcomes, from meaningful OpEx reductions to automated topline growth, powered by our Intelligent Digital Assistant, or IDA, which we discussed last quarter. Xvantage was architected three years ago with a proprietary AI factory that supports hundreds of machine learning models across vast data sets. It's not only a growth engine but a learning platform that fuels demand generation for our sales associates and customers. The AI factory allows us to design integrated solutions that bring together AI, cybersecurity, and cloud, which is crucial because collaboration across the ecosystem is critical to unlocking AI's full potential. Many of our vendor partners are now co-creating solutions with other vendors. With Xvantage, we can deliver these integrated bundles through a seamless self-service experience that combines hardware, software, cloud, and services for our customers and vendor partners. Ingram Micro's Enable AI program provides the tools to gauge readiness, sell AI solutions, and deliver measurable business outcomes at scale. It provides a structured step-by-step path to AI success through maturity assessments, base camps for foundational learning, growth tracks with leading vendors, and access to global centers of excellence. Since its launch in early 2025, the Enable AI program has engaged thousands of customers supported by our leading vendor partners to walk through the complex AI opportunity with clarity and confidence.
As proof points of the program's early success, AI is the most viewed resource content category on Xvantage by our customers. Additionally, one of the world's largest hyperscalers is using our Enable AI program to simplify customer AI certifications, and a leading GPU vendor is collaborating with us on multi-vendor AI solutions for key industries. Both these internal and external efforts rely on the accelerating momentum of our Xvantage platform, which is visible in our metrics. In the third quarter, IDA contributed hundreds of millions of dollars in incremental revenue. We also had rapid international adoption of IDA, with IDA-driven revenue in non-US operations growing by more than 100% in a quarter. IDA also drove Q3 quote-to-order conversion rates nearly double those of non-IDA engagements. Earlier this week, we announced our first enterprise-grade AI agent built with our Xvantage AI factory and powered by Google's Gemini large language models. This demonstrates how we are combining our internal AI intelligence, which is more than 400 models strong, with Gemini's advanced reasoning and language capabilities. The new agent, known as Sales Briefing Assistant, introduces a new standard for intelligent, scalable sales enablement in the enterprise. The agent will also help IDA generate better quote conversion, driving complementary intelligence for our entire sales lifecycle and pipeline. These innovations demonstrate how our AI-first strategy is playing out in tangible, measurable capabilities.
As we enter the fourth quarter, it's remarkable how much has changed in just one year since our IPO. While the pace of change in our industry is staggering, we continue to focus on what always guides our roadmap, and that is our customers. We understand that our success is dependent upon them, and what matters most is that we enable them to capture and deliver value to the millions of end businesses they serve each and every day. One of our longtime customers, Mark Sudter, President of Access Group and a TrustX Alliance community member, reminded us of this recently when he said, and I quote: 'In my 32 years in IT, I've never experienced a partnership like the one I have with Ingram Micro. I see my own vision reflected in your innovations. It feels like you're building and iterating with me, not just for me.' As an example, with Xvantage, our year-end cloud billing process went from three full days to just three minutes. End quote. At the end of the day, regardless of the sophistication of technology we are enabling, our biggest differentiator is our ability to serve our customers wherever they are in their technology journeys. We are grateful for our customers, our partners, and our team members for their dedication and creativity as we transform the B2B experience together. With that, I'll turn the call over to Mike.
Thank you, Paul, and good afternoon, everyone. As Paul highlighted, we had a strong third quarter with results that either exceeded or hit the top end of each of our guidance ranges despite the impact of the July ransomware incident. As discussed on our earnings call in August, the incident prevented us from transacting for a handful of days in early July. At that time, we estimated a potential 1 to 2% topline impact and a 2 to 4 cent impact on EPS. With the incident now more than 3 months behind us, we estimate the overall impact landed within a tighter range of 1 to 1.5% of net sales and 2 to 3 cents per share. And most importantly, we couldn't be prouder of how our team and our partners around the globe responded to minimize the impact and return to business so quickly. Looking at the third quarter in more detail, net sales of $12.60 billion were up 7.2% year-over-year in US dollars and up 6.0% on an FX-neutral basis. Client and endpoint solutions grew most notably at nearly 13% on an FX-neutral basis as we continued to see strong demand for notebooks, desktops, and related products. Advanced solution sales were down 4.5%, as growth in servers and storage was offset by software results in virtualization and infrastructure software. We also saw a 4% decline in cloud. However, excluding the impact of one of our non-core divestitures during Q3, our cloud net revenues were up low single digits year-over-year. The year-over-year comparison of our cloud net revenues was also diluted by a higher mix of demand for product sales that are recorded on a net basis.
Geographically, we had robust FX-neutral growth in the low teens year-over-year in both Latin America and Asia-Pacific regions, while North America growth was more moderate at a bit over 3%. EMEA grew just slightly on an FX-neutral basis as the overall macro environment remains generally softer in parts of Europe. As I scan across our regional segments, solid growth in client and endpoint solutions, and particularly the desktop and notebook refresh, was a common thread globally. Similarly, servers and storage along with cybersecurity were amongst the largest gains within advanced solutions across most of our geographies. We also saw cloud growth in most geographies, most notably in infrastructure as a service and modern workplace solutions. Networking growth continues to be more moderate in general, while the softness in infrastructure software that I noted earlier was mostly attributable to a large project that closed in Q3 of last year in Europe and did not repeat with the same timing in the current year. Turning to our customer categories, our overall mix and year-over-year growth remain more concentrated towards large enterprise customers, but we are also encouraged to see growth starting to accelerate in our higher-margin SMB category, a trend that first started in Q1 of this year.
Moving to gross profit and gross margin, our third quarter gross profit came in at $870 million compared to $845 million last year. The increase in gross profit dollars was primarily related to increased net sales. An improving margin environment combined with some strengthening in SMB that I just noted helped to drive a solid 34 basis point sequential improvement in gross margins. On a year-over-year basis, our gross margins were down 29 basis points due to the continued higher sales mix towards our lower-margin client and endpoint solutions as well as a mix within our advanced solutions product categories towards lower-margin server, storage, and other AI-enabling product sets. These higher-growth areas are important to our strategic priorities in partnership with several of our key vendors, where our wins come at lower margin but deliver strong returns on invested capital and serve as a foundational piece to our AI ecosystem strategy. Excluding sales from vendors associated with large GPU shipments, for instance, that were done on a low-margin and low-cost-to-serve basis, our total company gross margins in Q3 would have been above 7%.
Q3 operating expenses were $646 million or 5.13% of net sales, compared to 5.33% in the same period last year. Third quarter operating expenses included a $5.5 million loss or four basis points of net sales related to the two divestitures we discussed earlier. The quarter also included $3.5 million or three basis points of net sales related to restructuring costs associated with programs to continue optimizing the business, primarily in North America and EMEA. The year-over-year improvement in OpEx leverage reflects continued benefits of optimization and automation from Xvantage, the cost actions we have previously discussed, as well as mix factors associated with lower-cost-to-serve categories. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $342 million, up 3% in US dollars and up 2% in constant currency. Our non-GAAP diluted EPS of 72 cents, which was at the high end of our guidance range, came in flat to the prior year. However, our non-GAAP net income was up 6.0% year-over-year, growing from $159 million last year to $169 million this year.
The current quarter includes the impact of the July ransomware incident that I noted earlier. And as we've discussed in the past, our tax rate is also impacted by higher volumes of sales from our Latin American export business, which yields a higher gross margin but also bears withholding tax. This withholding tax impact was 3 cents per share in Q3 of this year versus 2 cents per share in the prior year. Turning to our balance sheet, we ended the third quarter with net working capital of $4.9 billion compared to $4.3 billion to close the same period last year. The higher investment in working capital this year is driven by the increase in net sales and investment needed to capture these opportunities. On a day basis, our net working capital was 32 days versus 29 days in the same period of 2024. The higher ratio of cloud sales recorded on a net basis had an unfavorable impact on working capital base. On a similar note, adjusted free cash flow was an outflow of $110 million, again reflective of investments to grow the business, although this was better than typical Q3 seasonal norms and improved when compared to an outflow of $255 million in the prior fiscal third quarter.
We returned $18.3 million to stockholders through dividends paid during Q3, and we announced a 2.6% increase to our quarterly dividend to be paid in Q4. We ended the quarter with $830 million in cash and cash equivalents and debt of $3.8 billion. Our gross leverage ratio was 2.8 times and our net leverage ratio was 2.2 times, both of which are roughly flat year-over-year, reflective of our investment in working capital to fund growth, offset by our debt paydowns over the past year. Shifting now to guidance for Q4 2025, we are guiding net sales of $14 billion to $14.35 billion, which represents year-over-year growth of more than 6% at the midpoint. We expect fourth quarter gross profit of $935 million to $990 million, which would represent gross margins of roughly 6.8% at the midpoint. This revenue and gross profit guidance is reflective of some fairly consistent trends in sales mix across products, customers, and geographies to what we saw in Q3. We expect non-GAAP diluted EPS to be in the range of 85 cents to 95 cents per diluted share. Our EPS guidance assumes approximately 235.9 million weighted average shares outstanding and a non-GAAP tax rate of 33% for the quarter.
In closing, as we look to Q4, we expect to continue our trend of year-over-year net sales growth, and our team remains laser-focused on scaling our Xvantage platform along with other strategic capabilities in which we continue to invest to capture additional market opportunities. With that, operator, we can turn the call over to questions.
Thank you. We'll now be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up the handset before pressing the star keys. One moment, please, while we pull for questions. Thank you. Our first question is from Ruplu Bhattacharya with Bank of America.
Hi, thank you for taking my questions. Paul, Mike, you talked about continuing strength in PCs, notebooks and desktops, and some weakness in advanced solutions. I think you mentioned one large project that didn't renew was a timing issue. Given the dynamics that you saw this quarter and what you see for the December quarter, how should we think about margins going forward, either gross margins or operating margins? Do you think the trends can get better, and how does the mix of SMB versus large enterprise impact margins? If you can give us any color there, and I have a follow-up.
Yeah, Ruplu, this is Mike. I can start on that and then Paul can add for sure. So what you can see implied in the guidance that we give on gross profit and revenue is still margins in the high sixes, around 6.8 at the midpoint. I think that's still looking at sort of seasonal norms where we see a little bit of a trend of more mix of the higher-volume products that we usually see in the spike in Q4, but still less seasonal differential sequentially than what we normally see. And a lot of that is probably the continued strength in SMB that we've seen gradually building over the last couple of quarters, which is very encouraging for us. Of course, we see the advanced solutions, as you just called out from our comments, really more of a timing thing on one large project and a difference in virtualization from a year-over-year perspective. But we continue to see solid growth in servers and storage, and we see the opportunity to continue to pursue some of the large GPU deals that we called out, which obviously could be a little bit dilutive from a margin perspective. But then lastly, cloud, we see growing at a more robust level in Q4. So what's implied in our guidance from a growth perspective is client and endpoint probably more in the mid-single digits with still some lags on the desktop and notebook refresh. We see advanced solutions growing in the lower single digits and cloud growing mid to upper single digits, and that's what's built into our guide.
I'll just add geography mix again too. So we continue to see Asia-Pacific performing very well as a percentage of the overall business. As we called out, that's a lower margin but also a lower cost-to-serve region.
Got it. Thanks for the details there, Mike. For my follow-up, if I can ask a little bit on inventory and free cash flow and cash conversion cycle. It looks like inventory sequentially went down a little bit, but if the hardware categories are recovering, how should we think about the pace of inventory reduction? And should we assume a fourth quarter also is a negative free cash flow quarter as you prepare for the first half of next year? So any color on how we should think about working capital and free cash flow going forward. Thank you.
Yeah. So one of the things that we talked about in our last call is how we ended Q2 with a little bit of buildup of inventory, which was mainly related to some large projects that we were going to sell through in Q3. And that did happen as expected, and that's what's contributing a little bit to the sequential decline you just noted, and also a lower-than-normal seasonal investment into working capital in Q3, where we usually are stocking for the kind of hockey stick that we see in Q4 sales. Now, I would point you — we don't give guidance on cash flow and balance sheet per se, but I would look towards last Q4 where you can see we had quite a sizable positive cash flow in that quarter, and things would point to a very similar sort of trend dynamically as far as where we see the business mix between hardware, software, and demand as we look at Q4, encompassing the mix factors that I just mentioned in answer to your first question. So we should see a solid cash flow quarter in Q4.
Great. Thank you for all the details. Appreciate it.
Our next question is from Erik Woodruff with Morgan Stanley.
Hi, this is Maya on for Eric. Two questions for me. Maybe just to start, on the traditional hardware side, we've seen PCs growing for multiple quarters now, servers growing as well. Where do you think we are in the cycle across those key product markets?
So this is Paul. Thanks, Maya. We're still seeing good trajectory on the desktop notebook refresh. We're in the second half of the refresh, but as we sit here today, we're still seeing good demand, not to the extent that we saw in the first half of the year. And as you know, as we talked about coming into the year, it kind of progressed very quickly. So I would say we're in the back half or the later innings of the PC refresh. And if you look at server, that was a very good performance for us in the quarter within our advanced solutions. Networking still had growth. So there is still some of the refresh going on as we talked about previously in some of the other categories, but there's still some legs to be there for those categories also.
Got it. And then given what we're seeing in the memory market right now, in prior periods of component cost inflation, have you historically seen customers try and pull forward spend to try and get ahead of rising component costs? Is this a topic in any conversations that you're having?
Yeah, this is Paul again. No, we haven't had any of those conversations at this point in time in terms of pull-forwards or from a pricing perspective. It's been pretty traditional from what we're seeing.
Our next question is from David Paige with RBC Capital Markets.
