All right, we'll go ahead and get started. Thanks, everyone, for coming. For those of you that don't know me, I'm Arjun Bhatia. I'm the analyst here at William Blair that covers InterDigital. For a full list of disclosures, you can go to williamblair.com. It's a pleasure to have the CEO of InterDigital, Liren Chen. Liren, thanks for coming.
Thank you.
Liren's going to run through a presentation, give a little background on the company, and then we'll go from there. The floor is yours, Liren.
All right. Thank you. Thank you, Arjun. Good afternoon. Thank you for joining me. My name is Liren. I'm the CEO for the company. Before I get into my presentation, may I have a raise of hand from the audience to see how many of you already knew something about InterDigital? OK, that's pretty good. For those of you who met me for the first time, I'll go through a prepared remark. We actually have quite a few slides because we want to distribute the slides offline. I'm trying to hopefully use a few, five to 10 minutes for Q&A in the end. OK? All right, I'll get started here.
What I'll cover is we'll go through a company introduction, who we are, what we do, the business momentum we have built, and also I'll present to you a long-term growth strategy. By long-term, I mean all the way to 2030. This is a one-pager. We are a technology company. Our company was founded in 1972, so we are 50-plus years in business. We do foundational research. I'll explain to you what exactly does foundational mean. We focus on wireless, video, and artificial intelligence. We built a very large and evergreen patent portfolio based on our research. And we licensed them to some of the largest vendors in our industry, and our industry is growing. Our technology is more important than ever. We have built a lot of business momentum by signing new customers.
The bottom is our financial result, driving revenue growth, driving earnings per share even faster than revenue. We have very healthy margins, and we are sitting on a large amount of cash position, which I'll also explain our capital allocation strategy in a later slide. This is our exec team. My name is Liren. I joined the company four years ago. Before I joined InterDigital, I was at Qualcomm for 25 years. I'm an inventor. I'm an attorney. I'm also a licensing veteran. I'm not going to go through all of them, but it's important for you guys to know that I believe we have put together the best team in our industry. Each one of us is an expert in our field. We all have decades and decades of experience. More importantly, we work really well together as a team.
Let me explain to you our business model. Our business model is somewhat complicated and very often misunderstood. We are a foundational technology company. We invest in research, try to be roughly five to 10 years ahead of the curve. We employ some of the best people in the industry. Our company is not gigantic. We have roughly 500 people, full-time employees. We are in seven different countries. We are in 14 different sites. We try to get the best people in the world. Our R&D site generally is co-located with the best university in the world. We try to get them when they are in PhD programs. We offer them internships. We hope they work for us afterwards. What separates us from most of our competitors is we have the highest concentration of inventors. Most of our employees are scientists and engineers.
Other scientists and engineers, 90%+ of my inventors. In most other companies, that percentage is in single-digit percentage. In us, think of us as an inventor-driven company. Our R&D work will be among the largest. Patent portfolio, we license them. That is only half the story. The other half of the story is we participate and lead in standard development. By standard, I mean open global standard that is driving an enormous amount of value creation. Standard is how we disseminate our primary technology to many vendors and to many customers worldwide. Let me get into the next slide here. Again, I will just focus on we have three pillars of research. We do foundational research in wireless. By wireless, I mean cellular technology. I also mean Wi-Fi technology. We are one of the key drivers for video technology.
I'll explain why video is super important in a later slide. We are also an AI technology company. We have been driving AI ever.
This presentation.
Driver for video technology. I'll explain why video is super important in a later slide. We are also an AI technology company. We have been driving AI evolution for the last multiple decades. Combined, we are one of the very few people in the world who know all three of them: know wireless, know video, and know AI in combination. Why is video really important? As you guys probably know, video traffic drives vast majority of internet traffic. The number varies quarter by quarter. Roughly, it's 80% of internet traffic driven by video. That's true in the fixed network. That's also true in your smartphone. People don't buy smartphones to send text messages, even though they do. The real driving use case for smartphones is video sharing, uploading, downloading, real time, and streaming all these different things.
This is an illustration of the power of video codec. I'll walk you through it. This is a 4K movie. Let's call it roughly two hours long, a little bit longer than two hours. Uncompressed, this will be about 11 TB. It's hard to put an arm around what is 11 terabytes. If you try to download a movie uncompressed with a typical home speed network, let's call it, it will take you close to seven days to download that movie. With compression, we are taking, if you draw on the sort of bottom right corner, that's compressed with multiple generations of codec, which is the compression algorithm. We are able to compress the content roughly 1,000x to one. We are driving multiple generations of video codec. Every generation is generally 30%-50% better.
By better, I mean you're using less bandwidth for the same amount of traffic or using the same traffic for much higher resolution, better user experience. That's sort of the core. As I said earlier, a global standard system is really important because standard promotes compatibility. Standard supports interoperability. Those two are related, but not the same concept. Just without standard, your iPhone would not be able to talk to an Android phone. Without standard, you would not have a device that supports 5G, 4G, 3G at the same time. When you travel to different places, your phone wouldn't be able to work everywhere. In the global standard, it offers you scalability, lowers the barrier to entry, frankly, has a lot of economic value. That's also what makes our engineers' innovation so much more effective in many, many different use cases. We don't just participate.
We lead them. I'll demonstrate to you in a later slide what do I mean. We work with everyone in the industry, from universities to research companies to our peer company to implementing of the standard. We work with all of them. We share our technology. Those are some of our engineers. I did not download this picture from the internet, random people. These are our employees. For respect of privacy, I took their name off, but they are all our employees. They are some of the most respected technical experts in the field. They also happen to be leading many important standard creations. They are chairs of very different things here.
I know the fund is very small, but you will recognize some of them as wireless technology standards, some of them as video technology, some of them literally as artificial and machine learning standard bodies. We are leading them. Just a case in point. I think everyone heard of 5G, which is our cellular standard. By the way, our engineers are already working on 6G, which will come out by the end of the decade, 2029, 2030 time frame. In 3GPP, which is a standard body that defines 5G and 6G, there are only 15 chair positions. That is everything. There are many, many companies in our industry trying to fight for those leadership positions. By the way, those leadership positions are elected. They are elected by participating companies. They are based on what you bring to the table, how valuable you are in the value.
As of today, InterDigital is one of the very few companies having more than two chairs, more than one chair. There are really 15 of them in the world, and we currently occupy multiple chairs. That just demonstrates to you our engineers are very well respected. Our company is being viewed as a leader in our industry. All right, this is not just me. I'm the CEO for the company. Obviously, I'm biased. I say our company is awesome. Every CEO says their company is awesome. This is ranked by LexisNexis, which is one of the more respected companies. They publish an annual report. They identify the 100 most innovative companies in the world. It's not just in our industry. This is everybody. For four years in our role, we have been ranked as one of the most respected companies, most innovative companies in the world.
This specifically says our technology needs the current impact, but more importantly, impact the future. Right, now let's talk about patents. This is our patent portfolio. I'm taking two snapshots, - 2017, - 2025. And so historically, we are a pioneer in wireless communication technology. So our portfolio, as you can tell, the largest slide is wireless patents. But now we are no longer just purely wireless. We have done major acquisitions with Technicolor. We have combined our research. We are driving up our technology innovation. Our portfolio has almost doubled in that period. It has different slices of the value. But equally important, this is an evergreen patent portfolio. On average, every single day, we are getting six new patents every single day, including weekends. But patent, I like to say patent is about quality. Patent is not a number. By definition, every patent is different.
The quality really matters. Again, this is not my word. This is ranked by LexisNexis. They rank portfolio by quality. Our patent quality is ranked number one in 5G, ranked top five in video, and number one in Wi-Fi. If you combine them, we are one of the very few companies that rank high in all three categories. I think it is worth saying that they are all important technology. All right, that is essentially what we do, what is a patent portfolio. We license everything here. Now let's talk about business momentum. I joined the company in 2021. 2021 happened to be an interesting point for our company. At that time, we had two of our larger contracts out for renewal. We wanted to renew them, which is Apple and Samsung. We also tried to keep our editing here.
This is a chart for annualized recurring revenue. This is a portion of our revenue. We demonstrate on the bottom key events. The top lines, during the four years I've been with the company, we have signed 40+ agreements with economic value. This agreement is more than $3.7 billion. They're adding on top of each other. The power of our business is when we sign people up for the first time, they're adding. We keep on adding them, adding them. Most of our contracts are long-term. By long-term, I see roughly five years, plus or minus. Once you start building them on top, you can start driving a more incremental growth of the annualized recurring revenue. The next chart is really what I call the four-panel chart.
If our CFO is in the audience, he will tell you this is his favorite chart. I'll try to do justice. On the top left side, this is our revenue growth year over year. In the last five years or four years, we were able to grow it by 20%-25% CAGR. Our business inherent power of the business model is once we invest in corporate R&D, invest in patent portfolio, our new license agreement carries 100% margin. As we drive revenue growth here, our profitability measured by adjusted EBITDA, the margin actually keeps on going up. The adjusted EBITDA is growing faster than revenue. Part of our business, frankly, also generates a substantial amount of cash. We use the cash to increase our dividend. In the last 12 months alone, we have increased our dividend by 50%.
In the last 10+ years, since 2011, we reduced our share outstanding by 45%. If you combine those multiple forces in power, we are able to grow our earnings per share in the last few years by 6.5x. That is 600%+. That is our financial strength, if you would. Now let's talk about long-term. I know folks always say, "That's awesome. You have done good things in the last few years. But what's next?" We are laying out our long-term strategy. One thing I want to make sure you understand, the technology we create is super important. It is more important than ever. Everything is wirelessly connected. There is an enormous amount of value being built on top of the foundational technology we build. If you try to measure the overall economic impact for the mobile ecosystem alone, this is a $5.7 trillion economy.
If this were a separate country, this would be the third largest GDP, only behind the U.S. and China. This is bigger than Germany, bigger than Japan in terms of annualized impact for overall economic impact. Our technology supports many, many millions of jobs. By the way, it's only going to be more important going forward. Let me explain. Going forward, we are addressing three markets. Our core market has been the smartphone market. Smartphone is a highly concentrated market. There's, frankly, roughly top 10 smartphone vendors capturing 95%+ of the market. We have done well. I'll explain to you. We also license our technology to consumer electronics. That's TVs, set-top boxes, laptops. We are also licensing a large use case, a mono use case called IoT, Internet of Things. That's cars.
I like to see cars adjust smartphone wheels from the connectivity and multimedia technology and sensing. By the way, going forward, we have identified a very large greenfield opportunity in streaming video in the cloud, which I'll cover that also. All right, let's go through it. What is the current opportunity we are thinking? On the past, we are currently on the recurring revenue piece. We are a little bit more than $500 million. We have announced in our Q1. That's a record high for our company. We believe, given time, with these three drivers, we will grow our revenue to about $1 billion in total revenue. They are breakdown by the three buckets. Our smartphone is the most mature market. We are currently at more than $400 million+ .
We believe in about a couple of years, we will grow it to be about $500 million in recurring revenue. Our second bucket, we are about $86 million per year in annualized recurring revenue. Just for reference, when I joined the company four years ago, that was $20 million. We have grown it by 4x in the last four years. We believe we can grow that market to be about $200 million by 2030. The largest greenfield opportunity to us is cloud. It is streaming video on demand. We believe by 2030, we will grow it to be about $300 million. All right, let's get to it. For the smartphone, we are doing really well. In the last four years, we have grown the device under license from about 50% to about 80%. The driver, there are a few vendors left.
We feel confident that we are going to be growing. Adding those few vendors, we will get to $500 million recurring revenue. On the CE side, it is actually multiple buckets. There is PC side. We just signed an agreement with HP. We announced in Q2. We are currently having more than 50% of the PC under license. Also, we have tablets and we have TVs. We have signed Samsung. We have signed some flagship customers in the space. We have enough growth in the field. We are confident about able to grow them. On the automobile side, I will give you a couple of things here. Currently, about 100 million cars are being sold on the market, roughly. Some of them, it is 80, depending on year by year. Roughly half the cars are connected. We believe over time, there will be roughly close to 100%.
I can't imagine the world in a few years where the car wouldn't have connectivity in them. You have navigation. You have infotainment. You have all kinds of use cases for it. It is also important to know currently, most of the cars are still connected by 4G. There is an evolution underway to add 5G to it. Car automobile, probably many of you guys are aware, has a longer life cycle for technology refreshing. Unlike cell phones, pretty much all the phones sold in the advanced market are 5G-enabled. There will be a higher penetration of 5G into the automobile use case. We get a higher valuation when they upgrade from 4G to 5G. We are part of a licensing platform. The adoption is quite promising in that field. We also have identified quite a big large of cellular IoT opportunity.
That's Internet of Things. That can be a number of things, as a tracking point of sales and smart meters. That is a market currently is untapped for us. We absolutely plan to grow it. Let me talk about the video on demand. We have streaming video on demand. We have advertised video on demand. They are really large opportunities for us. Third-party data, in about a couple of years, that market combined in time, annualized revenue for that whole industry is about $500 billion. They are roughly the same size as the smartphone market. I think I do not have to dive too much into the important video codec to that industry because the video codec overall allows them to drive higher revenue by offering higher resolution content, which they do charge more for those of us who pay a lot of subscriptions.
They also allow them to drive a lot of subscribers with the investment for their infrastructure. I'm talking about storage. I'm talking about power. I'm talking about cooling. I'm talking about memory footprint, all kinds of stuff here. It is really important. Let me touch about capital allocation. Again, I'm going pretty fast speed because I want to save a little bit of time for Q&A. Our capital allocation is pretty straightforward. We maintain our fortress balance sheet. We want to be very strong. The reason being our business model requires us to negotiate with very large customers. Company very often 100x bigger than we are. We want to demonstrate the strength of financial capability to sustain our business, to demonstrate creating value over time to them. That is important.
Second thing is really we keep on investing a higher percentage of our recurring revenue into R&D. Combining R&D and IP portfolio creation and enhancement, we invest 50% of our recurring revenue back into that front-end of the process. That's a very high percentage. We do keep dry powders. We have a large balance sheet. We do keep them. We are optimistic in terms of doing M&A. Our largest acquisition so far is our Technicolor acquisition, where we acquired their patent asset, acquired their team, which allows us to open new fields for different device licensing, frankly give us the opportunity to license in the cloud space. Largely, as I already touched on, our business created a lot of free cash flow. We do invest quite a bit in returning capital back to the shareholders. In the last 10+ year , we have done a lot.
I believe this is my second to last chart. These are our long-term growth. Where do we go from here? In order to reach our target in 2030, we are targeting to grow our recurring revenue at 14% year over year. We are going to maintain our margin at roughly 60% adjusted EBITDA margin, which translates into over $600 million plus of adjusted EBITDA in net dollars. We feel we're well-positioned to drive value. By the way, this has built in a certain amount of investment we'll keep on making and building how we sustain and keep on driving future technology like 6G, AI, and next-generation codec. All right, let me finish on this one chart. This is in summary. As I like to say, you are investing in our company by investing in our team, in our people.
I do believe we have a world-class team in everything we do. All the major blocks, we work well. We have clearly accelerated our business momentum, actually really well, in demonstrating our licensing success, IP creations. We have a very large market in front of us. Smartphones are bread and butter. We're doing well, but we are identifying different devices, different cloud space. We have a clear path to grow the company. We have hopefully demonstrated enough capability to execute. I think we are just getting started. With that, I'm happy to take any questions you may have.
Great. Any questions from the audience? Maybe, Liren, if we start off, can you talk a little bit about how you actually do contracting and how your licensing agreements are structured?
Because one of the questions that I think that I get from a lot of investors is you do a lot of business in China with the Chinese smartphone OEMs. Obviously, the tariff noise has kind of created some questions about that. How does that impact your business in light of your kind of licensing practices?
Yeah, that's a great question. In general, we are open and flexible in negotiating contract. There's generally licenses are two-way to negotiate contract. One is in our industry called revenue royalty. We say, "Hey, I'll strike to you on the pricing. You report to me on your sales and volume and price tier." Every quarter, we get together, generally in rear view, to say, "Last quarter, this is how much you sold. This is my pricing. You do the multiplication, and you get to a number." That's one way to do it. The other way to do it is we negotiate a fixed dollar amount. By the way, those numbers are not in vacuum. You basically make a lot of forecasts based on volume, based on technology penetration, based on price tier. I like to see in the perfect world of information, they are the same.
They are just MPV calculations spread by different years. That is not in the perfect world. There is risk shifting. People may or may not meet their target. Most of our contracts with large customers, fixed dollar amount, I give you a number. In 2024, real dollar-wise, 94% of our revenue comes from fixed fee agreement, which means we are not subject to quarter-by-quarter variance of the volume. Back to the tariff situation here. If you look at our business, we are doing foundational research. We are contributing to the open standard. We are licensing IP. That is intangible. There is really no physical goods across the border. Frankly, tariff does not really apply in our core business. In terms of revenue impact, most of our deals are fixed dollar amount. Short-term-wise, there is really no variance up and down.
Longer term, we obviously want the industry to be healthy. We wanted our customer to be increasing their sales, everything. Longer term, we obviously wanted the tariff to be resolved. In short-term-wise, there's not direct impact, just for ballpark-wise. Our main contract generally is five years plus or minus. Our largest contract, this is public info, and we'll be able to commonize with Apple. It's a seven-year deal, which they signed in 2022. That lasted all the way to September of 2029. We are able to get actually 15% higher than the previous Apple contract. That's the same revenue every year. That's just a thing.
Yeah, super helpful. Maybe, yeah, go ahead.
Just looking at your model, the catch-up payments are obviously monthly, quarter to quarter. I was wondering, can you just walk us through what does that look like from a conversation going back to your customers? Because of kind of the litigation that kind of is on the back end of it, can you describe what your relationship is with your customers?
Yeah.
How does that seem? How does it operate?
Absolutely. There are really two main questions in your question. One is, how do we negotiate contract for the first time to catch up versus recurring model? The second thing is really, what's the relation with your customer? Why do we keep on seeing there's litigation part of your business? Some people will say you have to sue your customer, which is a wrong perception. I'll clarify that issue. On the catch-up revenue side, keep in mind our technology, most of our technology are part of the open standard, which means people who have been using it for a long time. We are going to approach and convince them to take license. Those negotiations are complicated. Sometimes it takes more than a year. It's lengthy. We will demonstrate to them, this is our technology. This is part of the standard. These are our patent portfolio.
This is how we read on it. This is how much your customer is paying, your competitor is paying. Most of the time, we are successful. Out of the 40-plus agreements I have informed you guys in the last four years, vast majority, when I say vast majority, I mean 90-plus % of them are signed bilateral negotiation, including our largest one, including Apple, signed without litigation. Done. In the first time, we will try to demonstrate, hey, you have been using our patent for all these years. You should pay for past infringement as well going forward. Frankly, we try to meet them halfway for the past side because very often they have been using our technology for years and years and years. There are many millions of devices being shipped. I am practical. I recognize some of those people have not reserved enough money on the side.
We try to meet them halfway. Going forward, we say, hey, look, you need to pay your fair share. By the way, it is a funny dynamic. Once people started paying, they want to make sure their competitor also pay. They act on our side afterwards because I always say, hey, it is not just me wanting to enforce our right because it is not fair to us. You are not paying. Also, it is not fair to your law-abiding competitor because you, by not paying, you have a cost advantage. That is not fair. That is generally the dynamic. Regarding our litigations, as I said, we rarely use litigation. Once in a while, we do have to enforce our right.
That's just what's not fair to us as people who are essentially cheating us, stealing our IP without paying, but also not fair to the competitor who are paying us. That's generally the stuff. We do not sue our customer. We love our customers. We only chase the people who steal our IP without paying us. That's the reality.
All right. The red light is blinking. So we are out of time. Liren, thank you so much. That was great. If there are other questions, we are upstairs in Burnham. Oh, no, sorry. We're upstairs in Richardson for the breakout if you have more questions.
Okay. So we do have a breakout session. I'm happy to follow up the discussion for any question you may have. Thanks.