Notes from JBL's Q2 Earnings Call: Margins, Capex, and the FY27 Bridge
Spent some time digging into Jabil's Q2 FY26 Q&A this morning —17 analyst exchanges from seven firms: BofA, Goldman, JPM, Raymond James, UBS, Baird, and Fox Advisors.
The split stood out: six questions on margins, three on capex, two on strategy, and the rest scattered across auto, renewables, supply chain, and photonics.
Bhattacharya's follow-up on the margin line caught my attention. Management raised revenue guidance by $1.6B but kept full-year operating margin at 5.7%. Bhattacharya pressed on what was driving the conservative outlook. Dastoor pointed to geopolitics, then pivoted strongly to FY27: "I feel better about 6% than I have ever gotten before." That line landed.
The FY27 bridge Dastoor laid out included: mix shift (power, liquid cooling, silicon photonics), a $4B revenue step-up, utilization moving from 75% to 80%, and the Hanley acquisition scaling with Intelligent Infrastructure. Five clear drivers in a detailed answer.
Meanwhile, Chatterjee at JPM pressed on capex relative to peers announcing big increases. Dastoor went straight to the "asset-light" framing. The CFO followed up with a 1.5%–2% capex-to-revenue ratio. Clean answer, but it sidestepped the peer comparison.
Curious if anyone else is tracking the gap between what management says about the current quarter versus what they telegraph for future years. The strongest conviction on the call was for FY27, not FY26. That pattern keeps showing up across names.
