Annual Needham Growth Conference. Next up is a fireside with Impinj, I think, as most people know, is a pure play in the RAIN RFID market. Note that the company issued a press release after the market closed yesterday, reaffirming the Q4 guidance. I'm going to turn it over. Let me introduce the management team. We're pleased to have the CEO, Vice Chair, Co-Founder, Chris Diorio, and CFO, Cary Baker. Thank you both for joining us.
Thank you, Jim.
Cary, why don't you go ahead and.
Yeah, thanks, Jim. On Tuesday, after market close, we issued a press release announcing that we expect fourth quarter 2024 revenue to be within our prior guidance of $91-$94 million and adjusted EBITDA within our prior guidance of $13.6-$15.1 million. I will now provide as much color around that press release as I am able to share at this time. I ask that you please defer any follow-on questions about that release, including about our fourth quarter results or first quarter expectations, until our earnings call scheduled for Wednesday, February 5th, 2025 at 5:00 P.M. Eastern. These preliminary fourth quarter 2024 results reflect a seasonal decline in endpoint IC revenue and sequential growth in our systems revenue. We anticipate adjusted EBITDA near the upper end of the range.
On that note, I would like to thank you, Jim and Needham, for having us here today at the conference.
Okay. Cary, is it worth, and again, just tell me if you'd rather address this in the earnings call, but how were you thinking about the endpoint IC business, maybe just, and the systems business in Q4 as part of your prior guidance? Do you want to.
Sure, of course. So on the endpoint IC side, we were thinking at the favorable end of normal seasonality, which is down 5%-10%, in the fourth quarter. As a reminder, we ship in front of the holiday season, so Q3 is typically our strongest endpoint IC quarter. And we expected systems growth in the fourth quarter, both due to a seasonal perspective, you know, typical enterprise hardware buying decisions coming up against the end of a fiscal year and spending capital dollars that they have allocated in that budget. And we also had an outsized portion of revenue from the loss prevention deployment. We had a spike in Q4 before it normalizes in the first half of 2025.
Okay. Great. And again, most, I think, folks in the audience are familiar with the company, but it might be helpful just to provide a quick refresh on the strategy, you know, financial profile, endpoint ICs versus systems.
You're on a roll. Keep going.
I'll start with the financial profile, Chris, and you can go with the strategy. All right, so from a financial profile, we have two major product categories: our endpoint IC and our systems. Think of endpoint IC as roughly 85%, of the revenue in the third quarter and systems as the other 15%. Endpoint IC has increased over time. It's the recurring portion of our revenue. So in 2023, that mix was closer to an 80/20 or a 75/25 mix. From a financial profile perspective or from an operating margin perspective, you've seen us drive operating margin accretion. In 2023, our operating margin was around 7%. September 2024, year to date, we were 18.5%, and over that time, you've also seen us reach the scale where we're able to deliver consistent free cash flow. Year to date, September 2024, free cash flow was approximately $60 million.
And then I'll hand it to you on the strategy side, Chris.
So on the strategy side, our mission as a company is to connect everything, and we're really focused on that connectivity. Today, we deliver probably still more than half of our endpoint ICs to go into retail apparel and footwear. That percentage is declining. Not that retail apparel and footwear is declining, but the percentage is declining as other categories around general merchandise, supply chain and logistics, and other verticals increase. And we expect those other verticals to continue growing. Today, we are focused very significantly on enterprise adoption, working directly with Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 enterprises, the leading enterprises, to solve their problems, drive new use cases, drive adoption, hand off to our partners for them to carry the ball going forward as we focus on the next opportunity. Enterprise adoption is growing in all of those verticals. In 2023, the industry delivered 44.8 billion endpoint ICs.
We don't have the number for 2024 yet. The RAIN Alliance will publish those data probably in about a month or so. But I feel good about the 2024 numbers, and we see continued growth into 2025. In addition to enterprise adoption, the longer-term opportunity is consumer use cases as well. And so we have really begun the push into consumers getting the benefit from connected items. Today, there are very few consumer-enabled opportunities, and even the ones that are out there are driven by enterprises. For example, you can think of the Delta Track My Bags app. But I envision a future where people can directly get the benefit from reading and engaging their connected items. And that's one of the pushes that I'm personally working on, the company's working on, and that I think, or I believe, is the long-term future.
Thank you for that. You know, one announcement that back in early December that went largely unnoticed is, and I'm guilty of as well, is Impinj Gen2X.
Yeah.
And so, you know, explain to investors how this ties into the strategy, why is it important, some of the financial metrics to the extent you can share with us as to how we might, you know, evaluate it in terms of the success of this.
Okay, so there's an industry radio protocol and over-the-air protocol that describes how readers communicate with tags and vice versa. Over the years, we as a company have worked directly with many leading enterprises, and in order to solve their problems, we have made extensions to that protocol. We've done bits and pieces here and there on our endpoint ICs, in our readers, in both, to make the solution work. In addition, we've gained learnings along the way about how to make that air interface work better. That is, improve the reliability of the reading, improve the speed of the reading, improve the range of the reading, protect consumer privacy, provide item authenticity, and just a whole bunch of other pieces that we've developed as the leading player in the space to enable those enterprise solutions.
We've taken those things that we've done for the enterprise, combined it with the other learnings that we had or have, and introduced it as Gen2X, which is a set of enhancements to the radio protocol that do all the things I just said and speed and ease adoption. We brought it out broadly to the industry. We have today more than 25 reader partners who have adopted our Gen2 extensions or Gen2X, are supporting it and seeing dramatic improvements in the field, and Gen2X is not a static thing. We keep getting learnings. It's something that we're going to enhance over time. We have opened it up broadly to our partners, and we expect it to further drive adoption and preference for our endpoint ICs. Now, Gen2X does not marginalize any of our competitors. If you don't use it, performance is the same as it was.
In a mix-and-match population of endpoint ICs, if you have some of Impinj M800, it works better with those M800s. The more M800s you have, the better the solution works. But we don't degrade performance in any way. We only enhance solution performance for the use cases that all of us in the industry are approaching.
You know, Chris, what struck me also was seeing Zebra mentioned as part of that. You typically sometimes think of them as kind of a frenemy. You know, how do we think about their comment as it relates to this?
So I think of Zebra as a friend and way less as an enemy. There's obviously some points of overlap where we compete in the market, but we can achieve so much more by working together than we can by working separately. So we approached Zebra and said, "Hey, we got these Gen2 extensions, Gen2X. Are you interested? Here's what it does." And they said, "Yes.
Okay.
We're like, "Okay, let's do it," because we can together drive enterprise solutions better. And so expect me to be talking more of Zebra as a friend in enterprise adoption and take that enemy word away.
Okay. Stand corrected.
Not everybody. I mean, it's across all of us, you know, so.
The NRF took place this week. Is it over? I think it's probably over.
Yeah.
We did attend and took a tour. Fortunate enough to get a tour, but maybe you want to highlight what you saw there for folks who may not have been able to get over to the Javits Center.
Okay. Well, I saw a very dynamic NRF, a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of excitement. I would say the two leading technologies that I saw really touted at NRF were RAIN RFID and AI. By contrast to prior years when we and partners were talking a lot more about technology and what RAIN RFID enables, this year there was a lot more emphasis on solutions. Enterprises were coming to our booth and seeing our demos and talking about the solutions they needed. Other partners at the show were demonstrating solutions. And so it was a very much enterprise solutions focus around the RAIN RFID usabilities at NRF. Yeah, Cary, what would you add?
Yeah, I think I would contrast it. I'm coming up on my five-year anniversary at Impinj, and I actually went to NRF before I started with Impinj. Chris invited me to join as a civilian before I signed on full-time, if you will, and what I saw five years ago was RAIN as a technology. I saw a lot of handheld readers. I saw some inlays. I saw Impinj there. What I saw this year was RAIN as a solution, not just with the players that everyone thinks of as, you know, Impinj's solution, or Avery Dennison's solutions, or Zebra's solutions, but I saw a lot of other of our partners taking our technology and developing their version of a solution. I did a tour with one of our partners who was using our E710 reader IC, and they developed a very slick loss prevention solution, which is great.
This is exactly what we want. We want our partners taking our technology, our reader ICs, developing solutions that they can take to their customers that open up new endpoint IC opportunities for us. And that's been the transition that I've seen from five years ago to today.
I'll add, in that same vein, we had another partner who has delivered or has created an overhead reading solution for a particular retailer. It actually works very well. The retailer is very excited about it. And we introduced some of the Gen2X capabilities into it, and we were able to demonstrate that we could substantially improve performance. And so in addition to all the things I said here, in terms of NRF and Gen2X was very prominent at the show. Many of our partners, and yeah, many of our partners were demonstrating or talking about Gen2X or highlighting it in their booth.
I just want to stop for one second just to ask a question because pretty much every session has talked about trade policy and tariffs. And, you know, it's worth, let's just ask the question as to, you know, how it might affect Impinj. What happened the last time around? Was there any impact? And maybe you just talk to us in general.
Did you get any good answers on that?
No. But we have to ask the question.
Yeah, fair enough. So we're trying to understand that too. And it's top of mind for us. It's top of mind for our partners and our end customers. And I would say no one has a good answer yet. We used the term in the past. It's very opaque right now, and I think that's appropriate. And when there is that type of uncertainty, people just move a little more cautious, and that's what we're seeing right now. But I would say the last time we went through this and tariffs, we were largely unimpacted. We had one SKU in our supply chain that was impacted, and we were able to outmaneuver it. It was a very small SKU. So I don't see disruption from our internal supply chain, but how does it affect the consumer? How does it affect buying behaviors?
Those are the unknowns right now that we're trying to figure out.
I guess, Jim, I'll go back to NRF for a question. I spoke to multiple retailers at NRF, and the general sentiment among the retailers was that consumer demand in North America remained strong. Now, obviously, this was just my own personal sampling, but the sampling of those retailers was that U.S. consumer demand remained strong. Europe consumer demand remains roughly flat. But I didn't hear anybody talking about a pullback in consumer demand. What I did hear on top of that consumer demand related to tariffs was sourcing uncertainty, where to source from, because there's uncertainty in terms of where the tariffs will be applied. And so that sourcing uncertainty is leading to some uncertainty among our service bureau and inlay partners because they have factories all around the world. But if there's product sourcing uncertainty, then there's inlay delivery uncertainty.
The tariffs are causing, as Cary said, some opaqueness, some uncertainty. It's just going to take a little time to settle out.
And maybe on the note of just anecdotally what you just mentioned, and look, companies given some guidance for Q4, you've reaffirmed that. But I guess where I'm going with this is, you know, some of the data that we've seen suggests what you just mentioned, Chris, there was a fairly healthy holiday season, e-commerce and traditional in-store. And so I guess the question I'm asking is, yeah, if we think about those initial holiday sales reports, is there any way to think about how that could potentially impact inventory replenishment? And obviously, there are different cross-currents.
Yeah, we read the same reports as well. And, you know, what we see is a relatively healthy U.S. consumer, maybe a little bit less so in Europe. But for us, it's less about the sales data as it is the production and the production orders. So we also track a subset of public retailers that we think of as a RAIN indicator set. And I would say, you know, 90 days ago or so, almost all of those retailers were growing sales faster than they were growing inventory. So they were still normalizing. More recently, that has become more balanced where some are still growing and others have reached a normalization state. So for us to feel, you know, really good, we want, you know, inventory and sales moving in unison or as close to unison as possible.
We're just not quite there yet at the end customer, the retailer level.
Sometimes get the question about whether Impinj is indexed more to in-store versus e-commerce in retail apparel and the footwear vertical. But, you know, I think it's worth noting that, you know, the merchandise. Talk to us about where the merchandise is tagged and does it matter.
It doesn't really matter that their merchandise is almost exclusively tagged at source, that's at source at time of manufacturing when either the price label gets printed or for now more and more when garments are manufactured, the label is inserted or the tag with RFID is inserted into the price label or into the garment itself. Very little tagging happens after that. It's all source tag. So at that point, whether a store sells the item in-store or does buy online, pick up in store or fulfillment from store, it doesn't matter. That invisibility they get from having a tag on the item, the, you know, inventory accuracy, the ability to sell more efficiently accrues to the retailer regardless of how they sell it.
Okay. So we'll see some data come out of the RAIN Alliance about 20, you know, what the units were for 2024. Can you help us again, maybe to remind us just how it breaks out if, you know, logistics, general merchandise, and of course the big one being retail apparel in terms of sizes that were rough.
Sure enough. I used to say that retail apparel was three quarters of the market. Retail apparel and footwear was three quarters of the market. That was years ago. And then it went down to it's more than two thirds of the market. And now we're using the number, it's more than half of the market. But that doesn't say anything, again, it doesn't say anything negative about retail apparel and footwear. It's just that other categories are growing and growing dramatically. In terms of a breakout between supply chain and logistics and other categories, we haven't done that breakout or general merchandise, we haven't done that breakout. And it's going to get even more confusing going forward. And I'm going to apologize for this, but we're going to be seeing more logistics operations within retail as we work through more visibility through the retail supply chain.
So it's going to become even harder to break out retail general merchandise from retail apparel from supply chain because what all of these end users want is true end-to-end visibility from point of manufacturing through shipping to store to point of sale, and then eventually through consumer use to item recycling at end of life.
You know, generally speaking, you know, we look at the unit volume growth that we get from RAIN Alliance and Impinj growth. It doesn't always sync up. How do we think about that?
Yeah, so.
Investors think about.
Over the long term, the unit CAGR for endpoint IC has been in the 25% range. In the last three years, it's been 25%-30%. The last five years, it's been 20%-25%. Where Impinj stacks up in 2023, our unit growth was 36%. In 2024, September year to date, it was around 30%. So one year above, one year in line. Our growth algorithm typically follows this approach. It is the existing deployments that are recurring. It's the expansion within those existing deployments because most customers are not 100% deployed yet. And then we layer on the new deployments on top of that. In years where we outgrow the historical CAGR, typically what you will find is a new large deployment taking place. So in 2023, where we grew 36%, outgrowing the historical CAGR, we had a large logistics provider kicking off for the first time.
Last year, 2024, through the September quarter, we're growing right in line. We didn't have a new large customer going.
We are doing what we can to drive that enterprise adoption, drive preference for our products, and drive our share. First and foremost, we do that by enabling the enterprise.
You said it earlier, but just the retail apparel penetration rate is still somewhere in the neighborhood of 40%?
Probably 35 to 40.
35%-40% penetrate.
So we're operating on a little stale data right now because that's based on 2023. The RAIN Alliance should publish 2024 data in the next month or so. So we'll be able to update that.
And when you think of that number, 35%-40% penetrated, that's not the number of end users. The number of end users is dramatically higher. It's just that very few end users are at 100%. So we still see continued growth even among end users. And even in the ones that are at 100%, there's still further expansion of how they operate, growth within their own business. But we actually see continued growth and continued new opportunities that they have that I would say they're at 100%. And then I'm like, well, we actually still continue to grow with them. So there's more to be had.
So when the question comes up, the use cases are so compelling, you know, and people push back. So, well, why hasn't it gone faster? And it's. But is the answer the complexity of putting this in place for these customers, these large enterprise customers?
Yeah, I would say, you know, rather than use the word complexity, what I would say is that enterprises need to retool their operations to track every item individually from time of manufacturing through the supply chain to their stores. And it's just not something they historically did. They used average numbers from SKUs. You know, we ordered 100 items of this particular SKU. They didn't track individual items. Their systems weren't set up that way. So that whole process of transitioning their enterprise to tracking items, driving the efficiencies they can get from it through their entire ERP system, training their workforce to use the data, introducing new ways of operating based on the data, taking regular inventories, automating restocking, all of that stuff, it's new.
And so anytime you talk about something new of that kind of scale with a Fortune 500 enterprise, you can't expect it to happen overnight. It cannot. If you have to train 50,000 employees on something, it just takes time.
Yeah, we typically see any customer, but particularly the large ones, follow a fairly similar path in that they go from the sales cycle to a pilot. They prove out the technology in the pilot. Then they go to a controlled deployment, a subset of their overall operations that they can contain. They prove out the ROI at scale. Then they make the decision to roll out broadly. You can think of our second large logistics customer as a perfect example of that. We announced that win in the middle of 2020. That was after the sales cycle, after the pilot, prior to them going into their controlled deployment. They proved out the ROI in the controlled deployment and a portion of the business that most of us wouldn't even use because it's dedicated to high-end medical.
And then in 2023 or really late 2022, but more earnestly in 2023, they began their broad rollout. They ramped in 2023. They're going to ramp again in 2024 and they'll ramp again in 2025 before I think they start reaching the targeted level of penetration.
The other well-known use case that we've seen is general merchandise.
Yes.
You know, publicly, Walmart is mandated. It fell behind schedule. Is there anything publicly that they, you know, you could point us to that tells us where they are with respect to, you know, that rollout across general merchandise?
Yeah, so phases I and II of general merchandise really began tagging in earnest in 2023. It ramped in 2023. It'll ramp again in 2024. More encouraging conversations around what categories could be included in phase three are already occurring, so it tells me that they've seen sufficient progress that they're ready to start planning for the next step, but this full general merchandise rollout, so I think not just phases I and II, but three, four, and five or how many other phases there are in the future is going to be a multi-year effort.
At what point does this really begin to point to a broader adoption just of general merchandise tagging because of the sheer size of this?
And well, it's both the sheer size and the fact that Walmart is kind of clearing the way, you know, plowing the path in terms of how you put tags on items that otherwise have not been tagged. It's new categories. And as they do so, we're seeing RFQs from other general merchandise retailers now asking for the same tagged items. So Walmart really is plowing the way. I mean, you know, I have to say I've worked with Walmart for many years. Back in the old days when we were doing the standardization efforts, I even had a Walmart badge. And when Walmart decides to do something, they do it. Now, they're smart about it. They don't push faster than their supply chain can go, but they push pretty hard. And you can see in this general merchandise ramp that they're pushing pretty hard.
They understand there's challenges and difficulties, but they continue making progress as every other key Walmart initiative I have ever seen. And so I feel good about where they are. I feel good about where they're going.
Okay. You mentioned enterprise customers. Is there a way to think about, and you know, you've got the customer in Europe, the large visionary European retailer that you've talked about, but I want to understand, help us understand the vetting process as you begin to work with some of these large enterprise customers? And are you adding, can you say whether you're adding new ones or not?
Vetting process, I'll start there. There are a very large number of enterprises that come to us, more than we can handle. We tend to look at the ones that have significant endpoint IC opportunity, are visionary and kind of lighthouse enterprises that can move a market or move an opportunity and that have an unsolved business problem that really requires the innovating that only we can do. We then work directly with that enterprise to solve their problems hand in hand with one or more partners typically that they identify. Then as we solve the problem, we hand off to the partners to continue going.
For the other ones that come to us, as we identify an opportunity and it's similar to something we've already done, we typically hand it to a partner and say, "You guys, we'll stand behind you, but you guys have got this one. You can take the lead." What we're seeing now that was, in hindsight, if I knew more about enterprise adoption, I should have anticipated it. You should look at me and say, "Of course, Diorio, you should have known that." But with the visionary enterprises, when they come to us with a problem and we solve it, it doesn't stop. As soon as we're past that one, they come up with the next one and the next one and the next one. So our engagements with those visionary enterprises continues.
That for us right now, given the scale of the company, limits the number of additional ones we can bring on board because we're so consumed with the ones that we have, so expect us, as we've said previously, to put more effort into enterprise use cases, into those visionary lighthouse enterprises, into monetizing those opportunities, but most importantly, into making those enterprises successful so that they continue to drive adoption and then expand our footprint in a smart way, working directly with the key enterprises that we need to further drive adoption.
You know, we've got, I think, about 10 minutes or so, and I want to try to hit as many topics as we can. And maybe if we think about the newer opportunities that have cropped up, some are long-term, some are shorter-term, but things like the tags being embedded in apparel, what's going on with Kroger? And you have others that you want to highlight, I'm sure, but just go through some of those developments that are really important, I think become more important in the next couple of years.
Okay, I'm personally very focused on enabling the consumer use case. Yeah, so and the consumer use case requires the item be embedded, I mean, the tag be embedded in the item, and it needs to survive for the life of the item, so for retail apparel, it needs to be sewn in and survive up to 500 washings. For other items, shoes and things like that, it needs to withstand the rigors of that environment.
So working with partners to enable those embedded tags, us developing around Gen2X, the appropriate protections for consumer privacy, us working with the phone community, starting with Qualcomm, which, you know, their pioneering work they've announced is fantastic, to understand how we can drive consumer use cases so that every entity in that value chain can make money, see an opportunity to succeed by engaging with the consumer, and that bringing the enterprise forward to that mobile phone community, saying these enterprises need these use cases from consumers and are willing to pay for it. Therefore, we should drive that consumer adoption. Are we there today? No. Will we be there immediately tomorrow? No. This is a multi-year proposition. But my focus personally is on doing everything we can to enable that consumer use case, which is years out, but I fundamentally think is coming.
I mean, our industry delivered 44.8 billion chips last year. Yet phones can't read them. It doesn't make any sense. There's a value to be had there. So that's the personal focus. In terms of the company broadly, we're pushing pretty hard in the food use case because the velocity of food. First, the total number of items that are tagged is gigantic. The velocity of food is huge. The turnover is fast. And the opportunity is food freshness, reducing waste, reducing carbon footprint, donating more food before it gets spoiled, its overall goodness. So we are focused very significantly on that food opportunity as kind of the next key thing we want to drive.
Let's talk for a second about the M800 and pricing. You know, first of all, where are we with respect to market qualifications? And, you know, when would you anticipate that the M800 becomes the majority of the endpoint IC sales? And obviously, there's a benefit that you may want to highlight as it relates to gross margin.
Yeah. So the M800, we are most of the way through the market certifications at this point. Most of our partners are all the way through. There's still some working through it, which is good news because this is the unlock we need for North American retail. And now our inlay partners can start designing inlays to support end customers, get the end customer qualification, and start ramping the M800. If we follow a normal ramp for a new IC, we could see the M800 reach volume running status at some point this year, which is very exciting for a lot of reasons. One is the M800 is a more performant IC.
It's more sensitive, which means our partners can use a smaller antenna to get the same read range, which means they can take cost out of their BOM and we can start moving the cost down the cost curve of the IC and the inlay. M800's performance also helps unlock the more complex use cases in general merchandise or in food, which obviously gives us a nice shot at getting share in those burgeoning opportunities. And then finally, the M800 is a smaller IC than the M700. We get about 25%, more die per wafer with the M800 versus the M700. So as we ramp that up and as it becomes our volume running SKU replacing the M700, we expect to drive 300 basis points of gross margin accretion.
M800 implements Gen2X, which provides differentiations in the market, which makes it harder to displace.
Is there anything? There was obviously, you know, a large significant development with respect to your biggest competitor, the endpoint IC market. And the question we always get asked is, you know, how quickly could they potentially work around? And you're going to say, well, you know, talk to them.
We are going to say talk to them. You know, it takes time to design an endpoint IC. It takes time to replace your existing ICs with a new IC. And I think we made it a little bit harder just now because we basically have a broad settlement agreement with our primary competitor. That settlement agreement includes access to the Gen2X IP. If they choose to design out our IP and not use and basically end that license because they don't need it anymore, they also lose access to the Gen2X IP. Now, they're not currently using the Gen2X IP, but they have access to it.
So they're going to have to make a decision as to whether they continue paying us the royalty and have access to our IP, which we think has real value, or they decide to design us out, sunset their older products or refresh them. I can't tell you which way they're going to go, introduce a new product line that doesn't use any of our IP, and then, but I feel that IP has real value. So choice is up to them. By the way, and we're happy either way.
Yeah. You touched on the M800 and gross margins, but I also want to go to the idea of negotiations with customers and pricing. Remind us, those negotiations begin to take place in November?
Yeah, it's typically around.
Do they wind up when?
NRF is often a closing point for the negotiation because everybody's in the same place. So we had some wrapped up before we came to New York and others will hopefully have. I'll hear we're wrapped up this week at NRF. What we have seen from pricing negotiations in a normal environment is that on a like-for-like basis, we see low to mid-single-digit ASP declines. And we support those ASP declines, you know, over the midterm with cost down on wafers and then innovation. You know, as we get more die per wafer, we can reduce our cost.
You may want to just remind us too of the longer-term financial targets that you shared with investors back in 2023, and also, yeah, whether there have been other developments in the market and, you know, on the margin, does anything change in the way you're thinking about the targets?
Yeah. So we gave long-term targets, as you said, in mid-2023, from revenue to $500 million-$750 million. We expect gross margin from 55%-57%, and we expect operating margin from 19%-25%, kind of on the low and the high ends respectively. We're making good progress against that. You saw in our Q3 results that at 18%, adjusted EBITDA margin, we're getting very close to the low end of those targets we put in place. So we feel good about our progress.
You know, again, questions that come up, how to think about cash flow, free cash flow, and.
Yeah. Yeah. So as we move down from operating margin to cash flow, we set a sum of 5%, capital intensity. Our capital is small. It's typically geared towards post-processing. Our plasma dicing machines, we own the machines and our OSAT partners run them. You saw us take a big step forward in free cash flow this year. We've generated $66 million or almost $60 million excuse.
Last year. Yeah. 2024.
24 September year to date, almost $60 million in free cash flow. That excludes, just to be clear, that excludes the $45 million one-time settlement payment we received from NXP. That would traditionally be included in free cash flow, but to give a better representation of our ongoing business, we pulled it out.
And over the years, you guys have done some M&A. Is there any way to think about, you know, technology that you feel could accelerate the market growth?
There is. We continue looking at and for our opportunities that really drive our ability to deliver to enterprises. So from a technology perspective, we feel pretty good about where we are in RAIN or RFID. That doesn't say there's nothing out there, but from a technology perspective, we feel we've got that under control. Areas around us, like for example, we acquired Voyantic about a year and a half ago for test and measurement industrialization solutions. That was a net ad. There may be others in that area. And then focusing on how we enable enterprises and whether there's tuck-ins we can do in the enterprise space that will help us. So expect us to focus there.
Okay. Great. We may have time for one question if there's one out there.
I really appreciate you guys doing this. You know, sorry to ask about a more near-term question just given all the opportunities that exist for you longer term, but, you know, happy to see a reaffirm for Q4. Oddly, the market's not really appreciating that today with a stock down 10%, but I may have missed this in the beginning, but is there any clarity in terms of how business trends are shaking up for the first quarter? I think typically we see sequential growth in the first quarter. Is that the expectation we should expect just given some of these more positive trends, but I guess any color to think about some of the more near-term trends would be very helpful.
Yeah, so no commentary on the near-term trends until we get to our Q4 print, which will be February 5th at this point. What we did say relative to the re-affirm of guidance is we saw endpoint ICs within normal seasonality and systems revenue grew on a sequential basis.
Okay. Chris, thank you.
Thank you. Thank you, Jim.