Okay. Thanks, everyone. This is Morgan Stanley, day two, 25th anniversary, TMT European Conference. We are very glad to welcome to the stage CEO of NXP, Rafael Sotomayor. I'm the CFO, Bill Betz. Welcome, gentlemen. Welcome to Barcelona. Glad to see you here.
Likewise.
Maybe I'll just kick things off, just to level set everyone in the audience. Maybe walk us through, again, key points from Q3 and what you talked about for guide, maybe even by end markets. What was the key points, at least, anyway? Thanks.
Thanks, Bill. Q, yeah, absolutely. In Q3, first of all, I think there are several signals, right, and several reasons why we feel good about the trajectory of the business so far, right? If you look at, you know, this Q3 now will be two quarters in a row we have sequential growth. Let's start with the first one. First one, we delivered $3.17 billion of revenue in Q3, which is slightly above the midpoint of our guidance. What is encouraging is what's behind it, which is, it was broad based. Every region was up. Every end market was up. Our direct customers were up. The channel was up.
When you look at a company with this level of diversity and you have this, I would say, this synchronized improvement, that is actually a very healthy indication of, I would say, business improvement w hen you have this kind of everything is actually going well. Second piece is for us is very, very kind of very bullish is the, the areas where we invest more, the areas where we believe they are our growth engines, you know, the, you know, the differentiator of NXP. Why do you own NXP? Why are our customers selecting NXP? These are the, the areas that are very NXP specific. And these areas in self-refined vehicle and the transformation of edge, AI, and industrial, all these things are actually performing in an environment that is actually quite challenging, right?
That means they're growing, they're doing, even slightly better what we think they were gonna be doing. So, that's the second piece. Now, when you look at a broad base, the KPIs from a cyclical perspective, the things that we watched, and let's start with the most important one that we mentioned in the last earnings call. We see now inventory normalization, right? It seems that inventory digestion for the tier one auto customers that we have is finally coming to an end, which means that we're gonna start shipping to end demand. With shipping to end demand, it's actually quite good in auto, right? For us, we see this as a very nice thing to see finally coming to the end of the inventory, coming to the end of inventory digestion. Now, we look at the channel, the backlog of the channel is improving.
The sell-through on the channel is improving, and even our direct orders, the EDI signals that we get from our tier ones and our customers, is also improving. You can see overall, the demand for NXP products is in a different, you know, setting. Now, visibility continues to be low. That is one thing that seems to be universal. Uncertainty actually kind of makes customers kind of put orders very late and t hat continues to lead to customer escalations. Those escalations have, you know, kind of every quarter, they've actually increased the number of escalations, not necessarily the number of dollars, but the escalations have increased. Nonetheless, I think that kind of shows you that demand kind of continues to be i mproving, the demand conditions. Now, that leads me to the final point I will say, which is a Q4 guide.
Yeah. Like we guided to $3.3 billion, which is 4% sequential growth, which is above seasonality and that puts us for the first time this year on a year-over-year growth and 6%. That is at the low end of our guide, but we're quite excited about the fact that we kind of go back to growth year over year. If you look at what also is behind our guide is strength in company-specific drivers in industrial w hich is quite encouraging. These are company-specific. These are design wins that we had in energy storage, battery management, some design wins we have on a particular category of wearable devices is doing quite well in smart glasses. That growth sequentially is 10% j ust a year, a quarter over quarter in industrial. We feel optimistic on how the year is closing and how we are going to start 2026.
Great. It seems like, you know, most end markets doing well, channels quite lean, industrial strength being seen. Margin and the guide looks like it's at least seasonal. Things are going well, or at least, at least well enough through the bottom of the cycle.
Yeah. I mean, that's how we see it. Listen, I'm not gonna go and say this is the lens for the entire industry. I know that some of my peers have different kind of messages, but t he way we see it is things are improving and are going in the right direction. We like the setup.
Perfect. Okay. Maybe if we drill into some of the end markets. I mean, it did look as though automotive in Q3 was a little flat, but other markets were up. One did stand out. Communication infrastructure was down a little bit. Maybe help us understand, you know, what's happening there. And then what is the strategy to see that recovery coming back there?
Yeah. If you step back in Compson Infra, maybe we start with a premise. Compson Infra today is composed of three unrelated businesses. It's literally kind of a bucket of a catch of t hat is not mobile, not industrial, not auto Let me put it kind of that way, right? There are three businesses there. In November Analyst Day, we basically gave a projection that this particular segment, this particular revenue bucket for NXP was gonna be flat for the next three years. Now, let me tell you the dynamics behind that. You had three businesses. One is the networking edge business. This is a networking product that we stopped investing in a long time ago. We said that it's gonna go to zero by the end of 2027.
Okay? That means it's declining. You have radio power, which is, you know, radio for basebands, for networking devices in infrastructure, 5G, 4G, and 6G. That is a bit of a choppy business. It is a small business. It is relegated to two or three big customers. That is kind of it. You know, kind of flat over the years. You have the secure car business, right? Just you can imagine if you have a business that is declining, it means the secure car business is growing. That is the dynamic that you see is at the end of the day, at the aggregate level, that bucket is gonna stay flat. In reality, the one portion of the business that is actually performing and keeping it flat is the secure car business. These are products that go into payment cards, passports, ticketing, MIFARE, and RFID.
Gotcha. Secure card really holding the four, the other two flat, but somewhat declining.
Declining. Yes.
Gotcha. Bill, maybe if we turn to yourself on margins, I think, you know, last print we talked about return to the long-term financial model, I think 57%-63% is target. 57.5%, I believe, was margin for the next quarter. Maybe help us understand what are some moving parts in the margin and how does Q4 set you up potentially for next year as well?
Yeah, absolutely. Our model is 57%-63%. The very simplistic way to think about gross margins is for every $1 billion of revenue, it'll drive an incremental 100 basis points to our gross margins. Think about $15 billion, we should be around 60%. Now what has occurred with gross margin, there's the structural foundation of gross margin, the discipline inside the company. That's driven by two factors. The first factor is our portfolio, and it happens over many years. When I joined the company, and sure, when Rafael joined the company, the gross margins were at 45%. What that meant with our R&D investment dollars, and you think about the ramps of our products in both industrial and auto, it takes three, four years to that ramp.
The investment dollars and the choices we had 10, 15 years ago, that hurdle rate for the company was 45%. As we expanded and grew, it went to 50%. Then it went to 55%. Think about today, all our new investments and choices that we're making inside our portfolio, that hurdle rate today is at the midpoint of our 57%-63%, which is 60%. Those investments that we'll see, which you'll probably see post 2027, be beyond 60%. The other foundational change, they get gross margins more resilient. If you compare us compared to our peers, what has occurred is in the past, I would say when we went through a cycle, our gross margins would, you know, probably have quite variability. How we managed this last down cycle, we think we navigated it quite well.
We kept utilizations at the 70% internally. More importantly, our hybrid manufacturing strategy allowed us to diversify and become more flexible, more resilient for our supply, but also more cost competitive in our supply. Therefore, I would say, when we joined, Rafael and myself, again, 15 years ago or so, we were 70% fixed. Today, we're only 30% fixed. Through that transition, your variability on the gross margins becomes more variable in nature. You shouldn't see the large swings. We're not taking business to go fill our factories.
That's not what we're about. We're about making sure we provide the value to our customers and what they need and at a cost competitive that's helpful for them. Those are the foundational structural changes, I would say. Now, what's in the short term to medium term? What's gonna drive gross margins? Obviously, the function of revenue. We get back into model with Q4 guide plus our modeling soft guide. It gets us back to growth year over year. We feel very confident that we will deliver to in our financial model for next year and beyond. We're not backing away from the entire financial model. I would say utilizations, as we mentioned, is we're just beginning our 200 mm consolidation. Think about these internal factories that run 90 nm and above.
What's occurring is all our new design wins are on below 90 nm. There is a shift to make sure we support that. We will be structurally moving and transferring product to our foundry partners of TSMC or Samsung or GlobalFoundries for that resilience of supply. More importantly, we also have joint ventures that we're investing in, that we own, whether it's 10% of ESMC with the likes of Infineon and Bosch and TSMC for our resilience in Europe, or our VSMC, our newest joint venture that will be up and running in 2028 in full production, with the likes of Vanguard, our partner, also supported and backed by TSMC. That brings us a very cost competitive and be able to support and supply this ramp that we have, this huge design win funnel that we have to go deliver and execute to.
Over the next couple of years, you're gonna see us execute and grind gross margin higher through our hybrid manufacturing strategy. Again, short-term utilizations, the 200 mm consolidation, when we finally build the end-of-life products, utilization improves. We may sell these factories. Again, that's all up. We'll update that on a quarterly basis. Another thing I would say is the mix of our products over time. These new product introductions, like I talked about in the portfolio, grind the gross margin higher. Also, something that we like is the industrial space and our go-to-market through the distribution. The higher the distribution, think about it, it's low volume, higher margin. We want to continue to invest in our go-to-market. We feel pretty confident to get our gross margins not just at 60%, but think about post 2027 with just the likes of entering and filling up our VSMC joint venture.
We will get an incremental 200 basis points on top of the corporate margins post 2028. We will update more about that in our next analyst day in 2027. We feel very confident in our gross margin projections, with the support of our revenue growth in the markets we play in.
Gotcha. Sounds very healthy. A sensible hurdle rates, good variability and flexibility in the manufacturing and a transition as well where you're managing joint ventures at the same time. Seems in good shape. You talked about industrial growth. I think if I stay with you, Bill, actually, there is always pricing pressure. I think low single digits usually is mooted. It is right about this time of year, you see the price negotiations. How does that set us up for Q1 and the kind of margins you'd expect? Maybe just if I add on to there, you did talk about migrations, but is there anything else you're doing in cost management or cost reduction programs, restructuring maybe?
Yeah, absolutely. In investor day, what we assumed in those growth rates of 6%-10% is an annual low single digit price reduction, which majority of it happens in Q1 because with the automotive exposure we have, that's when it takes place. The way to think about that is you get an impact in that first quarter.
Going to your second part of your question, we then get the cost improvement, the yield improvements, the test time reductions, the cost reductions that we get back. The way to think about the low single digit price, that's just normal being competitive in the business, that all gets, you know, offset with the cost improvements that we make throughout the year. Those two kind of offset each other related from it. Typically, Q1 is our lowest quarter of the year. We kind of made sure that we get those gross margins. We still think there'll be a model. It's just, it's hard to always hold from Q4 to Q1 with revenue typically seasonally down and also our price gives. We feel very confident we'll get and grind those gross margins above c urrent levels of Q4.
Gotcha. Maybe, maybe if we turn back to yourself, Rafael, and I look at autos in particular t wo main drivers really. We had XEVs obviously pushing for a lot of dollar content increase, but obviously software-defined vehicles becoming a big play. I know you've got the S32 family. You're well positioned in this space. Help us understand how does the dollar content increase maybe next year and the year after as you, as you see things?
Yeah. No, happy to get into that. I think probably, you know, step back and look at it from the content, the way to look at NXP is, is not we do not have a fixed content per vehicle. When you have the exposure t hat we have in automotive NXP, I mean, it's likely you pick a car randomly in the world, there will be an NXP part. Sure, r ight? The content per vehicle really varies from as low as $100 all the way to, you know, greater than $1,000.
Sure. It really varies that much. It tends to be related with the architecture of the vehicle or the type of vehicle, the type of features. So it is an older model or newer model. Maybe a more probably interesting way to look at it is to look at the subsystems of the car so you can see kind of the drivers of content growth. I start with what you talk about. You mentioned SDVs, right? The software-defined vehicle. That is at the core of our processing portfolio.
and these are portfolios that go from, you know, relatively kind of low power, you know, types in the lower end MCUs, even though for us they're not super low end. You know, we tend to be in the, in the high performance, part of the spectrum and, and all our processing. But that will be in, let's say, on the $10.
Sure.
You have the products that are driving more the zonal architectures, right? That tend to be in the $15-$25, depending on the features and the memory and all that. Now you get into our five nanometer products, which are the latest and greatest that we have for the transition that is happening to central computer architectures. You see this spectrum, right, of choices and architectures, but also a spectrum in the choices you select for your microprocessor needs or microcontroller needs. Where you are in that spectrum is really largely determined by where the OEM is in their SDV journey.
Yeah, o kay?
There are customers who are in the zonal architectures driving a lot of the next generation zonal architectures with our K5 family, which is our 60 nm, with Arm incorporated. The other ones who are more progressive and going towards more of a central computer where w e are going to see content right there, but four or five of these chips at, you know, $50+ range. And so that's big content b ig content growth by the selection of the architecture. That is one driver. That one is undeniable, it is happening. The move to SDVs is unstoppable. It's just a matter of where the OEM is I n that journey. You have the push for more ADAS, right? The higher level of ADAS, which for us is a driver for sensors. The way you gotta look at it is the push for higher autonomy in the car drives the need for more radar and NXP is the leader in radar.
What it means is that not only do more cars adopt radar, but more cars adopt more nodes of radar. They go from one to three to even four radar nodes. Every radar node is about $20. There's some content growth there. You have obviously the electrification piece, right? The BMS piece, which for us will be, I think it'll be for a low end 400 volt, that will be about $60. For a higher end, 800 volt will be twice that You have all the other stuff, n etworking, connectivity, car access. I am sure I am missing some, and all that also is driven by the fact that the car requires more and more data.
Sure. The car becomes a massive networking machine. That is also content growth. When you look at 2026 and you put all these things together, obviously you at least understand the drivers from a content growth. Now, if you were to put numbers in it, and I'm gonna use the guidance that we gave in analyst day, our auto business is gonna grow in a range between 8% and 12%. If you assume a SAR growth of 2% o r mid single digits or low single digits, then you can see what that, at that level, at that average level, you can see at least a content growth that goes from where that would be 6%-10%. That will give you a sense of what the content growth is in the way we're measuring it.
I mean, really interesting the changes. I mean, I think you alluded to it a little bit there that there are different routes to this EE architecture or SDV play. It's interesting that you go from microcontroller to microprocessor. What is really pulling that microprocessor story and why are people coming to NXP in particular, do you think?
First of all, I think the processing needs of the next generation architectures Are just driving higher performance, just driving higher performance. About literally like almost seven years ago, we decided to actually basically tilt our focus into not what the business was then or even it is today, but what the business was going to be. What you would require is that we ended up with investments to develop products that are quite differentiated. I mean, some of our products, their original meaning is that there is nothing like them in the market. I think the OEMs have caught up to the idea that they need to own the software, they need to own the architecture, they need to keep up with what happened that was originally initiated by Tesla and some of the Silicon Valley customers, right?
Yeah. A new car or entry, but the Chinese quickly follow. A lot of the legacy OEMs are now coming up to the realization they need to adopt a software-first m indset. The products that we're using before t he dependencies of the supply chain and the automotive, they just no longer work for them. What they now go and say, okay, now I need to develop the software. What is the right architecture? The old products do not fit anymore. You need to look at these high performance microcontrollers, the high performance microprocessors b ecause you need to develop software. You need to also have, you know, you need to have the ability to have extra CPUs, extra cycles to be able to deploy future software.
Gotta think about the software-defined vehicle. Very interesting. The worst driving experience is gonna be the first day you buy the car. The car will get better over time, which is, is like, it's like, the reality is backwards, right? How it gets better is learn how you drive, how you like it. It learns how the vehicle is operating in their environment. It gets updated. For that, you need a really robust, y ou know, processing, foundation and t he right software on top of it. That is what is making NXP different.
Gotcha. So good hardware redundancy for the over-the-air upgrades that you're calling.
Absolutely.
Gotcha. Maybe just staying with, I think you just touched on China and China's adoption of software-defined vehicles. I think China grew 13% Q-on-Q for you guys. I mean, help us understand how does that, you know, how does that sort of maintain itself going into next year? We do hear about XEVs peaking somewhat in China, 50%-60% penetration. It has got to be SDVs, it has got to be the content increase there. But, you know, what is driving that?
Yeah. Start with the premise that China is a very important market for NXP. If you look at the latest, we have is 39% of our business was shipped to China. Half of that was for indigenous companies, like Chinese headquarter companies, whether the product stays in China or goes overseas. You know, at the end of the day, it's really hard to tell how much of that is, but it is for Chinese customers. So half of that is. You can see that China, you know, China headquarter companies correspond to 20% of our revenue.
It's a very important part of our business. I would say that for auto, just kind of step back. For auto, we like China because they're fast movers. They tend to adopt our latest and greatest innovation the fastest. We tend to see what works and what does not work first in China. So being there in China allows us to have a peek of what is gonna work for the rest of the world a little ahead. Strategically, we tend to consider China very important. If you can keep up with China, you can keep up with anyone.
Rght? Now, I think today competition in China, especially in auto, it continues to be the same people we compete outside China. It continues to be the Infineons, the STs, the Renesas, and the same players. I do not intend to say that the indigenous kind of semiconductor is not going to be there. All I am saying is that where we play today, we do not see it, r ight? When and how we were gonna see 'em, I can't really predict that. The way we see China is, is an over-competitive market among themselves. I'm talking about now car OEMs competing with other car OEMs c ompeting for the outside world. I believe that if we continue to play our playbook and e xecute our playbook, which is be ahead w ith innovation, be ahead with a product that create value for the Chinese OEM and the Chinese tier one, I think that playbook has worked so far.
I think it will continue to work as long as our will to keep up with innovation that adds value.
Gotcha. Okay. Innovation key there in that market. I'll, I've got a couple more questions for you, Rafael, and maybe I'll turn back to Bill later. At this point, I'll ask if there's any questions from the floor before I move on. Not at this point. Rafael, maybe just changing to mobile. I think mobile revenue's been a little volatile, it looks from the outside. What is your outlook for this segment going forward and what drives the business for you guys?
Maybe I'll rephrase your comment on volatile, especially the volatile part b ecause I think it's seasonal. I don't know, I don't consider the mobile revenue volatile. Actually, it is one of the ones that has actually been quite stable, but it's seasonal. I mean, the first half tends to be weaker than the second half because both of our biggest customers tend to introduce new products. In the second half of the year and then kind of, you know, basically be weaker in the first half. Our exposure to mobile is very limited to a particular niche category, right? Most of our revenue is driven by the mobile wallet which we have a very, a very big, you know, kind of share there and w e have very important customers.
We like that. It's a good franchise for us. It's something that, you know, we don't talk too much about because it, but it's mostly an ecosystem play. We gotta think about mobile wallet as an ecosystem play. It's a product that develops, that enables secure transactions. If you have your pay and your phone, it's very likely to be driven by NXP technology. Very likely and it's a system solution that drives the NFC, the near field communications ecosystem and security.
That evolution of the mobile wallet continues to happen. We continue to add more and more functionality to it. We do mobile payments and then we did mobile transit and now you can use your phone to actually do, you know, mobile transit. Even today here in Spain, you can go to Madrid and use your phone using the mobile wallet from NXP. The other thing that you can also now do is we are now today working on embedding the SIM. The SIM is another secure product that occupies too much space on the phone and we're gonna incorporate that functionality into the mobile wallet. The mobile wallet now becomes a very secure enclave for all sorts of secure transactions that are sensitive from a security perspective. That business is solid. I, again, it's solid. We are a niche player in mobile. We do not represent more than that. It will continue to be a good business.
Gotcha. Seasonal and product cycles, but a good dependable niche and secure ICs around the payment ecosystem.
You got it.
Perfect. I thought I was also curious that you talked about a growth in industrial. Some of your peers over here in Europe are still somewhat struggling. It looks, I mean, very much focused on general purpose microcontrollers, and are hostages to factory automation and the slow orders we're seeing there. So maybe help us understand what, where are you positioned differently? How are you seeing things in industrial, frankly?
I did get a lot of questions on industrial because the performance, what is considered the overperformance on our guide into Q4. Again, when you compare us and the comparison to our peers that are representative of industrial, I think it's not necessarily constructive. Let me put it this way, right? We, and I said it in earnings, we don't consider ourselves a bellwether for industrial. Our exposure to industrial is different. Our exposure to industrial is, if you look at our industrial exposure, is mostly on the digital side.
We are not a catalog component where we, most of our processing that we, whether it's microprocessors or microcontrollers, we have both, `ight, are application specific. I think that if you look at some of the performance that we have in industrial, I mentioned it, they seem to be driven by very company specific drivers, right? It may not necessarily indicate the health of the industry. It just indicates the health of our business, w hich, you know, I would say, we feel good about it. We also have a system solution. Every time we do a processor, likely we also get the connectivity piece. And energy, energy storage systems, for instance, is the way we won in that area is by doing complete system designs, right?
Yeah.
We deliver system solutions to our customer who are actually pre-qualified and pre-certified because m ost ESS need certification, by the way There is actually a go-to-market aspect that is very strategic in which we position NXP for industrial. The other thing, not to completely overlook, is how we manage the downturn, right? The downturn was managed with us managing the channel. Industrial, 80% of the business goes through a channel, so h aving a healthy lean position in the channel m akes it easy for you to address today's needs because you do not have to carry the burden of inventory that used to address yesterday's needs. That is quite different than some of our peers.
Today, our inventory in the channel and at the end customer is in a healthy manner. I'm able to actually stage products that have a high. We have high conviction that they're gonna sell through. That's what is gonna lead to overperformance in industrial for NXP.
Interesting. Just to add related to industrial IoT, I think a lot of it also is company specific, as Rafael said. So there's a subset of products that we shared during investor day, which is processing, connectivity, analog, and security. That size was about $600 million in 2024. We are well on pace to double it to $1.2 billion specifically as now the design wins and the cycles kick in., w e feel really good about it. As we said during earnings, all our accelerated growth drivers are tracking to those plans, at that 20% clip. We will break out a little bit more granularity at the end of the year. We feel very confident of, you know, what we're doing, and those company specific drivers are what's really probably given us a bit better than our peers, what we can see, along with that lean channel inventory that Rafael.
Yeah. That was the message. I was getting good lean, channel inventory management, application specific bias rather than general purpose. And a $1.2 billion run rate is target. Looks healthy. Maybe Bill, if I turn to you then, last question here for me. What are the key assumptions? I think your goal for earnings here by 2030+ , I think you gave something at the Capital Markets Day. It evades me. It's not on my paper here. Maybe help us understand what the long-term gain.
Yeah, absolutely. It is quite simple actually. If you, if you do not remember anything today, remember these three or four things, right? First off, we are gonna grow our revenue. We feel very confident in the high single digits. So, you know, we guide at 6%-10%. Just assume 8% in the model, right? Simple math in Excel. Gross margins, we are gonna expand them above 60%, right? If you think by 2030, we should be well above that by just applying for every $1 billion, 100 basis points improvement in gross margin. As you all know, we are very disciplined in OpEx, right? We have a model of 23%. We will probably get some fall through and improve on our SG&A as we adopt AI automation internally and so forth, just like every other company. We feel very confident. Look what we just did.
We basically took on three acquisitions that were dilutive to us because that revenue does not show up until 2027 and beyond and fit it in our portfolio and transform the company and get it ready as what Rafael talks about is we are playing for the future. We are not playing today. We are playing where we believe the future will be 5, 10 years down the road. If you just put that all in your Excel model, it will basically spit out an answer that says, you know, that $13 of earnings per share back in 2024 will be easily $26 in 2030. On top of it, besides doubling our earnings, we feel very confident about just think about the amount of cash that we return to our owners. That is very important. We have a track record over the last 10 years.
We have returned over $20 billion in the form of dividends and buybacks to you all, as well as expand and improve the earnings of the company. I think if I laid out an investor day, I think there's another $8 billion we're gonna return or $9 billion from now until 2030 as well as delivering to that financial model.
I lied about the last question. I've got two more if I could.
Yeah. Got eight minutes left, so keep going.
Yeah. You gotta keep, keep going. It's interesting you touched on the acquisitions. I think you've made two, I'll call them bolt-ons, Viva Links and Canara. I, as far as I understand, I think there's two months of impact in the upcoming quarter in OpEx. How do you manage bolt-ons like this feathering in? I presume there's annual bolt-ons as well. How do you manage the OpEx integration story there?
Oh, yeah. Quite disciplined. Myself, Rafael, or my predecessor, every year it's about how do you deploy that capital internally. We have a quite disciplined process in-house. It goes back to that foundation of hurdle rates, entitlements, and this rigor on execution, speed, focus, and innovation. It is all a combination. You know, when projects are not performing well, we have to shrink them or exit them. In other areas, we have to place bets and double down and go expand. It is a puzzle. You know, we do not plan on doing three acquisitions every year. That just happened from a timing perspective. What I would tell you is to help fund these acquisitions, we always had in our mind of looking at the portfolio. We also announced over the last quarter a divestment of a business called Sensors. We are actually selling it to one of our peers.
The beauty of that is, it's good, it's probably better off in their hands because guess what? They manufacture the front-end wafers for us. That business is a good core part of a business growing 2%-3%. Margin for us is slightly below the corporate margins. We saw it as a headwind because guess what? They are manufacturing the wafers for us, they can impact if costs go up, they will pass those costs to us. In theory, we took that money. We said, "Hey, let's go sell it." We sold that at the right time, get $950 million, take that money and actually move the portfolio and invest in more richer value to our customers, which means higher margin for us and TD Tech Viva Links and Kinara, which is gonna transform the company, and also help transform our customers and make them successful.
The point that you ask about how do you guys do that, by the way, you mentioned it from an OpEx perspective, but also w hat I wanna say is that there's a big longer-term objective here, which is the reinvention of NXP to position ourselves to be the leader of bringing intelligent systems to the edge in automotive and industrial. That requires a different type of capabilities internally. When we made this acquisition, it's also to bring talent that we didn't have and w e shed talent that we probably no longer kinda serves our direction going forward, right? It's got two aspects to it.
Yeah. I'll give you, I'll give you just a, Rafael, you just triggered something in my mind is after these acquisitions, right, Willie, more than 50% of our R&D community is software now b ecause we are focusing on that system aspect as Rafael. That's where we wanna be. That's where we're gonna drive value.
Yeah. Yeah. Key value areas, getting the full stack, MEMS sensors, it's not something you can get the hurdle rate to work. Send it to someone else like ST and they'll get the verticalization benefit.
Indeed.
It makes sense.
Indeed.
I promise this is the last one this time. I did hear you mention energy storage systems, and over here in Europe, we have a couple of players who are getting warmed up to that as a future play, particularly as we look at new power architectures in the data center. I just wondered if you know whether or not you saw that as a driver for growth in ESS for you guys or if it's somewhere else. Just help us understand.
No. I think the electrification of everything is a big driver for us to actually, you know, position ourselves into that secular trend period. I think it drives a lot of innovation. I think it doesn't stop in auto. It doesn't stop with energy storage systems. At the end of the day, you can actually envision a world where autonomous devices, robots are gonna be part of our daily life. All those devices are gonna have some form of electrification aspect to it, right? There's gonna be some form of cognitive capacity and intelligence, right, and processing needs. You're gonna have a lot of hinges, a lot of motor control. The way we position, the way we invest in our portfolio, it tends to be in technologies that are at the core of what the world's gonna look like 5- 10 years from now, whether it's autos today, robots tomorrow, energy source systems that are static to energy storage systems that are mobile.
I think we try to make sure that when we develop IP, we have the ability to catch the secular trends that are not so obvious today, but then they come, t hey become inflection points of opportunity in the future.
Yeah. That's very interesting. I never thought about mobile ESS, but there we are.
We're good?
Yeah. There we go. I learned a lot. Gentlemen, I think we'll cut it there, but thanks very much for coming. Enjoy Barcelona.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Cheers.