Semtech Corporation (SMTC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the 2021 ESG and Impact Summit hosted by Stifel. My name is Tore Svanberg and I'm a senior analyst covering analog, connectivity and processor semiconductors at Stifel. We will wrap up the conference today with the next panel titled How IoT Networks Will Contribute To More Sustainable Planet. And I can't think of a more ideal participant to discuss this topic with me than Semtech, represented here by the company's President and Chief Executive Officer, Mohan Maheswaran. And we also have Sandy Harrison with us, who is Vice President of Investor Relations. Some of you are likely familiar with Semtech already. But for those of you that are not, Semtech is a leading supplier of high-performance analog and mixed single semiconductors and advanced algorithms for infrastructure, high-end consumer and industrial equipment. The company is exceptionally diversified given its size and runs several product groups that relate to both ESG and SDG, the 17 sustainability metrics as defined by the United Nations. Without and without stealing more of the company's thunder, let me turn it over to Sandy for some brief disclosures and then also to Mohan for a brief introduction. Sandy and Mohan, over to you, and thank you so much for participating in Stifel's 2021 ESG and Impact Summit.

Great, and thank you for hosting the event and have us here today, Tore. Before we get started, I just 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 these statements today. 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. 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 financial measures useful, along with the reconciliations of non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP financial measures, can be found on our website at semtech.com. With that, I will now pass to this onto Mohan for his opening comments. Mohan?

Thank you, Sandy, and thank you, Tore. Let me start with a brief introduction to Semtech and a brief introduction to our LoRa technology. Semtech is a leading high-performance analog chip company focused on creating innovative technology platforms to enable a smarter planet, to enable increased bandwidth and to enable increased mobility. Semtech has addressed ESG with both internally focused initiatives as well as outwardly focused initiatives. Internally, we recently appointed Semtech's first Chief ESG Officer, who works closely with the Board to ensure appropriate levels of investment, priority and oversight on the company's sustainability programs and initiatives. These include the creation of the Semtech Women's Leadership Council, which was formed to elevate and empower women, advise the company in its efforts to identify, attract and retain top female talent for key engineering, technical and leadership positions, continuing our excellent track record of diversity, equity and inclusion. 30% of the company's Board of Directors is comprised of women and over 40% of the company's executive leadership is comprised of individuals from various ethnic backgrounds. Initiating employee engagement surveys to ensure employee engagement and feedback on company policy and continuing our health and wellness programs globally to ensure our employees are provided the best health and well-being support possible. In addition to our internally focused initiatives, we continue to invest in innovative R&D programs to enable a smarter, more connected and more sustainable plant. Semtech has invested in its LoRa technology platform for well over 10 years. LoRa-enabled sensors and networks are ideally suited to support the United Nations' Sustainability Development Goals. LoRa is a long-range, tens of miles, low power, approximately 10-year battery life, bidirectional, highly secure wireless communication platform designed for low-power IoT sensor networks. The main benefits of LoRa-enabled sensor networks are, firstly, its very long range, typically 15 to 30-mile range for outdoor applications. But we've also demonstrated satellite connectivity greater than 500 miles, and we have demonstrated deep indoor coverage without line of sight. Secondly, it's ultra-low power that typically enables 10x lower power than cellular-based networks. Thirdly, LoRa enables public or private networks with different configurations, such as star networks, mesh networks or point-to-point networks. And finally, LoRa-enabled sensor networks are very low cost, as they use unlicensed spectrum, enabling low-cost sensor loads, low-cost gateways and, in most cases, used to open LoRaWAN standard managed by the LoRa Alliance. LoRa-enabled sensor networks were conceived with the simple goal of enabling a smarter planet. Today, there are over 170 LoRaWAN IoT networks deployed globally, over 150 LoRaWAN IoT network operators in 13 countries. There are over 2.2 million gateways deployed and over 200 million LoRa-enabled IoT sensors deployed. These gateways and end nodes are deployed across numerous applications that are focused on the vision of creating a smarter planet and are tightly coupled with the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals. Specifically, LoRa-enabled IoT networks are being used today to eliminate waste, to manage and mitigate against climate change, to manage and facilitate the more efficient use of our natural resources, to improve energy efficiency with the use of smart metering and smart asset management, to enable efficient and sustainable industrial IoT systems and to create smart agriculture and farming systems. There are many more use cases being conceived every day that further enable our vision of creating a smarter planet using LoRa. The global implementation of smarter IoT technology is expected to result in the reduction of 2 billion metric tons of carbon emissions annually or approximately 20% of total carbon emissions. This will enable up to $10 trillion per year in savings within 5 years. Today, Semtech announced an initiative to further support United Nations' Sustainability Development Goals. Semtech will focus investments and strategies together with our global partners to deploy 1 billion LoRa-enabled sensors by 2026. That supports specific sustainable development programs. This is a new initiative that we will discuss more at future events, but we expect the increasing importance of smart LoRa-enabled sensor networks to increase rapidly over the next 5 years as global sustainability goals transition from a nice to have to an absolute need. In addition to our LoRa Smart Planet initiatives, Semtech's other product groups also have significant importance related to sustainability. Our Signal Integrity Product Group investments in infrastructure innovation and our Protection Product Groups focus on reducing electronic wastage through the protection of electronic systems further enhanced Semtech's association to the United Nations sustainability goals. Let me now hand back over to Tore for question and answers. Tore?

Great. Thank you so much, Mohan. And also for that very solid introduction. And you talked a little bit about this, but I want to sort of take it a bit further. What are some of the misconceptions do you think when it comes to Semtech and the topic of ESG? Not necessarily misconceptions from your customers, right, but investors, because sometimes I think things don't fully get out there in public, right, as far as some of the things that you're doing as a company, both internally, but also more importantly, externally when it comes to ESG.

Well, I'll focus on the external. The external aspect is really about investing R&D dollars in -- with specific goals in mind. And Semtech has -- we've always viewed smarter planet initiatives as a critical area to invest in, just simply because we knew the trend was going to continue to be up into the right for many, many years. Obviously, in the last few years, with some of the things that are going on with climate change and energy, it's starting to put a little bit more focus on these areas. But I think it's really critical to understand that some of these investments that we've made have been over a very long period of time. And they've taken time both on the hardware side, on the software side, but also building out the ecosystem. In LoRa's case, we have an alliance of 400 companies that are also participating in enabling a smarter planet. So that's very important. And I think with the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals, you start to look at how is the LoRa platform technology helping some of these initiatives. And we see a really good fit with clean water and sanitation, affordable and clean energy, sustainable cities and communities, responsible consumption and production, climate action, obviously, life below water, life on land. All of these initiatives are really very -- correlate very well with LoRa use cases and the value of LoRa. When you think about LoRa's value in being long range and low power and low cost, it really fits well with some of these initiatives. And so I think that's probably the #1 thing. I think the other aspects, even our other businesses, like our Signal Integrity Product Group, which is really about innovation and infrastructure, fits well with the UN's goal of innovation and infrastructure. And then also our Protection business, which is all about protecting systems so that they don't fail and so we don't have so much waste of electronic systems is really also key and fits well with the UN's SDG program. So we're looking at a number of ESG frameworks also in the company, including the UN's SDG program to provide more disclosures on both our internal SDG efforts and our outward-looking efforts and investments in support of the UN's SDG goals, and we'll be communicating more about that in the future.

Perfect. And one of the common things that are coming out of this ESG Summit is when it comes to ESG and especially sustainability, it's not enough just for one company to prioritize this. It seems like every single part of the supply chain kind of has to be bought in. And I was hoping maybe you can translate that to sort of the life cycle of LoRa. Because like you said, you've been investing in LoRa for the last 10 years. I'm sure, initially, the technology was maybe more sort of it'd be great to have, right? But like you said before, now it's becoming a must. So talk a little bit about that live stand and how the technology has evolved from being perhaps just a communications technology to now really being something that drives sustainability.

Yes. That's -- so what we have seen over the years is that LoRa initially was extremely good technology for smart metering, smart utilities and for a number of reasons. And I think we started to see that now -- then move to agriculture, farming. And now with really the inception of cloud-based initiatives and AWS' IoT corporates as an example of that, we're starting to see more logistics, asset management, and even the smart home campus neighborhood networks starting to play their role. But really, when we look at it, it does require, as you point out, the whole ecosystem, the whole supply chain, to participate. Semtech is a chip company, we do algorithms as well. But we don't make sensor devices. We don't make gateways. We don't make data centers. And so you have to have everyone in the supply chain that's providing part of the end-to-end solution participate with the whole -- with the goal in mind that we want to improve in a specific area. The good news is that there is, as I mentioned, the transition from these initiatives being a nice to have to being a real need for cities, for governments, for enterprises. It's really starting to change things for a number of reasons as we talked about with climate change or whatever. But we are seeing lots of good examples of that, like we have a number of examples that I can talk about which are different use cases for different areas of sustainability, but very important is that there's just not one company. It's really many companies who are involved in that end-to-end solution.

Got it. And so maybe we can move on to some of the use cases. And as a backdrop, what are some of the UN 17 SDGs that Semtech impacts the most and why? And perhaps you could share with us a few examples or use cases.

Yes. Let me start with a few examples, and I'll try to tie them to the UN's initiatives as well. We have -- from a smarter planet initiative, a lot of our customers have been developing systems to try to improve efficiency. As an example of that, Birdz in Europe is using a LoRaWAN smart metering network to save over 1 million cubic meters of freshwater annually. So they are using their network, their LoRaWAN network, to save water. Their subsidiary, Birdz is a subsidiary of Veolia. They're a global leader in resource management. And Birdz provides the ability to integrate IoT services and devices such as water leak detectors, fire hydrant monitors, water quality probes and smart meters into the LoRaWAN network. And purely, the goal is saving water, reducing inefficiencies in their water networks. Another example is a company in India, DevApp Solutions who integrated LoRaWAN into their smart trolley management system to enable more effective asset management. The system simply is smarter. It increases inventory efficiency and enables geofencing and energy savings. So their focus is on energy saving. In Korea, SK Telecom, they have a life care -- they call it life care as a LoRa-enabled sensor that transmits animal health data, enabling real-time health monitoring of farm animals. And that essentially increases milk harvesting of approximately 1,000 liters per cow and about $1,000 increase in value per cow. So we see different use cases with different objectives, but all kind of tied to a similar thing, which is really about improving efficiencies and reducing costs, saving and natural resources, things like that. Another example is Vinduino deployed a LoRa-enabled moisture sensor to monitor soil moisture and automate irrigation for farm crops. Vinduino believes that efficient water use leads to 50% savings in irrigation costs and a significant improvement in crop yields. So we've got a number of use cases. There are many, many more that I could talk about. Again, if I look at the correlation between these use cases and our -- and the UN's sustainable development goals, affordable and clean energy, which is the number seven on their goals. Sustainable cities and communities, and we can talk about smart cities and what they're doing. But that's definitely a connection with LoRa. Responsible consumption and production. Again, it's all about efficiencies, the #12, climate action. We definitely see LoRa being deployed across the globe to help mitigate and manage against climate. And then even the life below water and the life on land, more about agricultural efficiencies, farming efficiencies and things like that. So many, many different use cases.

Excellent. And Mohan, in the past, you've talked about LoRa really kind of inflecting from a diversification perspective, right? So like you said, initially, it was a lot of smart meter markets. I think initially, it was also very concentrated in China. But both by an application or end market or even geographically, you're seeing sort of an inflection point in diversification. Can you maybe talk a little bit more about that? And related to that, I know last quarter, you had that big bump up in the number of gateways. It was in the last quarter when we had a big number of new gateways. And I'm just wondering between new consumer type applications for LoRa versus perhaps more ESG or SDG type use cases, where is that sort of the incremental number of gateways coming from?

Yes. So a couple of points there. First, on the geographical balance of LoRa. Initially, when LoRa emerged as a new technology, certainly Europe was very quick to adopt LoRa. It followed with Asia adopting LoRa. I think the U.S. has been somewhat of a laggard in that, but starting to catch up now. And most of the use cases were, I think, tied to the smarter planet initiatives. Certainly, energy efficiency, monitoring of grids, smart metering for natural resources, pollution control, climate control, things like that. With the emergence of the cloud, one of the things we've definitely seen, and this is really putting a lot of the smarts and the intelligence on the edge, but also into the cloud itself, we've definitely seen an emergence of asset management, logistics, industrial IoT applications for things like predictive maintenance and trying to predict when a machine is going to fail or a line is going to come down and just bringing more efficiency and improving that. Also on energy savings and reducing on energy wastage and leakage or those type of things. We've seen also now the emergence of smart home campus and neighborhood networks. And you sit back and you think about, well, why is smart neighborhood and smart campus interested in LoRa network and IoT networks? And one could not imagine the amount of leakage detection, wastage in terms of water, in terms of energy due to lighting -- unsmart lighting and things like that that's happening in on campuses, on neighborhoods and in homes. They just don't have the smarts. And so by simply moving to smarter technology, you suddenly change that dynamic. And I think that's really kind of the essence behind the Sidewalk network, for example, where the Sidewalk Connect network can essentially turn a smart -- a campus or a home or a neighborhood from being essentially a down set of implementation of technology to a smarter implementation of technology and then using the cloud or the Edge to make smart-up more informed decisions about when to turn on light, when to turn off lights, when to stop irrigating, when to continue to irrigate, when to turn on heating, when to turn off heating, when to turn AC up and things like that, plus the security and safety aspects. So there's a ton of energy savings. There's a ton resource management value to that. And we continue to see all of those areas like our logistics, asset management, smart home neighborhood has been really embryonic. It's really just beginning. And I think that's the beauty about it. And so when we look at our own pipeline, we definitely started to see a transition from what I'll call more traditional use cases, which are still growing and still expect it to do very well in the future. But a lot of new emerging use cases are also going to drive the growth for LoRa. So very excited by that.

I just wanted to remind the audience, if you do have questions, you can submit those in the webcast, and I will get to them. But Mohan, in relation to that and maybe also in relation to what we talked about as far as everybody in the ecosystem kind of have to be bought in. You've talked in the past about LoRa starting to work with other connectivity technologies, kind of more as a partnership, right? So whether it's LoRa plus WiFi or LoRa plus Bluetooth or LoRa plus 5G. Would you say that there's an ESG, SDG pull there, too, where basically, everybody is starting to work a little bit more together? And the reason I'm asking the question is because I think very often investors, they have this mindset that there's going to be one technology that wins all. But I think from a connectivity perspective, because it's so complex, it's pretty clear that a lot of connectivity technologies are going to have to coexist within the next 10 to 20 years. So yes, if you could elaborate on that, that would be great.

Yes, I think that's definitely true. When you look at the different use cases and the value, LoRa is a low-power, long-range, very low-cost connectivity vehicle, but it's also low data rate. So if, for example, you want to video stream or audio stream maybe from a camera or something like that, LoRa is not a good technology for that purpose. And so integrating or combining with WiFi or cellular makes a lot of sense. And so every use case is different. Every use case will require a different combination, all technologies. And so yes, it is very much a system solution. But this is why the LoRa Alliance for us is a critical, critical component of the success of LoRa because if you look at the alliance, it's 400 members, but a lot of those members are at different elements of the value chain. Some are sensor companies, chip companies, component companies, some are gateway companies, software companies, system companies, cloud companies, operators. And that's the beauty is when you have these companies working together to promote a LoRaWAN initiative. They are already familiar with other technologies and using other technologies and then combining them with LoRa to make a really good IoT -- end-to-end IoT solution that's efficient and effective and works well. And I think that will be the future. That will continue to be the case. There's never going to be one technology that fits all of the different elements of a use case.

Okay. Yes. And obviously, I want to come back to LoRa. But before I keep going, I also wanted to address your protection business because I think that's an area that's perhaps a bit less obvious to people why your protection business would be so important from an ESG/SDG perspective. So if you could elaborate on that and perhaps you can give us some use cases of your protection business.

Yes. Protection is an interesting discussion because essentially what protection -- our protection devices do is they protect a system from failing. And so when you look at -- I will take a simple thing like a smartphone. When you have an ESG event that creates a problem for the chip inside the phone, essentially, the whole smartphone has to be recycled or there's a lot of electronic waste that occurs from that. Same thing in a computer or same thing in a vehicle. So our protection devices are there to try to soak up the energy and prevent those electronics from being damaged. And by virtue of saving electronics from being damaged, you really do save a lot in terms of the wastage aspect of these electronics. And so that's the whole thought about protection. Now the beauty about our protection business today is it's really proliferating. It used to be pretty much very focused on mobile and consumer devices. But now, as we see more advanced technologies, chip technologies proliferate into industrial systems, automotive systems, communication systems, it's very important that they get protected. The last thing you want to do is to have a vehicle, because of a main process of failure in a vehicle, for example, throw away all the electronics in the vehicle, which could be thousands of dollars worth of electronics just because of an ESG event. And so we are seeing the opportunity to make sure we can protect those devices as best we can with these high-speed interfaces. So it's more Ethernet ports, more USB ports, more displays, more antennas go into a vehicle. It's very important to add more protection, and that's what we do. And so that's another aspect of the UN's SDG goals, which is really the #12, which is kind of all about preventing waste and making sure we have this circular economy kind of concept, right?

Right. And on the protection side, you've talked in the past about the high-speed ports in a car. But as we kind of move into the battery management system, is there an opportunity for protection there, too? Because my understanding is that those systems are becoming more and more digital. They're starting to collect more and more data. So obviously, that means more processes, more software. So is that a future opportunity or maybe even already an opportunity for your protection business?

Yes, yes. So historically, we focused on very high-speed lines, but we are seeing high-speed lines with higher voltage requirements or higher current requirements. So those all become opportunities for us. And that's one of the reasons why our protection business is diversifying now, which is great. Obviously, that's good to see our industrial communications, automotive, new segments within our business grow nicely. So that's -- and we expect that to continue for a while.

Very good. So I wanted to shift gears a little bit and talk a little bit about this idea of a circular economy. And I think when we think about things like Amazon Sidewalk, I'm pretty convinced that long term, that's the main use case for Amazon Sidewalk. Obviously, today, it's a bit more rudimental, it's more a bit more asset tracking technology. But I can see the potential longer term of this becoming more of a circular economy type technology. First of all, do you agree with that? Second of all, how does Semtech participate?

Well, so we view a circular economy as really a system that tackles major global challenges like climate change, waste and pollution really. So just kind of separate that from our linear-based economy. And if you think about LoRa-enabled sensors or LoRa-based networks, they are being used in IoT use cases that are monitoring and managing pollution, minimizing waste, reducing energy usage. So that's kind of really fits well with that concept. And remembering that LoRa's primary value proposition is as extremely low power. And then secondly, it's long range. So together, that creates kind of an ideal platform. And that's why we're seeing this acceleration of low-power wide area network deployments driven by the circular economy. So for the circular economy, the key things are efficiency, productivity, shared assets and reusability are kind of the critical factors. So when we think then about the Sidewalk Network, as I mentioned, we've got really targeted smart home neighborhood and campus networks. It's all about improving, optimizing energy savings. It's all about minimizing waste, improving natural resource efficiencies and improving safety. That's kind of high-level key requirements and key goals over the Sidewalk Network as we see it. And LoRa-enabled sensors and LoRa-based networks are kind of a key enabling factor to enable those critical factors. So there are many players in developing smarter solutions to participate in the home, in the neighborhood and the campus. But I think what we're starting to see really for the first time now is a lot more investments and a lot more thought going into smarter waste management, smart leak detection. Leak detection has been talked about forever, but now the technology is there and really the need is there to try to reduce wastage and produce water and gas leakage, for example. Energy management, smart energy management. Again, the technology is starting to become more mature and become more -- it's becoming easier, I think, to recognize the true value if you implement a true system now. And predictive maintenance, as I said, to minimize waste. If you can predict when something is going to fail before it fails, you can really save a lot. And so again, I think the emergence of the cloud and cloud analytics and cloud intelligence, plus intelligence on the Edge, is really pushing that kind of these use cases and some of the thoughts behind them forward. So I think the circular economy is really going to move forward because a result of these different technologies coming together.

Right. And I know I've asked you this question in the past, and you've been very good about setting the expectation, right? But when you think about things like circular economy and sharing of assets and so on and so forth, is there a possibility that LoRa would be part of that controller eventually, the smartphone, where if every single phone has a WiFi or a Bluetooth chip, can it also have a LoRa chip? And the reason why I phrased the question was because in the past, you've always said, "Hey, Tore, hold on, that's not on the horizon, and we're not expecting that." But is that a possibility? Is LoRa kind of getting to that type of pervasiveness?

Yes. I think for sure, it's a possibility. I think the questions are really whether it makes the most sense. When we talk about LoRa's value being extremely long range, as an example, extremely low power. And then some of the use cases where we've seen -- there's no other suitable technology. Smart utilities comes to play smart metering, things like that, or agriculture. LoRa is a natural fit. Obviously, in a more competitive consumer domain, LoRa has to stand out and be a shining -- the value proposition has to be extremely strong for consumer manufacturers to implement LoRa. But as I say, I think the world is starting to turn a little bit now. We're starting to see that where I wouldn't have imagined 10 years ago, if you had said to me, "Well, LoRa is going to be in the smart home." I would have said, "Well, it kind of doesn't make sense because LoRa's value is much longer range than that." But what we've essentially seen is the home has become really an inefficient home and neighborhoods are inefficient and campuses are inefficient. And so if you can use new technology like LoRa to change that dynamic, I think you can really start to see that things can be improved. And that's what I think we're seeing. And I eventually think that LoRa in a phone or in a watch or something like that for safety reasons and then for backup, if the radios go down, if the cellular radio goes down, LoRa -- and then we -- as we talk about asset tracking and asset management, I think we're going to start to see more proliferation of LoRa into tags and things like that. It's taken a while. We've always thought this is what happened, but it's taken a while, and part of that is because just adoption of the technology and acceptance of how valuable the technology is for some of these use cases, but it's starting to happen now.

Right. Yes. No, because I remember when WiFi first came out, everyone was like, "Oh, the operator is going to hate it." And then the opposite happened, right? They loved it. They love the fact that they could offload their networks with WiFi. I would think the same thing goes for -- especially with things moving closer to the Edge from an AI perspective, IoT and so on and so forth, that the more network capability, the better, whether it is LoRa, whether it is cellular or whether it is other land type technologies. So moving on to a topic of LoRa micro services. So you've said in the past, Mohan, this is an area that you're investing in, you're very interested in it. I think you've even said that if LoRa microservices can get to a certain level, that you would potentially open up the LoRa standard, making it an open standard. Could you just give us an update on where we stand there?

Yes. So it's a new initiative for us, but it's something that we're very excited about. And you kind of touched on it, Tore. When you look at AI and you look at Edge intelligence, one of the reasons why I think it's starting to really take off now is the proliferation of low-power sensors. When you have low power sensors and LoRa sensors, by definition, don't really have a lot of intelligence on them, but they're extremely low power and they can last for a long time. So when you have millions of sensors, take global warming as an example of this use case and you have climate change initiatives. We have companies out there that are developing sensors to monitor early fire detection and monitor forest health and things like that. But when you have those sensors, they're pretty dumb sensors, but the ability to bring back information to the Edge and then the intelligence being done at the Edge or in the cloud, really makes a lot of sense and could be done efficiently, effectively, with much more speed because you're looking at patterns of information. And so I think all of that tied together with algorithms in the back end, either on the cloud or on the Edge, that can do certain things like device management. Notify when a sensor leads to battery change or it's not working or something like that or it needs a software update, device management. Or in terms of locating, geolocation is a key service potential because you want to know where a specific sensor is or a specific asset is. That's important information to an end-to-end IoT provider. So we have made it our kind of goal to partner with our ecosystem partners in the alliance to say, "Hey, if we bring some specific algorithms that can help improve the geolocation accuracy or help improve the device management or the device provisioning or something like that, we want to be able to monetize that." And so that's our thought. So we just rolled out our cloud services platform at the back end of last year. We started to now roll out the actual algorithms and the initiatives and are starting to get customers, testing and checking things out and making sure that we're not just kind of assuming that there's value. We want to hear it from customers that there's true value to this. And if there is, I think we will be able to monetize it. And I think it will be something that's -- obviously, it's recurring revenues, it will be based on usage or based on how many times devices uses an algorithm. But the beauty of it for us is it's just the beginning. This then starts a new journey in many ways and gives us the opportunity to turn Semtech not only being high-performance chip company, chip company, but also a high performance algorithm company. And I think that really kind of paves the way for a very strong platform play for us as a company, and I like that a lot. So we'll see how that plays out. Like I said, it's early days. We'll be talking more about it and hopefully as we roll out new algorithms, so we roll out now, we get some real success, we'll start to talk about it.

Very good. And again, a reminder to the audience, if you do have a question, just submit it on the webcast and then I'll ask the question. Related to that previous topic, Mohan, you referenced the number of networks out there. And of course, there's private networks and then there's open networks. And maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong, but when I think about private networks, to me, that kind of validates LoRa as a technology, right? Because the more private networks you are, I think there's customers that obviously see the value of the LoRa technology. But then when you think about an open network, that's probably very valuable for your LoRa services business. So first of all, am I correct in that perception? And the actual question is, what's been the growth ratio between those 2? Are they kind of growing hand-in-hand, open and private? Or is LoRa growing faster than the other?

Well, let me start with that. So initially, when LoRa came out, actually, we found a lot of operators that wanted to roll out public networks with LoRaWAN and we saw a lot of momentum. I think what happened was when they first rolled it out, there wasn't enough use cases. There wasn't enough sensors. There wasn't enough software. So there's a lot of bottlenecks. And so there wasn't a great deal of success with those public LoRaWAN operators. So what happened then was we saw this proliferation of private networks emerge. And the private networks are really more for companies that don't want their data on the public network. They prefer to have their information, maybe it's a security issue, maybe it's a -- they just don't want how other companies have access to their data. And so we see a proliferation and we continue to see proliferation of that. And I think that will continue for a while. We're now starting to see now the operators and the public networks starting to find really valuable use cases and use cases that could generate good business models for them. And one of the reasons for that is the emergence of the cloud. There's no question that the cloud has changed everything. Because with IoT, unlike cellular where you're paying for connectivity, with IoT, companies don't really want to pay for connectivity. They want to pay for information and intelligence and things like that. And so you're really seeing a little bit different business model that's floating out, coming out of the IoT networks and LoRaWAN networks. But the beauty about that, I think, is it's extremely sustainable. I think it will go on for many, many, many years. And so I do think now, as you start to see more networks being deployed, the company is driving those networks and driving the use cases are starting to recognize that they're going to be able to get a good return on investment and really create valuable business models out there. They just have to think of it differently than historically with just connectivity.

Right, right. And when it comes to the proliferation of technologies, there's numerous case studies, right, of the idea of third-party developers. And I know you guys definitely do some of that, and I think the LoRa Alliance may also be doing some of that. But it's not something that I hear very often from you guys, at least not from an investor perspective, right? I'm sure there's much more going on behind the scenes in the engineering world. But how important is sort of a third-party developer ecosystem for LoRa to continue to excel the way it is?

Yes, it's extremely important. And we've always known it. So like you said, we don't talk about it a lot because it's -- from an investor standpoint it's, well, so what, show me the money, right? It's always -- but behind the scenes, there is a very large group of developers that are emerging or LoRa-based networks and the Alliance partners are all part of that because there's -- like I said, we are a chip company, but there's a whole platform required for an end-to-end solution. So very critical. But yes, that's going extremely well. As you know, Tore, we give out a dashboard of information. We talk about a number of networks deployed globally, number of countries, number of gateways, number of end nodes being deployed, all those different metrics. One of the metrics we track internally, which we don't share, is number of developers, number of guys who register on our developer forum, how many companies and what they're doing with it. Those type of things. So we are monitoring other metrics as well. But I would say it's extremely positive. And then when you get companies like Amazon joining and Microsoft recently joined the LoRa Alliance, these are not small companies, and they have like a large network of developers themselves that once they start to get familiar with LoRa, I think we'll also help proliferate the whole technology.

Very good. Just to wrap up on -- sort of circling back to ESG. Government mandates. Obviously, government involvement is pretty important. And I'm just wondering if, Mohan, if you've seen any response, whether it's at the local or state or federal level, when it comes to this environmental crisis that we're having globally, right? I mean you and I both live in California, and we are hit by forest fires and all sorts of problems like that. Are you seeing the government kind of looking into technologies that could perhaps help with the situation?

So we're starting to see now. I mean, I guess, we've seen it for a while, but sometimes governments are slow to react to these things and especially when it's investing in new technologies, they have a -- there's a lot of red tape that prevents them from -- or prevent cities from really adopting new technology sometimes. I think one of the beauties about LoRa is it's so, so different and so compelling in some of these use cases that we're going to see that rapidly accelerate. There's no question in my mind. If I look at just the global warming and then we look at some of the things that have been going on with fires, LoRa's uniqueness is this extremely long range. Again, it's ultra-low power and very low cost, right? So it's public for deployments in rural areas, low-power sensor-based networks to provide early warning, for example, related to fire or flood, connecting millions of sensors to the edge cloud and just providing that intelligence. So that is going to be critical for the future. And what we're starting to see now is the emergence of a lot of different start-ups that are bringing out new technologies. So there's a company called Dryad, it's an IoT company in Germany. They've developed an ultra-early fire detection system and forest health monitoring system using LoRaWAN network with this company called Green Stream, which is an environmental technologies firm that developed an autonomous sensor network using LoRa-enabled sensors. And it's not that these technologies are amazingly special or innovative now. It's just that the need is there now. I think that they have actually -- this concept has been on for a while, but suddenly, the need is becoming very clear. And these are just a couple of examples of early innovators, but there's going to be a lot more. And now I think cities are paying more attention and are listening more and are thinking about this more and it's becoming, as I said, moving from a nice to have to a need. And even you may still not be able to change the fire or change the flood, but having early warning, all these things, I think, is -- does give us the opportunity to behave differently and to save lives and to save building structures and to do things like that. So I think cities are really paying attention to it now. And the other part of your question, Tore, on environmental mandates. We are starting to see more local governments beginning to -- I wouldn't say regulate, but definitely putting a little bit more priority on environmental mandates across the board.

Right. I mean, especially because they're money saving, right? I mean we're not talking about this mandate for the sake of mandate. We're talking about money savings. I mean, I can't even imagine the millions of dollars that go into getting these claims out. I mean, it's crazy. So before we wrap it up, I just wanted to remind the audience that Semtech is hosting a LoRa technology event on Wednesday, October 6, at 4:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. Sandy, I believe the details are on your website if you want to sign up.

Yes. Please go sign up and join us on Wednesday when we take a deeper dive into many of the topics Tore announced today.

Very good. And Mohan, any last things to wrap up the panel?

Well, I appreciate the time and the opportunity, Tore. I would just say that, again, LoRa is a fairly new technology. I know we've been working at it for a while. But in terms of the value that it brings to ESG and the sustainability -- sustainable development goals of the UN setup, I think it's fairly unique. So please take the time and look at the technology and look at the use cases and you'll see that it's really going to, to some extent, change the way the world uses technology for managing the environment.

Well said. Well, with that, we've run out of time. So Mohan and Sandy, thank you so much for participating. And for the audience, thank you for joining us on this panel. And this concludes the entire ESG Summit 2021. Stay tuned for our next event sometime next year. Thanks again. Have a good evening. Bye-bye. .

Bye.