Semtech Corporation (SMTC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

July 8, 2020

NASDAQ US Information Technology Semiconductors and Semiconductor Equipment special 59 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Craig Ellis

analyst
#1

Okay, then let me get started. Hi, everybody. I'm Craig Ellis. I'm the Director of Research and an analyst covering the Semiconductor and Semiconductor Capital Equipment Sector at B. Riley. I want to welcome you to the session that we have this afternoon with the Semtech management team. I'm going to start with some housekeeping items, and Sandy will take care of a few things from the Semtech side. And then we're going to get into a fireside chat session, which we'll kick off with an overview of Semtech from Mohan. So let me just proceed with some of the housekeeping items. So I introduced myself, Craig Ellis at B. Riley, FBR, Director of Research and lead semi analyst. But I also need to convey that in the normal course of its business, B. Riley FBR seeks to perform investment banking and other services for companies under coverage, and receive compensation in connection with such services. As such, investors should assume that B. Riley FBR intends to seek investment banking or other business relationships with any and all companies mentioned today. Additionally, B. Riley FBR acts as a market maker or a liquidity provider for Semtech securities. Today, we're pleased to have with us Semtech CEO, Mohan Maheswaran; CFO, Emeka Chukwu; and Director of Investor Relations, Sandy Harrison. I'm very pleased to have them all with us today. We appreciate our speakers spending time with us. Their opinions are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of B. Riley FBR. We ask them to avoid any disclosure of any confidential nonpublic information. So with that disclosure out of the way, let me mention one other item that relates to just our session today. We'll conduct our session via a fireside chat format. I have some questions for the team on a range of topics, but I would also like to take questions from the group. If you have a question, please e-mail me. You can e-mail me at cellis@brileyfbr.com, and I'll integrate your questions into the session that we have. So please don't hesitate to shoot those out. So I've got some of my housekeeping and disclosure items out of the way, but I want to hand it off to Sandy for Semtech's safe harbor statement. So Sandy, let me hand it over to you.

Sandy Harrison

executive
#2

Great. Thanks, Craig, and we appreciate you hosting the call. But before we get started, I want to quickly mention that today's call will include forward-looking statements that include risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from the results anticipated in any of these statements. For a more detailed discussion of these risks and uncertainties, please review the safe harbor statement included in the other Risk Factors section in our most recent reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. As a reminder, comments made on today's call are current as of today only, and Semtech undertakes no obligation to update the information from this call should the facts or circumstances change. Also, I want to point out, during the call, we refer to non-GAAP financial measures that are not prepared in accordance with the generally accepted accounting principles. A discussion of why the management team considers such non-GAAP financials measures useful, along with reconciliations of non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP financial measures, can be found on our website. And with that out of the way, Craig, I will turn it back over to you to start the event.

Craig Ellis

analyst
#3

Yes, that's great. Thanks, Sandy. So let's start off with a level-set opening. I find that what's most helpful in these sessions is for the company to provide an overview of its business and strategy. And Mohan, I think if you could do that for 5 to 7 minutes for us, it would give everyone the best context for then some more detailed Q&A on the different segments and the opportunities that exist for Semtech. So over to you, Mohan.

Mohan Maheswaran

executive
#4

So thanks, Craig. Welcome to everyone on the call, and we sincerely hope you are all safe and good health, and thank you for taking the time to listen to us today. I want to start by reminding everyone that Semtech is a uniquely positioned high-performance analog and high-performance algorithm company, that we focus on 3 main industry trends: the first is bandwidth expansion, the second is creating a smarter planet and the third is enabling mobility. And these are trends that we've put in place for quite some years now since I've been the CEO of Semtech here, which is almost 15 years. And the reason simply is that we believe these trends will continue to be strong trends for many, many years to come. And probably even 10, 20 years from now, we'll still be talking about further bandwidth expansion, further creating a smarter planet and enabling more mobility. So that's kind of a high-level perspective from how we drive our R&D investments in the company. We're also a very diversified yet balanced company, and I think that's important, especially in today's world. We're balanced geographically, with about 35% of our business from China, 20% of our business from the rest of Asia, about 30% North America and 15% Europe. And this is where our products are actually being used. And so we're pretty well balanced geographically, and I think that's also very important in today's environment, as I mentioned. We're also balanced from an end market standpoint, with approximately 45% of our revenues coming from infrastructure, 30% coming from industrial use cases and applications and 25% coming from consumer applications. And then we're also balanced from our products standpoint. We have 3 different product groups, and we believe in having unique competencies. And when I say unique, really unique. Separate -- we separate ourselves from the rest of the industry. And our 3 product groups are Signal Integrity product group, which represents about 45% of the company today; our wireless and sensing product group that has about -- represents about 25% of the company; and protection, which is -- represents about 30% of the company today. And now as I kind of just at a high level -- we have multiple growth drivers, and it's kind of our strategy to drive a life cycle of different growth drivers. So we have growth drivers that are in a emerging stage, we haven't announced yet. We have growth drivers in the growth streak stage, and we have some growth drivers that will start to become more mature. But that's the strategy we have. We're always bringing out new platforms. And so today, as I look at it, we have multiple growth drivers that we believe will secure strong revenue growth and earnings growth for the next 3 years, and then we have some emerging growth engines that we think will drive further growth for us in the 5-year time frame. So over the next 3 years, we expect our LoRa wireless platform targeted at the IoT market and specifically LPWAN, and I'm sure we'll talk a little bit more about that, to have very strong growth. And we believe our Tri-Edge PAM4 platform and our ClearEdge CDR platforms, targeted at the data center and 5G base station markets, to have very strong growth over the next few years. And our PON-X platform targeted at 10G PON to have very good growth over the next few years. And then our Z Protection platform, which is targeted at mobile devices but also now at high-speed interfaces in the broader industrial and infrastructure markets, to all have very strong growth over the next few years. And as I mentioned, in addition to those, we have a number of new platforms that we bring out -- we will bring out over the next couple of years that will drive further growth for us. So with that as a kind of a high-level summary, let me pass it over to Craig, and we can start the Q&A, and then I can talk about each of the different businesses in more detail. Craig?

Craig Ellis

analyst
#5

Yes, that sounds -- yes. Thanks, Mohan. So thanks for the overview. Let's dig in to start, the largest segment, which is Signal Integrity, as you mentioned, 45% of sales. So when we look at the business, we typically think of data center, we think of PON, we think of base station and a few other things, but those are the big 3. So let's start off with data center. So as we think about the data center part of Signal Integrity, can you just go back to the product cycle point you made earlier, frame the product cycles that you see coming, and help us understand what those product cycles mean from a content gain standpoint or a market share point, some of the relevant investor parameters that would be of interest?

Mohan Maheswaran

executive
#6

So data center has always been a target market for us. Within our Signal Integrity product group, we have 3 target markets in the infrastructure side. One is data center, one is PON and one is base station. Within data center, we focused mostly within -- inside the data center, and that's -- is line card to line card, server to server, server to top of rack switch, things like that. And so we have -- and our products go into optical modules, which then go into the data center servers and systems. And so we are -- our direct customers are optical module customers. And historically, we have provided what we call PMD components, is our physical media devices, amplifiers and drivers; and also CDRs, which are clock data recovery circuits, which are essentially used for high-speed connectivity to clean up the signal along the -- along these links, these high-speed optical links. We've been very successful actually in 100-gig optical modules today, which are done mostly with 4 by 25 gigabit lanes, using our ClearEdge CDR platform. We've had a lot of success there. And as we start to see that market now looking for higher bandwidth and potentially going to 200 gig and 400 gig, there's a new modulation scheme called PAM4 that's emerging, we see that as a really nice opportunity for us. We've spent the last few years developing a platform called Tri-Edge. Tri-Edge is our name for our PAM4 platform, and we believe that this will start to -- we just announced it. We just started to sample it. Starting to get very good feedback from the marketplace. And we believe that this is going to help us get a very good foothold in the 200-gig and 400-gig PAM4 market, which is starting to grow nicely and should see good growth over the next few years. And those links are at 50-gigabit per second links, PAM4 links. So from a data center standpoint, the really nice thing about data center for us is that it's -- the market is growing at a tremendously fast rate. I mean it's really probably now, as I look at it today, arguably the fastest-growing market that we're participating in, and we are involved in a number of fast-growing markets. But data center seems to be just exploding, and I think it's all driven by obviously more people, more companies, enterprises putting products and putting their systems on the cloud, putting their software in the cloud, putting their data in the cloud, doing more analytics on the cloud. A lot of the new use cases that are emerging out there will require cloud-driven analytics and things like that. And so the need for more bandwidth, more analytics and more synthesizing of data is clear, and therefore, it's driving the need for more data centers and for more bandwidth within those data centers. The other thing that we're seeing within data centers is that while most of our business at 100 gig today is coming out of the North American-driven demand, I think we're going to see a little bit more global balance there, China and Europe demand pick up a little bit on the data center side. So all in all, a very, very good growth market. I think our position is very strong with both our ClearEdge and our Z-Platform for 100-gig optical modules and with our Tri-Edge platform for 200-gig and 400-gig PAM4 modules. Obviously, that's new for us. We still have to demonstrate the success, but I think we're very pleased with the technology. We're pleased with the feedback we're getting. And so our expectation is that, that's going to start to ramp, get solid growth in terms of design wins this year and then drive significant growth in terms of revenue next year. And so a nice storyline there. And we don't see the data center market really slowing down for the next few years. I mean it's got a -- just by virtue of what's going on with the work from home and kind of more reliance on infrastructure, we think data center will continue to do quite well and grow very fast for us. We have about 40% share in terms of CDRs and PMD in that space, and we think we can maintain that position over the 3-year to 5-year time frame.

Craig Ellis

analyst
#7

Two follow-ups to the comments that you made, Mohan. One, as you look at the transition, the 200 and 400 gig from 100, what does that mean from a revenue standpoint for 100 gig? Does 100-gig growth persist even as 200 and 400 begin to ramp up next year? Or is there really a handoff where 200 and 400 take over and then we start to see a tail off in 100? And then secondly, you mentioned that China and Europe are poised to become a bigger part of the business, and it sounded like that was something related to events in 2021 and beyond. Is that triggered by what you see happening with the transition to 200 and 400 gig? Or is that just the natural evolution of IT infrastructure there and then finally catching up with infrastructure we see with U.S. hyperscalers?

Mohan Maheswaran

executive
#8

Yes. Let me take the last -- the second part of that. I think it is more just a natural phenomenon that data centers before were primarily the big guys in the U.S. But I think now many enterprises themselves are going to have their own data centers, or they're going to -- we're certainly seeing a more regional evolution here of data center customers. And so we'll see that natural progression, I think, occur over the next few years. Which is good, because I think it doesn't mean you have to be solely tied to the specific customer. You have a little bit more balance there. And then on the 100 gig or the 200 gig or the 400 gig, we actually see all 3 growing. Probably, obviously, the 200 gig and 400 gig are much smaller today, so they'll grow at a much faster rate. But I think the nice thing is the whole market is expanding very fast, and we do think the number of ports will continue to grow quite nicely for -- or even 100 gig. There'll be some slowdown in the 100 gig. Obviously, it can't grow at the same rate, and it's much larger today, and that will somewhat be offset by 200 gig and 400 gig. But I think the market as a whole is likely to almost double next year and maybe even again the following year, so we're expecting very good growth in all of our data center business.

Craig Ellis

analyst
#9

That's helpful. Let's move on and talk about a couple of the other subsegments within Signal Integrity. So you mentioned in your overview that one of your product cycles in PON is PON-X. And can you just help us understand the opportunity that you see as you look out in calendar '20 and '21 and beyond with the PON business? I suspect it's tied to some of the things that we're seeing globally as 5G starts to ramp up. So let's start with PON, and then maybe we can segue into base station after we flesh out PON-X.

Mohan Maheswaran

executive
#10

Yes. So the way we look at it as a data center being on one end of the network. The other end of the network, the access side, PON is a really critical technology for resolving bottlenecks at the access point. There's no point in having these high bandwidth, very fast links from the core of the networks using 5G infrastructure, if you then have a bottleneck at the access side. So PON has been a very successful technology, obviously, in China, where China is [ leading ] to optical fiber connectivity throughout the enterprise and home infrastructure. But one of the nice things we're seeing now is that other regions of the world, and including North America and Europe, are starting to also deploy more PON in their regions. And that's a very healthy sign for us, so we're getting more of a geographical balance there. The second thing is, obviously, as you talked about there, Craig, is that the handoff of 5G to 10-gig PON is a natural kind of handoff for high-definition video and for other very high bandwidth platforms. 10-gig PON is a natural handoff. And so I think what we're going to see, and we're already seeing that, is this kind of very fast acceleration in terms of deployments of 10-gig PON certainly in China, and I think it's going to be mirrored in other parts of the world. So that's kind of a double benefit for us. We get the more regional balance, but also we get the higher ASPs and the better content in the 10-gig platform. The other thing with 10-gig PON for us, it's the first time we're playing on both ends on the ONU side and the OLT side. The ONU side is kind of the CPE side, the real access side, and the OLT side is kind of the central office side, and we have chips on both ends. So that's also a nice thing for us. And PON is about 25% of our SIP revenues, SIP integrity product revenues. And I think we're feeling good about the growth in that business for the next few years as well to be driven by this 10-gig/5G kind of handoff and the globalization of the business.

Craig Ellis

analyst
#11

So one of the ways to think about PON-X and 10G for Semtech is there's really a content gain opportunity because you've got both ends of the link.

Mohan Maheswaran

executive
#12

Yes.

Craig Ellis

analyst
#13

Using that as a segue to 5G base station, I think a lot of companies that are associated with infrastructure are seeing content gain opportunities. I think that is the case with Semtech. But can you talk about what investors should expect with ClearEdge and FiberEdge products as it relates to the base station opportunity that's in front of you now?

Mohan Maheswaran

executive
#14

Yes. Base station is a very exciting area also for us, and for several reasons. One is that at the 5G node, most of the front-haul modules will be 25-gig optical modules versus [ one ] gig at 4G, and so you have a higher bandwidth optical module. That higher bandwidth optical module usually would require a CDR as well as a PMD function. So in 4G optical modules, you'd have just a driver and amplifier. That's all we provided to the marketplace, and CDR wouldn't necessarily be needed. For 25-gig optical modules, they do need a CDR. And so our content has certainly increased there, and we're already seeing that. So we'll provide drivers and amplifiers but also CDRs into that space. The other benefit that we're seeing for 5G is that there's just more optical modules being used in a base station. So a 5G base station has typically 12 and above optical modules, whereas in a 4G base station, you may only have 6 optical modules. So we have the more content, and we have the more optical modules. And then I think the other element of this, which is kind of a common theme now across all of the infrastructure segments, is that every region in the world is recognizing they can't rely on other OEMs in other regions to necessarily be their provider, and so we're seeing other regions start to also look to deploy and looking for options and solutions in their regions. So we've definitely seen an increase in the number of opportunities in North America and Europe for 5G technology to deploy their -- in their systems, and so that's also a healthy sign for us. So this is another market that we think is going to grow quite nicely. And our ability to grow with it, I think, as well as maybe increase our share, which is currently about 30%, I think, is looking quite good.

Craig Ellis

analyst
#15

Excellent. I have an investor question, so let me just jump back to PAM4. The question is regarding the reach for your PAM4 solution. Where do you expect it to gain traction? Is it distances greater than 100 meters, less than 100 meters, some other benchmark? But as investors look at that parameter, where would they expect Tri-Edge to fit?

Mohan Maheswaran

executive
#16

Yes. The first products are all relatively short reach, and then 100 meters, 200 meters. But by the end of this year, we'll have a platform based on the same technology, that I think should start to get us into the kilometer range and so a kilometer and eventually 2-kilometer range, I think. So there's no fundamental reason why the technology can't achieve that. I think we'll -- that's what we're looking for. But initially, the short -- the platform will be targeting short reach.

Craig Ellis

analyst
#17

Great. And then just to wrap it up on Signal Integrity, Mohan. You've emphasized throughout our discussion thus far that Signal Integrity has a number of very powerful growth drivers, and the momentum behind them looks like it's multi-year in nature. As you look out over the next 2 to 3 years, would you expect any meaningful change in the composition of revenues? Or how should we think about where Signal Integrity can go with the 3 segments we've talked about over the '23 to calendar '24 time frame from where we are today?

Mohan Maheswaran

executive
#18

Yes. I mean it's -- all 3 of these subsegments are looking very strong at the moment. I would say data center is probably the #1 in terms of growth, #2 is probably the 5G, the base station side. And then third is PON. So we may see a little bit of a shift in that. Today, data center is about, I think, 40% of the revenues, and PON is about 25% of revenue. Base station, about 15% of the SIP revenues. And so we may see a little bit more on the data center side as we go forward here. We have a video business that's -- that includes some legacy stuff that's about 20% of the business in that range, and that's not growing so fast. Obviously, this year has been a troubling year for -- due to COVID-19 on video broadcast and no conferences, no live sports and things like that. But we acquired a company a couple of years ago called AptoVision for Pro AV applications, and that stuff is really growing very fast. But it's very small today, so my sense is that business will also grow in the future. That's one of those 5-year time line kind of things I talked about. But I think the composition will largely be data center, base station, PON and then the video for the next couple of years.

Craig Ellis

analyst
#19

That's great. Well, I know there's a lot of people on the call that want to hear about LoRa. So let's switch gears to wireless sensing and jump into LoRa. And the first question I'll ask, I'll put a little context around. So from time to time, I'll go to the LoRa Alliance website and look at the approved products. And it's in, frankly, an incredibly impressive list of products from all over the world with just great functional variety and applications. There was -- there were things that I saw today that I hadn't seen before. So the question is, as we think about the product list that exists there and just the nature of what's been, I think, more of an industrial IoT business that's picking up more of a consumer element to it, a consumer access element to it, how should we think about the way that product uptake will occur? Is it going to be a classic analog model, where it's widely diverse across a huge variety of applications? Or is there a dam that's ready to burst by a specific geography or end market, where it would be more of a high-volume business that could evolve over time as part of LoRa?

Mohan Maheswaran

executive
#20

Yes. So that's a good question, Craig. I don't know that I have the answer to it, but I will give you what my feeling on it is, which is I think the latter, which I do think is going to explode, but let me tell you why. So if you -- if I take a step back, what is LoRa? LoRa is an ultra-low-power radio. So ultra-low-power enables kind of 10 years of battery life. Very long range, so kilometers of range. We're not talking meters, we're talking kilometers. Very low cost, and it's essentially a radio technology that's targeted at the IoT space. But specifically, it's been targeted -- we targeted the what we call the LPWAN space. LPWAN is low power, wide area network. So the technology was developed for this kind of a wider area network application, and what we did is we created this LoRa Alliance, and the Alliance drives the LoRaWAN protocol. They drive the whole ecosystem of companies, part of which you referred to there, in terms of sensor manufacturers, system OEMS, operators, cloud service providers. And the LoRaWAN Alliance drives that broader ecosystem, which then drives the adoption of LoRa and the growing number of use cases across the globe. So it's kind of really a nice vehicle for us to bring the technology out to the marketplace. And I think one of the things that we sat back and said, okay, what -- and when we first brought LoRa out is what's the key goal here, and our key goal was simply to make LoRa the de facto standard for the LPWAN marketplace. And the second goal was to make that LPWAN market huge, and hopefully the biggest segment of IoT in time. I would say over the years, that the difficulty has been just educating on LoRa, just telling people what is LoRa, what does it do, how does it work, why is it different, why is it nobody's talking about it, those types of things. Today, I don't have that problem. We don't have that problem. Everybody knows about LoRa. Everybody knows what it is. Everybody knows what the value is. Now the question is, okay, can we achieve those 2 goals that we set out? And when I look at the progress, I would say that it's really, really good progress on both those fronts. The first, becoming the de facto standard. We just see everybody talking about LoRa now. It fills a lot of technology gaps, whereas with WiFi and Bluetooth and Zigbee you have a fairly short range. And then with cellular and GPS, you have pretty high battery kind of usage. LPWAN and LoRa fit a really nice space there, where you can get very low battery consumption, very low power sensor networks, but a very good range and very good connectivity and those type of things. So it fits a nice hole. And I think we're seeing now the market has evolved to the point where, if I go back a few years and even now, most of our revenues are coming from smart metering, smart building, smart cities, smart environment, smart agriculture use cases, more industrial in nature, to now what's happening is the technology is really finding its way into numerous new use cases, including smart home, asset tracking, logistics, smart health, which is really a key one we'll talk about a little bit more. And other emerging use cases, which can drive much faster growth and much higher volumes and are almost -- they're -- although we call them LPWAN, they're kind of borderline LAN connectivity and WAN connectivity. Because in the home, for example, you can -- a 1-mile coverage or a 0.5-mile coverage usually covers your whole property and your whole campus, for example. And that's a range that is not easy to do with WiFi or with Bluetooth or other technologies today, so it's kind of filling in a nice hole, and I think that's what we're seeing more and more of now. So our sense is as we continue to see the deployment of gateways and the deployment of -- across the different regions of the world, we're going to see LoRa move from being just a nice technology for industrial applications to more consumer-ish, smart home type of asset tracking type of applications, which is really quite good for us. And I think that way, it kind of gives us more confidence that we can even get to that -- achieving our 2 goals that we set up, at a faster rate than we had initially thought we would get there. So I hope that answers your question, Craig.

Craig Ellis

analyst
#21

Yes. That does, Mohan. The next thing I want to do with LoRa is just use the metrics that the company provides to drill into the opportunity that exists in some of the trends that you're seeing. So just for people on the call, as a reminder, the company, from time to time, reports on countries of deployment, network operators, gateways, end nodes, has revenue targets and talks about its funnel opportunity. So what I wanted to do is just get some insight into what you've seen with the funnel. I think we've had about a year of unusual geopolitical and in-global environments, U.S.-China trade issues last year, COVID issues this year. As you look at LoRa's funnel, what have you seen as the multiyear trends going into this year? And what are you seeing as we progress through this year? And how are you feeling about funnel and funnel growth as we look ahead through this year and into next year?

Mohan Maheswaran

executive
#22

Yes. So again, let me take a little bit of a step back. And when we talk about a dashboard and we put down metrics, one of the reasons we do this is it's very difficult to predict this business when a customer -- even though a customer may have chosen LoRa as a technology it wants to use, how quickly that decision -- we're going to move from that decision to when we're going to see revenues, because there's typically in an IoT system, there'll be sensor deployments, there'll be a network deployed, then there'll be software application support and things like that. So sometimes, it's very difficult to predict. So one of the things that investors have always asked me, they say, "Well, Mohan, how can we monitor the progress to make sure things are going well?" So we put together a dashboard, and we present this every year, every quarter. And I talk about those elements of it, and we talk about the number of countries deploying LoRa, the number of operators, the number of gateways deployed, which is -- really indicates how well the infrastructure is being rolled out across the world, and then the number of connected devices. And then one of the things we talk about is the opportunity funnel, and the opportunity funnel is important because it tells us not only what type of use cases are deploying LoRa and going to and thinking about using LoRa or actually using LoRa, and also it tells us geographically what -- where those opportunities are coming from. So if you look at our revenues today from LoRa, about half of our revenues are from China. And part of that was because when we first brought the technology out, LoRa is a really, really good fit for smart metering, smart city, smart environment, smart building kind of use cases. And in China, it's just a really good region, where they do have environmental issues, they have a need for smart cities, they have a lot of smart metering use cases. And so it became a very good market for us and grew very fast for us. Unfortunately, because of the trade issues and a number of other things related to the China-U.S. geopolitical situation, China was soft for us last year, and I think that was a concern. And so we started to monitor a little bit closely, more closely, the funnel to see how the mix of revenues were potentially going to come in, in the future. And I think one of the nice things we saw is it was much more balanced. It wasn't all China. It was now -- now if I look at the funnel, it's about 30% is driven from Americas; 38% from Europe; about 19% China; and the rest of the world, 13%, something like that. So it's a lot more balanced. And not that we are staying away from China or we don't expect China to continue to grow. We do expect some of the other regions to start catching up, though, and especially, I think in the Americas and Europe, where we have now pretty much good validation of the technology and use cases. And now it's just customers moving from their proof of concepts to full deployments, and so we're very encouraged by that. We think that's going to be good. And then also, if we look at the funnel, the number of different types of use cases, it's -- we see a significant shift going towards more smart homes, smart logistics, asset tracking use cases and areas, where, as I mentioned, smart health has now started to make the list. It wasn't something that we had targeted before. In fact, we didn't even think it really was going to be a great market for us. But with COVID-19, I think the opportunity for LoRa, which is -- LoRa is a perfect technology for contact tracing, remote temperature sensing, occupancy management, smart quarantining, smart alert systems, things like that, that the combination of something like Bluetooth and LoRa or WiFi and LoRa really just enable a whole different set of use cases to emerge. So we're starting to see that now. Our opportunity funnel looks a lot more healthy in terms of the different use cases. And some of these use cases, we know of because we're obviously talking to customers, can be very high volume, and they can be very nice growth for us. So that's part of the reason why we have confidence in our 40% CAGR that we set out there for the next 5 years. And as I look at it, we're in what we believe is an early stage of a very fast-growing and very, potentially, very large growth market. And we have a proprietary position, obviously, because we own the LoRa technology, to be able to benefit from that.

Craig Ellis

analyst
#23

That's helpful, Mohan. And let's just jump into some of the nearer-term dynamics. I think on the last earnings call, the company mentioned that it had a very strong quarter, and the first quarter with funnel activity, engagement activity with LoRa. I think the company expected to see record revenues in the current quarter for LoRa. One, is that a fair summary? Two, what does that mean for how the company's looking at this year's revenue growth potential, I think, $90 million on the low end, $120 million on the high end? How are we tracking relative to that target?

Mohan Maheswaran

executive
#24

Yes. So as we came into the year, we actually thought that most of the headwinds from China were behind us. Unfortunately, with COVID-19, as you all know, February and March were pretty dead in China. I mean they just went -- there was nothing happening. Fortunately, it came back quite strong. And as I mentioned on the last earnings call, we had record LoRa-enabled bookings and record POS, which was very positive for us, and so we felt that Q2 was going to be extremely strong for LoRa. And so we kept our range, which is $90 million to $120 million for the year. Obviously, we're still banking on a very strong second half. And with some of the dynamics of COVID-19 and what's going on in the North American and Europe markets, it's difficult to reengage. But we see enough opportunities, enough things going on that, yes, we feel comfortable with where we are in that range. And it's such an early stage in the evolution of LPWAN in this market. To me, we only need 1 or 2 catalysts really, and I think the numbers move very quickly upwards. So I think we're fairly still -- still fairly confident about the 48 -- 40% CAGR and how that translates to revenue for us this year and the next few years.

Craig Ellis

analyst
#25

So if we look long term, Mohan, out into the 2024-2025 time frame, assuming that we can see that kind of CAGR, is it reasonable to think that LoRa could be a $400 million to $500 million business longer term?

Mohan Maheswaran

executive
#26

Yes. That's my expectation, actually. I think to reach $500 million in 5 years from now, cloud services, which we haven't talked about and are still to be proven, should generate about $100 million of recurring revenues for us in that time frame. The ability for us with our new LoRa Edge platform, which we just announced and is out in the marketplace, and this has 3 radios in it, it has a LoRa radio and a Bluetooth radio -- or sorry, it's a WiFi SNIPing radio and a GPS SNIP radio in it, with that platform and the cloud through our gateway, through our own gateway technology, to be able to provide a cloud service that does provide accurate geolocation or good geolocation both indoors and outdoors and to be able to utilize the different technologies, we think is going to be very powerful. We have to demonstrate it, but I think we can over the next few years. That, combined with, as I mentioned, some of the new use cases like smart home and smart tracking starting to emerge, and just the general need for this type of low-power sensor networks, which at the end of the day, are all contributing to this smarter planet capability that I think is going to continue to become a very important need for every region in the world because it really drives -- it's really driven by having smarter environment and a smart, safety environment and even now health, as I said. So yes, we think we can get to $500 million. Obviously, that's a big climb, a lot to do, but we're excited because the technologies are there, the platforms are there, the use cases are there. We've got an ecosystem that's working for us, and so we'll see. Yes.

Craig Ellis

analyst
#27

Interesting. Let's -- before we leave wireless sensing and jump into a few protection questions, I just want to touch on proximity sensing. My expectation has been with proximity sensing that 5G could be a catalyst for further uptake as we've seen proximity sensing go from tablets to smartphones and maybe deeper and broader with smartphones. But as we stand here today and with really the 5G device ramp really starting in earnest, I think, in the back half of the year, what's the opportunity for proximity sensing over the next 18 to 24 months?

Mohan Maheswaran

executive
#28

Yes. Proximity sensing is one of those where it's possibly just below the growth of the signal integrity products and LoRa, but it's still pretty good growth. And I think it's driven by consumer, by wearables or anything where there's a new radio, a high-performance radio. When you have a high-performance radio that has high power, typically, it needs to -- you need to manage that power to make sure it's not a health hazard. And in some regions of the world, there are increasing regulations. Those increasing regulations dictate that the company that's providing these devices or wearables or whatever it may be, even if it's a laptop or it's a smartphone, if you start to put 5G radio or a high-performance or a WiFi radio, you need to be able to make sure that you're not creating some type of health issue. And so what we do is we provide these proximity sensing, which is really a SAW sensor, which allows the customers to understand when the phone or the device is close to the human body and when the power needs to come down. And so we have some unique technology advantage there, and that's something that, I think, is going to continue to proliferate across the industry, especially with the proliferation of more radios, but also with the expansion of these higher bandwidth radios and more power. Because typically, the higher bandwidth, you have less range, and therefore, you need more power to get from point A to point B. And that power is what becomes a potential hazard, and so we see that more and more now. We expect other countries -- actually, while North America and Europe are already having -- have some regulations, we expect other countries to start embracing that need, and that will drive the need for more SAW sensing, and we think we can be a beneficiary of that. Yes, our consumer business, while we spend a lot of time talking about infrastructure and industrial with IoT, our consumer business, with both our protection and our proximity sensing, we think this year has been a little bit challenging year, obviously. But I think there's a good chance that over the next few years, that's going to come back. And we have a fairly broad set of customers now in this space. It was in the past, if you look at Semtech, we were very exposed to Samsung and probably overly exposed to Samsung. Today, we have a penetration of most of the China smartphone manufacturers, North American smartphone manufacturers, and it's a much more balanced business for us, so I feel very good about that business also.

Craig Ellis

analyst
#29

Interesting. Let me use that as a segue into protection and get in a protection question before I switch to finance and have an opportunity to ask some questions to Emeka. The protection question really ties into a point you made in your opening remarks, Mohan. You talked about the different types of balance that exist in the business, and I think that's a good way to frame what's happened with protection over the last 4 to 5 years as a business that had a high mobile quotient to it. Tablets and especially smartphones really picked up a lot of industrial and automotive exposure, and so has some good balance between those different end markets. How do we think about the growth potential of protection's different businesses and the way mix can evolve in that business over the next few years?

Mohan Maheswaran

executive
#30

Yes. The nice thing about our protection business, it's a little bit more like a traditional analog business. But I think if you look at the past, we have possibly been overly exposed -- too over-exposed to the client consumer space and particularly with Samsung, as I mentioned. Well, we made a decision a few years ago, we said, "Look, we need to get more diversified in this business," and we want to diversify in 2 ways. One is we want more diversification within the consumer business. So now we have exposure to, as I said, all the other smartphone manufacturers and displays and other consumer equipment like wearables and things like that. But then we want to look at the rest of the market and really start to spend a lot more time and investing in R&D, in bringing out platforms that suit that -- rest of that market. And that includes automotive, it includes telecommunication infrastructure, includes IoT. And so that's what we've done. And what we are seeing now is as most of the rest of the market, the broader market, starts to use advanced technology nodes, so 10-nanometer and below, so 7-nanometer, 5-nanometer and are using high-speed interfaces like 10-gigabit Ethernet, HDMI 2.1, USB-C, they're needing the protection. They're needing Semtech protection. And so we are now starting to see not only in automotive but in a number of communication infrastructure examples and in IoT a real pull on Semtech protection, and this is very pleasing for us because this is not -- it's not as volatile. So consumer, obviously, it can be volatile. You can get the smartphone success 1 quarter and then the failings in the next quarter, so it's one of those things that you kind of have to live with if you're in that space. But by having a broader industrial business also that this continues to grow and drives much higher gross margins for us, I think that's a nice balance for us. And so today, still, 65% of our protection business is consumer, and about 35% is nonconsumer. We want to get that to more of a 50-50 balance over time, and I think we will, and I think that's the way we think about it. This business doesn't have as strong growth as the other businesses, the wireless and sensing and the Signal Integrity product business. But I think it's a very solid, very profitable and good growth business for us, and I think the broader industrial business now and the diversified consumer business will kind of mitigate any downside risk that comes with just a broader consumer softness.

Craig Ellis

analyst
#31

Got it. So a business with some growth, and it sounds like some nice cash generation. Let me use that as a segue to you, Emeka, for some questions. And while I haven't asked one on COVID-19 supply chain issues, let me just ask you. I know that across the tech landscape, across the whole market landscape, the last earnings season was characterized by companies explaining what was happening with COVID-19 impacts. Just refresh us on what your expectation is with respect to supply, fulfillment, sourcing, et cetera. Anything that we need to be aware of either in the current quarter or as you're thinking about the back half of the year, given some of the unusual dynamics that are at play with the supply chain at present?

Emeka Chukwu

executive
#32

Thank you very much, Craig. Can you hear me, Craig?

Craig Ellis

analyst
#33

Yes. Hear you loud and clear.

Emeka Chukwu

executive
#34

Oh, very good. So with regards to our supply chain situation, I think we are in a very good place. We are almost back to normal. If we look at Asia, where we have most of our revenues are generated out of, I think we're probably back to 80%, 90% levels. In North America is where we still have some challenges, obviously, because of the COVID-19 situation, extending stay-at-home orders and the shutdown orders and all that stuff. We're probably at about 50% capacity or something like that. But overall, we don't have any constraints at this point. We don't really have anything that we are overly concerned about as of today. And hopefully, we don't see a flare-up of the COVID-19 situation again on a global basis. So our outlook right now is that the supply chain issues are probably mostly behind us.

Craig Ellis

analyst
#35

Good. I think everybody would like for that to be the case. Let's talk about some of the contemporary dynamics in the business. I think one of the things that characterized the recently reported quarter was particular order strength and then I think a historically low turns requirement in the current quarter. Can you just help investors understand what the company sees out there with order activity? And I think there is some concern that in different end markets, orders could soften in the back half of the year. What's the company's confidence that order activity that was strong recently can actually hold up as we get to the back half of the year?

Emeka Chukwu

executive
#36

So, so far during this quarter, our ordering pattern has been pretty much in line with what we expected. I think we did report just like most of our peers that in the first quarter, the orders were very strong. And probably a little bit of that was the concern that the ecosystem had with regards to supply there, so there might have been a little bit of an ordering ahead. But coming into the quarter, we did expect that maybe the orders wasn't going to be at the same level as what we saw in Q1. But the good news is that, so far this quarter, we are seeing orders that is coming in pretty much in line with what we expected, and then that is giving us a lot of confidence with regards to the second half, right? And I think as Mohan did talk about in his presentation, I mean, we look at the various businesses, the data center, the wireless 5G PON business, our LoRa business. Those are all tracking very, very nicely. And actually, we are seeing indications that our consumer business might not really be as bad as originally -- as what the thoughts were originally. So the order pattern has been good. It's been nice and coming in the way we expected to see it, and so that's given us a very hopeful outlook for the second half.

Craig Ellis

analyst
#37

That's helpful. And let's just extend the optics beyond the second half and just talk about how you and Mohan look at the, kind of the natural growth rate of the business. Obviously, it's difficult to do, given the trade issues and then COVID issues. But setting that aside and given the earlier comments around the growth in Signal Integrity, wireless sensing and protection, is your sense that the business is a high single-digit grower before anything that would happen with tuck-in or other acquisitions, low double digit, mid-teens? How do you think about the normalized growth rate of the business that you two have worked so diligently to architect here?

Emeka Chukwu

executive
#38

I think you're hitting that on the head. For us, the way we look at it is that if you assume that we don't have the type of issues we had, especially last year where we had the China-U.S. trade situation, if we don't have this like the COVID-19 situation, I think we would be really disappointed within the company if we don't see double-digit growth in the next few years for the company, probably something in the low double digits to the mid-teens and stuff like that, right? So that is how we think of the potential growth that we could generate just based on all the growth drivers that Mohan just went through in the presentation. And we are really very -- we're very hopeful that unless -- if the macro cooperates with us, that we should see some good times as we go forward.

Craig Ellis

analyst
#39

Good. And I know that you have set the expectation that gross margins can expand as we go through the back half of the year. And we -- from an April level that was 61.3%, so from a very strong April level. But as we think about gross margins, can you walk us through some of the gives and takes intermediate to long term? Can we get to, say, a 63% gross margin rate without something like a real significant cloud kicker? Or do we need to have some of those things really come into the mix to drive gross margins above the 61% to 62% range?

Emeka Chukwu

executive
#40

Yes. So on a non-GAAP basis, our target range for gross margin is 58% to 63%. We are currently around the 61.5% range. And the good thing is that most of the growth drivers and the end markets that we've talked about, the growth is going to come from -- pretty -- from gross margins that are expected to be above the current corporate average. So if you look at the data center growth and various [ I&I's ] gross margin business performance, the 5G wireless is a nice gross margin business [ for us ] LoRa, obviously. Even with regards to the Pro AV, the AptoVision video product that Mohan talked about, that is still pretty small today. That should drive growth significantly in the next few years. That is also a very high gross margin, right? And even within protection, the diversification into the automotive and the industrial type applications are all good gross margin businesses. So the expectation is that we should continue to make steady progress towards the 63% high end of the range, and I think we'll probably need a lot of cloud revenue to help us well with that. To me, that is all part of the broader gross margin expectations, so we think we have a path here that is very achievable to get to the high end of our target range.

Craig Ellis

analyst
#41

Got it. And let me, with the time we have left, ask a question about cash use. So the business is very cash generative, very nice margin structure, low capital intensity. As investors look at the meaningful cash balance that you have and the potential perhaps to generate $30 million, $40 million plus per quarter of free cash flow, help us understand where are the priorities now? And if we had an environment where some of the COVID issues started to clear and it was really a normalized environment, would those priorities change? And if so, what would they shift towards?

Emeka Chukwu

executive
#42

I think in the short to the medium term, the priorities are probably going to remain the same, I think. We will continue to strategically buy back our stock, and a lot of -- mostly to offset dilution from grants to our hardworking employees. We'll continue to make investments in start-up companies to gain access to new technologies but also to support the development and the growth of the LoRa ecosystem. And then we have a -- we do have some debt on the books that we'll continue to pay down. So in the short to the medium term, we don't really see any significant change to our use of cash.

Craig Ellis

analyst
#43

Got it. So we're within, I think, a minute or 2 of our closing time. So let me start to wrap up and thank you, Emeka, Mohan, you, Sandy. Thank you for being here and doing this fireside chat-style discussion session. Really appreciate your time and your thoughts on the business and the broader opportunity. I want to especially thank all our investors that have joined us and express our appreciation for them being on the line. And team, I'd be happy to give you the opportunity to make any closing comments if you have any, before we wrap up.

Mohan Maheswaran

executive
#44

Well, let me just, I'll thank everybody also again and just remind everyone that Semtech is a uniquely positioned company, and we have a really interesting portfolio of products that I think are just hitting the market at the right time. Sometimes it's better to be lucky, right? And with COVID-19, the need for infrastructure and the need for a smarter planet has suddenly emerged, which we've been saying is going to come. But now I think it's here, and so we feel this is a really good opportunity for investors. Thank you.

Craig Ellis

analyst
#45

Thank you very much, Mohan. Thanks, guys. And investors, thank you. Have a good day.

Emeka Chukwu

executive
#46

Thank you.

Mohan Maheswaran

executive
#47

Thanks, Craig.

Emeka Chukwu

executive
#48

Bye.

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