Keysight Technologies, Inc. (KEYS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. I think we're going to go ahead and get started with our next session. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Matt Niknam, communications and networking analyst here at Deutsche Bank. For our next session, we're very pleased to be joined by Keysight's CFO, Neil Dougherty. Neil, welcome to the conference.

Yes. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.

Great. Great. So I will -- this is going to be a fireside chat format. If anybody has any questions midway through the discussion, please raise your hand. We'll get a mic runner up to enable you to ask the question.

But without further ado, you guys just reported fiscal 3Q results just last week, so pretty fresh off of that. Maybe just to start, if you can touch on some of the key highlights from results and maybe talk about some of the top priorities for the team as you close out the fiscal year.

Yes. So we were pleased with the quarter that we've put up in what's been kind of a mixed and somewhat challenging market environment. I think we were able to deliver revenues that were above the high end of our guidance range. And that was really a function of the fact that there was a measurable outperformance in orders relative to what we were expecting 3 months prior when we put together the guide. So some incremental positivity there, primarily driven in the wireline portion of our communications business, driven by AI, where we've now seen multiple quarters of positive order momentum, clear sign that, that business is inflecting in a sustainable way. We saw some first time incremental upside in our semiconductor business and first person to admit that a single data point is not a trend. That being said, we'll take the positive data point. And now the thing that we'll be watching for is can we, over the next couple of quarters, back that up with some sustained momentum. And other portions of our business, I think stability is more the message of the day. In our wireless portion of commercial communications, in our general electronics business, it's -- we're seeing those businesses stabilize now for multiple quarters in a row, albeit at a lower level than they've been at a year prior, but at least we've seen it stabilize. So again, some positive messages to take away. We're still a little bit cautious as we look forward to FY '25 just because visibility remains somewhat muted. But as we look into Q4, we're continuing to stay focused on winning every opportunity that's in front of us, continuing to execute to drive results for the company.

So maybe if we just sort of pivot to the demand backdrop, how would you classify the current demand backdrop across your different end markets? And maybe more specifically, what are you hearing from customers? And how is that impacting the sales funnel?

Yes. So I think you really have to look at it end market by end market because right now, at least, we are not yet seeing a broad catalyst that is kind of driving strength across all the end markets. I think if you break it down and look at it market by market, as I've just said, wireline is clearly the area where we've seen the best inflection at this point in time. AI is the driver. And we see that inflection not just in kind of AI-specific applications, but in broader infrastructure related to wireline, right, the migration from 400 gigabit to 800 gigabit ultimately to 1.6 terabit and all of the infrastructure work that needs to facilitate that kind of network performance. Semi, again, if you follow the press, there's a lot of talk out there about FY -- or excuse me, calendar '25 being materially better than calendar '24 with some question about when in the calendar year does that inflection happen. As again, I said, we saw some positive movement here within the quarter, which we would expect us to lead that a little bit. And so is this, in fact, a first sign of that strength? Or is it just a blip? I think we need -- it remains to be seen. I think the one area where we're seeing some incremental weakness is in the automotive business. I think the press around EV demand waning and some of the challenges there from a trade perspective, I think, are causing a little bit of a pullback in that business. So I think that's an area to watch for. But again, bringing it back up to the Keysight level, I think we saw, again, incremental order strength relative to what we saw 3 months ago -- or yes, 3 months ago, we continued to build our funnel. We saw increased, what we call, funnel velocity, the rate at which deals are moving themselves through the funnel, which I think is an indication that there is more urgency on behalf of our customers than there was, say, this time last year.

And when we think about this from a macro perspective, I think around 60-ish percent, maybe a little under 60% of revs are tied to R&D.

That's right.

Is more of the macro pressure really centered around manufacturing and production? Or has macro impacted the R&D piece of the business as well?

Yes. No, I think the macro piece has impacted the R&D piece of the business as well because I think as our customers have seen some softness in their own end markets, they're reacting prudently to that, and they're getting cautious with investments, they're getting cautious with CapEx until they get their own confidence about their own business outlook. And so we have seen -- now it's not as steep as the pullback as we see in manufacturing, but there definitely has been an impact on the R&D side as well.

Got it. Got it. And so just as we think about order trends, maybe if you can help investors frame how to think about orders in fiscal 4Q and into next year, just given some of the more, I guess, you could say incrementally constructive comments last week.

So again, I'll talk about the guide for Q4. And again, we remain cautious about our forward-looking statements into '25 because visibility is somewhat muted. So let's talk about what historic seasonality has been like in our business. So we do expect a seasonal uplift into Q4. There's really 2 drivers around that. The first is the fact that in our aerospace defense business, our Q4 aligns with government fiscal year-end. So there does tend to be an uptick in orders in that business around the government at year-end. The second thing is more self-inflicted, if you will, in that our sales cycles are really structured around the half. And so there's a personal financial incentive for our sales reps to close deals at the end of the year. So as a result, we tend to finish with a flourish at the end of the fiscal year and then get off to a bit of a slow start in the subsequent quarter because the funnels have been depleted and we need to rebuild them. So we do expect a strong seasonal uptick here in Q4. You can think about it as mid-single digits sequentially. And then typically, we see in our core business, and I'll come back to that in a minute, a mid-single-digit decline Q4 to Q1 for the reasons that I've just described. Now that's going to be offset a little bit by the recent acquisition we did of ESI. ESI is a software business in the design engineering space. And because of the way their renewals fall, they recognize about 40% to 45% of their revenues in our fiscal first quarter. And so that will offset which would be -- will otherwise be a down -- cyclical down in our Q1.

Got it. Okay. Let's talk about AI. We held in a couple of questions before we got to the AI.

Yes, 8 minutes. Pretty good.

All right. So you cited AI as a recent driver of some of the strength in wireline. Can you just help investors frame or quantify the benefit here? Where is the demand coming from? What type of use cases? For example, is this primarily hyperscalers? Is it R&D? Is it manufacturing? Just maybe help us better frame what AI drives for Keysight in the wireline business.

So I mean, I think the good news, and I can -- there's a parallel here to the strength that we saw in 5G over the previous several years. And then we have a lot of touch points into this ecosystem, right? So you can think about it from an infrastructure standpoint where we sell to the connectivity guys and the folks in making chipsets. Within the data center, we sell to the network equipment manufacturers. We sell to the network equipment guys. We sell to the hyperscalers, even a little bit of long-haul cabling test that's in there. So there are a lot of touch points. As I think about the opportunity today, historically, the business is skewed even more heavily towards R&D. Our wireline business is skewed more heavily towards R&D than even the company averages, which you've mentioned in the mid- to high 50s. But we have seen some manufacturing strength here recently as well with the build-outs that are happening. So I kind of characterize our current AI -- our current wireline business is there are insertion points or applications that are very AI specific in their nature, right? And in that, I would include the work we're doing with hyperscalers to help them model their AI workloads and emulate their AI workloads in a lab environment before they deploy these big data centers. That would include anything that's kind of in the broader NVIDIA supply chain, if you will, AI is clearly the driver there. And we're seeing strength in transceiver manufacturing, in connector manufacturing related to that broader build-out. But then there's a whole other set of touch points that really are more put in the category kind of rising tides raise all boats, right? You need to work on the overall wireline and ecosystem development to support these AI streams. And so this is the evolution of Ethernet speeds from 400 gigabit to 800 gigabit to 1.6 terabit, again, where we have a lot of touch points in that ecosystem as well.

And as you look out maybe the next 6 to 12 months, does the opportunity around these AI-oriented use cases evolve? Is there less manufacturing? Like how do we just think about that evolution?

Well, I think that's literally the trillion-dollar question, right? I mean, I think it feels like you're very early days, but I don't think anybody knows exactly how this is going to play out. I think we continue to ask the question about how do we bring all of the technology that exists within Keysight to bear to solve the problems that the industry is facing. And we are finding new ways to help the industry, and I expect it will continue to find new ways. So there will be that kind of evolution. We know that the manufacturing volumes in other industries can be spiky in nature, and they can be episodic. What we don't know is how long these capacity build-outs are going to sustain because we're so new to this process.

Just one other one on this topic. Is there a difference for Keysight in terms of benefits and ability to sell solutions to customers as we move from training to inference?

Yes. I don't think so. I think it remains to be seen. But when I think about what we're doing, infrastructure, connectivity or even with the hyperscalers, helping them emulate workloads across the network, it's really agnostic to that question, I think, at this point in time. So I think it remains to be seen. But right now, my early indication is I don't think so.

Okay. Okay. Let's talk about wireless a little bit more. I guess the other, call it, 55% to 60% of costs. What are the latest trends you're seeing there? And maybe some of the bigger drivers of 5G-related revenues today?

Yes. So again, our wireless revenues and incoming order rates have largely stabilized over the last several quarters, admittedly at a lower level than they were 18 months ago. But at least we've achieved stabilization. There is still investment that's happening, and that investment is in things such as nonterrestrial network satellite communications, O-RAN. As we look to disaggregate the access portion of the network, we're seeing a lot of activity around that. Stand-alone versions of 5G, the various performance enhancements that are going to be in the coming versions of the 3GPP standards. So if you think back to prior generations, it was 3G, 3.5G, 3.9G, LTE, LTE Advanced, right? We're going to go through those same evolutions here in 5G as they look to improve the performance of these networks. And then I still think you're going to see something like a 5x growth in the number of 5G subscribers. And so the networks that are there are still not being stressed in any meaningful way. And so they need to prepare for increased traffic on the networks that have been deployed.

Is 6G a thing anytime soon?

Well, 6G -- we're seeing 6G investment today, right? We're engaged with the consortia that are helping to define what 6G is. We're engaged with the market-making customers that are doing early-stage research on 6G parameters. And so we are already seeing not terribly significant, but certainly measurable revenues at the Keysight level for 6G. I think we're probably 5 years away, something like that. There's a lot of people that are pointing to the L.A. Olympics as an example of a time when you might see a demonstration of 6G capabilities. And if you think about that time line late in this decade, we have more 6G engagement and more 6G revenue than we would have had, say, 5 years before 5G was commercialized. So I think people are investing earlier and they're investing real dollars to prepare.

Got it. Got it. I wanted to touch on aerospace defense. It's actually -- it's been an area where I think the commentary has been much more constructive around underlying demand drivers. But if you look at just pure revenues, you've seen some declines in the last couple of quarters. Can you maybe help us frame what's driving some of the near-term headwinds, at least on revenue, and visibility on when that business can return to growth?

Yes. So first of all, I completely agree with the first part of your statement. We're highly constructive on aerospace defense. We've not seen a meaningful pullback in that business, the market pull back the way we have in some other areas of our business. It is true that we have some revenue pressure. But reminding everybody that in the year ago compare, we were still shipping off backlog from the supply chain disruption. So really, really tough compare environment on a revenue perspective, given the backlog build of '21 and '22. You couple that with the fact that in 2023, the U.S. budget in -- the U.S. defense budget in particular was approved very early in the cycle. It was appropriated efficiently, and so we essentially had a known environment for much of the '23 cycle. We didn't get passage of the '24 budget until April. We didn't get appropriation of the '24 budget until June. And so that -- the good news about all of that is it doesn't tend to destroy demand. It's just the perturbations of government and politics that kind of shift things around. And so again, both of those budgets, '23 and '24, had measurable increases in defense spending, including the line item that we pay the most attention to, which is research, development, test and evaluation. We're seeing the NATO allies continue to increase the percentage of GDP that they spend on aerospace defense. So we remain highly constructive. And we look to, again, fit the government fiscal year-end here in Q4 and the fact that, that '24 budget did just get appropriated, should size -- drive some strength in the coming quarters.

Got it. Okay. So might hit on ISG a little bit. It seems like we're kind of going -- maybe several different vectors between semis, auto, general electronics. And I think in totality, there's been some pressure, and I'm not sure you're ready to sort of call an inflection a recovery. But maybe if we can unpack what you're seeing across those 3 that make up -- the 3 bigger segments make up the ISG.

Yes. I mean, I think I'll start with a broad level comment and then we can dive in a little deeper. But at the highest level, things incrementally positive in semi, stabilizing in general electronics and maybe incrementally still deteriorating on the automotive side. So within semi, again, I mentioned it earlier, a lot of positive press around '25. Fab set to come online. Certainly, the demand for chip production and the need to assure supply and read different regions around the world, those are the right long-term secular growth trends for us. There's probably some overcapacity that was put in place, but they're getting absorbed. And I think the intermediate to long-term outlook on the semi business is quite strong. In general electronics, this is a business that essentially for us covers all electronics that aren't aerospace defense, comms, semi or auto, which is a broad cross-section of industries. Within that, there are pockets of strength. I would point to things like med tech and higher education as areas of strength within that broader general electronics business. But there is still pressure coming from distribution where the channel is still dealing with not only inventory, but relatively slower flow through, although the flow-through is starting to improve, so that's a positive. That's also a business that has an above-average skew to manufacturing within the Keysight context. And there were huge investments in capacity in 2022, which were then followed by a pullback in demand in '23 and today. And so I think we need to see sustained PMI above 50 not just so that we can get the -- that portion of the economy expand again, but we need to absorb that capacity that's been put in place so that people start investing in new capacity. So I think those are some of the headwinds that we're facing there. And then in automotive, it really comes down to this EV question, right? The consumer adoption of EV has slowed. You've seen China EV manufacturers, there's a trade situation with Europe and the U.S. on Chinese electric vehicles and tariffs and that situation. And then the relative availability of low-cost Chinese batteries, I think, has a lot of OEMs rethinking their battery development efforts. And so we've seen a bit of a pause there, and I think we're in a little bit of a tornado, we need and see how that shakes out. Again, I point back to long-term secular growth trends, though, and it does -- that you continue to have the legislative pressure, the push towards zero carbon emissions. which should be good for the industry over the longer term. I just think we're in a period of turmoil here and we need to figure out exactly how this thing is going to play out.

Okay. ESI, I think it primarily sits within this EISG segment. Can you just talk a little bit about what that deal brought Keysight and how the integration process is faring?

Yes. So just if you think kind of 10,000-foot view, one of the things that we recognize, and I think others in the industry recognize as well is increasingly engineers are looking to do more work in the simulation and emulation space before they build prototypes. And Keysight has had a presence in this space. We have a top franchise in RF EDA. And what we want to do is build out a broader set of engineering tools, bring in additional capabilities, things like multiphysics capabilities for our engineering customer. ESI is a computer-aided engineering company essentially focused in the automotive market. So very close to home in a market which we are also focused on. And in particular, we felt like they had technology that was extensible into other markets, which were underserved by them, but served by Keysight, most notably aerospace defense. And so with that, we get a high gross margin, high recurring revenue, pure software business, where the software sales are disconnected from the sales of our hardware, but in markets that we are currently serving, where we have sales force that are calling on the customers that matter, relationships that exist. So far, I mean, we're only 3 quarters into it, but we're tracking to our plans. We're happy with how the integration is going, how the teams are working together. And yes, all full speed ahead at this point in time.

Got it. Competitive landscape. I think the industry has maybe evolved somewhat over the last year. Can you maybe talk a little bit about how, I guess, your competitive landscape maybe changed at all considering some of the industry consolidation that's gone on? And one of your peers are now part of a larger industrial conglomerate, national institute. There's maybe a little bit more -- I guess, there's always been relative fragmentation across some of the more regional-based peers. So has there been any change you've noticed on the competitive front?

Yes. I mean, no huge change. I mean, I think we're still competing against the same broad set of players, even though some of them have changed ownership. But we're still competing against the same broad set of ownership -- set of competitors. I think the one thing that has been encouraging for me, and you can see it in the results of our competitors as well as in Keysight, we're all playing in the same markets. We've all been adversely impacted on the order and revenue line. Within Keysight, we've talked a lot about our flexible cost structure, and we've talked a lot about the importance of sustaining R&D investment in the downturn. And we've been able to do that. And I think, to some extent, better than some of our competitors. And so our R&D investment is going to be basically flat this year. We've not only succeeded in keeping our foot on the gas in R&D, but we're pivoting those R&D investments towards where we see those future growth opportunities. So it remains to be seen, but I think we feel good about our ability to fully participate in a market inflection when it comes because what we've been able to achieve in the downturn.

Great. one other, I guess, on the topic of M&A. You've announced the pending acquisition of Spirent, you announced it earlier this year. Just from a high level, can you talk to the strategic benefits of the proposed acquisition and how it helps you better serve your communication to customers?

Yes, absolutely. So first of all, I'd say, one of the benefits is Spirent as a company is exposed to a lot of the same secular themes that we're exposed to: the 4G to 5G evolution, the wireline evolutions, the things that are happening in automotive. And so they're exposed to some of those same things. So there's a good alignment from that perspective. There's opportunity with this acquisition for us to expand or serve the addressable markets, $1.5 billion to $2 billion of incremental SAM coming from their network assurance business, from their expertise in precision location which gets directly to your question about how does this help us serve our customer set better, right? We talk about Keysight's ability to service the entire ecosystem end-to-end, up and down the stack, wireless to wireline, physical layer to protocol layer. And that's broadly true, but we've been largely relegated to R&D and manufacturing with not much in the post deployment phase. This assurance business that they have allows us that reach into the post deployment phase of the communications ecosystem. And then the second thing is we look forward from 5G to 6G. We believe this precision location piece is going to be increasingly important. It's a bit of a gap in our portfolio, and we're able to close that gap. So -- and then the last area is just value creation, both for our customers, as we've just discussed as well as for our shareholders. I mean, this is a business that has a significantly lower operating profit levels than what Keysight has today, but we ultimately think will be accretive to our business from an operating profit perspective. So there's great opportunity for us to leverage our sales force, leverage our marketing infrastructure, leverage our back office to drive profit improvement -- gross profit improvement.

Timing-wise, any updates on the ongoing review process or anticipated deal close?

No. I guess, the one update was that within our fiscal third quarter, we did have the shareholder -- or Spirent had their shareholder vote and we did get shareholder approval for the transaction. So that hurdle has been cleared. We've begun the regulatory process in the U.S. and U.K. as we outlined in the 2.7 documentation, and we continue to expect that the transaction will close in the first half of our fiscal year, which is somewhere between November 1 and April 30 is the window that we're looking.

Great. I'm going to pause. If anybody has any questions, just raise your hand, we'll get a mic out to you. We'll keep going. Software and services, it's a topic that I think comes up from time to time. But can you just update us on what percent of your revenues today are coming from software and services? And maybe update us on how that growth profile for that piece is doing relative to Keysight's core?

Yes, absolutely. So software and services in the most recent quarter together were 39% of total revenues. It's roughly, call it, 24% to 25% on the software side, 14% to 15% on the services side is roughly how that broke down. Both of those businesses continue to outperform the broader Keysight from a revenue growth perspective. I think on the software side, it's a little bit -- you could bifurcate it, right? We have these software-specific businesses that aren't linked to hardware. Those continue to grow. The ones that are linked to hardware, there is a high correlation between what happens with them and our hardware sales. So they have contracted, but not at the same level that we've seen -- so they've been more resilient, but they have shrunk. On the services side, we've seen continued growth in the services portion of our business. So generally speaking, we've seen significant outperformance on the revenue side from both aspects of those business.

Do you have a sort of long-term aspirational target in terms of where that 39% can go?

We have not publicly put out a target, but I think you can see not only from the organic performance, which I've just talked about, where, again, both of these businesses are outperforming the broader company. But also the focus of our M&A effort certainly has a software bend to it. And so I think we're going to continue to look at software assets of the company. We're going to continue to look to grow the mix services, too, but the bigger focus on the software side. The bigger -- to increase the proportion of our business is coming from software assets.

On the topic of sort of longer-term targets. Now this is more around the target of what you laid out at your Analyst Day back in March. So you've talked about, I think, 5% to 7% long-term growth, 31% to 32% op income margins by fiscal '26. Obviously, a lot has changed in the world since March of '23. Are these targets -- are they still relevant? Over what time frame are they applicable? If you could just refresh us on, I guess, how to think about these.

Yes. So first of all, I do think they're relevant. And in some cases, the time lines are going to need to shift out because we did not foresee what we've seen over the last 18 months when we were standing on that stage at the New York Stock Exchange back in March of 2023. But pointing to the 5% to 7% growth rate for the company, I'd go back and highlight that we saw dramatically -- growth rates were dramatically higher than that in '21 or '22. And to some extent, we're giving back some of that irrational exuberance that happened during that post-COVID recovery supply chain, right? And so we do think, again, that we've kind of been through the end markets, a lot of stabilization, some pockets of growth that we're going to get back onto that growth trajectory here when markets recover. On the operating profit side, obviously, we've seen a pullback in operating margins with the pullback in our business. We remain committed to getting to that 31% to 32% operating margin. Clearly, the time line is likely to push out beyond 2026. And I actually view that this is something that we do ultimately owe to investors is a new time line. It's hard for us to come up with that time line until we get a better understanding about the timing and the shape of recovery because that ultimately is going to drive the pace at which we can get back. So I think we're taking a little bit of, again, a wait-and-see approach of let's get into the recovery, get a better understanding of what that looks like, and then we'll come back and we'll revisit the time line to get back on -- in touch with those targets.

And so we've got the revenue and op income inputs. Is double-digit EPS growth still also a viable assumption?

Yes. I mean, I would point you back to the overall operating model, which is, hey, when our business grows mid-single digits or better, we're going to drive 40% operating leverage which doesn't quite get you to 10% EPS growth, but it gets you close. And then with the deployment of capital, you can close the gap the rest of the way. So I think that's the right way to think about it.

That's a great segue. I was just about to ask you about cap allocation. So obviously, you have the Spirent acquisition that's pending. But just, I guess, generally speaking, if you can refresh us on Keysight's capital allocation strategy and how you prioritize uses of excess cash.

Yes. So first thing, and I touched on this earlier, our #1 priority is to continue to invest in the organic growth of our business. Fund R&D, fund CapEx, fund the things we need to do to keep the business growing organically. And I think we've done a really good job during this downturn of protecting those investments and the positioning of the company to succeed as we come out of this down cycle. Beyond that, we're looking to strike a balance between growing our business, expanding our markets through M&A and returning capital to our shareholders via our buyback program. I think there were a number of years there when things were flying high and it wasn't that we had a shortage of ideas, but it was hard to make the math work and hit our return hurdles. And so we did a lot of tuck-in acquisitions, but not a lot that was at scale. More recently, I think we've been more successful. ESI Spirent as an example, we closed 2 acquisitions last quarter. A company called Riscure, a company called Anapico in Switzerland. And so we're finding these targets. We're deploying capital to expand our markets, provide growth opportunities for the company as we go forward while at the same time, continuing to return capital via our buyback program.

Great. Great. This is a little bit off topic. I don't usually ask about tax rate, but I will ask you only because this -- we've been getting a lot of questions about this in light of last week's results. You talked about some incremental benefits from a lower tax rate in the past quarter. And I think it sounds like it will be a bigger tailwind going forward as well. Just from a high level, can you help us think about what changed your expectation and outlook?

Yes. So it's so much more than I can say beyond what I said in our earnings call last quarter, but we did make some adjustments to our tax rate based on some amortization discussions that we'll be claiming going forward -- deductions that we'll be claiming going forward. We expect it to reduce our non-GAAP tax rate from 17% to 14% going forward. We booked a year-to-date adjustment to true up our fiscal '24 to that level, this $0.16 benefit quarter, $0.11 related to the first half, $0.05 in the current quarter. There will be a similar benefit in Q4 when we finished Q4, 14% relative to 17%. And then we'd expect that rate to hold going forward for multiple years. The next known tax increase is the increase in the GILTI tax -- the U.S. GILTI tax rate that's a tax on offshore profits, which is set to increase in 2027. And we'll need to assess the impact of that increase when we get closer to it because it's ultimately a function of the mix of onshore profitability and offshore profitability that's hard to predict 3 years out. So 14% going forward until at least '27 barring new tax legislation, which I know is on tap for both presidential candidates. So that's a watch for.

Great. I want to tie some of this together. So we talked about a lot of different end markets. What would you say from your vantage point, are some of the more -- or the most underappreciated growth opportunities for Keysight that you think investors should be more focused on?

Yes, it's a great question because I think at a high level, I think our investors have a good understanding of the markets that we serve in those underlying kind of large-scale secular themes, whether that's AI, 5G to 6G, semi onshoring, EV, autonomous driving, those secular themes, right? But I think beyond that, within those broad market segments, Keysight management, we're constantly reevaluating where we're allocating R&D dollars to capture the pockets of growth, right? So they're the obvious ones which we just talked about. But then there are things like quantum computing or again, one of the reasons we were so successful in 5G is because we pivoted early to 5G investments. We are doing the same thing now to pivot, to be ready for 6G even though we're 5 years away from commercialization. And so I would look to those things as the decisions we're making internally that are ultimately going to enable the business to capitalize on these larger growth things. They feel like seeds now that we're planting, but they're ultimately the things that are going to allow us to capture these waves. I think autonomous driving is another one that I put in that category. A little bit further out, but you've got to plant the seeds today.

Great. Great. Last question. If we're sitting here a year from now, what would you say you would like to look back on as key achievements or milestones over the next 12 months?

Yes. I mean, the first thing I'd like to see is to see the broad inflection in our industries, right? And then -- because I think that's going to be the most helpful. But that in of itself is not it. I don't want to that not only has Keysight been a full participant maybe that we benefited from the investments that we've been able to make on the downside of the cycle are allowing us to maybe get more than our fair share on the upside of the cycle because we've made the right calls. We've stayed disciplined. We've made the investments. Not only are we capturing the revenue, but we're converting into the profitability and getting back on the trajectory from both the growth and profit outlook that we were on prior to this cycle.

Great. That's a great place to end it. Neil, thank you.

Thanks, Matt. Take care.

Appreciate it.