Semtech Corporation (SMTC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary
April 7, 2021
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Harsh Kumar
analyst[Audio Gap] CFO of Semtech and Sandy, who most of you guys know as the Head of IR and Biz Dev. And so with that, I'm going to turn it over to Sandy for some forward-looking disclosures and some other legal stuff.
Sandy Harrison
executiveThank you, Harsh. And as always, we appreciate your hosting the call. Before we get started, I want to quickly mention 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 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 obligations to update the information from this call should facts or circumstances change. Also, during the call, we may refer to non-GAAP financial measures that are not prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. Discussion of why the management team considers such non-GAAP measures useful, along with the reconciliation of these to GAAP measures, can also be found on our website. And with that, I'll now turn the call over to Mohan for some of his opening comments. Mohan?
Mohan Maheswaran
executiveThank you, Sandy. Thank you, Harsh. Good morning, everyone. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for taking the time to listen to the Semtech story. Let me start by just saying that the high level, I would say that this is the best position we've ever been in with all of our exciting growth engines really starting to hit on all cylinders. Those of you who have known us and know the story will know that we've invested in a number of platforms for quite some years and a lot of these growth engines have been in the pipeline for many years. But I would say that today, what's really exciting for us is we're finally starting to see those investments really starting to drive real value for the company and very excited about where we are and the situation that we're in. I would say, over the last few years, we've had some major headwinds, including bans on Huawei and China trade issues and some of the pandemic-related issues. But it feels like there's a lot of tailwinds for the company now, and I feel good about the next few years. So let me focus my introduction on 2 main areas. I would say there's a lot of things we can talk about, but with the time limits, what I'd like to do is just focus on the 2 areas of infrastructure and IoT. And let me spend a couple of minutes on each of those, and then we'll go into Q&A. With regard to infrastructure, our investments are largely focused on bandwidth expansion. And they have been for a while, that's been one of the trends that we've been as a company focused on for quite some time and specifically, data center connectivity, 5G wireless connectivity and 10-gig PON connectivity. And those investments are all starting to yield very positive results globally at a time when clearly there's a need for more bandwidth. And not just more bandwidth but more bandwidth at lower power, lower latency and lower cost. And so I sense and we sense that kind of those segments now are all accelerating their investments in those areas, and we are starting to see the benefit of that. From a platform standpoint, we've invested in a number of platforms. We call them ClearEdge; Tri-Edge, which is our new PAM4 platform; FiberEdge; and PON-X, which is our 10-gig PON platform, and they all have tremendous design win momentum. And so we believe that the market really is starting to adopt now these high-bandwidth platforms. We think we'll continue to increase our global market share in all of our target segments going forward. So -- and we don't really think that, that would change. The need for high-performance infrastructure is going to continue as bandwidth expansion need continues. We can only see that continuing. So we're very pleased that we have these platforms and the momentum is clearly behind us. The second area that, obviously, I want to spend a little bit of time on is -- a few minutes on is IoT. And really, our investments there are focused on creating a smarter planet. That's been kind of the trend that we focused on. How do we help create a smarter planet, what are the initiatives that we can put together to drive that business in that -- with that goal in mind. And our focus has been on IoT and specifically on the lower-power IoT market and the lower power wide area networking market, which is a longer-range area segment of the market. And specifically, our LoRa platform, which has now really become established as the leading low-power wide area network technology in the industry. So we're very pleased with that. Obviously, that's been a key goal for us. We've been investing heavily in LoRa for quite some years. It's been making great progress. And I think now, is really starting to gain the tremendous momentum that we have been anticipating for a while, but we're really starting to see that now. I think the other aspect of LoRa that's exciting, the technology was always developed and targeted at the wide area network segment. What you're starting to see is the emergence of LoRa in local area networks, again, low power, local area networks and campus-based networks and even smart home networks. And that's a very exciting phenomenon for us, and we'll see how that emerges over the next few years. But the exciting aspect of that is that it really presents a much larger SAM and a much faster time to revenue opportunity for LoRa. So both of which I think are very important for us and very exciting for us. So -- and as with our infrastructure business, our IoT business has tremendous design win momentum globally and our latest LoRa platform called LoRa Edge is our first device-to-cloud platform that really enables our first cloud services initiative. This is a new initiative that we've recently announced. This is an incredibly exciting initiative for us as cloud services revenues are expected to be recurring, high margin and grow very fast as the need for asset management, asset provisioning, asset locationing start to grow. So I think those are the kind of 2 areas. The infrastructure and IoT areas are the 2 areas that are the most exciting. We have other exciting areas in the company. We could spend a lot of time on it. But I'm going to hand it over to Harsh now, and then we can start to go into Q&A. Harsh, do you want to come off mute, I think you're...
Harsh Kumar
analystSorry, I was on mute. Yes. Thank you, Mohan, for that informative overview. So guys, if you have any questions during the presentation, feel free to e-mail me, that's [email protected]. So with that, Mohan, you kind of highlighted on a couple of the key products that you're very excited about for this year. I want to hit on one of the products you mentioned. You had your earnings call. I could sense the enthusiasm. I've covered you guys now for 15-something years. I've never felt that Emeka, Sandy and yourself have been this excited about the business prospects. So just stepping aside from a product, what do you feel is so well lined up -- I hear you on LoRa, I hear you on infrastructure, but the enthusiasm is just kind of pretty high compared to historical trends. You mentioned that as...
Mohan Maheswaran
executiveHarsh, maybe you could just talk about -- I missed the question, because you froze there. But let me tell you why we're excited. I kind of will summarize, a very simple way. We've invested in some of these platforms for many years. As many of you know, LoRa is a 14-year investment where you invest in transceiver technology, transceiver low-power, transceiver platform. We invest in algorithms. We've invested in systems and the structure. We invested in cloud, a very, very large investment over a long period of time. And having the patience to see those technology investments now, kind of starting to yield real results for us in terms of the number of sensors being deployed, the number of gateways being deployed and now starting to attract really significant ecosystem players like Amazon, Cisco and others into the LoRa world, I think for us is extremely exciting. That's going to yield very positive results, we think, as we go forward. So that's one aspect of it. I think on the infrastructure side, as I mentioned, It's not just one area what we're seeing. And obviously, this is something triggered maybe by work-from-home and the need for more bandwidth, but what we've seen now is across the board from the core of the networks in hyperscale data centers to base stations, to the access networks and access enterprise to the home, fiber to the home, fiber to the enterprise. All of these areas, we're starting to see a demand increase for higher bandwidth connectivity. And when you are -- when you see that higher bandwidth connectivity need, we know that's where we shine. We want the higher bandwidth. We need customers to come to us and say they want more performance because that's what we do, that's what we focus on. And our goal is always to develop the highest performance, the lowest power and the lowest cost. And so when you see that need coming out and being driven by customers, that's exciting. I think the other aspect of the infrastructure I kind of touched on is the globalization of what we're seeing. If I go back a few years, certain regions of the world kind of dominate the demand profile. And that's not by design. It's just the way the world has been. What we're seeing now is definitely a globalization of that infrastructure demand. And that is also exciting because it starts to bring out new players, new customers, new partners in -- brings balance across the world geographically. And I think that is also a nice exciting thing for us. And to give you an example, I mean, 10-gig PON is an area where Semtech invested in many years ago, we had technology many years ago. But no one was really pulling from the market and now everybody is pulling. So we feel we have a very strong technology portfolio in that segment. And I think that for us now means we can start to deploy the technology and start to talk to the market about the technologies we've invested in for over many years. So finally, the bandwidth story is playing out, the Smarter Planet story is playing out. And as you know, we've also been a very big investor in the mobile world, in mobility and not just mobile devices, but mobility in general. Our technologies are extremely small. We've put an emphasis on form factor as well as performance, very low power. And so when we start to get momentum again, partly driven by a work-from-home environment, but it's been coming. We've sensed it's been coming as regulations come out on high-performance radios, for example. We start to see momentum. So everything seems to be going positively from that industry standpoint, from a trend standpoint, from a demand standpoint, and that's backed up obviously by bookings and our strength in demand. So all of that's good. And what we really, I think, are excited about is that we're just seeing the beginning. This is just the beginning. If I go through all of the list of growth engines we have, including AptoVision and some other areas that we've invested in, in video space and things like that, we have a portfolio of what I'll call start-ups that are emerging and growing now and starting to hit the market the right time. So in general, that's where the excitement is coming from. I just think we've hit the right time. And fortunately for us now, there is a strong demand outlook. And I think we sense with customers that there's a real need for continued investment in these areas.
Harsh Kumar
analystThanks, Mohan. So one of the questions that I got after your very positive earnings call, was -- what is it that you guys are doing in the 5G infrastructure, the base station side of the business? So what exactly, how do you participate in there? And then you cited strength when a lot of others are citing weakness. So it was sort of counterintuitive to what the other semi guys are seeing. Maybe you could explain what you do and then maybe why you're seeing strength versus some of the other peers?
Mohan Maheswaran
executiveYes. So first of all, in the base station side, essentially, we are providing physical media devices. These are amplifiers, drivers as well as CDR functions, cloud data recovery circuits into optical modules, and these provide the connectivity for front-haul connectivity, mid-haul and backhaul. But we focus mostly on the front-haul and some mid-haul connectivity on those base stations. The key things to remember in the base station market is as 4G transitions to 5G, many of the 4G links were at 10 gig and only -- we only sold the PMD content into those. At 5G, it's PMD and CDR content, because most of the links are going to be 25 gig or above. And therefore, we have more content. So we have more content per base station. In addition to that, typically, with the 5G base station versus the 4G base station, you have more optical links. So more modules in a 4G base station and maybe 6 optical links in a 5G, maybe 12. So we have more content. We have more modules, and therefore, more devices going in there. And then as I mentioned on the kind of the same aspect on the globalization, a lot of the demand historically has been driven by China, I think. And what we are seeing now is that the rest of the world is starting to wake up and starting to also become active in 5G system developments. And that also is opening up opportunities. So I would say all of those, combined, are driving stronger growth for us. And I'd anticipate actually growth for the rest of this year. We expect this to be a very good year for base station infrastructure. As with all infrastructure, it's lumpy, right? You get CapEx going in, you get deployment and then you have to absorb that and then it starts again, right? But that's the nature of the infrastructure business. But one of the things I know, and it's very clear is there's pent-up demand for it. So for sure, that's going to happen. And it's going to keep going up, up into the right for the next 3 to 5 years. That's -- there's no question about that. It's just -- it is a bit lumpy, but it will go up in continued growth. Hey, Harsh, you're on mute.
Harsh Kumar
analystI keep doing that. I apologize. I wanted to ask you a very similar question on the data center market. There are a lot of upgrades happening in the data center market. You guys are players there. Maybe give us an overview of what you guys make and perhaps what you're seeing in the marketplace and how that benefits you, Mohan?
Mohan Maheswaran
executiveYes. So a similar story. I mean, we have obviously a very strong position in the data center space, in optical modules that connect between data center -- between server racks and within server racks and we going to get the high-speed optical components. And we've really done very, very well in the 100-gig node, active optical cables and the modules connecting those cables. Increasingly now, we're seeing 200 gig and 400 gig. We have a number of platforms. Our ClearEdge has really been focused on 100 gig. We have now Tri-Edge, which is a PAM4-based analog platform targeted at about 200 gig, 400 gig and beyond. And it's gaining great traction. And so we are very pleased. And again, it's the excitement factor you are hearing because before it was just a technology that we brought to market, we now have design wins, we have revenues. We have customers and we're seeing more momentum. The primary advantage of the analog PAM4 platforms we have are power, really essentially is the key thing. Then latency, lower power, lower latency and lower cost. And we believe there's significant reduction in all 3 of those within analog solution. So we have first adopters that have been kind of using this and who know, testing it out, and we are seeing very positive feedback from those customers. So yes, it's really -- it's quite an exciting journey for us. Again, it's global. I think that's another aspect of it. Again, it's not just one region. And so we feel good about that. Again, data centers are a little bit lumpy, right? I mean you see last year, the first half was really strong, second half was weak. But again, we anticipate that the trend is going to be up and to the right, and we are projecting a pretty strong year for data center this year as well.
Harsh Kumar
analystSo Mohan, you touched on my next question actually, with that, the analog PAM4 product set. So I was curious, it's new for you. It's new for the industry. It's new for the world. What kind of feedback are you getting from -- is it a cloud guy that you are working with, or mostly the enterprise guys? Could you maybe just give us like an example of how much money do they expect to save or what kind of deployments are you seeing? And also 2021 is the year, because we were pretty excited about it last year. And you always maintain that this was going to be -- 2021 would be the year when you might start to see some revenue. So would this be the year when we expect this product to start to generate some revenues?
Mohan Maheswaran
executiveYes, it's starting now. So we are excited about the momentum and design wins. And obviously, we have to translate that -- we see that transition to revenues. I would say there's a number of different segments, the segments where power is important and latency is important and cost, other areas where we're most likely to see success. And I think that, that's quite a large chunk of opportunity in both cloud and enterprise. But I think it's less likely to be hyperscale data centers, guys using active optical cables. And high-performance computing applications where latency is important. Those are the areas that kind of stand out for us and likely we are going to do quite well there. We already have traction across different regions of the world, as I mentioned. And so it's difficult to quantify exactly the benefit for the customer. I think because it depends on their architecture and how many modules they're using, what type of systems they are putting in place. So from a cost standpoint, there's clearly an advantage over current incumbent solutions, but it's really dependent also on the power equation and those other aspects there. So to me, I think the key thing is, it's new for us. It's a new platform for us. It's just come out. It's got momentum. And I think for the rest of this year, the question is, okay, can we turn that initial momentum into something really big, and I think we can.
Harsh Kumar
analystGot it. And so now coming to the other products you mentioned, the IoT side of the house, LoRa. So maybe I was hoping, Mohan, you could talk about some of the recent sort of killer wins that you had in LoRa, some exciting wins that you feel are worth mentioning. And with that, I also wanted to ask you, LoRa has been very China-heavy the last couple of years. China, obviously, is doing better, better than most other countries, coming out of COVID. But what do you think the revenue split will be between North America and China or call it, the West U.S. and Europe versus China, over the next 2 to 3 years? And then also any kind of meaningful design wins that you think you want to mention?
Mohan Maheswaran
executiveWell, so LoRa, historically, the revenue has been 50% China, 30% Europe and then North America and the Americas have been 10%-ish, something like that. A lot of the opportunities, the pipeline opportunities, a lot of the asset tracking and a lot of the logistics and a lot of the smart home initiatives are in the Americas. So we're anticipating a little bit of a shift to, I would say, closer to probably over the next few years, 40% China, maybe 35% North America and 15% Europe. And so something like that. It'll be some mix that will change a little bit. And we're not stopping the momentum in China, by the way. I mean, we expect that to continue. I think the main thing is that we are expecting the Americas to start really accelerating its growth. And part of the reason is, obviously, the relationship we have with Amazon and the things that are going on there. There are some new initiatives. As I mentioned, the Smart Home initiative with Sidewalk is exciting. It's something that we never really -- when we developed LoRa, it wasn't targeted at the smart home or the campus networks. But what we're seeing is there's a real clear value proposition for LoRa in these low-power local area networks, campus networks and smart home networks. And that's exciting, a, because the volume is much higher; b, because the time to revenue's faster; and c, I think it can really be a technology, LoRa can be a technology that essentially replaces ZigBee and replaces UWA and replaces many of the technologies out there that weren't really designed for this extremely low power and long range. And so it's complementary. LoRa is very complementary to 5G, very complementary to WiFi. And so we see it as a really good fit for that segment of the market. We have numerous design wins, to be honest with you. I mean there's really many, many different use cases, from the tracking of animals to the tracking of or monitoring of natural resources to climate control, sensors to pollution control, the management of sensors to smart home initiatives, as I mentioned. And I can go on. The list is just endless. I would say that there's really a lot of excitement around our cloud services because of the ability to provide added value around device provisioning, device management, that's -- device provisioning is essentially setting up a sensor on the network and being able to update it in software, for example, device management or managing your battery on a sensor. If you think about how many sensors there are and how difficult it is once the battery starts to get low, how people have to go out and change the batteries and things like that, device management is quite important. And then geolocation. Where is the asset that you're tracking? Is it indoors? Is it outdoors? Where -- what is it close to? How can you -- is it moving? All of these type of things I think are value-added capabilities that our cloud services can bring to the table. And as I mentioned in my intro, we're very unique in the ability -- with this ability because we have a device to cloud platform. Obviously, we are unique in our ability to provide this capability and to bring it to the marketplace and generate value and then generate and monetize that through cloud services. So it's a new initiative for us, but what's exciting about it, obviously, it's recurring revenues, it's high margins, and it's built on the foundation of a LoRa a growing LoRa ecosystem and growing LoRa sensors. And one of the things I do every earnings call, I tell you about how many gateways are out there and how many sensors that are out there and how the ecosystem's growing. And if you can imagine, 3 to 5 years from now, as we continue to expand that, and the ecosystem becomes bigger, the opportunity for us to be able to generate cloud services revenue should be quite exciting for the company and for everyone.
Harsh Kumar
analystSo Mohan, I remember the sort of living room wars from the late '90s, I want to say early 2000s. Cisco, Scientific Atlanta was trying to control the living room through the, what was then the cable box that was the mode. Is this -- would you call this the battle for control of the IoT within the house that Amazon has taken the first shot and actually trying to sell kind of tangible devices to an American household or a U.S. household or a Chinese household that we can use? And then -- and that would be sort of the foothold and from there, they could expand. Ultimately, having, for example, my house, having 30, 40 such monitoring devices, is that kind of the goal?
Mohan Maheswaran
executiveI think it's more than that, Harsh, And I don't think that's necessarily just control. I think it's more providing the capability to manage resources -- natural resources like water, for example, smart irrigation to manage assets that are outside the home, for example, like lighting control outside your home to manage security away from the home. For example, you're probably -- your sensors, and most of them are on your doors and windows around the house itself. But increasingly, I think we're seeing the opportunity and the market is seeing the opportunity to provide safety around the periphery of your property line. And things like that, knowing when someone's coming up your driveway, knowing when someone opens up your mailbox as an example, knowing when your neighbor is having challenges or maybe knowing when your pet is -- gone outside a safe zone or your child is outside a safe zone. These type of things are all going to change, I think, the way the smart home is conceived and really kind of brings a new concept to the smart home initiative. And LoRa provides that capability. You can do it with other technologies, but it's cumbersome, it's battery-heavy. It requires a lot of batteries, a lot of batteries to be changed. It's expensive. And some technologies, they may do the job, but they use licensed spectrum, for example, if you're using a cellular connectivity, and it's just cumbersome and it's expensive. So LoRa is kind of a natural fit for these low-power systems, and that's what we're banking on.
Harsh Kumar
analystMohan, 2 more. Last question on the hardware side, and I want to switch over to the exciting services side. Is there anything you can tell us about the timing of Sidewalk, your products, their products, whatever you can mention? And are there any other major players that are worthwhile mentioning that you're allowed to talk about on this call?
Mohan Maheswaran
executiveWell, so I would say that the Sidewalk program is very exciting. It's moving ahead. It's -- from my perspective, I see the type of things that are going on. I think it's extremely encouraging. But it's not really in Semtech's hands. It's obviously in Amazon's hands. But yes. I would say it's just extremely exciting. We just want to wait and see. And as it rolls out, see the momentum and the approach and those type of things. But yes, I would say it's very positive. Everything's going to plan, according to what their plans are. And so we'll wait and see how that plays out. Obviously, Amazon's a big player. There are other big players in the marketplace. LoRa now is established. I think that's the one big difference between now and a year ago or even 2 years ago, everybody knows about LoRa now. We don't have to explain the technology that much. I mean it's still new, and it's still emerging, still new for a lot of people. But there is just generally now people are starting to understand what it does and how it works. And I don't get the question anymore, what is LoRa? I get more of the question as to, okay, why is this beneficial in this use case and how is this going to help me with cloud services, these type of questions now. Which is great. It used to be -- I can go back 3 years ago, the only question I would ask -- have to answer was, what is LoRa? What does it stand for, the way does it work, what's different about it, how does it operate relative to other wireless technologies and what's special about it and what's the proprietary position you have and blah, blah, blah. But now that's kind of shifted to, okay, how many sensors are you going to get out there and why are there not more sensors, these type of things, which is great. So I like that because it's starting to -- we're starting to see the proliferation of the technology. Globally, by the way. I would say I've never -- I mean I've been in semis for 40 years. I have never seen a technology that's so global. Every country in the world, I mean, you name it. And part of it is because of the value of LoRa to third world countries and to countries that have a need for managing natural resources and countries that have a need for managing climate and pollution and those type of things. LoRa's perfect because it's a low cost, it's unlicensed spectrum. It's very easy to use. It's very long range, so infrastructure investment is low. And so we see a massive proliferation across the globe. And that is also very exciting. Of course, some of those regions don't generate as much revenue for us today. But I think as the technology is established in those regions, it becomes a real foundation for future revenue growth, for -- as use cases emerge and as things like cloud services emerge.
Harsh Kumar
analystSo Mohan, shifting gears to the services potential and congratulations, I think you announced in the earnings call not that far back, like 2, 3 weeks ago, that you either had your first one, services contract, and it was close to being locked in. So with that, I was curious, how do you think about pricing these kind of LoRa services? I remember [indiscernible] Analyst Day or your Analyst Day -- Semtech's Analyst Day a couple of years ago when it was supposed to be like if I lost my dog, it be $0.05 or whatever the number was per click for GPS. So the question really is, how do you price these LoRa services contract? Are they per usage, per device or just a service contract on a monthly basis? Or how does it work?
Mohan Maheswaran
executiveYes. Part of this, Harsh, is being developed as we speak. I mean we don't really have a very thorough idea of what's the best approach. But we're trying a little bit of everything. Obviously, we would like to monetize based on usage. So as many -- every time the algorithm is accessed, for example, It would be nice to be able to monetize. I think in the early days, we're very flexible. And part of the reason for that flexibility is, our customers don't know either what's going to work and they have to see the value. They have to see hey, with LoRa, I can get this. And with Semtech's LoRa Cloud services, I can achieve this. I can't do this any other way. So the onus is on us to demonstrate that. But I think we are quite confident, we have a number of contracts in place and agreements in place and with customers with real use cases, with real problems to solve. And so there's a real opportunity and I think that's the key for us. So we have an aggressive goal, of course, to grow this to around $100 million in 5 years. And so we're very focused on getting customers in, engaging with them, getting to use our LoRa Edge platform. And as we expand on the LoRa Edge platform and offer valued services around that platform, that -- to bring value to them as a customer, I think the economics are going to work to our advantage because they work today for other companies. And we see that it's a model, our model should work if we bring value to customers because they're already doing it. They're paying other companies for that type of thing. So -- and we're not doing anything different than that. We're just kind of refining a new technology that provides more advantage to them. So we think we will be able to do it. But yes, to get to the specifics now, I would say it's still early.
Harsh Kumar
analystOkay. I'm going to move on to a different topic now. A couple of years ago, before the U.S. cellphone company had put out the OLED-based screen, I think Semtech was one of the leaders in the OLED screen-based protection, I think you guys were at the top of the charts as far as protecting the owner's screen. How is your positioning in that market as that technology has absolutely gone mainstream? And then also with that, I think there was also a side angle on automotive protection, because the console they're getting in the car, the screens are getting bigger and people's hands are all over that. So there's a pretty tremendous opportunity for that. I was wondering if you could talk about both those opportunities and where they are, what they mean to you?
Mohan Maheswaran
executiveYes. So I would say mobility in general, we tend to focus on infrastructure a lot and IoT a lot. But mobility also, particularly again from what -- due to the work-from-home environment, has -- is turning out to be really a nice investment for us. We continue to do that. And there's 2 areas, it's protection and our proximity sensing. On the protection side, the key thing that always drives our protection is the use of advanced lithography devices in the system. So as the customers move towards more 10-nanometer, 7-nanometer, 5-nanometer, those transistors become extremely sensitive, very easy to blow up and they're very expensive devices. And so where you have interfaces going into those chips, either through a display or through some other port, it's extremely difficult to protect. And that's what Semtech does. So we are leaders in most of the display areas and will continue to be. It's an area that we -- I think is a very good one for Semtech. But in addition to that, I think all of the high-speed interfaces like Ethernet ports, HDMI ports, USB-C port interfaces are all good areas for Semtech's protection. Increasingly, one of the things that's really quite exciting for us is that the industrial arena, including automotive, is starting to deploy more ports -- high-speed ports, displays -- more displays, more interfaces and generally more electronics and more sensors in the vehicles. And those are -- and it's kind of a hostile environment, the vehicle is a very hostile environment. So there are lots of high voltages and currents floating around. So I think that also is another very nice opportunity for us. And as we have started to focus a little bit more on the broader market, not just on consumer devices, we're starting to see that area expand in many different areas. The other area I'll touch on with mobility is proximity sensing. Because proximity sensing for us has always been the reason why we focused on it and decided to build these platforms, was we saw it really correlating to a trend. The trend is regulatory drivers, which is driving the need for managing radio power. So as your radio increases in power and the regulations say, you have to manage that radio power to ensure the health -- ensure it's not a hazard to the human body. And so that's what our proximity sensing does. So I would say those 2 areas, combination of proximity sensing and the combination of our protection devices in mobile devices gives us a really nice long-term play in mobile devices. And then what we're seeing is in protection, particularly is the expansion into industrial and automotive as well, which is also exciting.
Harsh Kumar
analystGot it. We got about 5 minutes left. So right at the end of the calendar year, there was a Semtech press release on AWS, some kind of agreement that Semtech had. I know that I, for one, didn't catch the significance of it until you and I spoke. And I think I could tell that you were very excited about it. It was basically the acceptance of LoRa -- or sort of the -- sort of like Lora just getting really tight within the AWS so that the enterprise wouldn't have to do much to deploy LoRa. Could you maybe just talk about that, Mohan, for the benefit of the people that we have on today's call?
Mohan Maheswaran
executiveYes. Yes, yes. I think it is the most significant announcement that has gone out on LoRa, not so much from a revenue standpoint. Obviously, Sidewalk will probably drive more shorter-term revenues. But from a longer-term strategic standpoint, it's a very important initiative. Essentially, prior to the announcement, prior to AWS' IoT core, any enterprise customer would have to build their own software platform to bridge from the gateway input, so all the packets coming into their system to a cloud back end. What AWS has essentially done is allowed and enable enterprises to connect directly from those gateway now into their cloud back end. And why that's important is they've already invested a lot in IoT kind of software platforms. So as an example, a customer who says, hey, I want to do predictive maintenance. Well, okay, add the sensors, you connect the gateways. They have all the data that tells them when a machine needs to be maintained. But then they have to develop all the back-end software. Well, AWS has now provided that channel so that just by connecting to -- through AWS IoT core, you get access to AWS' predictive maintenance software. And that is a time-to-market advantage. It's a cost savings. It's a value-add in the sense that if you don't have that, you need to have somebody who understands how predictive maintenance works, all of these things. So it's really a nice addition. We're very happy about it. Obviously, it's going to take time to roll out to all the different companies, but it's -- I think it's going to -- another one of those elements in the ecosystem that's going to potentially take LoRa from being just a nice LPWAN technology to a global low-power initiative and standard.
Harsh Kumar
analystMohan, with that, I think we're out of time. I really appreciate, Mohan, your time, Emeka, Sandy. All you guys making time for us and the investors of Semtech, we really appreciate it. And we will connect again soon, hopefully in person.
Mohan Maheswaran
executiveAll right. Thank you, Harsh.
Harsh Kumar
analystThanks, guys. Thanks, everybody, for joining in. Thank you.
Sandy Harrison
executiveThanks, Harsh. Take care now.
Harsh Kumar
analystTake care.
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