Thank you to everybody, you know, both in person and listening to the webcast. I'm Chris Snyder, a multi-industry analyst here at UBS. I'm very excited to be joined by Neil Dougherty, CFO at Keysight, and Kailash Narayanan, President of the Communications Solutions Group. Thank you guys for joining.
Thanks for having us.
Maybe starting off, this is a question I've asked, you know, a lot of the corporates so far, it's just around demand. You know, there's obviously a lot going on when we look at orders, revenue, with, you know, just all the variability in the supply chain. When you guys are talking to customers and you guys are, like, seeing the market, you know, how are the conversations gone around customer demand and appetite for Keysight's test and measurement solutions?
Yeah, I mean, I think as you know, Chris, you know, Keysight's a pretty diverse business. We serve a wide range of end markets. There's a lot of secular drivers, and so, you know, I think, you know, as is quite often the case, we've got, you know, some markets that right now are doing relatively stronger, and others that are experiencing a little bit of weakness. I think, you know, we've seen a bit of a checkup in the commercial communications space that Kailash manages, as a lot of our bigger customers are dealing with some inventory dynamics coming out of the supply chain situation of the prior year. Some of them have announced workforce restructurings, those types of things, which can be disruptive in the short run.
I think, you know, in those markets, you know, we take a lot of comfort in the fact that that business is heavily skewed towards the R&D lab, and that one thing that we know is, you know, new product pipeline is the lifeblood of these technology companies. We have a high degree of confidence that, you know, the spending in the R&D lab is gonna turn back on in a relatively short period of time, just because it's so essential to the go forward. I think, you know, similarly, kind of staying on some of the downside, you know, the semi business, very public, right?
A little bit of a pause right now in semi investments, but even there, again, we think the longer term trajectory, you know, the backlogs of some of the big players in this space is, you know, in terms of the fab equipment manufacturers are still quite extensive. We know there's a lot of fab capacity that's going in place related to, you know, the move to smaller process architectures, re-onshoring of fab production. While there's a little bit of a correction that's happening here in the short run, we think over the next, you know, three to four years, that the demand in semi is gonna remain strong. Then you look at the rest of our business, you know, it's kind of the other direction, right?
Aerospace defense remains quite strong at this point in time, where seven consecutive U.S. budgets that have had, you know, meaningful increases in defense, particularly in the, in the defense technology part of the market where we play. You've seen an expansion of NATO, you've seen the NATO allies commit to spending on defense at a greater percentage of GDP. We're seeing increases in spending in other allies like South Korea and Japan. We believe the long-term trend in that market is favorable as well. The auto industry, you know, particularly as it relates to our business, the investments that are happening in the EV technology are driving strength in that end market.
Even our general electronics business, which we think is kind of GDP-linked, and we know saw, you know, an uptick in business over the course of the, you know, last year, related to manufacturing and the supply chain disruption, has held in surprisingly well, right? We're seeing in the education markets, investments in advanced technology, in medtech, you know, this intersection between kind of the electrical engineering world and that life sciences medical space that is still small for us today, but is driving demand. Things like IoT, Industry 4.0, are relative drivers within a broad, diverse market. It's really a set of puts and takes, I think, as we think about the demand environment currently.
Yeah, I appreciate that. You know, if we go back, you know, orders came under some pressure in the January quarter, you know, down, I guess, high single digits, like, against the 20+ comp though. You know, the company kind of called for stability, you know, at these levels. That came through last quarter. Is just the importance of customer R&D spend, you know, the reason that you guys had confidence that, you know, things are stable until they get better, not further deteriorating?
I mean, I think that's true, but I think the confidence is maybe even a little bit more tactical than that, right? We run a six-month funnel process, I mean, based on all the observable inputs that we can see, granted, that can change at any moment, but based on all the observable inputs that we see, we just completed our first half. It looks to us like the back half of the year is gonna look an awful lot like the front half of the year, from funnel size, from things that we're hearing directly from customers about their levels of investment. You know, what we said on our earnings call is that right now, again, as close as we can see it, you know, we do not see a further downside catalyst, and that's good.
Unfortunately, at this point, we don't see an upside catalyst either, and so we'll, you know, we're on the lookout for either of those developments. Right now, I think, again, as good as we can see, it's stability is the word of the day.
Yeah, no, I appreciate that. Maybe to Kailash. You know, the Communications Solutions Group is the one that, you know, of the two segments, others, you know, being the Electronic Industrial Solutions Group, you know, has been the weaker on the communication side. Can you just a little talk about what you're kind of seeing under the surface there, you know, within comms? You know, where are you kind of seeing pressure? Where are you seeing stability? Anything actually getting better?
Sure. Within the Communications Solutions Group, we've got two main markets, right? We have the commercial communications space, which is where we have a weakness, and then you have aerospace defense that rolls up under our Communications Solutions Group as well, where we've seen strength. Within commercial communications, you know, we largely look at it as wireless and wireline. In wireless, we've seen a little bit of a slowdown, primarily in component manufacturing, things, chipsets and components that go inside wireless devices, due to that inventory buildup over the last, that our customers have done over the last couple of years, there was a little bit of a slowdown in that. R&D investments in wireless continues.
You know, we have ongoing 5G deployments, we have ORAN, we have newer versions of the 5G standard that's generating investment, satellite connectivity. see robust customer engagements and R&D spend there. Customers are primarily scrutinizing and pausing some of the near-term continuous improvement type of R&D spend, but the long-term strategic spend continues. On the wireline side, same thing. Long-haul networks, components that go into the long-haul networks, seeing a little bit of a pause because, you know, of a little bit of overcapacity. we're seeing use cases like AIML already driving up demand in data traffic. we see research spend going on in 800G networks, silicon that's focused on AIML, things like that. These strategic long-term engagements are still moving forward.
The softening is primarily due to our manufacturing exposure in the component sector.
In the, I think that's quite interesting. When you look at the, you know, kind of the underlying trends within comms, the R&D piece is, you know, showing more stable than the overall. Is that the same for 5G as well with comms? Is the R&D piece holding more stable?
A lot of our R&D business in comms is in the wireless sector in particular, is related to 5G. You see the first version of the 5G standard is being deployed. You have Release 16 and Release 17. These are versions of the standard that are still not deployed yet. There is R&D spend going on into that. These are taking 5G into other use cases. You know, a lot of people tend to think about 5G just as a smartphone-related use case. That was the case with 4G. 5G is really about other use cases, right? You've got industrial IoT, factory automation, you have private networks, you have satellite connectivity.
These are use cases that are yet to be deployed. There's a lot of R&D spend going on into that. ORAN or Open Radio Access Network is being developed. That is to improve network coverage and connectivity. It's attracting newer customers. It's the ability for any system integrator to put pieces together and build a network or build a base station. This is driving both R&D spend as well as deployment spend. You can kind of imagine when multiple pieces have to interact with each other, the need for testing and interoperability type of use cases go up, and that brings in our solutions. Those are some of the R&D areas. While we're talking about all of this, 6G research has already started, right?
Spend in 6G research has already started. That's a technology that probably will get deployed over the next five, seven years or so, but research spend on 6G has already started. When you look at all of this in aggregate, yes, we see customer engagements, fairly robust R&D on strategic programs continuing.
Appreciate that. You know, you mentioned AI in your response. Obviously, it's been a big focus for everybody, really the whole year, but even I'd say more so over the last, you know, two, three weeks now. You know, Keysight, you know, core competency, you know, customer R&D, exposure to data centers, exposure to semi. You know, what is the investment we're seeing in AI and the focus we're seeing in AI? What does it mean for Keysight?
Yeah, it's obviously an exciting space, getting a lot of attention. You know, when you think about this particular use case, it's sort of hitting an inflection point, primarily due to two factors. One, the data availability, big data availability is improving, which is a key ingredient for AIML, democratization of technologies that can deploy and develop AIML capabilities. With ChatGPT and tools like that, now more people have access to develop and deploy AIML technology, it's kind of hitting an inflection point. You're gonna see more AIML-focused chips. In the semi space, that's exposure to us. You're gonna see sub 7, 5 nanometer technology development, foundry investments take place. All of that is positive.
You're gonna see those chips coming out that need more R&D testing because they're gonna be focused on AIML, KPI, and performance. That's chipset R&D, functional tests, so on and so forth. We're gonna see exposure to that. You're gonna see AIML servers, GPU cards, and more of that. There's capacity expansion. You have ODMs and OEMs that are gonna make many of these cards. There's a positive vector there. We also look at how these AIML, GPUs, CPUs, switches all get put together into a network. High-speed networking will, in general, benefit from this. We've already been supplying 400G and 800G solutions to this market, but we expect on a forward-looking basis for those to ramp.
Finally, the biggest challenge, and this is a new area, even within AIML for us, is customers don't know how to really benchmark their AIML performance. They're building algorithms, they're building models, but they need to do this cost effectively, and they have to train their models in a short amount of time, and also look at energy efficiency. AIML training takes consumes a lot of energy. There's multiple KPIs that they're trying to optimize, and the only way that they're able to do this now is to do this through brute force, meaning let's build an AIML network. Let's buy a bunch of CPUs, GPUs, put it together, train the algorithm, see how it works, and if it doesn't work, just keep doing the trial and error.
We have an opportunity to help the industry with that problem. All in all, pretty exciting. Still early days, but we're excited about what this can do for us in the longer term.
Yeah, I appreciate that. Maybe kind of going from, you know, kind of communication group to the, you know, the multiyear kind of outlook. You know, at the Investor Day, back in March, you know, the company put out, you know, 5%- 7% you know, organic growth outlook, and an increase from, you know, the prior 4%-6%. To me, that was, you know, noteworthy. 'cause as long as I've covered the stock, the negative view has been very consistent. You know, Keysight is very heavily involved in 5G R&D. As 5G is deployed, you know, there's this headwind coming, and that would weigh on growth.
Yeah.
You know, clearly, you guys don't see it that way, five years of raising the growth outlook. Can you just kind of talk about what gives you guys confidence, you know, in the ability to generate that level of growth through this 5G, 6G handoff?
A couple things. First of all, I think, you know, the business is far more diversified than people realize. The 5G story has gotten a ton of press, I think rightfully so. It's been a great story. Since our spin-off back in 2014, we've grown at a 10% compounded annual growth rate. Both CSG and EISG share that same growth rate. The growth has not been dominated by one segment over the other. I think, you know, over multiple years, going back even pre-spin, we've been on a fundamental transformation of our business to shift the focus of our revenue streams more towards our customers' R&D labs versus their manufacturing lines. The business today is about 60% manufacturing.
In the commercial communications space that Kailash manages, it's probably closer to 70%, right? A heavy skew towards R&D versus manufacturing. You know, one of the things that gives us confidence is our customers are some of the best technology companies in the world, and their lifeblood is their new product pipeline, their ability to invest in R&D and drive innovation. You know, while, you know, the industry goes through a transition from 4G to 5G, ultimately to 6G, you know, I encourage people to look at the R&D budgets of the market makers in this space and find the period of time where they took multiple years off from investing in R&D during the lull. It just doesn't happen that way, right?
These big customers, they still have teams that are working on 4G development. There's parts of the world that don't have 4G today. People are still working to drive efficiencies from their 4G networks. We still get significant revenue from 4G R&D. Currently, the crux of the market is 5G. That is absolutely true. As Kailash has just mentioned, these customers already are seeding teams working on 6G research, and that mix is gonna shift over time, right? At some point in the future, 6G will be the predominant, and 5G will roll down. The overall trend on R&D spend for these customers is secular growth, right?
We want to continue to meet their needs as they go through this evolution from 4G to 5G to 6G, which is fundamentally different than where we were, you know, when 4G was rolling out, when we were primarily providing manufacturing tools to these customers rather than R&D tools. It's that shift that gives us confidence.
Yeah, no, I appreciate that. I would agree from where I was, you know, my initiation was much more than 5G. It's always been, you know, something I've been focused on, and maybe we could talk, you know, a little bit about those. You know, on the defense and government piece, you know, we all kind of see defense budgets going higher. You know, we see RDT&E taking share kind of within that. Can you just kind of talk about how that business has trended? You know, are we starting to see, you know, an acceleration even as kind of budgets come through and dollars are released, you know, kind of what's the outlook there?
Yeah. It's when you look at our Aerospace Defense business, for a long time, we've sort of characterized this as a GDP plus type of a business. It's been a fairly steady tracking, that sort of characterization. You know, global Defense budgets are going up, clearly in the U.S., as Neil pointed out earlier, in allied nations and in countries like South Korea, Japan. This exposure is giving us a little bit more predictability over the next several years in terms of what's to come. It's kind of hard to get that from a Defense spend and how it gets appropriated and gets into programs, and that program spend is what we're exposed to. It might...
You know, there may be quarter-to-quarter perturbations, because it's all dependent on governments releasing budgets and assigning it to programs. Looking for a short-term acceleration is probably not the way to think about it, but it's more of secular, long term, and with increasing focus on onshoring and government research and governments and nations wanting to drive technical superiority. All of this is leading to spend, right? Within our AD business.
You've got things about next generation capabilities. You have ranges like DoD ranges requiring recapitalization, where they shift from legacy infrastructure to new infrastructure, radar use cases, things like that, is a growth vector. The other piece is space and satellite. This is a renaissance period, if you will, for space and satellite, because you've got again, legacy satellite infrastructure that is rolling over to new infrastructure. It also needs to interoperate with the new commercial space applications, like the low Earth orbit, LEO satellites, that companies like Amazon and SpaceX and, you know, these folks are putting up there to provide, you know, global connectivity. These systems have to interoperate, and that's driving spend.
Government research money is also pouring in on new areas like 5G and 6G. You know, how does 5G get utilized in defense applications? What are key topics that need to get researched over there? Things like quantum, digital twins, lots of areas that are generating interest in R&D investment. When you kind of look at all of those, it is a secular growth vector. We were comfortable enough to raise our long-term growth rates by a point, as we outlined at the Investor Day.
Yeah. Just a quick add-on, right? We're now seven or eight consecutive years with increasing defense budgets in the U.S. You brought up the RDT&E line item. For those people that don't know, there's one line item within the budget that we pay particular attention to, RDT&E, research development, test, and evaluation. That's kind of the technology line item in the budget, and we pay. You know, that's where we really play. What you've seen over the last several years is that line item has grown at a faster rate than the overall budget. There's even more money that's going into defense technology than average. That gives us confidence.
No, I appreciate that. Maybe turning to auto, you know, from a very high level, you know, it feels like the company's kind of levered into every good auto trend, you know, EV battery, charging infrastructure, you know, eventually autonomous, which, you know, you kind of combine the electronic and the network tests kind of converge. It did, it seemed like, correct me if it's wrong, it did seem like that was one that maybe has seen some improvement over the last couple quarters. How should investors think about this business? What's the driver of the business?
Yeah
How should they think about it going forward?
Yeah. much like the rest of our business, I mean, the primary focus for us in the auto space is in the R&D lab, right? we do have a small portion aligned with the rest of the company. Kind of 30% of our auto business is manufacturing related, but the primary focus is the R&D lab. the current driver of that market is the EV evolution, right? The move towards electric vehicles. we're, you know, working with, you know, auto manufacturers, Tier one OEMs, Tier one suppliers, you know, to help build better batteries. How do you increase the range of a vehicle? How do you increase the life of a battery, more charge dissipation cycles, the charge time?
All of those things are the things that people are working on. As you said, we work with the charging infrastructure guys to make sure that the connectivity between all of the different auto manufacturers and all the different charging manufacturers, that when you pull into a charging station, you don't need to worry about who made your car and who made the charging station, that you're gonna be able to get effective, you know, effective and safe charge. Payment will happen effectively, that the handshake happens effectively. That's what's driving the market today. But I think as we look forward, potentially a more exciting opportunity even for Keysight, is this whole transition towards autonomous driving. Because the way autonomous is ultimately gonna manifest is through a convergence of multiple different communications technologies, right?
It's gonna take wireless technologies like 5G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, LAN, things like radar and lidar that we do in the aerospace defense industry. It's a convergence of bunch of technologies where we already have a high degree of expertise, that are gonna need to work in concert with one another, to enable these high levels of autonomous driving. That's a little bit more of a forward-looking opportunity, but it's one that we're really excited about and one that we really feel like we're in a differentiated position to help the market with those advances.
I appreciate that. You know, one thing that I think investors sometimes have trouble when thinking about Keysight, is, you know, it's more of a capacity play. It's not, you know, some other, another company that sells a widget into production and, you know, you can kind of model that out. I mean, it's really an installed base. I guess, you know, kind of the question, you know, we get a lot is, "Well, how do we know the world needs more test and measurement capacity?" I guess, you know, what gives you guys confidence that customers need more test and measurement capacity? And kind of with that, what is the catalyst for whether it's an upgrade, a new unit, an incremental unit? Like, what drives that?
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I'll maybe talk about some of the comms in the Aerospace Defense markets, right? What our customers are trying to do is really look at developing new IP, new technology-driven IP. This could be in pursuit of higher data rates. If it's in wireline, it could be in pursuit of wider bandwidth, faster response times, meaning lower latency. All of this means that you need to have smaller chips, you need to have higher density chips. All of this requires investment in R&D, right? These are complicated R&D topics that require heavy investment in throughout their workflow. What we do is we enable that workflow all the way from simulation.
They can't just go and put a chip out, they need to model that, first in software. We have an EDA portfolio that helps them simulate what that might look like. Then they'll need to build a proof of concept or an initial prototype. That needs to be modeled, characterized to see how it correlated with simulation. Then they, you know, once that sort of cycle continues, and then you move on to producing pilot designs, which need to be tested at scale. For all of these workflows, and finally, they need to get deployed in the live network, and then they need to be monitored, troubleshot, they need to be assessed for cybersecurity, these types of risks.
When you look at that whole overall workflow, it requires access and our tools, and most of it is focused on the front end and the R&D phase of it. This is what sort of drives this, right? Whenever customers are building out new SKUs, it generally and adding new capabilities, it drives need for our solutions. When they're moving from one generation to another generation of technology, that drives that drives spend. These are all kind of overlapping, so it doesn't move in a sequential manner. That's the beauty of the diversity that we have. You've got, you know, 5G going on. There's still meaningful spend in 4G. There's 6G research coming up.
There's push for 800G and terabit, now driven by AIML. You've got satellite connectivity that's needed, you know, in aerospace, defense, and automotive, and commercial sectors. All of these are sort of overlapping waves of innovation that requires our solutions, right? That's what gives us the confidence. On top of that, you know, we have the broadest portfolio than anybody else in the industry, in our industry, and our technology stack is pretty deep. We've got thousands of R&D engineers who have the expertise to deliver these capabilities and engage with customers. All of that gives us the confidence.
Yeah, you know, at the highest level, what does Keysight do? We make hardware, software, tools, solutions for electrical engineers. What do you need to believe to have confidence in the opportunity going forward? You need to believe that electrical engineering-based technology innovation is gonna continue. Just look at the markets we talked about, wireless, wireline, networking, and not to mention the devices, aerospace, defense, technology, automotive, semiconductor, the digitization that's going into, you know, everything from refrigerators to IoT. You know, suffice it to say, we have a high degree of confidence that electrical engineering-based innovation is gonna continue going forward.
As Kailash said, you know, nobody has a broader portfolio and a deeper bench of technology than Keysight, and so we're highly confident about the opportunity that lies ahead of us in the R&D lab.
I really appreciate that. you know, back in, I guess, like February, when the, you know, the fiscal Q1, when orders were under some pressure, you know, you guys talked about, you know, really like a lengthening of the sales cycle.
Yeah.
You know, customers just taking a little bit longer to decide, you know.
Yeah.
if they're gonna buy. You know, has that stabilized? You know, we see orders kind of stabilizing. Is it fair to assume that that sales lengthening has stabilized as well?
Yeah, I think, again, stabilization is a good word. It does feel like we're almost in the exact opposite position we were in a year ago, where there was this urgency to get in line, right? The supply chain situation of a year ago accelerated the sales cycle because people wanted to secure their spot in line and, you know, get in the queue for what we're lengthening lead times. Now with lead times, our supply chain situation is dramatically better. For the lion's share of our portfolio, we're back where we were before this whole thing started. Lead times have come in, their own demand has slowed, and so it's just slowing things down. I think the good news is, from our perspective, the engagement remains high, right?
We continue to engage with these customers. We know they haven't given up on these programs. They're just moving a little slower in the short run to try and get themselves through their own, you know, through their own inventory indigestion and these things. Yeah, I think it has stabilized. Again, you know, we have a high degree of confidence that, you know, while these companies do pause, they don't pause for long.
Yeah, no, I appreciate that. You know, one thing that's always kind of stood out on Keysight is not the margins, but just the rate of change in the margins. You know, if you go back, I think it was like, you know, 2018, I think it was 18%-ish operating margin.
Yeah.
Now we're roughly 30. you know, if I look at the incremental over that period, it's almost 60.
Yeah.
If my math is right. Can you just talk about, you know, what's driven that? You know, there's no company that I cover. I mean, other companies may have similar margins, but no one's has expanded them at the rate that you guys have.
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, we spun out of Agilent eight years ago. The business had been underinvested in, it had languished from a growth perspective. We turned the investment up, we got the business growing again. You know, our model essentially says, "Invest, invest in growth, invest in R&D, invest in sales, make sure you're funding the CapEx that's necessary to grow your business. Leverage everything else," right? I think as we've kind of changed our go-to-market to move more towards solutions, those solutions tend to be more differentiated in the marketplace, higher value added, therefore higher margin. We've added a ton of software content, you know, probably tripled our software business. We're now significantly over $1 billion over this eight-year period of time.
Obviously, high margin, and gets not just to the margin performance, but to the value add that we're bringing to customers. I think that fundamental transformation about the way we think about the market opportunity has not only increased growth, it's increased the margin of the things that we're the value that we're adding to customers, and therefore the margin that's associated with, and has fundamentally transformed the business.
Yeah, no, I appreciate that. Maybe following up on software, you know, I haven't gotten there yet. You know, can you talk about, you know, obviously software, it's growth accretive, it's significantly margin accretive, what about from a competitive, you know, positioning? You know, you guys are much bigger than everybody else, with the industry, you know, like, I guess many kind of accelerating towards software, what does that allow for you guys from a competition kind of moat perspective?
Yeah. Why don't I start and I'll let, hey, Kailash, jump in. I pull back to the comments that Kailash was making earlier. We really far focused on our customers' R&D workflow. Because of the breadth of our portfolio, not just in hardware and software, we have the largest set of building blocks with which to aid our customers across that workflow. You know, the design tools that they need at the front end in the simulation phase, feedback loop as they prototype, and then validate those solutions and ultimately come up with something that's manufacturable and deployable in a commercial environment. I think in this space, you really need both, right?
You need to have differentiated hardware, core measurement capability, and to increasingly add value, put the software around it. You know, it's not something where someone can really come in and just do the software piece. You really need to have this complete set of tools to be offered, to be able to offer them a complete solution.
Yeah, you know, we've kind of outlined our strategy at the Investor Day, moving from a box-based physical layer business into the protocol layer and the application layer. The protocol layer business drives the need for our customers to emulate things that they would deploy in a software-defined environment. There's a lot of attach rates to software, and it's a complete solution with our hardware platforms, driving more software content because they need to see how things are gonna look like or perform, or behave out in real deployment in their labs. That's driving a lot of software content. We've been able to, you know, acquire many companies such as Prisma Telecom, that emulates a device.
We've acquired SCALABLE Network Technologies, which provides a digital twin capability for network modeling. We've added Eggplant a couple of years ago, that's into software automated test. We're now able to string these assets together, as Neil talked about, and provide very focused capabilities to each of these diversified end markets, right? Those are hard to duplicate because you need to have the core assets up and down the technology stack, and you have to have the software assets and the workflow expertise to stitch it all together. Certainly, a big differentiator for us.
Appreciate that. You know, so the You know, I feel like the theme here, really going back to the last earnings call is just, you know, stability. I think that's obviously welcome, you know, given all the macro uncertainty. You know, the next, kind of last step from here is growth or a return to growth. Obviously, there's a lot of uncertainty in the market. You know, what should investors look at or track, you know, to determine if, okay, things are kind of returning, you know, back to growth mode?
Just because the nature of R&D is kind of opaque, and I think there's not always a ton of visibility, you know, from the outside looking in, you know, trying to determine when things are turning, you know, in either direction, really.
Yeah, I mean, I think I started this discussion with the discussion kind of what our relative strengths and weaknesses in terms of our end markets were currently, and obviously commercial comms being one. I think, you know, the good news is that the market-making customers in this space they're all household names, right? This is the Qualcomm and the Google, and the Samsung of the world. One of the things I'd be watching is, you know, it's what's happening and, you know, with those kind of, you know, market-making customers in the space. Are they getting past their workforce restructurings? What are they saying about their inventory situations and their level of investment?
I mean, I think, you know, we obviously have a deeper level of visibility because we're in their R&D labs on a daily, day-to-day basis, and there's an advantage for them to keep us up to speed on what their demand requirements are and what their roadmaps are like. I think from an investor standpoint, you can learn a lot just from what these kinds of companies are saying publicly about their levels of investment. Same on the semiconductor side, right? You know, which is the other area of relative weakness. The TSMCs of the world are very public companies, right? You can learn a lot from their public statements.
Yeah, no, I appreciate that. You know, maybe turning, you know, kind of lastly here to capital deployment. You know, not only is the company a very strong cash generator, but there's a lot of cash on the balance sheet, too.
Yeah.
I want to say $2.4 billion, $2.5 billion.
2.4.
$2.4 billion.
Yeah
At the end of last quarter. you know, can you just talk about, you know, what should investors expect from a, from a capital deployment perspective?
Yeah, I, you know, I think, again, we're trying to strike a balance here. I think first and foremost, as I've already said, we want to make sure that we are funding the future organic growth of our business. I think even in the situation right now where our business is under a little pressure, we're going to keep our core on. We might pause some nascent R&D programs, but our core R&D program, 6G quantum computing, these things that are going to drive the future growth of our business, we're going to keep those things on track. We're going to continue to invest in our sales force, again, to make sure that the business is positioned to grow.
I think beyond that, the management team has a preference to put capital to work in value-accretive, growth-generative M&A. I think, you know, there's challenges there. We have a pretty disciplined approach in terms of our return hurdles. There's, as you can tell from our comments today, there's a pretty strong software bias to our M&A funnel. Those valuations have been challenging, let's just say. You know, I think, you know, we've done 15 or 16 acquisitions in the eight years that we've been out as an independent public company, and I think you'll can see us continue to do that. If we're not finding ways to put capital to work, you know, we'll return capital.
We've committed at a minimum to be anti-dilutive with our buyback program. Over the last couple of years, we've been significantly more aggressive than that. Again, we're trying to, at the moment, make sure that we retain some dry powder, so that when we do find strategic opportunities, we have the ability to pull the trigger, but at the same time, be good stewards of capital and not hesitate to return it to our shareholders when we see the opportunity.
Yeah, I appreciate that. You know, if I kind of go back over the, you know, the long term, you know, there really wasn't that much buybacks. It was all kind of software M&A bolt-on, I think was the overarching focus. You know, the past couple of years, you know, much more buybacks, you know, kind of to your credit, you kind of modestly, but, you know, the multiples were high, and buyback was the right place. Is that algorithm shifting? Obviously, you know, multiples are down broadly.
Yeah.
Capital is tighter, I imagine maybe there's not as much competition for assets. You know, when you have $2.4 billion of cash, maybe, you know, financing rates aren't all that much of a concern, you know.
Yeah.
in the deal now.
I think it remains to be seen. I, you know, and I think there's reason for some optimism. It does feel to me like, you know, there's, maybe an increasing level of actionability on some of the assets in our space. I mean, we track a broad range of things. We literally look at hundreds of things every year. I mean, we try and cast a broad net, but it does feel like, you know, that there is, you know, maybe a little bit of an uptick in terms of the actionability of some of these assets. You know, the question is transactability, right? Due to particularly a lot of these founder-led companies, have they let go of the valuations of late 2021 and realized the new reality?
I think we'll have to wait and see.
Yeah. Well, I could ask questions all day, but we're up on time. Thank you, Neil. Thank you, Kailash. Thank you to everyone, you know, both in the room, you know, listening on the webcast, and hope everyone has a great day. Thank you.
Thank you, Chris. Appreciate it.
Thank you. Thank you, Chris.