Financial results and presentations for today's call are available on the Investor Section of company website at www.mediatek.com. Now I would like to turn the call over to Ms. Jessie Wang, Deputy Director of Investor Relations. Ms. Wang, please go ahead.
Good afternoon, everyone. Joining us today are Dr. Rick Tsai, MediaTek's CEO, and Mr. David Ku, MediaTek's CFO. Mr. Ku will report our third quarter results, and then Dr. Tsai will provide our prepared remarks. After that, we will open for Q&A. As a reminder, today's presentation will provide forward-looking statements based on our current expectations. The statements are subject to various risks and factors, which may cause the actual results to differ from the non-GAAP financial measures and uncertainties. For details, please refer to the safe harbor statement in our presentation slide. In addition, all content providing actions taken in reliance on content provided in today's call.
2% sequentially and down 22.6% and $37 billion in the year-ago quarters. Operating margin for the quarter was 16.3%, up 11.3 per. Net income for the quarter was $18.6 billion. First net income for the quarter was $19.1 billion. The first net profit margin for the quarter was 17% is attached in our press release for your information as well.
Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. MediaTek's third quarter revenue slightly exceeded the high end of our guidance, mainly due to an improving business environment and a more favorable foreign exchange rate. Third- quarter growth margin was in line with our guidance. In the last few months, we have observed improvement on overall channel inventory, particularly with respect to smartphone.
With prudent inventory management, we have reduced our inventory for five consecutive quarters. At the end of the third quarter, our days of inventory have reached a healthy level of 90 days. We expect the overall inventory environment to continue to improve in the coming quarters. For the future, the increasing computing capabilities, the proliferation of edge AI, and the higher adoption of semiconductor content, automotive will provide strong growth opportunities for MediaTek. For AI, we believe the increasing demand for cloud AI will create a complementary demand for edge AI. The more edge AI, the better cloud AI. Today, MediaTek is one of the very few edge AI providers that have the capability to incorporate edge AI into SoC, to support a wide range of devices across many major applications.
For automotive, MediaTek also offers a full range of solutions together with NVIDIA, to serve global customers in areas such as smart cabin, connectivity, and auto drive. We will continue to enhance our capabilities by investing in key technologies such as advanced computing, next generation wireless and wired connectivity, high speed data transmission, and edge AI, so that we are better prepared to capture the growing market opportunities. In addition, we recently announced our first 3nm tape-out at TSMC for our flagship Dimensity SoC, shipping in the second half of 2024. This represents an important step for us as we expect to expand our product portfolio to the higher end segments in automotive, computing, and enterprise ASICs. We believe with our ever-increasing capabilities and strong execution in R&D, we are able to create strategic value to our global customers and pave the way for future growth.
With that, now let me talk about the recent business performance of our three revenue groups. Mobile phones accounted for 49% of total revenue in the third quarter and grew 19% quarter-over-quarter. The sequential growth was mainly due to inventory restocking and new model launches for both 4G and 5G. With the industry-leading 4G and 5G SoC portfolios across segments, MediaTek offers best-in-class product quality to support our customers, strengthened by the strong partnerships with the leading foundries. We believe we will continue to benefit from 5G upgrades, while effectively catering to the sizable and long tail 4G market. For the fourth quarter, we expect mobile phone revenue to grow faster than the third quarter, mainly driven by the shipment of our new flagship SoC, Dimensity 9300, which will be unveiled in early November.
Dimensity 9300 further elevates CPU and GPU performance and equips with a powerful APU, AI processing unit, which is optimized to run large language models for generative AI. For example, we have recently demonstrated the industry-leading capability to run 7 billion parameter large language models on smartphone powered by Dimensity 9300. We expect smartphones powered by Dimensity 9300 to hit the market by the end of this year. We also plan to expand generative AI capabilities to more smartphone segments next year. We are confident that our strong APU support will facilitate the industry in developing increasingly useful generative AI features for end users. The rising trend of adopting more powerful APUs will not only stimulate smartphone replacement demand, but also enhance our product mix. Now, let me move on to Smart Edge platform.
This group grew 6% sequentially in the third quarter and accounted for 44% of revenue. In the third quarter, demand for our wireless and wired connectivity improved sequentially, with Wi-Fi 6 shipments reaching a quarterly record. Meanwhile, our Wi-Fi 7 solutions have been adopted by high-end retail routers, premium notebooks, and broadband devices this year, with more to come in 2024. However, for the fourth quarter, due to seasonality and the cautious overall consumer electronics market outlook, we expect Smart Edge platforms revenue to decline sequentially. That being said, we have been gaining share in several major operators globally. MediaTek's rich, wireless and wired connectivity product portfolio has brought strong value propositions to these global operators. Now, moving on to Power ICs, which accounted for 7% of total revenue in the third quarter and grew 11% quarter-over-quarter.
Among all applications, PMIC f or smartphone and PC performed better in the third quarter, due to restocking demand. We expect our IC revenue to be flattish in the fourth quarter. For fourth quarter, we expect the strength in our mobile phone to more than offset the seasonal decline of Smart Edge platforms. We will continue to execute our strategy of balancing among market share, revenue, and profitability. With that, we expect our fourth quarter revenue to be in the range of NTD 120 billion-NTD 126.6 billion, up 9%-15% sequentially, and up 11%-17% year-over-year. At a forecasted exchange rate of 32 NTD to 1 USD, 47%, ± 1.5 percentage points.
Quarterly operating expense ratio to be at 30%, ± 2 percentage points. Lastly, in the AGM held on May 31st, our shareholders approved a proposal to change our earnings distribution from an annual basis to a semiannual basis. In accordance with this resolution, our board has approved our first semiannual cash dividend payment of NTD 24.6 today. The amount consists of NTD 16.6 of regular cash dividend and NTD 8 of special cash dividend. The payment date is expected to be January 31, 2024. This concludes my prepared comments. Thank you.
Thank you. Operator, we are now ready for Q&A. May we please have the-
- answer session. If you would like to ask the question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Please ask your questions after your name is announced. Please, please limit your questions to two at a time to allow more participants to join the discussion. After two questions, we will move to the next caller. Should you have more questions, please press star one to come back to the queue. To cancel your question, please press star two. As a reminder, it is greatly appreciated that you turn off speakerphone mode of your device to prevent possible echo effects. Thank you for your cooperation. Now, please press star one to ask the question. Thank you. And our first question is coming from Gokul Hariharan, JP Morgan. Go ahead, please.
Yeah, thank you. Congratulations on the good results. Pretty strong recovery in mobile. So just wanted to ask how do you think about the market potential in going into next year, given that we've seen a pretty good restocking recently? Do we see that the momentum is likely to continue? And I think China market especially has been fairly disappointing until very recently. Recently, I think there seems to be a little bit of a turnaround. How do we expect the China market to be shaping up next year? And any thoughts on continuing 5G penetration also? I think this year, I think the 5G adoption seems to be a little bit slower compared to the last two years.
Within the China market, maybe any comment on what you're seeing, given this rising market share that Huawei seems to be cornering, especially in the last several months with their 5G solutions, the in-house 5G solutions? Thank you.
Okay. First of all, for 2024, I think we still have some time to observe the overall market dynamic. But based on what we see here is, we do believe 2024, overall speaking, to be a year of growth, for MediaTek. That's first things first. Talking about the market penetration of 5G or in general, maybe we talk about sell out on end market demand for next year. Again, so that's similar to our earlier comment about 2024. We do believe next year for the overall smartphone shipment globally, from the end market demand perspective, should be a year of growth, maybe in the low single digit, but at least from the trend should be favorable. The last question, you talked about Huawei.
I guess from our perspective, in general, it's our policy, we didn't really comment about a specific company. But on the other hand, overall, I guess we pretty much focus on the execution and deliverable. Like our CEO talked about earlier, we're going to announce our third generation flagship. We do believe along the year, and also we will continue that momentum. We will continue to put out the good technology and the great product, and also leveraging whatever process technology we have. And we do believe as long as we can focus on that, and plus, we will continue to invest aggressively for new growth opportunity, and that will be our overall strategy.
So, David, just to follow up on this, on the 5G adoption for next year, do you expect a meaningful pickup, given you just launched your, lower cost 5G solution as well? I think we have been, I think, kind of stagnating around early to mid-50% for a few quarters now. Are you seeing a meaningful step up in terms of 5G adoption next year?
Yeah, I think the overall 5G adoption or penetration will definitely increase next year. Again, based on what we see right now, the number may be changing in next quarter, but overall, we should be looking for a 5G global shipment year-over-year, double-digit growth next year. The market, the market end demand and market demand.
Okay, thank you very much. My second question is more broad-based and longer term in terms of the MediaTek strategy of entering new markets. I think you've talked about automotive. There is some progress in enterprise ASIC. There's also a lot of interest in Arm computing, especially for Windows-based PCs. My observation, it has been typically, MediaTek has made meaningful profits in markets where it has emerged as a top two or a top three player, like mobile SoC, TV, Wi-Fi, et cetera. In these markets, there are already very strong incumbents right now. So I just wanted to understand how do you prioritize investments in these markets?
Is there any rank order in terms of which markets you think are more promising from a potential market share perspective and profitability perspective? So just wanted to understand, like, what is the, what is the strategy to kind of try and break into these markets, which have pretty much all of them have pretty strong incumbents right now, and MediaTek is still starting at a, is still at a pretty early level in terms of the starting point. So just wanted to understand the longer-run strategy rather than the more nitty-gritty details.
Yes. You're quite right in saying that MediaTek has been mainly company, which we have done really well in, mobile SoCs, in TVs, in Wi-Fi, et cetera. We certainly will continue investing appropriately for those very successful segments we already have. As we also said, we are now investing aggressively in new markets, such as automotive, such as AI, either edge AI or cloud AI, such as ARM computing. You're also certainly correct in saying there are strong incumbents in those areas. I think from a fundamental point of view, MediaTek. Actually, if you look at MediaTek's investment over the last three years, which we put in for the flagship mobile SoCs. Now we don't have the third generation, Dimensity 9300.
If you look at the computing capability from that chip in their CPU, in their GPU, and in their APU computing capability, we are very proud and we are very confident in our capability that we built. And though all those capability are now, of course, being leveraged, and not just leveraged, really being applied to our new growth initiatives. Not to mention the capability and the relationship we have built with our leading foundry partner in utilizing the most advanced process technology and advanced packaging technology. These are all the necessary, very, very necessary conditions for the market segments that we want to go in.
We have, for instance, in automotive case, we have already built a partnership with NVIDIA, which by itself is a strong incumbent with extremely strong capabilities, both hardware, software, AI. So, you see, we were doing this, we're going in understanding the difficulties, but we are, we're also not only accumulating, we're building, already building to our capability, and we're building with strong ecosystem partnership. And in addition, we are a more, we believe, versatile and flexible business model partner for some large, shall we say, tech companies. With all that, we understand the challenges, but we are quite confident that we are making headway in some cases, very soon. In some cases, it will take some time, but we will get there. Thank you.
Maybe one follow-up, if I may. Like, how... What is your measure of success or KPI, Rick, in some of these new ventures? Is it like getting to a billion-dollar revenue or like 10% of revenue? Or just wanted to understand how the management thinks about the KPIs on some of these new initiatives.
I think in general, profitable growth, we need. I would say a major KPIs, progress was pretty high CAGR, pretty high CAGR for revenue, but with a good profitability. The profitability must be there, but it may not be as strong as some of our very competitive existing product line. But we will not. On the other hand, what I want to say is, we will not just pursue revenue with very low profit probability. So a high CAGR of profitable revenue growth, that's the. I think that's our KPI in the next three year to five years.
Got it. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Next one, Nicolas Baratte, Macquarie. Go ahead, please.
Well, yes, hello. When we think about next year, you know, since you're mentioning better phone demand, I mean, you know, low inventory for smartphone and some growth coming back in both 4G and 5G. Do you have a view, an estimate, the range of the 4G to 5G mix for 2024?
Nicolas, I think we don't have the detailed view yet. Again, you know, we've still got a few more, you know, months to get into the fourth 2024. But in general, I think the mix in terms of 4G versus 5G, our view is actually 5G will continue. From our own shipment perspective, 5G probably will increase and 4G will decline in terms of shipment compared to this year, 2024 versus 2023. Because 5G, again, next year, our view is the overall market still grow. Upgrading cycle, in general, actually is a good.
Okay, thank you. Sorry, did Nicolas just drop the line? Then maybe we'll just go on to take the next caller. Thank you.
Okay.
And then the next one on the call is Sunny Lin, UBS. Go ahead, please, Sunny.
Thank you very much for taking my questions. Congrats again on the very solid performance and also pretty good Q4 guidance. So my first question is on edge computing for smartphone. And so based on your current engagement with the supply chain, including the hyperscalers and also the software developers, what kind of the applications could smartphone better support versus cloud? I think that's a key question that a lot of investors wonder. And also when we think about the upside for your silicon content for smartphone SoC, with better support for edge computing, now that you have completed the development for 3nm smartphone SoC for second half of next year, how should we think about the upside go from here?
Sunny, Generative AI capability in an edge device, the way we look at it is a must capability we need to have in our offering. As I said earlier in my comments, we have already demonstrated with our customer, in a customer phone of having a 7 billion parameter LLM model, of which our customer is developing various applications for their end customers. I think some of the usual applications that you can imagine or you can think of, obviously, are, for instance, the natural language user interfaces, the camera picture improvements, et cetera, et cetera. These are obvious ones, but the not obvious ones, of course, not obvious right now.
I'm not joking, but I think we believe with the building capability in those high-end edge devices, such as our Dimensity 9300, the users worldwide will then explore the capability and come up with applications that will excite. That will be very exciting, very interesting, and very fun. It's not just useful. But that will take, I believe, a year or couple of years to establish, just like you will see, for instance, when 4G LTE technology and the capability ramped up about a decade, more than yeah, about a decade ago. People, after a few, a couple of three years, some people came out with all kinds of applications and built many profitable business models.
So saying all that, we, at this time, we're investing heavily in building those capability in, I believe, not just mobile phone. Mobile phone being the first obvious ones, but all the different various kinds of edge devices. And this is the time that we believe that will create new demand, the extent of which will, you know, I think will take a couple of years to really realize. But one thing we know is if we do not invest, we'll be left out, and we will not be left out. Thank you.
Thank you very much. So a quick follow-up is: how should we think about the silicon content upside for smartphone SoCs from here? And so if you look at your 3-nm smartphone SoC coming out in second half of next year, would that be able to drive any ASP increase versus this year?
Sunny, actually, like our CEO explained, right now it's in the beginning of the product cycle, so they will have some support. But I think more importantly is actually looking at probably due to the new features and function, you know, customer will like to buy the new phone, so will shorten, the replacement cycle. I think that was the cycle, the beginning of the cycle. Then people demanding for higher performance, then we put into more semiconductor content. But right now, actually, it's the overall semiconductor content, especially for the current product we've talked about here, has been, basically pricing in already. Yeah. But for the trend, we do believe we'll continue to demanding for more competitive power for AI related.
Got it. Thank you. That's very clear. My second question is on your collaboration with NVIDIA. And so any latest progress that you could share with us, in terms of the product pipeline? I think, three months ago, you shared, you have already secured about $1 billion pipeline for your automotive business. Any update there? And also, for this collaboration, any potential to expand to other product segments, like ARM-based computing?
First of all, our partnership with NVIDIA is only with automotive. I understand right now there are some, rumor or speculation talking about that partnership could be extended to other area. But I just want to clarify right now, the partnership between, NVIDIA and MediaTek is only on automotive, and that's actually the same statement we made maybe a few months back during our announcement back to Computex in Taiwan, in around June. In terms of, design pipeline and also product pipeline, it's actually the same like we update everyone during the Computex period. The only difference will be because in the last few months, both companies been getting on the wall tour, talking to different customer and formally disclose our product portfolio, for the next few years. The overall feedback are fairly positive. It's fairly positive.
So there's a lot of activity going on. We're probably not going to update in the pipeline yet, but I'll probably just say the overall momentum and also customer feedback are all positive and give us much more confidence compared to three months ago.
Got it. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Next one, Laura Chen of Citi. Go ahead, please.
Hello. Hi, good afternoon. Thank you for taking my questions. I'm curious about MediaTek's current progress in the high-end segmentation in terms of the market share or the current revenue contribution, or the shipment, et cetera. Because we know that it's actually quite important. Actually, MediaTek got very good progress on Dimensity 9000, and also 8000 series, since our management already talked a lot about how the performance good is, and also how the benefit can deliver to your customers. So just wondering that, in particularly for the flagship SoC, what kind of the contribution or market share or the shipment you are now, right now, and also what the growth potential or the target you may have? Can you share with us?
I think in terms of the revenue contribution, I think for this year, 2023, is [high single] . I would say in the range of $1 billion. It's progressing well, and actually that's actually in line with our earlier guidance. For going forward, again, with our third generation product. By the way, we are gonna do a formal product announcement in November 6th, with a lot of demo, which including the earlier questions, many people are interested about the GAI. We're gonna do a lot of demo, and we're gonna show our performance leadership. With third generation three, Dimensity 9300 product coming out, we do believe next year will be another strong growth year for our flagship product.
So if you're assuming that, for the global 5G smartphone to be grow double digit on year, so since the ASP is much higher for your flagship SoC and also your market share again, so supposedly that would be even stronger than what you look at the overall market, right? Is that correct?
I think, again, so we're not able to get in, giving out the detail, 2024 detail guidance, but trend wise, direction wise, I think that's the direction.
Okay. Thank you. And also on the edge AI space, we know that MediaTek has done very well in the edge AI potential in the smartphone space. So just also, I'm curious about your view about what can we see the trigger of Windows on ARM overall market? Because we are talking about in the industry for probably more than a decade, but seems like the portion of Windows on ARM is still quite small at this moment. But looking for what kind of the trigger you may looking for to see this market becoming bigger? And as MediaTek already well-positioned in, on, in terms of the different kind of technology. So, at earliest, any timeline you are looking for it can be becoming bigger?
This market, depending on how you look at it, actually, the MacBook processors are actually the ARM-based CPU. In our view of the industry, this is purely from industry trend point of view.
Yes.
This trend will certainly continue and grow. There's no doubt in our mind from industry trend point of view. We expect players to go in also. Thank you.
Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Next question, Brett Simpson, Arete Research. Go ahead, please.
Yeah, thanks very much. Rick, can you maybe just share your perspective on the impact of Huawei's chip ramp up on your TAM, specifically in China, Android? I mean, it looks like they are coming out with multiple chips, and they're going to address the mid-range fairly soon. And there's been a lot of commentary about the ramp up that we're gonna see from Huawei next year. Can you just talk a bit about how you think this is gonna impact overall the China Android market and your business specifically, and whether or not this leads to you know, structural a challenge from Huawei? Thank you.
I understand the question, Brett. The way I will respond to your question is, I mean, we are - we have been in this smartphone market for long enough to know how the dynamics play. And one simple, well, not simple, but one obvious data point was when, I guess, sometime in 2019, Huawei kind of, not totally exit, but certainly exited 5G smartphone market. The market share change, which company or which device benefits the most. Yeah, you know that. And then you can kind of imagine when Huawei comes back at certain price points, that they will take certain shares back.
As to our customer term, in my mind, we are really, really, we are very good, very strong with our portfolio from flagship, premium, mid-end to entry. If you look at our product portfolio and their capability, their performance, their power consumption, the use of the leading edge process, user experiences, we have no question in our mind that we are enabling our customers to compete effectively against whoever coming into the market, because we have great products. At the end of the day, emotion can work for some time, but I would expect rational consumer behavior will prevail, fairly sure.
Thank you. Yeah. Appreciate that, Rick. And maybe just to follow on, you've talked a lot about Gen AI coming to smartphones, and I think you mentioned the ability for the 9300 to deliver a 7 billion, run a 7 billion model on board a smartphone. But can you maybe talk a bit about what this means commercially, the content step up that this leads to for MediaTek? You know, what would that type of capability, the how, you know, how do you sort of benefit from a value perspective, delivering this capability? And then, when do you think the AI ecosystem is ready to drive applications for Gen AI on smartphones? Because I think that seems to be the big unknown at this point. Thanks.
Actually, David probably can give you a bit details, but what I want to say, firstly, as I said earlier, this is the beginning of, well, I don't know, era may be t oo much of a overstatement. B ut people are really, working to find the values. The values, I think, not just because of, not just the product, but different values, even more important, probably consumer, values, because that's where the value will be. And our customers, they realize that. And, for the smartphone, most of our market, especially our flagship market, reside in China. And Chinese, I, I believe Chinese consumers are quite, can be very innovative in coming with rich applications. But David, do you have any, more kind of a detail t hing for Brett?
Yes, Brett, we do, but unfortunately, because like I say, it's some of our customers, we have NDA, we're gonna do some so I would say probably just stay tuned and also join dial in our event to get more information. But I think I can probably just share without the detail is, the general idea is actually right now, most of the Gen AI have been demoed on the edge side, probably show some not so great resolution, Stable Diffusion, picture generation. But I think on the China side, especially for a lot of our customers, they've been pretty much focused on the large language model application. So the general idea is actually consider if the Gen AI can become your truly personal assistant on your phone, okay? Purely on the edge side.
So, you know, you have a personal assistant who can read all your information on your phone, because that's on your palm, not go on the cloud, so you have the 100% trust and confidentiality and privacy. And if you have a small sort of AI agent, agent on your phone, what you can do with this phone? I think that's the general idea. Another idea that, of course, on the picture side right now, on the taking pictures, on the camera side, a lot of the new functions being, deployed based on generative AI. In the past, maybe just simple beautify, but now actually you can consider, you can do some kind of a, a Photoshop function with a very simple natural language instruction, a few touch, and then operate on your phone. Again, because that's your picture, that's your phone.
You don't want to send your picture into a cloud, and you don't know who will have access to cloud. But you can do some editing, you know, beautifying or maybe modify on your phone. I think that's the direction. Again, like, Rick said, that's just the beginning of the cycle. It's really just a chicken and egg issue. Once you have a more computation power on your palm, on a smartphone, then you will see, more, developer and our customer in this case as well, trying to use less computation power to generate more user-friendly and interesting features to help plan to sell more phone or shorten the replacement cycle of the smartphone.
Great. Thank you. Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot.
Thank you. Next one, Bruce Lu of Goldman Sachs. Go ahead, please.
Hi, thank you for taking my question. I want to know that, you know, what if AI smartphone is widely adopted by the consumer? How fast can you render that? I mean that, you know, what's the incremental barrier for you to proliferate the AI function to Dimensity 8000, even to 1000 series? What's the tech requirement, the incremental cost or process speed or anything like that? You know, how fast it's gonna be if you want to further proliferation?
Okay. Bruce, currently, actually, the edge AI has been performing part of our APU function, which is part of our application processor. So in terms of the cost incremental, I think actually all been pricing in, and we don't see it's a huge cost increase so far, based on the current AI demand or generative AI demand. But going forward, again, depends on what kind of applications or how soon those applications will be adopted, and then we will talk about what the right semiconductor content can be put in. But so far, based on what we see in the marketplace, and more importantly, a lot of research being conducted by our customer, they're all trying very aggressively to explore this new direction, because they do believe that the new wave of function features upgrading through the GAI.
Well, maybe I can add a few words.
No, no.
Go ahead.
I'm sorry. Please. Oh, no, no. The question I will try to ask is that, you know, is that a technical constraint for the certain speed or certain thing to prevent you to further proliferate to Dimensity 1000, or it's a business decision?
W hat is 1000?
Dimensity 1000, meaning the mid- to- low end of your chips.
Oh, to the low end. Oh, you mean GAI to the low end?
No. Yes.
Okay.
Is there any technical requirement?
There's no technical sort of limitation, because right now, actually, once we announce the flagship, our generation 8000 series will adopt the GenAI as well. Okay, we're gonna announce that at the same time, in November. So, it really depends on, i t's more of an economic decision, if you like. Like, how much is the price point and how much the GenAI-related value you can put in, rather than technical difficulty or technical limitations.
I see. Understand. Thank you. So the second question I still want to ask about the ASIC, you know, I think a lot of investors do have the concern about the ASIC growth or the profitability. I think Rick just mentioned that the profit is gonna be good. But I just want to know that, you know, do we maintain a similar value add for the ASIC moving forward? I mean, do we, what's the growth outlook for our ASIC business in coming, in the coming years? I think Rick also mentioned about the ASIC addressable market two years ago. Do we see an enlarging ASIC business at this moment?
We see ASIC market to be growing even better compared to two years ago. The tempo, well, because of all these changes in the AI field, it's pretty obvious. Which, and also w e see, I'm sure as you do too, the, the behavior, or the silicon behavior from the big key cloud AI or cloud data center providers. Not to mention the rapid, still the rapid, improvement in process technology and packaging technology, from a power consumption point of view, et cetera. So, all those changes are, again, I would say , I believe, provide MediaTek actually better entry into this market. This market can be very big, and there are so many dynamics.
Also, the profitability question relates to also the business model. But what I said earlier remains certainly valid, whether we go into ASIC or automotive or on computing, is that we need profitable growth. We can have very good revenue, but also we will still have very good operating margin for that revenue. That's the way w e're going to.
A quick follow-up that, you know, because the hyperscaler, they are trying to develop the chip by themselves. You can see that from many hyperscalers. So what's the value proposition for MediaTek in this business now? At the end of the day, they are become your competitor or customer.
Well, that's where my comments earlier about the flexible business model comes in. We will be their partner. We don't compete against them. We have the ability that we have in leading-edge process capacity, the packaging capability, the high-speed SerDes capability. All these, I think, are very valuable and complementary to many of the data center providers. I'm sure I missed a couple, but my guys gave me quite a few more, but that's okay. You get the point. I think at the end of the day, also, this flexible and open-minded approach, the collaborative approach, which a potential customer will also prove very valuable.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Next question, Charlie Chan of Morgan Stanley. Go ahead, please.
Hey, good afternoon, Rick, David, and Jessie. First of all, congratulations for greater results. So I have a two part of question. One is on the your new business, right? So there were some discussions before I want to clarify some part of that. And second topic would be on your smartphone competition. So first of all, on that partnership with NVIDIA, I do search the website and both MediaTek and NVIDIA back in 2021 announced some partnership in the kind of a notebook. And MediaTek, sorry, Jensen, the NVIDIA CEO, even said that with MediaTek's technology, you guys can make a best or most excellent notebook experience.
So I'm wondering, you know, any progress in this, the partnership in the NVIDIA? So please correct me if I'm wrong. I do see you have this partnership since two years ago.
Yep. Charlie, it's David here. Yes, we do announce- we did announce the partnership, and we're trying to explain to everyone a few years back. That partnership basically is more so on the Chromebook side, and the idea is actually we have a pretty good CPU and we incorporate basically, whenever we incorporate basically put on from a system level, not on the chipset level. We leverage the NVIDIA high-end GPU. In fact, on one of the initiative NVIDIA are trying to drive, is to see whether or not we can find some sort of a gaming Chromebook, if you like. And that one actually is still ongoing, but didn't really proliferate well into other segments.
This actually is not quite like people speculating right now, this direction, but just to get back to your point, we did have that announcement, and that was what I explained. That was the nature of this announcement and also the partnership.
Okay, thanks, David. So the second part of the first topic is about the ASIC. I think Bruce has a few questions around it. So, my question is also a clarification. I remember a quarter ago, Rick mentioned that there could be some good news come or to announce around the year-end. So I'm wondering whether there's any progress, and if there is some progress, is there any big revenue ramp, no matter in 2024 or 2025, from the major projects? Thanks.
We just checked the record. We didn't really show, see anything, say, our CEO kind of talking about some announcement before end of this year. And also in general, that's actually is not possible. We probably don't disclose the news as yet. Yeah.
Okay. And Rick, do you have anything to add, or I can jump to the next topic?
I think I said just now, I really am very confident that we will be making the progress in this very, you know, very large and the high growth market with our capabilities and the business models.
Okay.
I think I'm repeating, so.
Anyway, wish your success. So my last question is really about Huawei impact. This is more open-ended question. I really want to get your kind of opinion because the concern is that Huawei Mate 60 Pro they seems to use an older generation process, like 7-nm process, you know, right? But they can still sell okay. Personally, I played with the phones for a few minutes. I think it runs out smoothly, right? So my question is to Rick, right? How do you justify your smartphone customers to or end users to migrate to 4 nm or even 3 nm which will cost more money? What kind of killer apps or kind of features that you have to migrate to 3 nm? Thanks.
Well, I mean, some of the applications, obviously, the high power gaming place, the, for the heavy gamers. I'm sure a 7-nm processor and a 3-nm processor will behave very differently. Very differently. Then you have the generative AI, which we have spent so much time on today, and also I'm sure in the months and the years ahead. You need those leading-edge processors to provide you all those computing power for the mobile part of the low, low power computing power. But there's no question in my mind that the 3 nm will beat the heck out of 7 nm.
With that, the large language model is going to be a key differentiator for t3 nm chip?
Charlie, yes or no, actually, so maybe another way to answer your question more directly. If the world only needs 7 nm, maybe the global phone maker will stay in that age, in that process.
Right.
No one want to migrate. But you, you actually see quite the opposite for the global phone leaders. So unless you believe the global phone leader are all wrong, and your five minutes test actually can show, can demonstrate, and can be a good rep for all customers, otherwise, I think the world still demanding a better process flow and better performance. But maybe for certain customer group, where they have certain usage behavior, you don't need the leading nodes. Okay? For most of the customer or big populations of customers, there's probably still need better sub-processor, which mean better process node.
Got it. Okay, great answers, gentlemen. Hope the rationale can prevail. Thank you.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we are running out of time, and that will be the end of the Q&A session. We thank you for all your questions. I'll hand it over to Miss Jessie Wang for closing comment. Miss Wang, please go ahead.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes MediaTek 2023, the quarterly conference call, and an audio replay will be available in one hour after the call at the investor section of MediaTek's website. We'd like to thank you for your participation, and you may now disconnect. Goodbye.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we thank you for your participation in today's conference. You may now disconnect. Thank you.