All right. We are going to get started. Welcome. I want to start by thanking everybody for being here, both in person and online. For those of you who are in person, many of you traveled from a long way, and I really appreciate that. We really appreciate that. It's not a trivial time to be doing across-the-coast trips. Thanks for being here. Today is an awesome milestone for NETGEAR. We've been largely under the radar, transforming the business. Today we get to share our plans for scaling the business and some midterm, long-term goals that we're going after. It's a big, big milestone for us. I want to start by thanking Crestron for hosting us today. For those of you who are joining online, we're doing this Investor Day from Crestron's Experience Center in New York.
We have Crestron's EVP of Marketing here, Brad Hincy. In addition to this being a great venue, the price being right—thank you, Brad—this whole Experience Center is powered by NETGEAR, our NETGEAR Enterprise Solutions, both on the AV side and on the Wi-Fi side. As you all know, we've been working hard to bring more visibility to the work that we're doing on the Enterprise side. We figured what better way to do that than to host an Investor Day that's powered by NETGEAR Enterprise. Here's the plan for today. I'm going to kick things off talking about our transformation, really the foundation that we've built that will allow us to scale. Pramod Baheti, who leads NETGEAR Enterprise, is going to share his vision and strategy for that business. Jonathan Oakes, who leads NETGEAR Consumer, is going to do the same for our consumer business.
Bryan is going to share some info on our financial goals, a little bit about 2026, some midterm goals, some long-term goals. I'll wrap things up briefly after Bryan, and then we're going to go into a Q&A. We have about 90 minutes of presentation planned, so buckle up. We've got a lot to share. We're planning for about 30 minutes of Q&A. For those of you who are in person, we're planning for a small reception. We've got some great demos to share as well. It wouldn't be an Investor Day without a safe harbor. We'll obviously be sharing stuff about the future that are subject to risk and uncertainties. We talk about those things in our SEC filings, so we'll direct you to those. I strategized about how to get off this slide as quickly as possible.
Instead of giving any type of background about myself, I'm going to direct you all to my LinkedIn. You can look at my career and accomplishments there. Instead, I'm going to jump right in to talk about why I joined NETGEAR and why we're so excited about the opportunity ahead. There are four main points I want to share here. First is we have a number of tailwinds working in our favor, whether it's the transition to IP-based AV, the growing complexity and importance of connectivity in the home, the scrutiny that's being faced by China-based or China-affiliated companies. We just have a lot of macro factors working in our favor. Second, NETGEAR has incredibly strong bones. We've got great brands, global distribution, and supply chain. We were very early to exit China a long time ago. That predates me. And a very strong balance sheet.
Really, we're really well positioned for a significant transformation. Third, kind of as I alluded to at the outset, we have a real opportunity to unlock our enterprise business. That business has been on a great trajectory despite the fact that it's been built in the context of a company that's largely been consumer-focused from a leadership and strategy perspective. Then relatedly, after 30 years of kind of operations under the same CEO, most of the same leadership team, we have a lot of opportunity to modernize our operations, change how we do things, and unlock value in the process. I'm about 20 months in, and I'm very happy to say that my thesis for NETGEAR and the reasons for joining feeling very good about all of those. I wanted to make the point that our aspirations for unlocking the opportunity at NETGEAR are really significant.
We're not here as a leadership team, as a broader team, to optimize the dials on some existing businesses. We're truly focused on transforming NETGEAR to deliver long-term value to shareholders. A good proxy for what we're looking to achieve is what we achieved at EA when we transitioned that business from a packaged goods retail business, transactional business model to a digital services business. In doing so, we unlocked billions of dollars of shareholder value by growing our margin, growing our profitability. Another one that's maybe a little closer to home to NETGEAR, because it's a device business, is Logitech. Bracken Darrell led an 11-year transformation of Logitech as CEO there. Again, in both of these examples, a ton of profit and gross margin expansion and a ton of value creation for shareholders.
Those are our aspirations, and we're confident in our ability to deliver that. How do we do it? We've developed and are following a three-phase transformation approach. Phase one is all about building the foundation. That's largely what I'm going to talk about. That will allow us to scale. We're largely exiting this phase now. I'll be looking back at what we've set up for NETGEAR. Phase two will largely be what you'll hear from Pramod and Jonathan. This is all about strengthening our core businesses so we can build value back into NETGEAR. That's the phase that we're just entering. Once we've done that, that'll put us in a position to be more aggressive in accelerating the growth of our business, particularly on the inorganic side of things.
In terms of phase one, we structured our transformation initiatives in three buckets: strategic, organizational, and operational. We really could not be more proud of what we have accomplished in each of those areas. I will talk about each of those now. First and foremost, for us to be successful in delivering on our long-term value creation goals and aspirations, we really had to reset our company's North Star and the expectations that we set for ourselves on what we plan to deliver for our customers. Our new purpose as a company really captures this at the most fundamental level. Going forward, NETGEAR exists to power extraordinary experiences. Whether it is powering Ed Sheeran concerts, protecting your business, truly solving connectivity in the home, our new purpose sets the bar for what we are seeking to enable for our customers. Similarly, we redefined our mission.
This is really the how, the what we do behind our purpose. Every word of this mission was chosen with care. I'll just elaborate on a few. Intelligent Solutions is a nod to the fact that we'll leverage AI and other technologies to deliver innovative software experiences that power the extraordinary. Protect is there because delighting customers with exceptional software experience isn't enough today in today's cyber landscape. Security, privacy, the peace of mind that comes with that are paramount to winning the hearts and minds of customers. Our new purpose and mission are being integrated into the DNA of the company. They're themes you're going to hear more about today and in the years to come. We also translated this North Star into a set of specific long-term business outcomes that we're pursuing.
Bryan's going to talk a lot more about these, but let me elaborate a little bit. From a market perspective, we're focused on investing in markets that are big, growing, and profitable. From a product perspective, NETGEAR is known for incredible hardware, the reliability, the quality, the performance. We are going to combine that with intelligent solutions that delight and protect, great software experiences that power the extraordinary. That will open the door to growing our subscription and services businesses. When you combine those three things, big markets that are growing and profitable, software differentiation, subscription and services, that will allow us to continue to expand gross margins on the long term. We've done a great job of that over the last couple of years, but this remains a long-term focus for us. Much of my career has been driving transformations from transactional businesses to services businesses.
I mentioned EA upfront. We have conviction that that opportunity exists for us here at NETGEAR. The reason for it is a little bit different when you look at enterprise and consumer. On the enterprise side, that business today for us is nascent. We actually lag competition, and customers are asking us for these services. We launched professional services a couple of quarters ago. That was at the behest of our customers and our partners. We have a lot of catching up to do, and we see a ton of opportunity on the enterprise side. Pramod will talk more about that. In consumer, we actually have a $35 million AR business today that's growing double digits despite the fact that we've created a top-of-funnel problem for ourselves, and we haven't historically been good at subscription fundamentals.
When we address those two things and then add value into our subscription service, Jonathan will talk about that, that will allow us to accelerate the growth of our ARR on the consumer side. Now, we could not do any of that without the right organization structure, the right team, and the right set of values. From an organization structure perspective, the biggest shift that we have made is to really elevate our enterprise team so that it is equal weighted to our consumer team, which has on a legacy basis been the focus of NETGEAR. If anything, we are maybe overcorrecting a little bit to make up for that on the enterprise side. We now have two true business units that have fully integrated product development and go-to-market capabilities that are driving those businesses forward.
That is really why today, Pramod and Jonathan are kind of the stars of our Investor Day. Their business units are supported by lean central teams so that we can get scale from those investments, whether we are talking about central technology, G&A, operations, central marketing. It allows us to get leverage from those lean teams that are supporting the business unit structure. The organizational shifts have been combined with a significant leadership team reset. This is our executive team today. The top row of folks have joined us over the last 18 months. You can see the BU structure reflected here with Pramod leading enterprise with his commercial leader, Eric Law, Jonathan leading consumer with his commercial leader, Kristen. These are folks, as this will become obvious when you hear from them, folks that have deep pedigree in the businesses that they are driving.
It is not just about the new leaders. NETGEAR has an incredible existing team, and we saw an opportunity to elevate a number of those up-and-coming leaders from the existing team and those people that really share the passion and the same vision and conviction in our opportunity ahead. I'm also happy to report that as part of our transformation, we've really restructured performance compensation really across the whole company as it relates to the executive team. We've increased the number of executives who, as part of their equity allotment, receive PSUs. This whole group gets PSUs. We've increased the percentage mix of PSUs, and then we've tied our PSU structure to shareholder value creation, which was not historically the case. This team is aligned with shareholders on growing the value of NETGEAR. That leadership team partnered with the rest of the organization to redefine our values.
We're incredibly proud of these. These are the behaviors and mindsets that are really needed to accomplish our long-term goals. They're now embedded across everything we do, whether it's hiring, performance management, compensation. These are part of our daily conversation. I won't describe all of them. Some of them are pretty well understood by their names. My favorite is, of course, Dare to Transform. We also have a great board with a strong mix of consumer and enterprise and public company experience. After I joined, two of our longest tenured board members chose to retire. That gave us an opportunity to recruit Laura Orvitas to the board. She's a 20-year Amazon veteran and is now CEO of a prominent consumer app-based subscription company. We also wanted to keep the board lean and mean.
We've built an advisory board and added strategic capabilities and experience for areas that are important to our transformation. Some of you will recognize some of these names, but just to call out Michael Marcellin, we've historically not been strong as an enterprise marketing company. Michael was the former longtime CMO of Juniper. Software. This is a critical part of our transformation. When I joined, we pretty much had exclusively outsourced software developers. This presents a major challenge for powering extraordinary experiences. I'm happy to report we've made great progress in insourcing this capability. Over the last 18 months, we've onboarded about 100 badged software developers. The best part of all of this is it's cost neutral. At the same time, these internal teams are going to be able to deliver higher quality experiences more efficiently for our customers.
What better time to be building this capability from scratch with all of the progress that we're seeing in AI tools and capabilities that can help us accelerate. The last pillar of the phase one transformation is really on the operational front. As you can imagine, with a number one value of Dare to Transform, we've changed a lot of stuff. Too many things really to highlight. Though we're very happy with the results and the predictability that we're bringing to the business. I have a group of CEOs that I look to for inspiration and advice from time to time. I mentioned Logitech upfront and the transformation that Bracken drove there over 11 years. I believe during his tenure there, he missed guidance once. We're looking to model our value creation, our predictability off of examples like Logitech and what Bracken accomplished there.
AI, I mentioned, is obviously a hot topic, and we've really resisted the temptation to put AI in front of everything. That said, if you look under the hood, we're being very aggressive at adopting AI. And really three key areas. One to improve our product performance, things like self-healing networks. Another to improve the customer experience. There's a bunch of areas where we can actually dramatically improve the customer experience while driving costs down a huge win-win. And then third is just on the operational efficiency side of things. Given the extent of the transformation at NETGEAR, it just gives us an opportunity as we're making all of these changes to ensure that we're being ultra-aggressive at building AI into our processes and workflows. So we're thrilled with the impact we've had on the financial side of things. We're just getting started.
The foundational financial profile that we're building from is obviously much stronger. We're back on a growth trajectory. We've expanded gross margin. We've expanded profitability, and we've grown our cash balance despite the fact that we've been repurchasing shares. A lot of this is tied to the work that we've done to really reduce our working capital inventory in particular. The most exciting thing is we've implemented philosophies and processes that will allow us to ensure we keep this in check going forward, whether it's matching sell-in with sell-through. We're going to chase supply versus chasing demand. All of that's allowed us to be smart and responsible allocators of capital. We've made some really smart acquisitions. I mentioned the stock buybacks.
I don't know if anybody's keeping score, but we've repurchased about just under $70 million worth of shares at under $20 a share over the last 18 months or so. We plan to continue to return capital to shareholders. Bryan will cover our capital allocation strategy in his section. Before turning it over to Pramod and Jonathan to talk about phase two strengthening our core businesses, I just wanted to touch on and tee up for them kind of the priorities that you're going to hear. For Pramod, it's really about maximizing our opportunity on the AV side of things. We have a strong moat, strong momentum. That's our number one priority. Also growing our share in enterprise networking and security to very significant markets.
For Jonathan, what you'll hear, it's all about solving connectivity in a differentiated way in the home and then also on the go. For both of them, it's about delivering intelligent solutions that delight and protect differentiated software experiences and expanding our services and subscription and services revenue. With that, I will hand it over to Pramod.
Thank you, CJ. Hello, everyone. I joined NETGEAR last year, and I come from an enterprise networking background. I was with a startup building Wi-Fi products, got acquired by Cisco, saw that huge growth within Cisco. After that, I was with Ruckus. I was running that business before it got acquired. I was with Arista for a little bit, running their campus business. You can see all enterprise networking businesses. When I engaged with CJ and the board initially about the opportunity here, my initial reaction was like, wow, NETGEAR is a great consumer brand, but I'm not sure there's anything for me to offer. As I engaged with CJ and learned more about the business here, I was really excited about the opportunity really in the B2B side of things.
My goal today is to hopefully share with you why I got excited about the opportunity here at NETGEAR. I really have two pillars of my business, and I'll be talking about both of them in detail. One is NETGEAR AV, which is our AV line of business. The other is NETGEAR Enterprise, which is building a solution for small and medium enterprises for both networking and security. Let's start with AV. What is AV? I think you all know. AV is audiovisual. In a room like this, you have cameras and microphones, which are sources for audio-video. You have destinations like these LED screens or speakers. What an AV solution does is get the signals from the source to the destination.
Now, it's not as simple as it sounds because there's a lot of timing, latency, precision that is involved in sort of enabling these solutions. I'll share with you sort of why we are differentiated in terms of the solution we offer here. In fact, if you take this room as an example, there are over 100 AV endpoints that are connected with over 14 NETGEAR AV switches managed by NETGEAR AV operating system that makes it so that the network doesn't get overwhelmed with all this audio-visual traffic. We also have Engage software that helps the people managing this to be able to set this up. Let me go through some examples of end user applications where NETGEAR AV is deployed so you get a sense of what this means in terms of the opportunity itself. Let's start with live events.
For those of you from New York, if you have attended a Broadway show or if you've attended concerts from Taylor Swift or Dua Lipa, my daughter took me to these concerts and I realized that there's actually NETGEAR AV behind it. If you watched the latest Pope's inauguration live, that was over a NETGEAR AV switch itself. We are considered as a leader in this space. When it comes to any experiences like this, when it comes to live events, there's more often than not a NETGEAR AV solution behind it. Conference rooms like this is another example. With the post-COVID hybrid work and return to work, there has been an increase in upgrade to conference rooms to be able to set them up for those multi-site conferencing, if you will, which requires multiple microphones in the ceiling, multiple cameras, and so on and so forth.
We play a role there. In fact, one of the largest retailers in the world is in the process of upgrading thousands of their conference rooms, and they're planning to use NETGEAR AV behind it. Again, a huge opportunity. Another example to illustrate the mission-critical nature of this, the recent G7 summit that happened in Canada, that was powered by NETGEAR AV solution as well. Hopefully that gives you an example. Digital signage and video wall is another good example. For those of you from New York, you've probably heard of the new JPMorgan Chase building on 270 Park. That building has a huge video wall inside. I haven't seen it myself. I'm planning to go there tomorrow, very excited about it. That video wall is again powered through our partner, and there is a NETGEAR AV solution behind it. Broadcasting is an example.
When it comes to studios, whether it's private enterprises that have studios to create content, there is a NETGEAR AV solution behind it. An example here in New York is the NASDAQ, where they use it for broadcasting their new listings, live events, and speaker engagements, and so on. Hopefully all of that gives you an example of how wide sort of AV is not simple AV. All of these experiences I'm talking about is not just like concerts. It's not just audio anymore. These are all digital experiences with huge video walls, synchronized lighting, and video and audio. It requires that precision timing that requires specialized hardware beyond regular networking switches. Moving on to the portfolio, this is the NETGEAR portfolio that powers it all. We have a very extensive line of switches. That obviously is the heart of that AV fabric.
It's running AVOS that optimizes that network and makes it plug and play. We also have software, and you'll see a demo later on, Engage, which really makes it and brings it all together to make the lives of installers easy. We have Wi-Fi, which is increasingly used in live events to power the network. If you go to any of these trade shows, and I've attended three big trade shows since I've joined, we usually walk away with the best of show category award in each of these. The awards you see at the bottom are just a subset of the awards that we won. Let's look at what are the market drivers driving this business or driving this segment overall. First of all, all those examples that I talked to you about, there is an increase in adoption.
We try to call something like the number of pixels being deployed, right? When people move from 4K to 8K, when they deploy more digital screens, all of that is powered by greater capacity. You increase the capacity of video and audio, you require greater capacity of AV switches behind it. The other trend in this space is the move from sort of matrix connections for connecting these audio-video signals to their destinations to an AV over IP network. The reason that transition is happening is because AV over IP is more scalable, it's more flexible, and it's more cost-effective. Because when you transfer the signals over IP, it allows you to do a lot of processing in software. When you look at the type of deployments which were enabling these in the older days versus now with AV over IP, you have a much simpler deployment.
That's what is driving the transition. Now, the third thing which is true about this segment is the AV installers who are responsible for putting these networks together. Unfortunately, they are not networking experts, right? When initially the move happened to AV over IP, people realized the flexibility and the importance of this transition. There were a lot of challenges really putting it together because these installers took a lot of time. Many of these networks were not prepared for that multicast traffic, which sort of overwhelmed the network. This is where NETGEAR has been uniquely focused over the last many years in learning from this market and tailoring a solution which uniquely solves the problems of this segment. I'm going to explain to you how. First, let's look at the market size itself.
The broader AV market is about $332 billion, fairly large market. It includes the endpoints like microphones and TV screens and all of that. Not the market we play in. What is more relevant for us is that $7 billion AV signal and routing space. Within that, about roughly we estimate 38% of that, $2.7 billion is that AV over IP market where we offer the solution. If you look at the CAGR growth of this market itself, the broader market is growing at a 4% CAGR. If you see that AV over IP market, that's growing at 14% CAGR according to what we have seen in the industry. NETGEAR solution, NETGEAR AV has grown at much faster than that over the last few years. We expect to continue to grow at a faster pace than the industry and grow share.
I'll explain to you why. This slide spends some time trying to capture what is truly differentiated about what we are doing in this space. First of all, as I said, we really invested in this to make this solution plug and play to help those AV installers. Like when they go in and try to put together a network, they're not experts in IP, but they understand the AV terminology. We made sure that our interfaces were geared towards that segment. We have innovations in our OS so that when you install an AV network, it doesn't overwhelm your IT network. That was a challenge before. There is something called IGMP Plus that we invested in that makes it so that you install a network and you don't have to worry about overwhelming your IT network.
We have, by the way, demos for all of this later on. For those of you sticking around, you should experience that. The second thing, as important as our investment in products, is we have over 500 partnerships with AV manufacturers. What happened in this space is there were unique idiosyncrasies of each of these AV manufacturers. We stepped in to make sure that we exchange products with these manufacturers. We test it. We make sure that we address any unique challenges that we have making these run over our network. We created simpler profiles so that when somebody tries to set up that network, like a Crestron network as an example, if you have a Crestron endpoint, all you do in our switch or in our software is just pick that, hey, I've got a Crestron at the other end.
Everything that is required to make that work flawlessly is taken care of. We have done this over the last many years with over 500 different manufacturers. Lastly, we have some of the best AV over IP expertise in my team. If you have a complex setup, if it is mission-critical like a G7 summit and things are not going right, you can rely on the experts in my team. If they cannot solve it, probably no one else in the world can, right? All of these things, the product, the partnerships, the support, all of this has resulted in a level of loyalty and preference for our products, which frankly, I have not seen with any other product or solution in my career. I am proud of a lot of things I have built.
This type of loyalty that I hear from our partners is just amazing in what the team has accomplished. In fact, when I visit, like I said before, I visited these AV trade shows. What I noticed there in some of the larger trade shows like NAB and Infocom is you go to booth after booth, and you'll have these AV manufacturers displaying their next-gen solution. They have a sign in each of these booths powered by NETGEAR AV. When they see me come in and they see I'm at NETGEAR, they actually reach out to me and actually thank me saying, "You guys are awesome. We love you because you have enabled this industry. You made our jobs easier." What we did is we captured a video in the voice of these partners.
Hopefully you get a sense of what we hear at this show. Thank you for watching.
Let's run around the booth and show you some of the great partners we got that help us put this together. First off, these amazing NETGEAR switches. NETGEAR are like the plumbing that help us put all this together. All the great 4K, 444 streams that come off our NBX go across that NETGEAR network and then get displayed on all of these beautiful Sony displays.
This is Daniel Mirador speaking, president of NDI. We love to be here at the booth with our dear partner NETGEAR. That helps the whole NDI ecosystem to connect very easy. We talk about plug and play. We are excited, and we are honored to have NETGEAR in our connected partner program.
Hi, this is Judy from KeyLoveU. We are a very close partner with NETGEAR, and all the KeyLoveU products can work perfectly with NETGEAR, and you can just plug and play.
Hi, it's Jamie Atkin here at Adder Technology. We're here leveraging the NETGEAR AV product line. We've chosen this product line because it provides the right level of connectivity, 1 gig networks, works out of the box with the AVM system, and delivers all the performance we need for high-performance video, which is pixel perfect, along with USB and audio.
Hi, this is Art Rooks, product management with Kramer, formerly Zeevy. One of the great things I love about the NETGEAR solutions is it just makes it so easy. It's almost a plug and play type situation. You just configure the system for AV over IP support, plug your devices in, and thankfully these NETGEAR switches are both 1 gig and 10 gig PoE. You plug it in, power it up, and you're done.
We chose NETGEAR because it's the most reliable access point for our solutions in medical.
We have a very great partnership together with NETGEAR. You can see the wonderful switches here. We have also started very nice trainings together even last year, and we will continue this even for the future.
My name's Jackson with D10. We're in the NETGEAR booth at ISE 2025. I just want to say at D10, we love to make things easy, and it's a natural extension of our partnership with NETGEAR.
Nate's philosophy around simplicity and design ties so well into NETGEAR's. When you're taking and ensuring that our customers get the best experience with preloaded profiles on NETGEAR's devices, it ensures that setup and deployment is as simple and easy as possible.
Patrick Hayne from QSYS just talking a little bit about NETGEAR. Every device, every experience that we're showing here is being driven by NETGEAR. We love you.
Hopefully you get a sense. That's just a subset of the partners. Like I said, we have 500 partnerships where we have enabled a lot of work involved in testing with them, making sure that the solution works flawlessly. Let's shift gear a little bit and talk about the software behind it. Like I said before, key parts of the solution is the hardware. The hardware is purpose-built because it requires some precise timing. There is operating system on top of that.
We call it AVOS, which makes sure that the system is plug and play. There is also the software called Engage, which makes it all come together like a system. If you are deploying a live event and you have switches, the installer needs to go and plug in the audio-video sources to destinations. They want to set up a Wi-Fi for live event. We make it all so that you can do it literally within minutes. We are even investing in this further to make sure that we continue using AI and other technologies to make it so that you do not even need to go on site to configure it. You can pre-configure these things. You show up on site. You have color-coded, and you will see this from Laurent. You just plug in the cables, and the system should be up and running.
Another area where we have really helped this industry transform. Like I said, there was a dearth of knowledge on AV over IP. We came up with training courses to train AV professionals in this space. We have become the go-to destination when it comes to AV over IP training. We have trained over 30,000 users, over 10,000 installers. In fact, some of our partners drive their end customers to our platforms for training. That is very helpful because these people who are getting trained are getting trained on our software, our technologies, and that is very helpful to our plans. Let me walk you. What is the end result of all of this in terms of how do our partners and customers see the value that we have created? I will walk you through a few examples in terms of customer testimonials.
The first one is from Eric Snyder, who is the CTO of CTI, one of the fastest-growing AV integrators worldwide, probably amongst the top three or four in the world. Eric decided to transition to NETGEAR AV a few years back. He had data with him to really analyze how many labor hours and how long it took to set up these networks when they did it before they had NETGEAR in their system solution versus afterwards. This is based on his calculations that he saw over 90% reduction in average configuration time. For these installers, that savings directly translates into their opEx savings. In many cases, the savings that they realize is more than probably the cost of what they're spending with NETGEAR AV. This is huge.
This is something we have continued to be focused on in terms of differentiating our solutions with. L'Oreal is another customer. They were deploying an internal AV solution. They decided to go with NETGEAR AV because they were really concerned about overwhelming their IT network with AV. They wanted to prevent this bottleneck. Because of that innovation in our software that I talked about, they were able to deploy it flawlessly without any concerns. Lastly, as I said earlier, G7 Summit. This was a partner who got this project to deploy a multi-site deployment of over 40 switches. In their own words, it was like an impossible timeline. They deployed using NETGEAR AV, and they were able to deploy it fairly quickly because of all of those integrations that I talked about earlier. How do we continue to grow in AV?
I think I talked about all the things that we have done in products and innovations, but we're not stopping there. Here are some things that we'll continue to invest in where we have opportunities that we see to realize in this space. First, we believe we can grow in broadcast as well as residential spaces. In broadcast, while we serve sort of the lower end of that market in terms of audio and small to medium-sized broadcast houses, we are going to be launching products next year that allow us to address a larger portion of that market. This is based on feedback that we directly heard from our partners. The second thing we are doing is we are continuing to enhance that plug and play nature of our software.
We're going to come out with an edge device which will run that Engage software, but it'll also run our security software that we acquired last year. I'm going to talk about it later because many of our partners are worried about security when it comes to AV networks. We'll have an edge platform that runs our Engage software that runs the security software. We'll also allow running third-party software, creating like a platform play, for instance, for edge AV networks. Very excited about the opportunities there. Third, we're going to be investing in professional services and support so that we can continue to offer as we go upstream, as we are reaching more mission-critical networks, we are being asked for professional services. We are being asked for SLAs. We're going to be offering these over the coming months as well.
To wrap it all up on the AV side of things, I'm really proud about what the team has created. It's truly differentiated. It's very transformational. It's very heartening to see what we hear in terms of the feedback from our customers. I'm very excited about the opportunities that we still have ahead of us. I'm going to shift gear now and talk about the second pillar that I talked about, which is networking and security for small and medium enterprises. What do I mean by small and medium enterprise? Let's go through some examples of the type of customers I'm talking about where we are actually deployed today. Education. These are private schools, K through 12 schools. Hospitality and multi-dwelling units, apartments, student housing, senior living. Distributed enterprises, distributed franchises. This could be a dentist's office, lawyer's office, burger chains. We're deployed in some of those.
Anywhere where you really have many, many sites and think of it as 500 users or less, we call that a small and medium enterprise. The portfolio that sort of powers all of that is a very comprehensive set of Wi-Fi APs. We have various form factors of APs. We have a fairly rich portfolio of switches for various form factors. We have routing. We have even mobile hotspot, which serves consumers. Many of our partners actually use mobile hotspot as the redundant WAN link or for failover. It serves that need. All of this is managed in the cloud by NETGEAR Insight, a cloud-based management solution. All of it is secured in the cloud by solution NETGEAR XCM, which I'll talk about later.
As you can see for this segment, and I've been in this space for some time, as I said earlier, this set of wide portfolio, both on the software as well as the hardware side, especially for this SME segment, it's fairly unique. Let's talk about what are the dynamics of this market. When I talk about small and medium enterprise, there are some things which are true for the space. One, they have the same need of reliability as a large enterprise. Their businesses depend on this. It might be the point of sale terminals. It might be that application in the cloud. If they can't reach that, they can't run their business. They have the same need for reliability. They have limited IT. Often, their networks are managed by MSPs instead of being managed by them directly.
They're probably even more vulnerable when it comes to security as compared to larger enterprises because they're vulnerable to the same. You probably all have heard about ransomware and malware and all of that. They have limited IT. They're more vulnerable than others. They have a tighter budget. They're looking to spend and get their money to go farther. We believe that this market is not served well today. This set of customers and partners are faced with two suboptimal choices. Choice number one is if they really care about reliability, they go with a solution from a larger enterprise, one of the top three vendors. I've built these products before in my past lives. Really proud of what we built before. I know that what we built was targeted for larger enterprises.
It was targeted for what we call as the muscular IT. It was not targeted for an MSP-driven organization. What ends up happening is these customers end up paying for complexity for features that they do not need. The second suboptimal choice before them is then to either take in do-it-yourself networks, patch together solutions with either something which is not reliable, something which is not backed by support when they need it, or it is not integrated enough to end up playing in sort of the paying in terms of the total cost of ownership. I am going to share with you sort of what we are doing to be uniquely addressing this market. First, look at the total market size of the opportunity itself. I am sure you all know wireless LAN switching, security in terms of on-prem and SASE security. These are huge markets.
The portion of it when it comes to small and medium enterprise is still fairly big, anywhere from 30%-50%, depending on the category you look at. We believe this market is ripe for transition and ripe for disruption. Let's look at how we do that. What I look at as my mission in this space and the team's mission is to really deliver a solution which is purpose-built for MSPs, which is purpose-built for SMEs, which provides enterprise-level reliability, which provides enterprise-level support, yet with SME-level simplicity and price right so the customers don't end up paying for the complexity they don't need. It has to be a solution which has to be servable by MSP. It has to be integrated into their platforms because, again, it's not the end customer who is often managing their network.
It's the partners who are managing their networks on behalf of their customers. Let me walk you through a few examples of our existing customers and the value they see in our solution to hopefully illustrate this. CMATS is a medical institute. It's an institute in India that deployed a campus-wide network, both wireless and switching, using NETGEAR APs and switches as well as cloud management, the Insight management I talked about earlier. They were looking for something which is simple to manage. They had a constrained IT organization. They were looking for somebody else to manage it for them. Yet, they did not want to compromise on reliability. They went with us and are very happy with a fairly large network with us. The second example is here in the U.S., Northwest Ohio School District. It's a very interesting example.
They actually were a customer of one of the top three vendors for that entire school district. During the post-COVID years, I'm sure many of you remember about the supply chain crisis that we had. They were looking to upgrade one of their schools. They were desperate to get GEAR, but they couldn't find GEAR because it was just not available from the existing suppliers. They turned to NETGEAR and said, "You know what? I'll try you in this classroom. What the heck? If it doesn't work out, it's just one classroom, but I need to do it now." Fast forward now, they realized that our solution was as reliable and was as performant as others. They didn't need the other features that they were looking for from larger enterprises. They've since then upgraded 25 schools with us and are continuing to expand with us.
Hopefully, this gives you an example of the type of customers and the type of value prop they see with that solution that I talked about earlier. Switching gear a little bit, let me talk about now the software investments we are making in terms of how we are differentiating and adding this value prop that I talked about. The first one is NETGEAR Insight. It's our cloud management platform. All those devices that I talked about, when they are plugged in, they reach into the cloud. They get discovered in NETGEAR Insight. Then you start managing it from there. It's fairly rich. It's built-in automations for integrations with MSPs. You can see a demo later today with how we use AI to help MSPs quickly troubleshoot issues. It's differentiated in terms of having the right features.
We are in the process of revamping completely the user experience. The new version of this is going to be launched. We are ready for beta trials in the next few weeks. It is going to be launched early next year. It is also going to be integrated with security. When I talked about that XCM, very, very unique in this space, we are going to take that MSP platform for security and integrate it with management so that MSPs have one stop for their switching, for their routing, for their security, and even their cellular failover, all of that managed in one place. The second area where we are investing is XCM. This is our security solution. This is the company we acquired earlier this year. XCM was built specifically with MSPs in mind and specifically for small and medium enterprises.
They're unique in that they offer both a SASE solution so that if you have a hybrid workforce, you can secure them no matter where they are. They also have an extra firewall which allows protecting the workspace, like your IoT devices and so on. What we are doing uniquely is we are taking the firewall and integrating with our routing so that when you deploy a networking solution, you have a security built-in that you need for those small enterprises. You just need to turn on a license to be able to realize that. The second thing we are doing is that inside cloud management I talked about earlier, that and XCM's cloud management portal, those get integrated. You have one single pane of glass. You do not have to log in into two places.
If you're managing networking, you can also see what the situation is on the security side of things. On the portfolio side, I also want to talk about NETGEAR Essentials is also a part of my portfolio. This is a line of switches which are primarily sold through retail and e-com channels. It's a cost-effective way many of our enterprises' customers also use. It allows them to extend their existing networks, if you will. It's a brand which is very well recognized for hardware reliability, for flexibility that is built-in in terms of power options. It's also a trusted brand when it comes to security. Let me now shift gear from products and solutions to our go-to-market. When I joined and we looked at what will be required in growing this business, we realized that it's not just about product and solutions.
We also had to focus on go-to-market. Part of that was building a team. A lot of my senior team, as CJ said earlier, came from other companies where they've been leaders in this space. They have sold through this channel. After building the team, we set a goal for ourselves that we really wanted to be the company that is seen as amongst the easiest to do business with. Because frankly, NETGEAR was not, right? Because we were, I think, in terms of how we interacted with our partners, how we reached our partners, there was a lot of opportunity to do things better. We started taking steps towards that. One of that is simplifying our pricing so that when our partners quote something to their end customers, it doesn't require too many back and forth, right?
We just did that a few months back, great results and great feedback. The other thing we did is launch a new partner program so that it's easy for us to engage with our partners. I'll talk about that later. We're also investing in technologies, AI, and others so that we can just use that both internally in our own sales team in terms of tracking progress towards our reach to customers, but also in terms of being able to interact with our partners. Let's talk about the partnership program. We just launched this earlier this month. The partner program is very competitive to the industry. It has various tiers for the partners depending on the amount of business they do, depending on the amount of certification they have with our products.
We also invested in a portal which makes it very easy for us to reach these partners. If they want to get certified, if they want to get trained, if they want new collateral from NETGEAR, if they want to bring a deal and register that deal with us, all of that has been greatly simplified. We just launched it earlier this month with great feedback from the partners who have tried it. CJ called out earlier that one of the goals for NETGEAR overall is growing our subscription and services revenue. That applies to my businesses as well. Here are the things that we believe will help us grow subscription and services revenue in general. First, as I talked about that NETGEAR Insight platform, that cloud management platform, we're going to be revamping the subscription for that, including support as part of it.
As we add more value to it in terms of the use cases that it enables, in terms of integration with security, we believe we'll be driving a greater attach of that product as we grow the NETGEAR enterprise business. That is one area where we'll grow subscriptions. Security standalone itself, SASE, these are all well-known markets. Customers know to pay for these through subscriptions. As we grow it, that will naturally result in growing our subscription revenue. Second, on the AV side, we will offer differentiated support because, again, many of our customers are asking us for specific SLAs when it comes to support. Our customers are asking us for next business day replacement of hardware. We are going to be packaging all of this in terms of offering a premium support service.
We expect a greater attach, especially as we go upstream to larger accounts. Lastly, as CJ called out earlier, we launched professional services, but there are greater opportunities there, not just in terms of professional services, but in terms of validating a design in terms of monitoring it later on because we are going into more mission-critical networks. These customers want someone from the vendor side to be present there. We feel that there's an opportunity for us to grow this business as well. To sum it all up, this is my last slide. Very excited about the opportunities before us. If I wear sort of the lens of long-term, what does it look like beyond 2030? I'm confident we can grow our top line double- digits.
I believe with all of the services that I talked about that will grow the subscription and services revenue at a faster clip. It will be greater than 20% of our business. I think our gross margins will be north of 55%. I think when it comes to gross margins, what we are focused on right now is, like I said, there's an opportunity we see for a player that offers solutions which are right-priced, but yet offer a great value compared to the larger enterprises, if you will. Our goal is to be able to offer this in a way such that we can grow our market share and yet be accredited to our gross margins overall. The priority, obviously, is to make sure that we can continue to gain share there. With that, thank you for listening.
Hopefully, I was able to convey a little bit about what I'm excited about in terms of the opportunities here. With that, I'll turn it over to Jonathan to talk about the consumer business.
Consumer devices and services space for 20+ years. A couple of highlights along the way. I ran product management for the Kindle products at Amazon. I oversaw the Paperwhite and the Fire tablets. I also led product and UX at Fitbit for seven and a half years, three and a half years of that at Google, where I oversaw the Pixel Watch, all of the Fitbit devices, as well as the Google Fit app, the Fitbit app. I grew our premium subscription service from the ground up to an over $100 million business during that time. CJ talked about our purpose to power extraordinary experiences for our customers.
What we know is that our products are essential. Sit on the couch to watch a favorite TV show, a movie. The network has to be there for them. It has to work perfectly. 68% of families say that that TV time is something that really brings them closer together. There is a lot of meaning in powering that experience. We know how important hybrid work is that the majority of them, 75%, say that their network connectivity directly impacts their productivity and their professional image. We know how important our work is here. We know how important the smart home has become. This is not a gadget world. This is really how you get into your home. It is how you unlock your garage door. It is how you know your family made it home safely.
70% of consumers consider their smart home devices essential for their safety, their security, and their comfort. Gaming has exploded. We know that 25% of households have a modern game console. That is putting a lot of stress on their network. 35% of those gamers are live streaming their game content. Gaming is an essential experience that we power. We also know that customers want to take those experiences, that connectivity on the go with them, whether it is a business trip or a family vacation. 70% of travelers actually rate Wi-Fi as their number one travel amenity. Public hotspots are notoriously insecure and kludgy. We build our mobile hotspots to solve this solution for our customers. I am proud of the portfolio we built. Behind this portfolio is a team at NETGEAR who is committed to solving these customer problems. We are customer-obsessed.
We go through those use cases. We try to figure out all the intricacies of what customers might see across our product line. We have our Nighthawk routers, our Orbi mesh systems, our cable business. We have our range extenders, our mobile hotspots. We thread all of it together with our mobile apps and our services. We're moving our portfolio towards a good, better, best lineup. CJ talked about that. We, as a business, previously had focused much more on the high end of the market, on the premium segment in home networking. We have made a shift to bring in lower ASP products to both expand to new segments, but also to create a top-of-funnel for our subscription services. We are excited about the focus that we're starting to see in our product lineup. At the top of the line is our Orbi 970 series.
This product, if you read the reviews, you'll see that they say over and over again that this is an industry leader as a product line. There is a lot of engineering behind the Orbi 970. It is unique in providing a dedicated backhaul, that connection between satellites and routers, so that communication is not interfering with that movie night or gameplay, etc. Another product that I'll celebrate across our product line is the Orbi 370. This product launched over the summer. We were able to take a lot of that engineering that went into the 970 and really pioneering mesh systems and bring it into a lower ASP product in the 370. Our goal was to make something much more affordable, much more accessible in the mesh space. I'll talk a little bit about our mobile hotspots.
With the M6 Pro and the M7 Pro, we have created the most powerful, no compromises set of specs and performance in mobile hotspots today. In keeping with this strategy to expand our product lineup, I'm super excited to announce, and you may have seen the press release this morning, that we have a new product in our lineup. This is the Nighthawk 5G M7. Our goal here is to help you stay connected on the go with secure, portable Wi-Fi powered by 5G. This is a super powerful product. It supports 3.6 gigabit per second connectivity and can connect 32 devices simultaneously. We brought this out at an affordable price point. It's launching at $499. It'll be available in January of next year, of 2026. One of the great design elements of this product is that it's pocketable.
We've designed it to fit right into a bag, right into a front pocket, while still having 10 hours of battery life. Another great part of the M7 is that it'll launch with a new NETGEAR mobile app that will come with an eSIM marketplace. With the eSIM marketplace, consumers can choose the data package that's right for them when they're traveling. They'll have the choice. They could use a physical SIM. They'll be able to bring their own eSIM, or they'll be able to just go into the NETGEAR app and shop for the data package that's right for them. Very excited about this product. I'll show you a little video so you get a better feel for it. Great. Excited to see this one launch. Great product development effort by our team to pull this together.
You'll get to see it early next year. As excited as I am about the products we have today, I'm really excited about the vision for the future and where we're going. We want to be the trusted partner for connectivity wherever you are as a business unit. As I talk about the future, maybe think back 10 years and think about what your home network was like. This was the early days of Nest. You might have been an early adopter and had a Nest thermostat. 4K TVs were really at their beginning, even though Netflix had started streaming 4K. Not a lot of homes could actually consume that content. Fast forward to today. Think about what your home's like, the number of devices you have, the number of streaming services coming in at 4K.
There is penetration of over 60% of 4K televisions. 8K is just starting to take hold. Fast forward into the future. Think about what 10 years from now is going to be like with immersive virtual reality content. We'll have personalized AI-powered gaming. All of those devices in your home are going to be higher bandwidth and even more demanding because of AI and their need to have a robust connection to the cloud. We see ourselves building this foundation for the future by solving these hard problems of the network of today, but also the network of the future. I'll talk about how we'll do that. First off, let's take a look at the market that we're in today.
We largely are in the home and on-the-go networking segment, which is the combination of the home networking retail space, the ISP consumer premise equipment space, plus mobile hotspots. We see ourselves having an opportunity to expand here. That is because we're really focused on the hardest problem. The hardest problem is that last mile, that last 100 yards, the intricacies of the home and getting a network to work and work the right way in the complex environment and unique environment of each home. We also have the opportunity to play in these two adjacent spaces, the smart home space and the consumer cybersecurity space, both of which are growing at a 10% plus CAGR. I'll talk about our vision for growing in these segments. First, let's start off with connectivity. This is really our heritage. This is what we're known for.
We've been building connectivity solutions for 30 years as a business. One of the reasons I joined NETGEAR is because it has such a heritage, such an amazing brand, and such a history of building connected products. Standing behind that are millions of customers who trust us and trust us to deliver these products for them. We have an IP portfolio of over 150 patents. We have an engineering capability behind all this that brought solutions like the 970 that I talked about earlier. All of this gives us a lot of confidence that we have a strong foundation that we can build our connectivity roadmap on. Behind this, we also have two really amazing consumer brands, the Nighthawk brand and the Orbi brand. Nighthawk is the brand we use for our routers and mobile hotspots.
It is meant to be a tech-forward brand with a tech-forward design to match. Our goal with the design is to signify technological mastery in our products. We also have the Orbi line. Orbi is focused on the advanced home user. Orbi solves, as a mesh system, those complex home problems that I talked about. We give you a lot of flexibility to put satellites in different parts of your home, to use wired or wireless connections between them. There is a lot of sophistication under the hood of Orbi, but we have built a design that is really elegant, refined, and ultimately very minimalist. Orbi is designed to fit on any bookshelf, any end table, and any home as a design. Where is this going? What's coming is Wi-Fi 8.
Wi-Fi 8 is going to intersect with an AI era for home connectivity. If you think about the progression of Wi-Fi, it's really gone from a numbers game, number of devices, bandwidth, speeds, adding more bands. We're moving towards the reliability era with Wi-Fi 8. What we expect to see in Wi-Fi 8 is 2x lower latency and 10x higher reliability. That's driven largely by the Wi-Fi 8 standard, which focuses on more intelligent coordination across the network, batching out bandwidth to the right device at the right time, a better experience moving between routers and satellites so that you can roam about the house, and then enhanced performance at the edge of the network so that when you get to that fringe of your network, you'll be able to stay connected more consistently.
The timing is really set up well to align with the future of AI. That is both cloud-based AI models and operating at the edge. What we will be able to do in this next generation is build proactive fixes for your network. We will be able to build models that identify anomalies, that identify problems, and fix those problems before the customer sees them. When customers do have issues, we will have ways for them to get more proactive support. We will be able to build tools with AI to give them proactive help and self-help. We are excited for what this is going to mean for the customer experience in the future.
To sum it up, where we see this networking of the next generation going is more predictive networks, the more personalized networks that can really understand the uniqueness of your environment, ultimately giving you a higher performance product. I'll shift gears and talk about how we'll grow in the smart home. I talked about this proliferation of smart home devices and the sheer number of devices in the home and the increase we've seen. That's only going to increase. The capability and expectations for those devices are only going to increase. We also know that most homes are not a single ecosystem. They actually operate across multiple ecosystems, whether that's Alexa, Google Home, Apple, but also dozens of other major players who build smart home solutions.
We see an opportunity to connect these ecosystems together, to be the company that can be multi-platform, that can be multi-ecosystem, and really support every kind of device on the network. As a part of this, we're excited to be partnering with Google. We are taking this first big step in our move towards the smart home and announcing that we're working with Google to implement the Google Home Runtime in upcoming and existing Orbi products. This is something you'll see rolling out over the course of 2026, but wanted to share this partnership with you today. As I said, this is the first step of many as we move towards our vision of being the trusted smart home of the future. That means our ability to connect, to orchestrate these devices, and keep them secure.
If you think about NETGEAR, we're in a pretty unique position here. We are an independent company. We don't have a different business. We're not a subsidiary of some other business that has other goals and motivations. Our motivation is very simple. That's to help make your home network work really well. We are conforming and a part of driving standards in this space. We're a US-based company that's focused on your safety, your security, and your privacy as a core value of our business. We think that gives us an advantage in the smart home space in the future. Now I'm going to talk about cybersecurity and where we see this going. We know just how great the threats are to homes today. The new front line is the smart home.
The same way that you wouldn't leave your physical front door unlocked, you shouldn't leave your digital front door unlocked. We're doing a lot of work to protect the home with 29 attacks on home networks every 24 hours. That's staggering. We protect your home and your data in three ways. The first is with our physical devices. We use standards like WPA3. We do a lot of third-party testing of our products before they ever leave. We do regular firmware updates that we push out to our devices in the field to make sure they have the latest and greatest security fixes. We know that there are emerging threats that happen in real time. We have something called advanced router protection.
This is a dynamic AI-powered system that looks for and identifies new threats, whether those are brute force attacks, denial of service attacks. We are able to push out a capability to block those attacks in near real time to our routers and mesh systems that are out in the field. We are also excited to have this advanced router protection capability launching with the new M7 that I announced earlier. You are really bringing a secure network with you wherever you go. The third plank of our cyber strategy is Armor. Armor is our subscription service. It delivers you a powerful suite of tools to keep you safe when you are online. We have a trial that we include with our routers when you purchase and then convert to a paid service thereafter.
Our goal with Armor is to protect you from scams, from viruses, from malware, and not just those devices in your home, but also you can take that protection with you on the go on your phone, your laptop as well. Armor is the tent pole. It's really the starting point of our recurring revenue and subscription service. Our goal as a business unit is to move more and more of our revenue into services, into more predictable recurring revenue streams. To do that, we have to build a foundation. The first piece of that is building a world-class mobile app architecture. We have that underway. You'll see the first instantiation of that when we launch the M7. We're hardening our subscription and payments capability. We're also building affordances in our product to support new revenue models.
The M7's eSIM marketplace is just one example of that. As we look out at our subscription revenue strategy, we have three major planks to that. The first is strengthen our current service. There is a lot of low-hanging fruit here for us to just optimize what we have today with Armor through better conversion, retention, and those kinds of tools. Second, we are going to add more intellectual property to our services. We see our hardware really as a catalyst, as a flywheel to drive new types of service that we will see coming out with AI, with some of the self-healing capabilities that we will have. Finally, we see the smart home as a great launching point for new service types for us as well.
With all of that in mind, as we look at this consumer business and the beyond 2030 time frame, we anticipate a single-digit growth in our top line. We will start moving more of our revenue to subscription and recurring revenue, 25% +. We will expand our gross margins to greater than 35% as a part of this transition. With that, I'm going to hand it over to Bryan, our CFO. Thanks a lot for your time.
Thank you, Jonathan. Good afternoon, everyone. Very excited to be here today to share with you all how our efforts to transform the business have already started to bear fruit in terms of our financial performance and some of the strategies you've heard today and how those will impact us in the future.
I wanted to start with looking at what we said at the start of 2025 and how we thought the year would play out, starting with our top line where we said we expect to grow. Happy to report that we're up 5% year to date. This has been driven by the AV business thus far, which has propelled the enterprise revenues to be up 20% year- on- year. We also said we'd expand our gross margin performance. We're up 900 basis points year to date. Lastly, we said we would not be profitable, but we expected to improve our performance off of 2024. While this one we're not really delivering on, I think we're quite pleased to be reporting positive non-GAAP EPS of $0.19 year to date. Our objective is long-term value creation.
To deliver on this, we've got some planning philosophies that are really important to guide us as we go. The first is we're going to invest in the portions of the business that we think have the highest opportunity for long-term profitable revenue growth. We're also going to fund the competencies that we think are required to deliver on the transformation. These would include software development being insourced and the go-to-market resources that Pramod touched on earlier. We're also going to continue to look and scrutinize the slower-performing portions of our business and look to optimize costs there to help fund our investments. Lastly, we're going to balance near-term profitability with long-term value creation.
As I said earlier, we've made tremendous progress thus far in terms of expanding our non-GAAP gross margin, up 900 basis points year to date at 37.5%, which is great, but we think there's a lot of opportunity to expand further. We are going to drive towards our long-term target of 50%. There are three key pillars to help us deliver on that. The first being increasing our mix of enterprise revenues, growing our recurring revenue streams, and driving operational efficiencies. Led by the momentum of the AV business, we've been able to expand the mix of our revenues coming from the enterprise business from 40% just two years ago to 49% this year. With the investments that we're making and will continue to make in the enterprise business, we expect this can grow to 65% or higher.
With the gross margin of enterprise at about 48% year to date, obviously, this will be a major contributor to expanding our total company gross margin performance. As you heard from Pramod and Jonathan comment to both of our businesses, we have a strategy to expand our subscription and service revenue base. While consumer is further ahead today with the Armor offering and with the M7 launch expected early next year, we'll have mobile services. Pramod laid out the opportunities that we have on the enterprise side with our cloud management platform, Insight, as well as security with Exium. Today, we're sitting at about 5% of our revenues coming from recurring services. We think over the long term, we can grow this to 20% or even higher. NETGEAR has a diverse supply chain. Today, we're manufacturing in Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia.
Not only are we not manufacturing in China, we are not sourcing any connected components from China. We've been participants in the CBP's CTPAT program for over 18 years, which I think speaks to our commitment to a resilient and secure supply chain. With the strength of our relationships with the supply chain, we think we can extract further cost efficiencies in our business. One such example is that as we recently signed a perpetual license for our managed switch OS that will not only allow us to execute faster and deliver on the capabilities that our customers are demanding in that space, but it's also going to provide P&L benefits. We expect to continue to be good stewards of capital. We have a three-pronged approach. One is to invest in the organic business, capitalize on those opportunities.
We're going to continue to look at strategic M&A opportunities that can accelerate our plans. Lastly, returning capital to shareholders. To capitalize on the opportunities that Pramod and Jonathan have spoken about today, we're going to have to make further investments. Enterprise, the focus will continue to be on insourcing software and go-to-market capabilities. On the consumer side, we're going to be more measured. We're going to minimally run that business to be contribution profit break even or slightly better. While the service provider and cable revenue stream within the consumer business is declining, it's down about 20% year to date. We expect it to decline at a rate of about high single digits to low double digits in the future years.
We do think that we're going to be able to harvest those profits to allow us to make the investments required to expand the core business and really drive the subscription business. Of course, we'll look at operational efficiencies, leveraging heavily on AI. While for 2026, we expect to grow our opEx at a rate slightly higher than revenue, we do think in 2027 and years beyond that will normalize. There are really three key areas that we're looking at in terms of M&A. One is capabilities, the VOG transaction from earlier this year provided the foundation for our software resource center in Chennai, India. We're also looking at product adjacencies, so Exium and security platform. When we did our enterprise business strategy, the first iteration of that, security was the top of the list.
Obviously, given that both businesses individually are subscaled today, anything that we think can create further scale in our business is something that we'll look at. Of course, we're going to maintain a very high bar when we're evaluating these potential targets. We view share repurchase as an efficient way to return capital to shareholders. From the start of 2024, we've repurchased 3.4 million shares, $69 million at $19.99 per share. We expect to continue to buy stock. We will at least offset dilution as we look forward. There are 2 million shares remaining on the current authorization. While we're not providing very specific guidance for 2026, we did want to give some directional indication of where we think the business is going to go. We do expect to grow our top line. AV will still be the driving force.
We do expect to change the trajectory of the enterprise networking business. We expect to further expand our gross margins, which, after we've made these incremental investments, will still allow us to improve our profitability year- over- year. As CJ said at the onset, we wanted to provide kind of a medium-term and a long-term target. I'd frame the medium-term to be a few years out, 2028, and how we think these businesses will be performing and what the combined impact would be. Starting with revenue growth, we think enterprise will continue to grow at a double-digit rate. On the consumer side, we expect if you exclude the service provider and cable business, that business will be growing at a low to mid-single-digit rate. Combined, this would be NETGEAR in total would be high single-digit to low double-digit revenue growth.
With the efforts of both businesses focusing on subscription revenue streams, we think we can grow the combined mix of our overall revenues coming from these services to 5%-10%. The enterprise gross margin is expected to be in the range of 50%-53%. We think consumer can be at 30% or higher. The blend of this would be in the 40%-43% range. Contribution margin for enterprise, we think would operate at 24%-27%. On the consumer side, we think we'll be break-even to 3%. The combined non-GAAP operating margin performance of the combined business would be expected to be in the range of 5%-8%. Looking to long-term, again, 2030 or beyond, we think the growth profiles of the top line would be double-digit for enterprise, single digits for the consumer, excluding service provider and cable.
Combined NETGEAR would be double digits. We think enterprise can grow its revenue mix to about 20% coming from subscription and services. On the consumer side, 25% or higher. This would blend to about 20% or higher on the combined business. Gross margin for enterprise would be 55% or higher and 35% or higher on the consumer side, blending to total NETGEAR gross margins at 50% or higher. Lastly, contribution margins would be about 30% or higher for enterprise and double digits on the consumer side, driving total combined non-GAAP operating margins in the range of 15%-20%. With that, I'm going to pass it back to CJ for some closing remarks.
Yeah, we're going to shift to Q&A in a minute. I wanted to make sure, just to sum up kind of the key things I hope you all, or we hope you all, took away from this. I guess it's not on the slide, but hopefully you recognize that we're pretty excited about the opportunity ahead. I guess moving to kind of the six things we wanted to specifically highlight is achieving that opportunity, we really feel like we've set the right foundation. We've got a different financial profile from a couple of years ago. We're really well positioned and on a strong trajectory forward. Second, Pramod spent a good bit of time talking about AV. That's our number one priority. We've got a strong moat, got momentum, want to build off of that.
Third, in terms of how we think about investing in other opportunities, we're focused on large, growing, more profitable markets. Fourth, whether it's consumer or enterprise, it's all about software differentiation that enables recurring revenue growth. Fifth, we plan to continue to be responsible allocators of capital. For enterprise, we plan to expand profitability while we invest back into that business. For consumer, over the next few years, we plan to keep that business, as Bryan said, roughly contribution margin neutral to enable us to transform it. Overall, we're committed to steadily increasing profitability and continuing to return capital to shareholders. Finally, if you think about 2026, as Bryan said, we plan to continue to grow revenue, continue to expand margin, expand profitability.
When you reflect on those mid and long-term targets, we're just excited about getting on that path of long-term value creation for shareholders. With that, I think we need two minutes to just set up for Q&A. Then we'll get right into it. I think we're going to move these chairs to the front.
Thank you, CJ. As far as maximizing the opportunity, building on the momentum, can you just take a step back a little bit? Because obviously, when you came in, you saw that business, you saw the opportunity. How far along are we in maximizing that momentum? I mean, because it's been a strong business the last two years. I just want to understand a little bit how much longer can that very unique momentum continue on the AV side?
Yeah, I can start, then Pramod, I'll hand it to you. We think we're early days there. The whole transition is really just beginning. We've got markets that we haven't expanded fully into, like broadcast. We're just launching services. We are in the early days of disrupting that market. Yeah, we're looking forward to the years ahead. If you want to.
Yeah, I think CJ said it. That is AV over IP transition that is happening, that is accelerating. It's not done yet. The market itself is growing. We're still, from a market share perspective, our estimate says we are still a tinier portion compared to the big players in this space. Just in the existing place where we play in, there is still room for us to continue to grow, to capture share because of all the things I talked about earlier. There are net new markets like broadcast and others where, with the new products that we'll be launching next year, we'll have further opportunity to grow in this. I think we still are, I would say, early in terms of being able to capture that entire share.
Great. As my follow-up question, maybe for you, Bryan, it sounds like you're going to grow opEx a little bit faster than top line growth next year. Because of the gross margin expansion, you're still expecting profit growth. I guess as we look at 2027, would you say that some of that heavier lift on the opEx side starts to come down so that beyond gross margin leverage, the actual operating leverage starts to kick in more meaningfully?
Yeah, that's right. Yes, as you said, we're going to invest in 2026. Really, we're focused on the long-term value creation. '26 will be ahead of revenue pace. 2027, I would expect to be growing in line with revenues. From there, I think we will get some additional scale.
Thank you.
Hi, this is Logan on for Adam over at Raymond James. Our first question was, we just want to ask about the decision to run consumer contribution margin at 0%-3% in the near term. Maybe what different scenarios were considered, any more color on where those investments are going, and any mechanisms you're using to monitor ROI on those investments.
Yeah, great question. I'm happy to start. I guess the foundational premise there is that we see a really significant long-term opportunity in consumer. A lot of what's put us here is a mix of some self-inflicted decision-making combined with some unnatural market forces. We're quite bullish about the long-term opportunity there. Now, in the short term, that business could obviously change significantly if there was a—we've talked a lot about the potential action on TP-Link. Even irrespective of that, if you—hopefully, it's hard to convey some of what Jonathan shared in earnings releases, right? We are quite bullish about being able to disrupt, regain our leadership position in that market independent of that. We do think that headwind's coming or that tailwind is coming anyway. Anyway, Ted.
Yeah, I would just say we know how long it takes to get the subscription business to really take off. We have to invest in the tools and the foundation that get us there. At the same time, we need to expand the top of funnel part of that portfolio with our hardware. We're doing those things. We're, I'd say, responsibly allocating capital to those infrastructure, those foundational projects that we think will bear the most return in the long run for us.
Yeah, and maybe the one other thing I'll add that would be hard for Jonathan to say, but I can say it. When we launched the search for Jonathan's role, there was a lot of interest for that position. Jonathan was our first choice because he brings a very deep product capability to the table. When you think about products in this space, solving connectivity in the home is just ripe for disruption. Everybody knows it. We all have homes. We all struggle with that, right? Having a product-oriented leader, really, especially with all of the technology shifts that are happening, I mean, Jonathan's the perfect person to lead us through this.
No, that's helpful. Thank you. My follow-up question is, those medium and long-term targets you provided, and you kind of touched on it with the potential TP-Link ban, how would those be impacted if that does happen? Any color that you guys want to provide potentially there?
Maybe I can start, and then Bryan can add in. Those assume status quo. The businesses where we compete heavily with TP-Link is obviously on the home networking side. Pramod ended his presentation with NETGEAR Essentials. That is a fairly sizable business for Pramod. In those two areas, we are head-to-head with TP-Link.
Yeah, I think the obvious is that it would get us some scale much earlier in the trajectory that we showed here today that would help.
Helpful. Thank you.
Hey, got me here? Okay, good. Tim Savageaux at Northland. I want to try and get a little more detail on the Pro AV stuff, given it is the top priority. That is, you threw out a few deals there, various metric counts. Are these million-dollar deals, $100,000-type deals? If you can attach a dollar value to the—I know it's probably tough to do that difficulty, but I'd love to get a sense of kind of what we're talking about there. Then higher level, can you talk in more detail about the competitive environment? Sir, who specifically are we talking about here? How would you break it down? I know you think you have a small share, but any more detail would be appreciated there too.
Yeah, I want to take it.
Yeah, do it.
Yeah, so the way the market is today when it comes to live events and stuff like that, there's a lot of small deals as well. It's actually—I look at it as a positive. It's a very well-diversified business. We do have some of those which I talked about, the G7 Summit. I talked about the largest retailer in the world, thousands of conference rooms. Boeing is another one which is deploying thousands of conference rooms. These are all million-dollar deals, right? We are beginning to see—the positive thing is we are beginning to see those larger deals. When it comes to competition, many of the networking switch vendors compete in this space. When it comes to broadcast, the big players, obviously, there are Cisco and Arista.
Specifically on the AV side, what we did in terms of our partnerships, the 500 partnerships that I talked about earlier, competition probably has barely two, right? I think that differentiation in the product, the differentiation in partnership, making it simple. Frankly, this is an area that the team here uniquely focused on solving, right? I mean, I've been with other companies. There are other places they're focused on, not on the AV side of things. I think those are the differentiations, if you will. The one thing which I didn't mention earlier is I talked about Boeing and the largest retailer. Unified Communications is also a place where we're beginning to see increasing traction. It used to not be before. It was more AV.
Now, when it comes to conferencing, when people are deploying and upgrading their rooms, they're often going with seeing the value of putting a NETGEAR AV switch in there.
Yeah, the one thing I would add, we've consistently reported on the number of AV partners we have. We're over 500 now. I want to make sure it's clear. That's not like we sign a one-page deal and you can co-market with logos. We're actually taking equipment into our lab. We're testing it. We're ensuring that the protocols of one of those partners are integrated into our software. When a system integrator goes to deploy an AV solution, it's a button click versus command line interface coding. 500 partners is a really, really big deal. Laurent, who's here, product leader for that, can just demo how simplistic we have made the deployments by virtue of that upfront work of partnership in lab and integrating their code into our software experience.
I just had one quick follow-up, if I could. Any meaningful difference within enterprise between ProAV margins and the rest of the business? Or really, you could expand that to all three of your segments if you got something to call out.
There's a greater subscription attached to the enterprise side because that's how the market is. We're not the only ones. Others offering that solution also offer subscription services. As I said during my presentation, we are sort of making sure that we are priced right to capture market share in that space because we are establishing our presence compared to a relatively small base right now. As on the ProAV side, we are already seen as a leader. Hopefully that helps.
Thanks. Scott Searle with Roth. Maybe to start on the home side of the business, consumer side, I wonder if you could calibrate us in terms of subscription attach rates. Right now, when I think about Armor being attached to home network deployments, kind of where are we? Where do you think that gets to? Very much in terms of the core skill set of the company is networking and connectivity. There are a lot of adjacencies then that start to come along with it that you're thinking about. I wonder if you could expand a little bit about that in the home and monetization opportunities and strategies because there are different applications. There is different other content that you could own. Kind of how you see the evolution of NETGEAR over the next couple of years.
Yeah, I'll talk about where we're going in the future and if you want to share more on the attach rates. I would say, first off, on the attach rate, there's a lot of optimization that can happen in the onboarding experience so that customers understand why Armor is valuable, what it does for them, why they should subscribe. There's a lot to still be unlocked there that I would just call, we call it the low-hanging fruit of that subscription space. As we look out on the horizon, we know that we're going to be able to solve more and more problems. Some of those are cloud-based AI applications. Those cost money. There are tokens that are behind those. We're going to design the business models around it so that there is a service component. That's just the nature of those kinds of solutions.
Yeah, I think we'll be able to build models that look at what's unique about a network to do so in a privacy-safe way, create the model in a way that is more in the customer's control, and be able to apply that as a service. That's sort of the core vision. We'll hopefully be able to share more product details down the road.
Yeah, I'll just add to the attach rates. We're not going to share specific percentages, though I will say we have a lot of headroom. We're not attaching very well today. This is when I said we weren't good at the subscription fundamentals. It's things like including a year for free of the subscription when somebody buys a product. They deploy the product. They don't realize that they're actually benefiting from a paid service. You ask them to make the purchase again a year later. Another example is we don't get the credit card upfront, right? It's not like, "Oh, you're in for a year, and then you've got to," it just automatically rolls over.
It's like, "No, no, we have to resell you on the value of Armor." There is just another one is you go to pay with your credit card. Your credit card does not pre-populate. Just a lot of basic stuff that we will get excellent at. That provides headroom on there. That is beyond the top of the funnel expansion. That is beyond adding value into the subscription.
If I could, on the enterprise side, I wonder if you could expand a little bit about, I guess, monetization of Exium, right, in terms of attach rates there. Is that more explicit subscription going forward? As I think about the evolution on the enterprise side, certainly, again, the enterprise in the world has been more Wi-Fi-centric in terms of connectivity. Private networks and cellular are starting to find their way into the equation now. I think, I guess, in your past life at Ruckus, there were some solutions that combined both Wi-Fi and cellular capabilities. I'm kind of wondering where private networks on that side kind of fits in the evolution. Do you see participation there in other monetization opportunities? Thanks.
Yeah, so I'll answer your first question about security first. Security absolutely will be a new subscription opportunity in addition to the network. We offer security, offer it as a subscription. If they buy a routing product and they want to add security in that as an edge firewall, then they buy a subscription for that and they enable that. We are in the process of sort of learning from our partners and integrating that. The first phase of integration is going to be coming out soon. We are introducing and talking to our partners right now. There's a lot of excitement about that. We expect that once we launch this integrated product, that will drive increased attach and increased growth of the enterprise business. On the cellular and private network side, let me talk about cellular first.
I went on a customer tour along with CJ, and we asked many of our partners the opportunity they see on the cellular router side. Absolutely, customers see this as a redundant WAN link for failover. They already use our mobile hotspot. We see an opportunity to potentially build a cellular router type of product to enable this segment. Private networking, we are watching. I mean, I have watched this, like you said, in previous companies, and I know people in this industry. I feel like right now, this segment is going for certain segments like oil and gas, difficult-to-reach places, logistics. Not exactly our initial focus area. If we see this as developing, if we hear this from our partners, then we'll look at it more closely. I don't know if you want to add anything.
Nope. That covered it well.
Yeah, and actually, maybe we can take one from the audience right now. Given the importance of ProAV and driving growth in the near term and longer term, how do you have conviction that that engine will keep moving forward?
Yeah, I think I talked about all the differentiation that Laurent and team have built over many years, right? These are not things that are just a feature that you go ahead and implement. It's not there are features that we've implemented. On top of that, those partnerships, those learnings about making our solutions plug and play, that's truly differentiated. The other thing unique about this is the relationship we have built with our partners, both on the integrator side as well as on the manufacturers. That gives us leverage in terms of our go-to-market as well. Many of these deals that I talked about earlier, the smaller deals, our sales team is not even involved in that. We are influencing the integrator base.
When they have a project, an AV project that goes in, they basically just prefer a NETGEAR AV switch, and we see the order for that. It's not somebody on my side who's selling that, right? Great leverage on that side. I'm very excited about some of the product roadmap items. I won't share it here, but we have some exciting ideas about how we can be innovating in this space even further.
Great. A quick follow-up on the other side of your business. How do you see the 5G mobile hotspot products actually helping grow the enterprise side of the business?
I think I answered that question earlier for Scott, right? The mobile hotspot is the unique thing about what we do compared to any of the previous companies I worked at, is that we support that mobile hotspot supported inside. Think of a partner who is deploying a small and medium branch, and they want redundancy. They want WAN to be cellular so that in case the primary network goes down, the network fails over to cellular. They can manage all of that using NETGEAR Insight. That central manageability is important. Many customers already use it. The opportunity with cellular router is, again, we can harden that mobile hotspot, integrate it better with our security solution. Now you have security, WAN, SD-WAN, security, everything integrated, everything managed in the cloud, right? It's just beautiful. I do not think anybody has that type of solution.
Yeah, Eric, I'd also just add that the carrier relationships that we have and we've had for a long time are super strategic. The way that we've worked with carriers, we expect to change going forward. We've historically responded to RFPs when there's a device need for the carriers. We're spending more time working with the carriers, more strategic go-to-market partners so that we can capitalize on some of the opportunities that Pramod just highlighted.
Hi, Tore from Stifel . I had two follow-ups. First one for you, Jonathan. When you think about, I think you mentioned the good, better, best, where you're now starting to add the lower end to the portfolio to drive more subscriber and recurring revenue going forward. I mean, that sounds a little bit of a balancing act. Maybe I'm incorrect here, but wouldn't the lower-end products be lower gross margin? I mean, obviously, the recurring revenue would be higher gross margin. To me, that sounds like a little bit of a balancing act. Will there be a significant lag time, you think, with getting that actual services revenue up and running?
Yeah, I think that's obviously a balance that we have to play. I think if we're feeding that top of funnel, if we have a very rigorous front end for getting people into trial, doing all the things CJ mentioned before of getting those basics in place, that cycle from trial to that initial conversion can be much shorter. I think it's much more about also making sure that the service and the way we position it is going to appeal to that buyer. If they came in, they're fully price conscious. Are they going to want a subscription? We need to make sure it's really a compelling narrative for them also. We're getting both a high attach rate and then a quick conversion cycle to see it turn around and show up more quickly in the revenue.
Yeah, the two things I would add is that there's real benefits to being up and down the market. One of those is that Amazon's a growing platform, an important go-to-market platform for us. If you're not in the volume part of the segment, it is very hard to get visibility and traction. A lot of our consumers, the behaviors that we see is people step up, right? They want the best, but they discover us through our lower-end products. The other thing, and this is relevant to me because I've got two college-age kids, is that's when they start to discover NETGEAR, when they want better connectivity in their dorms or their apartments. If you don't have those products, it's hard to build that relationship with customers. We're going to do a better job when they become a NETGEAR customer of retaining them.
That hasn't been historically kind of a focus with our software in that kind of relationship management piece. That's why we've got to be in the good, better, best.
Yeah, that's great perspective. As my follow-up, you mentioned it very briefly at the beginning, CJ. You talked about some better inventory management. You didn't discuss supply a lot here today. We do know that you're catching up with some supply, especially on the enterprise side of your business. We also know that semiconductor supply continues to be exceptionally tight. If anything, it's probably getting even tighter. What is the company putting in place to make sure that you don't go through these periods again where you don't have enough supply for your demand? Thank you.
Yeah, great. Great question. Do you want to take that?
Yeah, let me start. One is we've revamped our S&OP process. So we're scrutinizing down to the product level. We're looking out much longer to get ahead of things. Certainly, we've made a lot of progress on the managed switch, which you were alluding to. Every quarter, we've been able to improve that supply position and still remain very confident by the first quarter of next year that we'll be in a place where we'll have some buffer stock, which is very important just given the growth profile of that business. Now, there are things out there. We've talked about the memory market where there are obviously major suppliers that have exited a certain portion of that market that have created some pricing challenges. That certainly is partly because of supply out there. But we're having conversations.
I would say we punch above our weight with some of the chip suppliers where we have very strategic relationships and ongoing conversations where we're actively giving them some visibility and have some flexibility to move things in. For managed switch, even is a good example where stated lead times, it's the longest lead time component we have is 52 weeks. We've probably overachieved and gotten that down to in the low 40 weeks. We are actively working with the entire supply chain. We touch probably 60% of the active BOM, with the 40% handled by the ODMs.
Yeah, it's an area actually we're using AI quite aggressively, whether it's forecasting or how we present data, provide access to data. Bryan mentioned the S&OP process, which is kind of the overlay of that and how the data gets presented. It's an area that we've really made a big shift over the last 18 months.
Actually, one more question from the audience following up on the theme of AI. How do you see AI making it into your products?
Yeah, there's some good demos actually that will be able to answer that directly. Why don't I—I covered it a bit. Do you want to—you each want to take a shot at how it's relevant to your business?
Yeah, I think you will see it in the demo where one obvious use case of AI is to make it very easy for the end customer who's trying to troubleshoot things. My view is all the interfaces in the world will move to a conversational UI, and that's what we are enabling. You'll just be able to ask an AI agent behind software to do things. That's something. We also believe our managed switches, and I talked about this earlier, we've seen some of our customers use it in AI data centers. They use it because they find when they're deploying a data center switch, there is a part of it which is called management network, where you take the management ports and you manage that and switch that, and you need switches for that as well.
It seems like an overkill to use sort of more expensive data center switches. We have seen early deployments where customers use our switches for management network. That is something we are also going to explore and see how we can push that even further. Yeah, lots of opportunities with AI.
Yeah, yeah, we're starting to use it already for pre-sales. These are places where language and language processing really matter. That takes off a support call that would otherwise be an inbound cost for us that we can then direct into a sales flow. That's one example. With customer support, we can do a lot of training of models to understand really common issues that customers face and either give those tools to CS agents or put those out as a chat interface that customers can interact with directly. Some of the pieces that I talked about earlier, using AI models that can really understand what's unique about your network and model out solutions for you to identify problems that are really unique to your environment. Those are pieces where we see opportunities with AI.
Yeah, what may not be obvious to folks is that we get a lot of data relating to the performance of our products. So our experience is a perfect one to apply AI to. Again, you'll see it come out in the product demos that we're going to share. But there's a lot of opportunity for us in that regard.
Thank you, guys.
I think Logan might have had another question.
Hi, this is Logan for Adam again from Raymond James. The subscription side of the business is interesting. I guess first, I was curious how you would stack rank the opportunities of your subscription offerings in the enterprise and consumer segment. I have a follow-up.
Is this the stack rank of enterprise over consumer or more within each of those business units?
Let's do a combined, yeah, if you can. If not, you can break it up into each segment, but yeah.
No, no, it's okay. I mean, the way to think about it is consumer, we have product market fit today, right, with the subscription service we have. We just have a lot of low-hanging fruit on the top of funnel, on the subscription, just fundamentals. On top of that, there's going to be a ton of opportunity to add value to that subscription over time. We have a great starting point out of the gate with $35 million ARR. In Pramod's business, the most logical place for services and subscriptions is on the networking side. I mean, customers are accustomed to it. They pay for it. They've been pushing us for these services, which again led to the professional services launch. Even AV, we haven't talked about it much today, but AV, we see opportunities down the road as well.
Today, that's not a recurring—there's not a recurring revenue element to that business, but we do see opportunities for that in the future.
That's helpful. Thank you. Maybe back to the consumer side of the business. I know you've had some subscription offerings for a few years now on that side of the business. I guess how did you guys come to the determination that this was more of an execution issue versus a demand issue on that side of the business? Maybe another way to phrase it is, is home networking the right category for these subscriptions, or is that more of just a one-time purchase and they just kind of leave it after that?
Yeah, I mean, I might start off by saying I think in the short-term execution, in the long-term, it's creating more value and capability in the subscriptions that we offer. The near-term piece we can start addressing immediately. It's obvious if you've worked in subscription, as CJ and I both worked on consumer subscriptions, the things that we can fix on the execution side. The longer term is where we have a lot of ideas that will take some time to get out into the market that add a lot more value to customers, some spaces that go beyond cybersecurity as a core theme. We do think there is obviously that initial post-purchase moment where we really have your attention.
As we add capability, we have an installed base that's very large that we can go out to and bring those people back and put offers in front of them, let them know about new capabilities we're building. We see opportunities on both sides there.
Great, thank you.
Hi, I wanted to revisit an earlier question about TP-Link. Senator Ernst and 23 of her colleagues sent a pretty strongly worded letter to Commerce last week. I wanted to see if you had any sort of broad update on what that process is looking like. Just hypothetically speaking, if TP-Link got shut off today, would you have the capacity to fill that void?
We missed that. No, I'm just joking. Why don't you prepare to cover the last piece of that, and I'll take the first piece. So based on a letter we got from TP-Link after our last earnings call, they do not like us reporting what has been reported in the news, but we're going to do it anyway. Yeah, there's been a lot of activity. I mean, it's just escalating. The day after earnings, there was a WAPO article that said Commerce is recommending banning TP-Link. It's supported by six federal agencies. They're all of the state activity. There's the bipartisan support, the shutdowns coming to an end. I mean, yeah, it's hard to miss. In a day like today, what we're most proud about, of course, is what we're going to do to solve a customer's problem. While we love hearing that, we're heads down delivering for the customer.
In Pramod's side of the business, we're even seeing already—well, both sides of the business, frankly—we're seeing tailwinds from just the fact that we're focused on security, we're focused on privacy, we're a U.S.-based company. Jonathan said it well, we have no other motives. It really is hard. I mean, we read all the same things that you all do. We bring it up on earnings. TP-Link doesn't like that, but we'll keep doing it.
Yeah, and on the inventory front, we've obviously been watching the press like everyone in here and having conversations with our supply chain partners and preparing and planning for a response. We've made some inventory investments already, but we've been characterizing the inventory investment to be in that $75 million range. That clearly has not played out yet. It really depends on the form of any potential action that's rolled out there and how much time that would take to where we need to be able to respond. Certainly, there would be near-term demand shifts, I would think, if that were to happen. It would depend on how quickly the retailers change their footprints.
Thank you.
You want to share your address, Jay, so you can get a letter too?
Sorry, another quick one from the audience. Can you tell us a little more about the AV software acquisition?
Who wants to do that? I can take that. Oh, AV software acquisition, you want to take that? You want to explain that, or you want me to?
Sure. I mean, we've talked about VOG and Exium. We haven't talked too much about this publicly, but we have acquired the operating system that powers our AV switches. That is going to have a lot of different benefits. You referenced the financial benefit. You can come back to that. The most important thing is it's just going to allow us to iterate more quickly. It's just like insourcing the software capability. We now have a much stronger foundation to allow us to iterate more quickly. It hasn't held us back to date, but over the long term, it's going to pay big dividends. It does have a P&L impact. I don't know what you want to say about that.
Yeah, I mean, it's roughly 100-150 basis point impact to our overall gross margins.
Yeah, I'll just add that Laurent over there has a long list of innovations he has in mind. Having our own software engineering team and having access to being able to innovate on top of that software, we believe we'll be able to innovate and differentiate faster. Like in that case I talked about broadcast, to go into the higher-end broadcast space requires addressing some features that are needed that allows us to do that faster.
Is that 100-150 to the AV business, not the overall business?
Overall.
Overall.
Overall.
Bless you.
Okay, maybe one more on the partner front. Can you tell us a little more about the partnership with Google?
Sure. I can tell you what I shared today. I would say it's an exciting opportunity just for customers to make it easier for them to set up Matter-based devices, to make it very simple if you have an Orbi system, to use the Google Home app to set up those devices. I would say stay tuned. That's the foundation for, I think, a longer view of where we can go in the smart home space.
Yeah, I would add we are limited what we can say there, but we're really excited about the partnership. I think the bigger picture is if you think about what we've done in ProAV to build an ecosystem of partners to solve a specific end customer issue, that's the opportunity we have in the home, right? We're the only player that can do that. Everybody else has, whether it's government security scrutiny or you're part of a bigger company that has its own kind of home agenda, we're the Switzerland of the home. It's the beginning of what we see as a big opportunity for us there.
Anyone else in the audience? Okay, one more. Obviously, the team's changed quite a bit in the 18 months you've been around, CJ. How's the team handling this? It sounds like there's a solid foundation, but do you feel like you're in good shape going forward, or is there some more transition to occur?
Yeah, we're asking a lot of our team. People are fired up. The purpose, the mission, the values, people are excited. I will say we're driving more attrition than has historically been the case at NETGEAR. We've got a very thoughtful and new kind of performance management approach. Some folks that aren't—and I say this directly to the team, and I'm sure many of them are listening—transformations are hard and it requires extra effort and extra commitment and conviction. Some people just aren't up for that. We are really excited about the capabilities we have on the existing team. I mentioned the leaders, existing leaders that have been elevated at NETGEAR. I think people are really excited about the path that we're on.
Anything else from the audience?
Okay. Let me just wrap. I think that's a great note to end on. Just thank you, big thank you to the NETGEAR team. I'm sure lots of folks are watching. What I like to tell the team is we're just out of the starting blocks. We're just getting started on this transformation. Thank you for everybody who made the trip here. Not trivial. I know the shutdowns ended, but travel is still not trivial. Thank you and many West Coast attendees in particular. I want to thank all the folks that made this possible and thank Crestron again. I think we've lost Brad, but his team, Jonathan, Hansel. Oh, there's Brad. Jonathan, Hansel. Brad, Joanne. They've been great hosts. Again, remember, this is all powered by NETGEAR. Thank you.
Thank s all.