Company: BHE
Filing Date: 2025-02-24
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0000950170-25-025644
Chunk: 140

Company: BENCHMARK ELECTRONICS INC
Filing Date: 2025-02-24
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 7A
Chunk 140
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Our international sales comprise a significant portion of our business. We are exposed to risks associated with operating internationally, including:

•Foreign currency exchange risk;

•Import and export duties, taxes, tariffs and regulatory changes;

•Inflationary economies or currencies; and

•Economic and political instability.

Additionally, some of our operations are in developing countries. Certain events, including natural disasters, can impact the infrastructure of a developing country more severely than they would impact the infrastructure of a developed country. A developing country can also take longer to recover from such events, which could lead to delays in our ability to resume full operations.

We transact business in various foreign countries and are subject to foreign currency fluctuation risks. We use natural hedging and forward contracts to economically hedge transactional exposure primarily associated with trade accounts receivable, other receivables and trade accounts payable that are denominated in a currency other than the functional currency of the respective operating entity. We do not use derivative financial instruments for speculative purposes. Certain forward currency exchange contracts in place as of December 31, 2024 have not been designated as accounting hedges and, therefore, changes in fair value are recorded within our consolidated statement of income in Part II, Item 8 of this Report.

The Company enters into forward currency exchange contracts designated as cash flow hedges of forecasted foreign currency expenses. Changes in the fair value of the derivatives are recorded in accumulated other comprehensive loss on the consolidated balance sheet until earnings are affected by the variability of the cash flows. 

Our sales are substantially denominated in U.S. dollars. Our foreign currency cash flows are generated in certain European and Asian countries and Mexico.

We are also exposed to market risk for changes in interest rates on our financial instruments, a portion of which relates to our invested cash balances. We do not use derivative financial instruments in our investing activities. We place cash and cash equivalents and investments with various major financial institutions. We protect our invested principal funds by limiting default risk, market risk and reinvestment risk. We mitigate default risk by generally investing in investment grade securities.

We are also exposed to interest rate risk on borrowings under our Credit Agreement. As of December 31, 2024, we had $123.0 million outstanding on the floating rate term loan facility, and we have an interest rate swap agreement with a notional amount of $123.0 million. Under this swap agreement, we receive variable rate interest rate payments and pay fixed rate interest payments. The effect of this swap is to convert our floating rate interest expense