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Okay, great. Yeah, I'm Simon Wu. I cover the memory chip industry, and then I'm going to moderate this session. Actually, I have already received some investors' questions. Thank you very much, Jason. Number one, what's the Silicon Motion-specific long-term growth catalyst?
Sure. Look, I think, you know, it's increasingly important in this industry for memory. NAND flash memory is becoming critical for a wide variety of applications, smartphones and PCs being the main opportunity right now, but certainly seeing more interest in enterprise, in automotive, industrial, commercial. All of these applications are increasing the amount of memory required and the performance requirements for that memory. As each of these end markets, as the devices in each of these end markets become more complex, the need for memory increases. What we're seeing is, as memory makers expand and improve upon generation after generation of NAND, that creates opportunities for us to deliver additional solutions that help drive better performance, higher density, and overall expand our TAM and SAM.
Yeah, that's the great long-term trend. How about for the second quarter? Usually the low season, but any quick, quick recap or update near the second quarter, Awil?
Yeah, you know, look, I think, you know, obviously the world is, there's a lot of uncertainty around geopolitics, around tariffs, and it's certainly challenging to forecast around that. However, you know, we are still confident that this will be a growth year for us. We expect to be growing in the second quarter sequentially as new projects begin to ramp, as opportunities begin to scale. We've got a number of new projects that are coming online this quarter, including PCIe 5 for client SSDs on the high end. We've got, you know, certainly continuing new customers, new products increasing over the next few months that we anticipate will drive significant growth for us later this year.
Yeah, the final question is, any sort of pull-in demand from your customers for the second quarter?
You know, the conversations that we've been having with our customers would indicate that the demand that they're seeing in the second quarter is real demand and not pull-in demand. Certainly, there is a concern around uncertainty in the back half of the year and whether that would present, you know, itself in pull-in demand here in the second quarter. From our conversations with our customers, our belief is that the demand that we're seeing in the market today is real.
Yeah. And then looking at the second half, usually good season, but, you know, lots of uncertain factors there because of some China tariff or U.S. tariff. So any rough idea for the second half, Awil? And then the management's dreaming number, $1 billion run rate, could it be achieved?
I wouldn't classify it as a dream number. I think it's something that, you know, certainly we've got a lot of visibility towards and confidence towards. We have a number of new projects that are ramping in the back half of the year that we expect to be additive and help drive our business there. You know, obviously, to your point, there are things that we can't control. We can't control tariffs, we can't control geopolitics, but what we can control is certainly our ability to win more sockets, to expand our customer base, expand our project base. I would say that, you know, in the 15-plus years that I've been with Silicon Motion on and off, you know, we haven't seen a backlog as strong as we have in terms of the breadth of projects, the breadth of customers, the engagements with our flash maker partners.
We haven't seen an opportunity this strong in a very long time, if ever. What we're seeing is a really broad-based increase in outsourcing by every flash maker across the board, and we are gaining a significant share. On the client SSD side, last year we went from 25%+ to 30%+ . We believe we can achieve 40% market share over the next few years on client SSDs. You take a look at, you know, on the high-end PCIe 5 controllers that we just launched late last year, you know, we believe we'll be able to achieve 50% plus market share in this category. From a market historically, we haven't played in because the flash makers typically develop those controllers themselves, and they have now outsourced for those flash makers or have outsourced their entirety of their high-end PCIe 5 client SSD controller business to us.
Yeah.
That's been an opportunity where, you know, we see certainly the first of many opportunities beginning to open up.
Yeah. Maybe let me double-check the number you are talking about, about 50% market share for the client SSD.
For the high-end segment of the market where historically we haven't played in, this is incremental opportunities for us to gain share here that historically flash makers have provided the solution in-house with their in-house controller that now are outsourcing.
Yeah, that's a great thing. This 50% market share is mostly based on the PCIe Gen5.
5, correct.
Great. Maybe we can continue this discussion because some investors are a little bit confused about the conflict of interest with the NAND flash chip makers. Because memory chip makers, they have in-house controllers. Silicon Motion also sells your controller to the chip makers. Would you recap how the business model works for memory chip makers?
Sure. That's a good question. I mean, look, certainly the challenge historically has been around, you know, how can they, how do we reliably, you know, gain share over time if the flash makers have their own solution? What we're seeing now is certainly a shifting dynamic in the market. As NAND evolves, as more 3D NAND and 3D NAND layers' complexity increases, it requires new generation of controllers. We talk about the latest generation of controllers for the latest generation interface like PCIe 5, like UFS 4.0. You know, we're moving down to 6-nano process geometry, which is incredibly expensive. F or every single controller that we're developing at 6-nano, i t's $15 million to $20 million in development cost for a single controller. So you're now at a crossroads for the flash makers where you're seeing increasing reliance on outsourcing because the cost of development has grown as increased.
The cost of the range of portfolio solutions that you need to have to serve all the different end markets has continued to increase. You need to balance between NAND development as well as DRAM and HBM development, which is creating certainly challenges for resource allocation. All of these things put together present an opportunity for us to continue to gain share. We're the only merchant supplier out there that works with every single flash maker. With that, we're able to win a disproportionate share of the market in terms of gaining share. That's what we continue to be able to deliver on. That's what gives us confidence about the near term and the long term.
Yeah, yeah. How about the overall competitive landscape with other pure NAND chip controller suppliers, the Taiwan guys or US players?
From the merchant suppliers?
Yeah.
Merchant controllers?
Yeah.
Yeah. I think, you know, in my, again, when I first started here 15-plus years ago, there were probably half a dozen, 10 different other merchant controller suppliers for NAND memory. I think over the last 15 years, that number has come way down where there's really only one or two. Even with those guys, they're a bit conflicted. There's a bit more of a conflict of interest. We're really the only leading merchant controller supplier that isn't conflicted. We don't sell, we don't compete with our customers. We are a pure merchant supplier for the most part, and we are able to work with every flash maker and not compete with them in a lot of the areas that our competitors would.
Yeah, yeah. Maybe we can talk about the mobile solution. So any quick update on UFS-driven timeline growth versus maybe eMMC type of the demand downside?
Sure. You know, eMMC, you know, as part of the smartphone market continues to contract, getting replaced by UFS 2.2 and 3.1. UFS 4.0 historically has been more on the high end and now beginning to migrate into more of the mainstream segment of the market. We developed our UFS 4.0 controller last year, and we expect that to start scaling late this year and into 2026. Our solution is a two-channel controller versus all the other internal solutions out there are a four-channel controller. The advantage of a two-channel controller is that it's a lower-cost solution. It's, you know, from a performance standpoint, it's pretty comparable to what they developed many years ago.
We're able to help drive UFS 4.0 adoption from the high end into more mainstream, utilizing newer generation NAND that's more cost-effective, utilizing a two-channel controller that's more cost-effective. In essence, being able to improve the cost while maintaining the same performance in order to drive adoption into more mainstream handsets. We're working with a number of customers, including flash makers and module makers that are targeting the smartphone market that we expect to see meaningful growth starting to scale next year as the baseband folks start driving, incorporating UFS 4.0 capabilities into their mainstream baseband products.
Currently the UFS is already the mainstream for mobile.
It is. Yeah. You have UFS 2.2 and 3.1 that is primarily on the mainstream to lower-end segments. You have eMMC that is utilized in the very basic smartphone category, and then UFS 4.0 in the premium and flagship category today.
We can talk about more details of China or geopolitical risk, but, you know, Android phones are mostly manufactured by Chinese OEMs. And then, of course, Korean companies, Samsung. But what's your current business maybe risk opportunities with the Chinese smartphone makers?
Sure. Look, I think if you take a look at the top 10 smartphone OEMs in the world, right, number one and two is Apple and Samsung. We have virtually none to virtually none, no business with them. We do have a few sockets within Samsung, but it's fairly small. I think overall, and certainly Apple uses their own internal solution, but we support all the other eight players in the top 10.
Yeah.
None of those other folks really sell a whole lot into the U.S. We do not see a significant risk in terms of tariffs, et cetera, that would impact our smartphone-centric business. Most of the stuff that we're selling to them are fairly trailing edge and so are not subject to any sort of issues that are present in the market today.
Yeah. You mentioned that previously auto industry offers also the new growth opportunities. What's the management strategies for the auto area?
Sure. You know, automotive is an opportunity where we see significant growth longer term. It's already more than 5% of our revenue. We believe it'll scale to 10%+ of our revenue in the next couple of years. You know, certainly design wins today will lead to revenue in two, three years' time. That tends to be very sticky. That tends to have a lot of visibility towards that kind of long-term growth trajectory. Automotive, while certainly the automotive market itself isn't growing, the number of storage devices in a car is certainly growing very quickly. You know, from cameras to sensors to LiDAR to ADAS, infotainment, central processing, all these things require memory, typically a discrete piece of memory.
That increases the number of memory components that are going into a car where historically you had one for the infotainment, but now you're getting upwards of 10 or more devices depending on the complexity of the car that it's going into. It creates an interesting opportunity for us. It's not about just the very high end. It's, you know, we've got opportunities with Samsung for eMMC going into automotive. We've got a number of engagements for UFS going into automotive, SATA, PCIe 4, PCIe 5 wins that we're working on for long-term growth. There is a number of opportunities here that we're really excited about that I think as cars become increasingly more complex and the capabilities become higher with ADAS and autonomous vehicles, the opportunity for us will continue to grow nicely.
Yeah. Here in Sempron, we do see a lot of autonomous driving cars. So any kind of the Silicon Motion specific solutions or controller for autonomous driving?
Yeah. So we've talked about, you know, we've named off a number of customers, including, you know, Waymo, Tesla, GM, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, Honda, again, a wide range of cars that we are already supporting with our, whether it's controllers or SSD solutions, but providing memory capabilities to a lot of these cars. We are excited by all of this. I think certainly with, you know, Waymo being the leader, at least here in the U.S. for autonomous vehicles and everybody trying to figure out kind of how to catch up to that, I think the opportunity continues to grow very nicely for us long term.
Yeah. So this one, for example, Waymo here in Sempron getting more popular. Lots of people are using this. Would you specify Silicon Motion's, for example, controller only for Waymo or you purchase an end chip from the chip makers and then you provide a solution storage?
We haven't commented specifically on the solution for each automaker. Certainly each automaker, we could have one solution, we could have multiple solutions. It does vary quite a bit, but we haven't specifically called out what we're providing for each customer.
Yeah. Yeah, let's talk about the data center AI server requires some extra maybe NAND storage. Would you recap all the boot drive, et cetera?
Yeah. Our enterprise strategy is twofold, right? We talked about on this last earnings call, we talked about a new opportunity with the Bluefield 3 DPUs from NVIDIA where we're providing the boot drive for that. That's a great opportunity. It gives us, you know, certainly a foot in the door into the NVIDIA ecosystem, having a better understanding of the enterprise SSD requirements and the opportunities there. You know, where we see a bigger opportunity is what we've been talking about historically, which is our Mount Titan enterprise SSDs, right? This is a TLC/QLC controller supporting densities upwards of 128 TB where we are starting to, we went two tier ones and four additional customers last year. We expect those customers to continue to begin to scale throughout this year and then generate 5%-10% of our revenue by the 2026, 2027 timeframe.
We're on track for that. You know, we anticipate that with the increasing focus on AI, you know, delivering solutions that combine both high performance and high density at a TCO that's very compelling and very comparable to hard disk drives creates a new opportunity, a new window of growth, a greenfield opportunity for us longer term. We have more experience around managing QLC than anybody else out there. We've managed more QLC than anybody, flash makers included. And so being able to bring to bear that level of experience to this product category, I think really sets us apart and creates a pretty meaningful moat around our capabilities.
Yeah, yeah. Maybe a little bit more details. For example, when we look at the AI server, so we can see first GPU, graphic processor unit, and HBM, high bandwidth memory. Okay. So one convert. And then we can see the CPU, for example, Grace CPU and low- power DDR5. That's done a convert. And then we can see the storage called ESSD with your maybe Mount Titan or chip makers controller.
Yes.
The question is, would you recap your new solution, the boot drive, how it works within the AI server with the GPU, CPU, lots of chips are there? Yeah.
You know, the Bluefield DPU is attached to the Grace Blackwell configuration. It helps offload some of the processing onto the DPU, the data processing unit. That DPU connects to up to 15 enterprise SSDs. The opportunity that we have talked about here, the win that we talked about here in the last earnings call, is around the boot drive for that Bluefield 3 DPU. We expect to start seeing revenue late this year and that scaling more meaningfully into 2026 and beyond.
Is it possible to expect a multiple, more than one, you know, customers rather than one single NVIDIA dominant, you know, demand?
We already provide boot drives. We've been providing boot drives for, for example, for Google servers for a very long time, right, for the last many years. There are multiple opportunities here, but certainly, obviously, I think in this day and age, being part of the NVIDIA ecosystem has been very beneficial.
Yeah. Maybe we can continue the Mount Titan discussion. When do you expect any meaningful revenue contribution, Mount Titan?
Yeah. We started seeing early revenue late last year. We'll see continuously modest revenue throughout this year and then scaling more meaningfully into 2026. As you said, you know, scaling to that 5%-10% of our total revenue as we exit 2026 into 2027.
Toward the end of 2026 or sometime 2027, 5% or 10% of your revenue?
We come from Mount Titan, correct.
Oh, that's good. Yeah. All right. We have eight minutes, five or six minutes left. Maybe let's talk about the overall macro or industry uncertainties. Any impact on U.S. tariffs so far or you don't feel any big, big impact?
I think certainly the uncertainty around tariffs and the geopolitics is, you know, does create some consternation amongst our customers and end customers, et cetera. We haven't, you know, you take a look at the overall expectations for PCs and smartphones this year, it remains relatively unchanged. You know, the industry is still expecting growth of low single digits for both PCs and smartphones. We haven't seen that really change much since the beginning of this year, even with the implementation of tariffs and kind of all the volatility around that. I think, you know, certainly the hope is that we'll see, you know, the rest of the year play out. What we do focus on is what we can control, right? What we can control is our ability to win new sockets, our ability to scale with new customers and existing customers on additional sockets.
That is really what has been important for us. We continue to focus on winning more share with our flash makers, ramping up new projects with our customers. Those are the things that we can control. That is what gives us confidence about how we are going to scale in the back half of the year and how we are going to continue to scale longer term. That is, you know, somewhat independent of the macro. Certainly, if the end markets become weaker, while that would create pressure for everybody in the industry, given that the increasing amount of wins that we have should help bolster or help buffer some of our performance.
Yeah. Maybe just before the U.S. tariff implementation, do you see the little bit higher than normal level channel inventories these days or it looks broadly normal?
Inventory levels look broadly normal. You know, I think, you know, obviously we work very closely with our customers to understand their demand, their end market demands. You know, the amount of products that we're shipping to them largely reflects end- market demand. We believe that inventory in the channel remains fairly stable.
Yeah. Maybe we can talk about Singapore. Any update or comment regarding the older litigation thing? Yeah.
No, you know, the litigation is ongoing. The arbitration is ongoing. We expect Singapore arbitration to convene in October this year. We expect a resolution decision by the end of this year. Nothing has changed. There are no updates to that. Obviously, legal updates are, you know, it's a confidential process, so it's going to be difficult for us to provide kind of the day-to-day updates on the process. Overall, you know, we're still on, the Singapore arbitration is still on track for October.
Singapore arbitration, their review will start in October?
Correct.
They should make the decision by the end of this year?
Correct.
Okay. And then after that, still no any particular, you know, guidance?
Yeah. We're not commenting on it.
Yeah. All right. We discussed mostly business and then the almost also very important topic is shareholder returns. Would you recap your balance status and then how you're going to deploy continuously the shareholder return?
Yeah. I think if you, you know, our shareholder, our capital allocation policy has been pretty consistent over the last many years. The priority for us has been over the last 10 years is the dividend. We've been paying a dividend for the better part of 10 years. You know, we started off at $0.60 per ADS. Now we're up to $2 per ADS and we've increased that over time gradually. The second part of our capital allocation strategy is share repurchase. You know, we have share repurchase programs periodically throughout our history. You take a look at, you know, for example, over the last five years, roughly half of our free cash flow has gone to share repurchase. The third part of it is M&A. You know, we always look at, you know, potential to find things that are additive.
I think certainly going forward, you know, with technology becoming more complex, performance requirements increasing, there's going to be more synergies between the controller and the interconnects. We are continuing to look at how do we continue to develop solutions that are leading edge and that can take advantage of all the processing requirements, processing capabilities that are available.
Yeah, yeah. These days, there are many talented engineers, Taiwan, U.S. What's the overall, your R&D activities with very professional engineers for AI?
Yeah. So.
The growth opportunities.
You know, we've been increasing our headcount pretty meaningfully over the last year and a half, you know, partially to drive wins and development on the Mount Titan side, partially to develop new solutions at 6 nanometer for PCIe 5 and UFS 4.0. There is a number of new projects and opportunities that we continue to engage in that, you know, we'll continue to hire. To your point, there is a lot of great engineers in Taiwan and China and the U.S., and we'll continue to find the best talent out there.
Great. Yeah. We covered all the details, industry trend and company- specific. If you guys have any questions, please feel free to contact me, Simon Wu at Bank of America Global Tech Research. Thank you very much, Jason. This is a great session. We actually conclude this session. Thank you, guys.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Yeah. All right. What's that? Yeah.
Yeah.
Maybe, excuse me, maybe a personal photo?