Good morning, everyone. I'm George Gianarikas, one of Canaccord Genuity's sustainability analysts. Thank you for joining us on the second day of our forty-fourth annual Growth Conference. We're very happy to have with us today the team from Lantronix. With us are Saleel Awsare, CEO, and Jeremy Whitaker, CFO. They have a presentation, and we'll maybe leave a few minutes for Q&A. Please, go ahead.
Yeah. Hey, George, thank you for your time, and we've got a few slides. We'll walk you through it. So, my name is, as he said, Saleel Awsare, and he gets kudos for pronouncing my last name. It's not that easy, but anyway... So, you know, we are enabling edge intelligence, and what do we mean by that? We provide complete solutions that include hardware, software, device management, and services to enable edge intelligence, and we do that with our Compute and Connect technologies, allowing our customers to have scalable solutions, drive operational efficiency, and really providing real-time decision-making. And as I said earlier, we provide complete solutions because we understand the complexity that is required to do edge intelligence or edge compute, and that's why we kind of bring a host of technologies together to get into that final solution.
So enabling edge intelligence with compute and connect. Going further, we are now focusing on three extremely high-potential vertical markets, and the three vertical markets, and I'm gonna go into detail about each one of them, is Smart Cities, automotive infotainment and telematics, and enterprise. So if you think about Smart Cities, we have two areas that we focus on, the first one being smart utilities, and I will give you a clear example of our play in that space and how do we go about it. The other one is Critical Infrastructure. In the automotive infotainment space, we are really focused on the Digital Cockpit. What do I mean by that? As the new cars have mirror-to-mirror or pillar-to-pillar displays, they require a lot more compute and a lot more horsepower. We are able to provide that.
I'll give you a little bit more detail as I go into that specific vertical. We also do some telematics in that area, and I'll touch upon that also. And lastly, the enterprise vertical. This one is our focus is in two areas. One is data center out-of-band management, and I'll get into a little bit more detail specifically on that, and video conferencing. Why these three key verticals? I've kind of gone as a matter, I've just been at Lantronix about eight months. I just came there from Synaptics, so I've looked at all our products, looked at our technology, looked at where we are at, and we really do excel at these three things.
So these are three high-potential verticals that are growing 12% CAGR, and we anticipate and expect Lantronix to grow at, in the longer term, to grow at or better than that. So you see three verticals. If you'll think about it horizontally, what is the common theme? The common theme is compute modules that we provide, and we provide them for each of these verticals, and the other common theme is connect. Each of these verticals requires some form of connectivity, and we are unique that we are able to provide that. So enabling edge intelligence with compute and connect, focused on three very high-potential verticals, a market that's about $8.5 billion and growing, so we've got a lot of room to run in this space. So that's how I think about it.
So all the data set from where we got the data is at the bottom. So now I'll give you an example on each one of these, so you guys can kinda understand why I'm excited about it and why we believe this is a great growth vector for the company. Before I go into that, we are based in, you know, sunny California. Today, Boston's also nice and sunny, but a little humid, but we are much nicer in lovely Irvine. Our focus and our customers are mainly Western customers in U.S. and Europe. So we've spent a lot of effort becoming TAA compliant. We have our own small warehouse in Minnesota that allows us to do BABA-compliant products, and therefore, do last step of assembly.
So as this new geopolitical world is happening, us being more focused in U.S., North America, and Europe really has helped us. So that's how we are focused, and we've got about 350 people worldwide. Now, as I said, I'm gonna give you clear, specific examples of our success in each of the three verticals. Smart cities, I talked about the smart grid and critical infrastructure. I'm gonna go deep dive into the smart grid for you guys. What are we doing on the grid? We are enabling grid resiliency and flexibility with intelligence at the edge. As you know, in the last few years, the grid is now transitioning to being a smarter grid. Lantronix provides a box.
Our biggest customer, by the way, is Gridspertise, and, in our April call, we guided that that customer would be a 25% customer for the fiscal year. A substantial customer for Lantronix, approximately $40 million is what we had said, in our April call for fiscal year. Our fiscal year ended end of June. We haven't finished our reporting, so, you'll have to just wait a few more weeks, and we'll get you that information. But what is Gridspertise? Gridspertise is based in Italy. They are 50% owned by Enel. They just got spun off. Enel is the largest grid operator in Italy, a $40 billion company. They also own Endesa, which is the Spanish utility. So there's a theme that I'm gonna go down.
Gridspertise is owned 50% by Enel, 50% owned by CVC Capital Partners, which is a private equity out of Europe. They got spun out end of 2022 from Enel. Their main business has been smart meters. They're moving up the food chain. How are they moving up the food chain? Shipping a box called the Quantum Edge device. What is that? The way Gridspertise talks about it, it's a smartphone for the grid. It is a virtualizing the smart grid. It's a box, yeah, like a foot long and about 6-8 inches wide, and it really takes seven different functionalities that are now done in the grid discretely and put them in there. Things like remote management, compute, connect, other information on the power in the grid. So that's all virtualized and put into a single box.
We are the main supplier, we're the only supplier as of today, supplying to them, and they are now supplying it to Enel. We had said in our April call, in fiscal 2024, we will ship close to around 15,000 units to them, which is a big ramp-up and a big deployment that they have to continue to do. From what they have told us and the market size that Enel has told us through them, the opportunity size of these boxes, as they replace older boxes in Italy, is in the hundreds of thousands of units. So my hope and, you know, expectation working with them is this will be a 5+ year engagement with them as they kinda work through it.
But again, this really is a great opportunity for us, and now that Gridspertise is spun out, they're gonna go after other markets. So I consider them really a partner. I wanna partner with them not only on this one, but also partner with them if they do a roadmap around this. Just like smart meters, I expect this to go to a roadmap. It's gonna take some time. You know, the utility doesn't move at the speed of light by any means. But again, we've had great success. It's our largest customer. We projected it to be our largest customer as of June thirtieth. The great news is they've taken a lot of products, they gotta go deploy through it, but this is becoming what I would call a run rate business. What do I mean by a run rate business?
It's gonna be—they're gonna deploy, send us orders, we're gonna ship, they're gonna deploy that. And the great news is for the first half of our fiscal 2025, which is started July 1 through December 31 of this year, we already got an order, and we've given the number out, it's about $11 million. So we did about... We would have done, we guided that we would have done about $40 million, so we've got $11 million. As it kinda, they get a big ramp-up, then they're gonna go into a steady state business. So we've received the follow-on. So as to conclude, you know, this is, this is a great opportunity for Lantronix, great opportunity for us to grow in this market.
And as we partner with them, and they go into different geos and different areas, we have an opportunity to move forward with them. So that's, that's a good smart grid customer that's part of our smart cities vertical. And here we provide them not only the whole system, but we've got a compute module in there, we've got a connect module in there, we've got some different things, as I talked to you about compute and connect. Talking about automotive, right? Our lead customer is, most of you probably haven't heard of this, but it's the Turkish automotive EV. What I'm told is it's been 40 years in the making, not the EV, but a Turkish car. And it's supported by Erdoğan and everybody else, so...
I was just this morning in prep for the meeting, in the month of May, they shipped about 4,000 cars-5,000 cars, is what the data is, what I saw. So we've been in production, shipping with them for about a year now.
About a year, yeah.
About a year. And we continue to work with them as they move to additional vehicles and as they look at adding new features. So here, as I said to you, we do compute, but we do compute with a solution, which is providing software, services, and that really helps us here. So let's say they wanna go from Android 12 to Android 14, we are gonna be there with them, working on that. Let's say they want additional memory. We provide them a compute module, so it's got a ASIC from Qualcomm, it's got a memory, it's got some power management. We put it all together. So, so why the need for a lot of compute in automotive right now? As I said, the panels have become, you know, window, sorry, mirror to mirror.
And now, the infotainment system does not only hold audio and video, it does a lot of camera aggregation, as you, everybody's familiar with. It does driver HMI. It does a lot of other functionality. So this really requires a lot of compute power, and Qualcomm has shown they are very successful in the automotive market. Why is this interesting and important to us? Qualcomm is focused really mainly on the top-tier OEMs, you know, Mercedes, the BMW. There are a lot of Tier Two and Tier Three companies out there who really need a solution, and our objective is to focus with them to do that. And again, as you can see, we're gonna focus on mainly truck guys, we're gonna focus on farm equipment, we're gonna focus on folks who do motorcycles.
They all are getting larger displays, and as the displays get larger, they want more compute, and that's where we come. And we've actually created a little box called Automotive Infotainment Computer that we have, allowing us to kinda replicate this. So our goal here is we've got one, we are now gonna drive into a few more area in that. And, and for this, we pretty much are gonna support it out of our European team, where we have that. Because a lot of the customers for this tend to be out of Europe. So that's an example of our second vertical, where I talk about automotive infotainment. The third vertical is a business called... And I said there are two things here in enterprise we support.
We support video conferencing, primarily, again, because of our capability in audio and video and in compute, but I won't go into that one. I'm gonna go specifically in a business called out-of-band management. I bet you, most of you, and I wasn't very familiar with that until I showed up at Lantronix. I had a little bit of an idea, but this is really a great business within Lantronix. What is out-of-band management? Out-of-band management is enabling network resiliency, and this is not what you would think about as a fallback network. This is a monitoring network on the regular network that's in-band. So we are providing alternate pathways for servers, networks, and routers. And give you a great example where this is really important.
So this solution and products not only sit in the data center, they also sit at the edge. So let me give you an example. Let's say I have a Citibank branch office. They'll have a network running. If that network goes down, having an out-of-band network, checking to make sure what happened, do the diagnostics, and figure out how to bring it back up, and that's really what we provide. Really, very much in the news is the CrowdStrike outage that happened.
When the Windows device servers went down, if they had a product like the Lantronix Spider Duo, connected to some of these, not all of them, you don't need it for all of them, some of these Windows servers, when you saw that blue screen of death, you could have gone in, remotely looked at what had happened, reducing not only your downtime, but the need to have to go have somebody to physically maybe go there, look at it, and bring it up. So this is an area where I think it's very close and near as, as you think about the application, where just having the ability to do this remotely is great. Two other areas why I really like the business. One, we are probably in the top three to four in the industry, in this space, because it's not a big industry.
It's a $500 million+ business, totally, and we are in the top three to four. Secondly, the gross margins are much higher than the corporate average, which is always great. And thirdly, our end customers are mainly the CIOs at banks, at telcos, at Delta Air Lines. You pick it, you think about that. And what happens is the CIOs are putting a whole solution together. We have a portfolio of products that we are able to pull in because of this out-of-band. Things like media converters, IoT gateways, and a few other things. So we're able to pull in a few other things to provide a holistic solution. So overall, a great business for Lantronix, and it's growing very nicely, and I expect it to keep growing in the future, as you think about it.
So I gave you three specific examples in the verticals that we really like. I wanted to kinda show you fiscal 2023 to 2024. The dark blue are actuals, the lighter one is what we had guided, and this is the guidance we had provided in our April 29th call. Our quarter ended end of June. We will be having the call in the next few weeks. We haven't set a date yet. We'll go do that. But, you know, really tremendous amount of revenue growth, 22%. A quarter that we've guided to a midpoint of $0.49, and you can see the non-GAAP earnings leverage that we have created in the business. So 2023, we did about $0.23. For 2024, we've guided $0.40.
More importantly, you can see the first three quarters, compared to the same year last year, we've already exceeded the non-GAAP EPS. This is operational excellence, partnering with our CFO. We put in the company, where you're gonna continue to see operational excellence in the business as we think about it. So as we've done that moving forward, you can see a company in the macro that we're at, growing tremendous amounts. So, and a lot of the growth also came from our Gridspertise business, which is great, but, you know, it, it'll temper a little bit, but still, great vector for the company. So we've increased a lot and we've done some of this through acquisitions. My predecessor in the, you know, Jeremy was on the exec staff, and they did some great acquisitions.
And the philosophy here is, you wanna create scale through strategic, accretive acquisitions. These are focused in the verticals that we like and the products that we like. And you can see Uplogix, this was bought end of 2022. Again, creating scale in out-of-band, that's what the company did, allowing us to, again, this was more on the higher-end technology and product that Lantronix acquired. We had maybe the mid to low end, so we kind of combined it together. Transition Networks in Minnesota, which is mainly some of the switching and PoE and media converters, and I just told you with out-of-band, we're pulling in our media converters, so again, a better together strategy. Intrinsyc, based out of Vancouver, a great compute acquisition that's really now become a mainstay and a growth vector for this company.
Our compute platform is really based on Qualcomm's ASICs. We are a big platinum partner for Qualcomm, and we are one of the few Western partners for Qualcomm. So this has become more and more important for Qualcomm to have somebody in the United States who can even do last step assembly, if required, in the US, if you think about it. The other reason, you know, working with Qualcomm is good. Qualcomm comes to this focus from the phone side, so it's a lot of low-power devices, as opposed to the folks who are going in, into data centers and stuff, they're much more higher power.
So, that one, and then, wireless and cellular connectivity and some telematics that was bought, in, from a company in Germany called Maestro, and, that's one of the products we are selling into our critical infrastructure products, and I did not go into too much detail for today. But, so if I think about it, really increased scale, and we'll remain focused on that as I think about the future. A good leadership team, you know, a good mix of old and new. We brought in a new head of sales, Kurt joined me end of March. He and I worked together at Synaptics, where he was part of the IoT team, and prior to that, he ran worldwide sales for Silicon Labs, so really understands how to scale a business.
Jeremy's been with the company for maybe eight, 10 years.
Yep.
Lots of good history, what's going on. Mathi just came in as the Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer. He comes really having spent his whole career in IoT, and Telit is a company that went private maybe two or three years ago, but it's an IoT-focused company with modules and things like that, and, and since some of the rest of the team's been with us for a while. So really a great team that we can grow and, and, you know, like Eric and, folks from Microsemi, a company that had a great growth potential and then had a great exit. So we have a great team that knows how to grow and scale businesses. A quick recap of 2024. This is gonna—it's already dated, because 2025 is gonna come in a few weeks, but, we had record revenue of $41.
Remind you that we guided $0.49, so another big record for the company. Really driven by system solutions and our leading smart grid. Gross margin's around 40%, and really, some of the mix has changed because the smart grid business has become such a large portion of it. As it becomes a smaller portion, the margin profile will change. Non-GAAP net income of $0.11. We have guided, the June quarter to be around $0.15. Cash has increased. We are net cash positive. We've got a very good balance sheet, so that's really a good way to think about it, right? So I think this is my last slide. I think I'm okay on time, right?
Yep.
Really, as you think about us, just think about Compute and Connect with three high-potential verticals, providing full solutions, focusing on really large customer engagements, double-digit growth with increased scale, and an experienced leadership team. So to conclude, you know, I've been here about 7, 8 months. I'm really excited to be at Lantronix. The future looks really good as I think about the future and the products and the technologies that we have. Thank you.
Thank you. That was... I hit the mic.
Yes.
So let me just start off with a couple of questions.
Actually, yeah. Folks, you're sitting too close to the speaker. Maybe I move that?
Okay. Maybe I move here.
Yeah.
Can you describe your relationship with Qualcomm a little bit? I mean, you talked about it at length, but I'm curious, what is the symbiosis between the two companies? Why do they rely on you, and why do you rely on them, and which verticals exactly are you deploying Qualcomm, and maybe in which are you not?
Yeah, so great question, right? So the relationship with Qualcomm really started with Intrinsyc.
Hmm.
As they have now become a focus in automotive and IoT-
Hmm
... they've now combined that into a single division headed by a gentleman by the name of Nakul Duggal. They really need scaling partners in the Americas and Europe. Their main partners right now are a couple of guys out of China.
Right.
Not so good right now.
Yeah.
So they're now actually working with us on their next-gen products and want us to be first to market with some of the new SoMs that we do. So they'll make the ASIC, we'll make a system-on-module, we'll add memory, we'll add power management, we'll add other things, and then we'll provide all our software and services, enabling customers to go to market very fast.
They use you almost as a value-add partner. You add value-
We are a value-add partner-
Right
... and a scaling partner.
Right.
And it's also, you know, Qualcomm wants to figure out how to go after millions of units.
Right.
There's a huge world of hundreds of thousands. That's where we come into the picture, or tens of thousands.
This is important to us in our coverage of your last question. You have a relationship with Togg?
Yes.
And I would imagine that you're leveraging that relationship to discuss this, your solution with other OEMs as well?
Hundred percent.
Okay.
Stay tuned. We'll give you more of a perspective and a view as I think, you know, in the next few weeks. Because, as I said, maybe I just said it, we created a box called an Automotive Infotainment Computer. I wanna kinda cut and paste and replace that and take it... different app, different vendors who do this stuff, different OEMs.
Understood. It's a great place to stop.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you.
Appreciate it.