All right. Good morning, everybody. For our next session, we're hosting MaxLinear on here on the stage with me. I've got Steve Litchfield, the Chief Financial Officer and Chief Strategy Officer. Thanks for being here, Steve.
Thanks for having us.
So before we dive into our Q&A, could you give us a high-level overview of MaxLinear's products and strategy?
Sure. Sure. Yeah, so MaxLinear's an analog mixed-signal company. So, I mean, we really differentiate ourselves kind of in the mixed-signal space in between analog and digital, which I think is a really exciting space where there's a lot of innovation. Company went public in 2010. We're in a variety of end markets. I mean, we break them out. Infrastructure is kind of the big one, but we also do products in broadband connectivity as well as industrial. But I'd say our focus probably over the last five years has been in infrastructure. We started kind of an organic development in that area about six years ago now, focused on wireless infrastructure as well as data center. Business is expected to do north of $150 million next year, and it's an exciting space right now, especially with what's going on in the data center.
Yeah. So you reported earnings a little over a month ago in the commentary on things like order rates and expedite requests and things all sounded pretty positive. So where are we in the cycle? And are you kind of confident we're past the bottom and on the way up now?
Yeah. Good question. I think we are. It's been a long cycle. The last, I think we've had about six quarters now that have been down, and it has been probably not surprising given the supply chain shortage and the upswing that we saw early on, but it's taken a while to kind of get through the inventory levels, and it is encouraging. I mean, we did think that we'd probably see recovery in the first half, that's pushed out into the second half, but the order rates have definitely picked up. Backlogs, starting backlogs are much, much better. The expedites that you mentioned, yeah, we've commented on this because customers are coming in inside of our lead times, which is challenging, especially when you don't have inventory, and so they're seeing that, and so things feel like they're getting back to a little bit of normalcy.
The sell-through continues to be quite a bit higher than the sell-in numbers. That also is encouraging. But I think that'll catch up sometime next year.
Yeah. So next, I want to take a little time to go segment by segment through those different businesses that you mentioned at the top. So starting with infrastructure, can you talk about the secular outlook for the infrastructure business? And I think you guys have talked about the SAM growing almost four times to $4.7 billion by 2027. So what are the drivers of that really considerable growth?
Sure. Sure. Look, the big one, and talk about data center a little bit. This is our optical DSP product that we've had for a couple of years. We're on a second-generation product right now. That is, I would say, the bigger part of the SAM today. I mean, that's a business. I'm sorry, a market that probably did $800 million-$900 million last year. This year, well, I'd say over the next two years, they expect to do $1.6 billion-$1.8 billion. So a big uptick really driven by all this data center investment that's going on out there. I think we're really well-positioned to take advantage of that. We're a new player. There's a couple of big guys that are looking for alternatives right now. I think we've got a real differentiated solution really based on power. Data center is all about power these days.
We're seeing guys buying nuclear power plants and the like to fund these things, so we're really optimistic, and our customers have gotten very excited about the fact that we've got much lower power levels. We're very competitive here, and we're seeing good adoption, so that's probably the number one thing that we're seeing and excited about. I mean, the other one is wireless infrastructure. Wireless infrastructure has been down. Telco spending has been poor. We have a couple of different maybe product areas. We've got the access market where we have a modem and a transceiver. I'm sorry. On the access side, we've got our transceiver as well as our digital front end, and digital front end is brand new, so this is exciting. I mean, look, telco spending in the wireless infrastructure space is not huge, but we continue to just add more content here.
And so we can see almost a 50% increase just in content. So as that telco spend starts to creep back up, which it's been down, we do expect to see a recovery this year on the access side. And then we also do backhaul products. So backhaul are these big microwave links that they run instead of fiber. And we do expect to see a recovery in that market this year also.
Okay. And then on optical transceivers, I believe you guys are close to a million-unit volume run, right? So how is the mix in that million-ish units between the 400 GB, the 800 GB, and the 1.6 T today? And what sort of growth do you see for that as you look out over the next two, three years?
Right. Yeah. So the product, it's 100 GB per lane. And so it's primarily focused around 800 GB. And that's where we're seeing the most adoption. That's really what's exciting right now. Most of the bigger hyperscalers or bigger Tier 1 data centers will roll out 800 next year, some early in the year, some late in the year. But that's definitely happening. This year, the mix, to answer your question, is probably 60% 800 and 40% 400. I think next year, we'll still ship a lot of 400, I expect next year. But maybe it goes to 70% 800 and 30% 400. And 1.6 T, so 1.6 T is relatively new. This is 200 GB per lane. And we're excited about this product. And we think that we'll be below the competition from a power perspective, another reason to get more adoption.
So that, I think we'll demo this at OFC. I expect that we'll see next year will end up being about design wins. So we'll get design wins. We'll work with customers. And then production's probably in 2026. That's pretty aligned with where the market expectations are, with the exception of NVIDIA. NVIDIA will probably roll out next year. But the bigger hyperscaler guys, the Tier 1 data centers, I expect will happen in 2026.
Okay. One last one on optical. So on your most recent call, there was some discussion of a fairly large opportunity selling into China. Can you talk about how you're positioned for China maybe compared to some of your other peers and any specific considerations for that market?
Yeah. I mean, I think of this, there's kind of three buckets of people. I mean, you've got your hyperscalers, mostly U.S.-based, that are driving bigger volumes. You've got Tier 1 data center guys that you're wanting to penetrate. These are big like Ciscos and Oracles of the world that you want to focus on. And then you've got kind of the Chinese guys like the Tencents and Alibaba and the like. So we want to penetrate all of them, frankly. And we're engaged with all of them directly and then also engaged with them through the module vendors, right? And so the module vendors, you can imagine us as well as them. I mean, we want to penetrate or we want to get these modules qualified.
Once they get qualified at one place, then they want to go and sell them to as many people as they can, right? It's a bit of a domino effect. I mean, once we get a couple of data centers qualified, these qualifications can be quite long. They can be a couple of three months or they can, I mean, we've got a couple of guys that will run 6-9 months on some of these soak tests. They can be quite lengthy, but once you get them done and kind of the industry knows how tough these qualifications are, and once you get through them, then they're more comfortable adopting you sooner. It's a bit of a domino effect. We're excited about, hopefully, we'll see this inflection point happen in 2025 and really start to see some meaningful volumes.
Great. So switching over from infrastructure to broadband, this is another segment where you guys estimate really strong SAM growth, like over four times, almost five times to like a $1.9 billion type of number. So what underlies that really strong growth?
Yeah. So broadband, excuse me, broadband and connectivity, if I bundle them together, and we can dive into each of them as you like. But both of them, okay, so first of all, we're a provider, kind of an arms dealer to some degree. We don't really care whether it's fiber or cable or fixed wireless access. So we're selling into all of these guys. And often that comes in the form of a gateway in your home. It's got $40+ of content in that gateway, six, seven chips coming from MaxLinear. That product, if I go back five years, did probably $15 of content from MaxLinear. Now we're north of $40. And I think that'll continue to go up as we get more chips that penetrate that application. One example of that is like in DOCSIS, the processor that's inside of the gateway itself continues to grow.
The ASPs continue to go up. Our DOCSIS 4.0 chip, upwards of 50% higher content. That's one big driver. Wi-Fi also, as I'll give you an example, Wi-Fi 6 to Wi-Fi 7, ASPs go from, call it $12 up to maybe $15 with the added feature set and capability. Those are some of the reasons why that serviceable market is growing.
Yeah. Got it, so lots of content growth there.
Yeah. Yeah.
Going back to the wireless CapEx that we were talking about a little bit and telecom company CapEx generally, I think you guys are expecting things will start to improve in 2025 after like a pretty flattish couple of years, so are you already seeing concrete evidence of that in orders, for example, or is that still a little too soon, a little bit down the road?
Yeah. Yeah. I think we're cautiously optimistic here. I mean, I do expect a recovery. I think maybe the question is more about how much of a recovery. I think we're just trying to be cautious because it has been a couple of pretty tough years. But the order rates, the visibility that we have right now is definitely getting better. So I don't think we're here pounding the table. But we're definitely seeing those signs. We're seeing more expedites come in, which is a good indicator. I mean, bookings, obviously, we always look at bookings. And that is very different. We've had six quarters now of improved bookings off of a very low number. But those are the signs that we're starting to see.
Gotcha. And lastly, touching on connectivity, we talked about it a little bit already. But again, this is a segment where you guys have a really strong growth forecast for your SAM up to like a $3 billion level. So what are the kind of pieces of that recipe?
Sure. Sure. There's really two Wi-Fi and Ethernet. Those would be the two bigger drivers. Our connectivity business, I think, will probably grow this coming year north of 50%. I think most of the analysts have it in that ballpark. It's a recovery off of kind of a lower number. But there's also a lot of new product development and new product adoption that's happening. So Wi-Fi 7 that I mentioned a little bit earlier is one of those. And that's definitely driving the SAM. It's also driving the recovery in 2025 as well. Excuse me. The other one is Ethernet. Ethernet is a product line that we really developed to go into a gateway application. There's a lot of upgrades that are going on in Ethernet today from 1 GB to 2.5 GB.
There's probably a billion-plus ports out there doing 1 GB devices today that'll be upgraded over the next, call it, 18 months, so that's a big opportunity. It happens in the gateway, but we've actually leveraged our team and gone out to our industrial customer base where they're deploying more and more of this Ethernet into factory automation. I mean, just tons and tons of different applications, and so we're seeing good adoption there, which opens up a brand new market. Same thing on the enterprise side. We've won the big North America switch company. That'll start to ramp in Q2, Q3 of next year, so we're seeing good broad-based adoption in the enterprise market, which is entirely new, and again, that's driving the SAM numbers. This business, Ethernet, I mean, just as a maybe I'll highlight it, business was probably doing $40 million-$50 million in mostly gateway applications.
Now that's dropped down to, call it, mid-30s. I expect that to recover back up to the 50. But ultimately, I think we can get that number to closer to $75 million, maybe $100 million over the next couple of three years. So that's a big uptick for us on a product. I mean, this is kind of what we do. We go out and we kind of keep grabbing additional share, additional content, these upgrades in spaces that I think are sizable. But yet, the competitive landscape is such that I think we can really capitalize.
Yeah. Have you guys sized for gateways like the size of the content uplift when you go from 1 GB to 2.5 GB?
I mean, there's probably, I don't know, call it 15% increase. Not as high as something like Wi-Fi or even what we're doing on the wireless infrastructure. But it's a good uptick, yeah.
Right. So then, more of the growth is volumes recovering and industrial and these kind of other adjacency areas and not just more for more.
That's correct.
Got it. What about, how do you guys feel about the pace of adoption of Wi-Fi 7? Is that going as fast as expected or slower? And yeah, I guess, how's that going so far?
I think the Wi-Fi 7 adoption is going, for the most part, as planned. I would say, I think maybe what is slower, so the recovery is a little slower. I mean, that would be one, so that's really driven by CapEx spending, and if I look at service providers, probably make up 50%-60% of the Wi-Fi deployments that happen, and so if service providers hold back on CapEx, though some of these cable guys have been spending a lot of money on infrastructure upgrades, that'll transition over to CPE, the consumer premises side in 2025 and 2026, and so as that transition, we'll start to see more uptake, so I don't think it's necessarily behind.
I think the other dynamic that we've seen with this cycle is kind of you've seen some higher-end devices kind of move to more mid-tier devices, whereas in the boom times, the highest feature set always wins. I'm not saying that we're at the bottom of some economic slump here, but I think it's definitely moved down to mid-tier offerings, which is just driving a different volume for us.
Gotcha. So I've got a few more, but I should mention I forgot to at the start that there's a QR code on the table for those of you in the room. So if anybody in the audience has any questions for Steve, those will come up here to me. But moving on with my questions over to the industrial and multi-market business. So where do you compete in this market? And is it just kind of taking natural adjacencies from what you're doing for your others or more to it than that?
Yeah. So these are, in a lot of cases, they are adjacencies. But I would say a lot of the products are more analog-type products, broad-based, tons and tons of applications, thousands of customers, hundreds of products and product families. We've been in this business for a long time. It's primarily a distribution business. So a lot of partners. I guess maybe one differentiator, we do a lot of business in China here, which has hurt. I mean, China's been soft over the last, call it, year, year and a half. And so that's definitely depressed the market. And you're seeing this from a lot of our peers in the industrial space. They were kind of the last one in this cyclical slowdown. And so I think you probably got another couple of quarters. I do think we get back to growth next year.
I think we get back to. We typically see this growing at about GDP levels. And so I think we see kind of low single digits next year of growth from the industrial market. One thing I'd add here, we've had export controls. Export dynamics are challenging right now with China. This is one business that got affected by that earlier in the year. I think that's behind us now. So that's another reason that I'm confident that we can continue to grow. I don't expect any more. Now, who knows with tariffs and more restrictions potentially coming. But I think most of that's behind us. We actually saw in 2019 a fair amount of tariffs put in place. It did have an impact on our business. But we no longer ship a lot of that business under licenses. So there's less risk there.
I think we can get back to some normal shipment levels.
Got it. So we talked about broadband, connectivity, infrastructure, and then the multi-market kind of stuff. So if you add it all up, it seems like you guys are targeting revenue growth of about twice as strong as you would just get from the underlying markets themselves. So how much of that is you guys choosing really favorable spots within those markets? And how much of it is share gains at the expense of competitors or any other pieces of the growth formula you would call out?
I think the overarching principle is to drive more content with existing customers. So I think that's the play. Now, in turn, that also means that you end up gaining share. So that's certainly, they're really tied together in my mind. And as far as picking spots, I mean, clearly, we target, we try to leverage the capability, the technologies that we have into a real differentiating position. I mean, we differentiate on technology. That's how we win. I mean, I talked earlier about the power differentiator that we have in the data center. With that, we go head to head against some big guys every day. And we have since the formation of the company. But we're winning on technology, right? We're winning on that differentiation.
I think, fortunately, as some of these markets get much, much bigger and our peers even get bigger, they have to focus on bigger things, which leaves a big opportunity for us to go off and capitalize on. If you think of some of these data centers, I mean, there's tons of opportunities out there that a Broadcom just basically doesn't want to pursue because it's just too small for them. But it's a pain point for an Amazon, a Google, a Microsoft, right? And they rely on us. They've seen our capabilities. They see our customer support. So the door is open for us to kind of come through and really leverage that and turn into. I mean, you've seen this with some of the peers, even in the data center space.
They can take some really simple technology and turn it into some bigger dollars, all because some of the bigger guys just simply can't chase it.
Right. Can we dig into operating leverage a little bit? So you guys are a fabless company, but you've talked about a little bit of gross margin accretion from kind of the low 60s range now to more like a 65% long-term target. So what are the pieces there?
Yeah. So we've had a goal to be in the mid-60s. We've been running in the low 60s. Now, with this revenue decline, we tip right below 60. But I do see that recovering. Optimistic that we can exit next year at that 60% level. Some of its revenue, you're right, we're fabless. And so it doesn't have as big of an impact on us. But that being said, at some point, those fixed costs start to weigh in. Now, you're right on the mix. I mean, the mix is a big driver for us. And it's something that we're very focused on. The infrastructure business does run slightly above the corporate average. And it's something that, I mean, that's an area we've been investing heavily in because of the growth. But it's also got better gross margins for us, whether it be wireless infrastructure or the data center side.
Both of them have higher gross margins. If I think of our other businesses, we don't have anything that's super low gross margin. I mean, it comes in slightly below, but I'm confident that we can move back into the low 60s, and then as revenue improves and infrastructure, infrastructure will certainly grow faster than these other end markets, and so that's the reason we feel confident that we can get back up to the mid.
That'll be a tailwind for you. I think there's a lot of kind of green shoot or cautious optimism or outright optimism for next year in general on the revenue side. But then I think you've also targeted some pretty substantial 20%-25% OpEx reductions for next year. So can you talk about what specifically you're targeting and how you plan to do that and still make sure you're protecting the potential growth to the upside and not taking out costs that you would need, right?
Right, right. Yeah, yeah. No, look, I think we're excited about next year. I think there are some conservative estimates out there. We want to outpace the overall top-line revenue growth of the market, but your question on OpEx, so yes, in Q3, we did announce a cut of 20%-25%. I mean, that is a big cut. But if I reflect back on the last two years, we've had a number of different cycles that we've gone through. We've built this 1.6 GB, 1.6 T solution for the data center market. We've had Wi-Fi 7. We've had our PON upgrade. We've had our DOCSIS upgrade. We've had a lot of developments that are kind of rolling off right now, frankly, and now it moves more to a customer support mode, and so I think I'm very comfortable that our long-term growth won't be hurt at all by these reductions.
These reductions are never easy. They're not much fun. But I think we do need to get the cost structure right-sized. Long-term, our goal has been to be north of 30% operating margins. And we've done 30% operating margins above $1 billion. But we've done 30% operating margins at $3 million-$400 million of revenue as well. And so I certainly think that we can get to that 30%+ operating margin in the markets that we target, right? I mean, infrastructure can, like data center, can have a bit of a treadmill. Wi-Fi can have a bit of a treadmill. But most of the other markets kind of have a six- to seven-year life. And so you're not doing a chip but every six or seven years. And so we can manage that relatively well. It's a consolidated market. You're not on this hamster wheel.
So I'm confident that we can do that. I get the question a lot is like, well, now that you've reduced the 20%-25%, should I see a big increase when revenues start to recover? I don't think so. I don't think we're going to have to put that level of investment back in, not immediately. I mean, will it go up? It'll go up a little bit in 2026. Typically, we expect that number to go up maybe half the rate of the top line. So that would be our expectation. But I think right now, we're really focused on getting back to that 30% operating margin target.
Right. And then lastly, can we talk through capital deployment policy and how you allocate the capital that you have? And then if it comes to M&A, if that's one of the options, how you think about and evaluate either a big strategic transaction or a smaller tuck-in or acqui-hire type of thing?
Sure, sure. Yeah. So I mean, acquisitions have been a part of the strategy and will continue to be a part of the strategy. I think where we're at right now at the lower revenue levels, last quarter, based on those cuts and where the revenue was, we did burn cash in Q3. And we had some one-time costs related to severance. We'll have some more of that in Q4. But right now, I would say that we have just heads down, focused on generating more cash. And I think that's where our focus will be over the next, call it, 12 months. And then hopefully, we can get back to acquisitions down the road a little bit. So from a capital allocation, I mean, my focus is generating more cash.
Yeah, yeah. Great. Well, that's all I have so I'll leave it there. Thanks very much for the time today and I hope that we can catch up on some of these same questions a year from now and see how everything's gone in 2024.
Yeah. I look forward to it. I look forward to it.
Thanks, Steve.
All right.