Good afternoon, everybody. Why don't we get started with the next presentation? We're really happy to have Steve Litchfield, who's the CFO of MaxLinear, here with us. Steve, thank you for coming. Welcome to Las Vegas. As I've started with most of the companies, why don't we just talk about the demand environment. For the last year and a half in semiconductor land, it's been mainly about people talking about insufficient supply.
Sure.
Now, all of a sudden, demand has crept up to be a concern for folks in certain industries, certain verticals, more consumer stuff than what you guys do. Generally speaking, how are you seeing the demand environment right now?
Sure. Well, first, thanks for having us, Ross. Demand environment. I guess it is kind of an interesting time, I think, in the market because I think we, as well as plenty of others, are still having shortages, and it's still tough. I mean, there's pockets of areas, substrates, I mean, even wafers. I mean, there's various things that we are short of product. Trying to navigate that, and at the same time, as we look at the demand environment, you know, I mean, everything's holding up. Backlog visibility is good.
That being said, as we look into next year, I mean, we have had customers, you know, everyone's talking about, well, what is coming next year, and a little unclear, and we've had some customers, you know, look, talk about moving around scheduled shipments and things like that. That, you know, raises some concerns, so as we look out into next year. You know, certain parts of the business, definitely less exposed. I mean, we're very excited about some of the things, like in Wi-Fi and fiber. I'm sure you'll have more questions on those. Those are areas that new businesses, new products, I mean, our wireless infrastructure business, you know, executing extremely well. We're still trying to get more product in order to support some of the growth businesses there.
Gotcha. In the supply side, is that improving at this point, generally speaking, slowly but surely?
Yeah. Supply side is definitely improving. I mean, albeit there's some pockets here and there. It depends on nodes. It depends on, you know, substrate, like a ABF substrates continue to be, you know, somewhat of a headwind. Things are definitely improving, and I think it'll continue to improve.
Gotcha. Well, if demand, yeah. Not that your demand's gonna fall, but if demand in general slows down a little bit.
We're-
That'll solve the problem.
Yeah. I mean, we've been seeing some improvements, but I mean, I do, yeah, I think we definitely see more from here.
Gotcha. Why don't we're gonna talk a lot about your core business, but why don't we knock out the Silicon Motion topic.
Okay
First and foremost. Talk about the overall overriding strategic logic of the business.
Sure.
People look at it as a good company, but a very different company than what you currently do. I think there's a little more overlap than people might-
Sure
Be appreciative of it initially. Talk about the strategic logic of it before we get into the financials.
Sure. Yeah. I mean, there's 2 or 3 kinda key items here. I mean, clearly, scale is a big aspect of the acquisition. I mean, we've seen more and more consolidation, and the bigger you are, the more breadth of product offering technologies that you have, the better. So that makes a big difference. It helps us wafer supply, I mean, in specifically on the Silicon Motion side. I mean, these guys do, you know, 2, 3 times more wafer volume than we do. That's definitely gonna help out as far as pricing negotiations and the like, so that's a positive. At the same time, I mean, we get to leverage a lot bigger R&D investment across a much bigger company, right?
A lot of the R&D development, IP development that we're doing now can be leveraged across, you know, a much larger company. A lot of the same IPs we're developing is, that they're developing, so we intend to take advantage of that, right? That's, you know, just another aspect of scale that we'll benefit from. You know, at the end of the day, the scale piece is a big part of it. Naturally, I mean, the storage business, a big market with a big growth potential. I mean, double-digit growth over the next several years. We're excited about that. We see that as a potential. We play in this market.
I mean, a lot of folks aren't aware, we sell into the enterprise storage market today and are familiar, have a compression technology, won a big award at, FMS recently. We're excited about that market and have kinda tracked it for some time and thought it would be very complementary. Naturally, getting into storage is exciting, but specifically in enterprise and data center storage is something. You know, 70% of data centers are storage buys, right? At the end of the day, our ability to sell controllers into that space, we think is very compelling for company shareholders and the like. That's another big reason for the transaction. I guess, and lastly, financially, a very good transaction. Excited, I mean, you know, it's a large transaction for us.
It does get us up to $2 billion, gross margins. We think we can continue to make some nice improvements on their gross margins, to take it from there. There, we've identified $100 million worth of synergy.
Sorry for the background noise, folks. We're gonna take care of that here in a second.
We've got $30 million from COGS that'll come from wafer and back-end assembly tests. I mean, some improvements on the COGS front, and then $70 million from the OpEx side that we expect to realize.
Since you guys announced this deal, the consumer side has been weaker and weaker. I know you don't own Silicon Motion right now, but how are you feeling about the deal given what the expectations were when you bought it?
Sure.
When you announced the deal, you haven't purchased it yet, versus now, considering the markets that they're addressing have tended to be weakening since that time.
Yeah. I mean, I don't think we've seen anything that we didn't expect. I mean, there was, you know, early signs. I mean, even Silicon Motion had talked about this back in January, February timeframe at their earnings call. They had seen PC weakness at that time, so that wasn't new. Clearly, during diligence, we saw this. We continue to watch, you know, the market. I mean, these guys are. I mean, you know, handsets, PCs are exposed. I think that being said, I mean, they've navigated, you know, these cycles in the past and have done extremely well in taking market share and continue to execute, and I think that will continue to be the case.
We were good for a second there when the door. There we go. They're making drinks back there or something with a blender. Sorry for those of you on the webcast. Trust me, it's funnier if you're here. You talked about, I think, a 25% accretion from a financial perspective.
Right.
When we looked at it, if we put the two companies together and talked a little bit about the accretion and just even keeping a conservative view on Silicon Motion's revenues, it seemed like the accretion could be a bit more than that. Was the 25% just kind of a conservative metric that you guys were putting into the equation, or was that just a reflection of your view on a potential slowdown in their business that you were embedding?
I think it's a little bit of both. I mean, I would chalk it up to conservatism in general. Yeah. I mean, look, we had anticipated that they would, you know, see some potential slowdowns in their business, so we wanted to be conservative naturally. And at the same time, I mean, their gross margins are a bit lower than ours, and so we wanted to have the flexibility to be able to go out, you know, and kind of manage that appropriately, right? Whether that means not providing product or not pursuing, you know, maybe a different pricing dynamic, things like that we would assess accordingly, and that's why we set that expectation lower.
Have you guys. I've known you guys since your IPO. I can't recall an acquisition that you've completed where you didn't improve the gross margin over time. Is there anything structurally that would apply on Silicon Motion that would preclude that?
No, not at all. I mean, I think we're very confident that we can make improvements there. I think it's a bit of just it's a priority. I don't think it was a big driver for them historically, and I think it will be for us going forward.
Right. Yeah. I think they were more focused on the growth side, less on the profitability side.
That's right.
You guys can balance that a little bit more. Two last questions on this. One, I think you guys just announced you're gonna be doing the long form SAMR approval as opposed to the short form. If you just wanna update people on that. I don't think it really
Sure. Yeah, there was a filing this afternoon made that the short form we will actually convert over to move forward with the long form, which is consistent with our view. I don't think there's really much of an update there. I mean, we've anticipated that the deal would close in the first half of next year. The SAMR process in general is, you know, quite an opaque process, and so not great visibility there. Anticipating the first half of next year, nothing's changed on the front from the standpoint that there's no overlap in our business. We're not a large company that's looking to do a lot of bundling, which is typically what regulators are concerned about.
We think this has got a great chance to get through in a pretty quick manner, but nothing else has really changed on that front.
Gotcha. Then the last question on the deal is the somewhat unique choice. Well, you guys are choosing to use mainly debt for this, and so your leverage ratio is going to go up a lot higher than most. You didn't use shares, et cetera. Talk a little bit about it. Is it still 3.5-4 times levered when the deal is finalized, and how quickly can you bring that down, especially as the concerns about a recessionary environment and rising rates and all of those sorts of things make leverage ratios that high scare some people?
Correct. Yeah. That's right. I mean, what we said that we'd expect it to be below 4x at close and then a year out, you know, get that down below 3x. While I agree with you, that is relatively high. I mean, there's definitely been more semiconductor deals done at higher levels, but completely acknowledge that it's on the higher end. Look, both businesses, our business, their business, does throw off a lot of cash. We think, you know, we will be 100% focused on paying down that debt as fast as we can. We think, you know, that we can do that very quickly.
What do you think the cost of the debt generally is gonna be when it's all said and done?
Yeah. So when we announced the deal, I mean, I think our expectation was somewhere in the 4.5% range. I think today we would say it's probably closer to 5.5%, you know, kind of given how the market's moved. I mean, the debt itself will ultimately price closer to the time of the close of the deal. I think 5.5% is kind of where we expect to see it today. It'll be, we plan to do it in the Term Loan B market. Now we have been out in the pro rata market, kind of taking some of that off now, which, you know, saves us on fees, it lowers the rate and, you know, we can kind of reduce the risk a little bit.
We've been active in doing that thus far.
Let's get to your core business. Why don't we start with the biggest business first as far as percentage of sales. Almost half your company is your broadband segment. That Intel Home Gateway business was just a home run from a couple of years ago. Talk a little bit about what the growth is from here. The concerns people have would be kind of as work from home or return to the office, that transition takes place, that some of the broadband demand might slow down. But I know it's not really as much of a unit game on your side. Talk a little bit about the growth expectations going forward and what the drivers of those may be.
Sure. Yeah, I mean, look, the broadband business has been relatively good. If I go back a couple of years, we had lost some share, and so some of that, you know, we were winning back some share. Things have been going good on that front. If you think about our overall broadband connectivity business, we've been gaining content per box, right? A lot of the story has been about that content increase from $15 to $30-plus of content. You know, a lot of that growth has been driven there. Your specific question about what is that broadband growth, I think historically, that's kind of been low- to mid-single-digit growth. That's kind of the way we see the market, right? Look, a lot of changes have happened in the broadband market as of late.
I mean, you're seeing a lot of investment just beginning, right? I think as we look out over the next 3-5 years, there's a lot of market data showing up. Dell'Oro had a report recently that took that number up by at least 30% over the next 5-7 years. It was a big increase, and I think it's consistent with what you're seeing in the market. You're seeing a lot of investment on fixed wireless access. You're seeing a lot of fiber rollouts. DSL guys are upgrading. The cable guys are having to upgrade. You're seeing a number of these guys upgrade and as you know, Ross, we've always kind of positioned ourselves as that arms dealer. We don't really care which one of these, you know, solutions wins because we're supplying into all of them.
excited about that. I mean, I think if you look out over the next five years, at least the market data does support a much higher number, and I think that's why ourselves, Broadcom, has been out, you know, commenting about a double-digit growth over several years. That's not to say that, you know, as we were talking about, just slowdowns in general, not to say that you don't see some kind of moderation, you know, next year as things slow. Now that being said, we haven't seen, you know, like crazy unit growth, to your point, over the last couple of years. I mean, COVID time, like 2020 we saw that, but 2021 and 2022, I mean, we kinda saw a moderating environment. I don't feel like we've got huge risk out there.
That being said, it wouldn't be surprising to see some moderation. Beyond that, you've got a lot of additional CapEx dollars being spent over the next 2 to 3 years that are committed. You know, that these things do take time to roll out. They're big investments. You've also got a lot of government money that you haven't had historically, and that's pushing fiber. It's not fiber alone, but definitely a lot of fiber deployments. That's a new market for us and, you know, last year we did less than $10 million of fiber revenue or revenue attributed to fiber anyway. This year we're expected to do probably a little north of $30 million this year, and then I think as I look into next year, I think it can potentially double again.
That's exciting for us and the key part about the fiber market is it's probably 2, maybe as much as 3 times bigger than the cable market. While we have a lot of exposure in cable, at the end of the day, fiber is a lot bigger, and we have the opportunity to penetrate that over the next several years.
What was it that kept you out of that market historically?
You know, it's an interesting question. Nothing really. We had sold into it, but it wasn't a focus, frankly, of the business historically. Now as it's grown, the customers are looking for alternatives. They've come to us. They see us as a great alternative. We do have the. It's similar to cable and it's similar dollar volumes in the gateway. They also want a full solution. They wanna have an SoC, they wanna have Wi-Fi, they need Ethernet. I mean, they want that entire box to be filled, and then naturally the firmware that goes on top of that.
Okay. The fact that you didn't have the entire bundle before.
Potentially was part of it. Yeah, that's true.
Is there something that's inherently different in the technology? I mean, obviously I know the difference between coax and fiber, but is there something that precluded you from a technology perspective, not necessarily kind of a breadth of product perspective prior?
Nothing obvious. I mean, they're similar. The SoC itself is definitely similar. Yeah, the technology is a little different, but the product, I mean, it's really kind of processing horsepower inside of that box and so it is very similar. Right now, actually one of the reasons we're winning on the PON side is because of that technology. It is because of that SoC and the differentiation that we have there. Then also the distribution. I mean, it's critical that we're getting, you know, the Wi-Fi wins and we have that, and that is very important to the customer.
That's a perfect segue to your connectivity business, which, you know, kind of 20%-25% of revenue is growing really, really rapidly. Wi-Fi's been the biggest horse pulling that along. Talk a little bit about what's allowing your Wi-Fi business to grow. Well, first, right size where Wi-Fi was and is for you guys and maybe where it will be. Then secondarily, talk a little bit about what's been driving that growth.
Sure. Yeah. If you go back 2020, we did kinda $25-$30 million of revenue from the Wi-Fi business. Now, that was early days of Wi-Fi 6. I mean, we had a product in Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi 5, but it wasn't very significant. We were late to market. Winning in Wi-Fi 6 was super critical, getting there early. We won a lot of share. That business doubled the following year to north of $50 million. This year, we're expected to do well north of $100 million, and then have talked about being north of $200 million next year. We've definitely made a lot of progress. I mean, it is, at the end of the day, it is that differentiation that we have in the product, the Wi-Fi product itself.
It's great that we're getting the attach, meaning, you know, we're selling alongside of our SoC, and now we've got penetration within the fiber market. You know, next also, we've got some third-party routers that we're starting to ship into that diversifies that revenue stream even further.
How are you guys positioned for the next-gen Wi-Fi when we go to Wi-Fi 7?
Yeah. Very well positioned. We're seeing Wi-Fi 6E kinda happen right now. Wi-Fi 7 is behind it. I mean, I think we'll, you know, there's definitely a lot going on in Wi-Fi 7 right now, but I don't see real revenue driven until probably 2024. We might see a little bit at the tail end of next year, but most of that happens in 2024. It might be worth mentioning, you know, one of the reasons these dollars are, or I should say, the revenues are going up, is because the ASPs of a Wi-Fi 5 solution versus say, a Wi-Fi 7 solution are quite different. I mean, Wi-Fi 5 is, you know, it was $5-$7 of content. Today we're seeing, you know, 10-ish dollars in our Wi-Fi 6 solution.
Wi-Fi 6E, you know, you bump that up another couple of dollars. Wi-Fi 7 expected to be slightly ahead of that. The content of those solutions is also going up, along with the unit volumes.
When I think of it, and correct me if I'm wrong, you guys had the front end. You've got the Intel home gateway business that brought the back-end side and the Wi-Fi along with it. Is really what's going on is that that unified platform maybe used somebody else's Wi-Fi, maybe used Intel's, but your focus is on bringing Wi-Fi in and making sure that's part of the bundle. Maybe somebody else was the Wi-Fi solution and that's what's driving your growth? Or is it just mainly Intel had the asset, but you guys are focused more on it, that's driving it? Is it a substitution for somebody else, or is it you guys just going out and convincing the customers of the merits of your solution and the merits of the bundle as a whole?
Yeah, I mean, look, we developed the product. We're winning the customer. I mean, I think, you know, early on, I mean, I mentioned that we were late to market on Wi-Fi 5. When we came early with Wi-Fi 6, that was critical, right? We had to win those sockets early on. We did that. What else did we have to do? We also had to make sure that we supported the customer, we had the software and the firmware, support services around it to make sure that we executed, right? When you deploy one of these gateways, there is a lot of firmware that has to be supported, and so we had to do that during those ramps, and I think we've proven that or are proving that now.
It has gone extremely well, which I think bodes well for the future that we can win more of these sockets going forward.
What else is in the connectivity side? It's good to see the 50-100, the 200 move on, the Wi-Fi side of things, but there's other connectivity protocols.
Sure.
You guys play in as well.
It still has so our G.hn and MoCA are existing technologies. MoCA has been growing for a while. Don't see a huge amount of growth from here on MoCA, 'cause Wi-Fi will capture some of that content. That being said, it is kind of a, I think of it, a higher end play, and so we've continued to see interest in MoCA. I think it does continue, but it's a smaller portion of the market, and that portion will be captured by Wi-Fi. G.hn's a little smaller. Wireline technology's been around for a while. Then the last piece is Ethernet.
Ethernet, 2.5 gig, 5 gig, getting a lot of adoption in the market right now, so we've been very excited to win that, of course, on the gateways, but we're also winning outside of gateways. That's something that I think we can leverage a lot of our channel relationships to grow, you know, kind of beyond what they had done historically.
If I stop for a higher level question between broadband, first segment we talked about, and connectivity, it seems like there's the part that's growing fast in connectivity, it's Wi-Fi, and then the other side maybe not so much. In the broadband, you have the fiber side growing fast, and then the cable side not so much.
Yeah.
How do you think those two dynamics of the faster growing subsegments versus the slower, how do those net together for that combined, say, whatever it is, 70-75% of the company?
Yeah, look, I mean, at the end of the day, the Wi-Fi business, I mean, we're still a very small player in Wi-Fi, right? I mean, it's a $2 billion-plus market. You know, talked about doing north of $100. I mean-
Right
We're still a small player, a long way to go. We're winning sockets. We've got the performance today, so excited about that, and I think that's, you know, likely to continue as we diversify and really, you know, penetrate more of those other markets. I mean, the fiber side, you know, kind of probably goes without saying, I mean, there's just a lot of emphasis on fiber. I think the real takeaway, Ross, is probably thinking about broadband as a whole and how much investment is going to happen over the next five years.
You mean with connectivity together?
With it, yeah. I mean, yeah, the broadband market.
Yeah
which, you know, would include.
Yep
Wi-Fi is large and growing, right? The amount of investment in CapEx that's going into the space is quite substantial. Frankly, it really hasn't started yet. I mean, look at that $65 billion of the Biden infrastructure bill. I mean, I would argue they don't even know where that money's going yet.
Hopefully to you.
Well, it won't go directly to us, but these operators are very focused on it, and I would expect to see them to get some of that money to offset and subsidize some of the deployments that they intend to make over the next several years. It is an exciting time and I mean, but you're seeing that on the fiber side. Fixed Wireless Access is another place that they're, you know, definitely very active in. Even the cable guys, I mean, they're gonna have to respond. They've gotta improve their own networks. I know there's been some concerns out there around, like, subscriber growth and things like that, which, you know, I mean, I guess in my mind, doesn't impact. I mean, I think it impacts a company like a Comcast or a Charter, clearly.
At the same time, if they need to upgrade in order to compete with carriers, you know, I think that works out okay for us because they're gonna have to upgrade the gateways and the infrastructure itself in order to compete with them on a go-forward basis.
Why don't we switch over to the infrastructure side of things? This has some sex appeal with the 5G side of things.
Sure
some of the data center aspects, but it's been a little lumpier and, you know, it's relatively small part of the business, kind of 15% of sales.
Sure.
Talk a little bit about the wireless side, access side of things and how that side is going, or the wireless infrastructure. Let's leave it at that higher level.
Sure. Yeah, infrastructure as a whole, you're right, I mean, you know, smaller portion of the business. It's also, as you're aware, I mean, a place we've been investing heavily. Wireless infrastructure is a big piece of that. Wireless infrastructure to us is backhaul, modems, as well as, transceivers, so that's a big part of it, and access, right? 5G access, Massive MIMO. Big opportunity we identified, started investing, what, 2+ years ago, and hasn't really emerged as fast as I think what everyone had anticipated. The markets pushed out China. You know, some of the shutdowns, the tariffs, and the Huawei dynamics that happened in China definitely has slowed the market adoption. That being said, we started shipping first half of last year and has continued to progress.
We've seen nice growth in that business over the last couple of years, and I think that continues. I think you're starting to see some signs in China that things are loosening up as well, where you're gonna see some investment beyond Huawei. On the backhaul side, that's also, I would say we've seen a fair amount of growth in backhaul. The modems, which we're really the only merchant supplier of modems today in backhaul, have continued to grow. The transceiver is a new product for us, and that contributed to a lot of the growth this year and will continue into next year. We've been short on substrates, and we talked about that in the earnings call recently.
We're starting to see more supply come online in Q4, and then but some of that demand will naturally be pushed into Q1 of next year.
In the competitive landscape, no big changes on that front in that wireless infrastructure area?
No, none. On the transceiver side, it's mostly ADI and, on the modem side, merchant supplier access, it's ADI and Texas Instruments.
Gotcha. What about on the data center side of things? You know, the whole PAM-4 side.
Yeah.
of things. It's been kinda fits and starts about which of the cloud guys adopt which technology at what time.
Sure, sure.
You're fighting against a couple behemoths in that space.
Sure, sure.
Not that ADI's a small company, but
Right.
Broadcom and Marvell are no slouches on their own.
Sure, sure. Yeah, the optical space is very exciting. We've got this 5 nm chip that we're, you know, kinda first to market with a 5 nm solution. That's getting a lot of interest and this is our second chip. Our first entry into this market was our previous Telluride solution, focused on 400G. You're bringing up a good point. You got a handful of these data center guys. There's only a few that really, you know—I mean, there's a lot of them that can move the needle, but the big four guys can move it a lot. Google and Facebook started out at 200G. We came into the market at 400G, so we didn't intersect that, and that's a market that Inphi or Marvell now has done extremely well with.
Those guys are starting to move to 800G, which is the perfect point where we can intersect that with our 5 nm solution for 800G. It's great to see more customers kinda ready to launch an 800G solution. You also see the Amazon and Microsoft that will also continue to move up or either have a 400G or 800G solution. We think we're well positioned to take advantage of it. Now 800G, I mean, this is probably we'll see some revenues next year, but probably the 800G, I think 2024 ends up being a much bigger adoption year. Exciting times right now. I mean, we're first to market ahead of Broadcom, ahead of Marvell, those behemoths that you mentioned. It's exciting to be there early. We've gotta keep that lead, right?
We gotta move quickly to get the firmware and, you know, customer adoption happening.
I think that the importance of getting that 5 nm part out can't be overstated, because a lot of the pushback I've heard over the years was you just didn't have the R&D budget to be able to go to that 5 nm lithography, and the roadmap was the issue. Telluride was great, but what's next always became the question. Now that you have this, that should definitely help.
That's right. I think that you're dead on. I mean, these customers are. This is true of all of these big guys. You know, they don't wanna just see your product today. They wanna see your roadmap over the next few years and making sure that you wanna have the financial wherewithal but also the technical prowess to be able to do it, right? I think we've proven that. It's our. You know, frustrating that we didn't get more adoption on the first generation, but in some respects, not all that surprising, right? I think it really sets us up well to take advantage of the markets with this next generation solution.
Do you think that the lack of adoption in the first one was because you just didn't intersect with the 200 gig solution that ended up being adopted by the early adopters?
We didn't have a 200 gig solution. Yeah, in some respects, yeah, you're right, the fact that we didn't go to market with a 200 gig solution. I actually think it was the right decision.
Mm-hmm.
To come at 400 gig, but there just weren't as many sockets available, right? You also, you know, Amazon themselves kind of pushed out a little bit and hasn't really turned into as big of a business. It's starting. It's, you know, getting bigger now. I think we're really, you know, it just sets up well for that next generation solution.
The optical side, the electro-optical side, are there other opportunities beyond kind of the PAM-4 stuff, the ZR side of the equation between data centers? Is that something that you guys also are looking at?
Yeah. You're right. I mean, there are a lot more, I think, options available to us now, especially given that we've got this IP that we've built. Now we can start to leverage that across a broader set of applications. You know, I was mentioning we're leveraging across more customers, we're also leveraging across more applications. That can be potentially intra data center, but we can also, I mean, you're looking at, you know, Active Electrical Cables is starting to emerge as something that we can address, seeing more need for retimers in the market. There's definitely, you know, a larger market emerging there that we can leverage these IPs across.
The last segment you have is the industrial and multi-market side of things. That's, you know, calling it a catch-all. I don't mean to have that be a catch-all.
Sure
Figurative term, but it's more broad-based, obviously, from the name, more industrial. Talk a little bit about the drivers there. Is that where some of the storage efforts that you guys have already done organically underneath the covers would overlap with what Silicon Motion's doing? Just talk in general about the drivers there.
Sure. Yeah, industrial multi-market's kind of been, in some respects, it is somewhat of a catch-all bucket. It is a broad-based distribution business that we've sold into, you know, industrial markets. I mean, it's just a wide breadth of markets. There's thousands of customers. Most of that stuff goes through distribution. Historically, we've said it's growing at, you know, kind of GDP plus, kind of a 3%-5% growth per year is kind of what we typically expect from this product portfolio. It's proven itself. We've upgraded the products. I mean, it's mostly power management and interface products, and they have been growing. Those products primarily are focused around infrastructure or in some respects, broadband.
They can clearly sell into broad-based markets, like, even like an Ethernet product or power management, POL, regulator, that we have targeted to sell into infrastructure. Now we put it into distribution, and we have a wider breadth of opportunity. That's not a lot of changes on that front, but growing and continuing to do well.
In the last couple minutes that we have, when you guys announced the Silicon Motion deal, the stock got hit pretty substantially. Since then, you know, the stock might be down a little bit, but so is everything else. Really on a company-specific basis, it hasn't really moved very much different-
Right
than anything else. What do you think people have missed the most? Or what's the message you'd wanna convey on the merits of the Silicon Motion deal, assuming, you know, that was the reason why the stock took that step down when the deal was announced?
Yeah. Well, look, I think as if you look at the timing of the deal, and I think the feedback that we got in May was, well, it was kind of twofold. It was the consumer exposure, which you brought up a little bit earlier, and the leverage. I think it was frankly the combination. I think it was a bit of like the leverage, yeah, it was a bit high, but in different markets, maybe I would've been more comfortable, and vice versa. Consumer, you know. Anyway, it was that combination that I think made it a little bit worse. As far as, I think there were a lot of questions that we get and what we try to address is, okay, so what about consumer? How bad is it? Things like that, right?
You're seeing that play out now. I mean, I think from our perspective, we had seen that, Motion had seen that, the market had seen that earlier. We're seeing it play out. I think as you walk through, those who are more familiar with Silicon Motion are more comfortable with that as well because they've seen them execute. They've seen the share gains that they've made, they've seen the wins and, you know, how they've navigated this in the past. I think those that are familiar are much more comfortable. On the leverage side, we also spend a lot of time just talking through cash flow generation on the MaxLinear side of the business. They've been extremely good.
For that matter, Silicon Motion's has been good also, and I think the model itself for the combined company is very compelling, and it doesn't require a huge amount of CapEx needs. There's some opportunities on the synergy side. There's some real estate opportunities. I mean, there's various ways that we intend to cut back on some of the capital required, and then naturally just driving up profitability to increase cash flow and pay down that debt.
Got it. Well, we are right on time. Steve, thank you so much for joining us out here in Vegas. Best of luck getting that deal closed.
Great. Thank you.
All right.
Thank you, Ross.
Thanks.