Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Awesome. Well, thank you all for joining. I'm really excited about this next session. We have Ruth Cotter, SVP of Marketing Communications and HR, from AMD an amazing session to close out what's been an amazing 1.5 days. So thank you so much for joining.

Thank you. Thank you for having me and kudos to UBS for putting this event together. I was just delighted by the theme and to see it in its second year and I look forward to seeing a lot more of these types of events. So thank you for doing this. .

I appreciate it, and I couldn't agree with you more. So let's make sure that half [indiscernible]. But Ruth, maybe a good place to start would be -- under the leadership of Dr. Lisa Su, the CEO and Chairman of AMD. There's been an incredible turnaround in the story in recent history. So I think for those that maybe might not be as familiar with AMD, can you just recap how AMD got to where it is today over the last 10 years?

Sure. Great. So we just celebrated our 55th year anniversary last month. So hard to imagine with the fervor that's around semiconductors today that we've been in existence for 55 years. Lisa, our CEO, has been leading the company now coming up on 10-year anniversary this coming October. And when we sort of came to that phase of the company, we were very PC-centric, very consumer centric. That's where the majority of the business was. And we were looking to how do we drive into higher margin, more profitable portions of the market where the competition were. When Lisa came in, she took a sort of a fresh approach with her leadership team. We are an engineering-led company. So we have an incredible portfolio of IP and a lot of technology assets and how do you harness those with -- to drive business purpose and finding the right balance between that technology and business purpose was something that Lisa very much led. She's had been an incredible partner in Mark Papermaster, who's currently and continues to be our Chief Technology Officer. And as they looked at that portfolio of IP and balanced it with these higher-margin portions of the business, to help and drive AMD into sustainable profitability with a very strong balance sheet, they really leaned into the vision around data center. So how can AMD return to the data center? How can you build a very reliable, consistent methodically delivered roadmap to that customer set who need it for the archery of all their businesses and the applications that they're running. And we looked at the PC space and how do we move out of the consumer-centric environment again into enterprise. Again, to do that, you needed a sustainable road map. So we went back to basics around building a core framework for that road map and that could also be leveraged across multiple product lines within the company, multiple markets. Building great products became a mantra within the company in the early days. That's why we all jumped out of bed every day. And then what came next was the customer. Were we in service of the customer, where we listening to the customers' needs, where we're solving their problems. And that customer voice and mindset coming and being fostered within the company, has stood true to our success today, and we are always, always thinking about the customer first and then we have become very complicated. 10 years ago, we had just sort of been in the early innings of becoming fabless, having sort of spun off our manufacturing assets. It was a new environment. It was a new way of running a business. And we had to really simplify how we were doing business. So those were sorted at the three key tenants. Today, here we are, having reentered the data center with our CPUs moving from 2% share in 2018 to now 33% shares of our most recent quarter. So we've had good success there. We're pushing well into enterprise momentum in PCs so much so that over 50% of the business is no longer consumer-centric or relied on consumer types of businesses. So we're certainly seeing the returns on that early focus on discipline and since then, we've been doing some very exciting things besides all those new markets, we also doubled down in our relationships with the supply chain. Even before COVID, we have become fabless, it was important that we had leading edge capability in our supply chain. TSMC has been an incredible partner for us on that journey as we both have market growth in parallel together. So that was a good strategy. And then we looked at M&A as we became stronger and had a more robust balance sheet because we knew that the ecosystem was moving beyond just chips, and it was all about platforms and systems and the more of the data center that you could touch even with your chips, was it going to be very important as we think about where data center modernization was headed. So we acquired Xilinx a few years ago, and that brought data center capability, FPGA capability and access to a number of markets that will allow us to drive our technology now, taking AI into the edge over the next many years, which has also been an exciting part of the journey. So what's still being grounded in our culture, culture is really important. No matter how good our IP is at the company, it's all about people and what they're choosing to do. So making sure that we have a highly incentivized, high-performance workforces we felt some of the largest problems for our customers is [ key ].

Perfect. Yes. It's an amazing story. And so I appreciate all of that background. That was very helpful. Maybe let's talk about some of the recent announcements. So Dr. Su gave a keynote presentation at Computex most recently. Maybe you can highlight for the group, what were some of the key takeaways from that keynote. And what are the most -- what are the parts about that you're most excited about?

Yes. So Computex is a very large global sort of more consumer technology show -- it's in Taiwan every year. I'm just back. It was an amazing experience. It seems like every company was there. This year, a lot of keynotes that was exciting. We really use the opportunity to show the depth and breadth of our company. We talked about our data center momentum, our PC momentum and our embedded momentum as we think about the edge and not just hardware, also software, also interconnect, also networking, all the pieces that are required to show the depth and breadth of the portfolio that we have put together. So that was very strong. It was differentiated to the competition as we think about that breadth and that we have with both CPUs and GPUs and now NPUs in the era of AI. It's been exciting. So we showed leading-edge PC capability. It was all about AI. I think everybody might have been tired of those 2 letters after a week in Taiwan, but it was very exciting. As you just think about the applications that are going to be harnessed and the features that are going to be made available throughout enterprises for enhanced productivity or for consumers for greater performance, it's an exciting time. So we launched new products in the PC space. And also in the data center, we talked about our data center GPUs and as we drive the underpinnings and foundational layers of AI for everybody moving forward. And then we spent time talking about our embedded business and some of the applications that we are driving there as well as software updates, and I'm sure we can get into some of those details.

Yes. I want to touch on each one of those. And AI, as you can imagine, has been a big theme at this event, too. And I don't think anyone in the audience is tired of talking about AI. We can talk about it forever, right? So -- you made some important announcements at that event on your road map for MI300. So could you just highlight some of that for the group? And what exactly those were?

Sure. So MI300 is our current data center GPU offerings. We're very excited by the opportunity as we have leading-edge performance in the area of inference and we're highly competitive in the area of training. The MI300 family really has just been in existence a couple of quarters. We launched our first offerings in December of this year. And within 2 quarters on a combined basis, we have a little over $1 billion of revenue. So it's the fastest ramp of any product in the history of the company, just been quite amazing and very, very exciting. We unveiled our road map most recently. There was a lot of interest into where are you going over the next sort of 3 years and where you're taking that journey. So by the end of this year, we'll be launching a new product that we talked about MI325. As we think about that offering, it will bring additional memory capacity and capability, which will have again, outside leadership performance in the area of inferencing, which is great. In next year in 2025, we'll have the MI350 offering, where we'll move to 3-nanometer, the next leading edge node with enhanced memory capability, harnessing high-bandwidth memory 3E. All these acronyms are now becoming very, very interesting to everybody. I'm not sure we would have been thinking about the nomenclature from memory some years ago. But here we are, it's very important. It's a very important differentiation because it allows a lot more productivity and efficiency and performance efficiency on our hardware because of a lot of that capability that we have called in particular, in the area of inferencing. And then as we look out in 3 years' time, we then transitioned to our MI400 family based on our next level of architecture, which will be our CDNA next architecture. Again, you'll see some of the similar attributes that you're seeing right now. But again, the focus is very much today around not just this chip road map, but also our software road map with our ROCm software and capability and is that keeping a pace of what is now becoming an industry standard of an annual product update for our customers, and that's going to really signal significant capability as you think about technology advances, typically, over the last several decades, an 18-month product transition was pretty fast in the semiconductor industry. Now we're on a 12-month cadence, which is just indicative of the innovation that's occurring and customers pull of ground innovation and their learnings, which are quite significant. So we're very excited. We're very pleased with the capability with MI325. We're going to be able to leverage large language models up to 1 trillion parameters, I mean, just something nobody had ever even imagined in the past. We're going to see generational increases in performance of 35x. I mean just stunning metrics as you think about how the enhanced performance capability will be brought to market for everybody to harness.

Yes, that's excellent. Maybe let's turn to the client PC business. So can you talk about AI PCs, how are you positioned in that market? And maybe you can talk about the TAM expansion opportunities there?

Yes. So the PC market has been mixed over the last several years. I think we saw the peak through COVID and then sort of inventory sort of restabilizing and getting cleaned up from there on in. 2024 is an exciting year. We had very good momentum at the beginning of the year. We're looking forward to a stronger second half of the year as well, what sort of back-to-school and holiday seasons that you typically see. Our PC products are our Ryzen portfolio. Again, we have a very strong product road map based on our Zen architecture where we have leadership in battery life and performance, which is important not only for consumers, but in this enterprise market that we continue to look to gain share in. So we feel the next bastion of opportunity is AI, and we are delighted to be partnering with many industry leaders, whether that's on the OEM side with Lenovo and HP and Dell and ASUS and others or whether it's on the sort of side with Microsoft and all the capability that they're doing in terms of their enhanced feature set that they're bringing with Copilot. So we're well positioned. We believe it will benefit consumers as you think about bringing greater efficiency to anything from gaming to content creation, to sort of personal assistant management. So we look forward to those features coming out here over the next 12 months. And then on the enterprise side, it's all about enhanced capability in terms of productivity. So for the early uses, it's very exciting, and I have been on early Microsoft feature capability enhancements and it certainly helped my day. And there's a long ways to go. We're just in first several quarters of AI, which is quite fascinating. So you're going to see a broad set of capabilities available. We did launch our Ryzen AI300 Series offerings at Computex this week. Again, you'll see some very strong performance in the area of AI, and we are a great partner of Microsoft with their copilot plus PCs. And we actually exceeded their requirements for AI copilot plus PCs with the NPU now coming in at about 50 tops, which is higher than what the competition have in that space. So we're very pleased to continue to excel in the area of innovation.

Yes. You mentioned that it's early innings with AI adoption. But I guess how do you see that trending into the future? And how do you think about that trajectory?

Yes. The trajectory is exciting. It really is unknown in so many ways. I mean, when we're engaging with our customers, it feels like every few weeks, we're all learning. So that co-innovation and co-optimization that's going on at the moment is very important work that's occurring. We're all learning how to even use AI. It hasn't really been consumerized yet beyond ChatGPT where a lot of people sort of played with it and then suddenly realized it can actually enhance productivity. So as we see more of these Microsoft Copilot+, I think PC is being proliferated across enterprises and in consumer, it's very exciting that the potential that for the work environment, we can be on conference calls and my colleagues across the ocean can engage with me in their native language. And they hear me in their native language and vice versa. So you can have multigeographic location conference calls very efficiently. Transcription, really refining meetings, meeting notes is very good. Summarizing e-mails where you're not getting lost in your inbox depending on how busy your day is, all the way through to -- from my marketing organization in terms of content creation, is very, very exciting as we think about not needing to bring a design team into a very important PowerPoint presentation or the writing of a white paper. AI assets and features are all going to be there to help us. So -- and we're excited. On the engineering side, it's also super exciting, though, as you think about productivity of training around predictive types of trends, whether that's in quality control, all the way through to actually writing software. So I think you're seeing hours of productivity is what people are talking about right now for employees as we think about our days to give us time to go focus on some of the more important things that are available to us and we're excited by that. But I think the trends of where this is all headed will continue to drive, and it will be more apparent next year as I think we see more consumerization use when it comes into AI. And then you see a lot of the large enterprise capabilities, bringing in AI as a layer over what is already in existence for greater efficiency.

Yes. Given that you mentioned the applicability on the marketing side, you gave me the opportunity as a selfish software analyst to ask this question. But given your role -- are you leveraging AI at all internally within your teams and your organization?

Yes. Look, it's very important that we are harnessing AI internally as actively as possible. We also learn from it through our own hardware and workloads and algorithms that we're sort of exemplifying across the company. My marketing team have a number of projects underway. We're very focused on it in the brand, area of brand, for example. So content creation is something whether it's visual or written or otherwise. It's been creating great efficiency there for the team, saving them time. We've had to been careful about copyright. We're still working through that as is the rest of the world, but we're very much using it. We've used it for large key presentations and keynotes that we've been doing. So it's very much operational and working in the area of localization. So as it relates to translation we serve so many different markets and so many countries globally. Localization is an early area of a [ applicability ]. And then for the [indiscernible] and comms teams, sort of writing and transcribing, it's also incredibly well harnessed there, voice to text, voice to video or other areas that we are using. And then in another areas, it's high experimentation as we're just trying to figure out how can we use AI responsibly and safely, but still have that sort of secret sauce that's applicable to our company and our sort of brand. So we're quite excited. And then in another area, as we think about how you internal use, how we aggregate? I mean, imagine as an employee having access to many facets of information across the company in moments. So even looking at things as basic, but as chatbot, so having a brand, chatbot, a chatbot for HR organization, where you as an employee can ask it any question and within moments, it has the answer that's applicable to you, you personally in your company is something that we also find quite exciting.

I appreciate all those thoughts. Now back to the exciting parts of the AMD story. So one thing that you mentioned in your earlier remarks was just talking about the shift to enterprise, right? So maybe let's talk about the data center and the server opportunity. So when we think about the general purpose server market, are we at a point where you're starting to see a refresh cycle picking up? Maybe you can comment there.

It's been a mixed environment. So it sort of varied by customer. I think depending on one where their focus is. And secondly, perhaps within certain hyperscalers, what their inventory load is. So we've worked through that. We are looking forward to enhance strength again in the back half of the year, particularly for our server business. We're very excited. I mean, the trajectory that we've been on and going from 2% share in 2018 to more than 1/3 of the market today is is a wonderful place to be. And as we straddle both cloud and enterprise, we decided to lean in with cloud first. As it's a smaller group of very highly demanding customers, where we could really fine-tune our capability around not only their internal workloads but also external capabilities for their customers. So much so if you look at Oracle's Exadata capability, where 76 of top Fortune 100 customers are using today. It's exclusively on our fourth generation of offerings there. So we do see CIOs are very focused around data center modernization, efficiency. They have many constraints that they need to be thinking about and considering. So [indiscernible] it's all about total cost of ownership. And we excel and we shine there. And as that total cost of ownership with power constraints and other factors in play, we were very pleased in that we think it's a rising opportunity for us. And AI, it's also going to help drive not just CPU or GPU demand, but also CPU. So things are looking promising.

Yes. So you mentioned like the tremendous progress that you guys have made on the enterprise side. So -- when you think about that 30% plus market share, right, that you have today, where do you think that ultimately can go? How do you see that progressing into the future?

Yes. Well, we expect to continue to gain share. We believe we have the right product portfolio. We have the right customer adoption strategy. The last piece, we really needed to hone was our go-to-market strategy. That enterprise sales model is different to the hyperscaler sales model or a consumer-centric sales model. So we've bolstered our capability across our sales force. It's also somewhat of a technical sale on occasion. So we've strengthened our field application engineers on the ground available to market. So -- and we're seeing the benefits of that in a way of being able to speak to the customer in their language about their challenges and helping them on the journey of understanding that if they have AMD in their data center and at the same performance level, they will require 40% less servers in their data center and they will save at least 40% in CapEx upfront and half their operating costs. Like those are dramatic savings when CIO has no physical footprint for more data center space. It's with stuck power capability into to feed into that data center. So we can offer them total cost of ownership, better performance per dollar, performance, and yet we're giving them more space in their data center and additional power capability and a draw to continue to build out their data center or to balance it with the eye capability as it's needed. . So again, being able to have that conversation with the customer and being able to offer them not just CPUs, but GPUs and also to have the interconnect capability that they need, the networking capability that you can have that wholesome platform conversation with them and not just to discrete conversation sort of where the future is headed, and we're very well situated there.

Yes, you mentioned on the go-to-market side, it's a lot different going after enterprise, right, the consumer. So -- maybe you can touch on how you've pivoted the communication and marketing to really go after that opportunity and make sure AMD is well positioned.

Yes. It's a different model. You're talking to CIOs and not gamers. So they have very different concerns and careabouts and stability is really, really important and reliability and consistently almost is really what is key. So we have to prove our road map. We have to prove our capability was very reliable, it was very consistent. We had the infrastructure around that to help them support the customers, and the language that we used in our marketing materials was also very important. It's also a different sales model with our partners. So we sell through our OEMs and channel partners to consumers while in the enterprise space, it's a joint almost handholding exercise and that you go to the customer with the OEM to sell to the enterprise or in many cases, with the hyperscalers, it's a direct sales model to them. And that requires a very technical marketing capability, but in a language that recognizes the challenges of the customer, but also the proof points of the returns on the performance, it's not just speeds and feeds. It's -- what is this actually practically going to do for me an X, Y, Z workload that I have running and in my enterprise. And then the last piece was also marketing and co-marketing with the hyperscalers for their third-party capability as they have their own customers to service, not just their internal workloads and making sure that we had the right technical papers, white papers to really celebrate and show other company's successes. So brand capability and the association with strong brands has something that has really helped us.

Perfect. Now let's move on to the embedded business which has very diverse end markets from industrial, auto, communication infrastructure, [indiscernible] measurement. So despite seeing some weakness in recent quarters, you've talked about a return to quarter-over-quarter growth embedded in the second half of this year. What are you seeing in that market? And how do we think about the AI opportunity is moving that business forward?

Yes. So the embedded market, we love the diversification of the markets, many of which you called out. It does lead to different market dynamics at different times, right, because of the diversity of aerospace and defense, all the way through to sort of more edge capability. We have seen some softness there, and we're coming out of that softness here. The recovery is a little bit slower than what we had expected. But nevertheless, we see the markets neutrally coming out of that phase. We do think AI is going to be helping and advancing that market. Obviously, AI is a little later coming to the edge. So we have new product capability as well with our Versal AI [ Edge ] second-generation capability that really brings multiple preprocessing all the way through to the journey of post-processing capability onto one chip, that's very attractive in terms of the efficiency that, that will also lend to many of the markets in which we play. And we've strengthened the brands in which we're engaging in customer acquisition. As it relates to AI, some of the early adopters would very much be in the health care market, broadcasting, automotive as well. So as we think about the likes of Canon, Hitachi, Subaru as examples. They're all on the leading edge of how to harness AI in the embedded portion of the market. And we believe we have an incredibly strong portfolio and that market may choose to use FPGAs. They may choose to use adaptive SoCs. They may choose to use CPUs or GPUs. So we have that full portfolio of capability to help on that journey. And as we see the market recovery, we feel well positioned with that leadership capability.

Perfect. Awesome. Given this event is centered on how to empower women and further promote diversity and inclusion. I'd love to pivot the conversation and maybe some questions around that. And I think one focus area is how can women successfully advance their careers, right? And I think you've had amazing career trajectory. So when you think about where you started to -- all the way up to your amazing role today, maybe you can just talk about how you navigated that career path and any learnings from that?

Yes. It's been an amazing journey. My primary education is in history and economics. So it's very far from where I am right now as you think about sort of an education basis. But the education of life and enterprise has certainly lent to my career. I started early on thinking that public relations and sort of communications was a field that I was interested in and that's kind of where I started and I transitioned into marketing from there. I've worked for government agencies through to building materials, route to software and now semiconductors. So it's been an interesting career journey as you think about different sectors as well. . I've been at AMD over 2 decades. So it's been a privilege to have really grown up with the company. I started in a manager kind of a level and sort of worked up through the runs. And I really think it's -- I'm a person who looks forward, I'm very forward-looking. I'm very invested in people. I love working at the company. I love my colleagues and I believe in AMD's potential even if it wasn't being realized in the early stages. And because of that, I had an abundance of curiosity, which sort of prompted me to volunteer, like I'd always be the annoying person who might put their hand up. Even if I wasn't sure how the name of goodness, I might be able to effectively contribute, I knew I could probably figure out how to help. So that sense of curiosity and volunteerism has stood to me, I would say, in my career and allowed me to sort of lean in and opportunities. But one of the keys has been having advocates in the company. There's been times where I might not have been the first choice for a role or a promotion or an opportunity. And unfortunately, as I say to my team all the time, when those conversations happen, you're rarely in the room. So like -- how are you going to know that you're being appropriately represented in the moment. So it's important that we build some advocates for us. It can be your manager. It can be a peer of your manager or whatever it is. You should have a couple, so the worst thing that I see having had the privilege to be at the table more regularly now is somebody saying, "Oh, I don't know, Ruth. So it's good to be known. It was very helpful that I had a career path that people were very interested in. A lot of people internally and enterprises are very interested and rightfully so and shareholders and shareholders' interest. So it was easy for me to share and have conversations and build my brand internally. So I think that's important, and it's worth investing and I think some of us are hesitant or a little slower to invest in our brands for ourselves, but I have seen it pay dividends for me and I would encourage everybody to really think about, are you doing that? And if you're not, how are you going to do that for yourself? But who are your advocates? And are they going to fairly represent you in the room when you're not there when important decisions that will impact you are being made and then spending time with them and making sure that they know about you and what matters to you.

Yes, those are all amazing points. And sorry, I appreciate all those thoughts. And I think one common theme that we've heard is that it's not always a straight line, right? It might be right the exactly along the way until you get to your ultimate goals. So maybe you can just talk about some of the hurdles that you ran into and how you overcame those.

Yes, I think I meet hurdles every day, honestly. Like I said, I'm pretty forward-looking. I think any hurdles that I meet, I just tend to pause and reflect and replay a little bit. I'm not in a highly technical discipline. So it's not like I have very poor technical decisions that I can share with you as to like, "Oh my gosh, moments. My mom says I distill them down, have been really I've either really ineffectively communicated. I just haven't been clear as you sort of bring it back to basics and -- we're very much a learning organization and a growth organization. So it's taking those micro moments along the journey of a day or a week to go, how could I have done that better or could I have done it better. And you learn a lot from that. So that's sort of a discipline that I have sort of brought into my day. I think understanding and giving yourself forgiveness for those moments is important. It's not the end of the world. I mean, if we learn something from it, then that's okay. I think owning it, owning those moments when we stumble or I think is a good thing, and we can all move on. And we can give confidence to those around us that we've got it and we're solutioning and we're going to find the path from there. And then having good mentors that you can sort of go to and bounce your ideas and thoughts off because often, perceptions are a bit different to what might be going on in our own heads or our own views and biases. So making sure that we're leveraging somebody who's been tangential to that stumbler challenge that we're going through and then trying to figure out from theirs perspective, how the situation could be made better. And then just getting all of it.

Yes. I think one common hurdle that I hear about that women face would be not knowing how to properly advocate for themselves, right? And so I guess, what advice would you give to women that are struggling maybe with the feeling of not getting the recognition that they deserve. And I know you mentioned a little bit earlier on the importance of mentorship, right and communication. So that might be your answer, but would love to hear your thoughts.

Well, firstly, please don't doubt yourself. You are capable, right? You're in your job because you're highly capable and you're a wonderful person and the company saw something in you that they want you part of the team. So you are a very capable person and you really must advocate on your behalf. It doesn't have to be bragging or anything. It is very important that you're a manager knows what's important to you. It's important that they know what gets you out of bed every day, what drives you, what makes you very performance -- and what makes you happy because if you're happy, you're more productive and you're more performance. And it's okay to tell them. It's important that you might have regular meetings with your manager. They won't always be all about you meetings, but that you do carve out time regularly once a quarter, at least to just do a touch base, how am I doing? How do you think I'm doing. This is how I think I'm doing. By the way, this is really important to me. Like sharing that is important, being very clear. And it's okay because your manager is dealing with multiple versions of you. And by them knowing what your career aspirations are, what your hopes and what your expectations are, it really helps your manager because when they're making decisions around job opportunities or promotion or compensation or benefits or whatever it is, knowing which of those things are important to you then they can make sure that they're also serving you in the appropriate way and depending what tools they have in their toolbox for you. This -- it's being a MAC is something that I talk a lot about, which is mentor, advocate and [ cope ]. We need each of the 3 of those at different stages of our careers. But we can also be that for everyone. It doesn't matter whether you're very new in the early stages of your career or your me about to be a dinosaur in my career. I need them at different stages all the time and as do others. And it's really being very participative in giving back. But that's why I love this event. I just wish this was on video and everybody could see this film.

We are next year.

It's just -- it's good, like it's good that we can have these conversations because in many meetings that I have with my team, my male counterparts always clear, and they enjoy telling me how much they can do my job and how some of them might think that they could do a better job than perhaps I am. And you know what, fair game. But I have -- even now, right, 2024, I have never had a woman come to me and tell me why they could do my job and how they might be able to do my job better than me. And I know many of my colleagues have great ideas. And I'm sure many of them could do an even better job. So like -- why not I wouldn't be offended. I think it's a great thing. And I could help them become me and have this role. So I just -- I think being a more obvious and just practice, I think -- maybe your managers are a bit [indiscernible]. So just practice on the colleague first or with yourself in the mirror whatever it is, it's all good news, but I really challenge you between now and, say, September, just the moment where you can provide clarity to meet someone in leadership about what matters to you and what will make you better to allow you to be more you in your job.

I see what happens. I'm dying to hear. No. Yes. I couldn't agree more, and that was all amazing advice. And it actually parlays really well into this next question, which is for those in the room that ultimately wanted -- ultimately want to transition into a leadership, right, or work their way up to a leadership position that you have today -- when you think about succession planning, what do you look for in candidates?

Yes, that's a great question. It varies depending sort of on the role, on the area and the capability. So first of all, it's the journey of the employee or the person that you're considering? How has their journey been? Have they spent time in roles? Have they learned? Are they reflective. Are they sort of all about growth and thinking about that journey? Have they strong leadership attributes. Are they being followed by their team, that's very important. Are they activated around goals and clarity of messaging and those goals? And what are the returns that they get in terms of the performance of their teams are all very, very important things. . And then for me, I look for clarity, I look for honesty, like is this person going to be the person that tells you there's a wart on your face for some reason because that allows you to move faster and it's done with kindness for the greater good of the company or you or your advancement in your career. So that sort of holistic view of being very people-centric while also having that technical capability or skill set is very important. And I think that balance of really driving increased and accelerated growth balanced with -- at the end of the day, we have teams. We have teams of human beings who must and need be motivated and examining those attributes of how leaders go towards motivating their employees is something that I spend a lot of time on. And then the last thing I tend to look at is [indiscernible]. Like will this be the right person in this team? Will they succeed? Will they be happy? Will they be successful in this team environment or within this group. That's something that goes a long way because then you have much more efficient change management and you have much more longevity and sustainability within the team that pays out on the other side.

Perfect, Ruth, that was amazing. And I want to be mindful of your time, but maybe if there's one from the audience or if anyone has a question. If not, we can just wrap it there. Thank you so much for all of your thoughts. That was great. We really appreciate it.

Thank you.