Qorvo, Inc. (QRVO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

June 11, 2024

US Information Technology Semiconductors and Semiconductor Equipment investor_day 187 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Doug DeLieto

executive
#1

Good morning. All right. I'm Doug DeLieto, I'm the Vice President of Investor Relations for Qorvo. And I'm really, really pleased to invite all of you to our 2024 Investor Day. The-- we bought a great team with us, and we're going to kick it off with Bob Bruggeworth in a second. And first, before we do that, we're going to go through a quick housekeeping items. First, I'll remind our audience both in the room and online that the safe harbor language that applies to our press releases, also applies to today's presentation. During today's presentation, our comments will include forward-looking statements that involve risk factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from management's current expectations. We encourage you to review the safe harbor statement contained in our press releases as well as the risk factors associated with our business in our annual report on Form 10-K filed with the SEC because these risk factors may affect our operations and financial results. Our comments and comparisons to income statement items will be based primarily on non-GAAP results. For more information regarding non-GAAP financial measures, see the supplemental information on non-GAAP Financial Measures section included with this presentation. For a reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial measures, please refer to our earnings releases for the relevant performance periods available on our Investor Relations website at ir.qorvo.com under financial releases or the reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial measures included at the end of this presentation. For those unable to stay for the entirety of the presentation online, a replay will be available on our IR website at ir.qorvo.com under Events and Presentations. Turning to the agenda. Bob Bruggeworth, President and CEO, will kick it off with an overview of our business. Following that, Dave Fullwood, SVP of Sales and Marketing, will discuss customer segmentation and our strategic growth and diversification initiatives. Following Dave, Frank Stewart, President of ACG, will review ACG's business. After Frank, we'll have a 20-minute break likely beginning just before the market opens. When we resume after the break, Philip Chesley, President of HPA, will discuss our HPA business. After Philip, Eric Creviston, President of CSG will present CSG's business. And our last speaker will be Grant Brown, CFO, and he will walk you through finance and operations. So we'll begin the Q&A period after grant, and we expect Q&A to run until about 11:30, when we conclude the event and move into the lobby for another coffee service. And with that, I will turn it over to Bob.

Robert Bruggeworth

executive
#2

Thanks, Doug, and good morning, everyone. I'm Bob Bruggeworth, and I wanted to thank all of you for being here in the room and for those of you that are also online for joining us at Qorvo's 2024 Investor Day. I started at RFMD in 1999 and a few years after that, I became the CEO. Our last Investor Day, and several of you recalled this already, was 2018, just a few years after we formed Qorvo. I was a driving force behind the decision to form the company. So I'm especially glad for all of you to be here today, and I welcome you. In years leading up to our last Investor Day, our primary focus was on merging two large companies while continuing to grow revenue. Over the last few years, we've been working not only to grow our revenues, but also diversify our business. We have accomplished a lot since forming Qorvo, and I believe our most exciting days are ahead of us. Now let's take a quick look at who we are. First and foremost, we enable best-in-class performance across billions of devices, including the roughly 100 devices that are in the room today. In fact, I'll bet that not one of you has a phone that doesn't have Qorvo content that's connecting you to the network. Doesn't look like anyone's going to take me up on that. We service our customers through multiple locations worldwide to simplify the map. We have consolidated U.S. operations by states, we've consolidated international operations by country. For example, there's one pin in California where we actually have multiple R&D sites as well as sales offices located there. As you can see, we've got a strong global footprint. On a trailing 12 months basis, Qorvo generated approximately $3.8 billion in revenue. We have approximately 6,100 employees, that reflects our recent divestiture of our assembly and test operations in China, which closed in May. We operate approximately 244,000 square feet of fab and test clean room space, and that includes our Category 1A foundry in Richardson, Texas. Our patent portfolio includes more than 2,300 patents and our portfolio continues to grow. As a representative measure of our continued progress towards our sustainability goals, we reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 43% in fiscal '24 as compared to fiscal '20. We're pleased with the progress we're making there. And we've been in a very strong position for many years. When we formed the company, we did about $2.6 billion in revenue. And last year, we did $3.8 billion. Over time, our EPS has grown from $4.38 to $6.21. We've been doing a great job of expanding the opportunities we have and our free cash flow. We increased our TAM by $30 billion with the investments we've made over the years, and we've generated cash flow of $5.9 billion. We've been consistently returning cash to shareholders. We've repurchased 52 million shares of our stock since we formed the company, which represents 35% of the shares that we had outstanding when we formed the company. Now what you're going to hear today. Each of our presenters today will outline our strategic positioning and our ability to deliver long-term growth and diversification. We serve very large and attractive markets, including automotive, consumer, defense and aerospace, industrial and enterprise, infrastructure and yes mobile. Our markets are characterized by global secular trends, multiyear upgrade cycles and technology transitions. We have maintained excellent relationships with our customers, and we are a trusted partner with broad market reach across customers, suppliers and ecosystems. We compete and win where customers value performance, technology and speed to market. You may ask, how do we do this? We leverage distinct competitive strengths that are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to replicate. This enables us to drive innovation, further expand our unique capabilities and grow new and existing markets. To continue to spin the innovation flywheel quickly and over the long term, Qorvo targets our investments in products, technologies, manufacturing capabilities that are highly differentiated and deliver value to our customers. Now driving our next phase of growth, we have realigned into three operating segments and moved from a decentralized sales organization to a single sales team. And in a moment, Dave will speak to customer segmentation and how we're diversifying our business and our market reach. First, let's look at the three operating segments. In Advanced Cellular, we are focused on two primary segments: consumer and mobile. And it's called Advanced Cellular because we focus on 5G smartphones. That's an important distinction to keep in mind because smartphones that are 4G and migrate to 5G enter our SAM. Our long-term growth target for ACG is mid- to high single digits. Next up, High Performance Analog, supports Automotive, Consumer, Defense and Aerospace, Industrial and Enterprise as well as the Infrastructure market. We are targeting double-digit growth for that business. Lastly, the Connectivity and Sensors Group focuses on Automotive, Consumer, Industrial and Enterprise and Mobile. And we're expecting strong double-digit growth from them. As HPA and CSG become a larger percentage of Qorvo's total revenue, margin and growth rate are expected to improve and grow. While each of our segments represent distinct businesses and end market applications, they leverage the same core competitive strengths that we enjoy as Qorvo to deliver RF and power solutions that optimize power, size and performance. These strengths are a premier technology portfolio, manufacturing scale and expertise, systems level expertise and our established role as a trusted supplier with broad market reach. These are distinct advantages built over decades, and they are central to our growth and our diversification goals. Looking first at our technology portfolio, it's imperative in our business that you bring a comprehensive skill set. That includes process, device, component and packaging. The strength of anyone is reliant on the strengths of the others. And Qorvo excels at each. We begin with cutting-edge processes that leverage our manufacturing expertise and scale to deliver award-winning quality and reliability. These processes are primary building blocks for our growing number of devices that populate our best-in-class components and system-level solutions. There's a tremendous amount of functional density in Qorvo's best-in-class products and each function must deliver exceptional performance. With each generation, Qorvo drives integration to improve performance, reduce form factor, simplify complexity, which requires continued development of advanced packaging. I think it's important for the investment community to understand that we deploy capital where we differentiate and we use others capital where foundries and OSATs are available to leverage their scale. We use foundries for silicon, silicon on insulator, silicon carbide, silicon germanium and gallium arsenide. We outsource all our assembly and test except for what we do for the defense business and some of our cable TV line amplifiers. We are the only RF supplier with onshore capabilities to manufacture SAW and BAW filters, gallium arsenide and gallium nitride devices. As I also mentioned previously, we are the leading provider to the United States Department of Defense for GaN and GaAs foundry services as well as advanced packaging. We have a resilient and cost-effective supply chain that enables us to capitalize quickly on opportunities across markets, customers and product categories. Systems level expertise has been central to Qorvo's success since the transition from discrete components to modules about 25 years ago. It happened first in smartphones and now we're seeing it in our other businesses, which you'll hear about later. I'm talking about the systems we are building as well as our customer systems, meaning our ability to understand the complete solution and then deliver value to our customer. Across our businesses, customers are moving from discrete solutions where our customers had historically solved complex system-level challenges through integrated solutions where Qorvo is integrating those systems and solving those challenges. We are moving up the food chain, transforming from a components, supplier to a supplier of system-level solutions. You have to understand the complete system solution to be able to add value, and that's what we're doing. Now leveraging these core strengths, Qorvo wins by achieving common customer goals across our businesses. Fundamentally, customers in all three segments are looking for performance enhancement, power savings and reductions in form factor. As you listen to our presidents, each of our segments today, you'll hear them talk about these parameters. As all of our proven track record on these critical metrics, we are frequently recognized by customers. What you're looking at here is a representative list of recent customer awards recognizing Qorvo for collaboration, delivery, performance, quality and other achievements. We're clearly a trusted supplier, and we're very proud of that, and we continue to earn our customers' recognition across all our businesses. We're also a Category 1A trusted foundry to the Department of Defense, which we believe is extremely important. In 2020, we were selected by the DoD to advance heterogeneous integrated packaging through the SHIP's program. The intent of the program is to accelerate the pace of microelectronic innovation. And last April, we were very pleased to deliver the first RF multi-chip module prototypes to BAE Systems. Qorvo businesses are underpinned by global megatrends that include electrification, connectivity, mobility, and sustainability, AI and datafication. In addition to these, there's multiyear upgrade cycles and continuous drivers that overlap in time and over multiple years. I won't read all of them on this slide as our presidents will speak to them. But looking at upgrade cycles, we're asked most often about 5G. However, upgrade cycles for Qorvo include 5G Advanced, nonterrestrial networks, WiFi 6, 7 and yes 8, DOCSIS 4.0, Matter, RedCap, ultra-wideband and others. They include upgrade technologies like AESA radars and upgrade user experiences like indoor navigation and touch sensors. These are new technologies and new protocols that offer performance and enhanced functionality. Looking at continuous drivers, they include increasing requirements for bandwidth, speed, latency and a sharp focus on power efficiency and power management. In DNA, they include the trend of one to many and evolving onshoring requirements. Across our businesses, they include customer requirements for system-level solutions and trends toward greater functional densities. Whether customers measure performance and power out, data throughput, talk time, battery life or distance between charges, they increasingly require higher levels of performance with greater efficiency and a reduced form factor. Qorvo is critical enabling these capabilities. Now this is my favorite slide because we're very focused on accelerating growth and diversification. Our long-term target growth is to grow greater than 10%. In ACG, our investments are focused on our largest customer, and we have agreements to support that investment. In HPA, our investments are focused on defense and aerospace, along with power management. In CSG, our investments are focused on automotive connectivity, matter and ultra-wideband SoCs. So you can see what we're focused on is improving our mix, our margin and we have a long-term target of CSG and HPA becoming greater than 50% of our total revenue. We have a great team here today so you can get a better understanding of our business. Coming up after me, you'll hear from Dave, then Frank, Philip, Eric and Grant. Each of us is glad to be with you today, and we're all eager to share with you on how Qorvo is going to continue to grow and diversify our business. And with that, I'm going to hand it over to Dave.

David Fullwood

executive
#3

Thanks, Bob, and good morning, everyone. I'm Dave Fullwood, and I've been with the company for 25 years, primarily in sales, but have also led a product line and strategic marketing for our mobile business. Recently, I've had the opportunity to lead our combined global sales and corporate marketing teams. This is an exciting time for me and for Qorvo as we pivot from serving mostly highly concentrated markets to extending our reach into broader opportunities through an expanding portfolio. I'd like to start by shedding some light on our customer segmentation and how we're diversifying the business and expanding our market reach. We're addressing a substantial $38 billion SAM within a 5-year horizon. Now think of this image on the right as an iceberg. What's mostly visible to all of you is above the waterline, a robust business with our strategic customers in smartphones, infrastructure and defense. Here, we have a tremendous growth opportunity. We've cultivated a special seat at the table with these customers. They trust us to engage over multiple generations to solve their most challenging problems. And the door is wide open to us as we bring new solutions in new product segments. There's also large adjacent markets we've invested in for several years where we're developing strategic relationships. Automotive is a great example that I'll share in a couple of slides. But there's much more to our story. Below the water line is a growing business driven by many of our product and technology investments over the last few years. We're tapping into an $8 billion SAM by targeting a subset of customers that are leaders in their markets, which we call focus accounts. Through a combination of direct and extended sales channels, we enable deep engagement to maximize our opportunity at the most important customers across our end markets. Additionally, we're expanding our reach in the broad market segment where we see a SAM of over $7 billion. By leveraging innovative support models such as an AI-powered website, comprehensive reference design solutions and advanced modeling tools like QSPICE. We enhance our ability to serve a diversified customer base, streamline the customer journey and drive broad market expansion. Over the next few slides, I'll give some examples of how these businesses develop across each customer segment. By integrating these strategies, we ensure that our growth is not only visible above the waterline, but also propelled by substantial and often unseen business opportunities below it. This holistic approach underscores our commitment to sustained growth and diversification. So the first and most recognizable market for Qorvo, where we've established our reputation and our leadership is, of course, mobile devices. In total for Qorvo, this market segment is growing into a $16 billion SAM opportunity. For years, we've been a leader in the products you see on the left side of the screen, where we offer the broadest product coverage in the industry across all ecosystems. Our deep customer engagements involve multiyear road maps placing us in a special position as a trusted global supplier for all the top smartphone OEMs. They rely on us to deliver integrated RF solutions, complex filtering, antenna tuning and WiFi front ends across all the chipset solutions they use. But these relationships also open doors to new product areas that you see on the right side of the screen. We've demonstrated success with multiple smartphone OEMs in the premium tiers with our ultra-wideband solutions. As UWB adoption expands beyond asset tracking to new use cases, like secure access, presence detection, indoor navigation and contextual interfaces, Qorvo is poised to capture this opportunity. Our force-sensing solutions are revolutionizing the user interface experience, enabling features such as side button sliders and 3D Touch on displays. I hope for those that are here in the room today had a chance to experience some of the demos out in the break room on this innovative touch experience. If not, you can find some additional information on our website. In power management, as demand on the battery increases with new features like AI, we're helping customers extend the battery life of devices. Whether through envelope tracking solutions for RF or innovative power management architectures for displays and cameras, we enable devices to maximize every charging cycle. By leveraging these strategic relationships and product innovations, we continue to expand our footprint in mobile devices, driving growth and reinforcing our leadership in this largest market segment. The automotive market represents a significant opportunity for Qorvo, addressable by many of our product lines with a serviceable market of over $3 billion across all vehicle types, including internal combustion, EVs and hybrids. We have extensive relationships across the automotive ecosystem from module makers to tier 1s to the OEM brands. Our broad technology portfolio, high-volume capability and outstanding track record of quality and supply give us instant credibility as a strategic supplier to automotive customers. We have a strong presence today in connectivity solutions, including 4G and 5G network access, WiFi infotainment, telematics and emerging technologies like vehicle-to-everything communications. A new regulations and safety ratings are driving the adoption of ultra-wideband for secure car access, child presence detection and other advanced radar features both inside and outside the vehicle. Our force-sensing solutions enable a more modern in-cabin control experience for steering wheels, dashboards, displays and door panels. In Power, we're addressing new requirements in battery management, onboard charging and motor controls, ensuring efficient and reliable power solutions for the next generation of vehicles. Our extensive portfolio uniquely positions Qorvo to drive significant growth in automotive, establishing a new set of strategic customers that will bring long-term sustainable growth. Later, you'll hear some examples from Philip and Eric of how our products are being adopted in automotive. But let's continue to explore how our innovations are enabling growth in other markets. With the focus customers I described earlier and in broad markets, we often start with a single product engagement based on a specific need. As the customer relationships deepen and their products evolve, new opportunities naturally emerge. For example, consider a focused customer and power tools who initially relied on Qorvo for motor control solutions. As this customer's product features evolved to meet new market demands, we leveraged our full product portfolio to help them deliver even more compelling solutions. Whether it's enhancing battery management, revolutionizing touch and control interfaces for greater safety or improving diagnostics and precision location, Qorvo is expanding our position with leaders in consumer and industrial markets. Our ability to integrate diverse technologies and provide a broad portfolio positions us as a critical partner in enabling customer innovation. This not only solidifies our existing relationships, but also opens doors to new opportunities. With the breadth of our portfolio, we're able to repeat this land-and-expand scenario across our end markets. So as we expand our reach into broad markets, we're supercharging our ability to serve an expansive customer base and long tail business. This journey begins with a customer-centered experience, ensuring everything we do helps our customers succeed with minimal touch. On the left side of the slide are 6 key areas that will enable significant expansion into broader markets. We're developing an AI-powered website that will transform the customer experience. This platform will offer tailored solutions and guided design advice specific to the unique challenges customers face and their product designs. Leveraging world-class hardware and engineering support, a broad customer technical support team and developer communities will provide invaluable assistance to customers, helping them solve complex design problems efficiently. Digital tools and models like QSPICE will enable customers to design faster and more efficiently, creating lasting relationships with Qorvo as their go-to resource for future projects. Readymade solutions and reference design provide customers a launch point to accelerate their development cycles and bring products to market faster and more effectively. And instant feedback on product and support will feed our innovation flywheel, ensuring we constantly adapt to changing customer needs. By investing to grow these capabilities, we not only enhance our service levels to streamline and accelerate the customer journey, but also ensure a sustained growth and diversification across a wide array of market segments. Similar to the land-and-expand example I just shared, let's look at how these initiatives translate to real-world success stories in broad markets. So we have numerous channels for acquiring new customers, such as an extensive network of reps and distributors, targeted website and e-marketing campaigns, and innovative design tools like QSPICE. Here are some real-world examples of broad market customers who initially engaged through these sources for a specific need, but ultimately expanded their relationship to include new solutions. First is a maker of small appliances who initially engaged with us for motor control products through our rep network. The opportunity set quickly expanded include power management solutions and eventually human machine interface with force sensors. Based on the significant growth potential with this customer, we've upgraded them from broad markets to a focused account. Second is a major audio equipment company who initially engaged via e-marketing through our website for WiFi solutions for speakers. We then expanded the engagement to include power management and force sensing. This broadened our ideas on how to leverage our technology and deepen their relationship with Qorvo. Third is an emerging satellite imaging company who initially engaged through our website, QSPICE and e-learning. It started with a specific need for an expand power amplifier, and we leveraged our broad range of RF solutions and beam forming to enhance their satellite product offerings. And the final example is an AI machine learning robotics company that initially engaged through our website and rep network for motor control solutions. Our motor control technology enabled human-like robotic arm movements with 15 placements per arm for brushless motors. This expanded to include force sensors with 22 placements, enabling precise pressure application in sensitive operations. This engagement illustrates how we can meet niche market needs and expand our presence in specialized areas. Over the last few slides, you can see how our broadening product portfolio in combination with advancements in our tech stack enables us to do more for customers and really meet them where they are. We continue to build this muscle so we have these levers to pull that will further accelerate customer diversification. Okay. Now that we've walked through some details on how the business opportunity plays out in different customer segments, let's take it back up to a 30,000-foot view. Based on the end markets we serve and strategic investments in our product portfolio, our TAM is projected to grow at a 9% CAGR from $47 billion in FY '24 to over $72 billion in FY '29. However, our SAM is expanding even faster with a projected CAGR of over 13%, growing from just over $20 billion today to over $38 billion in FY '29. This accelerated growth reflects our focused efforts and investments in high potential areas. Now let's delve into how this growth breaks down by business segment. Each graph here illustrates our foundation business shown in gray, which represents the revenue that you recognize today from our traditional product portfolio. And blue represents expansion business driven by current investments that will significantly impact our future revenues. In ACG, the SAM growth is largely driven by two major factors: First, there is significant growth opportunity with our largest customer. While we have a strong position in silicon-based tuning and RF power management, we have been underrepresented in integrated RF modules outside of ultra-high band. To address this, we're making substantial investments and have agreements in place, which are aligned for long-term growth across a broader set of RF products with our largest customer. Second is content expansion opportunity as we absorb additional content through integration as new and more challenging smartphone form factors are introduced and technology upgrades, such as 5G advanced and non-terrestrial networks emerge. And Frank will give more details on these trends in a moment. And although 6G is on the horizon, it's just beyond the visibility that we're showing here today. So our ACG SAM is growing from about $10 billion today to approximately $13 billion in FY '29. However, today, we're addressing only a small portion of the potential you can see here in blue, but with the investments we're making and our position with leading smartphone customers, we can outgrow the market as we more fully address the SAM over the next few years. Our HPA SAM is growing at a 19% CAGR, driven by investments in power, gallium nitride and advanced packaging for defense applications and beam forming for defense, satcom and infrastructure. Our SAM in CSG is growing at a 20% CAGR, fueled by investments in ultra-wideband, Matter, BLE, automotive and sensors. These substantial growth rates coupled with our focused investments position us to capture significant opportunities in expanding markets, ensuring Qorvo will drive long-term diversified growth. On this slide, you can see our SAM broken down by market segments through FY '29. Now each segment here shows our SAM based on Qorvo's complete product portfolio. We're making strategic investments today across these markets to drive growth in the expansion SAM, I described on the previous slide. These investments are critical for our long-term growth strategy. On the right side of the slide, you can see a range of customer and product development cycle times. This time line indicates that in some markets, it will take several years from initial engagement to scale revenue. In many cases, these engagements already began a couple of years ago. So we're not starting from scratch. However, it gives you an idea of how long it takes to develop the business across each segment. This underscores the importance of our investments and strategic initiatives to ensure we capture these opportunities as they develop. And as Bob mentioned, our long-term target is to achieve greater than 50% diversified revenue. By diversifying our revenue streams, we mitigate risk associated with any single market and ensure sustained robust growth across our businesses. This not only strengthens our market position but also ensures long-term value creation for our stakeholders. Thanks for your attention. I look forward to discussing how these initiatives will continue to drive our success in coming years. Now I'd like to turn it over to Frank Stewart, who will walk you through our growth plans for our Advanced Cellular business.

Frank Stewart

executive
#4

Okay. Good morning, everyone. I'm Frank Stewart, President of the Advanced Cellular Group. This is my 23rd year at Qorvo. During my career, I've led teams to ship our first Switch products. We delivered our first WiFi modules into mobile phones. We shipped the world's first antenna tuner products and I led a GPS product line. Before my current role, I led our Android business in mobile, where we grew annual revenues by 5x and established Qorvo as a leading RF supplier in the Android ecosystem. With those achievements in Qorvo's history, I'm as excited as ever about our future and -- as I have been in my career. Qorvo has a long history as a leading supplier of cellular products. We have built a strong foundation as a trusted strategic supplier to all major smartphone customers, delivering innovative products supported by a premier technology portfolio. This foundation positions us well to capture the growth opportunities in front of us, including market growth in 5G and 5G Advanced and ACG growth across multiple products at our largest customer. Obviously, cellular technology is vital to smartphones, which is ACG's primary market. ACG is also a leader in cellular connectivity for laptops, tablets and smart watches. In 2028, approximately 100 million cellular-enabled laptops, tablets, smart watches and other wearable devices will ship worldwide. 5G and 5G Advanced to provide high-speed secure connectivity for laptops and tablets and extend the safety and health features of smart watches. Smartphones are the largest consumer electronics market in the world, consistently achieving 1.2 billion shipments per year. Within that 1.2 billion annual shipments, 5G smartphone volumes are growing greater than 10% per year with Android penetration exceeding 75% in 2028. ACG's focus is 5G with all of our R&D investment here. The growth of 5G provides a tailwind for ACG SAM growing faster than overall TAM. Combined with 5G Advanced content increases, ACG SAM will increase at 5% per year through our fiscal year '29. So Bob introduced this slide. There's a few items I would like to highlight starting at the top with global megatrends. Connectivity and mobility are fundamental to our daily lives and to ACG's focus on cellular connectivity. And if I take you to the bottom on continuous drivers, the cellular ecosystem is driven by continuous demand for improved power efficiency, increased network bandwidth and speed and reduce latency. Now to the middle of the slide. Qorvo is at the heart of many exciting technologies driving future upgrade cycles in smartphones, including 5G Advanced and satellite communication from ACG and others from CSG that Eric will cover. Now back to the top in the global megatrend that is AI. The smartphone is proving to be the perfect device for AI usage, enabling a personal assistant for everyone. Analysts forecast that greater than 40% of smartphones will be AI capable as we exit CY '27. Artificial intelligence is driving increasing demands on processing, memory, data transmission and battery usage, resulting in increasing demand for high-performance RF for improved connectivity, lower latency and lower power consumption. AI is actually part of an overall premiumization trend toward flagship smartphones and a growth driver for ACG. Flagship smartphones have significantly more RF dollar content with densely packaged integrated modules that support worldwide frequency band coverage, complemented by increased antenna tuning content to provide efficient data throughput in a smaller area budgeted for RF and antennas. ACG is a leader and well represented in both tiers of the market, 5G entry and flagship smartphones. But obviously, we are excited about the growth in AI and the related shift towards flagship smartphones with more RF content. Okay. I would like to introduce you to ACG products and Technologies for a few minutes, starting with technology on the left-hand side of the page. Qorvo continues to advance the size and performance of our BAW filter technology. BAW is complemented by our SAW filter technology, we recently announced the release of Qorvo's latest high-performance SAW or LRT, increasing performance in targeted frequency bands. BAW and SAW are manufactured internally in Texas and North Carolina, respectively. Qorvo's gallium arsenide HPT for power amplifiers is also manufactured internally in Oregon. Qorvo's BAW, SAW and HBT technologies are all central to many ACG products. Qorvo leads the industry in SOI technology, which is crucial to our antenna tuning products. Related, we continue to invest in MEMS specifically for next-generation antenna tuning products. We are excited to see our MEMS technology road map advancing as we work on the next generation of this technology. Now to the right-hand side of the page, ACG's product portfolio, and I'd like to start with our integrated modules or what we call PADs, PADs are defined by frequency range, ultra-high band PAD, mid-high band PAD, low-band PAD and TxDSM or sometimes called a secondary transmit for those mid-high band frequencies. ACG enjoys a leadership position in all 4 product types. A great example is the latest flagship smartphone released, the Galaxy S24. Inside the Galaxy S24, you will find Qorvo's ultra-high band PAD, mid-high band PAD, low-band PAD and our secondary transmit module. Integrated modules leverage our high-density packaging technology to achieve ever shrinking size constraints. Our leading position demonstrates our capability, but integrated modules also represent ACG's largest opportunity, particularly at our largest customer. Integrated modules for our largest customer are the largest investment in ACG, and we have agreements in place with this customer targeting ACG's integrated module growth in coming years. ACG is the leader in antenna tuners, and we continue to advance performance to extend our leadership. Antenna tuners are not obvious in Teradata reports, but they are crucial to smartphone performance. ACG develops high-performance filters, leveraging our BAW and SAW capabilities. And last but not least, ACG is a leader in RF power management, both average power tracking and envelope tracking. We are a leading supplier to the two largest smartphone providers and we are excited to grow our RF power management revenues in the coming years. A key to optimizing all ACG products is our systems expertise, which is vital to our customers as we architect future generations with them three and four years out. ACG's products are changing over the next few years as flagship smartphones transition to 5G Advanced. Cellular technology standards are coordinated through 3GPP releases. We're at Release 18 today from a standards perspective and still at Release 17 with respect to the technology that is shipping in most flagship smartphones today. New features will be introduced in Release 18, Release 19 and Release 20, and all of these are called 5G Advanced, with production starting this year and continuing through the end of the decade until we begin the ramp of 6G. With 5G Advanced, we expect to see consistent improvement in user experience, unlocking the full potential of 5G technology. Another slide I'd like to spend a few minutes with you on. And I'd like to describe what 5G Advanced means to the RF section of smartphones. So let's start on the left side. With MIMO or multiple input, multiple output data transmission to and from the smartphone. 5G Advanced drives increase is in uplink and downlink MIMO content to improve data throughput and broaden cell site coverage. MIMO content results in the following upgrades and additions in content. Uplink MIMO is growing in ultra-high band frequencies, driving the number of ultra high-band pad placements to double from one to two. Uplink MIMO also grows in mid- and high-band frequencies, increasing the RF transmit content in the secondary transmit module. 5G Advanced drives both downlink and uplink MIMO additions in low-band frequencies, resulting in a second low-band pad module placement and additional RX content in both of those low-band pad placements. Another enhancement in 5G Advanced is increased output power or Power Class 2 for extended cell site coverage and improved data throughput. With 5G advanced, Power Class 2 is extending in the mid-band frequencies that are inside the mid-high-band pad. Over on the right-hand side of this slide, you'll see NTN or nonterrestrial networks. We're in the early stages of satellite connectivity additions to smartphones, providing ubiquitous worldwide coverage. Today's smartphones provide satellite connectivity just for emergencies. In the future, satellite connectivity will expand to 2-way text and data connectivity, resulting in additional RF content and output power increases, mostly in the mid-high band pad. As we move towards the second half of the decade in approach 6G, new frequency bands will be released to continue delivering improved capacity and data throughput. Additional RF content will be included to support 6, 12 and 13 gigahertz frequencies. This will result in new and additional ultra high-band PAD modules added to 5G Advanced smartphones. In summary, the rollout of 5G Advanced results in dollars, not dimes of RF content additions over the next 5 years, supporting the growth in ACG's SAM presented. I have a few product examples that I'd like to show you. The mid-high band pad is an area of strength for ACG, and we're excited to extend our leadership with the release of 2 next-generation products. First, we have now ramped our next-generation mid-high band pad with integrated diversity receive content that historically was a separate module where ACG did not participate. This is the most complex mid-high band pad shipping today, and it provides significant size savings, reducing phone board area by 35% while also improving power consumption. This mid-high band pad leverages our high-density packaging with our latest BAW filter technology, our newly announced LRT SAW technology and gallium arsenide HPT all on the top side of the module with Qorvo's silicon on insulator and CMOS capabilities on the bottom side. ACG is delivering similar innovation to our mid-high band pads for next-generation mass market smartphones in the same package size of our previous generation. We are integrating complete low-band content, delivering over 40% smaller solution size while again improving power consumption. Both of these products, the mid-high band with integrated diversity received for flagship and the mid-high band with integrated low band for mass market represents substantial innovations to the mid-high band pad, which is the largest revenue driver in the RF space. These products begin a multiyear trend of RF content integration into the mid-high band pad. This integration trend is definitely a tailwind for ACG's growth. Also, hopefully, you were able to see already both of these products are actually in display in our demo area outside. A few more. Wearables and new smartphone form factors represent additional growth opportunities for ACG. Let's start on the left side. With antenna-tuning products and foldable smartphones, in particular, Qorvo's antenna tuning products saw severe antenna challenges over a decade ago with the rollout of 4G. Without Qorvo, antenna tuning antennas could not support multiple bands of operation nor fit in a smartphone form factor. Smartphone design and environment have a significant impact on antenna performance. How a person is holding the phone, the materials in and around the phone and the overall phone and antenna design. In a foldable form factor with a foldable smartphone, there is an added dynamic with the device itself changing when open versus folded, which impacts the antenna performance. As a result, smartphone providers use greater than 40% more antenna tuning content in a foldable versus a traditional smartphone. A second example on the right, the RF solution inside a smartwatch actually looks pretty similar to what's inside of a smartphone. Mid-high band and low band pads provide broad frequency band coverage in a very compact size, antenna tuning enables tiny antennas to efficiently achieve data throughput and RF power management efficiently regulates power to each RF product. From a customer perspective, ACG's consistent support is unmatched, resulting in our strategic supplier status at all major smartphone providers. Customers rely on Qorvo's high-volume manufacturing and quality capability to complement our differentiated products, in support of their business over multiple generations. We enjoy long-range road map collaboration with our customers and ACG engineers are excited to continue delivering innovative products, including the 5G Advanced benefits that we discussed. I'm excited about ACG's future. We have a strong foundation of premier technologies, a broad renovative products and strategic relationships with our customers. ACG SAM is growing still supported by double-digit growth in 5G volumes, combined with RF content additions from 5G Advanced, all fueled by AI and a shift to flagship smartphones. In addition to market growth, ACG is driving growth at our largest customer and driving content integration into our integrated products. Altogether, ACG is well positioned to accomplish mid- to high single-digit revenue growth going forward. With that, after a break, you're going to hear from Philip Chesley who is President of HPA. But now we're going to start a break for approximately 20 minutes. Thank you. [Break]

Philip Chesley

executive
#5

All right. Let's kick this off. Welcome back from the break. So before I get started talking about all of the exciting things that are happening in HPA, I thought I'd start by doing a brief introduction of myself. I joined Qorvo 2.5 years ago, and I have spent the better part of 28 years developing Analog products like power management, RF products, mixed signal products. I actually joined from Renesas, where I spent 4 years as an executive. And before that, I was with Intersil as a Senior Executive for 14 to 15 years. So I've been in the business a long time. And one of the things that I'm very excited about is the unique opportunity we have at Qorvo to drive diversified growth. One of the reasons that I see such an exciting opportunity is really the strong foundation that we have in our technology bench. And I think the investor community is probably very well -- very aware of the technology that we have in GaN and GaAs. And we continue to maintain our leading-edge position in compound semi technologies. In fact, we're partnered with the U.S. government and the Primes to develop next-generation onshore 6-inch, 90-nanometer GaN process technologies under the STARRY NITE program as well as advanced our RF technology packaging technology under programs like the SHIP RF program. And I'm going to talk more about why that's important in a few slides. I think what isn't as well known is our deep bench of technologies in power management, in motor control, in silicon carbide power, in silicon SOI designs. And again, I speak from a lot of years of experience that we have some really industry-leading products, technology and design talent, and we're just really getting started. And with this deep bench of technologies, it allows us to land and expand our footprint in existing markets that we're in today, like defense and aerospace and infrastructure as well as expand our TAM and SAM into newer markets for Qorvo like automotive, industrial and enterprise. This ability to land and expand, but also open new doors in new markets, where Qorvo is under underrepresented allows us to drive our SAM faster than our TAM. And if you look at HPA's TAM, it's $19 billion, growing to $33 billion. But our SAM is more than doubling from $6 billion to close to $15 billion by FY '29. And I'm going to give you some examples of this multiplication effect in a few slides. HPA is on the right side of key global megatrends, and I want to spend some time talking about 2, in particular, that's electrification and connectivity. So in electrification, all the markets that HPA is focused on is in the early innings of this trend. And some examples, I'll pick one in the defense and aerospace market. The DoD continues to upgrade legacy-based mechanical radar systems with new advanced electronically scanned radar platforms, okay? Given the unrest we're seeing in the world, we're seeing an acceleration of the technology deployment in the defense market. And we're seeing the worldwide defense budgets increase at a pace not seen in decades. The automotive market is driving electrification both in electric, but also in internal combustion engine-based platforms. You can go buy an ICE-based car, and it's becoming more and more semiconductor spend and more and more electronics in those platforms. In consumer and industrial, power tools, e-bikes, motor scooters continue to move to battery power operation and it requires motor control as well. And in fact, I'll give you maybe kind of a funny story. So I have a house in Florida, in Clearwater Beach area, and I show up and my wife had bought a beach cart that is now battery operated, okay? And it has motor control, all right? So just an example of -- you don't really know all the applications that are going to kind of take over this electrification trend. In connectivity, we are in the early days of LEO satellites bringing global Internet coverage, and Qorvo technology and products are key to this trend. And again, I'll talk more about that in a future slide. In terms of key upgrade cycles, we are a leader in the base station business, and in particular, with our small signal products that we have, we still see runway in that market. 70% of the base stations worldwide are not upgraded to 5G mid-band today. So we still have opportunity there. And in broadband cable, DOCSIS 3.1 is in full production. But DOCSIS 4.0, which is the next-generation standard that brings 10-gigabit download and 6 gigabit upload speeds is just starting, okay? And so we have a lot of content and a lot of market share in that market. I like this slide because it kind of puts what I think the investment community knows HPA for kind of on one side and maybe some additional markets on the right side that aren't as well known. So defense and aerospace and infrastructure, again, we're well known for those end markets. We are very excited about the growth prospects that we have in the DNA business. And for our infrastructure business, we see that business as a business that will generate above-average operating income to help us fund newer growth opportunities. In fact, we made the hard decision to stop investing in GaN PAs and GaN PAMS for the base station market. And take that instrument dollars and put that into what we see as faster-growing opportunities, namely power and defense. We're excited about the opportunities we have in industrial and enterprise, both in power management with the transition to brushless motors. In data centers, we have a big opportunity in silicon carbide power both on the high-voltage side as well as we have a big opportunity in the solar and the energy markets. I talked about automotive trends, and in particular, with our silicon carbide products for DC-DC converters, onboard chargers and EV charging stations. And in consumer, we are expanding our PMIC technology. So this is not the RF power. This is our standard power management products that has been used in client-based solid state drives, and we're going to apply that to other large markets like handsets, wearables and other consumer products. I'll get a drink here, hold on 1 second. So to summarize, we are positioning ourselves for long-term diversified growth. We are leveraging our market-leading technologies, and we're expanding our system-level portfolio. We are expanding our strategic market presence, and we have a large opportunity of margin accretive growth opportunities. Now what I'd like to do is -- I've shown some of these pretty slides. I'd like to give you some specific examples, which I consider the exciting part. So I want to start with the defense and aerospace market. Okay? So I'm going to talk a lot about what is called an AESA. And an AESA is an active electronically scanned array, all right? And it is really a great example of the electrification trend that's occurring in the D&A market. So AESAs, and the picture to the right, in the upper right corner is an AESA, they replace legacy-based mechanically scanned radars. AESAs have significantly more RF content than mechanically scanned radars, and they have to be faster. They are electronically scanned, hence the name. They have to simultaneously operate multiple beams and multiple frequencies to be able to achieve the objective of the radar. Now I'm going to talk more about what the Qorvo opportunity is and an AESA in a couple of slides. But it's important to note that without Qorvo's technology, it would be very hard for the U.S. government to build an AESA. In fact, it would be hard to find a modern-based U.S.-developed radar, whether that's air, sea or ground, okay, that does not have Qorvo inside. We are excited about the size and the longevity of this opportunity for Qorvo. And it's important to understand that we're still in the early innings of this transition in this market to AESAs. And not only that, as AESAs are transitioned, they continue to upgrade the radar capability with more and more RF content at different frequency bands. So this is a trend that is going to be here for a long time. So let's take a deeper look at the Qorvo opportunity. So in my land and -- sorry, I'm using that land-and-expand framework. So again, if you start to the right, you can see the radar with all these sub-arrays. And in each sub-array, there are thousands and in some cases, up to 10,000 sub-arrays per AESA. Okay? And today, we have a big opportunity just on the RF front end. We have hundreds of thousands of dollars of Qorvo content in ever -- every one of those AESAs just on the RF front end, all right? But then if you move to the middle graphic, you can see that we add beamforming ICs. Okay? So recently, we bought a company called Anokiwave, and Anokiwave was a leader in beamforming technology. This is why we bought them, to be able to expand our footprint in markets like DNA with this technology. Then on top of that, we add our power management ICs. Okay? So that's more dollar content. And then we add switched filter bank technology, right, which, by the way, is -- leverages our BAW filter technology, which in Frank's business is really the key to that technology. So we leverage a lot of the mobile technology in the defense and aerospace market. Okay? So we've got this -- we've got all these -- we got this AESA transition. Okay? We have our footprint with the RF front ends and then we expand with beamforming power and our switched filter banks. And then on top of that, we are now -- the graphic to the left, we take all of that technology and we shrink it down into advanced onshore packaging that we do in Texas, okay, again, starting with the SHIP RF program because you have to be able to take all of this and shrink it down into very, very small sizes to fit into the next generation of the platforms for the Department of Defense, all right? So this is really a core piece of the strategy, a lot of dollar content for Qorvo, and we see this trend going on for a very long time. Now in addition to that, so you got AESAs that have got all these sub-arrays. You have our products that are -- that we're adding products to the arrays. But in addition to that, you have the one-to-many trend. Okay? And this trend is really where the Department of Defense and the primes are adding capability where they're going from maybe one plane to hundreds of drones, one geo satellite to thousands and thousands of satellites in the LEO area. So you get this additional multiplication effect that's going to continue for many years in this end market. And as they shrink the technology down, not only do you have to have the advanced packaging, but you have to have more capable sensors. You have to have better RF, which is right in Qorvo's wheelhouse. All right. I talked about the one-to-many trend. And one of the great examples is what's happening in the LEO sat market. So today, Qorvo has thousands of dollars of RF content on each satellite in 2 of the leading LEO constellations. Okay? Now I'm going to read this, so I get the numbers right here. But -- so SpaceX has launched 5,500 satellites to date and counting. In fact, I saw an article yesterday saying they want to launch up to 45,000 satellites. OneWeb has launched 684. Intelsat has announced they will invest in Gen 2 constellations. Amazon plans to launch over 3,000 satellites beginning in the first half of the year. Taiwan has announced a 300-satellite constellation. Hanwha Korea has announced a 300-satellite constellation. The point is the space race is back on, and we have a big opportunity on the satellite side. But now that we have beamforming technology, we also have an opportunity in the ground terminal piece that has to communicate with the satellites. Okay? We have an opportunity in the consumer ground terminal market, which is a few hundred dollar opportunity. But we also have an opportunity in the upgrade cycle that's happening in commercial airplanes, where, basically, you want to have faster Internet when we fly. I want to be able to watch my YouTube TV when I'm on a plane. And we have a multithousand-dollar content opportunity on every one of those planes that gets upgraded. In infrastructure, which again is our broadband and our base station business, we are picking our investments carefully, but we are well positioned in both markets. I talked about the DOCSIS 3.1 to 4.0 transition that's starting this year. One point I will make is there is significantly more RF content in DOCSIS 4.0 than there is in 3.1. For our infrastructure business, we have made some tough decisions. As I talked about, we stopped investing in the GaN PAs. And I want to make a point, if you remove the base station GaN PA revenue over the last few years from HPA, HPA's revenues grew consistently. Okay? The Huawei ban and the ZTE impacts and the aftermath has been the most significant headwind that has impacted HPA's top line growth, right? So it's been a big -- it's had a big impact on the business. We're going to continue to invest in the small signal side of the business. Again, we see 70% of the base stations worldwide that are still needing to be upgraded to 5G, and we have a few hundred dollar content opportunity per cell tower by 5G cell tower. Right. In my remaining minutes, I want to talk about power management. We have, I think, a lot more power management capability, IP and products that most people probably recognize at Qorvo. We have world-class development teams that we're adding to from some of the premier power management competitors in the market. We have world-class development teams at Vietnam, Minnesota, Dallas, Texas. And we are opening new offices. We're going to open a new office in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, where there is a deep, deep talent pool of power management talent, engineering talent in that area. So the goal that we have is wherever we have RF products, we're going to have a power management solution. And then as Dave talked about, when you add QSPICE, so for anyone that's been in the power management business, being able to simulate your design is really, really important. And we have QSPICE. It is the leading capability in analog and mixed signal simulation for power management. So you get the software and you get the hardware. Give you a few examples of our strategy. I'll start with what I consider a fun garden tool example, which is a chainsaw. Now my wife is not really ever happy when I get my chainsaw and actually try to use it. But here's an example where it was powered by gas. Most of them now are powered by battery, and today, we have a leading position in the brushless motor drive section. Okay? We're going to land and expand our footprint here. So we are adding the battery management to this as well. And in addition to that, we are developing ML algorithms and using AI to do predictive analysis both on the motor control to optimize the motor and then also on the battery to optimize the battery life. So -- in some applications, not in the chainsaw application, they need Bluetooth like in e-bikes, right? We'll add the RF content as well. All right. So here is an example in consumer. So this is a PMIC that we put into a camera for GoPro, all right? This has 30-plus voltage rails. And I will tell you, I would put this technology, power management technology up against some of the bigger names that you're probably more familiar with. It is that complicated, and it's that good of technology. But now we can take that. And if you look at that picture, it looks a lot like most other consumer devices, and it looks a lot like a handset, okay, in the mobile space. So we go to the next slide. So that's what we're going to do. In this graphic, you can see where, today, we have our RFP PMICs. You can see that in the white circles where we see that we have PMIC opportunities that are not being internally developed by the handset suppliers because some of the power management is developed by some of the bigger mobile handset suppliers. So we see this as a big opportunity for us, and we see this as an opportunity that is dollars, not dimes. In automotive, we also have a very large opportunity. We have -- with our silicon carbide technology, we see a $30 to $40 per vehicle opportunity as we focus on the onboard charging and the DC-DC converter, but we're also seeing a pull for our motor control products to be moved into the automotive space as well. So in summary, let me maybe kind of give you kind of the key takeaways. So first, we're going to continue to invest in strengthening our portfolio of onshore RF GaN and advanced RF packaging for D&A. We're going to continue to build world-class power management design capability, and we're going to provide system-level solutions, not just RF products like RF front ends. We're going to use this technology and these new product categories to land and expand our footprint in D&A, handsets, industrial and automotive. Where we have RF, we're going to have power management. We're going to -- third, we're going to shift our investment focus away from slower developing markets with slower lower growth to markets where we see accelerated growth and above-average corporate margin opportunities. The old HPA of D&A and infrastructure is changing. And over time, HPA will become much more broadly diversified and have a wider set of technologies. As we do this, it will drive double-digit revenue growth and expanding margins. So thank you. And now I will turn the time over to Eric, who has some exciting things to say about what's happening in CSG.

Steven Creviston

executive
#6

Good morning, everyone. So yes, I'm Eric Creviston. I joined the company in 1994. No one in our company had a mobile phone when I joined. I was very, very fortunate to join when I did. Shortly after I joined, Nokia selected RFMD to be a strategic supplier of power amplifiers. And over the next decade or so, mobile phones exploded. Nokia went from #3 to #1. We went from 0 to nearly 100% share at Nokia. So it drove a tremendous amount of growth in those early days. So over the next few decades, I was able to enjoy that and grow the mobile business. We picked up several acquisitions along the way in mobile, which I'll talk about. When we started looking at new segmentations and ways to focus on the growth areas of the company, I was very excited to take on CSG. One, I think it's tremendous growth opportunity, very exciting technologies, customers and markets. But also, I felt responsible some of the really key parts, and what we're spending a lot of R&D on in what became CSG are acquisitions that we made while I was in mobile, so Decawave for ultra-wideband, 7Hugs for software stack, NextInput for force sensors, and I'll talk about all that. But I personally had driven a lot of the key building blocks of what became CSG, so very, very excited to be in this. And I literally think, we are -- when it comes to connectivity and IoT and what we're doing in CSG, we're at the same point we were at mobile in 1994. The market is just about to finally really take off, and I think we're in a real driver seat right at the heart of it. So at a glance, just to cover what we're talking about when we talk about CSG, first off, we're starting from a great foundation, much more scale than like when we started the mobile business in 1994. We were literally starting with nothing. We're a $500 million business right out of the gate, a strong foundation, for example, in WiFi, broad-based WiFi across all markets, both in the enterprise part as well as in the mobile part. We have exposure to the best brands in the world. One of the other benefits in forming CSG is I've got personal relationships with the key ecosystem providers. If you're looking Apple, Samsung, Google, Xiaomi and so forth, been working with those companies for decades, and we have the ability to go in and really help influence their strategies. So we've got a great foundation to build off of. Now on top of that, we're adding the growth vectors we've talked about, Matter, BLE, Thread, WiFi and sensors. And I want to define for the group as well because it's really important what we're talking about even with those technologies. So you may have heard of ultra-wideband as Verizon's branded millimeter-wave service. That's not what we're talking about here. That's their brand name for that millimeter-wave service. So we're talking about an actual IEEE-defined standard broadband, short-pulse radio technology that was really developed by the company Decawave, which we acquired a few years ago. And it's got several really key benefits. The way it works is it shoots a very short pulse, a very broadband energy out and there's various bands but, say, 6 to 9 gigahertz of range, so high frequency broadband, short nanosecond pulse shot out, a receiver, another UWB radio receives that, and after a predetermined very precise time, sends it back to the original receiver. At that time, the original receiver knows the timing, now can calculate time of flight, knows precisely within a centimeter or 2 how far away it is from the other radio. If it, in turn, then ships it back to the other radio, they both know exactly where they are within a couple of centimeters of each other. If you have multiple antennas, they get 3-dimensional orientation. So ultra-wideband, what we're talking about is primarily used for this function of having precise 3D orientation of devices, all right? And that will come up over and over as we talk about what we can do with that now, right? Now along the way, there's other things that can do as well. It's basically a radar if you use it in that function because it's shooting a burst of high-frequency broadband energy out. That reflects of all kinds of things and comes back. So we're working on protocols and ways to use it for radar. I'll show you what we can do with that. So it's a very flexible technology. We've got the original people that invented it in our company. We've added a lot of resources there. So that's going to be a big part of what I talk about today. Also, force sensors. When we talk about that, sometimes you think of it as a touch sensor, and we're all used to using touch sensors, but mostly they're cap touch based. So it's a capacitive contact. You know that feeling when you touch your screen, for example, right? We're not talking about that. We're talking about a function like that but replaced with an actual strain gauge sensor. This is technology required for NextInput. So this actually works on pure force. And so it's a much more natural interface you can touch. When you touch, the force is registered, and it knows where precisely you're touching. There's a demo. I hope some of you got to try out there that 2-inch thick industrial plastic block. And if you press on it, we're showing in our demo, we can see it. So it's a nanometer of change we can feel the bottom of that 2-inch piece of plastic. And if you really play with it, it's also -- it's sensitive, right? So it's not just on or off. It knows how hard you're pressing as well. We'll talk about all of the things we can do with that and what we're doing in CSG. So similar to what you heard from Frank and Philip as well, we're -- we enjoy a large TAM in this area and actually a double-digit growing TAM. We've got mobile of course. We have applications within the mobile handset. Many, many, many other consumer electronic devices, I'll talk more about; automotive and expanding our footprint there with these same technologies; and then very exciting industry -- industrial and enterprise markets, which can be very, very large in the long term. So we're adding to the strong footprint we have in advanced cellular, adding on to a lot of those devices with much, much more content in our TAM. Now when we look at our SAM, it's even more exciting because it's growing even more fast, as you can imagine. And that's the expanding footprint we have, our portfolio of product sites we're building it out. We're only 2 years into CSG right now, but we've expanded our headcount dramatically. And our product portfolio is growing rapidly, and the solutions are becoming much more mature. Okay. So you've seen this chart twice now. We're highlighting specifically ultra-wideband and CSG in particular, is playing, obviously connectivity through WiFi and even through ultra-wideband in some parts. Mobility whether it's in the handset, the watches, we have solutions for all the mobility products. And then the AI datafication, and that's what I'll talk to, about RTLS, what we're doing in the industry, and you'll see the opportunities for the datafication of a lot of applications and how we can use that and enhance it. And the technologies we're bringing, especially the 2 I talked about, with 3D precise location, combine that with 3D functional force touch, the Matter standard unifying what was BLE, ZigBee and Thread now coming together in a universal standard called Matter. So all of these things are going to offer us upgrade cycles, which we're poised to take advantage of. And of course, we're focused on the things that matter to our customer, power efficiency, network speed, system-level integration and new applications. Okay. So going one click deeper here in how we're thinking about the business. So from our sort of home base of mobile, we're already very strong in mobile and consumer. These are sort of foundation industries for us today. In mobile, with the force sense touch, we think we have an opportunity to really impact new levels of user interfaces. You're going to see handsets -- a few are already in the field. A lot more are coming now that are leveraging that 3D touch capability. For example, you can -- on Google Maps, you could pick where you want to go. It's a location, push to zoom in on that location, zoom back out, right? We can also make slider functions on mobile phones on the edges of the phones, and these are sealed surfaces. They don't have to have gaskets and buttons, just the force on the side can be controlled with our sensors and do certain interface functions. Secure transactions are enabled, again, through our ultra-wideband. It's very highly secure technology. And data speed and reliability through WiFi, WiFi 6, WiFi 7, WiFi 8. The RF content there and our contribution continues to grow. Likewise, in consumer devices, bandwidth is going to continue to be at a premium, so helping to drive the evolution of WiFi. We call it the true smart home because with our technology with 3D positioning and knowledge, you've got a lot more context to the actions that you're making within a smart home. So it is a more true smart home, also more integrated. I'll take you through that as well. Now auto, we've had -- as I said, we've had a footprint in auto. You've also heard this from Philip. I mean we're already a valued supplier in the auto network. It's been mainly in the cellular connectivity base to date for us in our part of the business. Going forward, though, we've got a lot more impact we can have. The ultra-wideband is now adopted as the next-generation key fob, I'll take you through that, because it's a much more secure interface. The key fob, you know exactly where it is in relation to the car. It can't be sniffed and reproduced for example. It's more secure. So we've got a lot to play with there. And then our force sensors in the smart cockpit, one of the first markets that have really adopted our 3D force sensors has been in the cockpit of the car. It's a much more intuitive interface where you've touched the steering wheel or, as Dave mentioned, on the door handles and on the console. So a lot of new opportunities for us in automotive. And then as I mentioned, I'm especially excited about industrial and enterprise. It's a massive market with capabilities that we can add a tremendous amount of value. The harsh environment refers to the fact that we can have user interfaces on sealed surfaces, so you don't have buttons with gaskets that are -- can be corroded and have a reliability issue. You have a totally sealed surface that you can now interact with. Location and navigation is going to be a massive market. When you look at revolutionizing smart factories, when you know where things are within centimeters of each other, the densification within the factories, drones and people and robots interacting much, much closer together because you know precisely where everything is, you don't have to leave safety boundaries all over the place. So it's a great opportunity for us. Okay. So in terms of our portfolio itself, the technologies we've touched on, WiFi, obviously building off the core business and what we're doing in mobile, and we've been supplying mobile WiFi for some time, combining that now with the access point part of WiFi as well, combining those into one group under CSG, driving the technology road maps. Also cellular IoT, I mean, the -- yes, cellular IoT, long range, which leverages the mobile portfolio quite a bit. And then our new investments, Matter, ultra-wideband, which picks up BLE and the force sensing. So now when we say expansion, what we're really excited about is the opportunities of combining all those together for our customers, so helping them make really disruptive solutions because we're bringing in all of these elements together to help impact their form factors and what they can do with their products. The markets are foundation, mobile, right, no doubt, mobile handset, a valued supplier there, also in WiFi, the access points in industrial as well as consumer, and enterprise access points. This is our home turf. We're investing, as I said, to build more into auto, smart home, industrial IoT, in gaming and so forth, in PCs; and then long-term expansion, building into the mobility markets, touch markets, user interface markets and more RTLS. Building from the foundation of the key ecosystems who are well known today, as we've talked about, so if you're looking at Apple, Google, Samsung but also within, on the WiFi side, Comcast, Cisco, we're already very well integrated into their plans for technology road maps. And then we're moving beyond that into a set of focused customers, a few hundred customers that we're really taking our newer technology with. And longer term, we really want to be a broad portfolio supplier to thousands of customers. So complement the mobile business where you're very deep with a few large customers, we're starting there because it's our home turf. Long term, we're moving the CSG model to where it's much more of a portfolio business and thousands and thousands of customers that are able to order products and use them without much support from us. All right. So I'll take you through just exactly as Philip did a few vignettes of what we're talking about here. So in the mobile and consumer markets, we're really helping our customers innovate. You can think about, in mobile, the secure payments becoming a reality now with ultra-wideband, the contextual awareness of 3D. So if you look at video gaming, for example, AI, VI sort of headsets and so forth, in the mobile industry, you're going to start seeing your phone interact with other devices around it because it's aware of where they are exactly, and there's context there. Suddenly, your phone has context of what you're trying to do, who you're trying to do it with or what you're trying to interact with. So we have the ability to affect that. The UWB market is really just beginning to take off. There's several hundred million, nearly 1 billion UWB nodes out there. But as you can probably imagine, they're almost exclusively Apple today. Apple has built out the ecosystem broadly. We think 2 things. Now that we've got the maturity in the solutions now, they're beginning to go throughout Android and other ecosystems, and second -- and also consistent with that, Matter protocol unifying these interactions. We see that now going much more broadly in the ecosystem. So when you think of the consumer market and mobile markets sort of interacting, this is where we talk about the true smart home. So if you're looking at Apple with their own ecosystem there, they got the HomeKit. You've got Samsung SmartThings ecosystem, Google's got Google Home. These are some of the large ecosystems, which we're very much a part of and integrating our technologies with them, but there's going to be a lot more, right? You've got -- when you're looking at the consumer and especially the smart home applications, there are literally dozens of product categories in your homes. So as soon as you're used to using your phone to open your car, as you -- some of you are already doing, when -- that's enabled by UWB. You're going to expect to open your house the same way. So smart locks, we've got examples out there of a company called Last Lock, very interesting, UWB-enabled door handle, door lock for your home. And when you turn the handle, that, actually, kinetic energy recharges the battery. That's why they call it Last Lock, but it's UWB enabled, use your smartphone, highly secure access. There are so many, many examples like this. If you go throughout the phone, Nest thermostats, for example. Smart lighting is a -- smart lighting will be one of the ones that's really taking off. You can go to Home Depot today and buy smart lightbulbs. They're not that easy to use. There aren't great smart hubs yet to where the whole home can be coordinated, but it's coming very rapidly. The technology is maturing. Go into security systems, audio, obviously your audio system throughout the house. You can control your lighting if you wish with your phone. It knows which room you're in, so you can control the temperature, the lighting of the room based on who's in it. I mean these are the sorts of things you can expect to come enabled by our technologies. And just outside the home, you may have seen -- I think, we've announced we're working with the company on robotic mowers for your yard. And actually, this is an application that had already been started even when we acquired Decawave, but it's gotten a lot better since we've improved ultra-wideband. And so for every mower, you actually have a number of anchors that you set around your yard, which defines the perimeter, and then the mower knows with centimeter accuracy where it is and can automatically keep the yard mowed essentially. Would it work in a lot of yards? Possibly, but there are many, many yards in which it works very well. So the possibilities are practically endless for how this technology, when all combined, can really affect people's lives. So the more -- defining the user interface. So we talked about the contextual awareness. So we combine force sensing with ultra-wideband. We can really make any surface at all an input surface. So we talked about sliders on the phone. We talk about being able to press on a table to enter an order for example, the inside of the automobile being completely programmable based on where you touch. And with UWB, we add the contextual awareness piece because we know where you are, so we can anticipate what you're trying to do, right? It's not just a dumb input. It knows what you're trying to do. The radar function allows presence detection. That can be used for several things. So if you have a UWB-enabled light switch, for example, it can not only be used by your phone, it can know when you're -- when you pass by. It can add context to what you're trying to do. Essentially, there's many applications for that. And when we look at security, the access being driven from your mobile phone, that's security that's built from ultra-wideband. So it's really about taking the technologies that we acquired, adding the core D&A that we had within Qorvo and then scaling these technologies into these new use cases. In automotive, as I mentioned, we have a strong foundation there today. We've been a qualified supplier for many years. working in telematics, in the infotainment system with WiFi and also the NAD, the network access device, which gives you the cellular connectivity in your car. That's sort of home base for us today, going very well. However, with the formation of CSG, we're really putting a significant strong push into more capabilities in automotive. We have a strong network already of contacts throughout automotive. Our people are well integrated into the key OEMs and ODMs. And so we've got a lot of opportunities for this land-and-expand strategy that you heard earlier. It's a perfect example of how we're applying that in CSG. So although the car unit market, as you probably know, is flat to up slightly, not growing a lot in units, the content expansion for us is double digit. So we think it's roughly a 10% to 12% CAGR for the content that we're investing in. V2X is a market that's already being deployed today. It's just beginning to roll out. I'm sure several of you have heard about. That's where the vehicles can talk to everything, V2X. They talk to each other. When I say talk, they communicate to each other, to traffic lights to bicycles and so forth. So eventually, the idea is a much, much safer environment because the cars have contextual awareness of what's around them and what's going on. So that's being mandated in Europe to begin with, and then it's going throughout the rest of the world. We're well positioned there with the RF components that drive V2X. Ultra-wideband, as I mentioned, is just getting started there. The next-generation key fobs have adopted ultra-wideband primarily because of the security originally. Again, as you probably are aware, these key fobs can be sniffed by someone and then can be reproduced to open and unlock your car and take your stuff, right? So UWB cannot be sniffed because you have to have -- be in the exact same 3D location to be recognized as the right user. So that was the original impetus for that, and that's taking off now. And all cars will have ultra-wideband in them, and then you'll have the key fob. Another advantage, though, is once you have that sort of digital interface, you don't actually need the key fob anymore. So your mobile phone now is your car key. And so that's an advantage. You don't have to carry a car key, but it also enables then you can share your car key. You can share your car. So I could give Doug a 2-hour use of my car with a key that expires in 2 hours, and he can use it, borrow it, take it, do what he needs to do, and then his key won't work after the time. So this is a perfect example, and this happens over and over, where we enter with a given technology for a given purpose. Once it's in there, you find other ways to leverage it. I'll cover other examples of that as well. And then the digital cockpit. It's kind of surprising. In automotive, generally, it takes a long time to get a new technology into new designs. Our force touch stuff has really taken off very, very rapidly. And mostly, it's in EV. So EVs are looking to like -- they want the cockpit to feel different, right? They want it to feel innovative and do different things, and we give them that capability. So as I mentioned, solid surfaces, now you can have indentation or color or something to let the user know where the function is, but these aren't buttons that have to move. They don't have gaskets and all that. They're totally solid surfaces. You can use them to swipe. You can use it to push in, to zoom and control things in what's a much more natural tactile way. And that's really taking off, and we're in Teslas, and many, many, many EV manufacturers are already adopting our force touch technology in the cockpit. And that alone is a couple of hundred-million-dollar SAM over the next few years. So going one click deeper in the automotive example. So we talked about digital car key, and once you have the -- the way it works is you put anchors, UWB anchors inside the cockpit of the car. People are looking at different ways. There's 4 to 6 ultra-wideband anchors within each car for the digital car key function, some on the outside, some on the inside, but there definitely will be multiple sensors in the cockpit. And so once we have that -- and this is an example where we work directly with auto OEMs instead of just the Tier 1 suppliers that we normally would. So we worked with the Tier 1s, the Boschs, the DENSOs and so forth, the Continentals to get the UWB access, car access in there. Once the car manufacturer looks at that, the manufacturer's saying what else could I do with this function, and a very, very interesting example is child presence detection. So this is going through regulations now. Very shortly, it will be regulated. If a manufacturer wants to get a 5-star rating, 5-star safety rating for their car, they're going to have to enable child presence detection. It's a tragic issue, but unfortunately, there have been many, many deaths caused by children being left in cars, pets for that matter, too, with closed windows. That cabin heats up. And so we have the ability now. We have radar. Our ultra-wideband radios are in the car. They can now function as radar, and we can actually detect breathing, and we can actually -- with artificial intelligence, we can learn how to track exactly where -- what's in the car, where it is, and we can distinguish whether it's a pet or a small child. And if the cabin temperature gets a certain time -- it's been a certain time, we could begin to alert with -- not we, the automotive manufacturer has ways to then signal. We can signal the driver. You can flash the lights, honk the horn, get attention before it becomes a fatal situation. So this is being regulated. Every manufacturer is going to want a 5-star rating. They're going to need to implement this function, and we can do it with what we already have. Other features besides that one, the kick sensor that some cars, you can use your foot to open the trunk. Once we have the UWB anchor out there, that can be replaced as well. That can work as the kick function. So another example of sort of land and expand. Get in. Once you're there for a core reason, find other ways to add value. Now industrial and enterprise. As I mentioned, this is one that I'm really excited about, the opportunity for really changing our customer scope and reach. It is a longer time to develop. This market will take years to develop, but we're already off to a very good start. So again, ultra-wideband is pretty important here because it can know where things are to each other, but then also BLE and Matter for just universal connectivity. So what's the factories? If you take a factory today, this works for factories. It also works for distribution centers. The key metric they're looking for is how to get more value out of the floor space they have, right? So they're turning to lots of automation. They're using -- already using drones to do inspections and inventory accounting and so forth. They're using more robotics to move things around. And the issue is without knowing where those things are precisely, you have to leave a lot of extra room. Drones, in particular, can vary quite a bit as they're zooming around. You can't have people close to drones as they're flying by. Robotics as well are dangerous if you're too close to them, if you don't know precisely where they are. So adding ultra-wideband into the factory situation gives the factory a much more efficient. You can make the aisles much narrower, pack a lot more density in. You can put ultra-wideband or a tag on every single pallet, know where every single pallet is absolutely within centimeters in your entire factory. Right now, there's a lot of efficiency lost in factories because pallets disappear. Somebody puts them in the wrong place, right? Where you're not depending upon a person to do this now, the ultra-wideband knows exactly where it is. So we think this segment alone is greater than a $5 billion SAM for us over the long term. We're addressing a bit of it today, but we've got plans to expand significantly, adding the RF capability we have with this fundamental 3D sensing and then having the Matter capability to build the backbone for it. And once you think about that for the factory situation, the really exciting part is we can now actually enable true indoor navigation. So just as I mentioned in a factory, how the ultra-wideband lets you make the factories tighter because you're very, very accurate, we now -- because we know which side of a wall you're on, which has been the key missing factor since we've got centimeter scale accuracy, if you're in a building, we know which side of a wall you're on. Well, that's the key to enabling indoor navigation. So Google Maps 20 years ago, right, was just getting started. Now today, most of us probably can't even imagine unfolding a paper map to get someplace, right? In fact, we use, I use Google Maps to go places I go every day just because it may know a faster route. There may be an accident someplace, right? I, at least, am very dependent upon Google Maps and other navigation software, right? But as soon as you walk into a building, you're back to like, if it's the first time you've been there, trying to find a directory. You're walking around trying to figure out what the room labeling means and what room number you're trying to find. All of that is about to go away. Exactly the same paradigm is going to work itself out now. So we're working with enterprise access providers to get the ultra-wideband infrastructure put in place. You can think of, for example, WiFi access points being UWB enabled. There are some people that -- in fact, a lot of people that are looking at putting ultra-wideband into the fluorescent lights, so the lighting in industrial or enterprise building will provide the framework for the infrastructure for location services. And then with that, your phone, of course, will be your central point for having the ability to navigate around these buildings. So this is a massive opportunity when you look at the size of the spaces that we can enable with indoor navigation. Okay. So those are -- gives you some idea of the areas that we're focused on now, taking a broad step, taking a step backwards and seeing where we are today. We sort of acquired and built the foundation from the mobile business plus several key acquisitions. We've scaled the team now. We have over 400 engineers in SoCs. These people came from leaders in this industry. We've got a very strong technical team. We're investing now to drive the technology. We've released Matter now in 22 nanometer. We're one of the first companies to get Matter certification. So we're not starting from behind when you look at SoCs for Matter, BLEs, UWB, Thread. For those sort of applications, we're right there at the forefront of it now. So we're getting into our stride. We're becoming -- we're releasing chips on time, getting the right technologies out, broad customer interactions. So now we really want to expand that going forward. So leverage all these things I talked to you about, the ecosystem relationships we have, the RF expertise, the ability to produce billions of devices reliably at low cost, so we're leveraging all that Qorvo has to offer and now moving into these specific markets like RTLS and so forth, which will really add a very strong and durable revenue to the company. All right. So just as the others have, I'll just summarize here at the end. We've put together a portfolio of businesses and technologies, which we think address a very attractive set of markets. And together in our SAM, we see something like a 20% growth opportunity here long term. We've got the right technologies, the right customer relationships, and we're building up a strong foundation here, so we expect to get strong double-digit growth in CSG and continue to expand, diversify, in particular, the company's exposure to new industries and trends. Thank you. And now I'll turn it over to Grant.

Grant Brown

executive
#7

All right. Well, thanks very much, Eric. For those of you I haven't had the pleasure of meeting, I'm Grant Brown, and I appreciate all of the feedback that we received from the investor survey. It has been incorporated today. You've been heard. And as always, we welcome all of your input. And hopefully, we've answered quite a number of your questions. I've had the pleasure of being at Qorvo since its inception, a little over 10 years ago, and I've been the CFO now for about 2 years. And again, I want to thank you for your attention today, appreciate your feedback. And if you have any further questions after this is done in Q&A, you can always reach out to Doug DeLieto or myself. Before I get started, I did want to touch on a theme that I think has been woven throughout all of the presentations today. Hopefully, you've picked up on it, and that's the concept of complexity. This theme is an evergreen opportunity for Qorvo. Not only does it recycle itself in various ways. There are multiple drivers and megatrends that are fueling it, but there's also this concept of it accelerating. It's getting ever more complicated. And as that happens, Qorvo has had the opportunity to move upstream, become more of a systems level engineering company as we incorporate that into our products. And really, productizing that complexity for our customers has given us the seat at the table that you've heard from all the business presidents today. We then take those products and look to profit from them, obviously, for our shareholders. But in order to do so, it requires 3 primary things. Firstly, we need to maintain our technology leadership. Secondly, we need to maintain our manufacturing leadership and expertise, both internal and external. And then finally, we need to maintain our operational efficiency, and that gets to our core systems and processes as well as the tools we use to achieve those. As we do that and as we execute toward our financial model, which I'll get to in a minute, we'll drive the goals Bob mentioned at the beginning across growth, profitability and diversification. All right. With that, I want to provide a bit of a historical context. Qorvo is not the same company today that it was over 10 years ago. As you can see from up to fiscal '24, which may not be a great representation, had just come out of the whipsaw associated with COVID and the inventory correction that we're emerging from now, but even still, we've grown the top line 45% over that time period and even twice as much from a free cash flow perspective at 90%. Our technologies have advanced. Our product portfolios have grown. Our diversification's increased. We have made adjustments to our factory footprint. And of course, we resegmented the business to provide management focus on the areas that you heard about today. The growth hasn't been in a straight line, but we've managed through it. For example, as Philip pointed out, our second largest customer was banned due to trade tensions a number of years ago, which impacted our base station and our smartphone component sales masking some of the growth elsewhere. But we responded as share shifted. We emerged stronger and have focused on our customers throughout all of the -- all of these disruptions. Our technology and overall importance to the ecosystems that we support is what helps insulate us from some of those cross currents and allows us to continue to grow over the longer term. And the key takeaway I'd like to point out here is that of financial resiliency. Looking at that, a little bit more depth. Most recently, we experienced an inventory correction that we're just emerging from now. We've talked about it on most of our earnings calls. But from fiscal '22 to '23, revenue fell 23%, so single largest decline in Qorvo's history. It's a significant change from a revenue perspective, and Qorvo was early to recognize it. We had the severity of the situation that was caused by COVID, the supply and demand swings and the resulting whipsaw in the factories, but we reacted quickly. We took decisive action to address the situation. We cut utilization, renegotiated a large long-term supply agreement. We rationalized our variable and semi-variable costs and delayed CapEx plans. And in the end, speaks to our importance of the ecosystems we support and the financial resiliency. I'm proud to say that -- through it all, we didn't record a single quarter of negative free cash flow. Now $5 million is pretty small for a company of our size, so we cut it a little close. But nonetheless, it's still positive. So we're all very proud of that. We learned from the experiences both the peaks and the troughs, and we'll be applying that as we go forward. All right. You've seen this slide before. Bob presented it earlier. Now that we're past the inventory correction on the far left, you can see -- we began shipping back to end customer demand. I can't do this more justice than Bob did, but this is really our strategy on a single slide. It sets up each of the businesses and shows how we're going to build to our financial model. Dave covered the increasing breadth in our customer base, and you heard from Philip, Eric and Frank, who laid out the plans to grow each of those business segments. It's important to note that we're actively changing the revenue mix. The growth differential in our segments over time should lead to our goal of getting to over 50% of our top line coming from HPA and CSG. Our value proposition doesn't end with the hardware, but as Eric pointed out, now extends into the software areas, the systems and helps our customers achieve their goals in the end market applications. All of these ongoing investments in our foundational franchises plus the expansion opportunities that we have in new areas will support the 3 primary objectives along the bottom in terms of growing revenue, increasing our diversification and enhancing our profitability. Okay. In order to achieve those growth goals and the revenue diversification, it requires us to be nimble, and we've talked a lot about reducing our capital intensity. It's really the solution and the key manufacturing strategy that will help us get there. The 3 components to consider are internal manufacturing, our external partners and the mix between them. Internally, we'll continue to execute on the cost initiatives and productivity improvements that we've spoken of in the past. These are increasing wafer sizes, continuing to maintain and improve our yields, will be shrinking dye sizes and reducing our overall device sizes. This is a classic semiconductor playbook, and we're executing it very well. All of these things go to lowering costs for our internal production. On external basis, we're looking to gain more access to the scale that we don't have to invest in ourselves. The recent divestiture of our Beijing and Dijon facilities to Luxshare is a great example. They're a terrific partner. They have meaningful scale, and the team went to great effort in order to achieve operational readiness in 4 months, which speaks to both the capabilities internally for Qorvo as well as our partner in Luxshare. There's many, many alternatives for Qorvo. We also partnered with Amkor and many others, and we maintain a strong OSAT partner network that we can leverage their scale and their investments as they reinvest in R&D. So the question would then be, well, why is that important? And obviously, as we look to maintain this robust network of outside partners, it provides Qorvo with flexibility. We can choose amongst options on an external basis that optimize our cost or performance based on the market that we're serving, and we don't have to maintain all of those options in-house at our expense. And finally, the mix between internal production and external production is important. And this is what we get -- this is where we talk about when I get to capital intensity, is that we're going to manufacture internally where it differentiates our products and then we're going to leverage this network of external partners where we benefit from both our technology and scale as well as a broader set of options. As we do this, we do expect it to increase our gross margin over time as we optimize. We have reduced our capital intensity thus far, we expect that there's still opportunities to move further. We're committed to our 50%-plus gross margin target and have a plan and a path to get there. It will not be a step function jump, as I commented on in our calls, but it will come first in seasonally strong quarters before we record an entire year of plus 50%. I think at this point, it's safe to say we're past the normalization phase where we've emerged from the inventory correction, we're selling to end customer demand. The channel inventory is cleared. And now as I commented on the last quarter, we are clearing through the high-cost inventories that were built during periods of lower factory utilizations. Next phase comes to the utilization phase where -- as I remember in my time in the capital markets, they used to say the markets would take the elevator down and the stairs back up. I think the same thing is true for utilization. We reacted quickly to the demand imbalance that we saw coming out of COVID, and we are now taking strides to increase that utilization as our customers as their demand increases, but there's a strong sensitivity to not recreating the inventory correction that we just emerged from. Once we get through that utilization, which we haven't seen work its way into the P&L yet completely, we will get into an optimization phase where we'll continue to evaluate our factory footprint, and we have more work to do on that front. And finally, we get to diversification. So this is really the key from the prior slide about what we're doing to grow alternative areas of our business outside of mobile handsets into HPA, CSG and combining more than 50% of our top line. All those factors will build on each other. They're not necessarily sequential. They overlap, but it's this confluence of factors and tailwinds that will help us improve gross margin over time. From a OpEx perspective, I spoke to the complexity and speed of change, all of which are growing, and we're investing to benefit from those. In terms of R&D, it's over 2/3 of our spend. So we're allocating our dollars towards areas where we can generate revenue. And we're looking to be efficient in sales, general and administrative expense. In order to drive that revenue growth, we're investing in our existing product portfolio, new technologies, and in terms of the sales effort, Dave pointed out the efforts that we're making to broaden our customer base as well as invest those dollars in tools that will help them find and buy our products. In sales -- excuse me, in terms of G&A, efficiency is critical. We're upgrading the core systems that we use to run our business and the processes that are built around them. We're challenging ourselves to turn over every rock and find the areas where we can be more efficient. And we're just on the beginning phases of a digital transformation to modernize our tools and the systems and core capabilities that we are required to use in order to achieve the operating leverage we expect in our operating model. On that front, complexity is increasing. There's also complexity internally in order to manage a complex supply chain, and there's new challenges today that we're not here 25 years ago when these legacy systems were developed and deployed. We have the opportunity to move to the cloud for broader interoperability across all of our digital assets. There's new methods and tools for production planning for demand forecasting, in fact, there are hundreds of basis points of margin opportunity on the table for Qorvo to unlock related to excess obsolete material, material flows, the optimized pricing, production scheduling and many, many other areas associated with this digital transformation. As I said, we're looking at every single process. We have a focus on ROI for this project. And we're confident that these investments will help us achieve our financial model. Without further ado, here's our financial model. I think there's a lot to be excited about. There's a multitude of megatrends, upgrade cycles and secular drivers that provide the growth across each of the business segments that you've heard today. Philip, Eric and Frank covered the growth rates. Dave covered the sales efforts in order to achieve those. And I've covered some of the gross margin drivers. All segments will benefit, as we pointed out, BAW filters are used in multiple areas of our business. The factories are used in across multiple products. And as you've seen in some of the examples out in the hallway, all of the dye, up to 3 dozen of them going into a single product can be sourced from anywhere in the world, including our own factories and those of our of our partners. As we grow, we'll expect to achieve the top end of our operating margin goals. We'll see the full benefit of lower capital intensity, higher operating leverage is enabled by our digital transformation, our broader customer base and product portfolio and a more diverse revenue stream. Over time, the business mix will also change substantially. The business mix from HPA and CSG will combine to be over 50% down the road, and that will benefit the diversification as well as our gross margin. As it happens, I think there's opportunity to do even better than what we've got on the right-hand side of the screen. As we achieve our target financial model, it's going to throw off a significant amount of cash flow. Since inception, we have reinvested about $14 billion of the cash that we've created. We've maintained a balanced approach and expect to continue to do so. We've retired over 1/3 of the shares outstanding, as Bob pointed out, and we're committed to our share repurchase going forward. M&A has always been opportunistic by nature, and we'll remain active there in areas where it can augment our business. R&D is the lifeblood of our business and our product portfolio, and it creates the differentiation that we need to remain competitive and profitable. And finally, as I mentioned, the share repurchases will commit to over time as our primary mode of returning capital to shareholders. In terms of debt capital structure, we are looking to reduce our leverage. We have our 2024 notes expiring this December and barring any massive changes in the interest rate environment, we do expect to retire those notes. Outside of that, we have no other near-term maturities. We just refreshed and upsized our credit facility to $325 million, which remains undrawn. And we have over $1 billion in cash, a strong liquidity position and remain committed to our investment-grade rating profile. We're in the early phases of the journey of transforming our business across multiple dimensions. The business mix, our manufacturing footprint, core systems, improving to meet our financial targets, and we're confident in the business and our competitive positioning. We serve large addressable markets and have ample opportunities for growth and diversification. We're a technology leader who our customers rely on to solve their most complicated challenges. We're excited and passionate about our business and expect to deliver on the promise of revenue growth, increasing diversification and improved profitability. I want to thank you all again for your interest and for joining us today in person and online. That wraps up our formal presentation. But before we turn to Q&A, if you give us a minute, I'd like to bring everybody back on stage. We'll clear off the podium, and then we'll get started with your questions. Thank you.

Doug DeLieto

executive
#8

So as I said, we conclude at 11:30. So we'll have about 30, 40 minutes of [indiscernible] on me. But if you can, we'll have 2 mic runners. And if you just ask a question and a follow-up, that would be great. Gentlemen? flow forward.

Thomas O'Malley

analyst
#9

This is Tom O'Malley with Barclays. So you've seen this transition over years of moving away from the RF business. It's a really nice plan, seeing HPA, CSG as a bigger percentage of revenue. So if you look at the CAGRs from 2018 and 2019, they look more like kind of mid-single digits. And obviously, you have the Huawei headwind that you kind of described, and that's a factor of that difference in growth rates. But when you look forward, what gives you the confidence? I mean you're showing SAMs that are 20-plus percent. You're saying strong double-digit growth, but what gives you the confidence that you're going to grow at that higher rate longer term? And like what is happening in those markets that gives you that confidence just because it's a big jump from what you've seen historically even with the Huawei mix added in.

Robert Bruggeworth

executive
#10

Yes. Great question. We had very strong growth, as you know, up until a couple of years ago with what will happen and really appreciate that. What I think is most important, I'll let each one of the business units talk about it, and Dave can add some color as well. What we do have is the opportunity to get the return on a lot of the acquisitions we made. And some of those markets didn't develop as fast as we expected, ultra-wideband being one, Matter, things like that. The sensor business is just beginning. So I think that's why you're seeing the higher growth rates that we see in those areas. And then if you look at what we've done on the power side, quite honestly, we bought active years ago. It's had great IP. We didn't do much with it. And I think bringing in a leader such as Philip, who has that experience and expertise and has also brought in a lot more talent to leverage that IP is also going to drive that to grow a lot faster. So that's the primary thing. And then you look at Frank's business, we've said for several years, we've been underrepresented at our largest customer, and that's where we've made significant changes in our investment. We worked very hard to have a very diversified business in Frank's business but we're underrepresented now at our largest customer, and that's where we after. But Eric, anything you want to add to that?

Steven Creviston

executive
#11

You covered CSG really well. I think you were talking about greenfield technology, ultra-wideband is an example of that where there's it's going to be a rate and pace of just getting the applications out there, the infrastructure, but the use cases are just tremendous. So we're estimating at least how quickly that infrastructure is going to be put in place and things roll out. And that's -- that's our best estimate kind of high double digits.

Philip Chesley

executive
#12

I'll just maybe add one thing to that. I think also when we re-segmented and we put a single sales force in, I think big benefits from that. And I can talk just on the power management side. When we first -- when I first took over, it took us about a year to really kind of look at the technology, kind of position it. We had to -- we re-segmented, we had to get Dave's organization in place. Today, I have more power management opportunities than I have resources. I mean it's completely flipped, right? And so I think that's an important point not to miss as well.

Thomas O'Malley

analyst
#13

Helpful. And then just as a follow-up, I think this is more of a CFO question, but you laid out kind of the growth profiles and then also the operating structure of the 3 businesses. And you've kind of indicated that CSG is going to be the fastest-growing with HPA and CSG, but CSG tends to have the lower operating profile. And you're kind of describing the total company operating margins at 30% to 35%, but the CSG business is a little bit lower than that. If that's the biggest grower, how do you get to that operating structure?

Steven Creviston

executive
#14

Yes, sure. So I mean, to start with, it's a smaller component of the business, right? So let's just kind of put that into perspective in terms of the overall mix of the business today. So it's being smaller. It's currently a negative operating margin today, and we're expecting it to go positive. So getting to the target in CSG is admirable target to start with, I think it can get even better than that as the scale increases over time. If you look at some of the other examples out in the market today for businesses pre-adoption, if you will, or as adoption is just starting to come into focus for the UWB area. That's, I think, in line with it. The final point I'd make on that is that over half of that business today in CSG is currently WiFi. That WiFi business is suffering from underutilization in our North Carolina gas fab, which I've talked about, and that will relieve itself over time. But it will take some time, and that's having an impact on the overall operating margin target for that business. So as that gets resolved, we'll optimize factory footprint. I think there's a lot more potential there to do better than our current target.

Gary Mobley

analyst
#15

Gary Mobley with Wells Fargo Securities. Bob, forgive me if I miss paraphrase this, but you mentioned in your prepared remarks "agreements in place with your largest customer to help frame your investments". And I know you're probably going to be unwilling to share all those details with respect to your largest customers, but there's a general framework for those focus accounts like that. What sort of guarantees do you like to have in place? Are we talking about R&D co-investment? Are we talking about purchase agreements? Any details that you can give there would be helpful.

Robert Bruggeworth

executive
#16

I appreciate the question very much. As you know, with all of our customers, we have NDAs, so we can't get into a lot of details. But what I can say is what we feel comfortable in is we've developed the technologies, the products, and I think you look at some of the innovation that we talked about today, we feel good about our road maps. We talk a lot about our larger customers, our focus customers that we go out 3 years in the road maps and get good alignment, and we feel good about our chances to win. And that's about all I can say about that, Gary, because again, a lot of what we do with every 1 of our customers, not just our largest customers covered by NDAs, but I feel very good about how the team is executing, what we've done up to this point and all of our customers. I mean, Dave talked about and Frank also talked about how well, we've done at Samsung as an example, and you look at the content gains we have had on our largest customer over the years and continuing to add to different products that we sell to them.

Gary Mobley

analyst
#17

If I can ask a follow-up question. There's a case to be made for a large transformative acquisition, which would check the boxes of diversity maybe could lead to some valuation rerating for your shares. So what are the internal discussions between deciding to buy back your own market cap, in a share buyback or making some large transformative acquisition and maybe if you can just maybe give us some details on what would check all the boxes in terms of size and diversity and growth and margin profile and whatnot.

Robert Bruggeworth

executive
#18

Yes. Thanks, Gary. Good question. First and foremost, and the team will tell you this, first thing I'd say is explain to me why we're a better owner, Explain to me why we're going to make that business better. So that gets to what kind of synergies are we going to get. Revenue synergies, as you guys all know, are very hard to achieve. So a lot of times, it comes to OpEx. So what I would tell you is when we look to put together RFMD and TriQuint, it was very clear, putting those 2 companies together would be -- we can make it a better company than they were separately. We could drive a lot of synergies, drive a lot of growth. So we would look at the same thing to make a diversification play for our business, who's out there that we would actually create shareholder value. Unfortunately, a lot of those diversification plays have much higher trading multiples and things like that, and they're very expensive, right? And that's expensive. So you have to look at it from all those different dimensions, but it really comes down to the core, why are we going to make that better? So if you look at what we have done, yes, we've bought smaller companies, some pre-revenue, some based on technology, some with revenue that we felt we could scale. And that's really what you're hearing about from Philip and Eric are those types of acquisitions where we felt we were a better owner, and we can scale them and drive diversification. It does take longer, but I believe today, based on what's out there. Now you also have a higher-level thing of trying to get deals done, whether it's now the U.S. or anything that needs China approval is quite challenging. And even if there's not much overlap in businesses, China tends to drag its feet. It's also probably not going to let a U.S. company acquire a company outside the United States. So that reduces what's available out there. So when you're in that limbo of waiting for approvals, employees get nervous and you run the risk of actually reducing the strength of your own business. So it really has to be compelling, really has to be compelling.

Vijay Rakesh

analyst
#19

This is Vijay from Mizuho. Thanks for hosting me even that -- this is very helpful. So -- but I just want to ask a quick question on the AI handset side. If you look at -- can you lay out what the content increases when you look at an AI-enabled phone versus what has been the traditional phone in the past prior years, I guess, either from RF or connectivity, et cetera, so.

Frank Stewart

executive
#20

Yes. This is Frank. I'll take that one. Probably the best way for me to say it concisely is to look at the RF content in a flagship smartphone that we talked about today. So that flagship smartphone has a lot more of the integrated modules that we talked about and a lot more RF content in those integrated modules. So the mix of kind of mass market versus flagship, we see shifting to more of that flagship look and feel of RF content because of AI. We also see the antenna tuning content being more prevalent you're probably going to get upgraded power management, RF power management in solution. So that -- the way -- the reason we presented the slides that way around AI and flagship smartphones kind of being paired together was for that purpose because we see a flagship smartphone in the associated RF content being a good proxy for what happens as AI drives that are the hardware side of the phone.

Vijay Rakesh

analyst
#21

Got it. And just a quick follow-up. On high-performance analog presentation, I guess, you talked about gallium nitride kind of moving away from the PA multiplexer side. Can you talk to gallium nitride in automotive? How much content growth are you seeing there? How much -- what do you see the industry content in gallium nitride in orders today? Where do you see that, let's say, 3 years out, 4 years out? And where do you see Qorvo in there?

Philip Chesley

executive
#22

GaN in automotive is mostly GaN on silicon, not GaN on silicon carbide. So that's not an area that we're addressing today. But do think just from a general trend perspective, you'll see GaN on silicon in some of the sockets. We see it competitive in the onboard charging side of things as well. Really, the way that I view it is if 600 volts and below, you can see GaN on silicon carbide or GaN on silicon as a competitive technology, really still 600 volts and above. It's really silicon carbide technology.

Matthew Ramsay

analyst
#23

Matt Ramsay from TD Cowen. So my first question, I think, is probably for all of you, but maybe I'll start with Dave. I mean we've seen companies over the years kind of do the squeeze box of let me take the sales force and distribute it and then bring it back together and distributed and bring back together and everybody has their own, I don't know, business school version of what's the best structure. I guess -- maybe you could give a little bit of the pros and cons for Qorvo and how you guys made that decision. And I guess the second part of that question is, we've kind of been together as an industry through the mother of all inventory corrections with what happened with COVID on the back end of that. Does the new structure give you any additional visibility to inventory levels at customers.

David Fullwood

executive
#24

Yes. So on the first question, you're right, there's no right and wrong way to organize. I think what we tried to present today was the value that we're seeing and having a single sales force and a single combined corporate marketing organization, is we look at the entire channel as one channel, and we think about how do we grow the entire business across all the different business groups. So some of the land and expand examples we gave we probably wouldn't have executed so well on a couple of years ago because our sales force was fairly focused on 2 separate business groups and there wasn't a lot of collaboration going on across the different sales organizations and the business units on the other side. Now that's gone. So when my team goes in and they're talking to the end customers and all of us on the stage here have experiences as well. The door is wide open. When we're in there talking about Frank's products, the very next discussion is, okay, let's talk about what we can do for you in power management. And truly, Philip shared some of the examples of where we've got clear opportunities now there that we're executing on to bring new power management in not just the RF power management into the smartphone, for example. So we see huge benefits in how that's playing out. Is that giving us better visibility. I think as Grant pointed out, we've made a -- we've learned a lot, and we've made some investments. We buy a lot more external reports that we can see better into the channels. We have more intelligent discussions with our customers about what is in their channel and how much inventory they're carrying on their shelves. And this is now integrated in all of our forecast processes. So we talk through all these details with our business unit colleagues as we roll up those forecasts. And so we have much better visibility into what's going on in the channel than we did probably going into the COVID experience that we all saw.

Matthew Ramsay

analyst
#25

Got it. Just as a follow-up for Grant. You guys -- you gave the 10% plus revenue CAGR target and then some pretty dramatically different operating margin targets out at the back end, what's going to happen with utilization, what's going to happen with growth, et cetera. So I guess the question is, if we think about 24% to 29%, what's the shape of that? Is this a really back-end loaded model because that's some of the questions I've been getting here on e-mail.

Grant Brown

executive
#26

Yes, it's a good question. If you think about the stages of growth, right? ACG in the very near term as we expand that business and go to our largest customer, where we're underrepresented, there's a significant amount of opportunity for us there in the coming couple of years. As you look into the power management businesses and then beyond that UWB, as Dave pointed out, some of those have sort of longer periods of time in order to get engaged and get the flywheel going. It does have the benefit of over time, maybe addressing the first question, how are you going to maintain that growth today being more heavily weighted in the smartphone area with growth rate in the SAM, will transition over time. And the revenue base begins to shift, the mix shifts, and we'll be participating in the future on larger opportunities for growth. It's not back-end loaded. If you think of the revenue growth, we're touching on today, it's greater than 10%. We've talked at length about fiscal '25 that we're in today. So nothing to add there. But as we look into fiscal '26 and to fiscal '27, if you want a rule of thumb in terms of gross margin for every incremental, call it, $100 million of business or so, we should add 50 points in gross margin, is a rough rule of thumb. It will work for fiscal '26 and '27. That's pretty significant in the very near term. So it's not back-end loaded, if you will. OpEx, again, we're looking to be as efficient as possible. Philip touched on some of the areas that we're moving out of in order to finance and fund better growth opportunities internally. So we're being disciplined on the OpEx front. And then for our digital transformation, we're calling that out separately. So you can see the actual business performance that some of that OpEx might otherwise be masking. So I don't think it's necessarily back-end loaded. I think we've got some great near-term, midterm and long-term opportunities to achieve it. And as I said, as we get the revenue mix towards 50% CSG and HPA is probably the longest term goal that we laid out today. But as we achieve that, I think there's opportunity to do better.

Christopher Rolland

analyst
#27

Chris Rolland, Susquehanna. Grant, this one is probably going to be for you, and you answered probably a lot of my question in your last answer. But gross margin greater than 50%. A lot of people are looking at that 50% as kind of the important line in the sand. Might we hit that before fiscal '29. I think the answer is yes. But can you walk us from the $45 million to that $50 million and the importance of all these driving factors, utilization mix and some of the other cost benefits for manufacturing you were talking about as well.

Grant Brown

executive
#28

Yes, sure. Let me -- I mean, just -- I gave a kind of quick rule of thumb there. And I would say that's probably the simplest way to think about the march from 45.5% in fiscal '24 up to 50% plus, right? depending on your revenue assumptions over time, you can use that tool beyond fiscal '25 to get an assessment of the timing of it. It incorporates a number of variables that are hard to tease apart in the form of mix, not only amongst our businesses, but amongst the products, internal versus external manufacturing mix, which also plays a factor in this. The mix of wind products were manufactured and when they are sold, obviously, as we pull through those costs and relieve them through the income statement. So there's a significant amount of complexity associated with that rule of thumb. But for every $100 million, you add 50 basis points of gross margin and then you can get to gross margin above our 50% target, much sooner than fiscal '29. The kind of looking beyond maybe fiscal '26 and to '27, of course, the gains become much harder, the higher we go over 50%. So it's not boundless, but we do see a significant amount of opportunity in the gross margin line. A lot of its utilization. I commented on the last call, we're going from the 40s to the 60s, and that hasn't worked its way through inventory and then seen in the P&L. So we'll see some of that beyond that, it really then gets to mix of our products and the growth in the top line overall scale.

Christopher Rolland

analyst
#29

Great. As a follow-up on ACG. I think you guys gave 3 important drivers: Premiumization, 5G advanced and AI. I know you want to lump them together, but would love to know how you've kind of force rank those as content growers for you guys. And for 5G advance in particular, how important is this? Is it more filters for you guys I know Vijay asked on actual content. If you don't want to give a dollar amount for these changes, perhaps like a percentage or something like that, just so we can broadly think about this.

Frank Stewart

executive
#30

Yes. The way I would describe it is all 3 are intertwined. So things like premiumization, AI, where it's end users desiring a certain look and feel and functionality set for their phone is kind of more tied to the end user, where 5G advanced is kind of more plumbing. It's affecting the raw throughput capability, the quality of service, the sell side coverage, it's things that just affect the overall usability of the phone. So I see them as more intertwined instead of like 1, 2, 3 kind of ranking. The way we tried to describe 5G advanced, I mean we made the comment of dollars, not dimes but it plays out over a number of years as well. And that's what I tried to describe with the releases. It's not like there's one standard release that equals 5G advanced. It's playing out over standards releases '18, '19, '20, which is a number of years, which has a rollout across each individual smartphone manufacturer. They've got their own decisions of rate and pay. So that's why we're a little guarded of putting an exact number to it just because there's a number of variables that affect the timing.

Robert Bruggeworth

executive
#31

Frank, I think you can also talk about the dual upload, dual download the mass -- I don't know what it does for ultra-wideband on what it does for the MHB, I mean, because that is doubling of some of that, but go ahead

Frank Stewart

executive
#32

Yes. No, that's a really good point, Bob. And that is a way to get it a little crisper. So that's a good [ tier ]. One of the reasons we step through each of the product types on that 5G advanced slide. So ultra-high-band, a lot of that space, that frequency range, there's been one ultra-high-band pad placement in the phone today. And with uplink MIMO being more broadly adopted with 5G advanced in those frequency ranges, it literally is a second ultra-high-band pad placed in the phone. So you can do a teardown report, if it is a 5G advanced phone in those frequencies, you'll now see 2 ultra-high band pads instead of just one. So that's -- it's pretty crisp and quantifiable for you. In the mid-high band frequency ranges, so 1.5 to 2.5 gigahertz, you already have those 2 placements, one is called an MHB pad, the other one is called TX DSM or NDC module. So you're not getting a whole second placement, but the amount of transmit content. So think an extra PA dye, maybe a couple of extra filters in the TX DSM. So you'll see some content added there. And then low band is more like UHB, where up until now, all of that MIMO, that RX MIMO mainly, all of that was in the higher frequencies. People didn't focus on low band with respect to MIMO, and that's changing with 5G advance. There's more MIMO, multiple and multiple out between the base station and the handset going on in those low band frequencies than there was in basic 5G, and you literally get a second low band placement in phones, the same way you do in UHB.

Steven Creviston

executive
#33

There's also the number of units, right? So I mean, as you're talking about these killer applications that might leverage AI specifically or the premiumization as those handsets come -- the replacement cycle will speed up. The number of those handsets where the table stakes for them is higher levels of content, mix shifts to the types of content increases that Frank and Bob were just mentioning. So the unit story can also play a part in the growth opportunity for us.

David Fullwood

executive
#34

Maybe one more comment. It goes beyond Frank's business as well. I mean, as the use cases for AI accelerate in the phone, it's going to put more pressure on the battery. We've got great opportunities in [ Phil's ] business in other areas of power management to help extend the battery life so that you can get through the day and still do all the things -- great things that AI is going to be able to do, whether it's offloading the activities you currently do or adding new things like some of the contextual awareness and other applications that Eric talked about, which will drive ultra-wideband adoption and other things that will go on the phone as well.

Jack Egan

analyst
#35

Jack Egan Charter Equity Research. So yes, on the mobile side, I guess this is probably for Frank. You guys out in the demos, you showed 2 highly integrated modules, the mid-high band module with the integrated DRx and then the low, mid-, high-band modules. And given how most phones already have all of that content in separate modules already. Does that integration represent a lower overall ASP versus the 2 modules? And then just any impact to the margins of those parts, that would be helpful as well.

Frank Stewart

executive
#36

Yes. I'll take that one. So one of the things -- I'll get to your question, but I want to add a highlight. One of the things we wanted to make sure we covered is that these integrated modules, the MHB, the UHB, and the low band, they are integrating content into the phone. And we focus heavily on these integrated modules in our portfolio. So that is a way that we see the ability to grow at a slightly better rate than the market because it allows us to integrate content into these modules where we have a strong presence. And a lot of the times, the content we're integrating are areas where we weren't focused before, like the diversity received content that we're integrating into that mid-high band. To your question, the technology we're using to accomplish this integration like in the mid-high band with DRx integrated that's out there. As I mentioned, that is the most complex mid-high band that is available on the market today. We are leveraging our high-density packaging capability to make that product capable. I do not see it as like an opportunity destroyer from a dollars perspective it's quite the opposite. It's leveraging advanced technology to accomplish that size shrink, which is really critical to our customers.

Steven Creviston

executive
#37

Maybe from a margin standpoint, let me just follow up on that too. The LMH product is one that we're using to align to the mass tier in certain cases. And so that's helping us match the product to that particular tier of phones versus a higher cost solution, a last generation solution in some cases and that gives us the cost competitiveness there to find attractive margins in that integration.

Jack Egan

analyst
#38

Got it. That makes sense. So I guess the next one would be for Philip. But on the silicon carbide side, I was kind of curious as to where that is being used in the data center. So I'm assuming it's in the power supply, [ direct ] level, so power supply -- and typically, what I've seen is that you can use silicon carbide maybe in the AC to DC conversion and then gallium nitride for the lower power DC/DC conversion, but I know at the same time, Qorvo's JFETs are a little bit different in how they function versus MOSFET when it comes to die size and some other features as well. So if you could kind of talk about that opportunity and which slots you're competing, and I think that would be helpful.

Philip Chesley

executive
#39

I think you framed it correctly for the silicon carbide piece specifically. Today, we're not playing in the DC to DC side directly powering the processes within there. So it's really more on the AC to DC side. And so -- but we're seeing that end market pick up steam. There's a lot of activity there. Obviously, every point of efficiency in a data center matters given the power budget is, I think, the most expensive part of operating a data center. So we see that as a really attractive opportunity for us. I think you framed it correctly.

Ruben Roy

analyst
#40

Ruben Roy from Stifel. I had a question for Eric. A lot of interesting new technologies, Eric, that you guys are working on in the Connectivity and Sensors Group. And when you look at your competitive landscape, it seems to me like you're competing against a lot of companies that have system-level solutions, software microcontrollers that go along with connectivity technologies. What's your -- can you maybe just give us a little bit of how you're thinking about the competitive landscape and how you're planning on, if you are partnering with folks that are bringing system-level solutions on with compute, et cetera.

Steven Creviston

executive
#41

Yes. Yes. Thank you for the question. So you're right in that respect. I spent a lot of time talking about the areas where we're going to focus, right, like ultra-wideband which is a very unique element to new system implementations right? We've built out our technology team when it comes to SoC development, software, in particular, a lot of emphasis on that. We think we got a very competitive team now when it comes to that. When it comes to adding in microcontrollers, we've got partnerships to do that. I think the more important thing is the applications we enable and being really clear about user interfaces to those for our customers and then the ecosystems that are going to leverage them and how we're going to enable that. So it's kind of building it block by block. The RF part also the areas that we're focusing on are very RF intensitive areas. So we know we already got best-in-class capability there and in the high-volume manufacturing, of course, also. So there's just a couple of technology blocks that you mentioned, but we've got partners that can plug those holes. So we're pretty comfortable now with the maturity of the platform.

Ruben Roy

analyst
#42

And then a quick follow-up. Following on to something Matt asked earlier, and I think Dave commented on just in terms of sales and building out resources. I mean, this is a much different set of end customers, much broader, et cetera. And I know Qorvo RFMD try going to work with distributors historically. But how are you envisioning over the next 3 to 5 years, sort of your relationships with distribution versus building up an internal sales force to address what ends up being a very, very broad set of end customers.

Steven Creviston

executive
#43

Yes. I mean it will be a mixture of all that, right? So we do have a very strong technical sales force as well as an application engineering team that's deployed worldwide to work side by side with our customers. But you can't touch every customer in the world that way. So that's where we leverage our distributors to give us that broader exposure. And also, we -- there's distributors that work with us that have very good access in the power industry, for example, that can get us much more quick exposure to expand our customer base. And then finally, is the website, to really be able to touch all the customers that Eric talked about, thousands of customers we're working on ways to leverage the website all the data and knowledge that we have and how to use our products internally and leveraging AI then to be able to have customers almost self-serve. So as they're coming to us, it's a complicated technologies that we're delivering to customers, and they need to be able to implement these things in their designs. And so we're investing in those areas as well. So it will be a mix from website support through our distribution channels and manufacturers' reps. And then for our direct teams, we're focusing on those strategic accounts that I talked about and then those focus accounts.

Unknown Executive

executive
#44

Maybe, Eric, you could also touch on the UWB development kit. So the opportunity to reach customers with some...

Steven Creviston

executive
#45

I was actually before that, I was going to comment on the AI thing. A lot of the work is helping people find the information on our website and putting it together in the way they want and are piloting so far of some of the AI algorithms is really amazing. I mean it's doing exactly the job that it would take a lot of engineers to do in every case by case, but 1,000 customers was going to be doing that at the same time, getting their solutions designed. So that's a big piece of it. What was the partner?

Unknown Executive

executive
#46

Oh, the UWB development kits now.

Steven Creviston

executive
#47

Yes, yes, yes. That's another -- so obviously, we're investing a lot. We've talked about -- we're not making money yet. We're investing in all this infrastructure the development kits now that we send out with UWB. I mean, really, a great school could come up with an idea and find out almost immediately, whether it works or not with contextual awareness and 3D sensing and so forth. So a lot of money and time goes into that to make it mature and easy to use, but we think the payback is really massive.

Philip Chesley

executive
#48

I maybe add one thing. On the power side, we are adding key technical field application teams in the focus and strategic accounts. But for the broader space, we also have QSPICE. I mean we went from having 0 to over 20,000 users of that software application within 6 to 8 months. right? So that's our -- another angle that we have in play and at least on the power side to the broader market.

Robert Bruggeworth

executive
#49

I think we have time for one more.

Christopher Caso

analyst
#50

Chris Caso from Wolfe Research. Grant, first question for you. in the financial targets you provided, you didn't provide specifics on free cash flow target. So if you could speak to where free cash flow is at your targets, -- and then perhaps nearer term, one of the big elements of the margin improvement is getting utilization back that naturally should have some effect on free cash flow. So maybe you could speak a little nearer term on how that has an impact as well.

Grant Brown

executive
#51

Yes, sure. So from a free cash flow perspective, we'll obviously benefit as the operating margin targets are achieved, and I would expect it to be somewhat comparable to what we've seen in the past at those operating margin levels. Capital intensity is coming down. So that's going to benefit us relative to history. We've invested in our factories. We have capacity to serve our customers across a large breadth of products. So today, we're in a better position there. And then even divesting in some cases, Beijing, and Dijon and other areas where it benefits us. So capital intensity will come down and unlocking more free cash flow. I haven't been explicit about the target there, but very high-level confidence it will increase along with the financial model as we execute. And then as it gets to capital deployment, again, I think it would be a balanced approach. We got the question on M&A, share repurchases and then R&D are the primary ways that we're looking to reinvest the capital and grow and grow the business.

Christopher Caso

analyst
#52

And Bob, maybe a follow-up for you. Just kind of following on to that in terms of the manufacturing strategy. And that's been the part of the business that's been difficult over time, just figuring out how much capacity you put in place for customers who actually don't know how much capacity that they need. I'm glad I don't have your job on that. But particularly as the business shifts in favor of some other segments away from cellular. How does your manufacturing strategy change going forward? And does it become more predictable, perhaps less cyclical as you shift away from those cellular businesses?

Robert Bruggeworth

executive
#53

Yes. First, I think we have a great team that takes everything from what the customer says, converting it to what we're going to make to a team that makes what we need. And what we've been focused on, if you look at what we've done, and I said it in my prepared remarks, is we'll invest the capital where we can differentiate and where we can leverage someone else's scale and technology, we will. If you look at all the acquisitions that we've made, they're all riding on someone else's capital. So that volatility, as Grant pointed out, will come down over time just because of the capital intensity that we have in our own business. So that's going to be a plus. The other thing we continue to look at is the technologies that we do have -- we're trying to make sure that we don't get too far ahead of our customers with our capacity. Now clearly, because of what happened with the buildup that we saw 2 years ago, we had too much capital today deployed, but maybe not always in the right areas we need. So we're working on that now. Dave commented on the tools that we're bringing in. So we have better visibility to also understand end markets and what's going on. We're doing a better job of understanding our customers' inventories so that we don't build up too much over time. But I think in general, just by reducing the amount of capital we write on, look at what we just did with our Beijing and Dijon factories. That's less capital that we're going to spend. Now we don't have that volatility as it swings up and down with demand. So I think we're going to do that. But when it comes to the core technologies of gaAs/Gan and BAW and SAW filters, right now, we're not seeing that available outside. So we still believe we have the best in class. We can differentiate with that, so we're going to keep it in-house. So thanks for the question, Chris.

Operator

operator
#54

That concludes the event. I want to thank everybody very much both in the room and online, we're going to move into the lobby for a final coffee server, so we can allow the hotel to reset the room. And thanks again very much [ as a ] webcast replay on our website, along with all the slides. Thanks again.

Unknown Executive

executive
#55

Thank you very much.

Read the full transcript via the API

You're viewing the first half of this call. Get the complete Qorvo, Inc. transcript — plus 256,000+ transcripts from 12,000+ companies, speaker segments, AI summaries and full-text search — through the EarningsCalls.dev API.

Get the API View API docs →

This call discussed

For developers and AI pipelines

Programmatic access to Qorvo, Inc. earnings transcripts and 256,000+ others is available through the EarningsCalls.dev REST API. Plans from $24.99/month — full transcripts, speaker segments, full-text search, and the recently-added /api/v1/transcripts/recent polling endpoint for ETL pipelines.

More tools for stock research

OptionsBell: an unusual options activity scanner that tracks options flow across all US stocks and emails you when large trades appear in Qorvo, Inc. or any ticker on your watchlist.

StockMarketScan: a stock screener with alerts: 24 pre-built screens refreshed every 5 minutes, watchlists and email notifications. Both offer API and MCP access and fair monthly pricing.