Recently, so I've had a lot of introductory calls with clients that are looking at Keysight for the first time. One of the questions that is more challenging to answer is sort of your competitive moat and differentiation. I can see it on the slide in your deck that shows all of the OEMs and how you've got almost near-unanimous share across all of your end markets with all the major OEMs. But what I don't understand is how you win that. Is it your technology, speed to market, services, base of engineers that are just comfortable with Keysight technology? What is it that drives that moat and drives the share gains that you build into your long-term model that we'll talk about later?
All right, thank you. Well, it's great to be here, and thank you for covering us. You did a great job with your first write-up. It was very good. So I just say, Keysight's a business that's been around for multiple decades. And as an engineer, I graduated out of grad school and went to work for Motorola. And one of the things that excited me about working at Motorola was I got to play hands-on with a lot of equipment and stuff. So being a grad student and a researcher, becoming an engineer, and had an opportunity to work with a lot of the tools that Keysight today. So what creates that moat is engineers need tools to characterize their designs and the trust that is so integral to any characterization of a device or a technology. That this trust has been built over multiple decades.
We're so embedded in the client's workflow through all the times and the changes that happen in the technology world that it by itself creates a moat for the company. As I start with the client. Then what enables that to be continued is the ongoing pace of change of technology that occurs across all our end markets. Driven by that change, Keysight has to stay on the cutting edge and has to have its own technology that keeps evolving faster than the rate of external change. This group has done it for decades as part of HP and then as part of Agilent. What's different about Keysight is the speed aspect to it. We realized that just by providing tools, we were capturing a portion of the marketplace.
But by offering solutions to customers' problems, we could actually expand the pie, create a bigger value for them, and capitalize on it or capture it. And so by offering solutions, we furthered our advantage with our clients by becoming more of the trusted advisor and a partner, leveraging the trusted position we had with them for decades. But being there for them ahead of when they needed us was a big change that we made in our operating DNA. And we call it our first-to-market commitment. Because when we are first-to-market, there is a level of abstraction that you have to get the business to operate with because things are not as concrete at the front end of any design cycle. But that's where the opportunity to partner is. And I'm very proud of the scaling of partnerships we have with our customers today.
And the pull on that is at an all-time high across all our end markets and across all the globe where we serve our customers. But at the heart of it is our ongoing commitment to technology in-house because we have to be looking out further and making calls sooner to be able to be there for our customers. And that's where the technological moat starts.
Got it. And that plays into sort of the results we saw for Fiscal Q4 recently, obviously. Kind of want to ask you to sort of maybe relay some of the highlights that you took from those results, maybe some of the things you've heard from investors, things that they've understood or not, and kind of play that into the last three years. I think with my initiation, I talked about an inflection. It's a very overused word, but it feels like the stock has gone sideways. The business has been hit with a number of headwinds for the last three years. This quarter, things really seem to turn around. So maybe you could kind of detail the quarter and your thoughts on that.
Yeah. Well, since Keysight's independence, I say, in 2014, when we spun out as an independent company, we really set out to transform a business that was captive inside of the Agilent organization and was largely a product-focused company. We said, "We need to transform to be more solutions-oriented for our customers." And in order to do that, we have to look at our contributions not just through the lens of hardware, but through the lens of software-centric changes that are happening in the universe. And I think those changes resulted in strong performance over a period of five-to-seven years that culminated in 2022, the COVID effects of supply chain where we saw peak demand. We obviously capitalized on it.
But then what transpired in 2023 and 2024 was the normalization from that peak because customers had, what we now know, had pulled forward spend because there were supply chain challenges and people were ordering ahead, and so they had all the tools and solutions they needed for a period of time, so we had to wait that out, but I'm very proud of the way the company responded because we took a longer-term view again and sort of reinvented the portfolio around relevant teams for our industry, such as 6G and connectivity, AI, which was not even a business in 2022. We've established a strong position there in defense technology, so we sort of retooled our portfolio to be more relevant to our customers in a downturn and took advantage of opportunities to also add to the portfolio via select M&A that we've done.
We emerged out of all of this phase of normalization in 2025 by growing the business, but also with momentum as we look ahead.
Got it. And that momentum to a certain degree is coming from AI demand in your wireline business. Can you maybe talk about how big that business is? I think you gave a little color on the call, where you're seeing the growth and what that growth looks like right now.
Yeah, the wireline ecosystem. I mean, you look at our commercial communications business, roughly 45% of the company's revenue today. I mean, it is the leading-edge business in that it works with the leading innovators across two industries. One is the wireless ecosystem, and the other is the wireline ecosystem, and what we consider a wireline ecosystem has customers that design silicon, the hyperscalers, there's the whole supply chain, and now increasingly the NeoCloud providers that are actually installing a lot of these AI clusters. So we have a business that when we first started, we were working with the market makers in the space, and so it was small, but the business rapidly expanded in 2023, followed on in 2024, also grew, and this year we finished at a record year in our wireline business, which now is a little under 50% of the commercial communications business.
Very profitable business. It largely is still very R&D and lab-oriented, so we think it's sustainable because of the rate of change in the AI cluster technologies that are happening, and that ecosystem is expanding for us. We see more forward-looking momentum, and about 50% of that business today is exposed to this AI effects that we reference, and we think it continues to grow as we look ahead.
Got it, and I think one of the things investors have tried to do is understand what specific aspects of the demand is maybe more or less relevant to you, whether it's on the switching side, the optical side. Is there any way that you can sort of help us think through the relative importance of the different technologies and vendors and products that maybe matter more to Keysight? Or is this part of your competitive moat, right, that you're touching everything?
I think the breadth is so important, right? You can't go to an AI cluster customer and say, "Well, I'll just do this one piece." So we may have competitors that can do one thing, but our ability to really look at the whole system and work through all the critical pieces of that system, all the way from compute to interconnects to memory to storage to servers, and then look at how these systems and networking and how these systems really interact with applications and help our customers solve those problems. I mean, that's at the heart of the value proposition is you have a company that's focused on system-level complex problem-solving with a set of tools and solutions that we offer to the space.
Got it. And specifically on the hyperscalers, on your wireless side, I think the service providers tend to be the smallest of the customers, maybe one of the most important because of just their importance in the ecosystem.
Strategically.
Yeah. Are you selling more direct to the hyperscalers directly on the wireline side than in your traditional wireless business? And is the customer makeup any different?
Yeah, we think in the wireline business, it's diversified. And the silicon folks that design silicon are obviously on the front end of it, and they tend to consume a lot of our tools. But the hyperscalers is also a pretty important customer base, much higher in concentration than our service providers on the wireless side. And for a couple of reasons. One is the hyperscalers all have in-house silicon programs. They are actually not just specifying. They're also operating their own data centers, and they have in-house engineering teams that make decisions on what goes inside these systems. And in many cases, they're driving the roadmap and the architecture for their data centers.
Got it. And then one of the things I wanted to ask is sort of specifically to, we've gotten a lot of questions. I think you use the phrase that one of the things that's driving the growth that we've seen, sort of double-digit growth here, is that you're trying to help deconstrain the supply issues for the hyperscalers and this AI build-out. And I think that is one thing that raises a concern that maybe there's a lot of spending right now inefficiently because it's such a quick-moving market and they're destroying so many assets or resources of the product to move forward. Is there anything one-time to this growth, or do you think looking at the visibility that you have that it's not a concern?
Yeah, we're not concerned at this point. I would just say there is a mixed change that we have reflected. It's a long-term, our wireline business, 80% R&D, 20% in the manufacturing. Right now, the business is growing on both R&D and manufacturing, and maybe manufacturing is growing slightly faster, and maybe so right now, the mix is 70/30 between the two. So there is a swing there, but the nature of the AI clusters is such that if you have a weakest link in the cluster, that's going to prevent you from taking billions of dollars of investment and realizing the productivity from an AI application perspective. So the test intensity there is higher as well, contributing to that growth. So it's not as much as excess capacity being put in place.
It's the extra levels of diligence and testing that our customers are performing so that the value-added cluster does deliver to the KPIs of their clients.
I see. Another question just in terms of the customer base. I think the AI evolution is going in a couple of different directions depending on how the hyperscalers are moving in terms of what chips they choose. And there are these ecosystems that seem to be developing. And one side is one group of companies on another side is another group of companies. Depending on which technologies win, which accelerator wins, which large language model wins, does that affect you in any way?
We're sort of agnostic. I think if you look at it in wireless, we were really agnostic to the underlying technologies. And it's the same on the wireline side as well. We're really agnostic. And part of the reason is we've intentionally designed our platforms to be more software-defined. So we can work with multiple standards revisions and enable our customers to try out and prototype multiple standards and see what works best for them. Because we recognize that the nature of innovation involves a fair amount of experimentation, and some with small-scale and some with larger-scale experimentation and learning. And so providing our customers that flexibility in our platforms is important. So we participate in over 30 standards bodies. We have PhDs that sit on these bodies.
They think about what our customers think about and bring back that IP and put it in our platforms so that we can enable our customers to be more productive.
Got it. Got it. And maybe just to sort of tie this all back to the financial model, I think orders were up 12% this year, this fourth quarter, first quarter revenue growth, I think it's 10% organically. What is your visibility toward? I mean, I know you only got up to one quarter, but sort of how should we think about the growth in the wireline business kind of going forward from here? Is it ramping? What color can you give us?
I think the demand signals continue to be strong. I mean, despite all the talk about AI bubble and all this stuff people are hearing, the fundamental drivers of innovation that we hear from our customers remain strong, and we look at it in terms of acceleration of multiple waves of technology. You just pick networking, right? I mean, in the past, we would have 400 gig, let's say, and people would go into R&D, and then that would go into production, and then that would sort of abate, and then 800 gig would start in R&D. I think what we're seeing now is pretty unprecedented that our customers are investing time, attention, energy, and money to basically parallel track these things, knowing that the design cycles are compressing.
And then you might say, "Why are they doing that?" Well, they're doing that because they recognize that whatever be the next vintage of the AI cluster, the economics of that cluster can be significantly improved if you have better performing networking, if you have better performing memory, if you have better performing versions of compute, because it's coming. And the models are getting better, and the consumption from consumers is growing with AI payloads growing. And so there is a sustainable level of demand as we see it, and our customers are continuing to invest time and attention. And we're also seeing the business grow from not just a few customers that it was when I described it as constrained to a broader set of customers, not only in the United States, but globally as well.
You're not seeing anything affecting your business like supply shortages on your end or lead times extending? It hasn't gotten that strong yet.
Nothing material. Nothing material. We're working with our supply chain to stay ahead.
Got it, and sort of shifting to the financial model, because I think coming from the initiation, one of the things I think that was underappreciated is you've had a number of tailwinds that reverse now in the next year and then really, in my opinion, pretty strongly in 2027, some drivers on the gross margin side because of the tariffs, so maybe can you walk us through sort of the known things that are impacting your margins in 2026, 2027 from the tariffs, the dilution from the acquisitions, and then the synergies, and how we should think about margins improving from here?
Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned tariffs, so we'll start with that. Obviously, tariffs implemented in April, increased in August. At this point, as we enter Q1, we believe we've got the April round of tariffs fully offset on a dollars basis, and we're in position to offset the August increase here by the end of this coming quarter. So we'll be more or less neutral going forward here at the end of the quarter. And so that should take that more or less off the table. I think we've committed, obviously, to growing at the high end of our long-term 5%-7% range, and we've committed also to delivering 10% EPS growth this year. And that includes the acquisitions. We just recently completed three acquisitions. We do expect them to be mildly dilutive to earnings here in fiscal 2026, but accretive to earnings in fiscal 2027.
So while we expect to deliver the 10% or better EPS growth this year, as you look forward to 2027 and you take those acquisitions from being mildly diluted to accretive from core business continues to improve, that should provide an incremental earnings boost or incremental leverage as we enter next fiscal year, right? So we're well positioned here for a couple of years, at least as far as we can see, of strong earnings growth.
Right. And can we dig a little into those synergies? I think you've said $100 million, I think, and that's on a cost base of about $250 million based on my math from the filings from Spirent or SG. I tend to think when I do my estimates and what I did for Keysight was in the 20%-25% range of OpEx as sort of realizable. What makes you so confident that you could do 40%? Is this consistent with what you've done in the past, or is there something unique to Spirent?
Yeah, I think in the case of Spirent, it's a portfolio, and it's a set of technologies that are relatively close to home for us. And so there's opportunities for us to pretty significantly leverage our go-to-market infrastructure. We have over 1,500 salespeople in our sales force, and we're inheriting a great sales force from Spirent. But there's no reason that the sales forces can't be trained up to sell the entire bag across those portfolios. The technologies are very similar. As you know, when we do acquisitions like this, we do a pretty complete integration. It tends to take us 12 to 18 months. We'll move to a single ERP, Keysight's single ERP instance. Once we do that, we can leverage our administrative costs. They can take on the incremental volume with relatively minimal incrementals.
And so we have great ability to drive synergies across the G&A infrastructure, the sales and marketing infrastructure as well. And so really good opportunities for us to improve the profitability of this business. And we're talking about taking this business, which is currently, as we inherited, operating well below Keysight levels of profitability, getting to the point where it's accretive to Keysight's current high 20% operating margins and doing that in a relatively short period of time.
Right.
It's also important, Andrew, just on the margin expansion point that you made, I want to assure everyone that the fundamentals of our value creation algorithm are intact. It starts with having a differentiated portfolio that's focused on more sustainable, complex challenges of our customers across our end markets and outperforming our markets, which tend to grow at 4%-6% on average, outperforming them by a point or two. That's sort of where the starting point is. And because of the differentiation, we're able to then capture the value in the gross margin expansion. And I feel really good about the pipeline of new products that we have coming out in the next 18 months. That's value in our control. Those were investments we started in 2022, 2023. So I feel good about the differentiation of them.
In many cases where we reference customer collaborations, give us an early proof point that indeed the value that we saw when we started those programs are indeed real because we're engaging with customers along the way. We feel good about that. As these products launch, we'll start to see more positive accretion to gross margin. We're not done. We've taken a business that was high-50s gross margin, and we're in the mid-60s. I don't see that as a flaw. I think there's more upside to gross margin. One of the reasons, as we talked about the acquisitions of about $375 million of revenue, the gross margin of that mix is north of the company average today. It's over 70%. I think we have more gross margin tailwind, and we'll continue to run the company with a 40% incremental in the way we invest.
We'll stay disciplined, which will lead to profit accretion and EPS expansion.
Right. If I flip the question about Spirent on its head, one of the things that's interesting to me about this acquisition is that this was a consolidation in the industry, right? That some of the other acquisitions are sort of newer markets or different solutions, but Spirent is a direct competitor. That led to an extensive regulatory review and a disposition of some of the businesses. But what's interesting to me is that we were a very successful competitor, but couldn't really break above 10% op margins. You guys also look at this business and can take a lot of expenses out. And I think what that tells me is that it's very difficult to compete in this industry because there's a fairly substantial R&D component that's required to be competitive. That's what those pieces tell me.
It's true because you have to stay. One of the things we learned is we have to stay on the cutting edge of technology. You think about AI. It becomes material as our customers come in and say, "We want solutions in 2023." You can't make the products that they need at that point. We started some early work on AI in 2019. We started our 6G program at the company in 2022. Often it takes that kind of investment. The scale that Keysight today has now with this expanded capabilities is a huge advantage for the firm.
Right. Does the regulatory scrutiny change how you think about M&A going forward? How are you going to use that lever to grow?
Yeah, I think we've been very select in our M&A strategy. We looked at over 300, 350 opportunities, and we've only done about 25 since the company, and in all cases, number one, we think about our customers first and say, "Does this make our customers' life easier?" In many cases like Spirent, the positioning technology was a piece of unique technology that was missing in our portfolio that we could apply to all our end markets. Our aerospace defense customers needed for spoofing and jamming applications. Our wireless customers are looking for better accuracy and the next generation connectivity, so across the portfolio, by adding these tools in, we can complete more of the solution for our customers. That's what we look at, and as we think about the future, we laid out some markets that were interesting to us. We'll continue to look at those markets.
Obviously, for the next six to nine months, we're pretty focused on making these acquisitions, integrating them, and realizing the value from those integrations.
Right. Maybe in the last five minutes, we should really touch on your wireless business. It's still your biggest. It's a little bit bigger than Wireline and Aerospace and Defense. They're all kind of getting pretty close, but that business has been slow since post-5G, right, in that 2022, 2023 timeframe when things slowed down. Would love to hear your thoughts on kind of the near and medium term. It does seem like it's picking up, maybe it's mostly easy comps. But then also, if you can kind of sort of parlay that into, what are your thoughts on wireless as a part of AI longer term? Seems like that would be kind of the home run, right? AI and Wireline, margin expansion with synergies, and then potentially the wireless business picking back up.
Yeah, the wireless industry. I have a background in this. I ran our wireless business before becoming the president of the group, but I just say this. It's a very dynamic industry, lots of technological change and innovation always happening. There are some lulls between cycles such as what we saw, but out of this comes innovative thinking, and right now, what's driving wireless has become much clearer. A series of micro inflections, I call them, leading to 6G. One around use of spectrum, second around connecting tightly satellite communications with terrestrial communications for better coverage and better experiences, and third, it's around use of AI to make networks more efficient from an energy perspective and utilize spectrum better. I think this is sort of the trifecta, that sort of three tracks that are forming in the wireless industry.
And there's going to be a series of micro inflections between now and when a 6G standard gets ratified. So nobody's waiting for the 6G to pop. People are starting and awaiting, and we're participating in all three. And we're building stronger positions every day. So I'm very excited by the opportunities in wireless as well.
Interesting. When do you think that what would be the drive? Is there a possible inflection related to AI in that business? Would it be the 6G spend? Or I guess what I was specifically thinking about is what if the model, as the models move closer and everything moves out to the edge, there might need to be the type of investments in wireless networks like there is now in the fiber networks and the scale across networks, etc.
I think that's sort of what we're hearing from customers, although we're not seeing a huge inflection. We did grow the business this year. We take it for that. We think we can grow it in 2026 as well from these levels. And should there be an inflection, we'll capture it. We're working with customers. But this AI thing is becoming more real as we speak.
Got it. And how about, sorry, I sort of skipped over your semiconductor business. Obviously, it's wafer fab, it's lithography, it's not the interfaces which are in your other parts of your business. But is that business benefiting from AI as well? And what are the trends in semis right now?
I think silicon photonics was a trend we would not have caught if we didn't have a small presence with semiconductor. We've had a wafer test position. And when clients asked us to engage with them in 2022, 2023, we got involved in silicon photonics. And now more fabs are getting seriously interested in deploying silicon photonics, and that business is growing because of that.
Got it. Actually, it reminds me of a question I wanted to ask you, Neil. When we're thinking about your gross margin trend through 2026, how are you positioned on the memory side? Is that something that has affected you with some of the price increases they're seeing there? Is that anything that's been an issue for you in the past?
No, I don't think so. I think as you look across our portfolio, we have differentiated positions in a lot of areas, semi being one of them, commercial communications, a highly differentiated position. I think if you look at Jason's business, the industrial business more broadly, it does tend to have more of a manufacturing bias to it, which can be a slightly lower gross margin, and maybe a little bit more of a distribution bias to it, which can be a little bit lower gross margin. So if you think about the differential within the portfolio of gross margins, we see a broader range within EISG because of those manufacturing and distribution components than we see in the commercial communications side of things where we have these cutting-edge technologies that are really driving in a more heavily focused R&D portfolio.
Got it. Got it. And maybe just one last question on the balance sheet. You issued some debt to do the acquisitions. Remind us what your leverage is. I don't think you have any need or priority to de-lever, but what are your priorities for yourself?
Yeah, I mean, we're below two times gross leverage. We're below one time net leverage. If there was a benefit that came from having to prolong the approval process for these acquisitions is that by the time they were completed, our balance sheet is very strong. Again, we're approaching $2 billion in cash, low leverage. And so we maintain great flexibility to either pursue further M&A once we're done with the integration of these transactions, or we just announced a new $1.5 billion share buyback authorization. So I think you'll continue to see a balanced approach to deploying capital from Keysight.
Sure. Well, this has been great. Thank you both.
Thank you.
Appreciate it.