Analog Devices, Inc. (ADI) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Welcome back, everybody. I'm Joe Moore, Morgan Stanley Semiconductor Research. Very happy to have Richard Puccio, EVP and CFO of Analog Devices. Rich, thanks for coming.

Thanks for having us.

So maybe just start off with kind of where we are in the cycle. You've had 9 consecutive quarters of above seasonal performance. You've got some idiosyncratic growth, some kind of early-stage cyclical drivers. Can you just give us a general sense of where we are in all of this?

Sure. I'll start with the idiosyncratic because if you -- I'll do a little bit of a walk back to where we thought this started. We talked about 6 quarters ago that we had some pretty resilient parts of our business that we're starting to show some growth, and we expected we'd start to see real sequential growth. And a lot of that was being driven by a couple of real strong performers. So from an idiosyncratic perspective, you've probably heard me talk about a couple of these. We've had real strength in our ATE business, which is one of the sub-elements of our industrial end market, obviously, fueled by the continued demand for high-performance compute and high-bandwidth memory, which requires more complex testing, which means they need sophisticated testers. We have a very strong position in ATE. So that has been a very strong market for us. I think we talked about that business growing year-over-year in '25 over 40% and continuing to go strong into current year. You look at our aerospace and defense business, we've talked about that business in the size that it's reached. That was a very resilient business. That one also has pretty strong tailwinds in the market given the increased spending we're expecting to see from the U.S. government on military and aerospace spending and also the increased levels we're expecting to see in Europe. So those were really strong drivers in the 2 parts of our Industrial business. Then if you look at another business that has been growing really strong for us, grew in the back half of '25, the last 3 quarters, 50% year-over-year, and it's continuing to grow is our data center business. So when you look at that externally, you see that in our communications. So our communications business is about 2/3 of our data -- 2/3 of that is our data center business. And that business has been very strong also given the massive expansions in CapEx. So that has been a really strong business. On the auto side, if you think about where we've seen success, that has been a strong business for us. If you look at the sort of cycle dynamics, that was actually a business for us that only went down low single digits from peak to trough. And despite that, we've now had back-to-back record years. So we are very well positioned there. And then the story there is we've captured share. We have great content gain, and we are a strong player in the Chinese auto market and a lot of the growth that's been happening in auto has been in the Chinese market. So that has been really strong for us. And then if you look at our consumer business, we've talked about the pretty significant diversification of our business. And I think our share gain there, the number of new sockets that we had ramping has played a big part. Consumer was one of our first businesses to come into the -- back into a high-growth mode and has grown for 6-plus straight quarters and has had continuing expansion. So it's not the old very heavily tied to handsets. It's now handsets, it's hearables, wearables, gaming platforms. So a bit more diversified portfolio, and we feel like that one is really well positioned. So those are things that I would have said are idiosyncratic where we've picked up share. We have a product that's leading in a space. The cyclical piece for us, we talked about one of the things we had been waiting to see was the return of our -- the mass market in our industrial, right, our broad market business. And we were able to see that start to pick up and it started picking up in the middle part of '25 and started to accelerate. And classic cyclical upcycle trend for us is we can track -- we do track down to the part level. And we could see at the beginning as we started to grow, but we didn't feel like we were in the upcycle, a significant number of parts we would have sold in the normal up cycle, we're still not moving. We're at a point now where 90% of the parts that we would expect -- 90-plus percent of the parts, we would expect to be moving in the up cycle are moving. The other thing is we were pretty aggressive, as you all know, for 2 years, leaning out the channel and both our customers directly and our channel inventories at our disties. So we can see in the ordering patterns now that they have clearly worked through the inventory hangover across -- broadly across those spaces, and we're seeing that in the order patterns. And we're seeing it in the acceleration of our turns business because, one, we have pretty regular lead times now so they can order in quarter for things in quarter. And turns volumes has been very strong, another cyclical upside indicator. So if you think across both, we've had some really good activity all at the same time, while we've been building more resiliency into our manufacturing processes, expanding capacity, et cetera. So we feel pretty good. And I think that's a big part of what we've been seeing.

Yes. You guys have managed through all of that really well, both the idiosyncratic and the cyclical. So maybe we could drill down on some of those things. Starting on the industrial idiosyncratic drivers, ATE, I think you talked about 30% sequential growth this quarter. Markets really worried about AI sustainability beyond 2026. What kind of visibility are you getting into that ramp? And do you feel like good about that growth? Do you feel like there's some risk of an overshoot at some point?

Well, first, if you -- one of the signals we always watch and pay very close attention to is if you look across the sort of large platform/hyperscaler companies and what they're forecasting for CapEx, right? So we all waited anxiously to see what would happen during the most recent Q4 announcements, and they lined up to each say how much more they were going to spend, and they'd more revenue if they could build more capacity. So I think the short to medium term, I don't think that we're going to see any drop-off in that AI capital spend. So I think that is going to be a strong tailwind for a period. At some point in the future, maybe they don't, if technologies improve, the power availability and data center demand will probably -- those lines will get closer and closer, and that might be an inflection point, but I don't think we're anywhere near that yet. So I think -- and from a visibility perspective, just purely for us, obviously, we have what our customers publicly say and what we talk to them about. But from a firm orders sort of backlog thing, as we've talked about before, we got about a quarter's worth of visibility, particularly given normalized lead times.

Yes. And then from the bottlenecks that the GPU guys are seeing from test capacity, there seems to be a pretty clear visibility there. Yes. And then aerospace and defense probably premature to talk about the events in the couple of days. But there seems like there's a very strong long-term tailwind there from the automation kind of edge AI happening in that business. How much have you invested in that business? You mentioned last night about Hittite and some of the benefits of those businesses. What's the long-term growth profile there?

So that is -- for us, we think that is one of our subsegments in industrial that will continue to grow above company average. We're very well positioned across the spectrum in aerospace and defense, whether it is in the RF and microwave that you might find in guidance systems, whether it's our products that are going into satellites, both GEO and LEO satellites. So we feel like there is a lot of macro tailwind there, right? As I mentioned, the spending in aerospace and defense is going up around the world. And I think we've got a really good position there. So I think we'll continue to benefit there. We also -- you see this, and this is a really good example in ADI of our ability to capture more value is you mentioned Hittite and you go back to something that -- where we might have been selling components into a prime. Now we're selling more modules and more solutions, and those capture significantly higher value for us. And aerospace and defense is one of those really good examples inside of ADI, where our ability to provide a full solution has created a tremendous amount of value for us. And I think that's important. One of the things -- and this applies everywhere else, but it certainly applies in aerospace and defense. Our ability to provide solutions to the most complex problems is what allows us to capture that higher ASP and higher value.

Okay. Great. And then other segments, instrumentation, medical devices, the energy part of the business, those seem like they're a little bit more of a gradual cyclical recovery, but any puts and takes, any areas of strength or weakness to note there?

So it's interesting. We were clearly 2 of our subsegments have been leading the charge. But as we talked about as we progressed into the back half of last year, we got to a point where across all of our industrial subsectors, the ones you mentioned and across all of our geographies, we were seeing growth, right? And when we exited -- just recently exit Q1 and think about what we're looking out at Q2 with positive book-to-bills across all of the industrial submarkets, and that's by all geographies. And that is before any impact from the Q1 price increases. We still had book-to-bills above 1. And as we start to think about where we are in the cycle and our ability to continue to sort of get additional benefit despite talking about having ATE and aerospace and defense and data center at record levels, the other businesses within industrial, for instance, whether it's automation, energy, health care, they're all still 20% below their prior peaks. So we feel like there's still room to run in the cycle for those to get back. We think that we're largely through the inventory correction, but we're still now see lots of upside opportunity. And I think that implies across the broader portfolio, where we're at peak in a handful of businesses, but we've still got room to run. Even if you just look at historical trend line, we're still well below the trend line.

And you have a situation where you're not looking for restocking. Inventories are at very lean levels. You're not projecting any. You certainly aren't requiring, you're not depending on any kind of restocking. But doesn't it feel inevitable at some point? I mean, aren't these inventories just 2 years after the shortages that we saw getting kind of lean?

Well, the real question is, do customers have any short-term or even medium-term memory. But I do think one of the interesting drivers now, and I think about ADI, 90% of our parts have lead times less than 13 weeks. So if you're a CFO sitting in a buyer chair, you're not incentivized to go buy and place orders of ADI early or many of our peers because you can get it in insurance business because we were set up. When I think the change you're talking about happens when you start to see some tightness in supply chains across semi when the buyers will start to get nervous. And they'll be thinking, if I don't have that part, I can't ship my product X, Y or Z, I'm going to start placing orders out further than the 13 weeks or sometimes we're getting orders with-4-week lead times. I think when we start to see lead times extending, that will be when they'll probably start feeling like they have to rebuild some of their buffers. But you -- our view is our customers haven't done that yet. We don't see that. We've watched them lean out inventory actually. And we spent 2 years leaning out the channel from our perspective. Now given how much we leaned it out and then we hit into this up cycle with growth, we actually -- I think I talked about this last quarter, we dropped below 6 weeks in the channel, right? And we like the 6 weeks model because our teams have done a lot of work operationally to make it so that we essentially match back-end cycle times. So if our back-end cycle times roughly 6 weeks, we want to have 6 weeks in the channel. We dropped a little bit below. So you saw us put a little bit of inventory back in the channel in Q3 and Q4. We're not expecting to put more inventory into the channel. At the midpoint of our guide, we don't expect we'll put more inventory in the channel. We have moved away from the historical sort of 7- to 8-week channel model because we found having the inventory on our balance sheet, especially when things do get tight, if they get tight, have them control and our ability to make decisions and work with customers is better on our balance sheet. So you'll see this dynamic continue where we expect channel inventories will stay lower than historical levels and our balance sheet inventory will be a little bit higher. And we're consciously managing that equation every quarter, every day. But we feel like we're in a pretty good position. With the up cycle continuing, it's very hard to catch up if you don't have some reserve supply. So we've talked about in the last -- in the last year, we've built more die bank and more finished goods buffers because of the amount of turns business that's coming in and our ability to capture that.

Okay. That's helpful. And then moving to the communications portfolio and data center, you've talked about a lot of strength there, the strength that you saw last year, a very robust position in optical, but also a lot of opportunity in power. So how much have you focused R&D around this opportunity to sort of capture the growth that you've had? And how much can you focus going forward now that it's becoming so much more critical?

So we -- you're absolutely right. We are spending a significant amount of our R&D. Look, I've said this before, our first call on capital is R&D, right? We're spending 16% of our revenue dollars in R&D. And if you think about in the data center, the way I would carve that up just so you get a little perspective, the data center, we said is 2/3 of our comms business, and it's roughly split 50-50 between our power portfolios in our optical portfolio. And then if you look at the pieces there, where we play at the power management level, it's always been a strong area for us. You think about hot swap and some of those features I think that's an area that has lots of growth opportunity, particularly as we move to higher and higher voltages, right? The safety and those capabilities become more and more important. We've been a very good and had a strong position in the power conversion space. And the area I would have said where we frankly, punched under our weight was probably in power delivery. We are -- and we've talked about we are now shipping in a vertical power solution. And we're seeing that get more and more traction, particularly given all the power constraints. Our vertical power solution has about 30% less power loss than a lateral solution. So it's an effective way to sort of offset some of this power drain. We're not the only ones playing in vertical power, but it is certainly gaining traction as an architecture. So I think that presents us a pretty significant growth opportunity. So we feel like there continue to be areas for us in power to grow. The other half of the portfolio is optical. And I would say the one thing -- the near-term thing I would highlight there is we have already got our first 1.6 terabit optical module shipping to customers. And our R&D teams back to where are we making investment. R&D teams are already working on the 3.2 solutions. That's the acceleration and speed we're seeing across the data centers that are being built. So we feel like we've got a good position. We're already shipping product at 1.6. We're already developing at 3.2. And over time, I think they both have growth opportunities, just given the sheer scale and the potential power opportunity. That one could be a medium term grow faster, but I think both of those will be good high-growth opportunities for us.

And the margin profile of these data center businesses versus your sort of communications business base station oriented used to be a little bit lower margin than anything else.

At this point, the wireline part of our comms business is an above corporate average margin business for us. So if you think about the overall company margin, industrial and the comms tend to be products that are above the corporate average. Consumer auto tend to be a bit below corporate average, blending out to our corporate model.

Okay. And then wrapping up the end markets, automotive, you talked about -- you did a really good job of helping us navigate the last 9 months where there were some bumps in the road that you saw that not everybody saw. So I really appreciate that. Aren't we at the point where those inventories are getting too low because automotive, in particular, we saw Nexperia issues that shut people down for a few days and then that got resolved. People have been worried about DDR4 memory. I've been really surprised that we just haven't seen outside of China, any real restocking around those kinds of supply chain things. And I think there's very clear evidence that those inventories are very lean. So shouldn't we be looking at space that's about to improve cyclically?

I would expect -- look, I think there's 2 pieces to it. There's what happens with the unit volumes, right? The current forecasts are for sort of flattish to maybe slightly down SAARs for the full year, right? And I think that will have a significant impact on what the back half of the year looks like. But I do agree that we think the inventories are lean. And I would say what we've seen, and we've talked about how auto has played out over the last couple of quarters, we were pretty confident that we saw early buying behavior across the automakers. Q2, we saw it with the U.S. and Europeans. And in Q3, we saw it with the Chinese. And we expected that we would see some implication of that, some washout or reversal either in Q4 or Q1. We really didn't see Q4 actually came in quite a bit more favorable than we expected, but we -- it does appear we see some of that now because you can see it, we end up with book-to-bill under 1 in auto exiting Q1, which not unexpected given we thought they bought a bunch of inventory in advance. Now as we work through that, we think the -- there probably is a little bit more in Q2 we might see. But beyond that, I wouldn't expect any more corrective. And if they continue to grow the way they are planning to grow, particularly for us, where China is now 1/3 of our global auto business is in China. And China has been the fastest grower. It's been taking share from Europe and the U.S. As they continue and start to reramp growth, I would expect them to need to get more inventory on their books. So I agree with that sentiment.

And maybe your sense of that market from ADI's perspective. Obviously, China has got a lot of focus on internal development of silicon capability, but you actually bring really unique value-added to markets that are being pioneered in China around EVs and really low-priced ADAS EV type systems. So your confidence in that as an ongoing growth driver despite Chinese domestic competition.

So I think -- look, we've talked a little bit about this. I think our competition actually in China for the most part, continues to be the competition it was before we all started talking about the local Chinese suppliers, right? They are -- the local Chinese is certainly making inroads and doing a lot of great work. But for ADI and if you think about ADI's position in China, we tend not to have a huge presence in the low ASP market, right? We're not in that sell as much silicon at the $0.50 and below. We tend to have a significantly higher ASP, which is tied to us delivering the best solutions, the most innovative solutions to the hardest problems, right, which is why we are at the much higher end. And you see that in auto, right? High-performance battery management, high-performance communications from a GMSL, A2B, E2B perspective, functionally safe power. So we've invested in all of these trends in auto that are super important. And one of the things, if you look at the China forecast there's still only 10% -- coming out of '25, they're about 10% penetrated in L2+ ADAS. The forecast of '26 are getting upwards of 30% penetration. So the further they penetrate, the more opportunity for us there is from a content perspective. And obviously, if they're taking share from other places that aren't producing at that level, where their EVs are coming out, that gives us additional tailwind.

That's helpful. So maybe moving to some other issues -- question, price increases that you talked about, we've seen raw material prices come up for a while. It seems like you're passing those through. Could you just talk about what you're doing there and what the reaction has been?

Sure. So -- and this is the message our customers have heard. We spent a pretty significant amount of money over the last 3 or 4 years, building out and giving our customers more resiliency, right? We've talked about the expansion of our capabilities internally, the cross qualification of our products. That creates a pretty significant margin headwind because we've been absorbing that cost. At the same time, the input costs continue to increase across our business. We do everything we can to minimize it. Vivek and our operations teams are grinding out efficiencies every day, but it has been a very inflationary environment, and we've been absorbing that for quite a while. And we just felt like the environment was the appropriate time. Look, we are continuing to deliver more and more value to customers. You can see that in our ASPs. So we felt like it was an opportunity to recapture some of that value. Look, it's -- pricing has always been a dynamic thing at ADI. Prices have increased, prices have decreased. It has been a while since we've done in large scale. But we felt like given the current environment of inflationary pressure, it was the right time to do it.

Helpful. Then gross margins, you've talked about a path to 74%, you're at 71% now with mix kind of going against you. Can you just talk about the puts and takes there?

Sure. So -- sorry. I'll back up a little bit. I lost my train of thought for a minute. So 2 things that we've talked about that drove our gross margins down, right, were mix and underutilization. At this stage, we've continued to grow utilization in the factories, and we think we're at -- pretty close to what we think is an optimal is probably the closest word, an optimal level of utilization. So I don't expect us to see a ton of upside going forward from the utilization part of the equation. However, from a mix perspective, if you remember at peak, we were 53% industrial. We were as low as 44% industrial as we were going through the down cycle. We're still only back at 48%. So we feel really good that at 48% industrial, we were able to get above 70%. And we continue to expect we'll see some additional accretion. Obviously, in Q2, we talked about there will be some accretion just from the price increase and some of that will stick and recur, but some of that will be onetime. But we do expect we will continue to see additional accretion. And if you think about the way I've described where growth is going to come from, we've talked about industrial and communications growing strong. Those are 2 above margin businesses. So if we continue to see that share shift out of the lower margin -- some -- away from the lower-margin businesses, we would expect to see some pickup there. So I expect primary driver will be mix and mix within the mix, to be honest, even within the businesses and less about utilization, which has been a big factor during the down cycle.

And then also leverage on the operating expense line, you had some variable cost increases last year with compensation stuff and still managed to deliver healthy leverage. How do you feel about that going forward?

So as we've talked about '25, essentially OpEx grew at basically the same rate as revenue, right? Not ideal, but that is a little bit of the mechanics of our variable comp system, right, where we've talked about going from paying very little to paying more normalized variable comp in '25. So we will likely based on the trend line we're on now, we'll pay more variable comp in '26 than we did '25, but it won't be as big of a percentage and a driver. We've also continued to be pretty diligent, although we are investing more because we need to continue to be leading innovation and being first to solutions, we will grow OpEx sort of half of what revenue grows in '26. So we expect we'll continue to see it. And you see it in the guide, we're already guiding to a Q2 operating margin, which obviously is a combination of our expense work and our gross margin work that's up 200 bps.

So a couple of questions on strategy, then I'll open it to the audience. Maxim, you've talked about $1 billion in revenue synergy. That deal was done a while ago, but you're still very focused on extracting the sort of capability of the combined company. Can you give us an update on that?

Sure. When we did the deal, I think the expectation we'd set externally is we would do $1 billion of synergies by the time we got to 2027. A little context, we did tens of millions of dollars of synergies in '24. We did hundreds of millions in '25, and we expect to do several hundred million more in '26 than we did in '25. And we feel like we're on a really good path, and we will get to our $27 billion synergy target, which is really important for those of you who are around for the redo of our financial model in '22, one of the things that we attributed to being able to bend the growth curve was the $1 billion of synergies. So that has been a very significant area of focus for our teams. And I just had my latest update and feel very confident we're on track for '27.

And then thinking about the M&A strategy. I mean, obviously, huge acquisitions in your past with Linear Tech, Maxim, Hittite kind of forming this company. Now it seems like M&A is starting to happen again. Your view on whether there are big transactions to do small transactions to do. Are you more in [indiscernible]?

So from an M&A strategy perspective, I'll start with -- and we just covered this, so I won't state a lot. Capitalizing on the Maxim synergies has been our top priority. We've done a couple of what I would call tuck-in acquisitions, where we've advanced product or gotten teams in areas that are important to us, whether it's in digital or software. We've talked about making organic investment heavily across AI, digital and software. And so we will continue to look for opportunities in those areas. Look, if a large opportunity came along, we'd evaluate, right? We're very fortunate we have a very strong balance sheet. We've got a lot of flexibility. But near term, it is about -- it is really about capturing the synergies.

And then the corollary to that cash return, you've done a pretty good job of returning cash, particularly since those deals were done. How you continue to think about 100% cash return and what's the mix?

Yes. So we do continue to think about 100% cash return. And I would say I feel very good about what we've been able to accomplish given that we make our first call on capital, as you'll hear Vince say all the time is on R&D, and we're spending a pretty substantial chunk of our cash on R&D. But we will continue to return 100%. Our model is 40% to 60% on the dividend. And as you probably all saw, we just increased the dividend for our 22nd year. I think in total, it was about an 11% increase. And the remainder we'll use to retire share count. So if you think about what we've accomplished, I think I talked about on the call, going back to when we did our first repurchases, the amount we've bought back, we feel like that is a really strong position. The other thing that's happened is we've reduced share count by 10% since we did the Maxim acquisition through repurchases. And so we will continue on that model.

Yes. Okay. Let's pause here and see if we have questions from the audience.

Richard, can I take you back to the data center and some of the new areas in power that you were looking at? And I think you called out Vpd in particular. So it sounds like you're moving into second stage, delivering power directly to the GPU substrate. So could you give us a sense for how is that qualifying with customers at this point? And maybe just the sense for how your TAM will grow as you penetrate the second stage?

So yes, on the first part of your statement is correct. We are currently in -- we are actually shipping and generating revenue at a single large customer. We are in conversations with a number of the other players in that space where we expect to continue to make further traction. Obviously, if the architectures change, and I don't know what that TAM looks like because I don't know how much of the existing lateral architecture gets replaced by vertical architecture. But suffice it to say, it gives us a growth opportunity beyond where we've played historically in lateral and which is why we continue to invest heavily in our product there and in our processes to make sure we can deliver it cost effectively because obviously, at that scale, the inevitable outcome will be future price pressure on everybody. So we want to make sure we've got the highest performing product that we can deliver at the best cost, too.

Thank you, [ Lee ]. Any other questions? Maybe I'll just finish following up on that. You've talked about a solutions approach, a module approach to these types of markets. That seems to be increasingly a differentiator, particularly versus your biggest competitor that you have this mindset that you're looking at data center optical data center power as a complete solution. Can you talk about that philosophy a little bit?

Well, I think that Vince has talked about this a couple of years is our ability to move up the stack where we can take advantage of our core analog capabilities, add in software and digital solutions and AI solutions and be able to deliver more complete solutions to the more complex problems is what -- for us is driving a ton of incremental value. The easiest way to illustrate is, if you look at our products that were released at least 10 years ago versus the products that were released in the last 10 years, the ASPs are up 2x products in the last 10 versus product greater than 10. And some of that is clearly our ability to sell and deliver complicated solutions. And they're powerful because you take where in many places, we would have had somebody buying a bunch of parts and maybe doing the work themselves. They now come to us and say, here's your problem. What's my solution? And we build out a more sophisticated combined solution, we're able to capture a significant amount more value by doing that, which is why we've been so aggressively investing in the software, digital and AI capabilities is to capture that value.

Very helpful. We'll wrap it up there. Richard, thank you so much.

All right. Thanks for having me, everybody. Appreciate it.