Good day. And welcome to the Arrow Electronics second quarter 2026 Earnings Call. Today's conference is being recorded.
And at this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Michael Nelson, Arrow's Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Thank you, operator. I would like to welcome everyone to the Arrow Electronics Second Quarter 26 Earnings Conference Call. Joining me on the call today is our Interim President and chief executive officer, Bill Austin, our chief financial officer, Rajesh K. Agrawal, our president of global components, Richard J. Marano, and our president of global enterprise computing solutions, Eric C. Nowak.
During this call, we will make forward-looking statements, including statements about our business outlook, strategies, plans and projections regarding future financial results, which are based on our predictions and expectations as of today. Our actual results could differ materially due to a number of risks, including the risk factors and other factors described in this quarter's associated earnings release and our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and other filings with the SEC. We undertake no obligation to update publicly or revise any of the forward-looking statements as a result of new information or future events.
As a reminder, some of the figures we will discuss on today's call are non GAAP measures which are not intended to be a substitute for our GAAP results. We have reconciled these non GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures in this quarter's associated earnings release. You can access our earnings release at investor.arrow.com along with a replay of this call.
We have also posted a slide presentation on this website to accompany our prepared remarks and encourage you to reference these slides during this webcast. Following our prepared remarks today, Bill, Rajesh, Rick, and Eric will be available to take your questions. I will now hand the call over to our Interim President and CEO, Bill Austin.
Thank you, Michael. And good afternoon, everyone. We appreciate you joining us for a discussion of second quarter 2026 results.
Before turning to our results, I want to thank our team across the globe. Their commitment to serving our suppliers and customers is a key reason why Arrow delivered another strong quarter. Starting on Slide 3, we delivered excellent results in the second quarter.
Total revenue of $10 billion increased 32% year over year and operating margin expanded 120 basis points year over year to 4%. Each of which exceeded expectations. The combination of broad-based demand, disciplined execution, and positive operating leverage resulted in non GAAP EPS of $5.45 representing a significant increase of 124% year over year.
Our strong results this quarter were underpinned by 4 primary drivers. 1, sustained unit volume growth with incremental benefits from price inflation. 2, disciplined execution as we managed expenses and working capital against the backdrop of solid customer demand. 3, positive operating leverage resulting in year over year margin expansion and 4, favorable mix of higher margin value added services. Global components once again performed exceptionally well with strength across geographies, industry verticals and customer mix. Similarly, within ECS, we continue to benefit from long term secular demand trends around cloud, cybersecurity, infrastructure software, and AI driven workloads.
While continuing to execute our strategy around higher value software and services. Rajesh will share more details on our financial performance in a moment. But first, I would like to spend a few minutes discussing several key themes from the quarter that reinforce our confidence in the sustainability of the business and growth strategy.
First, our leading indicators continue to give us enhanced visibility and conviction in our operating model. Book to bill ratios improved further and remain well above parity while our backlog continues to build into 2027. Importantly, these leading indicators further strengthen our confidence in the durability of demand and sustainability of our growth trajectory.
Second, our growth remains largely customer-demand driven. While we have seen incremental benefits from inflation, the primary driver of growth has been increased unit volume. Not only are we benefiting from ongoing AI investment trends, but we are also experiencing strength in industrial, aerospace and defense, and the reemergence of transportation.
Third, growth is broad-based, and we are still in the early stages of a mass market upturn as backlog from our mass market customers continues to slowly ramp. Fourth, value added services remains a differentiator. With supply chain services once again contributing significantly to overall profitability.
Encouragingly, these favorable demand signals are interconnected. With each contributing to a broader opportunity set across our portfolio. As we have highlighted previously, Arrow remains well positioned at the intersection of several attractive secular growth markets.
Allowing us to benefit from their continued expansion. Finally, the quality of our growth continues to improve supported by a more favorable mix of customers and geographies, contribution from value added services, and ongoing productivity gains across the business. Combined with the structural changes we have made to reset our business model and our disciplined expense management, these factors are enabling us to deliver meaningful operating leverage and generate strong incremental returns.
Turning to slide 4. I would like to briefly revisit 4 pillars of our investment thesis and why we believe Arrow remains uniquely positioned for long term growth and an attractive investment opportunity. I have discussed these pillars over the past several quarters, and you are starting to see the true strength of the business come through in our results.
First, Arrow maintains a strong position in large and growing markets and plays a critical role in our 6 core markets of industrial, transportation, aerospace and defense, medical, consumer electronics, and data center. These end markets are supported by favorable secular trends that continue to create growth opportunities. Second, Arrow has differentiated capabilities driving profitable growth.
We are benefiting from a richer mix of higher value service offerings including supply chain services, engineering and design services, and integration services. Notably, these offerings build upon our long standing strengths in our core distribution franchise. And represent a natural extension of the capabilities that have long differentiated Arrow in the marketplace.
We continue to expand our suite of differentiated capabilities that deepen customer engagement and further differentiate Arrow. We recently introduced digital test drive, a new remote AI driven engineering platform that allows customers to evaluate hardware benchmark performance, and accelerate product development without the logistics and delays associated with physical evaluation of equipment. This expands our ability to support customers globally while increasing the efficiency and scalability of our engineering services.
Additionally, our eInfochips business continues to strengthen its position as a leader in engineering services. Its differentiated silicon to cloud capabilities help customers navigate increasingly complex product life cycles. During the quarter, eInfochips was recognized in Gartner's emerging market quadrant for physical AI services.
Reinforcing the strength of our technical capabilities in this rapidly evolving market. We also recently expanded our ECS experience centers providing partners access to more than 100 prebuilt hybrid infrastructure, cybersecurity, and AI solutions alongside our engineering expertise to accelerate solution development and deployment. Historically, these engagements have resulted in a proposal close rates of 90%.
I am proud to share that Arrow recently earned 3 key Microsoft distinctions for our ECS business. Frontier distributor status, specializations in copilot, and Azure virtual desktop. Together, they validate our scale and expertise across AI, cloud, and the modern workplace.
Strengthening our ability to help channel partners deploy scalable solutions through ArrowSphere and supporting continued growth in recurring cloud consumption. Third, Arrow has a diversified business model that provides financial flexibility supported by strong balance sheet and consistent free cash flow generation. The combination of our global components and ECS businesses is a strategic advantage allowing us to participate across the full technology life cycle.
And fourth, our focused capital allocation strategy is designed to maximize shareholder value by deploying capital where we expect the highest long term risk adjusted returns. We will continue to reinvest in the business to drive organic growth evaluate disciplined M and A opportunities and return excess capital to shareholders while maintaining an investment grade credit rating. Turning to slide 5.
We are very pleased with the strong results we delivered during the second quarter. Which reflect our team's disciplined execution and the progress we have made over the past several years. We continue to build on our traditional distribution DNA, all while expanding our higher margin value added services across both global components and ECS creating a broader portfolio of solutions that strengthen customer relationships and improve the quality of our earnings.
We believe Arrow is uniquely positioned across both the hardware and software technology ecosystems, giving us the opportunity to participate broadly as our customers continue investing across the full technology life cycle. As we enter the second half of the year, our focus remains on improving the quality of our growth through strong execution and disciplined financial management. We continue to make targeted investments in opportunities supported by customer demand and attractive long term returns.
While maintaining a highly efficient business model which we expect will drive additional positive operating leverage. We are confident in the direction of the business encouraged by the opportunities ahead, and remain focused on creating sustainable long term shareholder value. With that, I will turn it over to Rajesh to discuss our financial performance in more detail.
Thanks, Bill. On slide 6, sales for the second quarter increased $2.4 billion year over year to $10 billion exceeding our guidance range and up 32% versus the prior year. Or up 30% versus the prior year on a constant currency basis.
Second quarter consolidated non GAAP gross margin as a percent of sales of 11.2% was flat versus the prior year. Our second quarter non GAAP operating expenses increased $88 million year over year to $719 million primarily driven by variable costs and FX. Importantly, non GAAP OpEx as a percent of gross profit declined 10.5 percentage points year over year to 64.1%.
We continue to focus on disciplined profitable growth and our efforts around operational efficiency are driving substantial operating leverage in the business model. In the second quarter, non GAAP operating income increased $188 million year over year to $403 million Non GAAP operating margin rate expanded 120 basis points year over year to 4% of sales. Interest and other expenses was $37 million in the quarter as we benefited from lower average debt levels throughout the quarter and our non GAAP effective tax rate was 23%.
Finally, non GAAP diluted EPS for the second quarter increased 124% year over year to $5.45 which was above our guidance range driven by a number of factors, including favorable sales volume, continued strength of our value added services, operational leverage from productivity initiatives, and lower interest expense. Turning to slide 7, let's take a closer look at our global components business. Global components sales increased $726 million sequentially to $7.4 billion in the second quarter.
Above our guidance range and up 11% versus prior quarter. Global Components non GAAP operating income increased $32 million sequentially to $397 million up 9% from the prior quarter. Non GAAP operating margins modestly declined 10 basis points sequentially to 5.4% and were up 180 basis points versus the prior year and well ahead of expectations.
The growth that we experienced in the second quarter was once again broad based across geographies industry verticals and customer segments underpinned by healthy trends in our leading indicators. Book to bill ratios continue to increase and remain well above 1 in all 3 regions. Overall, lead times continue to extend for certain technologies, but they remain lower than a pervasive shortage environment.
Customer order patterns broadly are normal in size and pace, reflecting a rational market environment. Our backlog construct continues to grow and is building out the first half of 27, giving us visibility and confidence in the sustainability of the business' momentum. Encouragingly, the growth that we are seeing continues to be led by customer unit demand with some incremental lift from price inflation.
Price inflation contributed roughly 1/3 of the sequential revenue growth in our global components business. Memory now represents a low double digit percentage of total segment revenue. Our strategy remains focused on profitable growth and our execution is driving a healthier business mix.
First, while we continue to benefit from secular growth trends related to AI and data center, we are experiencing broad based demand across our portfolio rather than concentrated in a single market. Strength in aerospace and defense. Industrial, and the reemergence of transportation particularly in the West, are presenting tailwinds to our global components business.
These are our 3 largest verticals globally. Second, book to bill ratios and backlog across our mass market segment continues to improve. And we believe there is still healthy runway.
Third, interconnect passive and electromechanical components for IP&E continue to grow surpassing $1 billion in sales for the second consecutive quarter. Fourth, our value added services, primarily supply chain services, made another meaningful contribution to our overall second quarter operating income. These capabilities expand our addressable market deepen customer engagement, and increase the durability of our earnings.
Lastly, we have remained disciplined with our cost and have added positive operating leverage to our model. This discipline is expected to drive continued flow through as the broader market grows and expands. Taking a closer look at each of the regions.
In The Americas, sales growth was broad based, highlighted by strength in aerospace and defense, industrial, and transportation. In EMEA, the market was underpinned by strength in transportation and aerospace and defense. And finally, in Asia, sequential growth was driven by industrial, transportation, and demand for data center computing power.
Turning to slide 8 and our global ECS business. In the second quarter, global ECS sales increased $332 million year over year to $2.6 billion above our guidance range and up 14% versus the prior year. Or up 13% year over year on a constant currency basis.
Total ECS billings were $5.9 billion up 14% year over year. Our global ECS business is strategically positioned at the complex end of the IT stack where hybrid cloud and AI demand is driving healthy backlog growth of over 75% year over year finishing the second quarter at another all time high. We are experiencing strength across our portfolio of cloud, cybersecurity, data protection, data intelligence, and infrastructure software.
Today, hardware solutions for on premise storage and compute remain constrained, by thin supply mostly due to memory and SSD shortages. However, our role in the middle of technology makers channel partners allows us to source, provision, manage, and scale alternatives that lean more on the software and public cloud solutions that we offer. And our single integrated ArrowSphere platform continues to help drive these efforts, unlocking deeper engagement and recurring revenue volumes.
In the second quarter, we took a charge on certain underperforming multiyear contracts. With 1 of our partners. As a result, second quarter ECS non GAAP operating margins declined 100 basis points year over year due to the charge.
As we have noted in prior quarters, we have been working through discussions with 1 of our strategic partners with whom also have these beyond distribution relationships. This is a highly valued relationship, and we wanted to ensure we reach the right outcome. Have now terminated 1 key element of our Beyond distribution agreement, with this partner and continue to work towards restructuring another.
We believe these actions will help to get this part of the business on the right track. Both of us remain committed to achieving success going forward. Turning to the balance sheet on Slide 9.
Net working capital declined sequentially in the second quarter by approximately $100 million ending the quarter at $6.8 billion Inventory grew sequentially by $217 million ending the second quarter at $5.9 billion Importantly, the financial metrics that we monitor continue to significantly improve. Return on working capital increased 10.9 percentage points year over year finishing the second quarter 23.6%. Likewise, return on invested capital increased 5.8 percentage points year over year finishing 13.9%.
Working capital as a percent of sales declined in the second quarter to 17% and our cash conversion decreased year over year by 23 days. Cash flow from operating activities in the second quarter was $318 million taking us to over $1 billion of operating cash flow year to date. The strong cash generation is driven in part by timing effects from our supply chain services offering, which may partially unwind as the year progresses.
This offering is largely working capital life because the inventory is typically consigned. But AR and AP cash flows within existing customer supplier relationships can create quarter end slings. In general, the countercyclical cash flow dynamics of our business model have not changed.
Gross balance sheet debt at the end of a second quarter declined sequentially by approximately $300 million and declined year over year by approximately $650 million finishing at $2.2 billion Our lower debt levels along with increased profitability has improved our adjusted leverage ratio by over a turn the past 12 months to 1.75x. Which provides us with increased financial flexibility Finally, we repurchased $43 million in shares in the second quarter. Now turning to Q3 guidance on Slide 10.
We expect sales for the third quarter to be between $9.6 billion to $10.2 billion representing an increase of 28% year over year at the midpoint of the range. We expect global component sales to be between $7.5 billion and $7.9 billion representing sequential growth of 5% at the midpoint. In enterprise computing solutions, we expect sales to be between $2.1 billion and $2.3 billion which is up 2% year over year at the midpoint and reflects growing over a large partner addition last year.
We are estimating a tax rate in the range of 23% to 25% and interest expense of approximately $50 million Our non GAAP diluted earnings per share is expected to be between $4.83 and $5.03 Details about the impacts of changes in foreign currencies can be found our earnings release. As we look to the balance of the year, we remain confident in the momentum we are seeing across the business and our ability to execute our strategy. At the same time, we recognize that a number of factors can influence the timing, and linearity of results from quarter to quarter.
We expect global components to perform at or above seasonal trends in all of our regions for the remainder of the year. However, consistent with historical patterns in Q3, Asia is expected to be seasonally strong while EMEA is typically seasonally weaker. Additionally, our supply chain services expected to return to more normal profit levels in the third quarter.
Overall, we are confident that our healthier business mix diversified business model, and financial discipline will enable Arrow to deliver additional operating leverage and drive significant earnings power. With that, I will now turn the call back over to Bill for some closing thoughts.
Turning to Slide 11. As we look ahead, we remain focused on disciplined execution, building on the operational momentum we have established, and further improving the quality of our growth. Leading indicators continue to reinforce our conviction that underlying demand is strong.
Combined with the actions we have taken to enhance efficiency and optimize our operating model, we believe we are well positioned realize increasing levels of operating leverage. Our strategy is producing tangible results and strengthening our competitive position across our markets. As a result, we believe we are well positioned to capitalize on emerging opportunities and convert them into sustainable, profitable growth.
We will continue investing in innovation and customer enablement to deepen relationships and expand our value proposition with a disciplined focus on allocating capital, to the highest return on investment opportunities. In parallel, we will strive to continue growing our portfolio of higher margin value added services across both global components and ECS, deepening customer engagement, and supporting more durable, higher quality earnings over time. Everyone at Arrow is proud of the progress we have made.
Confident in the direction of the business, and remains committed to creating long term value for all of our stakeholders. Finally, I am excited to welcome Dee Merriweather as Arrow's new president and chief operating officer. Dee's extensive distribution experience and successful leadership of commercial, operational, and financial teams will further strengthen our organization.
Just as importantly, she brings the humility, transparency, and purpose driven leadership that aligns with our culture and commitment to delivering value for all of our stakeholders. These additions strengthens our succession planning, and I will continue to serve as Arrow's interim CEO until a permanent CEO is named. With that, Rajesh, Rick, Eric, and I would be happy to take your questions.
Operator, please open the call for questions.
We will now begin the question and answer session. You would like to ask a question, please press 1 to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press 1 again.
We ask that you pick up your handset when asking a question to allow for optimum sound quality. And if you are muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster.
Your first question comes from the line of Will Stein with Truist Securities. Will, please go ahead.
Hey, thank you for taking my question. Congrats on the good overall results and outlook.
Thanks.
I have a couple of quick questions. First, I think we are about 5 quarters into the component cycle in terms of expressing year over year growth it is a very robust growth level now. I think it is 2 quarters of 39% pushing 40% year over year growth.
What inning would you say we are in, in terms of that dynamic? Are you seeing things that make you concerned that were in the sort of the last couple innings of that cycle? Think we are at the beginning still or, perhaps somewhere in the middle?
Will. Thanks for the question. it is Bill. You know, the starting pitcher is still in the game.
Alright? We have not gone to the relief pitcher yet, so it is the early innings of the game. I would say, you know, we are in the second inning, you know, somewhere in that range.
But, Rick is sitting here, and he is living it every day. So I am gonna turn it over to Rick.
Yeah. Yeah. Thanks.
Thanks, Will, and thanks for the question. You know? And I will build on you know, Bill's response know, when we look at this recovery, it is really 3 different positions in the recovery cycle if you want to call it that.
You have AI, which is not a recovery. AI is a market that is evolving and will continue to evolve. You have what is happening in Mil-Aero and then you have what is happening in the core business which is fundamentally the growth drivers to which we have always seen recoveries.
Happen in the business. And as we said before, I kinda look at it and say it from this perspective. The growth in the core business is steady, All the indicators are strong.
Backlog continues to build. And there is plenty of time left in the game. From my perspective as it builds.
Yeah. that is really helpful.
Next, I wanna highlight sort of a question mark in the guidance. Your ECS guidance is below typical seasonality. It was a bit surprised by that.
And related perhaps related to this, there was a report mid quarter noting that there was a departure of a supplier relationship I think this called out a $1.4 billion revenue level of business, but I think that might not have been perfectly accurate. And so I would like you to maybe set the record straight in terms of whether there was a loss, the timing of it, the sizing of it and whether that is perhaps what we are seeing in the Q3 guide. If it was not that, maybe elaborate on that.
Thank you.
Yeah. Well, good great question, and thanks for bringing that up. It was a missed report.
On the $1.4 billion. It was-- it is roughly half that. at $700 million on the revenue line to us. But Eric is here, and I will let Eric dive into that deeper if you would like.
Yes. There would be no impact in terms of revenue and margin and profits for ECS with this loss of a contract, it is in fact it is a mutual agreement. Sometimes the strategy between the vendors and the distributors are diverging.
And this was the case here. And basically, we are not a volume distributor or laptop or PC distributor. We are an infrastructure software hardware distributor in cloud.
And we are focusing on this. And so, basically, these particular vendor wanted to have distributor that can do both. That is not our case.
So we will focus on alternative solutions, and our partners will buy from us alternative solutions. And we do not expect any change at all in terms of the growth or whatsoever.
And then, Will, just the other part of your question was the below seasonal guide that you referred to.
The growth rate in the in the quarter on a year over year basis is primarily the result of growing over a large partner addition last year. there is no change in trajectory of the overall business. We still expect to get to low double digit billings growth during the course of this full year. So it is really a grow over issue, for this particular, time frame.
Yeah. Just I will just add to that, Rajesh, for a moment. The ECS business the base business, the core business is quite strong.
Our backlog is up 75% as Rajesh noted. In his script. And if you look at the product segment, the performance within the product segments, on a year over year basis.
Storage is up 21%, compute is up 51%, business application is up 26%. So there is a really strong, healthy demand out there, and we are parked as we have always said, kind of right in the center of that ecosystem. So, the business is doing very well.
K. Thank you.
Thanks, bro.
Your next question comes from the line of Melissa Dailey Fairbanks with Raymond James.
Hey, guys.
Hey, Melissa.
Thanks for taking my question.
Hello. How are you? Good to talk to you again.
Congrats on a great quarter. Dee welcome to Arrow. You are joining a great team, so I look forward to meeting you.
I wanted to see if you might be able to comment on some of the things that we have heard from, some of your suppliers during this earnings season about how automotive OEMs are now beginning to pressure some of their tier ones. To maybe carry more inventory because we went way too far into the correct territory and things are too lean, and now we are seeing lead times. Extend.
I am wondering if you are seeing any of those types of dynamics where this is going to be now we are back to normal, you know, kind of not just in case, but also not as lean as the just in time times were.
Yeah, Melissa. it is Rick. Thanks for the question. I will answer the question this way.
I think if you kind of put the cycle into play, we went from a cycle where, obviously, we went through the pandemic, inventories got elevated, The cycle we went through, everyone bled off a lot of in inventory or held a lot of inventory and had to bleed it off. And then we have seen this progression of a really nice, slow recovery. And in that recovery, discipline has come back into the supply chain overall.
Customers are now adding buffer inventory back into their supply chains. As well as giving us more visibility and extended visibility to what their MRPs are showing from a longer period of time. I do not think any 1 particular segment is reacting or acting much differently from an overall perspective, but I do think what is happening is some of the traditional vertical markets to which carried more inventory per se than others are building buffer inventory back into their mix.
And as it relates to what they are seeing from a demand perspective. But I do not I do not consider it irrational in any way at this point in time. I do not.
Okay. Greg. Thanks, Rick.
I appreciate that color. So just kind of building upon that, you are getting better visibility. Rajesh, I think you commented that you are now you have some visibility extending into 27.
As lead times are extending, especially for some of the higher value products that are going to the data center or the IP&E stuff, Are you are any of your customers looking to preposition inventory and maybe having you manage that supply chain for them and then and then just put that inventory on consignment in place? I am wondering if that is a dynamic that is been happening.
No. it is Rick again, Melissa. I think that is the answer. As I said earlier, I do not see anything irrational from that perspective.
I do not see or we do not see a lot of panic out there You know, lead times when you think about them overall, there are some lead times that are extending. Based off technology. Other lead times are extending based off of demand.
That are it is you know, that is basically putting on them, but nothing irrational from my perspective overall. Prepositioning of inventory or buffers or bonds you know, established by customers are relatively normal. From what we would see in a normal cycle.
So I do not see that necessarily panic out there in any way, shape, or form. Driven either by price or by, you know, end market demand at this point.
Perfect. Very much, guys. I appreciate it.
Thanks, Melissa.
Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Ruplu Bhattacharya from Bank of America.
Hi, Ruplu?
Hi.
Thanks for taking my-- hi. Thanks for taking my questions. Hi, Rajesh.
I want to start with the ECS billings.
Looks like in the second quarter, EMEA had very strong billings, 22% year on year change. Americas was more in the mid single digit range. Can you talk about what drove the difference in performance between the 2 regions?
I am gonna hand it over to our expert here, Eric. Eric C. Nowak.
Yes. As we already explained, we aligned the strategies of America to Europe some, let's say, quarters ago now. And so, basically, this strategy around hybrid cloud and AI in the mid market and much more software and much more mid market. that is also now each completely global.
We are deploying our ArrowSphere platform now in The US. And so, basically, we are up and running and for years and years in Europe, and so we are taking profit of this. In The US, it is now taking, it is ramping up.
But, of course, we still need a couple of quarters to be at the same level.
Okay. Thanks for the details there. Rajesh, can I ask a follow-up on margins?
So on ECS, there was 100-bps year on year decline. You said there was a charge. Can you quantify like how much was the year on year impact from the charge?
Then how should we think about ECS segment margins as we go through the rest of the year? Typically, the fourth quarter sees a big jump. Are you still expecting that?
And then on the on the similar question on the core business, In components, should we expect that you can maintain healthy 5% plus margins? What are the puts and takes if you can give us any details you can?
Yeah. Absolutely. We did take a charge, and ECS business that impacted the margins within ECS by a 100 basis points. that is that equates to $27 million.
Had it not been for the charges, you know, the margins would have been at well over 4% charge relates to something we have been working on with 1 of our key partners to restructure and change the economics around some of the Beyond distribution contracts. And 1 key point of progress we made was we terminated 1 key aspect of the Beyond distribution relationship with this partner. And, we are working to restructure the other 1 that has been causing us some issues.
We still have a great relationship with this partner, so we wanna make sure that we work it out in the right way. But I think we are on the right path there. I do expect some more charges in the second half of the year, probably at a lesser pace than what we saw in the second quarter.
But we get behind the restructure, I think we will be on a on a good path there. And as Bill had mentioned earlier, the core business continues to perform really well, so no concerns at all there. And Ruplu, on your point around the fourth quarter seasonality, we will expect to see very high margins again in the ECS business in the fourth quarter as we always do.
We get, you know, double the volume. We get margin expansion because we are leveraging the OpEx. And so I would not expect to see anything different there.
Remember, though, that we had 4 extra ship days in the first quarter of this year, which will be 4 less in the fourth quarter of this year. But other than that, the dynamic should be exactly the same. With respect to components, know, we have been operating at around 5.5% margins in the first half of the year.
So we are really pleased with the margin expansion And, you know, in our guide for the third quarter, we do believe that Asia will continue to have strong growth. And our supply chain services offering will step down a little to a more normalized level of profit, but I would be surprised if we did not get to 5% margins again in the third quarter. And so we are on a different path now.
The margin will ebb and flow for components. But we are in a great place. You know, all the conditions that have gotten us here thus far, like, the right kind of geographic mix, the mass market customer coming back, value added service and the leverage we are getting on the cost structure, all those conditions will continue to be in place, and they are not changing anytime soon.
So we feel pretty good about the margin profile in components.
Okay. Rajesh, thanks for all the details there. I am gonna try and sneak 1 more higher level question, and this is for Bill or Rajesh or anybody who wants to chime in.
Right now, it seems like everything is going really well. I mean, the you know, you have good backlog. You have increasing visibility, end markets are strong.
Can you just talk about like as component costs are increasing, are you concerned at all whether it is in the ECS segment or in the component segment that end market demand can decline or there could be some destruction of demand. And what risk mitigation are you taking so that if that happens, how would you react to that? Thanks for taking my questions.
Really appreciate it.
that is a good question, Ruplu. it is Bill. Good to talk to you. No.
We do not see, demand destruction in either the global components business or the ECS business, we see that the fundamentals in the market are quite strong. Whether it is whether it is on the component side or the E or the software side ECS. And if you think through what Rick had said in his comment, there are 3 upward graphs that are taking place. 1 is AI, 1 is aerospace and defense, and the other is the mass market, and they are all trending up and to the right.
And if you build those 3 graphs on top of each other, the market has expanded, and that is what we are benefiting from. And we see the continued expansion of that market. So when you look in market and you say, oh, these companies now do not they do not have the ability to get storage.
They do not have the ability to get compute on prem. It has to go to the cloud. That perfectly fits in with what Eric's business does in supporting those businesses with enterprise wide software.
So we are really sitting at we have always called it the crossroads of, you know, the intersection of all of these secular demands that are going up into the right. So we really feel good, and we do not see that the demand is going to be destroyed.
Okay. Thanks for all the details. Appreciate it.
Thanks, Ruplu.
There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back to Bill Austin for closing remarks.
Thank you, operator, and thanks, everybody for joining us today. And everybody here is excited that Dee is going to be joining us. Over the sometime in early September.
I think it is September 8. She will be here. Excited to have her joining us.
She has great background. She's got great qualifications to come and join us in this distribution business. And then until that time, that the board says that the succession planning process has completed, I will continue to be the interim CEO I am not going anywhere.
I will be here until the board says that it is time to end the process. So thanks for joining, and we look forward to talking with all of you over the course of the next several weeks and months. Take care, everybody.
This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.
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