Four different product groups that you target. I think that's broadband, connectivity, optical, and wireless. Just give us a general sense for the at a high level of what those different products are.
Sure, sure. Thanks, Eric, and thanks, everybody, for joining us. So, MaxLinear kind of four end markets, the broadband and connectivity, they're kind of closely related, and they run close to 50% of our revenue, kind of at various times. But the broadband piece is mostly SoCs that go into PON or cable applications. And then our connectivity business is really our Wi-Fi products, along with our Ethernet and, to some smaller degree, our MoCA products. And so anything that are connecting these gateway boxes, wireless or wireline, is that particular box. Kind of a higher growth profile, you know, with some of the things going on in Ethernet, some of the upgrades, as well as Wi-Fi. Infrastructure is an area that we've been investing in heavily.
The business grew close to 30% last year, and that's a business we really started out organically, probably 5 years ago right now, and it was approaching $200 million. I think we've got a lot of potential here. This covers our wireless infrastructure business, which is backhaul, backhaul products as well as access, so 5G access, our transceivers sell into that market, and that probably runs about half of the infrastructure business. We do sell some power management analog chips as well as our optical products. So our optical transceiver, our PAM4 DSP, is in the infrastructure, and it's a big part of our growth potential going forward for the infrastructure business.
The last one is the industrial multi-market. Industrial multi-market's been more of our, our... It's power management, interface products that are going into more, I'll just call it analog applications. It's a broad market, thousands of customers, sold globally and, just a broad-based, kind of a distribution business, and... But it's a probably a, kind of a GDP plus type grower t ypically, but a super diversified portfolio and nice, stable market.
How big is that industrial one?
It's probably closer to 15% of our revenues, typically.
Okay.
So.
Okay. All right. So you, one of your stated goals is to grow twice the rate of the market. One question is, how are you growing at twice the rate of the market? And two, what do you think of as the overall market rate that you're targeting?
Sure, sure. So obviously, that varies kind of year- to- year and somewhat of a relative basis. But maybe to key on the first part of your question and how do we do that? So a big part of our strategy is spending and growing content in a specific application. So I can kind of quote several areas where we've done this. We've taken, like, broadband gateways that, call it five years ago, we were doing about $15 worth of content with maybe 3-4 chips per gateway. So today, we're doing probably 7-8 chips in that gateway, and the content is upwards of, it can be north of $40 per gateway. And so we've kind of set out to just continue to grow that content in a particular application.
Did the same thing in our, in the backhaul space, where we always had a modem for a number of years, and we went off and developed a transceiver, doubling the ASP potential that we had in that particular application. So I could quote several other markets, but that's always kind of been the play. We also have nice complementary products, such as power, that sit alongside of a lot of these chips as well, where you may have, like, an SoC, but they all have power rails that you wanna address. Well, we have those as also, and so that adds another $2-$3 worth of content in any specific application.
Okay. All right.
Maybe the other part of your question is, like-
Yeah
... what, what markets do we pursue? I mean, so clearly, a few years ago, kind of diversifying beyond broadband, wanted to go after the infrastructure market to target some bigger, I'll call them, more stable markets that had the ability to really differentiate with core complex technology. And that's. We wanted to kind of leverage that mixed-signal analog capability that we had, some of the RF capability, and optical markets and wireless infrastructure are great places where you can really differentiate. You don't have a, you know, tough competitive landscape either. I mean, there's typically Marvell, Broadcom, are the type of competitors-
Mm-hmm
... that we would typically see in those applications.
Okay. All right. So your revenues declined in fiscal 2023. I think they're gonna decline here in fiscal 2024, or at least that's the projection. Just discuss what caused that, and then where are you in terms of your, your customer inventory levels?
Sure. So, like many semiconductor suppliers saw a very, you know, big ramp, 2020 through 2022. Lot of growth driven by all of our applications. Supply chain crisis kind of hit 2022. We continued to ramp and kind of peaked in Q4 of 2022. And I describe semiconductor cycles, kind of interesting. Now that the semiconductor industry is quite a bit bigger, you've kind of seen a correction happen across different end markets. I mean, the consumer guys, handsets, PCs, really started correcting in 2022, whereas we didn't see any slowdown in 2022. So we started to see it in 2023, and that's really where I'd say communications, telecom-
Yeah
... a lot of spaces you're familiar with, started to see that impact in 2023. But then even if I look at other spaces like industrial, automotive, now they're starting to see that now. So specific to, to MaxLinear, so we saw a decline in 2023, just kind of gradually work down, each quarter throughout the year. Knew there was inventory in the channels, our guidance for Q1 is gonna be down again as we continue to work through that inventory. Where we see the biggest inventory challenges is in broadband and connectivity. Things are getting, better. We thought we would've seen, you know, more progress on the inventory, frankly. So what, what's different? Why was the guidance what it was? It was really driven. The inventories haven't changed.
Really, the demand, I think, at the end of the day, has changed a little bit more than what was originally anticipated. The sell-through hasn't been as good on some of those applications. So in some of our customers that are dependent on, or not dependent, but at least waiting on some of these government subsidies around the Inflation Reduction Act, for example-
Mm-hmm.
This BEAD money, for example, some of that has kinda shifted to the right a little bit, and it seems like those CapEx spends have also shifted.
Hmm.
I think that's slowed a little bit. I think that's had some dynamics about, you know, how fast we're recovering. We've said that, you know, probably first half of this year, we continue to kinda be challenged by some of the inventory out there. I do think that, you know, with the visibility that we have, we're seeing improvements. Certainly, we're seeing bookings pick up. We're seeing just general forecast are improving for the rest of the year, and backlogs improving, et cetera.
There are some encouraging signs. I mean, I think the other thing is we're starting to see some of our newer programs ramp as well. We've got, you know, some of our... the Wi-Fi product that I mentioned, some of our PON products in the fiber space are improving, our Ethernet products. Optical DSPs is a big, big, exciting driver with AI, kind of really pushing the launch of 800 gig right now. So there's some, you know, real secular drivers that I think will drive us out of this, kind of regardless of the inventory to some degree.
When do you anticipate inventory would normalize? Would it be by the end of 2024?
So I think, maybe I'll break it down by end market. We don't have a lot of inventory in the channel on the infrastructure side.
Yeah.
I mean, little to none. Just that, that wasn't an area that was built up, and so that's. I wouldn't say that that's.
Okay
... a problem at this point. So broadband connectivity, you know, I think, first half of the year, there's still gonna be excess inventory. I mean, we're still shipping below in demand. I think Q3, it... I mean, some of it may spill over into Q3, but I definitely think we'll see progress throughout the year on our revenues.
Okay. All right. Just a reminder, please do feel free to ask questions. You've projected operating margins. What are you doing to drive operating margins higher? I think you set the goal for 35. I wanna say that you were at 15 in 2023, so what's driving that?
Sure. So yeah, so operating margin, so I think if you look at these type of businesses, they'll typically run north of 30% operating margins. 2022, we were certainly above 30% operating margin, so now we've seen this inventory correction that's, that we're going through. So we'll work through that. We'll start to see the revenue recover. But we've also taken a hard look at our own OpEx and did some cuts back in October. So we've been, we were running $83 million-$84 million a quarter in OpEx, call it a year ago, and now we would expect this year to exit the year closer to $70 million.
Hmm.
So we are driving down that OpEx. We're in a great business from the standpoint that product life cycles are a little longer. We're not on this kinda, you know, hamster wheel to some degree, of having to bring out new products every six months. We've got a little bit of longer time. There's some real differentiation, real complex products, and so that enables us to, I guess, spend a little wiser. And, so, so we've had some spends that have been ongoing, so we're able to dial back that spend without sacrifice any of the growth potential going forward.
Okay. All right, let's dive into some of the individual product groups. In the broadband gateways, and I believe that's largely the cable set-top and the fiber set-top boxes.
Right.
What are the underlying demand drivers? I mean, you have. It's a mature, mature market.
Sure.
What is driving-
Yeah
... driving your growth?
So on the broadband side, I mean, agree completely. We've seen broadband kinda roll out over the years. It's always been kind of a, what I think of, kind of a low double-digit, maybe 3%-5% a year grower, unit growth across all these markets, right? From time to time, there's upgrades that happen in the market. So most recently, fiber to the home has seen a big uptick. You've seen telcos really spend quite a bit to be aggressive, get more homes passed, and really grow that content per home. So that's something we've seen lately. Now, for us, I mean, like, we don't really care who wins this race.
Mm-hmm.
I mean, there's fixed wireless access, there's cable, there's fiber. From our standpoint, we're kind of that arms dealer, and as long as they're all upgrading, that competition actually works out well for us. And that's what we see right now. We see fiber guys, you know, putting out more fiber, going to, you know, whatever, 1 gig, 2 gig, 25. I mean, you know, they got infrastructure out there for 25 and 50 gig now.
Yeah.
So that's exciting. Well, what does that drive? That means that the cable guys have to upgrade, and that's why you've heard a lot about like DOCSIS 4.0. So that upgrade cycle is just beginning. They just started upgrading the infrastructure recently, and then that'll roll out to the CPE side soon, and so we should benefit from that. So again, as that competition keeps going, then we will-
Yeah
... benefit.
Okay.
I might want one other comment on what's driving that. The pipe to the home is something that's important, but I would also highlight that there's a lot of stuff going on inside the home, the distribution itself. So Wi-Fi, I mean, we all live with Wi-Fi now, but Wi-Fi is driving a lot of growth, and there's a lot of distribution that happens within the home. You're seeing these mesh networks happen inside the home. All these companies are wanting to monetize more of what's going on. I mean, you've heard, like, AT&T and Verizon talking about 25, 30, 35 devices within the home communicating all at the same time. So that ends up being a real challenge.
I mean, one, it's an opportunity to grow more content there, but you also see more opportunities to grow applications within the home, and that's how you monetize more things like... So there's a lot of Wi-Fi sensing can now sense. There's a number of applications that have kind of emerged, such as security applications. So now you don't need a Ring at your doorbell. You can do all of this through a wireless access point. So it can detect. It can differentiate between you and I. They don't. You don't. They actually don't have to see our devices.
Hmm.
They can actually penetrate you and know-
Wow
... you know, this is Eric, this is Steve. They'll know that, and they'll know you're... I mean, this even gets into AI. There's a lot of really unique things that are going on for these guys to monetize more. The health applications is something also, you know, those-- you'll see a lot of more subscription services come to be, and that's what the telcos are chasing, right? That's the money that they're chasing.
Okay. I think you've talked about a $300 million pipeline in the gateways. Is that correct? Can you talk a little bit about, I think those are new design wins. Can you talk a little bit about-
So I think the-
What that is?
I'd say the biggest thing that we've kind of been talking about within the broadband market is PON or the fiber-
Yeah
... to the home, right? So the fiber to the home market is about 2x as big as the cable market. Historically, MaxLinear had really penetrated the cable markets more so than the PON markets. PON, you know, it's a $2+ billion market, and in North America and Europe, it's really dominated mostly by Broadcom. In Asia, you have a couple of other players like a Huawei or a MediaTek that have ASICs that address that market today. We historically just had not really addressed the market, and so about 3 years ago, put a concerted effort into it. It's similar technology, so we've been able to go after and leverage existing customer relationships to penetrate this market. Two years ago, it was less than $10 million. It grew to kind of $30-ish million-
Mm
... and then was expected last year to double, but with the inventory overhang that was out there, grew to $50-ish million.
Yeah.
It was almost a 50% increase. It was a nice increase, not as big as it was, but that is the multi kind of $100 million opportunity that's out there for us to go off and pursue. This can be much, much bigger than, say, our existing broadband market, but it's gonna take some time.
Yeah.
But it's a new market, and it has new application, and it continues to grow. The subsidies, of course, that you've seen kind of globally will help that, but we're definitely seeing some opportunities.
Okay. Do we have any questions? Here we go.
Thank you so much for speaking. My question is: how do you see Asia or more specifically, Southeast Asia, infrastructure investments drive your revenue growth? Because 70% of your sales come from Asia, and I guess to focus deeper into that, how do you see the India growth also fit into your picture?
Yeah. So you're right on the percentage of revenue that's going into Asia. It is a large percentage. Now, have to keep in mind that a large chunk of that makes its way back into North America and Europe. So it's manufactured there in a box and then shipped back into North America and Europe. We naturally do have applications. I mean, we're selling Wi-Fi, for example, but a lot of our industrial multi-market, so China, for example, is a big consumer of our high-performance analog, power management chips, interface chips. And so that's, you know, continued to grow. I think we've made nice progress there. We participate in, I mean, all countries throughout Southeast Asia, including India. I'd say wireless infrastructure is probably the one area that, to highlight on the wireless infrastructure side.
We do a lot of backhaul chips, backhaul. So backhaul is microwave backhaul links that are in between two base stations, so this is microwave or even millimeter waves. So they'll, in a greenfield application in India, specifically, between these base stations, rather than roll in fiber, they will do a microwave link instead, and so that's one particular area that we've benefited from. But we also do other, you know, 5G access applications there also.
Thank you.
Sure.
Further questions? Yeah.
Yeah, the potential penalty you guys will have to pay in this aborted merger, what is the range? Can the court double or triple that, or how does that stand? And how much cash do you have to be able to pay for that?
Sure. Hey, John. So maybe I'll-
Yeah
... calibrate everyone. So we did an acquisition, announced an acquisition a year and a half ago that was terminated in July of this year with a company called Silicon Motion. That, based on the merger agreement, that's now in arbitration. It's in arbitration in Singapore. Expected to take 12-18 months. It's a confidential process that takes place in Singapore. With regard to the potential— So it was terminated based on a MAC, which means that we would not— our position is that we don't owe any money. Silicon Motion put out a press release that identified that they're owed the break fee, including some legal expenses and potentially damages. So that, of course, gets taken care of in arbitration.
I'd say that without going into any detail or any confidential information, naturally, I think most investors have kind of framed that around. It's somewhere around the break fee is what their expectations are. Could it be higher than that? The answer is yes. Could it be lower than that? Yes. Is our position zero? Yes. So that's kinda. But I think most folks have kind of bucketed it around that $160 million, the break fee is $160 million, so they've kind of bucketed it around that level. With our balance sheet, you know, we've got $180+ million of cash, and we do have a credit line that's $100 million, so comfortable, you know, with those ranges.
Thank you.
Sure. Mm-hmm.
Steve, you talked about infrastructure growing, and you said it was year-over-year last year. But going forward, we talked about backhaul. What else is driving infrastructure? Is it that the main driver, or is it PAM4, or what is that?
Sure. So we have talked about... I mean, infrastructure in our mind, it was approaching $200 million. You're right, I mean, we've talked about it being $500+ million. Many of you heard our CEO, Kishore, talk about, you know, that potential. Where is that coming from? Wireless infrastructure, you know, to date, it's always kind of ebbed and flowed a little bit, somewhere around 50% of that overall number. So that is something that we will continue to grow. We continue to introduce more products. We were at MWC last week, announced a new product there that continues to grow that content, so that's certainly a part of it. I think most recently, we've talked a lot more about our optical products. That's one of the things that our PAM4 DSP is a big driver.
Expectations this year are somewhere in the $10 million-$30 million range. Now, 800 gig is really not happening, I would say it's not happening in earnest until the second half of this year. There's a couple of hyperscalers that are starting to ramp now. But from a MaxLinear standpoint, it'll start to move into production the second half of this year, much bigger contributor in 2025. And, and this is one, maybe calibrate a little bit on the market size, the market size itself, $800 million-$900 million this year with just DSP products, whether it be 200, 400, or 800 gig, and that's expected to go to probably $1.6 billion-$1.8 billion in the next three years. So a very sizable increase.
We feel like we can go off and take 20%-30% of that market. We're engaged with all these customers today, and when I say these customers, I'm speaking primarily of hyperscalers, such as, you know, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Google, Nvidia. I put those in the same category as they're building systems as well. So all of those customers we're engaged with, they all rely on module vendors, which we're also working with in order to sell products into those data centers. There's another tier of guys, whether it be enterprise or, you know, kind of tier two data center guys, that we're also, you know, working with naturally, enterprise storage guys, guys like that, that are building out their own infrastructures that we can benefit from. So it's a very large market, hundreds of millions of dollars.
We have a 5nm chip that kinda it's been out for about a year or so, kind of ahead of the competition. So power levels, we really differentiate on power, and, and that's why we're winning. Naturally, it doesn't end here. You've got 800 going to 1.6, 1.6 T. Two weeks from now, we've got OFC, so, you know, you would expect to hear lots more about 1.6 and a lot more about the optical space in general. And I think for us, I mean, we, we moved into this space probably four and a half years ago now, and this is our second generation product. We've had, you know, a lot of experience getting, understanding the landscape at this point. Our first generation, we didn't see that at, that mass adoption. We didn't have that teaching customer.
But then, since then we have, and we've really upped our game with regard to the technology itself, but probably more importantly, the building those relationships, understanding the applications, the firmware, because the hardware, I feel like we have been exceptional with, and we've been, you know, leading edge on the hardware side. Now, we've got the firmware really dialed in, and I think we've got tremendous potential at exactly the right time when AI is really a big driving catalyst to push more of these standards out.
Do you have any advantages over Broadcom and these things that everyone hates Broadcom, how can you get in?
It's a great question, John. So in this particular application, I mean, we enjoy, you know, everyone likes saying things about Broadcom, but Marvell is kind of the dominant player in the PAM4 DSP space, and our differentiation is on power. I mean, today, we got there, you know, a year ahead of the competition with a lower power product. And so that is why we're winning, that's why we're at the table, and that's why customers are choosing us.
Additional? Yep.
You're saying a lot about the last mile, fiber to the home, and cable, and copper, and all that. Recently, we've seen all three of the major U.S. carriers release products that are cellular to the home, that are hotspot-based.
Right.
Does that change the competitive dynamic, and how are you guys addressing that? Is it a trend?
So, you're absolutely right, and I put that in the same category. I mean, fixed wireless access, cable, fiber, doesn't really matter to us. Wireless, wireline, we can take advantage of that, and we can take advantage of it in a number of ways. We still sell that gateway. So in a fixed wireless access gateway in the home, you know, we get similar levels of content. In the fixed wireless access, we can also go after small cell opportunities as well. So that cellular or the device that's, you know, communicating with that gateway into the home, we can participate in as well. So it doesn't really matter to us, and I... That, while it's been smaller to date for the industry, it is a growing piece, and I think it'll continue to be a part of our growth.
All right, we're gonna have to wrap it up. We just went over.
Okay.
Steve, I want to thank you very much.
Great.
That was great help.
Great. Thank you, everyone.
Thank you all for joining us.
Appreciate it. All right. Thank you.