Lattice Semiconductor Corporation (LSCC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Greetings, and welcome to Lattice Semiconductor Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Rick Muscha, Vice President of Investor Relations. Thank you, Rick. You may begin.

Thank you, operator, and good afternoon, everyone. With me today are Fouad Tamer, Lattice's CEO; and Lorenzo Flores, Lattice's CFO. We will provide a financial and business review of the second quarter of 2026 and the outlook for the third quarter of 2026, followed by a brief overview of AMI and its business model. If you have not yet obtained a copy of our earnings press release, it can be found at our company website in the Investor Relations section at latticesemi.com. I would like to remind everyone that during our conference call today, we may make projections or other forward-looking statements regarding future events or the future financial performance of the company. We wish to caution you that such statements are predictions based on information that is currently available and that actual results may differ materially. We refer you to the documents that the company files with the SEC, including our 10-Ks, 10-Qs and 8-Ks. These documents contain and identify important risk factors that could cause the actual results to differ materially from those contained in our projections or forward-looking statements. This call includes and constitutes the company's official guidance for the third quarter of 2026. If at any time after this call, we communicate any material changes to this guidance, we intend that such updates will be done using a public forum such as a press release or publicly announced conference call. We refer primarily to non-GAAP financial measures during this call. By disclosing certain non-GAAP information, management intends to provide investors with additional information to permit further analysis of the company's performance and underlying trends. For historical periods, we provided reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to GAAP financial measures that can be found on the Investor Relations section of our website at latticesemi.com. With that, I'll turn the call over to our CEO, Fouad Tamer.

Thank you, Rick, and welcome, everyone, to our Second Quarter Earnings Call. Lattice delivered exceptional financial results this quarter, reflecting a healthy market environment, compelling catalysts and our own strong execution. We have a focused and consistent strategy to create durable value by growing faster than the markets we serve. We do this by expanding into new applications, serving leadership customers, delivering differentiated innovation and driving sustainable shareholder value as a result. We are executing against each of these strategic elements and the results are increasingly visible across the business. Following last week's close of the AMI acquisition, Lattice is now positioned to deliver even greater value to customers and our shareholders. You will hear more about this acquisition shortly. First, let me update you on our second quarter results and outlook. Revenue for the second quarter was a record $201 million, representing 18% sequential growth and 62% year-over-year growth with strength across all our end markets. Our Compute and Communications end market reached another record revenue level, growing 18% sequentially and 83% year-over-year, driven by continued momentum in data center AI applications. Demand for Lattice solutions continue to be fueled by increasing CapEx, increasing AI content per server, expanding FPGA attach rates, rising security requirements and the shift towards more complex disaggregated architectures. We also saw a continued recovery in our Industrial and Embedded end market with revenue up 17% sequentially and 36% year-over-year. We see momentum building across a diverse set of end markets, including industrial automation, aerospace and defense, medical, robotics and other emerging physical AI applications. These applications increasingly require our Lattice differentiation in low power, small form factor, low latency and secure processing. With channel inventory at healthy levels and multiple new design wins beginning to ramp, we expect Industrial and Embedded to remain an important contributor to growth through the balance of 2026 and beyond. As we had anticipated, profitability continued to grow significantly faster than revenue with second quarter non-GAAP EPS of $0.53, representing growth of more than 120% year-over-year. This outstanding performance underscores the operating leverage we have built into the model. We expect this momentum to continue based on demand trends building across our major end markets. This is evidenced by accelerated bookings and our backlog extending well into 2027. At the same time, design win momentum remains healthy across our FPGA portfolio and end markets. As demand continues to strengthen, we remain focused on working closely with our supply chain partners to ensure that we can support our customers' growth plans. Taken together, we expect these trends to support a sustained multiyear growth outlook. Turning now to AMI. We are pleased to announce the successful close of the acquisition last week. It brings together Lattice's leadership in low-power programmable FPGA's with AMI's industry-leading firmware and infrastructure manageability portfolio, and it positions us to create the industry's most complete, secure management and control platform for AI data center infrastructure. We expect that this combination can double our addressable market. In the 3 months since the announcement of the transaction, we have engaged with about 100 hyperscalers, OEMs, ODMs and ecosystem partners, including many at Computex in Taiwan. And uniformly, they have all given us unequivocal positive feedback about the time to market and value that our joint solutions can provide. This reinforces our confidence that the acquisition can provide long-term value to our shareholders. AMI is a highly attractive business with strong profitability and durable recurring revenue characteristics. As we exit 2026, we expect the business to be operating at a revenue run rate of more than $200 million with gross margins above 75% and EBITDA margins above 40%. These metrics underscore the strength of AMI's market position, the depth of its customer relationships and the highly efficient operating model the company has built over many years. The AMI business is well balanced with approximately 60% of revenue generated from its boot firmware franchise and 40% from its infrastructure manageability solutions. Revenue includes firmware licensing, royalties and platform enablement services. This model creates strong visibility, attractive lifetime economics and durable customer engagements across long product cycles. We see multiple avenues to grow AMI over time, winning more platforms, increasing content per platform and expanding further into AI infrastructure and embedded markets. This includes new trends such as rack scale architectures, secure boot, data center manageability and remote monitoring and control. AMI will continue to operate with the same open silicon-neutral approach that has earned the trust of customers and partners across the industry for decades. We are excited to welcome the AMI team to Lattice, and we have already hit the ground running together. Looking forward to the third quarter, our revenue guidance for our FPGA business of $220 million at the midpoint represents approximately 65% year-over-year growth. When adding 2 months of AMI revenue contribution, our revenue guidance becomes $255 million at the midpoint, putting us at over $1 billion annualized revenue run rate. This strong outlook reflects our confidence in the accelerating momentum of the business and the breadth of demand across our end markets. The midpoint of our EPS outlook is $0.56, which reflects roughly 100% year-over-year growth. This highlights the powerful operating leverage in our model, the differentiated value of our products and our disciplined approach to scaling Lattice. We expect that we'll be able to consistently drive earnings growth that significantly outpaces revenue growth. Looking ahead, accelerating AI infrastructure demand, the emergence of physical AI and the addition of AMI create a powerful foundation for Lattice's next phase of growth. The secular trends fueling our business have never been stronger. We are confident that we are in the early innings of a multiyear growth cycle, and our focus is clear: deliver sustained above-market growth while converting that growth into strong earnings and cash flow to benefit you, our valued shareholders. With that, I'll turn over the call over to Lorenzo for a comprehensive review of our second quarter results and outlook. Lorenzo?

Thank you, Fouad, and good afternoon, everyone. I will begin with a review of Lattice's Second Quarter 2026 Financial Performance, followed by our outlook for the third quarter. We'll then close with a brief introduction to AMI and its business model. Q2 financial performance was exceptional, exceeding the high end of our guidance. Revenue reached a record $201 million, growing 62% year-over-year and 18% quarter-over-quarter. Earnings growth continued to outpace our revenue growth and exceeded the high end of our guidance. Q2 non-GAAP EPS at $0.53 a share demonstrated significant leverage, growing more than 120% year-over-year and 29% quarter-over-quarter. Q2 non-GAAP gross margin was above expectation at 71.7%, up 170 basis points quarter-over-quarter and up 240 basis points year-over-year. Q2 gross margin benefited from favorable product and customer mix. Q2 non-GAAP operating expense was $67.1 million, up approximately 10% sequentially and 30% on a year-over-year basis. The sequential increase was primarily driven by continued R&D investment. performance-based bonuses and commissions associated with our stronger revenue and profitability also contributed. Our Q2 non-GAAP operating margin expanded 390 basis points sequentially to 38.3%, while our EBITDA margin increased 340 basis points to 43%. GAAP net cash flow from operating activities for the second quarter of 2026 was $88.3 million compared to $50.3 million in Q1. Free cash flow in Q2 was $81.3 million with a 40.4% free cash flow margin, up from $39.7 million and 23.2% in Q1. Strong financial performance and the fact that we paid out our 2025 annual bonus in Q1 were factors in the sequential improvement of cash flow. In summary, Q2 demonstrated the strength and leverage of our financial model with non-GAAP EPS growth significantly outpacing revenue growth. Now for our guidance, which will include our FPGA business and approximately 2 months of the AMI business given the closing at the end of July. Our FPGA business continues its accelerated growth trend. Revenue is expected to grow into the range of $210 million to $230 million. AMI revenue for the partial quarter is expected to be between $33 million and $37 million. In total, Lattice revenue is expected to be in the range of $245 million to $265 million. Gross margin for the FPGA business is expected to be 70%, plus or minus 1% as we continue to manage our supply chain and costs in the face of increasing pressure. Combined, Lattice Q3 corporate gross margin is expected to be 69.5%, plus or minus 1% on a non-GAAP basis. This guidance reflects transitory issues in the AMI business, and I'll discuss those in more detail shortly. We expect non-GAAP operating expense to be between $83 million and $90 million on a combined basis. Most of the growth in OpEx will be in R&D and reflects our continued disciplined investments to drive long-term sustained revenue growth. We expect income tax rate for Q3 to be between 4% and 6% on a non-GAAP basis. We expect non-GAAP EPS to be in the range of $0.54 and $0.58 per share. In summary, our Q3 outlook continues to reflect strong revenue and earnings momentum with EPS growth expected to once again significantly outpace revenue growth. This underscores the leverage in our model and our ability to scale profitably while continuing to invest in long-term growth. Earlier, Fouad provided a strategic overview of AMI in his prepared remarks. I'll provide additional color on the business model and the near-term factors that will affect comparability as we integrate AMI. I will also cover the acquisition financing. AMI brings a highly attractive business model that is closely aligned with Lattice's long-term financial framework. We expect the base revenue of greater than $200 million in 2026 will achieve significant growth in 2027. AMI has built a very profitable business with gross margins in the mid- to high 70% range and EBITDA over 40%, which should improve our already strong business model. As AMI is integrated with Lattice, we expect to see meaningful accretion to EPS starting in Q4. AMI revenue is primarily driven by firmware licensing, recurring maintenance and subscription revenue and per unit royalties that scale with customer platforms over time. AMI also provides platform enablement services that support customer adoption and help establish durable long-term royalty stream. One of the transitory issues referenced above is a low-margin hardware pass-through business that is not core to AMI's strategic value. AMI began proactively divesting this business before the acquisition. While we expect this noncore business to be fully exited by the end of 2026, Q3 and Q4 will include this revenue. Completing the exit in Q4 should structurally expand AMI's margin profile in line with our expected go-forward model. We anticipate that any other adjustments will be normalized by the end of 2026 as well. To reiterate, as we integrate AMI, we will show accretion across our business model with meaningful accretion to EPS starting in Q4 while we enable additional strategic growth opportunities. Regarding the acquisition structure, we purchased AMI for $1 billion in cash and 5.2 million shares of our stock. We funded the cash portion of the acquisition with $925 million of financing and $75 million of cash from our balance sheet. We put in place a financing structure with a $1.15 billion credit facility consisting of a $950 million term loan, drawing down only $925 million of it and a $200 million revolving credit facility. We were pleased with the strong participation from a high-quality syndicate of financial institutions, reflecting confidence in the Lattice AMI combination. Given the strong free cash flow profile of the combined company, we currently plan to reduce leverage to below 2x EBITDA by the end of 2027. In closing, this has been an incredible few months for Lattice with our record Q2 results, our closing of the transformational AMI transaction and our record Q3 guide. We are very well positioned for strong near-term growth as well as the next level of strategic growth with accelerating revenue, earnings and cash flow generation. Operator, that concludes our formal remarks. We can now open the call for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is from Quinn Bolton with Needham & Co.

Congratulations on the continued strong results and outlook. I guess, Fouad, just wanted to start with the Comms and Compute business. Obviously, very strong growth in AI data centers and general purpose as well. But wondering if you could talk about trends you're seeing in terms of FPGA attach rate per server dollar content or ASP per FPGA. Have you seen those trends continue to increase sort of on a quarter-to-quarter basis here in 2026? And then I've got a follow-up.

Thank you, Quinn. A few things that are worth noting this quarter. Number one, the latest Digitimes report shows the server TAM is now up to 20 million units forecast for 2026. which is a really strong growth, much stronger than prior year. And so we're seeing the Agentic revolution still continuing, and we're seeing that drive not just the AI server, but more traditional server, networking, storage, all the cloud infrastructure that goes along with this inference and Agentic revolution. So that has helped our business because we participate in both. We participate strongly in the AI attached server and times. We also participate in the supporting infrastructure, the cloud infrastructure. So we're really happy about that. The attach rate continues to grow. The CapEx continues to grow. The new applications continue to grow. The ASP of some of the new products continue to grow because we're coming in now with further and more complex security requirements as an example. And we continue to be very positive on the characteristic of our FPGA such as low latency determinism, parallel processing connectivity, wide range I/O. These are the 1.2 to 3.3 volt I/O in the data center, connecting up to 1,200 sensor and some of these servers together. And so our FPGA continues to find use cases in numerous new applications such as, for example, power and cooling.

Excellent. And then I guess maybe for Lorenzo, as you bring AMI on board, it looks like it has gross margins in maybe the mid- to high 70s. I think you said op margins above 40% in the core FPGA business. You're already approaching a 40% op margin, and you've kind of highlighted that earnings growth will grow much faster than revenue. And so now that you've closed the AMI acquisition, can you give us some thoughts on where you think a longer-term model might be for gross margin and operating margin? Could it be in the low 70s and low 40s? Is there another range we should be thinking maybe a year or 2 out on a combined basis?

Yes. So I'll try to answer your question in near term and long but we are benefiting right now in our business model from very, very strong revenue growth. But if you look underneath, we continue to invest. AMI is also a R&D heavy organization because they continue to invest for the future. So the model that you see right now is probably approximately what we'll see for the next little bit. And as we get into 2027 and our longer-term growth aspirations manifest themselves, we see a little bit better performance in our business model than we may have been expecting before. So 70-ish percent on the gross margin and a little bit sooner to 40% on the operating margin level than we had seen in the past is probably where we're taking it. But that's also -- keep in mind that's in the face of with the accelerated revenue growth we're expecting. So in that model, you'd start to see a very significant acceleration in EPS as well.

Our next question is from Christopher Rolland with Susquehanna International Group.

Maybe just following up on the last question about gross margin. Lorenzo, I think you said there was a hardware business associated with AMI. How much revenue is that hardware business? Was that on top of the $200 million? Or does that take from the $200 million annual revenue? And is that the reason for margins being down in September?

Yes. So this -- look, this is a really transitory issue. As we pick them up, we have a partial quarter. They have already begun to, as I said in my comments, divest the hardware part of the business while maintaining the royalty stream. So it's not -- from the Lattice perspective, overall, it's not a meaningful amount of revenue. And by Q4, it won't have an impact on our overall financials or actually even the AMI-specific financials. So it's something that we wanted to point out because it does cause a Q3 step down from what we're expecting.

Okay. And was that revenue on top of the $200 million or...

The $200 million a year run rate for AMI would exclude that in the end.

Okay. Excellent. And then perhaps a follow-up. I'll talk about I&E. I think the situation with I&E is maybe they didn't understand we were in a new semiconductor cycle, and we're kind of holding back spending. Any update on bookings there? Has it accelerated? Have they finally got the message? And I think we -- back in the day, we're talking about maybe a $75 million normalized run rate for that business, but it now appears maybe to be higher, particularly with the guide for the fourth quarter, I would imagine it's higher. Can you talk about I&E and what's happening there with the channel, what a new normalized level is, and that would be great.

Yes. Thank you, Chris. Our Industrial and Embedded segment is doing great. I&E is doing good. And we have talked about the really strong sequential and year-over-year growth, and we see this continue to grow throughout the rest of the year. The PMI now is at levels -- they are very positive levels worldwide. There's a bit of a temporary slowdown in China, but continue to be very excited about the design wins, the physical AI momentum. And the recovery of that business. The channel is -- inventory is now where we need it to be. We're not focused as much on the channel inventory anymore as we focused on supply being the main focus and very positive on all the different segments, including some of the new robotics and humanoids, we're doing quite well. Some of the new autonomous vehicles, new medical application, aerospace and defense. So the list goes on, on penetrating few new market segments and accelerating the growth into 2027.

Let me just add on one of the things we are not -- at Lattice, we are not impacted by automotive. This is a relatively small business for us. So that end market weakness is not having a drag on us.

The only other one -- Please go ahead.

Our next question is from Melissa Weathers with Deutsche Bank.

I wanted to touch on something you just talked about the supply side. With everything seeming like it's coming back pretty hard. Can you just talk about any constraints that you're seeing on the supply side, how you're managing it? And could this actually gate your growth going into next year?

Yes. Thank you, Melissa. As I said, we are doing good on sort of the fab side at the front end and the testing side on the back end. In the middle, on the assembly side, there are constraints across the industry right now. And so us and the rest of the industry are experiencing these constraints. We are putting capacity agreement in place that -- and then qualifying new capacity that we believe will get us in line -- supply and demand in line by September, and we should be in good shape in Q4 and definitely for 2027.

Great. And then on AMI, congrats on getting the deal closed. I know you've talked about your SAM, I think, doubling with the inclusion of AMI. So can you just talk about, is there any like new kind of long-term growth rate framework that we should be thinking about for FPGAs? Is there like an adder to whatever percent growth you could have grown in the past? Just any help on how we can think about AMI layering like actually accelerating your FPGA sales, I think that would be helpful.

Yes. So Melissa, a couple of things. I'd like. Number one, from our long-term aspirational goal, we'd like to hit $3 billion by 2030. So that's the goal. We are already ahead by about a quarter. So if you look at -- we had 3 months ago said that we'll hit $1 billion run rate by Q4 and the combination of Lattice plus AMI, we just hit this in our guide in Q3, a quarter ahead. So we're seeing the benefit of this. We should exit this year at a $1.2 billion run rate. And so you could see where our growth is accelerating.

Our next question is from Kevin Garrigan with Jefferies.

Congrats on the great results. Fouad, just on the supply again. With these new negotiations that you're doing, are any of your manufacturing partners trying to negotiate higher prices? And can you pass those along to your customers?

Yes, the costs are increasing across the industry, not just cost from a supply chain point of view, but a whole bunch of expedite fees because the customers are all under pressure to get supply ASAP. So we're seeing the cost increase across the industry. And we're doing the best we can to absorb some of these costs, and we're going to have to pass some of these costs. So it's going to be a mixture of us absorbing some and passing some.

Okay. Great. And then you continue to see strong bookings, strong backlog kind of into -- all the way into 2027. I mean has that visibility extended over the last 3 months? And how much of that backlog is noncancelable?

Very good question. The visibility is increasing daily. I mean it's really unprecedented. We've got visibility all the way to the end of 2027. 2027 is pretty much booked. And so we're seeing that to be very strong. We are putting capacity agreements in place with our supplier where we're going to have to take the capacity. And so we are, in turn, putting capacity agreements with our customers and partners to make sure that our customers provide us with the same commitments. So yes, I mean, I think you're seeing this across the whole supply chain now as with our supplier and as with our customers, putting all these agreements in place.

Our next question is from Ethan Potasnick with TD Cowen.

Congrats on the results. Just a near-term question. You guys guided the stand-alone FPGA business. But I was wondering, could you guys help us think about the sort of the relative growth rates across the various segments as we move through the second half?

Yes. So we do break down our FPGA business. We do break down our Comms and Compute and our Industrial and Embedded so those have been broken down. And you could see that the Comms and Compute has been growing very strong. So this Q2 was 83% year-on-year growth, 18% sequential. Industrial and Embedded 36% year-on-year growth, 16% sequential. We haven't broken this up for Q3. On the AMI side, we expect AMI to grow about 25% year-on-year. So that would give you all the 3 major segments.

We're seeing strong demand across our end markets, though. And I'd just say the Industrial and Embedded business has been lumpy in the past and probably going to behave that way in the future, but the general trend is up.