Item 1. BUSINESS

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Item 1. BUSINESS

OVERVIEW

We are a globally-recognized, provider of Sketch-to-Scale® services - innovative design, engineering, manufacturing, and supply chain services and solutions - from conceptual sketch to full-scale production. We design, build, ship and manage complete packaged consumer and enterprise products, from medical devices and connected automotive systems to sustainable lighting and cloud and data center solutions, for companies of all sizes in various industries and end-markets, through our activities in the following segments:

•High Reliability Solutions ("HRS"), which is comprised of our health solutions business, including surgical equipment, drug delivery, diagnostics, telemedicine, disposable devices, imaging and monitoring, patient mobility and ophthalmology; and our automotive business, including vehicle electrification, connectivity, autonomous, and smart technologies;
•Industrial and Emerging Industries ("IEI"), which is comprised of energy including advanced metering infrastructure, energy storage, smart lighting, smart solar energy; and industrial, including semiconductor and capital equipment, office solutions, household industrial and lifestyle, industrial automation and kiosks;
•Communications & Enterprise Compute ("CEC"), which includes our telecom business of radio access base stations, remote radio heads and small cells for wireless infrastructure; our networking business, which includes optical, routing, and switching products for data and video networks; our server and storage platforms for both enterprise and cloud-based deployments; next generation storage and security appliance products; and rack-level solutions, converged infrastructure and software-defined product solutions; and
•Consumer Technologies Group ("CTG"), which includes our consumer-related businesses in IoT enabled devices, audio and consumer power electronics, mobile devices; and various supply chain solutions for consumer, computing and printing devices.

These segments represent components of the Company for which separate financial information is available that is utilized on a regular basis by the Chief Operating Decision Maker (“CODM”). Our segments are determined based on several factors, including the nature of products and services, the nature of production processes, customer base, delivery channels and similar economic characteristics. Refer to note 19 to the consolidated financial statements in Item 8, "Financial Statements and Supplementary Data" for additional information on our operating segments.

We provide design, manufacturing and supply chain services through a network of over 100 locations in approximately 35 countries across five continents. We have established global scale through an extensive network of innovation labs, design centers, manufacturing and services sites in the world's major consumer and enterprise products markets (Asia, the Americas,

and Europe) in order to serve the supply chain needs of both multinational and regional companies. Our services provide customers with a competitive advantage by delivering improved product quality, increased flexibility, leading-edge manufacturability, improved performance, faster time-to-market, and value. Our customers leverage our services to meet their requirements throughout their products' entire life cycles. For the fiscal year ended March 31, 2019, we had revenue of $26.2 billion and net income of $93 million.

Over the past several years, we have evolved beyond a traditional Electronics Manufacturing Services ("EMS") company, and now consider ourselves to be a provider of a full range of Sketch-to-Scale® services – beyond electronics manufacturing services – including strategic product development planning and design-phase innovation, supported by teams of talented design engineers. Our innovation strategy is focused on three levels: products, systems, and manufacturing technologies and processes.

We believe that the combination of our extensive innovative solutions, design and engineering services, advanced supply chain management solutions and services, significant global scale and regional presence, and manufacturing sites in key geographies provide us with a competitive advantage and strong differentiation in the market for designing, building, and servicing consumer and enterprise products for leading multinational and regional companies. Through these services, centers and sites, we offer our customers improved product design, increased flexibility and responsiveness. We also enable faster time to market, product safety and regulatory compliance and supply chain predictability with real-time visibility, all of which accelerate product launches, access to new markets, and mitigate of risks.

We recognized research and development costs primarily related to our product design and innovations service offerings of $66 million, $78 million, and $66 million for the fiscal years ended March 31, 2019, 2018 and 2017, respectively.

INDUSTRY OVERVIEW

Our expertise is Sketch-to-Scale® services: design, manufacture, and supply chain services for a broad range of products, from medical devices, connected automotive systems and smart home appliances to sustainable lighting and cloud data center infrastructures. Although Flex has evolved beyond traditional EMS, the majority of our customers are electronics original equipment manufacturers ("OEMs"); as such, the closest broad definition of our industry remains the outsourced EMS industry.

EMS has experienced significant change and growth as an increasing number of companies elect to outsource some or all of their design, manufacturing, and after-market services requirements. In recent years we have seen an increased level of diversification by many companies, in the technology, automotive and healthcare industries along with the convergence of many industries being transformed by technology advancements. Companies that have historically identified themselves as software providers, internet service providers, or e-commerce retailers are entering the highly competitive and rapidly evolving hardware markets, with products that include mobile devices, home entertainment products, and wearable devices. This trend has resulted in significant changes to the hardware manufacturing and supply chain solutions requirements of such companies. Increasingly complex products require highly customized supply chain solutions, in turn resulting in significant changes to the overall manufacturing and supply chain landscape. The growth of the overall industry for calendar year 2018 is estimated to have been around 4%.

We believe the total available market for the EMS industry is poised for continued growth, with current penetration rates estimated to be about 31%. The intensely competitive nature of the electronics industry, the increasing complexity and sophistication of electronics products, and pressure on OEMs to reduce product costs and shorten product life cycles are all factors that encourage OEMs to utilize supply chain service providers as part of their business and manufacturing strategies. Utilizing global manufacturing and service providers allows OEMs to take advantage of the global design, manufacturing and supply chain management expertise of such providers, and enables OEMs to concentrate on product research, development, marketing, and sales. We believe that OEMs realize a number of important benefits through their strategic relationships with EMS providers, including:

•Improved inventory management and purchasing power;
•Access to worldwide design, engineering, manufacturing, and after-market service capabilities;
•Ability to focus on core branding and R&D initiatives;
•Accelerated time-to-market and time-to-volume production;
•Improved efficiency and optimized production costs;
•Improved product quality through advanced design and production at scale; and
•Reduced capital investment requirements and fixed costs;

We believe that growth in the EMS industry will be largely driven by the need for OEMs to respond to rapidly changing industries, markets and technologies, the increasing complexity of supply chains and the continued pressure to be innovative and cost competitive. Additionally, we believe that there are significant opportunities for global EMS providers to win additional business from OEMs in markets or industry segments that have yet to substantially utilize such providers.

SERVICE OFFERINGS

We offer a broad range of customizable services to our customers. We believe that Flex has the broadest worldwide product development lifecycle capabilities in the industry, from concept design to manufacturing to aftermarket services. We believe a key competitive advantage is our people, processes and capabilities for making products, systems and solutions for our customers:

•Speed: Our sophisticated supply chain management tools and expertise allow us to provide customers with access to real-time information that increases visibility throughout the entire product lifecycle, reducing risk while accelerating execution.
•Scope: Our full range of services, from Sketch-to-Scale®, include innovation and design, engineering, manufacturing, forward and reverse logistics, and circular economy supply chain management. Our deep industry and cross-industry knowledge and multi-domain expertise accelerate the production of increasingly complex products for increasingly interconnected industries.
•Scale: Our physical infrastructure includes over 100 facilities in approximately 35 countries, staffed by approximately 200,000 employees, providing our customers with truly global scale and strategic geographic distribution capabilities.

We offer global economies of scale in advanced materials and technology sourcing, manufacturing and after-market services, as well as market-focused expertise and capabilities in design and engineering. As a result of our extensive experience in specific markets, we have developed deep understanding of complex market dynamics, giving us the ability to anticipate trends that impact our customers' businesses. Our expertise can help improve our customers' market positioning by effectively adjusting product plans and roadmaps to efficiently and cost-effectively deliver high quality products that meet their time-to-market requirements.

Our services include all processes necessary to design, build, ship, and service a wide range of products for our customers. These services include:

Innovation Services. We provide a comprehensive set of services that enable companies to successfully ideate, create new products and solutions, and gain access to new markets. These services span the entire product introduction and solution lifecycle by providing access to new cross-industry and technology platforms and building block technologies, accelerating innovation and product development from early concepts to final production-ready design, and providing advanced manufacturing and testing for new product introduction and market access to grow our customers' offerings. This area of our business has seen increased investment and focus over the past few years.

Beyond our flagship Customer Engagement Center in Silicon Valley, we have established a global network of Design and Engagement Centers. Our innovation and design services include:

•Innovation and Design Centers. Our Innovation and Design Centers specialize in supporting customer design and product development. Customers gain access to our design and engineering facilities, technical subject matter expertise, and rapid prototyping resources such as metal and plastic 3D printers and soft tooling capabilities.
•Cross-industry Technologies. Along with our portfolio of building block technologies in electrical/electronics, electromechanical, and software, we also have deep technical expertise in cross-industry technologies. Our Cross-industry technologies are a combination of building block technologies expertly applied to products and solutions for use within numerous industries. These technologies include: Human Machine Interface (HMI), Audio and Video, System in Package (SIP), Miniaturization, IoT Platforms and Asset Tracking.
•Centers of Excellence/Competence. Our Centers of Excellence/Competence provide strategic technology capabilities developed by Flex in critical solutions areas which leverage our expertise across multiple

industries, for integration into our customers' products and next generation industry requirements. Centers of Excellence/Competence have specialized capabilities in connectivity, sensors and actuators, power, battery, interconnects and PMATX, smart software, optical, and "soft" Systems.

•Systems Integration Services. Through systems integration, we design and integrate advanced data center servers, storage and networking equipment and data center appliances, providing engineering and design services with an emphasis on multivendor integration and open technologies that promote interoperability at a lower cost. Our CloudLabs provide a staging lab for customers to deploy the latest technologies, allowing for performance testing of workloads and enabling faster diffusion of technologies in a controlled environment.

Design and Engineering Services. We offer a comprehensive range of value-added design and engineering services, tailored to specific industries and markets, and the needs of our customers. These services can be delivered using one of two primary business models:

•Design Services, where customers purchase engineering and development services on a time and materials basis; or
•Joint Design and Manufacturing Services, where our engineering and development teams work jointly with our customers' teams to ensure product development integrity, seamless manufacturing handoffs, and faster time to market.

Our design and engineering services are provided by our global market-based engineering teams and cover a broad range of technical competencies:

•System Architecture, User Interface and Industrial Design. We help our customers design and develop innovative and cost-effective products that address the needs of the user and the market. These services include product definition, analysis and optimization of performance and functional requirements, 2-D sketch level drawings, 3-D mock-ups and CAD drawings, proofs of concept, product prototypes, interaction and interface models, detailed hard models, and product packaging.
•Hardware Design. We offer design for printed-circuit board assemblies (PCBA); identification and selection of key components, Subsystem design and full-product design including electrical and mechanical design. We provide complete electrical and hardware design for products ranging from small handheld consumer devices to large, high-speed, carrier-grade, telecommunications equipment, incorporating embedded microprocessors, memory, digital signal processing, high-speed digital interfaces, analog circuit design, power management solutions, wired and wireless communication protocols, display imaging, audio/video, and radio frequency systems and antenna design. In addition, we offer detailed mechanical, structural, and thermal design solutions for enclosures that utilize a wide range of plastic, metal and other material technologies. These capabilities and technologies are increasingly important to our customers' product differentiation goals.
•Software Design. We offer cloud integration design services which include developing and embedding a cloud agent onto a device, firmware and applications services including developing and embedding software of functionality and user-specific tasks and features.
•Design for Excellence. We provide comprehensive design for manufacturing, testing, and reliability services leveraging robust, internally-developed tools and databases. These services leverage our core manufacturing competencies to help our customers achieve their time-to-revenue goals.

We are exposed to different or greater potential liabilities from our various design services than those we typically face in our core assembly and manufacturing services. See "Risk Factors—The success of certain of our activities depends on our ability to protect our intellectual property rights; claims of infringement or misuse of intellectual property and/or breach of license agreement provisions against our customers or us could harm our business."

Systems Assembly and Manufacturing. Our assembly and manufacturing operations, which generate the majority of our revenues, include printed circuit board assembly and assembly of systems and subsystems that incorporate printed circuit boards and complex electromechanical components. We assemble electronics products with custom electronic enclosures on either a build-to-order or configure-to-order basis. In these operations, we employ just-in-time, ship-to-stock and ship-to-line programs, continuous flow manufacturing, demand flow processes, and statistical process controls. As our customers seek to provide greater functionality in physically smaller products, they increasingly require more sophisticated manufacturing technologies and processes. Our investment in advanced manufacturing equipment and our expertise in innovative miniaturization, packaging and interconnect technologies, enables us to offer a variety of leading-edge manufacturing solutions.

We support a wide range of product demand profiles, from low-volume, high-complexity programs, to high-volume production. A continuous focus on Lean manufacturing, and a systematic approach to identifying and eliminating waste (non-value-added activities) through continuous improvement based on customer demand allows us to increase our efficiency and flexibility to meet dynamic customer requirements. Our systems assembly and manufacturing expertise includes the following:

•Enclosures. We offer a comprehensive set of custom electronics enclosures and related products and services. Our services include the design, manufacture, integration and deployment of electronics packaging systems, including custom enclosure systems, power and thermal subsystems, interconnect subsystems, cabling, and cases. In addition to standard sheet metal and plastic fabrication services, we assist in the design of electronics packaging systems that protect sensitive electronics and enhance functionality. Our enclosure design services focus on functionality, manufacturability, and testing. These services are integrated with our other assembly and manufacturing services to provide our customers with improved overall supply chain management.
•Testing Services. We offer computer-aided testing services for assembled printed circuit boards, systems, and subsystems. These services significantly improve our ability to deliver high-quality products on a consistent basis. Our test services include management defect analysis, in-circuit testing and functional testing; as well as environmental stress tests of board and system assemblies. We also offer design for test, manufacturing, and environmental services to jointly improve customer product design and manufacturing.
•Materials Procurement and Inventory Management. Our manufacturing and assembly operations capitalize on our materials inventory management expertise and volume procurement capabilities. As a result, we believe that we are able to achieve highly competitive cost reductions and shorten total manufacturing cycle times our OEM customers. Materials procurement and management consists of the planning, purchasing, expediting, and warehousing of components and materials used in the manufacturing process. In addition, our strategy includes having third-party suppliers of custom components located in our industrial parks to reduce material and transportation costs, simplify logistics, and facilitate inventory management. We also use a sophisticated automated manufacturing resource planning system and enhanced electronic data interchange capabilities to ensure inventory control and optimization. Through our manufacturing resources planning system, we have real-time visibility of material availability and are able to track work in process. We utilize electronic data interchange with our customers and suppliers to implement a variety of supply chain management programs. Electronic data interchange allows customers to share demand and product forecasts, deliver purchase orders and assists suppliers with satisfying just-in-time delivery and supplier-managed inventory requirements. This also enables us to implement vendor-managed inventory solutions to increase flexibility and reduce overall capital allocation in the supply chain. We procure a wide assortment of materials, including electronic components, plastics and metals. There are a number of sources for these materials, including customers for whom we are providing systems assembly and manufacturing services. On some occasions, there have been shortages of certain electronic components, most recently this has been connectors, capacitors, LCD panels and memory (both DRAM and Flash). However, such shortages have not had a material impact on our operating results for any periods presented. See "Risk Factors—We may be adversely affected by supply chain issues, including shortages of required electronic components."

Components Business. We offer a full-service power supply business that provides a range of solutions from custom to highly scalable system solutions. Flex has expertise in high efficiency and high-density switching power supplies ranging from 1 to 3,000 watts. Our product portfolio includes chargers for smartphones and tablets, adapters for notebooks and gaming systems, and power supplies for the server, storage, and networking markets. Our Power Modules business designs and manufactures a wide range of isolated DC/DC converters and non-isolated Point of Load (PoL) converters intended primarily, although not exclusively, for the Information and Communications Technology market, including Servers and High-Performance Computing applications. We also offer specialized power module solutions suitable for other markets. We pride ourselves on our ability to service the needs of industry leaders in these markets through valuable technology, design expertise, collaborative development, and efficient execution. Our products are fully compliant with the environmental and Energy Star requirements that drive efficiency specifications in our industry. Customers who engage with Flex gain access to compelling innovations and design expertise in digital control and smart power.

Logistics. Our Flex Global Services business is a provider of services including after-market and forward supply chain logistics services. Our comprehensive suite of services is tailored to customers operating in the computing, consumer digital, infrastructure, industrial, mobile, automotive and medical industries. Our expansive global infrastructure includes 27 sites and approximately 11,000 employees strategically located throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia. By leveraging our operational infrastructure, supply chain network, and IT systems, we are able to offer our customers globally consistent logistics solutions. By linking the flow of information from these supply chains, we create supply chain insight for our

customers. We provide multiple logistics solutions including supplier-managed inventory, inbound freight management, product postponement, build/configure to order, order fulfillment and distribution, asset tracking, and supply chain network design.

Reverse Logistics and Repair Services. We offer a suite of integrated reverse logistics and repair solutions that use globally consistent processes, which help increase our customers' brand loyalty by improving turnaround times and raising end-customer satisfaction levels. Our objective is to maximize asset value retention for our customers' products throughout their product life cycle while simultaneously minimizing non-value added repair inventory levels and handling in the supply chain. With our suite of end-to-end solutions, we can effectively manage our customers' reverse logistics requirements, while providing critical feedback to their supply chain constituents, delivering continuous improvement and efficiencies for both existing and next generation products. Our reverse logistics and repair solutions include returns management, exchange programs, complex repair, asset recovery, recycling and e-waste management. We provide repair expertise to multiple product lines such as consumer and midrange products, printers, smart phones, consumer medical devices, notebook personal computers, set-top boxes, game consoles and highly complex infrastructure products. With our service parts logistics business, we manage all of the logistics and restocking processes essential to the efficient operation of repair and refurbishment services.

STRATEGY

We help our customers responsibly build products for a connected world. We do this by providing our customers with product development lifecycle services, from innovation, design, and engineering, to manufacturing, logistics, and supply chain solutions. Our strategy is to enable and scale innovation for our customers, maintain our leadership in our capabilities, and build extended offerings in high-growth industries and markets.

Talent. To maintain our competitiveness and world-class capabilities, we focus on hiring and retaining the world's best talent. We empower talented employees to develop innovative solutions that transform industries and companies. We have taken steps to attract the best engineering, functional and operational leaders and have accelerated efforts to develop the future leaders of the company.

Customer Focus. We believe that serving leaders in dynamic industries fosters the development of our core skills and results in superior growth and profitability. Our customers come first, and we have a relentless focus on delivering distinctive products and services in a cost-effective manner with fast time-to-market.

Market Focus. We aim to apply a rigorous approach to managing our portfolio of opportunities by focusing on companies that are leaders in their industry and value our superior capabilities in design, manufacturing, and supply chain services. We focus our energy and efforts on high-growth industries and markets where we have distinctive competence and compelling value propositions. Examples include our investments in specific technologies and industries including healthcare, automotive, industrial markets, and energy. Our market-focused approach to managing our business increases our customers' competitiveness by leveraging our deep vertical industry and cross-industry expertise, as well as global scale, regional presence and agility to respond to changes in market dynamics.

Global Operations Capabilities. We continue to invest in maintaining the leadership of our world-class manufacturing and services capabilities including automation, new product introduction and large-scale manufacturing. We constantly push the state of the art in manufacturing technology, process development and operations management. We continue to capitalize on our industrial park concept, where we co-locate our design, manufacturing, and service resources globally in lower-cost regions, to provide a competitive advantage by minimizing logistics, manufacturing costs, and cycle times while increasing flexibility and responsiveness. We believe our global scale, breadth of services, IP, and assets contribute to our significant competitive advantage.

Extended Value Propositions. We continue to extend our distinctiveness in manufacturing into new value propositions that leverage our core capabilities. We opportunistically invest in new technologies, capabilities and services to provide our customers with a broader value-added suite of innovative services and solutions to meet their product and market requirements.

COMPETITIVE STRENGTHS

We continue to enhance our business through the development and expansion of our product and service offerings. We strive to maintain the efficiency and flexibility of our organization, with repeatable execution that adapts to macro-economic changes to provide clear value to our customers, while increasing their competitiveness. We have a focused strategy on delivering scale, scope and speed to our customers through world-class innovation and design services, operations, supply chain solutions, and industry and market expertise. We provide active tracking and real-time data analytics (Flex Pulse®) that enable improved supply chain visibility, allowing customers to better monitor and mitigate risks. We believe the following capabilities further differentiate us from our competitors and better serve our customers' requirements:

Significant Scope and Global Scale. We believe that scale is a significant competitive advantage, as our customers' solutions increasingly require capabilities and competitive solutions that can only be achieved through capabilities scope and global scale.

We have established an extensive, integrated network of design, manufacturing and logistics facilities in the world's major consumer electronics and industrial markets to serve the outsourcing needs of both multinational and regional companies. Our extensive global network of over 100 facilities in approximately 35 countries with approximately 200,000 employees, helps increase our customers' competitiveness by simplifying their global product development processes while delivering improved product quality with improved performance and accelerated time to market.

Additionally, we are a leader in global procurement, purchasing approximately $27 billion of electrical and mechanical materials during our fiscal year ended March 31, 2019. This scale provides us with an ability to use our worldwide supplier relationships to achieve leading-edge technologies, access, supply chain flexibility and advantageous pricing for our customers.

Digitized Supply Chain Solutions. We offer a comprehensive range of worldwide supply chain services that simplify and improve global product development processes, providing meaningful time and cost savings to our customers. Our broad-based, full cycle services enable us to cost effectively design, build, ship and service a complete packaged product. We believe that our capabilities help our customers improve product quality, manufacturability and performance, while optimizing costs. We have expanded and enhanced our service offerings by adding capabilities in innovation and design centers, modern manufacturing including additive manufacturing, automation, robotics, real-time supply chain software, end-to-end supply chain modeling and simulation, precision plastics, and machining.

Long-Standing Customer Relationships. We believe that maintaining our long-term relationships with key customers is a critical requirement for maintaining our market position, growth and profitability. We believe that our ability to maintain and grow these customer relationships results from our history and reputation of creating value for our customers while increasing their own competitiveness. We achieve this through our market-focused approach, our broad range of service offerings and solutions, and our deep vertical industry and cross-industry expertise, which allow us to provide innovative solutions to all of the manufacturing and related service needs of our customers. We continue to receive numerous service and quality awards that further validate the strength of our customer relationships.

Extensive Design and Engineering Capabilities. We have an industry-leading global design service offering, with extensive product design engineering resources, that provides design services, product developments, and solutions to satisfy a wide array of customer requirements across all of our key industries and markets. We combine our design and manufacturing services to provide Sketch-to-Scale® customized solutions that include services from design concept, through product industrialization and development, including the manufacture of components and complete products across the industries and market that we serve, which are then sold by our customers under their brand names.

Geographic, Customer and End Market Diversification. We believe we have created a well-diversified and balanced company. Our business spans multiple end markets, significantly expanding our total available market. The world is experiencing rapid changes, and macro-economic disruptions have led to demand shifts and realignments. We believe that we are well-positioned through our market diversification to grow faster than the industry average and successfully navigate through difficult economic times. Our broad geographic footprint and experiences with multiple product types and complexity levels create a significant competitive advantage. We continually look for new ways to diversify our offering within each market segment.

Customer and Product Innovation Hubs. We have established state-of-the art innovation hubs in the Americas, Asia and Europe, with differentiated offerings and specialized services and focus. With subject matter expertise in connectivity, sensors and actuators, batteries, power, interconnects, human machine interfaces, smart textiles, optical technologies, software & security and advanced manufacturing, our technology leaders collaborate with customers to co-develop their next generation of products. We offer concepting and quick-turn prototyping utilizing the most advanced 3D plastic printing, 3D metal printing, surface mount technology (SMT), AI, Machine Learning and advanced collaborative software to support major industries in bringing innovative products to market rapidly. We are dedicated to providing quality and reliable solutions to meet the customers’ requirements. We ensure confidentiality offering dedicated customer-confidential work spaces that provide increased security and restricted access to protect our customers' intellectual property and the confidentiality of new products being launched into the marketplace. These innovation hubs offer our customers a geographically-focused version of our Sketch-to-Scale® services, taking their product from concept to volume production and go-to-market in a rapid, cost effective and low risk manner.

Industrial Parks; Cost-Efficient Manufacturing Services. We have developed self-contained campuses that co-locate our manufacturing and logistics operations with our suppliers in various cost-efficient locations. These sites enhance our supply chain management efficiency, while providing multi-technology solution value for our customers. This approach increases the

competitiveness of our customers by reducing logistical barriers and costs, improving communications, increasing flexibility, lowering transportation costs and reducing turnaround times. We have strategically established our industrial parks in Brazil, China, India, and Mexico.

We have selected manufacturing operations situated in regions around the world to provide our customers with a wide array of manufacturing solutions where our customers and/or their customers are located. As of March 31, 2019, approximately 80% of our manufacturing capacity was located in emerging markets, including Brazil, China, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Poland, Romania, and the Ukraine.

Sustainability. We believe in the power of technology to connect people, products and services to create a smarter, more sustainable future. It’s not just good business, but it’s good for the environment, for people and the communities in which we live and work. This belief forms the cornerstone of our sustainability commitments and actions.

CUSTOMERS

Our customers include many of the world's leading technology companies. We have focused on establishing long-term relationships with our customers and have been successful in expanding our relationships to incorporate additional product lines and services.

As our business spans multiple end markets, we believe that we are well-positioned through our market diversification to grow faster than the industry average and successfully navigate through difficult economic times. As an example, we serve the following key customers across our diverse business groups: health solutions customers Abbott and Johnson & Johnson and auto customers Ford and Nexteer in our HRS segment; Teradyne, Applied Materials and Xerox in our IEI segment; Cisco, Nokia Solutions and Ericsson in our CEC segment; and Lenovo/Motorola, HP and Bose in our CTG segment.

In fiscal year 2019, our ten largest customers accounted for approximately 43% of net sales. No customer accounted for greater than 10% of the Company's net sales in fiscal year 2019.

BACKLOG

Although we obtain firm purchase orders from our customers, OEM customers typically do not place firm orders for delivery of products more than 30 to 90 days in advance. In addition, OEM customers may reschedule or cancel firm orders depending on contractual arrangements. Therefore, we do not believe that the backlog of expected product sales covered by firm purchase orders is a meaningful measure of future sales.

COMPETITION

Our market is extremely competitive and includes many companies, several of which have achieved substantial market share. We compete against numerous domestic and foreign manufacturing service providers, as well as our current and prospective customers, who evaluate our capabilities in light of their own capabilities and cost structures. We face particular competition from Asian-based competitors, including Taiwanese Original Design Manufacturing ("ODM") suppliers who compete in a variety of our end markets and have a substantial share of global information technology hardware production.

We compete with different companies depending on the type of service we are providing or the geographic area in which an activity takes place. We believe that the principal competitive factors in the manufacturing services market are: quality and range of services; design and technological capabilities; cost; location of sites; and responsiveness and flexibility. We believe we are extremely competitive with regard to all of these factors.

CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPSONSIBLITY

Sustainability remains central to who we are and how we operate. Our sustainability governance principles are a core part of our business operations. Through innovation and smart technologies, our sustainable solutions positively impact people and the environment.

Since February 2018, we have been participants of the United Nations Global Compact ("UNGC"), the world's largest corporate sustainability initiative, to showcase our commitment to integrate sustainability throughout our company and across our entire supply chain. Our commitment aims to help customers, partners and other businesses increase their own efforts to build a more sustainable future.

Our strategy and global efforts, through our sustainability programs and multi-year "Flex 20 by 2020 goals," are aligned with the principles set forth in the UNGC, and the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals ("SDGs"). While our global efforts

contribute to most of the SDGs, we have prioritized them and focus on decent work, quality education, clean energy and responsible consumption and production.

We achieve social and environmental compliance through a robust integrated management system that consolidates several management systems into one. Our Corporate Social and Environmental Responsibility management system has several elements, including environmental, health and safety compliance, labor and human rights and ethics. The Flex Social and Environmental framework is based upon the principles, policies, and standards prescribed by the Responsible Business Alliance (“RBA”), a worldwide association of electronics companies committed to promoting an industry code of conduct for global electronics supply chains to improve working and environmental, health and safety conditions, as well as other relevant international standards (e.g., ISO 14001, United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights). Flex is a founding member of the RBA. Social responsibility is also an area of increasing concern, with specific regulations such as the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act, the U.S. Federal Acquisition Regulation on Human Trafficking and the U.K. Modern Slavery Act of 2015, all creating new compliance and disclosure obligations for the Company and for our customers. We operate a number of programs, including compliance audits, data collection, training and leadership programs that focus upon driving continuous improvement in social, ethical, and environmental performance throughout all of our global operating units, all in accordance with our Code of Business Conduct and Ethics ("CoBCE"). We also go beyond compliance by offering a wide range of programs and initiatives to engage both our internal and external stakeholders.

We are committed to providing decent work for Flex employees, respecting their dignity and striving to advance human rights around the world. Our philosophy, strategies, and policies in human rights, health and safety, diversity and inclusion, support the inclusion of all people in our working environment. Some of the cornerstone specific goals through which we measure our performance include increasing employee development, social and environmental management system audits, human rights policy training completion, RBA compliance for rest day requirements and decreasing incident rates.

We work with nonprofits, community leaders and governments to promote inclusive and sustainable economic growth, employment and decent work for all. We help protect the environment, support resource conservation and provide disaster relief. We accomplish this through grants from the Flex Foundation, corporate and employee donations and volunteerism. Our multi-year goals in this area cover increasing volunteer hours and the percentage of sites with community activities as well as implementing the worker empowerment training program and Flex Foundation community grants.

We take necessary measures to protect the environment, conserve energy and natural resources, and prevent pollution by applying appropriate management practices and technology. We take actions to protect the environment, including but not limited to strict compliance with material requirements, reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, waste, water and energy consumption, and circular economy implementation, among others. Our multi-year goals for environment cover increasing our use of renewable energy, water recycling, waste diversion rate and number of powered homes equivalents and decreasing water consumption, CO2 emissions, and cost of electricity to the grid vs. fossil fuels.

Our corporate compliance program integrates our obligations and commitment to integrity into our day-to-day business practices. We expect our employees and business partners to follow the highest ethical standards. The CoBCE serves as the foundation of our Ethics and Compliance program. We conduct regular internal audits, and we maintain metrics around compliance to continuously benchmark and improve. Implementing in-person training on CoBCE for direct labor employees and increasing CoBCE training for annual completion for indirect labor employees are our integrity multi-year goals targeted for 2020.

We are committed to continuously monitoring and complying with social and environmental requirements across the supply chain. We require our suppliers to have a management system in place to ensure compliance and mitigate potential risks. We also have sustainability supply chain programs in place like on-site sustainability training for suppliers, working hours improvement and labor agent programs which help us to develop our supplier’s competencies for them to comply with the applicable requirements. We measure our progress through two goals, namely increasing out sustainability supplier training and supplier screening on social and environmental criteria.

All of these activities are the subject of our annual sustainability reporting, done in accordance with the Global Reporting Initiative’s (“GRI”) standards, and further information can be found in our annual sustainability executive and GRI reports, as well as the Flex 20 by 2020 bi-annual report posted on our website.

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (the “Dodd-Frank Act”), Section 1502, introduced reporting requirements related to the verification of whether we are directly (or indirectly through suppliers of materials) purchasing the following minerals (“Conflict Minerals”): columbite-tantalite, also known as coltan (the metal ore from which tantalum is extracted); cassiterite (the metal ore from which tin is extracted); gold; wolframite (the metal ore from which tungsten is extracted); or their derivatives, which are limited to tantalum, tin and tungsten; or any other mineral or its derivatives as determined by the U.S. Secretary of State to be associated with financing conflicts in the Democratic Republic of

the Congo or an adjoining country. We work directly with suppliers, industry groups, and customers to comply with the reporting requirements necessary to comply with this law. See "Risk Factors - Compliance with government regulations regarding the use of ‘Conflict Minerals’ may result in increased costs and risks to us." We have filed the required reports on Form SD with the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") in accordance with the Dodd-Frank Act.

In addition, we are a founding member and active participant in the RBA’s Responsible Minerals Initiative ("RMI"). RMI promotes the goal of understanding and mitigating social and environmental impacts of extraction and processing of raw materials in supply chains. As an active member of RMI, we leverage direct and indirect partnerships and use international standards, e.g.. Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development ("OECD") Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, and the United Nations (UN) Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, as our guides. We are committed to responsibly sourcing minerals, in accordance with our Responsible Sourcing Policy, and follow the RMI’s Conflict Minerals data reporting format.

ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATION

Our operations are regulated under various federal, state, local and international laws governing the environment, including laws governing the discharge of pollutants into the air and water, the management and disposal of hazardous substances and wastes and the cleanup of contaminated sites. We have implemented processes and procedures to ensure that our operations are in compliance with all applicable environmental regulations. We do not believe that costs of compliance with these laws and regulations will have a material adverse effect on our capital expenditures, operating results, or competitive position. In addition, we are responsible for cleanup of contamination at some of our current and former manufacturing facilities and at some third-party sites. We engage environmental consulting firms to assist us in the evaluation of environmental liabilities associated with our ongoing operations, historical disposal activities and closed sites in order to establish appropriate accruals in our financial statements. We determine the amount of our accruals for environmental matters by analyzing and estimating the probability of occurrence and the reasonable possibility of incurring costs in light of information currently available.

The imposition of more stringent standards or requirements under environmental laws or regulations, the results of future testing and analysis undertaken by us at our operating facilities, or a determination that we are potentially responsible for the release of hazardous substances at other sites could result in expenditures in excess of amounts currently estimated to be required for such matters. Additionally, we could be required to alter our operations in order to comply with any new standards or requirements under environmental laws or regulations. There can be no assurance that additional environmental matters will not arise in the future or that costs will not be incurred with respect to sites as to which no issue is currently known.

We are also required to comply with an increasing number of product environmental compliance regulations focused upon the restriction of certain hazardous substances. The electronics industry is subject to various regulations based on region or country. For example:

•Restrictions on Hazardous Substances ("RoHS") 2011/65/EU
•Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment ("WEEE") 2012/19/EU directives
•The regulation EC 1907/2006 EU Directive REACH ("Registration, Evaluation, Authorization, and Restriction of Chemicals")
•China RoHS entitled, Management Methods for Controlling Pollution for Electronic Information Products ("EIPs").

Similar legislation has been or may be enacted in other jurisdictions, including the United States. Our business requires close collaboration with our customers and suppliers to mitigate risks of non-compliance. We have developed rigorous compliance programs designed to meet the needs and specifications of our customers as well as the regulations. These programs vary from collecting compliance or material data from our Flex controlled or managed suppliers to full laboratory testing, and we include compliance requirements in our standard supplier contracts. Non-compliance could result in significant costs and/or penalties.

RoHS and other similar legislation ban or restrict the use of lead, mercury and certain other specified substances in electronics products and WEEE requires EU importers and/or producers to assume responsibility for the collection, recycling and management of waste electronic products and components. In the case of WEEE, although the compliance responsibility rests primarily with the EU importers and/or producers rather than with EMS companies, OEMs may turn to EMS companies for assistance in meeting their WEEE obligations. Flex continues to monitor developments related to product environmental

compliance and is working with our customers and other technical organizations to anticipate and minimize any impacts to our operations.

EMPLOYEES

Our policies, philosophy and strategies support the inclusion of all people in our working environment. We’re committed to respecting the human rights of our employees and improving their quality of life. We encourage our people to engage in lifelong learning and growth. And we give them opportunities to perform to the best of their abilities.

As of March 31, 2019, our global workforce totaled approximately 200,000 employees including our contractor workforce. In certain international locations, our employees are represented by labor unions and by work councils. We have never experienced a significant work stoppage or strike, and we believe that our employee relations are good.

Our success depends to a large extent upon the continued services of key managerial and technical employees. The loss of such personnel could seriously harm our business, results of operations and business prospects. To date, we have not experienced significant difficulties in attracting or retaining such personnel.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

We own or license various United States and foreign patents relating to a variety of technologies. For certain of our proprietary processes, inventions, and works of authorship, we rely on trade secret or copyright protection. We also maintain trademark rights (including registrations) for our corporate name and several other trademarks and service marks that we use in our business in the United States and other countries throughout the world. We have implemented appropriate policies and procedures (including both technological means and training programs for our employees) to identify and protect our intellectual property, as well as that of our customers and suppliers. As of March 31, 2019 and 2018, the carrying value of our intellectual property was not material.

Although we believe that our intellectual property assets and licenses are sufficient for the operation of our business as we currently conduct it, from time to time third parties assert patent infringement claims against us or our customers. In addition, we provide design and engineering services to our customers and also design and make our own products. As a consequence of these activities, our customers are sometimes requiring us to take responsibility for intellectual property to a greater extent than in our manufacturing and assembly businesses. If and when third parties make assertions regarding the ownership or right to use intellectual property, we could be required to either enter into licensing arrangements or to resolve the issue through litigation. Such license rights might not be available to us on commercially acceptable terms, if at all, and any such litigation might not be resolved in our favor. Additionally, litigation could be lengthy and costly and could materially harm our financial condition regardless of the outcome. We also could be required to incur substantial costs to redesign a product or re-perform design services.

From time to time, we enter into intellectual property licenses (e.g., patent licenses and software licenses) with third parties which obligate us to report covered behavior to the licensor and pay license fees to the licensor for certain activities or products, or that enable our use of third-party technologies. We may also decline to enter into licenses for intellectual property that we do not think is useful for or used in our operations, or for which our customers or suppliers have licenses or have assumed responsibility. Given the diverse and varied nature of our business and the location of our business around the world, certain activities we perform, such as providing assembly services in China and India, may fall outside the scope of those licenses or may not be subject to the applicable intellectual property rights. Our licensors may disagree and claim royalties are owed for such activities. In addition, the basis (e.g. base price) for any royalty amounts owed are audited by licensors and may be challenged. Some of these disagreements may lead to claims and litigation that might not be resolved in our favor. Additionally, litigation could be lengthy and costly and could materially harm our financial condition regardless of the outcome.

FINANCIAL INFORMATION ABOUT SEGMENTS AND GEOGRAPHIC AREAS

Refer to note 19 to our consolidated financial statements included under Item 8 for financial information about our business segments and geographic areas.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Our Internet address is https://www.flex.com. We make available through our Internet website the Company's annual reports on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, current reports on Form 8-K and amendments to those reports filed or

furnished pursuant to Section 13(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 as soon as reasonably practicable after we electronically file such material with, or furnish it to, the Securities and Exchange Commission.

We were incorporated in the Republic of Singapore in May 1990. Our principal corporate office is located at 2 Changi South Lane, Singapore 486123. Our U.S. corporate headquarters is located at 6201 America Center Drive, San Jose, CA 95002.

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