Hi, good afternoon. Oh, sorry, go ahead, Quinn.
Oh, yeah, yeah. Hi, everybody. Welcome to the first day, and thank you for making it through the first day with us here at the 26th Annual Needham Growth Conference. I'm Quinn Bolton. I am the semiconductor analyst for Needham and Company. It's my pleasure to host this presentation with Diodes. Diodes delivers a broad product portfolio of discrete, analog, and mixed-signal semiconductors, as well as leading-edge package technology to the world's leading companies in the automotive, industrial, computing, consumer electronics, and communications markets. Joining me from the company today are Brett Whitmire, CFO, and Gurmeet Dhaliwal, Director of Investor Relations and Corporate Marketing. Brett, Gurmeet, thank you for joining us.
Before I hand it over to Gurmeet for the presentation, I'd just like to remind investors watching the webcast, if you do have questions for management, you can submit those through the dialogue box on your screen, and I will come back to moderate the Q&A after the presentation. Gurmeet, over to you.
Thank you. Thank you, Quinn. Thank you for joining us this afternoon. I will start the presentation by introducing the company. Before I start that, I'll just remind all of you, today's discussions and presentations may contain forward-looking statements. Investors are advised to refer to SEC filings and other information available on diodes.com. With that, I will start with introducing our Chairman and CEO, Dr. Keh-Shew Lu. Dr. Keh-Shew Lu joined Diodes Incorporated in 2005 as the President and CEO of the company. Prior to that, he was with Texas Instruments for 27 years, where he held Senior Vice President of Worldwide Analog and Logic Division, and he was President of Texas Instruments in Asia.
Dr. Lu has a doctorate degree and master's degree in Electrical Engineering from Texas Tech University, and also a bachelor's degree in Engineering from National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan. In 2020, Dr. Lu was, he also took over as Chairman. So between 2020 and until, two weeks ago, he held the title of Chairman, President, and CEO. And two weeks ago, as of January 2nd, he announced, or the company announced, our President of the company, Gary Yu. Gary Yu became President in January 2nd of 2024. Gary has been with the company for many years, since 2008, when he joined the company as a manager of a Sensors and Satellite business unit. He has held various positions.
Most recently, he was the Chief Operating Officer, and prior to that, he was the Senior Vice President of the Business Groups, President of Asia, and General Manager for Fab, as well as Vice President of Asia Pacific Sales. Prior to that, he was with Lite-On Semiconductor, and he started his career with Texas Instruments in IT, finance. Gary has MBA from University of Dallas, as well as master's degree in Telecommunications Engineering from Southern Methodist University, and bachelor's degree in MIS from Taiwan. And this is yours truly. I have been with the company for over 10 years. I joined Diodes Incorporated through Pericom acquisition. Prior to that, I was with Pericom Semiconductors, and before that, I have held marketing positions in semiconductor companies, systems companies, as well as on the software side.
I have MBA in Marketing and Entrepreneurship and Bachelor's in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UC Santa Barbara. So I'll now turn over to Diodes as a company. Diodes has a broad portfolio of products, which includes analog, discrete, logic, and mixed-signal products, that we serve our customers around the world in five market segments, including automotive, industrial, computing, consumer, and communications. Our ticker symbol is D-I-O-D. We are traded on Nasdaq. We have been in business for over 64 years, and for the last 31+ years, we have been consecutively profitable. We have 9,000 employees at 32 locations around the world. In 2022, our annual revenue was $2 billion. Our focus has been on automotive and industrial. In 2022, 42% of the product revenue came from our automotive and industrial segment. In 2022, we had about 28,000 SKUs.
We shipped 50 billion units to 50,000 customers around the world. Our headquarters is in Plano, Texas, and we have manufacturing locations around the world in U.S., U.K., Germany, China, and Taiwan. All of our manufacturing facilities are ISO and IATF certified. Our growth has been combination of organic growth as well as acquisitions. As you can see, since Dr. Lu joined the company in 2005, we have acquired multiple companies. So most recently, you know, I'll, I'll mention some of the recent ones, which is 2005-2015, we acquired Pericom Semiconductor, which was all of Pericom Semiconductor's business and assets. In 2019, we acquired a fab from TI in Greenock, Scotland, and in 2020 we acquired Lite-On Semiconductor, which included their factories, their business, as well as share buyback. They owned some of our stock.
And recently, in 2022, we closed an onsemi's fab in South Portland, Maine. So that's how we have been, over time, growing our business and our manufacturing footprint around the world. So that leads me to the manufacturing footprint. As I mentioned, our headquarters is based in Plano, Texas. The circles that you see in blue are where our wafer fabs are located, which is South Portland, Maine, Greenock, U.K., Oldham, Shanghai, China, and then Taiwan. And then yellow circles show our assembly and test facilities, and then green circles are our design, sales, and marketing offices. So in 2005, when Dr. Lu joined the company, Diodes Incorporated, he had set a bunch of $1 billion goals for the company. The first goal was to achieve $1 billion market cap.
That was attained in 2010, and at that time, the next goal was $1 billion revenue. That we achieved in 2017, and that's when he announced the next goal, $1 billion gross profit by 2025, using the model of 40% gross margin and revenue of $2.5 billion. So this is a model that we put in place at that time, how we will get to $1 billion gross profit. It doesn't have to be the exact same revenue and gross margin, as long as our real focus is on the $1 billion gross profit. We also have the next goal, $1 billion PBT, which we haven't announced yet because we are working on our 2025 goal. As we accomplish that goal, then we will announce the timeline and model for the next goal.
If you look at our track record, since 2005, Diodes has grown 14% CAGR in revenue, and our gross profit growth has been 15% CAGR over the same timeframe, between 2005 and 2022. At the same time, in 2017, when we had put a goal out there, $1 billion gross profit, we also said that we will achieve 40% of our revenue from automotive and industrial segment. As of Q3, our 45% of the product revenue came from the automotive and industrial segment. At the same time, in all of the five segments that we focus on, we further focused on sub-segments in each of these market segments. The first one is in automotive, we focused on connected driving, comfort, style, safety, and electrification. In industrial, embedded systems, precision control, and IIoT. Now, we can even call it AIoT.
Consumer is IoT, wearables, home automation, and smart infrastructure. In communication, smartphones, 5G networks, and advanced protocols. In computing, we are focusing on server, AI server, storage, and data centers. We also, in 2017, as we were setting up new goals, we changed our go-to-market strategy. We started with total solution provider strategy, and this slide depicts, if you look at an example of an embedded system, all of the blocks that are shown in blue is Diodes silicon. So except the processor or SoC or FPGA, whatever, you want to pick, and the memory, we pretty much offer all of the peripheral products that go in a computer or an embedded system.
With this approach, we started having a conversation with the design engineers and go-to-market strategy, where we're not going as a single product, but as a total solution provided to the customer based on how they want to choose these products, how they want to differentiate their end product, and we were supporting the customer's requirements. Just to highlight the key growth areas, as I mentioned, automotive and industrial are driving growth earlier. Automotive, we established that business unit in 2013. Since then, we have grown 31% CAGR for automotive area. The way we have been growing is by releasing new products to the market and continue to improve our dollar content per car. Just in the Q3, we released about 139 products for the automotive segment, and in the nine months that we ended in 2023, were over 300 products. Industrial is similar.
Another focus area for us is where we have 15% CAGR between the same years, 2013-2022, with focus on embedded systems, network systems, automation as well. We are building momentum. We introduced more than 20 silicon carbide, Schottky diodes, and MOSFETs for this market segment. So I'm going to go a little bit more into detail for automotive segment. As I mentioned, our focus areas are three areas: connected driving, which consists of ADAS, telematics, infotainment, and then comfort, style, and safety is lighting, BLDC motor, fan controls, and then electrification, which includes conventional powertrain, hybrid, and electric cars. If you look in on the chart on the right side, which I mentioned earlier. Since 2013, when we put this business unit in place, we have grown our CAGR, 31% CAGR.
And also the revenue from automotive segment in the last two years have grown from 12% of the total revenue to 19% of the total revenue. In 2017 or 2013, when we placed the business unit in place, we looked at how are we going to grow our content in the automotive segment. If you look at it, the number of cars over time is pretty much flat with slight increase, but the way we have been growing is to continue to grow our dollar content per car. Just from 2018 to 2023, we have doubled our dollar content per car, from $70 to $140 per car. And what is driving that? One is obviously our new products that I mentioned earlier.
We're introducing new products and targeting the applications in those three sub-segments that I mentioned earlier, and also the applications are driving demand for silicon or for our products. For example, this is an example of a sound view of SuperCam platform, which has multiple cameras. 10 years ago, we used to have one camera in the car, now we have dozens of cameras in the car. So that is driving demand for our products, and we continue to bring new products to the market. In this diagram, you'll see all of the blocks that are shown in blue are products from Diodes that can be used in this application. Similarly, here's another example of a USB charging solution.
We used to have one port in the car for charging, and now we have multiple ports in the car for charging solution or USB connections, and we continue to bring new products to the market. Now we have a complete USB Type-C power delivery charging solution for the automotive segment. Switching to industrial segment, as I mentioned earlier, our growth has been CAGR has been 15% since 2013, and we have done that by again by introducing new products and targeting the market segments within industrial that are growing, such as embedded systems, industrial controlled motors, smart power, green power, energy, industrial. Those are the segments that we're seeing traction even today in these areas.
Here's a slide that we touched on earlier that shows how we are selling our total solution for whether it's a, you know, a notebook or embedded system, or any computer around the CPU. So we continue to add more products and to deliver a complete solution to the customer. Not only that, this slide also shows that at companies that I mentioned earlier in the first couple of slides, where we have acquired a number of companies over time, how well have we integrated those companies into our company, in the backend system, in our processes and the product development, as well as enhancing solutions for our customers. And the way we deliver those products, or bring those products to the market, by focusing on our technology.
If you look at our products on the left-hand side, these are the products that cover signal integrity, automotive area. Packet switches are mentioned on the slide. We were the first one to bring automotive-grade packet switch to the market. And I mentioned earlier, complete USB Type-C solution, as well as the MOSFETs and now newly introduced silicon carbide, Schottkys and MOSFETs. We have a hybrid model for manufacturing, which means, you know, if you look at our wafer fab, 50% of our wafers are sourced internally, and 50% are external. That gives us great deal of flexibility, how we control our builds and our loads, and we continue to expand our capabilities and products, height and the volume of products into our own factories. And in fact, for assembly and test, that percentage is even higher.
We probably have 80% to 90% internally that we do our assembly and test, and small portion of it is externally sourced. Just to recap our wafer fabs that I mentioned earlier, we're around the globe. We have a fab in U.S., which is in South Portland, Maine. In China, we have fabs in Shanghai and Wuxi, and Taiwan too, in Hsinchu Park and Keelung. U.K., we have two fabs in Greenock and Oldham, and our processes are shown here by CMOS, CMOS BCD, and we have a global footprint around the globe for engineering capabilities. Assembly and test is in China, Taiwan, and Germany, and we'll continue to expand into other areas as well. So just to give you a profile of our revenue, about, 1/3 of the business is direct and 2/3 is through a channel.
What I mean by 34% that is shown on the slide is we cover directly, that we call on those customers. We do demand gen and fulfillment directly, and the 66% is combination. That could be demand gen done by us, but fulfillment through distribution, and both done through channel as well. If you look at from region point of view, 72% of our business is in Asia, 10% in Americas, and 18%. This profile is based on our third quarter 2023 results. Just to clarify, 72% that is shown in Asia Pacific is based on the ship-to location, not necessarily where it's consumed.
The five segments that I mentioned earlier, 19% of the revenue were from automotive segment, 26% from industrial, 25% from computing, 12% from communications, and 18% from consumer segment. Just to highlight our outlook for the fourth quarter that we have communicated on November 8th, we expect our revenue to be in the $325 million, ±3% range, with gross profit of 35%, ±1%. And net interest income to be approximately $2 million. With that, I will stop here, and if you have any questions, you can contact me or Leanne Sievers at Shelton, for any questions. So her information and my information is on the screen. Thank you, Quinn. Back to you.
Great. Thank you, Gurmeet. I have a few questions, and we'll see if we get some audience participation. But obviously, you know, one of the big questions and, you know, you've probably been getting this question for the past year, industry's gone through a pretty severe inventory correction. It started in the consumer markets. It's kind of moving to auto and, or certainly industrial and possibly auto. So what are your sort of latest thoughts on where we are in the inventory correction, sort of by end market?
Okay, I'll start then, and, and Brett may jump in. So I think I'll just give you what we see in the all of the five segments. We have seen that in compute was the first one to see inventory issues, and now it seems like it's the first one that has gone through the inventory correction. Inventory seems healthier, and we are seeing signs of some picking ups and some traction. Consumer is generally low for us in Q4, so we'll see how it picks up in Q1. Communications has been mixed for us. In some areas are not as good, but others are stable. Similarly in the industrial segment, it's a broad segment for us. There's a lot of, l ike I mentioned earlier, there's a lot of sub-segments. There's always, if something goes down, something else picks up.
As I mentioned, you know, we are seeing traction in the medical, in the green energy, in the solar side. Automotive is relatively stable. Part of the reason is, because we cover all regions. We serve customers in U.S., Europe, Korea, China, Japan, in all regions. And our products, if you look at it, you know, the, what I mentioned is, infotainment and comfort, safety, style, connectivity. These are, agnostic, whether it's ICE car or EV car, so that's helping us in that area.
Got it. You know, there's some concern on the auto front. It's sort of, you know, the auto front. It's sort of, you know, the last segment that hasn't been hit too hard yet, at least by the inventory correction. Mobileye had a negative pre-announcement a couple of weeks ago. Microchip did as well, although I don't think Microchip specifically called out any particular end market in its results. But, you know, what are your thoughts on just the auto market? You highlighted significant content growth for Diodes. Do you think that's true of the broader market, or do you think that, you know, the Mobileye and/or the Microchip pre-announcements may be, you know, evidence that the auto's, you know, that last shoe to drop is finally dropping?
Yeah, that, that might be the case. So far, we are seeing, you know, maybe pockets or some areas, some softness, but like I mentioned, is we are agnostic to EV and ICE, so we continue to bring new products to the market. Our focus is to grow, and that's why we're bringing new products to the market and continue to focus on how we can increase dollar content per car. And like I mentioned earlier, is applications are also driving demand for us. And being able to, you know, that, that we are not heavily dependent on either ICE or EV, that is probably helping us broaden our portfolio and cover all areas of the automotive segment.
Got it. Another question we've gotten on a number of semiconductor companies is, you know, kind of just the demand outlook for China. You mentioned 72% of sales shipped to Asia. I'm not sure how much of that is China and, you know, probably a lower percentage is actually consumed in China, but, you know, do you have any thoughts on just overall demand levels in China? Have you seen any green shoots, or does China economy or China demand still feel pretty weak from what you see?
I think it's pretty much the same. We are seeing some signs of recovery in some areas, like I mentioned, compute, as well as even in communications in some areas, including handsets. But I think going back to the 72%, that is shipped to Asia, not just China, which includes Korea, Japan, Southeast Asia, Taiwan. So I think the China shipped to China is 40%, and consumed in China is even less, maybe half of that. I don't have the exact number, but much less than 40%.
Got it. But in some of those broader markets, like handsets and PCs, it does sound like you may have seen some pickup as we've gotten through the inventory correction. We do have a question from the audience. It is, what was Diodes' philosophy for pricing over the period of pandemic shortages, and what is the pricing environment like now.
Okay, I will start that, and maybe Brett can jump in. So during the pandemic, you know, we didn't increase our prices across the board and say, you know, "Let's increase by a certain percentage." What we did, we did increase the prices, but in certain areas. One is to cover the cost increase that we had. That's what we passed, and we selectively increased where we had to increase prices. But instead, what we did is, we used that strategy to support our customers, not to gouge prices on them, but hold their hand during that time, continue to support and build stronger relationships. As a result, we believe we were able to gain more market share, more products, and continue to reinforce our solution-selling approach to get additional share of the wallet from a customer.
As far as pricing currently, we are not, you know, generally, our prices are not, w e're not seeing as much price pressure. Of course, we are seeing in certain areas, what we identify as a deep commodity, especially in China, and that is the area that we have been strategically, not because of this environment, we started that many years ago to improve our product portfolio and our product mix, that we are strategically trending down in that side of the portfolio, what we classify as deep commodity, and improving our product portfolio as we improve the quality of our products and the portfolio quality.
Got it. Thank you. Yeah, one, one question for me. I think you mentioned the guidance for the fourth quarter gross margin and the 35% level, yet your $1 billion of gross profit sort of assumes a 40% gross margins. You know, kind of walk us through, you know, what gets you from 35% to 40%? How much of that is just volume leverage in the fabs? How much of it may be either pricing or product mix, you know, efficiencies, things like that?
I think it's combination of all those things, right? In the last few quarters, we have been working on our manufacturing efficiencies. You have heard us talk about the factories that we have acquired, whether it's GFAB or SP Fab, how we are accelerating the product qualification into those fabs. That will help us. Certainly pricing and manufacturing efficiencies will help us, and more importantly is our product mix, our quality of our product portfolio. That will help us as well. As we are focused on, like I mentioned earlier, is automotive and industrial. These are the two market segments we get much higher gross margins, 40% to 50%. Similarly, if you look at our product side, power, discrete, and analog also gave us similar margins across all five market segments.
So we are focused on product mix, we are focused on pricing, and we are focused on bringing new products to the market, expanding our portfolio, continue to expand our solution-selling approach, as well as manufacturing efficiencies. So I think all of these areas combined should help us. And our focus is, like you pointed out, is on our $1 billion gross profit. Whether that happens in 2025 or 2026, most of our strategies and our tactics are driven by that goal.
Got it. You mentioned the mix. I think today is roughly 50/50 between internal and external foundries. You know, you've highlighted a couple of the fab acquisitions you've made. Do you expect that mix to stay roughly 50/50, or do you see the company over time moving to a higher percentage of internally sourced wafers?
I think generally we would stay in that range. It may change 55 to 45, depending on which products and which mix it is. But overall, I think the hybrid model has worked very well for us. It has served us well. We'll continue to keep our strategy around that, but the numbers may shift a little bit. Brett, would you like to add some more to that?
Yeah, I think from a model perspective, we would expect that to remain about the same. I think it gives us the opportunity for leverage to drive revenue, by being able to source in across the entire portfolio of internal and external factories. But then also, I think we would see, as we're managing the cycle, you know, we may lean up higher on the internal sourcing once we get more of the flexibility. The acquisition that we made of the factory from Texas Instruments in Scotland, and from Onsemi in South Portland, Maine, are specifically targeted at our power, discrete, and analog businesses that are over half of our portfolio, that average up our margin.
To be able to safely source at least half of those products internally, that gives us a lot of flexibility and a lot of leverage, both from a revenue and a margin perspective.
You know, thinking about margins, you know, as revenues have been affected by the inventory digestion, do you disclose what you've seen in terms of trends of your utilization rate? Are we sort of in the fourth quarter, you know, kind of nearing where you think a trough in utilization rates, or is it, you know, do you not disclose utilization?
But we haven't been talking specifically about it other than basically we're our assembly test sites are targeted over 90% in terms of utilization, and the fab will be over 80%. Both of those are running a good bit below that, and that gives us confidence in our ability to ramp up and to have tailwind from a margin perspective. And I think as we think about a trough, you know, we've talked about, we guide one quarter out, but we've talked about our expectation and our belief is that here we are in fourth quarter, usually first quarter is seasonal, flat to slightly down.
And then the expectation, and I think that we have as well as a lot of others, is that we would hopefully start to see a more seasonal trend into this year, which would mean second and third quarter start to pick up. And I think that speaks of being able to maintain and hopefully improve, where our utilizations are.
Great. Last question for me. Just, just trends that you're seeing in terms of lead times. I know a number of companies through the 2021, 2022, and even early 2023, supply shortages, saw lead times, you know, in some cases, stretch out to almost a full year. I think, many semiconductor peers have reported, you know, a normalization, you know, in their lead times through 2023. You know, kind of where are you now in terms of your lead times? Are you back to kind of pre-COVID levels or what you would consider to be more normal, or are you still kind of going through a period of lead time adjustment?
I would say, yeah, we've seen those lead times come down. We actually are using, we're seeing it in the kind of normal level, 4 weeks to 6 weeks, and we're actually seeing that, have an availability in place as a competitive advantage to be opportunistic. That's something we've been leaning into, honestly, for the last year, as we came off of our peak in third quarter last year, and continue to make sure availability is in place, reassess the environment, you know, realign our outlook, and consistently make sure that we're playing with availability to drive share and growth to achieve our model going forward.
Great. Those were my questions. M aybe I'll close with sort of, you know, the following. Are there any key points that you'd like to leave with investors watching today's webcast?
One thing I'd like to say, and I think you saw it in, in Gurmeet's presentation, which was quite good, is, you know, in the last few weeks, you see Dr. Lu promoting Gary Yu and to be president. I think that's one of the things that there's a lot of subtlety to that, but one of the things that comes with that is Gary's vast experience from a sales perspective. I think that will drive, continue to build on momentum we built through COVID, of getting closer to customers, building and leveraging relationships to talk about next generation and get on the designer's desk to win business. And I think Gary focused on customers and making sure that we shore up our new product development process to really target it on what can drive growth.
I think you see that in other people in the space and benefits that have had, and I think we'll see those benefits, too, of being, continuing to be more externally focused, to drive business, to drive revenue, and take advantage of the manufacturing footprint we have and the nimbleness we have across the operation. Gurmeet, would you add anything?
Well, I think that's good, and Dr. Lu and Gary will continue to stay focused on our 2025 goal, the $1 billion gross profit goal. So that's going to drive a lot of the decisions and strategy and execution.
Yeah, and I'm looking forward to the $1 billion of pre-tax profit goal next. So it'll be fun to, fun to watch. But gentlemen, thank you very much. Brett, Gurmeet, thank you for joining us at the Needham Growth Conference. Really appreciate your participation today.
Thank you.
Thanks, Quinn. Appreciate you hosting us.
Thanks, everybody.
Bye.
Bye-bye.