The way you thought about it in the past, your priorities for the next year. Start with that.
I think that we get very excited about the current trajectory that we have of bringing intelligent systems to the edge. I think it gets even now, you know, the things that are happening in the industry, it gives more conviction that we're on the right path and just accelerating what we have already on the pipe.
Yeah. Okay. You had a pretty strong Q4 result, pretty good Q1 outlook. You talked about things being better than expected, 90 days earlier. You know, can you just talk generally about the industry environment that you're seeing now?
Yeah. No, indeed. I think Q1, the outlook that we gave in Q1 is, the performance of Q1, is definitely more robust than we thought, 90 days ago. That's kinda driven by visibility.
Yeah.
Right? The current backlogs that we had in direct and the channel strengthened. If you look at the recovery that we gave from a Q1 perspective, it was broad-based. All segments are improving year-on-year, that's quite healthy for us. Now, if you look at under the hood, I guess there are three main drivers you would think of. In auto, you can see that the normalization inventory is healthy, is good. Now we're starting to ship to end demand, now the story of content growth, which is a real story in auto, is starting to kinda drive top-line growth. Industrial, you see broad-based recovery and that is truly broad-based.
What we see in industrial is a bit more of a, I would say, kind of a flight to quality, I would say, in industrial. You can see the leadership that we have in processing is starting to kinda take share of some of the recovery demand that we have in the segment. The last one is company-specific product, project ramps. We have, you know, NXP-specific ramps in auto, in industrial, in mobile, and now we're executing to that. You know, backlog has strengthened and some of the company-specific drivers starting to kinda really perform.
Yeah. That makes sense. You sort of talked about, you know, not seeing or anticipating any kind of restocking in customer inventories. You know, I see the same thing, but I'm sort of surprised by it. You've had this kind of Nexperia situation which had people lying down fairly quickly. It kinda resolved pretty quickly too, like, it sort of showed how little inventory there is. There's, like, angst on DDR4 memory going into cars. Don't those kinds of supply situations trigger the feeling like, "Hey, we probably need a little bit more inventory to deal with all of this?
It may and it should, but we're operating on the assumptions that the current demand environment is a new normal, right? Just to be clear, we have no broad-based restocking on any of our outlooks. By the way, we don't depend on it either.
Yeah.
Okay? If, the demand environment, I mean, you know, It's also important to also acknowledge that the auto supply chain is, it's kind of difficult to really kind of, analyze. It's complex, and it varies by Tier 1, by OEMs. We are, at the aggregate level, we are operating, I think, we consider deem the inventory levels to be below our manufacturing cycle time.
Yeah.
That kinda makes it very tight.
Potentially this, you know, sensitive to disruption and demand. Right now, I mean, this is how companies are man-managing their working capital. The good thing is that we're now shipping to end demand.
That gives us transparency, it gives predictability. Yeah, we don't see broad-based recovery. We will see it if it happens, and if it happens, we will see it as a consequences of improving fundamentals. The way we see it, we will see it in our orders direct. We will see it in our channel backlog. We will see it on sell-through in the channel. We will see it in spike in short orders. Regardless, we kind of remain disciplined. You know, we basically plan for what we see and if, you know, the signal says something else, we will adjust accordingly.
Great. Within autos, you're shipping to end demand and you're starting to see content increases matter. Can you talk generally about the state of that market? I guess, you know, you talked about the complexity. It seems like regionally there are a lot of differences. The Chinese market is sort of off sync with other parts of the world timing-wise. Can you just talk about the general enthusiasm that you have for automotive as a, as an end market?
Well, let's start with the fact that the 2025 was a transition year, right? It was clouded by inventory digestion, primarily coming from Western Tier 1s. Now with that inventory digestion kinda behind us, you can now see that the true story in auto, which is content growth driven by this transition to software-defined vehicles, is actually emerging. This is actually our play.
Our play is on that transition to new architectures, to higher compute, to digitization of the vehicle. I think this is universal. It's happening in China, it's happening here in the US, it's happening in Europe, and this is kind of a better way to actually make a car. We're all in. The core of the NXP strategy is around software-defined vehicle and the processing unit that goes around the different type of architectures. That's what is making transition NXP to a component player, to a strategic, kind of a strategic vendor for the OEMs, is that this is a, kind of a big investment for them in terms of software and in terms of architectures.
You grew in those accelerated growth drivers, I think 10% last year. You know, can you talk about software-defined vehicles specifically and sort of how does that get provisioned? Where are you in kind of the S-curve of adoption with software-defined vehicles?
Great question. Just to get into a little bit on the growth drivers last year, it was essentially flat. Maybe it was slightly declined, but essentially flat year-on-year for auto, for NXP. The growth drivers in the year grew 10%, which is slightly below our model, but they grew in a very tough environment, in an environment that was all about kind of inventory digestion. Clearly kind of basically points to not only the strength of the trend towards software-defined vehicle, but also points to the strength of our portfolio targeted to software-defined vehicles. We're at nascent. We're basically in the beginnings of the transition to software-defined vehicles and platforms as all OEMs are in different stages in this journey.
The way you should think about our strategy from an NXP perspective is software-defined vehicle is the core. Think about a hub, and the rest are somewhat attached to the platform. Think about like spokes. The stronger the software-defined vehicle platform is, the stronger your attached story is gonna be from a system perspective. That's the way we approach it. We know there's not a one-size-fits-all for software-defined vehicles. It goes from Zonal to a central compute. Our roadmap and our technology investment is geared towards higher performance compute, where all these compute devices are going to basically incorporate what used to be all this kind of a myriad of ECUs around the nodes. They're gonna basically integrate them through high performance compute and heterogeneous compute.
You need a particular flavor if you're going Zonal, you need a particular flavor if you're in central compute. We made our investments where the industry is gonna go towards these high performance compute platforms.
Where do you see the competition coming from? Is it sort of traditional microcontroller competitors moving in that direction? Is it people doing infotainment, sort of centralized CPUs that are trying to incorporate some of those software-defined vehicles in, into their software, like a Qualcomm's trying to do?
Yeah.
Just how do you see that competitive dynamic? I know your position's fairly unique.
The way we look at automotive from a vehicle architecture perspective, think about it, and I'm just gonna be a bit kind of primitive in the way I mention it, just to kind of basically simplify the concept, but think about three domains. Think about the infotainment domain, your cockpit. Think about ADAS, which, you know, there's a big brain that is making decisions how to, you know, basically make decisions how to the car drives. Then you think about the vehicle core function of the car, right? The vehicle core functions. These are real-time, low latency, high security, high functional safety, high redundancy. The three of them, you could make an argument that they're quite distinct from one another.
Today, the core function of the vehicle is very specific, and it requires a certain domain expertise and different certain skill sets. This is where we see today is the legacy players' challenge that we have in this market is that this particular function requires higher performance compute, more heterogeneous compute, more cores, more advanced processing nodes. I think this is where the advantage of NXP is, that we invested way ahead of the competition in 5 nm.
We're the only company right now with an automotive-grade processor in 5 nm. It's not only one, we have several ones now. I think this is where the market is going, and I think we saw that, you know, about six, seven years ago to actually invest ahead and just be ready for what, you know, the future demand of the products.
Maybe, Joe, maybe I'll remind everyone, this is our largest accelerated growth driver. In 2021, it was about $500 million. In 2024, it surpassed $1 billion, and we expect it to double in 2027 to $2 billion. The traction we see, as mentioned before, the first half of 2025, it grew in the high single digits. I'm sorry, in the high single digits. The second half accelerated to the high double digits. That came across very good. We see that trend continuing. That's well in track to grow at those growth rates that we shared during Analyst Day for SDVs.
Very helpful, thank you. Can you talk about maybe competing priorities within the automakers between EV power, and I know you're also focused on that as a growth driver as well, doing battery management, but also ADAS and things like that? It seems like those functions have kind of gone back and forth in importance. Are we now prioritizing both and are people taking... You know, I think feel like to really do software-defined vehicles, you sort of have to top-down redesign the whole ecosystem of the car. Are those investments happening at your customers now?
Oh, for sure. I think you touched several things. You talk about EVs and you talk about SDVs. I think the mega trend is SDVs. Just to kind of put it's just a new way of thinking about the architecture of the vehicle, the way you remove features from hardware, you add them in software, the way you think about a lifecycle management of a vehicle over-the-air updates. How do the OEMs stay connected with the consumer post the initial sale? The whole concept of the car driving the worst the first day you drive it, because, you know, a year later it learns how you drive and it just becomes better. That this whole paradigm has shifted. SDV is the main driver, I would say.
Now what, how you choose. Like the powertrain that you choose is a different aspect of it, whether you choose a hybrid or EV or an ICE. We continue to see a massive trend of EVs, especially outside the United States in China and EVs continues to be kind of the main category in some of these high growing markets in automotive. We've again, we play in SDV and in the areas where EV is being taken, we play as part of our, you know, kind of basically our BMS portfolio that we have.
Great. Then maybe talk about the role of China a little bit. We're seeing a lot of the innovation in the automotive market is happening in China, incorporating these types of features into lower price point cars and things like that. How is NXP positioned to take advantage of that?
Well, very much. By the way, there was a new, kind of a new regulation that it just kind of passed in China, where the Chinese government are increasing the reliability and the safeties, you know, standards, what it takes to kind of go into market in China. I'll tell you that that is a nice tailwind that is going to basically cascade from the high end to the low end of the supply chain. obviously the intent that China did there was, listen. There are three obviously multifaceted reasons for why they wanna do that. They wanna basically, I would say, curve the destructive pricing competition they have, you know, what they call involution.
They want to you know, for sure increase the safety of the vehicles. They wanna avoid some of the headlines that kind of high profile incidents that happened last year with respect to safety. The last one they wanna do is probably align more to the global standards in safety and security benchmarks to basically enable the Chinese OEM to continue to expand overseas. That is a really nice tailwind for NXP, because it's no longer about the product itself, right? It's about the product, it's about the level of service that you provide to the customers in terms of technical support over the life cycle of the product. It's about the safety. It's about the security.
When what's happening in China right now, I think is customers are assessing or reassessing the semiconductor basic partners in order to really incorporate the kind of these aspects associated with what is it gonna take for them to be competitive into China given the new regulations. I think that is a tailwind for us in China. It's very clear. The playbook for us doesn't change. We compete by being better and being faster. I mean, the level of innovation and competitive in the Chinese market is massive.
Yeah. The state of Chinese competition within semiconductors to serve those markets?
Well, for sure. I mean, like I said, I think you can arguably China auto market is probably the most competitive market in the world. We treat it as that. For sure, right, it is the customers demand the highest level of innovation, the fastest time to market. China has an indigenous semiconductor industry. They've been successful in high performance compute for ADAS. They've been successful in high performance compute for infotainment. They've been successful in some areas of analog and discrete power. The area that we compete, which is the core function of the vehicle, I mean, this is an area we still compete with the Western peers. The reason for that is the products there are not just the spec sheet, right?
This is about decades, multi decades of IP development products, that they are automotive grade in terms of reliability, in terms of safety, functionality, longevity. This is not just about product space, this is about IP and know-how that has been developed over decades. We still remain very kind of alert to the competition. Again, playbook is you need to be better, you need to be faster in China to be able to compete.
Manufacturing China for China helps you guys as well?
Well, I think it's mandatory.
Yeah.
I think it's just par for the course. I mean, it's just kind of it gives you ability to compete. We have invested heavily in making sure that we remove objections in terms of supply chain. We invested in, we have, you know, several fabs with SMIC, TSMC, and I believe the third one is, give me a second. Grace, we have, basically a packaging, that is NXP owned in Tianjin, close to Beijing. We have now a really nice, robust supply chain for China. We have also a robust chain for China for the rest of the world as well.
Okay, great. Thank you. Other elements of automotive, you know, you've talked about electrification, you've talked about radar as key growth drivers. Can you give us an update on those?
Yeah. We said this SDV is the core, I think you mentioned that we grew in 2025 with SDV in the, I would say, the low teens. Connectivity was standout in 2025. I think grew in the high 20s above our model. We have very strong franchises in connectivity as well. Also, you know, the car is becoming just a big networking engine, right? When you have so much digitization of the functions, you need high performance throughput around the car. Connectivity is a standout. It's doing quite well. Radar grew in the low single digits in 2025. I mean, that was one of the franchises that got caught out in inventory digestion. I think as normalization happens, we see that going back to a long-term model.
BMS was below our model. I think it was also another franchise that got caught into, you know, program, basically inventory digestion. We also saw a delay in some program ramps that we anticipated. We see 2025 a bit of a deviation from what we wanted to do, but I think we expect this to go back to where the trend around electrification is very strong and it's gonna get back to trend. Overall, I think we expect the investments that we're doing on this transformation of the vehicle are starting to scale right now.
Yeah. Okay, you're seeing return to the automotive market shipping to production. You've got good traction with the goods accelerated growth drivers and kind of seeing all of them essentially.
Yeah, the way.
contribute this year.
The way I would frame it is inventory digestion removes the headwind, and now the secular drivers are the growth engine for the rest of auto.
Okay.
Yeah, just maybe to add, just to give you a feel of the accelerated growth drivers in the Auto bucket. In 2024, it represented 39% of the Auto composition of the revenue. In 2025, it was 43%. We feel very comfortable and confident that we'll get this to above 50% by 2027 based on the traction we're seeing. Now, what dragged us down the first two to three quarters was the inventory digestion related to our core business. Our core business inside Auto finally turned slightly positive in Q4. What we expect in Q1, that's back to that low single digit for the core business. Therefore, you also see the total company doing quite well above model at a +11% in our guide for Q1 as a total company.
Joe, I think this point that he just made, in terms of the composition of the revenue in auto being growth drivers by around 50%, you know, basically, that's where we're moving to. It's very meaningful because that kinda gives you a sense of why we feel so strongly that the auto revenue has now become structural. The shift towards kind of the secular trends that make the new cars is tying our product and our revenue to that secular trend is what we gives the conviction that auto is becoming more and more structural for NXP.
Very clear. Thank you. Maybe we shift to industrial. If you could talk about industrial IoT, strong growth year-over-year. Can you talk about where we are there cyclically and then versus the growth drivers in that space?
Yes, it's a great question, industrial, 'cause I would say because 2025 was a tough year for industrial. The way I would frame industrial is both a broad-based recovery, also a broad-based structurally opportunity, a structural opportunity for us. We are seeing, and you can see in Q1 guide was a strong guide, but we're seeing broad-based. We are seeing products emerging in a core industrial and industrial IoT. We're seeing products in factory automation, energy storage, building automation. It is quite healthy in terms of broad-based. No single vertical is driving the business right now, and that's what gives us conviction. There are some new areas, with like energy storage, which is actually coming strong.
I think the way you should think about industrial, it seems like every single segment is getting a transformation. Every real segment is getting reinvention. What makes NXP different than all the industrial companies is that we are a processor-first company. We lead with processors. So we kind of really go to this market with a strength of processing portfolio. What we're seeing right now, based on the engagement that we have with our customers is not only new areas they're emerging, but it just seems like there are a lot of use cases that are getting reinvented.
Whether it's managing, you know, kind of deterministic networks for factory automation, whether it's doing control, new types of controls for building, you know, management or secure access or in healthcare, you know, patient monitoring, different types of instrumentation. These are requiring kind of new products, new type of silicon solutions. We see this. We also see the complexity that these systems are taking. We're taking an approach that says, "Listen, product is no longer enough. We need to remove complexity for our customers." We incorporate, you know, connectivity. We kind of incorporate security, the processing, the PMUs, the analog piece. We're taking a system approach, very similar to what we do in the auto, we're applying into industrial.
We kinda go out there and said, "Okay, this is how we're gonna remove complexity to our customers." Industrial is. It has this transformation happening and the true secular trend that is happening in industrial is AI at the edge, you know, physical AI, edge AI at the edge. It's at the center of every conversation that we have with our industrial customers. You can't avoid walking into a customer and not having a conversation on how to deploy AI to either augment their current offerings or create new ones. We see it. Our customers are developing platforms with room in terms of headroom, in terms of processing.
They don't know what they wanna do, but they know that we need to evolve that platform to basically over-the-air update these features, make them secure by design, make sure they augment it with other, you know, functionality. This transformation is very visible. They're going from very similar to what happened in automotive to hardware-defined features to more software-defined systems. NXP is kind of prime, a prime position to help them in that journey.
I guess in autos, it's very clear why that needs to be at the edge because you can't be going to the cloud for stuff when you're driving a car in real time. Is that same thing true in industrial? Why can't I just call in the cloud for that information? Why do I need the actual AI capabilities at the edge?
Well, it depends.
Yeah.
It depends. I think it's gonna be a hybrid model. I think even the car is still connected, right?
Yeah.
You still need to update the models and actually kind of go back to a car for training. Anything that is low latency, anything that is high level of security, anything that is gonna tamper with the actual functionality of the system, you want it to have control. You want it to be at the edge. I think that's what is just the one thing that is quite wonderful about industrial right now is companies are thinking about what the software-defined systems are gonna look like. These are the type of conversations they're having with us because of the capabilities that we have, not only on processing and on security, on deterministic networking, but the new capabilities that we have with AI.
I tell you, the level of interest that they have on AI platforms or customers are massive, and this is what gives the conviction. I think in many ways we feel internally at NXP that industrial is a sleeping giant in our portfolio for NXP because there's massive interest of AI at the edge.
Mm-hmm.
Maybe, Joe, let me hopefully hear the excitement and the investments we're making in physical AI. Let me, for our owners out there, provide some numbers. Remember our industrial IoT end market, 60% is industrial, 40% is IoT. In Q4, this was up 24% year-over-year, and we just guided Q1 up in the low 20s. The accelerated growth drivers, there's a bucket of them focused on processing, analog, and security. In 2021, this bucket was about $500 million. 2024 was $600 million, and really the growth has just taken off. This grew above model near 30% in 2025, and our ambition is to be above $1.2 billion in 2027. During that, the core even declined by about 10% in 2025.
You'll see the strength of our industrial IoT come across and a composition of the end market. Think about it, in 2024, the growth drivers were 28%. In 2025, they were 36%, and we're well on our path to have the growth drivers be meaningful to +40% by 2027.
Just to put even add another layer kind of a data that gives you the strength of kind of the ramp of AI in our portfolio. In 2025, the revenue that had some AI component in industrial was only 3%. We expect this to more than double in 2026, and there is doubling also in a year where industrial is gonna grow. You can see from a actually absolute value perspective, AI is becoming more and more of the portfolio of industrial. This doesn't even include the generative AI capabilities that we acquire through Kinara, through the Neural Processing unit that they have that is discrete. It includes nothing of that. This is actually organic growth over previous AI solutions.
Again, this is actually a really strong tailwind that NXP and it is gonna differentiate NXP and industrial.
Yeah. I mean, I assume you have a lot of long-lived sockets, so when you have that kind of approach, it means a lot of your new activity is around those areas.
Yeah. Well, I think AI is actually kind of becoming a transformative move. You must have it.
Yeah.
I think the transformation that's happening is challenging incumbencies, right? You can't assume that incumbency the same way you assume incumbency a while back in industrial. AI is gonna transform that. Now, the good thing about, you know, what we are positioning NXP is incumbency is gonna get strengthened by the addition of AI. It's also an opportunity for us to actually challenge other incumbents in the market with maybe less optimal or less innovative solutions with respect to AI.
Great. maybe just to round out the product portfolio, talk about your communications exposure, sort of transitioning from RF to secure cards. Just how do you think about that?
Well, we've been transparent, right, on the structural change in the revenue of comps and infra. To give you, just to remind you, in 2024, in analyst day, we said this segment was going to be essentially flat throughout 2027, with, you know, secure cards really kind of mitigating some of the decline on the other two segments with digital networking RF power. In 2025, secure cards was north of 50% of the revenue. The other two, you know, digital networking just took the other two, almost equally.
What I wanna highlight what is, one thing that's probably being masked, is this headline of flat over a period of three years, I think is masking a structural shift towards higher quality, more predictable revenue. Because it goes away from lumpy businesses, RF power, digital network, and that we have, you know, stopped, we stopped investing towards franchises. Basically, we have more visibility to predict. It's got higher, you know, kind of higher growth areas. Just to remind you, in secure cards, we have very, very strong franchises like MIFARE or UCODE, which is our RFID product that's seeing really good growth in the market.
That's where I'll leave you, is there is a structural change that comes in infra from revenue from away from digital networks and our power towards secure cards, and that gives us more visibility and more predictability.
Okay. Helpful. Thank you. Then finally, mobile. You're sort of become more of a niche premium supplier to that market. You know, what are you seeing there? Any, any turbulence around memory, things like that?
Well, I can't necessarily comment. We don't purchase memory, so I'm not, I'm not gonna be able to actually have a provider. I mean, memory is a conversation with every customer, okay, no matter what flavor of memory they use. Mobile, we focus on a, on a franchise that has deep technical moats that relies on ecosystem. You know, this is a mobile franchise. We also do some analog-specific products for some of our customers. Last year, we saw a growth in mobile business, you know, close to 6%, which is a bit shy of 6%. It was driven by the strength of a mobile portfolio in the mobile wallet. It was strengthened by content gains that we have in mobile. The way we see this basically uplift is in terms of longevity.
I think this growth is durable. The franchise that we have in the mobile wallet is strong, it has deep moats, technically, use cases, ecosystem, and the content gains that we have tend to be kind of multi-year design wins. We feel strongly that right now the mobile is in a good trajectory.
Great. Thank you. I have one more question, and then I'll turn it to the audience. Maybe if you could just remind us, you talked about a gross margin model of 57% to 63%. Can you talk about the puts and takes there as you approach?
Sure. In the short term, typically you have utilization, you have mix changes. More exciting, we use this rule of thumb for every $1 billion, think about 100 basis points on top of their model. Everything is projecting and forecasting to what we expect, and things are just grinding higher as revenue grows at this point in time. The real uplift that'll occur, probably a step function, more material for the company is probably in 2028, 2029 with the 200 basis points increase related to our joint venture with VSMC out of Singapore, where basically we'll just get the economies of scale from going from 200mm to 300mm, as well as more of a cost-plus type of model so that we can compete with other peers.
Do we have questions from the audience? One over here, please.
Is that on?
Yeah.
Rafael, you mentioned inside the drivers for industrial that you mentioned the energy storage systems. I just wondered if you could size that out for us. Is there any growth outside of data centers for ESS right now? Thanks.
Well, this is definitely an emerging market for us that we target as a complete total system solution. We don't sell necessarily a BMS product. We actually tend to sell the entire system solution because it needs to be certified with both security and functional safety. We ended up kinda helping our customers, basically go to market with these systems. This is a nascent market. It actually didn't start with data centers. It started with a lot of systems that were used to actually load balance the grid, and this is where we saw it. For some systems, they actually create some, I would say some basically resilience for buildings.
We are starting to see now more and more that data centers are going to be driving the need to be able to kind of really load balance the center and the spikes in terms of both power that they need to have. It's gonna be something that is gonna be a tailwind for us. I can't tell you right now, the data in terms of how big the market is still evolving. We're gonna be looking at. This is an area we believe is actually an area that is going to be an area of focus for us, given the system solution and the kind of portfolio that we have is quite good for this market.
It's not just on the energy storage system, but it's all the way to charging and the management of a bi-directional charging and bi-directional charging from the buildings to the grid. This is an area. It's kind of our portfolio is very well suited for it.