Welcome to MACOM's fourth fiscal quarter 2022 conference call. This call is being recorded today, Thursday, November 3rd, 2022. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. I will now turn the call over to Mr. Stephen Ferranti, MACOM's Vice President of Strategic Initiatives and Investor Relations. Mr. Ferranti, please go ahead.
Thank you, Lydia. Good morning and welcome to our call to discuss MACOM's financial results for the fourth fiscal quarter of 2022. I would like to remind everyone that our discussion today will contain forward-looking statements, which are subject to certain risks and uncertainties as defined in the safe harbor for forward-looking statements contained in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those discussed today. For more detailed discussion of the risks and uncertainties that could result in those differences, we refer you to MACOM's filings with the SEC. Management statements during this call will also include discussion of certain adjusted non-GAAP financial information. A reconciliation of GAAP to adjusted non-GAAP results are provided in the company's press release and related Form 8-K, which was filed with the SEC today.
With that, I'll turn over the call to Steve Daly, President and CEO of MACOM.
Thank you and good morning. I will begin today's call with a general company update. After that, Jack Kober, our Chief Financial Officer, will provide a more in-depth review of our fourth quarter and full year results for fiscal 2022. When Jack is finished, I will provide revenue and earnings guidance for the first fiscal quarter of 2023, and then we will be happy to take some questions. We finished our fiscal year with a solid financial performance. Revenue for Q4 was $178.1 million and adjusted EPS was $0.77 per diluted share. For the full fiscal year ending September 30th, 2022, revenue was $675 million, and adjusted EPS was $2.82 per diluted share. This represents 11% year-over-year revenue growth and over 30% year-over-year growth in adjusted earnings per share.
These results demonstrate the strength and leverage in our business model. Over the past four quarters, we have incrementally improved our gross margins and operating profits, resulting in improved cash flow. We finished the fiscal year with $587 million in cash and short-term investments on our balance sheet. FY 2022 was also a strong year for new product development, with our R&D teams launching nearly 150 new products, an increase of approximately 15% year-over-year. We believe many of these products will enable market share gains and support our near and long-term growth targets. There is a high level of excitement at MACOM because we have many new projects underway, a growing team of world-class IC designers, and unique manufacturing and packaging capabilities. We will continue to expand and build upon these competitive advantages in fiscal year 2023.
In Q4, our book-to-bill ratio was 1.0-to-1, and our turns business was approximately 10% of total revenue. For the full fiscal year, our book-to-bill was 1.1-to-1. Our backlog remains at near record levels entering fiscal 2023, providing us with a strong position to achieve our growth goals for the upcoming year. To provide some additional context, over the last three years, our backlog is up 2.5x, translating to a 36% CAGR. We believe our backlog growth over this time frame is reflective of the market strength as well as MACOM's market share gains due to new product adoption. However, to be clear, we do not believe our business will be immune from a global recession or market slowdown.
In fact, recently we have seen softness in order flow, and as a result, we are being cautious and believe our book-to-bill ratio could be at or below one this quarter. Despite this, we are optimistic about our prospects for fiscal year 2023 and beyond. More and more customers are viewing MACOM as a strategic supplier of high-performance analog, RF, microwave, and lightwave semiconductor solutions, and we believe this is directly attributable to our strengthening product portfolio. Additionally, we see a tremendous opportunity to better address our $5 billion-$6 billion serviceable addressable market, or SAM, by continuing to expand our product lines and portfolio. As a reminder, we maintain a diverse revenue base with little to no consumer exposure, which we believe is a strength and a business advantage for the company. Our diversification spans product lines, customers, and end markets.
In FY 2022, our top ten end customers represented 31% of our total revenue. We had no direct customers greater than 10% of revenue, and for the full year, no single product generated more than 2% of our total revenue. Turning to our end markets, fiscal Q4 revenue was generally as expected, with industrial and defense at $78.5 million, telecom at $62 million, and data center at $37.6 million. For the full fiscal year 2022, data center was flat, I&D was up 5%, and telecom was up 29%. Looking at the details for each end market, our industrial and defense end market performed well during Q4 and for the full fiscal year.
Our goal is to sell all of our technologies into the I&D markets as our business development and sales teams continue to find large opportunities to leverage our optical capabilities, RF subsystems and modules, GaN power transistors and MMICs, KV CAPS, and filter technologies across a wide variety of ground, airborne, and ship-based programs. As an example, one of our U.S. defense customers has recently been awarded a large multi-year contract to manufacture and deliver tactical radios to the U.S. government. In fiscal 2023, our Lowell fab will support this production program with our unique technologies and custom ICs. Defense customer requirements often push the limits of semiconductor performance because they're building systems at extreme frequencies, high data rates, and high RF or microwave transmit power levels. These challenging requirements align perfectly with MACOM's core competencies.
Our strategy is to further leverage these same technologies into the industrial markets to support test and measurement, medical, automation, commercial radars, and new automotive opportunities. Our telecom end market revenue was flat in Q4. During the quarter, softness in 5G was largely offset by strength in the broadband access segment. For the year, telecom had a very strong growth performance, growing 29% in FY 2022. The drive for higher data rates and faster connections across sub-segments like 5G wireless, metro long haul, PON, hybrid fiber coax, SATCOM, and microwave networks plays directly into MACOM's strengths. Our exceptional growth in telecom in FY 2022 was broad-based and driven by these strong end market dynamics, coupled with new product introductions and market share gains. Our data center end market revenue was up in Q4, but flat overall for FY 2022.
As a reminder, our data center product portfolio includes our high-performance analog, or HPA, drivers and transimpedance amplifiers, or TIAs, for NRZ and PAM4, coherent drivers and TIAs for ZR, crosspoint switch products, and legacy OTN mappers and framers, in addition to new product offerings, including our linear equalizers, direct drive solutions, and 25 G DFB and 50 G CW lasers. Today, we have a strong backlog in place for our crosspoint switch solutions and OTN products, noting that these orders were impacted by supply constraints for the majority of FY 2022. In many cases, we are the sole source supplier for these products. Over the course of FY 2023, we expect new products to be the primary drivers for data center growth. For example, our sales and marketing efforts for our new 25 G DFB lasers and 50 G CW lasers is just beginning.
Our linear equalizer products have started ramping during FY 2022 and will continue this year in support of high data rate applications, including backplane and active copper cable. We are also beginning to see the proliferation of coherent optics in the access market with low-cost tunable 100G solutions. All of these products represent incremental growth drivers of MACOM's business. As we have discussed in prior calls, today, we engage selectively within the data center market, focusing on areas where we can leverage MACOM's competitive advantage and technology portfolio, including high-performance analog ICs and optical semiconductors, such as lasers and photodetectors. We are a small but broad-based supplier into the data center market. We will continue to pursue this targeted engagement strategy, and increasingly, we will focus on finding attractive new opportunities outside the data center, leveraging these same design resources and technologies.
We had many engineering accomplishments in fiscal 2022, and I would like to recap a few of these today. We opened two new design centers located in Seoul, Korea, and Western Massachusetts and staffed them with industry-leading talent. Our 0.14 GaN on silicon carbide MMIC process is on schedule to be qualified and released to production at the beginning of next quarter. Our fab and device engineering teams have done remarkable work to meet schedule and to achieve these results, and we know our customers are waiting for the first wave of product introductions. Our HPA team launched MACOM's PURE DRIVE product line, comprising of linear drivers and transimpedance amplifiers that target single-mode and multi-mode 400G PAM4 architectures. This innovative chipset has been designed to support broad dynamic ranges, linear equalization, and low noise amplification to enable direct connection to switch and server ASICs.
Working together, these linear links can support leading-edge throughput, while at the same time enable specialized functionality for each component in the data path such that power, cost, and latency can be minimized. We believe this is disruptive technology as it can eliminate the need for a DSP in certain applications. Our diodes teams completed an important product qualification for a key automotive customer. We expect more design wins from this and other automotive customers in 2023 now that our Lowell fab is IATF 16949 certified. We continue to push the boundaries of compound semiconductor performance in high-power RF applications. We expanded our MACOM PURE CARBIDE power amplifier product portfolio to include a 7-kilowatt power amplifier, which we believe is the highest power part in the industry.
The 7 kW product is ideal for high power and high voltage aerospace and defense applications, including EMP, radar, and electronic warfare systems. This extremely high power level was achieved by combining novel high voltage circuit topologies with advanced packaging materials for improved thermal management. Our Lightwave team transitioned several customers from qualification status to production status on both photodetectors and 25G lasers. We have slow but steady market penetration. Notably, our Lightwave engineering teams first measured results on our 100G EML products looks compelling. Last, we expanded our RF subsystems and module design capabilities for I&D applications. Here, we will leverage our engineering expertise to provide customers with unique subsystem solutions based on MACOM's proprietary semiconductors.
As we focus on fiscal year 2023, our priorities include taking market share in gallium arsenide and GaN on silicon carbide MMICs, diversifying our high-performance analog IC business, maintaining our leadership position in coherent IC solutions for telecom and data center markets, continuing to gain content and market share in 10G XGS-PON and other broadband access solutions for North American and European fiber to the home markets and upgrade cycles, continuing to expand our RF and microwave module and subsystems capabilities and win more amplifier in microwave assembly business, executing on recently awarded radar development programs, strengthening our competitive advantage by introducing new products based on MACOM's proprietary semiconductor processes, working with federal, state, and local authorities on securing CHIPS Act funding to grow capabilities in our business.
Further optimizing the efficiency of our operations to improve profitability and cash flow, and continuing to develop our employees' careers so that they can grow with the company as well as enhance our entire organization with attracting industry-leading talent.
A central theme for fiscal year 2023 is to move quickly and capture market share. In summary, MACOM has a wide range of products in production today, spanning dozens of different product lines, servicing thousands of customers. Many of these products have long life cycles and produce revenues for years after they've been introduced. We view this diversity of technology, products, and end market applications as an inherent strength of the company, helping to provide a broad and stable revenue base. Jack will now provide a more detailed review of our financial results.
Thank you, Steve, and good morning, everyone. Before getting into the details of our quarterly results, I would like to summarize a few items associated with our fiscal year 2022 financials. First, our order backlog grew by more than 20% during fiscal 2022, and our full year 2022 revenue grew by more than 11% over the prior fiscal year. Second, we continue to expand our margins with our adjusted gross margin for the full fiscal year of 2022 at 62%, up 240 basis points from 59.6% in fiscal 2021. This is the first full fiscal year that our gross margin has exceeded 60% since MACOM went public in 2012. In addition, our adjusted operating margins for fiscal year 2022 were in excess of 31%.
Third, our fiscal year 2022 adjusted net income was $201 million compared to $152 million in fiscal year 2021. Fiscal year 2022 adjusted EPS was $2.82 compared to $2.15 in 2021, a more than 30% improvement. Finally, from an operational perspective, MACOM's team of outstanding employees continue to remain focused on improving the performance of the business and executing our strategy as we move into fiscal 2023. Now onto the quarterly results. Revenue for the fiscal quarter was $178.1 million, up 3.4% sequentially based on modest growth from our data center and I&D markets.
Our Q4 completed another year of double-digit growth for MACOM, with fiscal year 2022 revenue at $675 million, up from $607 million in fiscal 2021. On a geographic basis, revenue from U.S. domestic customers represented approximately 50% of our fiscal Q4 results and 47% for fiscal year 2022, up from 46% in both fiscal Q4 2021 and fiscal year 2021. Adjusted gross profit for fiscal Q4 was $111.5 million or 62.6% of revenue, up 40 basis points sequentially. Over the past fiscal year, we executed on many annual initiatives to improve yields, reduce cycle times, and optimize pricing, resulting in these improvements to our gross margin.
Going forward, we expect gross margin to continue to trend higher as we commence additional improvement initiatives and as new products contribute to our overall revenue mix. Total adjusted operating expense was $54.5 million, consisting of research and development expense of $35.3 million and selling, general, and administrative expenses of $19.2 million. The $1.4 million sequential increase in adjusted operating expense was primarily driven by the continued expansion of our R&D staff and higher employee-related costs. We plan to continue to invest in our R&D capabilities over the course of fiscal year 2023, which will modestly grow our OpEx over the course of the year. We believe the investments we are making in R&D resources and technology will help us to continue to deliver new technologies and leading-edge semiconductor solutions to our customers in the years ahead.
Adjusted operating income in fiscal Q4 was $56.9 million, up from $54.1 million in fiscal Q3. Adjusted operating margin increased 60 basis points sequentially, reaching 32% in fiscal Q4. Fiscal year 2022 adjusted operating income was $211 million, compared to $170.3 million for fiscal 2021, representing a 24% year-over-year increase, highlighting the operating leverage in our business. Depreciation expense for fiscal Q4 was $6.1 million and $23.8 million for fiscal year 2022. Adjusted EBITDA for fiscal Q4 was $63.1 million. Trailing 12 months adjusted EBITDA was approximately $235 million as compared to $194 million last year, representing a 21% year-over-year increase.
For fiscal Q4, we had adjusted net interest income of less than $100,000 compared to net interest expense of approximately $400,000 for fiscal Q3. Fiscal year 2022 adjusted net interest expense was $2.6 million, down from $11 million in 2021. The decrease in fiscal year 2022 net interest expense was driven primarily by the partial repayment and associated refinancing on our term loan in our prior fiscal year of 2021, as well as higher interest income from our increasing cash and short-term investment balances. Our adjusted income tax rate in fiscal Q4 was 3% and resulted in an expense of approximately $1.7 million. Our net cash tax payments were approximately $400,000 for the fourth quarter and $2.2 million for fiscal year 2022.
We expect our adjusted income tax rate to remain at 3% for fiscal year 2023. Next, I would like to discuss a $200 million non-cash tax benefit recorded on our GAAP financial statements during our fiscal fourth quarter. Historically, MACOM had recorded GAAP losses in our financial statements and had accumulated net operating loss and R&D tax credit carryforwards that could potentially be used to offset future income. Due to our history of recording GAAP income statement losses and the limited potential for us to utilize these historical loss carryforwards to offset the future income, the GAAP accounting rules historically did not permit us to reflect these loss carryforwards as an asset on our financials.
Primarily as a result of our improving GAAP profitability, we have updated our financials here in the fourth quarter of 2022 to now have substantially all of these tax benefits recorded on the face of our balance sheet as a deferred tax asset. This adjustment resulted in a Q4 non-cash tax benefit of approximately $200 million recorded on our GAAP income statement. This $200 million tax benefit was not included in our adjusted non-GAAP earnings for the quarter. As of September 30th, 2022, our net operating loss carryforwards are approximately $645 million, and our deferred tax asset balance is $237 million.
As I noted earlier, one of the primary considerations for this accounting adjustment was that more recently, we have consistently generated positive income on a GAAP basis and expect to continue to generate GAAP income going forward. For reference, our GAAP net income was $38 million in our prior fiscal year, 2021, and $444 million for our fiscal year ended September 2022, inclusive of the $200 million benefit from the tax adjustment I just noted, and a $118 million gain associated with the Q1 sale of an equity interest. For fiscal Q4, adjusted net income was $55.1 million compared to $52.1 million in fiscal Q3.
Adjusted earnings per fully diluted share was $0.77, utilizing a share count of 71.3 million shares, compared to $0.73 of adjusted earnings per share in fiscal Q3. Now, moving on to operational balance sheet and cash flow items. Our Q4 accounts receivable balance was $101.6 million, down slightly from $106.6 million in fiscal Q3, mostly due to improved linearity during the quarter. As a result, days sales outstanding were 52 days compared to 56 days in the prior quarter. Inventories were $115 million at quarter end, up sequentially from $110.2 million.
During fiscal year 2022, we have continued to make strategic investments in various inventory items, including manufacturing consumables, substrates, precious metals, as well as critical wafer stocks and finished goods to support our customer orders. Inventory turns were 2.3 x, down sequentially in Q3 from 2.4 x in the prior quarter. Fiscal Q4 cash flow from operations was approximately $60 million, up $19.6 million sequentially. This quarterly increase is primarily due to the timing of working capital payments. As a result, for our upcoming first fiscal quarter of 2023, we expect our cash flow from operations to moderate and be below this high Q4 level. Capital expenditures totaled $7.7 million in fiscal Q4. Fiscal 2022 CapEx of $26.5 million was up from $18 million in fiscal 2021, attributable to fab and R&D spending.
We expect our fiscal 2023 CapEx to be approximately $40 million as we continue to expand capacity and process capabilities at our domestic manufacturing locations and R&D facilities. Next, moving on to other balance sheet items. Cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments for the fourth fiscal quarter were $586.5 million, up $50.2 million sequentially, and up $242 million or 70% from the same quarter in the prior year. With our continued cash generation and the increase in trailing twelve-month EBITDA, our fourth quarter gross leverage is 2.6 x, down from 2.7x in Q3. Our net leverage remains below one, and our net debt is now less than $20 million. In summary, our business continues to perform well. The quality of our earnings continues to improve, and our cash flow remains healthy.
We are aware of the macroeconomic uncertainty currently impacting the semiconductor industry. However, we maintain a strong balance sheet with ample cash to help fund our strategic goals. We carefully manage our discretionary spending and expect to support healthy margins and remain cash flow positive over the course of these business cycles. I will now turn the conversation back over to Steve.
Thank you, Jack. MACOM expects revenue in fiscal Q1 ending December 30th, 2022 to be in the range of $167 million-$182 million, and adjusted gross margin is expected to be in the range of 61.5%-63.5%. Adjusted earnings per share is expected to be between $0.78 and $0.82 based on 71.4 million fully diluted shares. In fiscal Q1, we estimate flat or modest growth across the three end markets. As I've noted, we maintain a long-term perspective on executing our strategy. We are confident that we can continue to improve our financials and take market share in the months and years ahead. Our product portfolio is stronger than it was a year ago, and for this reason, we are confident that we can meet or exceed our targets.
Over the long term, we believe trends including the drive towards more bandwidth, faster data speeds, higher frequencies, and higher power levels will support MACOM's growth. These trends will require higher performance levels from semiconductor suppliers, which means better analog designs, specialized compound semiconductor materials and manufacturing processing, and innovative packaging solutions and strong system-level know-how. MACOM is unique in our potential to bring all of these requirements together to provide our customers with the highest power, highest frequency, and highest data rate analog semiconductor and subsystem solutions in the market. I would now like to ask the operator to take any questions.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star one one on your telephone keypad. One moment, please. Now, first question coming from the line of Harsh Kumar with Piper Sandler. Your line is open.
Yeah. Hey, guys. Hey, first of all, guys, solid execution. You know, we're seeing semiconductor companies just fall apart in this earnings season, so we appreciate a very steady Eddie printing guide. With that, Steve, you did say that you're seeing, you know, you're seeing some softness in orders. I wanted to understand, A, first of all, where are you seeing the softness in orders? Then, B, we are cognizant now, very, very aware that there's recessionary activity or soft economic activity. How do you perceive your long-term goal of, call it the low teens growth? Is that still even a valid mark for us to think about?
Thank you, Harsh, for the questions. The softness that we talked about on the script in terms of bookings are fairly broad-based. I wouldn't necessarily call out any one particular segment as being sort of weaker than the other. I'll highlight that our defense business is still holding in quite strong, as well as some of the new design wins in the automotive market are also supporting the overall bookings. I just have to highlight that this was, as Jack said, the eighth consecutive quarter where we had a book-to-bill of greater than one, which really allows us to set up ourselves for a strong fiscal 2023, which really leads to the second part of your question, which is our overall, you know, long-term growth and goals.
As you know, we don't give, you know, annual guidance. We generally give one quarter at a time. As I mentioned in my script, we feel like we're in a stronger position at the start of this year than we were last year, primarily due to the work we're doing to expand our SAM in the addressable markets, primarily driven by new product lines that we've been launching, many of which we've talked about during the course of the year. You know, at the beginning of fiscal 2021, we set a target of greater than 10% year-over-year growth. We delivered 14%. At the beginning of fiscal 2022, we also set the threshold at 10%, and we delivered 11%, so we were happy about that.
As we think about fiscal 2023, we're really taking the same philosophy forward that we wanna have at least 10% growth. However, you have to understand that, given the macroeconomic conditions, the geopolitical risks, certainly some of the softness we're seeing in Asia, specifically China, all of those items do provide, I would say, more uncertainty in terms of our targets, in terms of fiscal 2023. If you take a big step back and look at our long-term goals, which I think is more important, we still do believe we can achieve $1 billion of revenue in our fiscal 2025. The math is quite simple.
If you just take our guide for Q1 and annualize that and apply an average growth rate of low double-digit growth rates, you get to $1 billion quite quickly. We think we're doing all the right things. It starts by increasing the number of new products. I can tell you from 2019 to 2022, we have doubled the amount of products we're launching on an annual basis, and this will be the ultimate driver of our growth.
Okay. Thank you, Steve. Very helpful. I had a follow-up, and then I'll get off the podium. Are you seeing any ASP pressures at all in any of your markets? And then, you've got a kind of strong, very strong new product activity. Can you maybe highlight for us where you feel which areas of the three end markets with the new products you feel very optimistic about for growth? Thank you.
The semiconductor industry, as you know, is very competitive, and we're constantly seeing price pressures. That is something that I think that the team is quite capable of handling. We try to optimize the value of our solutions to customers. We are not a price leader in terms of you know, chasing business at lower prices. We try to differentiate ourselves. As you've seen over the last really two to three years, as we've introduced more and more products, our gross margins are going up. Yes, some of that's due to operational improvements in supply chain management and yield enhancement programs and whatnot, but it also speaks to the fact that the portfolio is getting stronger and more differentiated, which allows us to command you know, stronger pricing.
We expect those trends to continue, as Jack highlighted in his script. In terms of the new products and or the NPI products that you referred to and what markets or segments are we most excited about, you know, it's hard for me to sort of call out any one particular area, market or technology because we have so many different things going on. But I will say that we are really turning a corner with our 0.14 GaN on silicon carbide process, which we'll be introducing right after New Year's. That is a major event for our company, and we're very pleased about the performance of the process.
We know the market's there, and over the next 2-3 years, it'll be a lot of fun to go out into the market and take market share. I think the whole team is really excited about that.
Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question coming from the line of Vivek Arya with Bank of America. Your line is open.
Thanks for taking my question. Steve, I just wanted to go back to the comment you made about the potential and the opportunity to grow perhaps double digits this year. I was hoping you could give us some color by segment. Which segments do you think could help you grow faster or below that rate? Or you think all three segments can grow in line with that growth and opportunity?
I think it's very difficult for us to sort of communicate with, you know, fidelity where we think the year will end in terms of ultimately which markets will drive our growth. If we can achieve high single-digit and low double-digit growth across the mix of markets, I think we'll be able to achieve our goal. I don't wanna necessarily call out any one particular item or end market. Certainly, everybody knows that 5G is fairly soft right now. We know that defense is strong and getting stronger. Our telecom business is doing quite well, primarily driven by product introductions. As we mentioned during the course of the year, we expanded our SOI product line.
We're getting involved more and more in cable infrastructure and broadband access with a variety of control products, amplifiers, and filters. I mentioned also on the optical side, really interesting projects that we're working on, including EML lasers, which is very additive to our laser portfolio. Again, when we think about lasers, we think about establishing a portfolio of functions that addresses not only data center and telecom, but also sensors. We have a lot of interesting projects underway in and around lasing. We're excited about that for this coming year. A lot of interesting projects. I wouldn't necessarily highlight any one that will drive our growth. I guess I'll leave it at that.
All right. The reason I asked that question is, you know, there was a big disparity in the relative growth rates of the three different segments in fiscal 2022. The one I wanted to really get your perspective on is industrial and defense. The 5% growth. Obviously, you know, last year you grew 44, so compares are tougher. How do we put this 5% growth in the context of 15%-20% growth in industrial and defense sales that we saw across a number of your other analog and industrial peers? Like, you know, where I'm struggling is how to model growth in industrial and defense, what to correlate this to. Thank you.
Sure. I think it's important to put things in context that our industrial and defense business was range-bound for many years in the sort of $40 million-$50 million a quarter range. That was due to lack of investment, lack of focus, and really the strategy of the business. When we went through our update of our strategy back in 2019, we made a decision then to make industrial and defense a priority. Now fast-forwarding to Q4 was actually the record level of I&D revenue for the company at $78.5 million. That was a record quarter. Going into this Q1, we're also expecting you know, either flat or modest growth on that.
We're actually quite pleased about IND, and we think we have sort of broken out, and we're doing all the right things to continue to see reasonable growth. In terms of long term, we think we're gonna achieve $1 billion by continuing to have solid performance with our telecom business as well as our I&D business. I think I would leave it at that.
Thank you. One moment for our next question. Now next question coming from the line of Thomas O'Malley with Barclays. Your line is open.
Good morning, guys. Thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to go back to a prior comment you made, I think, to an earlier question about the well-known weakness in China. Is there any way you could contextualize the weakness that you're seeing, the company-specific weakness from two quarters ago until now? Then also, we recently saw the Entity List come out, and there was a large amount of Chinese optical companies that were actually on that list. Could you just give any color on, one, if you've taken a look at that list, and two, what you think the impact might be if some of those customers were unable to ship in the future?
Sure. Well, a few things about China. First of all, as everybody knows, China is a very important market for the semiconductor industry. I think in 2021, China imported $400 billion of semiconductor products. Today, MACOM's overall business, we ship about 25% of our business into China. If you go back and look at the last three-year trend, that's actually been trending down. In 2020, we were just below $200 million, and now that's trending towards about $175 million. So it's an important market for us. It's a diverse market for us. This past year, what MACOM did is we actually did a bit of restructuring and rebuilding and expansion of our team inside of China.
As we think about our growth going forward, we recognize that there's some very interesting markets in China, including electric vehicles and new energy markets that will require a wide range of semiconductors. Part of our go-forward strategy is to certainly try to address some of those large markets that we're not currently addressing today. The second thing I'll add in terms of just overall export control, we take that very seriously. Whenever there's updates to you know, denied parties or entity lists, of course, we are very active, and we would react immediately and address all of those changes.
There has been instances in the past where companies have gone on the entity list, and as a result, we do have to, you know, take an impact, and we see that our revenues dip down. Of course, Huawei back in 2019, we were trending to about $20 million a year, and now that's zero. I guess, Tom, what I would say is, as the regulations are updated, we follow the regulations. It's hard for us to sit here today and make comments about how any particular change would impact our business other than we adjust and follow the regulations.
Got it. Really helpful. Just to follow up on the I&D business. Historically, I think you guys have given the breakdown of 60% defense, 40% industrial. With the moving pieces, you would expect that defense would be a bit stronger as we go forward. Is the breakdown still 60/40, or have you seen the relative sizing of those two pieces change over the last couple quarters? Thank you.
I think that ratio is about correct. I think it's a reasonable ratio to use. I think over the long term with some of the big programs we're getting involved in with defense, I would expect defense might actually grow beyond that 60/40 ratio.
Thank you. One moment for next question. Now next question coming from the line of Tore Svanberg with Stifel. Your line is open.
Yes, thank you, and congratulations on the 62% gross margin for the full year. That's a good milestone. First question, maybe I didn't quite catch this, Steve, but when you were doing your prepared remarks, I think you said, you know, a SAM of $5 billion-$6 billion. I know in the past you've talked about $5 billion. So I was just wondering, you know, why you said $5 billion-$6 billion, and is that additional billion, is it coming, it's obviously coming from the three segments, but obviously auto is now also becoming a segment. So I'm just wondering if you're gonna start sort of separating that out, as its own SAM.
You are correct that we are working hard to expand our SAM. You know, SAM numbers can range depending on what you include in the SAM and what you don't. We generally try to be a little conservative on our ranging of SAMs. What I will say is the growth is coming from new product lines and new technologies. As you know, over the last few years, we've launched a whole number of new product lines. That same expansion is coming from GaN and silicon carbide. It's coming from some of the optical products, including the OTDR products we talked about on the last call, the EML lasers that we're looking to introduce next year. As well, you know, the list goes on.
The SAM expansion in that $6 billion is a real target number. Part of our strategic plan is to make sure that every year we're adding new functionality to our portfolio. You should expect that number to continue to grow.
Very good. As my follow-up, you know, for your data center business, you know, I think MACOM's been a bit contrarian, right? I mean, this year you didn't see any growth there while a lot of others did. It does sound at the margin that you have a lot of new products coming in next year, especially, you know, the DFB lasers, the FP lasers and so on and so forth. I'm just wondering, based on what you see today, even if that market were to be weak next year, you know, could you still grow the data center segment based on your new products?
We think yes, and we think that growth could actually achieve double-digit. Just to remind everybody, we had forecasted at the beginning of fiscal 2022 that there would be about a $15 million drop in legacy business within the data center market. If you were to add that back into our $138 million of revenue, you would have, you know, about 10% growth. When we think about this coming year, we think about ramping a lot of our 400G products. We actually, you know, if we look at some of the dynamics right now, we definitely see some of the NRZ platforms that we're involved in today being replaced with 400G platforms. Short reach, long reach is an area where we're very strong.
As you know, we launched our active copper cable products last year. Those will ramp in 2023, and that'll provide us some incremental growth. Generally, as the world starts to move to more and more to PAM4 at the higher data rates, this is where our product line really shines when you look at our drivers, our TIAs, and now even our lasers.
Thank you. One moment for our next question. Now next question coming from the line of Matt Ramsay with Cowen. Your line is open.
Thank you very much. Good morning, guys. Steve, I wanted to ask, I think we started the call with a question on just kind of some of the order patterns that you're seeing, and you guys have been above book-to-bill above one for a while now. You did mention maybe it would go below one in the coming quarter. I just wanted to maybe have a bit of a clarification on the length of the backlog currently, I don't know, in revenue relative to the run rate. Are you seeing actual pushouts or delays in orders within the backlog, or is it just sort of new orders book-to-bill is less than one? Thanks.
Thanks. We have a very high-quality backlog, and we're constantly you know, making sure that orders that we're placing are being placed within a reasonable amount of lead time. We don't typically put things on our backlog that extend beyond a year for some of our larger programs. I will say that you know, recently we have seen a little bit of everything. We've seen some cancellations on the margins. We've seen pushouts, we've seen pull-ins. But generally, it becomes very customer specific in terms of what they're doing. We've seen, for example, major customers that were in high volume production cancel programs in certain of our market segments. Yes, we are seeing a little bit of that.
At this stage, we think it's manageable, and even when we roll all of those numbers during the quarter, we still came out with a greater than one book or a one book-to-bill. We're happy about that. We're definitely seeing a pressure on the booking side. Maybe Jack can add to the comments in terms of trends and also channel inventory and whatnot.
Thanks, Steve. Yeah, Matt, we have a fairly rigorous process here when we look at our order inflow and our backlog over the course of each period.
It's time that we spend with our sales and operations team to make sure, you know, we've got our fingers on the pulse of what's happening from an overall order and backlog standpoint. We have been very fortunate over the past couple of years in terms of the book-to-bill across all three of the different end markets that we serve. It's been fairly well diversified in terms of the strength that we've been receiving from an orders point of view across those three different end markets. On top of that, in terms of when we look at our backlog, it's generally going out no more than one year.
You know, in terms of it being time-bound, I'd say substantially all of our existing backlog is under one year at this stage.
Thank you both for all the detail there. That's really helpful. Jack, I just wanted to, I guess Steve as well, back up and kind of. I mean, no semiconductor downturn is the same, I guess, but they all have similarities. I guess, Steve, right before you came in and took over as CEO, we were kind of going through the last one in 2019, and there was the headwind that you mentioned from Huawei as well that impacted the business back then. I'm just trying to kind of compare and contrast things. It looks like, I mean, you guys have added what? 13 points or so of gross margin since then. You're now.
You just finished the year at 31% op margin, and the op margin in 2019 was basically 0%. You just flipped sort of net cash positive. I just wonder if you can maybe compare and contrast the position that the company's in now versus the downturn that the company might have felt in the past. Any thoughts, new or different, on capital allocation now that the balance sheet's in a very, very different place than it was in the past? Really appreciate any big picture thoughts there. Thanks.
Interesting question. You're right, no two downturns are the same, I guess. I guess what we can talk about is why we feel like we're gonna do better than most going forward. I think that's an important part of your question. It really comes down to the diversity of our business. A split almost evenly between domestic and international, no greater than 10%. Customers are very few. We have 2% of revenue on any one particular product. In the last three years, we've introduced over 400 new products in a whole wide range of product lines. These are the best defenses we can have, as we think about, you know, dealing with recessions and potentially revenues that might go down in the future.
The last thing I'll add is that we run a very lean and mean, you know, organization. We, as Jack pointed out in his script, keep a very careful eye on discretionary spending and waste. Our operations, our sales, our finance, our planning and logistics teams, shipping teams, all do a phenomenal job working together to save the company money. That allows us to invest in the things we want to invest in. We think the best place for our cash right now is investing in the business. We will be allocating, as Jack highlighted, more on a year-over-year basis and, you know, more capital spend. A lot of that will be going into our fab here in Lowell, as well as Ann Arbor. We think we have a solid position.
Now if our customers start producing less products or canceling programs, of course, we'll have an impact, and we'll have to adjust our strategy and accommodate that. I think, you know, if I think about at the end of the day, where we stand today versus where we stood three years ago, as Jack highlighted in his script, even if we go into a downturn, MACOM will remain profitable and cash flow positive. That is a major difference from where we were three, almost four years ago.
Thank you. One moment please for our next question. Our next question coming from the line of Quinn Bolton with Needham, your line is open .
Hey, guys. Congratulations on the nice results and outlook. I guess, Steve, you've been through a number of cycles. And I guess I'm just kind of wondering, you've had eight quarters of better than 1 book-to-bill. You mentioned some, you know, some adjustments in backlog, and order softness, but I'm just kinda wondering, you know, eight quarters of positive book-to-bill would sort of suggest that you guys can continue to put up, you know, kinda flat to some sequential growth through next year. So my question is, you know, how long would this period of order weakness have to last before you think you might start to see quarterly revenue start to trend down? I mean, can you absorb a quarter or two of order weakness? Could you absorb more than a couple of quarters?
You know, how should we be thinking about, you know, what the impact on quarterly revenue might be if this period of weaker orders continues?
Yeah, probably one or two quarters is the short answer. I mean, when you're trending with book-to-bill below one for too long, it impacts your top line. I would say probably one to two quarters now. As Jack also talked about, we have a very, very strong backlog, and we're in a good position. It's probably in the range of one to two quarters.
Great. Thank you for that. Obviously a big, big focus on new products, and you mentioned about 150 new products in 2022. Do you have a target for 2023? Will it be about that same level? Do you expect to grow it potentially in fiscal 2023?
We do have targets. We have internal targets, and the expectation should be for more new products next year. We're not ready to sort of put that number out there. I can tell you that our entire organization, it revolves around new product introductions. For example, when you walk through this facility here in Lowell, Massachusetts, there's monitors in all the different conference rooms and cafeteria, and it basically has product launch schedules and releases and actual performance to quarterly goals. The entire organization is focused on moving products out the door. It's not just R&D that needs to support that. It's logistics, it's people building prototypes, it's technicians in the labs that need to test the products. Suffice to say that we have an expectation that there will be more, but we also keep an eye on quality.
We're not just launching products for the sake of, you know, increasing the number of products in our portfolio. These have to be better products than our competitors, and that's the standard we hold ourselves to. One interesting fact is about 20% of our revenue today comes from products that were launched less than three years ago. That speaks to the work that the team is doing to launch compelling products that are taking market share.
Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question coming from the line of Harlan Sur with JP Morgan. Your line is open.
Yeah, good morning. Thank you. Innovation and new products obviously has been a big driver for the team. Your standard product offerings are complemented, I believe, by some pretty key custom programs. How does the custom pipeline look heading into fiscal 2023? Can you just give us some examples of a few of the key programs? Maybe if you can just give us a rough sense of the mix of custom as a percentage of your total revenues.
Yes. We encourage all of our engineering organizations to enter into custom chip developments. We're doing that at the diode level, we're doing it at the MMIC level, we're doing it with our analog mixed signal devices across all the different areas. We highly value those engagements because now customers are willing to fund you to develop a solution that's specific to them, you know, to their programs. We don't particularly break out the amount of development dollars we're getting or we haven't really sized that type of our business, so we don't really wanna break that out here today. It is an important piece.
I can tell you that generally speaking, all of our different engineering organizations have probably anywhere between 1 and 5 custom developments going on. Some of those are customer funded, most of them are, but some of them are done for the right reasons because they're strategic accounts. Absolutely, in a short response, probably busier than ever in terms of custom development work.
Great. Thank you. In data center, we keep hearing more and more about active copper cable or active electrical cable, you know, for 400 gig, early 800 gig within rack, between rack connectivity, especially as the switching architecture, right, moves to 26 and at some point 52 Tb per second. Feels like the direct attach kinda just runs out of steam, right? You talked about this contributing to growth here in fiscal 2023. I know you guys are targeting it with your linear equalizers. Can you remind me, are you guys also supplying the CDR chip as well? And how many cable vendors have you guys qualified with? And roughly how big is this market opportunity?
I think there's a lot of hype around active copper cable and so we don't wanna put fuel on that fire. We look at the opportunity with our ACC or linear equalizers as just a product in our portfolio. There are customers that for short reach do not wanna use optics. They want to use you know basically keep the signal in an electrical form and run the higher data rates over copper. We have some really elegant linear equalizers that get the job done that work up to in some cases 10 m. These chips do not have CDRs. They're not re-timed.
These chips can support PAM4, 100 G per lane, and we're now developing 200 G per lane as well. We have a very unique position in the market. We can't necessarily disclose how many cable manufacturers we're dealing with. We do believe, given the strength we have with equalization and signal integrity, that we are fast becoming the go-to supplier for these type of solutions. Now, our solutions are not dumbed down DSPs or solutions that some of our competitors are having. These are low current, low latency, low cost chips that get the job done for short reach.
Thank you. Our next question coming from the line of CJ Muse with Evercore. Your line is open.
Yeah, good morning. Thank you for taking the question. I guess another question on your revenue outlook for fiscal 2023. You've clearly talked about aspirational goals of you know high single digits low double digits. At the same time you know highlighted that you're not immune to kind of the macro weakness that we're seeing. Is there a way to kind of parse your portfolio that is you know cyclical versus secular? If I kind of threw out a semiconductor revenue world of down 5%-10% in calendar 2023, what would you guys kind of do in that type of environment?
That, that's a very difficult question for us to answer. I'm not sure we could give you something that would be meaningful here. All I can sort of highlight is that we're launching more and more products. As a priority for the business, we believe taking market share is a great way to buck the trend, so to speak, and that's what we're working on. MACOM is not a bellwether of the semiconductor industry. We're quite small. If the semiconductor industry goes one way, up or down, wE won't necessarily go in the same direction just due to the nature of our portfolio, our customer base, and the things that we're working on as a priority. It's very difficult to answer that question with something meaningful.
We'd probably get it wrong.
No, that's helpful. Appreciate it. I guess maybe as my follow-up, regarding the CHIPS Act, and it sounds like, you know, there'll be greater clarity in the February kind of timeframe. I'm curious in terms of kind of your focus, CapEx or R&D related, and how you would see that over time, you know, helping your business.
We're very active with efforts to win CHIPS Act funding, and we've had multiple engagements with various government agencies over the last 4-5 months. In a nutshell, you can break down our ask, if you will, to really four different categories. One is overall modernization and capacity expansion of our wafer fabs as a priority. The second would be funding for advanced process development and working on next generation processes, whether it's higher power or higher frequency or whatnot. The third is an element where we want to develop package technologies that are currently being purchased offshore, and we would want to establish an onshore capability for some assembly and test.
Then the last element is really, workforce enhancement and winning funds to support stronger engagements with universities and bringing in, you know, more talent to the company. Those are the sort of the four pillars that we're focused on, which we believe aligns with the intent of the CHIPS Act. As you know, it's a little unclear right now, the timing and the methodology and the scale that will ultimately flow down. A lot of those things are being worked out. I think it's something that we'll continue to update everybody on in fiscal 2023, but we don't expect funding, let's say in the first half of 2023. We suspect it's beyond that timeline.
Thank you. Now next question coming from the line of Melissa Fairbanks with Raymond James. Your line is open.
Hi, guys. Thanks for squeezing me in at the last minute. I will trim my list accordingly. Maybe just following up on some of the CHIPS Act, I was just wondering how much of the investment is, how many of your customers are approaching you in terms of nearshoring or onshoring activities with some of your future CapEx investments? I know by definition, you know, a lot of your defense business already is there. You have a pretty robust supply chain domestically. Just wondering if you're sensing a shift in your customers' requirements for that supply chain.
Yeah. As you know, we're in multiple markets. I think some customers care deeply about the topic and others don't. It's hard for us to sort of break out and quantify that for you. To your point, yes, there's some U.S. defense customers that care deeply about supply chain and where things are being built and processed and whatnot. To the extent that we can support their concerns with CHIPS Act funding, we'll do that. As a general overlay, we look at this opportunity to accelerate things that we would want to do anyways.
That has, you know, the focus of expanding or investing in our business has to be a long-term strategy, because once the CHIPS Act money comes and rolls through, you still have to be profitable and grow and have a good business plan around whatever you just invested in. That's really what's driving our decision and thinking regarding the asks that we have around the CHIPS Act. By the way, the other caveat I'll put out there is there's no guarantee that we'll win a single dollar. You know, we believe we are a candidate, a strong candidate, but it's a process, and it certainly carries risk.
Got it. Thanks very much.
Thank you. Our last question coming from the line of Richard Shannon with Craig-Hallum. Your line is open.
Great. Thanks, guys, for taking my question. I'll just ask one here. Steve, you talked about having the GaN on silicon 0.14 micron ready here, I think introducing it early next year. Maybe you could talk about the early customer engagements or if it's even appropriate to talk about a pipeline here. What should we expect, if any, in revenues in fiscal 2023? Then how does this compare broadly with the ramp and opportunity with your silicon carbide products as well? Thanks.
Yes. Thank you. We have been careful not to promote the technology before it's fully qualified, and we're just getting to the point where we're successfully completing our HTOL or high temperature life testing, and all the data looks good, and things are falling well into play. Really we're just starting to release PDKs and design kits to strategic customers that wanna use our process as a foundry, as well as our design team really during the course of fiscal 2022 was running a whole wide range of designs just to gain the experience on the process. All of those things will come together at the beginning of calendar 2023. We do expect to have a reasonable launch where we'll have compelling products.
We'll be hitting all the major defense frequency bands as well as SATCOM bands, with, you know, high power devices. In terms of revenue expectations for 2023, I don't necessarily wanna break anything out. I think it'll be a slow ramp. You should expect modest and only incremental gains in revenue, but we need to enter the market win sockets and then ramp those programs with our customers. In terms of how we compare this opportunity to our lower frequency PURE CARBIDE, I think they're equally exciting. I mean, we are having tremendous success with our low frequency PURE CARBIDE products, which are generally targeting very high power and lower frequency.
Now with the 0.14 process, we'll be targeting higher power and higher frequency. Very different technologies, equally exciting.
Thank you. I'm showing no further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the call back over to Mr. Steve Daly for any closing remarks.
Thank you. In closing, I'd like to acknowledge the hard work and dedication of all of our employees that make these results possible. Thank you very much. Have a nice day.
Ladies and gentlemen, that does end our conference call for today. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect. Good day. Now disconnect.