Thanks, everyone. Good afternoon. I'm still Chris Danely, still the semiconductor analyst here at Citigroup. Thank God, although probably to the chagrin of many of, many of you out there. Next up is NXP. Pretty much have the whole management team here, the dream team. We have, in order, Bill Betz, the CFO. We have Henri Ardevol. I keep wanting to say Henri Prudhon, which is a very famous Burgundy domain, but he's not a winemaker. He's Henri Ardevol, VP and GM of Auto Processing, and then the Grand Poobah of Investor Relations, Jeff Palmer, to my immediate left. So guys, I'll just, I'll just jump right in. We'll get into the, to the automotive, questions in a second. But I guess, you know, how are you guys sort of seeing the end markets?
Nothing near-term, but what are you most excited about, over the next, let's call it year and a half, in terms of the end markets, if you could rank them for, for NXP?
Yeah. I'll start that off, Chris. So I think, you know, clearly, with automotive being half of our business, clearly automotive is where we're the most focused on. We feel the most confident about our core automotive business as well as our core industrial business. As you know, Chris, our mobile business is small, maybe 12% of revenue. We're a niche player. We do something very specific there. We're facing the same challenges a lot of our mobile peers are with the Android market. We are seeing a cyclical kind of refresh with the iOS market in the second half of this year.
But I think, and this is why we brought Henri along with us to this conference, is we're very excited about this whole evolution of the software-defined vehicle going forward, and I'm sure Henri will speak to that more, a bit more today.
Mm-hmm.
I mean, from kind of a cyclical perspective, we're taking a more and have been taking a more cautious view. We're keeping our channel very tight, our distribution channel, which is about half our revenue, and we're being much more pragmatic and adaptable to our customers' needs on the direct side of the business with what we call our NCNR orders.
Yep. Maybe, you know, touch on the preemptive measures you guys are taking in terms of utilization rates, keeping inventory low for, you know, no matter what the cycle. You're one of the first companies to say, "All right, let's keep inventory low, let's keep the utilization rates low, and see what happens." Maybe talk about, you know, sort of what caused that and what actions you've taken.
Yeah. So as many of you who've followed us for a long time know, our management of the channel is, has been a learned experience. You know, 2016, we operated the channel probably a little bit more in a laissez-faire approach. Ship in, reconcile at the end of the quarter, off you go. That worked fine, but we did stub our toes back in 2016, and we made the concerted effort at that time to change how we manage a channel. So today, and this is directly Bill's doing when he became before he became CFO, we manage what we sell into the channel, we manage what sells out of the channel, and we manage what's in the channel by part level, by geography, by distributor. We get that data daily.
The management team reviews it weekly, and so we keep a very tight handle on that. As we entered 2023, if you remember back to our Q4 call, we were a bit uncertain about where the market was going, and so we took the decision to keep the channel tight at about 1.6 months, which is about a month less than our normal target of about 2.4-2.5. And what we've done instead is keep die form material on our balance sheet. So using our balance sheet to basically take care of die form inventory in case demand rebounds.
Mm-hmm. And you guys were one of the pioneers in terms of using long-term contracts to provide better visibility. Can you talk about, you know, I guess, what is your maybe ideal level of backlog that would be covered by these contracts, and, and how you feel about maybe backlog for next year in terms of, you know, coverage by the long-term contracts?
Yes. So our program, we call it, it's non-cancellable, non-returnable orders-
NCNR.
NCNRs, right. We run it on a calendar year basis. We only extend these programs to our automotive and our core industrial customers, so no distributors, no mobile customers. It really was formulated in conjunction with our large direct customers who wanted supply assurance, and we wanted visibility assurance.
Mm-hmm.
So we have put those in place. We're currently in the late part of 2023 now, just starting to have the discussions for 2024. They're not yet done.
Mm-hmm.
We're just fulfilling our 23 commitments at this point.
Sure.
We do think that in 2024, a number of customers will come back into the program again.
Okay. You know, will there be some sort of ideal backlog coverage? I mean, I would imagine it's not 100% to, you know, provide any wiggle room. Ideally, would it be 80 or 90 or 85-
Sure
or 75 or?
Let's, let's use our auto segment as an example. So 40% of auto goes through distribution, so that would not be covered by an NCNR order. So that would mean 60% of our auto might be covered by NCNRs in an ideal case.
Mm-hmm.
Right? Our core industrial business is roughly 60% of our industrial and IoT segment.
Yeah.
You might extend it to a subset of that. So clearly, it's not going to be 100% of the backlog.
Right. Great. And are the, you know, terms changing at all of these NCNRs as we enter into 2024, whether it's a, you know, pricing perspective or anything else?
So pricing, the way we approach pricing is we're only passing along the inflationary input costs that we receive from our suppliers.
Mm-hmm.
While maintaining our gross margin percent, so it does have a positive effect on revenue and gross profit, but gross margin percentage stays stable.
Yeah. Can you guys talk about overall input costs? Is it pretty much just a case of whatever the input costs do, they go up, whatever, 3%, 5%, you just pass that on to the customers and... no issue or is it a little more complicated than that, or?
Well, the math is a little more complicated, right? So if you have a 3% input cost and you just, as an example, have a 50% gross margin, you've got to pass along a 6% increase, right?
Yep.
To keep your gross margin stable.
Yep.
Passing along increased cost is never easy. It's never a conversation customers like to have. We've been very transparent on why we've taken this approach. We've also provided to our customers the ability to have audit rights if they think, "Hey, that seems awfully high, Mr. NXP. Let's have a look at why your input costs are going the way they are." You have to also remember, about 60% of our revenue, we source externally from foundries.
Yeah
... 40% internally, and on the internal side of things, we are still seeing some sticky inflationary costs in terms of energy and labor costs, but a lot of the more consumables into our own fabs and things has normalized today.
Yeah. And, you know, I've noticed that as we've had all this inflation and increasing input costs, it clearly hasn't dented your margins. Do you see any of these input costs easing over the next, let's call it, couple of years? And could that be a margin-enhancing, given it was, you know, you were able to to pass anything off?
Well, our view is, at least for as far as we can see right at the moment, we don't see input costs on the foundry side going down.
Yeah.
But I'll let Bill take gross margin conversation on that.
Yeah, I think we've been doing a pretty good job with our gross margins. If I think about long-term structural changes with the company, and Jeff talked about, we do about 40% internal, 60% external on the wafer fab. That puts about a 30% cost structure on us. When I joined 10 years ago, our cost structure was about 70% fixed. So going from 70%-30%, that reduces the variability of the movement of your gross margins. So that's a big plus. And if you think about going forward, the real ramp of NXP is 90 nanometers and below, and that's what we're gonna continue to source externally. And recently you saw over a couple of weeks ago, we have an equity position in a joint venture called ESMC, with TSMC, Bosch and Infineon.
The other structural change, I would say, is really our investment strategy. All the revenue you see today is coming from investments we made three or four years ago that had a margin hurdle rate of call it in the low 50s, so that revenue's coming to be. Think about all the investments we're making today, in three or four years' time, that new hurdle rate is around 58% from a corporate. Because we're oversubscribed, we want the team to go focus on their investments and strategically play and continue to improve the quality of our portfolio. And, so I'd say that'll gradually continue to grind gross margins higher. Now, more short- term, medium- term, there's a couple of headwinds at the moment.
Our utilizations are in the low 70s, as well, and, and, you know, we came from 95, we brought it down to 90, 85. So we learned from, you know, keeping and doing that in the right and proper way. We learned also not to stuff our channel or ship ahead of demand, which I think we're doing differently than our peers. You hear our peers talk about adjusting their top-line revenue because of inventory digestion. For us, we've been very lean. And so when you have that, this material that we haven't shipped, and we're starting just to ship to real end demand, is accretive to corporate gross margins. Think about it, distribution long tail has richer mix than your direct business high volumes.
And then the mix underneath our segments is also positive, thus offsetting that current headwind related to the lower utilizations. As we expect market to rebound in 2024, we have two tailwinds that'll play into our space. We'll have the utilizations help us improve from 70% back to that sweet spot of 85, as well as we are holding back about $500 million worth of revenue because our channel's at 1.6, where we don't believe or see any indication to replenish the channel this year. So eventually, we will have to, and it will be a gradual approach, which is a richer mix, which then helps drive the gross margins higher in the short- to medium- term, I would say.
But overall, we're very pleased with the progress we're making, as well as passing on those higher input costs to our end customers, but nothing more. We're very transparent about it, and so far, it's been a success.
Hey, Bill, when the utilization rates do bounce back to, say, the, you know, optimal 85% or even 90%, what would be the concurrent increase in gross margin?
Yeah, we don't break that out. In all honesty, there's lots of puts and takes in the gross margin. Tailwinds, both headwinds. Headwinds could be mix, for example. Headwinds could be, what if we're not successful passing on the higher input costs?
Mm-hmm.
We like to just, you know, we don't break out every little bit and piece associated with it, Chris, but I would say it's a tailwind.
Sure
... that will be beneficial to the company.
Maybe one little breadcrumb is your incremental gross margins, you know, recently have been somewhere in the 70s%. Is there any reason to believe that that would be any different this time around? I gave you a wide range, so,
I think-
Or you choose not to answer.
I'll jump in and help my CFO here. We don't speak about incremental gross margins.
Yeah.
I think a couple of things. First off is we would, we would highlight, don't use past performance as a way to try to read the future, because we have changed the structure of our internal factories. We've pushed out all bulk CMOS out of our internal factories-
Yep
... and then we've reoriented the lines to be exclusively mixed-signal proprietary processes. And so you can't go back and look at a period like March of 2020 and say, "Oh, the revenue was down X, the gross margin was down Y. That's what I'll use as my metric." Really, we,
Yeah
... lead to the wrong direction.
The only thing I would add is, you know, the current levels of gross margin is not our final destination.
Yeah.
... we'll continue to work and improve those. We have an analyst day coming up in almost a little over a year, November 2024, and that's the time where we'll probably reinstate our new growth margin targets longer- term for the company.
Great. Jeff, that's one interesting thing, is, you know, the 60% foundry, 40% internal, your manufacturing model has changed for the better, quite a bit. Whoever wants to take this question, maybe talk about what you've done over the last couple of years to optimize the manufacturing model, and could we see any more changes going forward?
I think in terms of at least our commitment to our hybrid model, which is very much aligned with our partners like TSMC, GlobalFoundries, and to a lesser degree, Samsung, will only continue. We're not going to build our own 12-inch factory. We just can't economically justify it. It doesn't make sense.
Yeah. Do you think over time that'll move more towards foundry then, like 70-30 or something like that?
Sure. Yes, over time.
Sure. And then, just a question on availability. You know, shortages, lead times, availability have been a hot topic in semis for quite some time, although things seem to be getting better. I guess we'll start with the NXP products first. Could you just give us an update on, you know, whatever metrics you use, your average lead time or the amount of shortages or both, kind of how we stand right now versus, you know, maybe earlier in the year?
Yeah. So lead times have normalized. And so our cycle time to build a part from a fresh order, fresh wafer through delivering it out, is up to six months. So, you know, we having some, some subset of that as being a target lead time is a reasonable target, but lead times have normalized. The only exception is in those areas where we do have NCNR orders-
Mm-hmm.
because effectively, you're pre-selling capacity, right? So if someone comes in who doesn't think they have to forecast an order, they're going to see their lead time quoted to them out beyond what we've already committed to other customers.
Can you give us a sense of what they were, say, I don't know, a year ago, to talk about the-
Well, I mean, a year ago, we were sold out. We were looking at greater than 52 weeks almost across the board.
Mm-hmm.
Right?
Yeah.
But I think one thing is we never really talked about our backlog 'cause we have always discounted it.
Yeah.
The way to think about it, our best metric to really understand what's going on in the market is through our distribution channel sell-through. And so in Q1, Q2, we kept that very, very tight. And so if you think about any new orders that came in within the quarter-
Yeah
... are real demand orders. And what we've seen, and we were able to service them and do a little bit better than what we thought. But the key here is making sure that you can drive that upside related to those orders, understand those different pockets of areas across the world where you wanna go focus and drive real end demand. And that's our leading indicator, I would say, Chris, is really getting a good feel of that-
Mm-hmm
... to give you confidence. And since then, I would say, you know, we've gradually sequentially improved in China every quarter since then. Not from a year-over-year standpoint, but China has improved since Q1.
Great. And then, so can we also infer that the availability of foundry product is, has pretty much normalized at this point, or is there still some, you know, spot shortages or difficulties or extended lead times or whatever?
I would say it's normal, and normal means you always have a couple percentage, probably 5% of your portfolio, that's always doing some sort of mismatch, or you need to expedite or something along those lines, but it, it seems back to normal levels.
And that's both on the internal foundry side and the external foundry side, right?
Mm-hmm. And so I've asked this to every company on the analog space, and they've all given different answers. So I'll ask you guys that you've got this sort of wide range of companies saying, you know, we're seeing a correction to we're not seeing anything. You know, where would you guys characterize NXP on that spectrum, and why do you think you are where you are in that range, I guess?
I'll take it, and maybe Bill will chime in on it. As we entered this year, in Q4 when we had our call, we really felt very uncertain about the environment, and clearly it was due to what was going on in China.
Mm-hmm.
Right? Some of our peers anticipated a rapid rebound after the COVID reopening. We didn't see indications that was going to occur, so we took a more cautious approach.
Yep.
Right? And we think that that's served us well.
Yep, keeping the inventory low, keeping the yield rates low.
Keeping things tight-
Yep
... staying close to customers. Now, what we have seen, as Bill mentioned a minute ago, we have seen a sequential improvement in China, but not on a year-on-year basis. We're continuing to be down year on year in our consumer IoT business, as well as in our Android handset business. Auto in China is actually pretty good, and auto in the rest of the world, still pretty good, as is core industrial.
Great. So yeah, just to go back to the sequential improvement in China, you're the first semi company that said that at the conference. That's good news. Maybe just expand on the I guess we'll call those green shoots or something like that we're seeing in China.
I think it was more that we took a pretty big hit in Q1.
Yeah. Okay, great.
Yeah, more than that one, unless you-
I think what you see with our peers is they're going through this inventory digestion.
Mm-hmm.
Right?
Yeah.
When there is no inventory in the channel, which we try to keep it very lean-
Yeah
... then we get a real view of what real demand's doing. And I think many of our peers tell us, "Yeah, demand's there.
Yeah.
They have to go through this inventory correction, and it's just timing.
Mm-hmm.
I think that's on both the distribution side, but also on the direct side. It's how you treated these NCNRs that Jeff talked about in the beginning. Did you jam it and force your customers to take it when real demand's not there? And we've kind of taken a different approach. Since Q1, again, we entered into these NCNRs back in October of 2022. So as we pulsed and new orders came in, we checked with them, and they, you know, maybe customer A would say-
... I wanted 100, but now I need 95 or 90. And we said, "Okay, well, that's not what we, you know, assigned capacity for you. Okay, let's find a win-win." And we worked this out through commercial ways, meaning, okay, they didn't know, but we could actually take that supply that they don't need, those 5 units, and give it to somebody else in need. So that worked, but we also got something else out of it, like a future design win, or maybe higher pricing because of the working capital. We didn't take on their working capital issues and gave it all back to us. We found the win-win or maybe on a previous quality claim or something.
So we think we did that a bit differently than some of our peers throughout the year, and just not now, when some are now adjusting their internal utilization or their ordering, purchasing behavior. We did that, as you could tell by our internal utilizations, it went from 95, 90, 85, slowly went down. And that's a lesson learned as well, is how do you manage your internal factories and your ordering behavior to be able to, you know, have a soft landing? And I think we've been going through that soft landing. Yeah, I think the industrial market is a perfect example of that. Everybody's worried about it rolling over. You guys already went through that. You know, it already corrected for you, and now it's starting to stabilize.
But I think that's also, Chris, you know, we keep getting asked about, you know, "When's the shoe gonna drop on automotive?" And I would say that we've, through our approach in NCNRs and our management of the channel, you've already kind of gotten that correction already, right?
Mm-hmm.
Our guidance for Q3 for automotive is, ought to be up in the mid-single digits, up 5% year-on-year. That's below our long-term-
Yeah
... growth rate.
Yeah.
Right? And so clearly, you're already going through that rationalization now.
Yeah. Okay, enough about the near-term stuff.
Okay.
We've satisfied all the client questions. Let's talk about the fun stuff. One thing is, you know, it seems like every other day, there's an announcement about some, you know, analog start-up in China. There's a couple of, you know, reasonably, well-established companies like Silergy over there on the competitive front. I get this question all the time: you know, how much of a threat do you guys see as, you know, China's domestic semiconductor industry to your, you know, core mixed signal MCU, business?
You want to take that one, Henri?
Yeah. So I think on the low end, there's probably some possibilities for them to creep in on-
Mm-hmm
... you know, the high volume, low complexity kind of products. Really with the transition, which is happening in an accelerated way to XCV as well as to SDV, especially in China, our angle and what the market requires is to continue to accelerate in terms of complexity and in terms of the quality of the portfolio. So we're not very concerned about the threat of China in the coming period-
Yeah
... in terms of local suppliers.
Yeah. Note, note to everybody, you already sold the, the low-end standard products business, so that's all-
That's sixteen.
That's all gone, yeah.
Yeah, and, you know, we've said this at other conferences, Chris, but in China, on a level playing field, the competitors we see are the same competitors we see in the Western markets.
Right.
Yeah.
Um-
If it were a silicon carbide supplier, it would be a different-
Yeah, yeah. We're not, not a discrete supplier, and there is a lot of excess capacity being built in China, but that's not our, our, our area.
Sure. Okay, let's get to the fun stuff, auto. There's everything from ADAS to efficiency to safety to, you know, you name it, Henri. What would you say would be the, at this point, the, I don't know, top three drivers of semiconductor content in the automotive space right now? And then we'll, we'll dig into a series of questions on that.
Yeah, so really what we see is accelerated trends which are combining xEV together with SDV together with ADAS. And so, on, on, you know, the overall automotive business, we said we were gonna grow at a 9%-14% CAGR on 2021 - 2024, and we're well on our path to execute on that. On the SDV, which is related to the core processing portfolio that we run, we said that we're gonna run a 10%-12% CAGR, and particularly the most advanced part of our portfolio, the S32 family, was gonna grow from $300 million to $600 million in the 2021 - 2024 period, and again, we're executing to that.
On xEV, BMS inverters will have an outsized presence, particularly in China, and the target that we put, which was to grow from $200 million to $500 million in 2024, we actually achieved $400 million at the end of last year, and we are well on the path to execute and to exceed the target. Finally, ADAS for us is a very focused and very strong leadership lane radar, where the secondary trend is clear that it's gonna be a triple growth of the more complex types of radar which are being installed in car, the higher number of radars which are coming into cars, as well as the high level of autonomy, which is requiring more processing capability into those processors.
And so that brings that business from around $600 million in 2021 to $1.1 billion in 2024, which is a 20%-25% CAGR. So those three drivers are at play, and we see them accelerating each other.
As, Henri, as the automotive business has, has really exploded for you and everybody else over the last 10 years, has there been any change in the margin profile of that business? Is it a little bit easier to, you know, maybe keep, keep pricing flat to slightly up? And have your margins been able to, to go up, or do you kind of model it so they stay flat, or how, how does the, you know, sort of the P&L work for that?
So I'll probably jump in on that. So we really don't break down our margins by segment, but over the last 5+ years, the dispersion of margin across the segments has become very, very tight. So you don't have as much dispersion as maybe you did 5, 10 years ago.
Okay, interesting.
Yeah, I think, you know, historically, Chris, we had been operating in an environment where you would give very low single-digits annual price downs to your customers-
Mm-hmm.
In automotive, negotiated every year. But as we started, as we talked about a few moments ago, as we're seeing input costs go up, we've had no choice but to go back to all our customers and say, "Hey, our input costs are higher," and, and demonstrate to them why.
Yep, and so-
Just as driving for us to improve our gross margin is just to pass on-
Right.
For the input cost on.
Great. And then, Henri, how about on the geographic side? You know, there's sort of different pockets of the automotive market where, you know, North America, Japan, Europe, China. Maybe describe where you're seeing, perhaps the most growth for NXP and the different approaches that all these you know sort of regions or their domestic manufacturers take. And if you could give us a rough breakdown of your exposure to the main end markets in automotive.
So I think in China, as a company, about 30% of our revenue is coming from China-
Yep
... which, which in automotive is maybe, you know, a little bit farther than that. So that, that's a good thing because the innovation cycles in China are a lot shorter, and so they are early adopters of new versions of technology, and we are at the forefront of innovation in, in SDV, as well as, as in xEV and, and, and, radar. So we're benefiting from what is happening right now in terms of, of Chinese, manufacturers, which are serving the local market as well as the, as, as well as the export market. On, on the short- term, we actually continue to see the U.S. and Europe continue to perform. The, the numbers of, of vehicle sales were out, from August, where, the U.S. was 14% growth year-on-year, year-to-date.
Yeah.
Versus 13% in July and versus a forecast of 11%, so we're ahead. In Europe, 18% growth versus the forecast I think is around 10%, so that is also executing. The inventory levels of finished cars are very low, at 39 days in the U.S., which is about 1 - 5 million cars less than historical. So we feel pretty good in terms of what the market is doing. And therefore, our focus is not so much on what the units of vehicles are going to do, but much more on the content growth.
This is where, you know, everything that we do with OEMs in terms of driving the innovation, in terms of the programs which are gonna come into play in the 2025, 2026, 2027 year, are going to be a big acceleration.
Mm-hmm. And then within your products, so you guys do, like, literally tens of thousands of products. Within your products, what would be the top, I guess, three to five, or, you know, the, the top products you would care to mention that you see the most increase in content for, for NXP?
Overall, for the whole company, processing is probably the number one. Secondarily would be analog attach. We also, in our industrial and IoT business, we're seeing real interest in bringing not only the processor and the analog attached to the solution, but connectivity, whether that's Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, near-field communication, as well as security.
Mm-hmm.
So that's kind of your rank order. I think, for those of you who have followed NXP for a long time probably know this, but if you were to kind of cut the company by products, about half of our revenue comes from processing products.
Yeah.
The other half comes from analog and RF products.
We try, and that's a big difference versus NXP of five years ago, to really mesh those different product lines such that the sum is greater than the parts. And so if you look at automotive, you know, half of our revenue is microcontrollers, but the fact that we have the power management, the fact that we have all of the IVN and the physical side of the networking, the fact that we have the analog front-end for the battery management systems, the fact that we have the gate drivers for the inverters, it, you know, enables us, for those customers that want to go very fast to market, for example, China, to deliver complete solutions where it's, of course, the typical hardware reference design.
But we go a lot beyond that in terms of delivering software which is integrated across the complete system solution, functional safety concepts which are also at the system level, security concepts which are at the system level. And so it's a complete box where customers can go and get in production very quickly. And in that xEV market, it's very important because there's a lot of new actors which are coming on board, and so they need us to step up and enable them to go into the application development. That then enables us to also continue to innovate, where there's gonna be a consolidation of the different domains within the electrification of the powertrain, right? I mean, if you take a typical powertrain of a Chinese OEM, you would have a lot of physical integration, but it's still separate boards.
So you still have a board for your BMS, a board for your inverter, a board for your charger, your own DC-DC, and your onboard charging. And so there are still the opportunity to combine all of that into an EV-on-a-chip kind of concept, which we are then able to further optimize by the fact that we have the analog front-end, gate drivers, et cetera, into building higher-speed interfaces to those peripherals, and then to concentrate all of the processing and decision-making into that single processing unit, which then enables us to have this concept of a software-less, a software-free BMS, which is gonna be driving a lot of efficiency.
Mm-hmm. By the way, is there any, I guess, figure or number you guys look at where if there's so much X amount of processing content for every $1 of processing content, you can, or you get, I don't know, $2, $3, $4 of mixed signal and other content. And would you say that the, the primary decision on RE is the processing unit, or is it the analog, or is it something else, or is it both or neither? What, what, you know, when you guys are working with customers on design wins, is there anything that they particularly start with from NXP and then you build out from that?
Yeah, typically, I would say that the processor is the primary decision.
Yeah.
And actually, very often, the conversation now is even not so much about the silicon, but it's much more about what kind of architecture do they want to drive. And so we have gone with OEMs into much more of a consultancy type of engagement. Instead of a product conversation that we were having with tier ones, with OEMs, you want to have a holistic conversation about all of the different layers of the vehicle architecture, such that you are able to create a hierarchy, and you are able to meet their objectives in terms of software, in terms of functional safety, security, the organization of the network, how the data structures in the car are going to be organized.
How do you have an over-the-air structure across the vehicle, which is stable and which can drive monetization?
How do you connect it to the cloud? So that engagement actually happens even before talking about the silicon. Then the silicon becomes a logical consequence, and of course, you know, the configuration of the processors, and then how can we make that something which is even more efficient and coming into market faster with all of the peripherals?
Great. A couple other questions on automotive. I've had a few people over the last month bring up, you know, the UAW potential strike. Does that ever come up in your conversations with customers? Is this a concern, or is it more of a, "Whatever, it'll be, you know, a month or two months of disruption, and then we'll move on"? Does this pop up for a semiconductor company at all?
I mean-
If the answer is no, I'll take it. I just need to ask it.
Yeah, I mean, we've experienced this in the past. It didn't really have an impact. I mean, we'll watch it, right? Obviously, we don't want supply chain get disruptive, so that's our biggest concern. The last thing we want is a COVID repeat, but we don't think that's gonna happen based on the lessons learned recently. It's still pretty fresh. So-
Yeah
... we think, you know, as Jeff mentioned, it takes three-six months just to reach that point.
Yeah
... to them.
Yeah. If I kind of zoom out from the question, there's a lot of learning that has happened in the industry, and I would say particularly with the OEMs, in the sense of wanting to make sure that the new model is gonna be very different from the model of the past. And so when we look at new awards from OEMs, typically, they have a requirement of at least three months of inventory in the chain towards the supplier in order to actually have a chance to get the award, and some of them go up to six months. So very structurally, those measures are being put in place, and, you know, some of the cost is also being discussed from the OEM of being passed down the value chain in order to sustain that.
So, the learning seems to be there on a structural basis.
Great. Thanks for answering that. Okay, so in terms of NXP content, I am required to ask you the obligatory question of EV versus hybrid versus ICE car. What's your sort of average content and maybe how you expect that to trend over the next two to three years?
Yeah. So it, Chris, for us, on average, ICE car, you know, for the industry is about $500 of semiconductor content. For EVs, it's probably double that, $1,000. Something that was very eye-opening to us is, as the EV mix started to really accelerate, we basically saw a huge pull-through beyond just our electrification portfolio. So it would pull along more radar, pull along more in-vehicle networking, pull along more processors. But, you know, the, the unfortunate thing is how the supply chain works is we don't get a clear view that, you know, one of our tier ones orders a radar product from us. They don't say X% of that product goes to EVs, X% goes to ICE cars. We just don't get that level of granularity.
Yeah.
Yeah, and I would say the way to think about it is in terms of waves, what we were discussing before, right? I mean, you have the electrification wave, you have the SDV wave, you have the ADAS wave, and they add to each other. In a similar way, when you think about SDV, you know, how the OEMs are organizing now the vehicle architecture, you have the end nodes, and you have more of those because you have more functionality, so you need more microcontrollers. Domain controllers, which is the clustering of the function, is a reality, and I, you know, I'm gonna be hard-pressed to think of any OEM which in 2024, 2025, is not gonna be in mass production with a domain controller.
Then they wanna go and also think about the physical network, how to simplify the harness, how to take hundreds of meters of copper wire away from the car, which is leaving cost, leaving weight out, which can be reinvested into the silicon, and those would be the zonal controllers. And then you have the really advanced guys that want to take this consolidation, which is taking place in domain controllers , and even further integrate it into the whole vehicle state management into a complete vehicle computer. Those are then building on each other at different speeds, depending on the OEM, but they're providing additional layers.
Yeah, that's what I was getting at, is I would bet that NXP content is probably up, you know, 30% in the average EV/hybrid vehicle over the last, I don't know, four or five years. But I'm always, always looking for new data points to confirm or deny that, see what's going on in the future.
Yeah, I mean, our electrification players, as we were discussing, we said was gonna grow at a 30% CAGR, and we're well on track to actually exceed that. Our radar, 20%-25% CAGR, and on the processing side, 10%-20% CAGR.
Great. Thanks, guys. We're out of time. Appreciate it.