Well, welcome, everybody. My name is John Vinh. I cover some of these here at KeyBanc Capital Markets. Pleased to have the management team of Silicon Labs with us. Got Matt Johnson, CEO, and Dean Butler, CFO. Welcome, guys.
Thank you.
Thanks, John. Thanks for having us.
Hey, maybe where we can start, Matt, is just maybe just give us an update on just kind of your design win funnel. I think the messaging has been really clear. Obviously, you're going through kind of this destocking cycle, but it sounds like you're feeling extremely confident. You're seeing design wins continue to kind of pile up here. Maybe just talk about that design win funnel and what's the typical time frame that it takes for these design wins to translate into revenues for you?
Sure. Yeah. For those who aren't familiar, we're hyper-focused on design wins because, one, it's critical that we're gaining those sockets in the share, and it's also the best leading indicator we have of what things are going to look like going forward. We've always set our design win targets. So mathematically, we're set up for our 20% revenue growth goal as a company, if not better. And over the last few years, we've been securing designs at a rate that allows us to achieve that, if not better, which has been really exciting. I think the thing that's been challenging going through this cycle is that it has delayed a lot of those ramps. In fact, a lot of designs that were supposed to ramp last year that we're now just seeing ramp this year for various reasons, whether it was supply chain related or just the overall environment.
But sitting here, we're seeing those ramp, which is encouraging. We see sufficient design win momentum to drive our long-term growth goal that we've committed to of 20% or better. To answer your question, on average, it takes a year or two for a design win to ramp. It varies by end market, customer, geo, etc. But as a general rule, we'll think a year or two, and it can take years for that design to reach peak revenue. Then it starts to work its way back down. We're thinking from this feathering in as we go forward.
Got it. I'm sure you've done some analysis historically, but on average, what's the average duration that it takes an average design win to get to peak?
45 years.
45 years. Very nice.
To be clear, four to five, not 45. That would be depressing.
Obviously, we're kind of going through this destocking cycle, and we're kind of working through. I'm wondering if you could just talk about what you're seeing in Industrial Commercial versus Home and Life. It seems like we're a little bit further through the cycle here on Home and Life. What's your kind of take here on those two segments of the market?
Do you want to take that, Dean?
Yeah, sure. I mean, what we sort of noticed is both of those businesses actually have seen a pretty significant downturn through the destocking sort of cycle. Home and Life actually entered that cycle a little bit earlier than Industrial Commercial. What at least we have started to glean is that there are signs that perhaps it will end up sort of coming back, sort of being first in, first out, actually a little bit sooner than Industrial Commercial. I mean, that being said, quantitatively in Q2, which we just finished, both of those businesses were up in a similar manner. One, I think, was +39% quarter-over-quarter. I think the other one was +35%. Effectively sort of same growth rate in the June quarter. We guided into the September quarter to be up again sequentially.
We did note that it does look like for at least the September quarter, from what we can see, Home and Life looks like it's likely to be up a little bit more than Industrial Commercial. One data point isn't quite a trend just yet, but it does seem like they are exiting at slightly different timings rather than maybe different rates.
Great. Thanks for that. So I thought what was also really interesting, Matt, is on the last earnings call, it says you've kind of developed a process to better track your end customer inventories, right? I think we all understand what's sitting at distributors, but I think what everyone in this industry is trying to figure out is how much inventory is sitting at the end customer. Obviously, with your channel business with thousands of customers, how are you able to do this? And where do you think you are in terms of just end customer inventories more broadly at this point?
Sure. And maybe important to preface a caveat this with, we don't believe our process is perfect, and we're open to any suggestions. This has been tough to figure out where customer inventory is at, just simply said. What we've been doing is sampling our top 60 or 70 customers, what I mean, literally just picking up the phone, having a conversation, trying to understand where they see things. And some they have the number at the ready. Others, they have to think about it, work through it, come back to us. But we do that every quarter. And that's big enough sampling to give us reasonable confidence that it's indicative of what we're seeing on the whole. And what we've shared as part of that process is back, I think, in Q4, we shared we believed our customers were carrying more than a quarter of excess inventory.
And what we've shared since then is each quarter we've seen that working its way down in terms of the count and the average that they're carrying. And this last earnings call, we shared that a lot of customers are getting close to where they should be or at where they should be, but it's still pretty wide distribution. And we still have some customers who are carrying too much. So we'll expect to see that continue. And key point is that's been one of the primary growth drivers for us. As end customers destock, that allows our revenue to go up and approach our consumption. As that phenomenon winds its way down as we move forward, the next bigger growth engine for us would be the design wins ramp.
That's fortunate that we have these years of solid design win momentum, and those are starting to ramp across multiple applications, geos, customers, which gives us a tailwind because there's still a lot of macro uncertainty out there. So that's kind of the next growth engine for us after the destocking ends.
Got it. You talked about trying to figure out what true end demand is. Obviously, your revenue peaked at $1 billion, which would imply $250 million a quarter. Obviously, I don't think that's probably the upper bound, but have you thought about or is there a framework to think about what your normalized run rate is once we get through all this inventory?
Yeah. So quick answer is not being flippant, but it's between where we are now, where the peak was, and it's a range because it's impossible to exactly pinpoint that. There's a lot of moving pieces. But what we've shared is, one, we think it's a lot easier to have confidence in that consumption, if you will, once you're fully through the cycle. In the cycle, it's more difficult to call. But what we've shared publicly is we're not there yet in Q2 or in Q3.
Got it.
Dean, I don't know if there's anything you want to add that might be more helpful than that.
No, it's imperfect science, right? I mean, you won't really be able to judge until sort of you're in the rearview mirror. I think our focus is primarily around design wins. Actually, to grow it back into that billion-dollar sort of plus kind of business is our focus is design wins, sort of your first question, John.
Great. I do want to touch base on some of the new design win opportunities, but one more question on just cycle and inventory that I think is potentially pretty interesting. One of your peers, semiconductor peers, but more in the automotive space, came out recently and said that some of their customers in this new environment want to hold as little as two weeks of inventory. So when you talk to your customers about what they think the new norm and new equilibrium is, what's your sense of where that's falling out? Is that coming in above or below kind of pre-pandemic levels when you talk to them?
Yeah, I'll take a shot at that. So in general, I think it's changed over the course of this cycle. I think at the peak of the cycle, they all would have said they were going to carry more moving forward. Right now, they want to carry less moving forward. I think it's important to remove that. And exactly what Dean said a minute ago, look at it on the other side of the cycle. We're not seeing anything in the two-week range. Most of our customers want more than that. But again, we're doing a broad sampling across our top 60 or 70 customers, and it can vary by industry. But I think what you're going to see is people will go too far the other direction, too low. And then once we're fully through the cycle, you'll start to see people coming back to more typical levels.
But we're not there yet because we're not fully through the cycle.
Okay. Maybe we can switch to Bluetooth. That's been a huge success story for you guys. Can you give us a sense of just what the contribution to your current revenues is today? And can you also just talk about how are you able to get such strong momentum and traction in this space against such a strong established incumbent?
Yeah, sure. So for anyone not aware, one of the things that makes us unique as a company is we support all the wireless technologies for our customer base, so sub-GHz, 15.4, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth. So in terms of size, 15.4 and sub-gig are the largest and about the same in size. And those were more thinking of them as traditional IoT technologies that we've always had leadership positions in. Years ago, 3/ 4, 5 years ago now, lose track of time, we decided to increase our focus on BLE or the Bluetooth space. And in doing so, we learned a few things. One was, and let me be clear, it's not easy. It's difficult, but it's easier than the other technologies we were kind of cutting our teeth on as a company and as bringing up technology.
We found that its very nature, it was inherently meant to be easy, easier to adopt, easier to use, etc. So we've been able to gain share because of that. And because of that, it's actually our fastest growing technology currently. So it will catch up with the other two. The other two are growing well, but it will catch up in the next couple of years or so. And then the third one is, or sorry, the fourth one is Wi-Fi. We're much earlier days in that journey, but excited to see that we have a product that is production released, and it's a Wi-Fi 6 solution for the IoT, and it has the industry's leading power consumption. And I'm not talking by 10%, 15%. I'm talking by 40% or 50% better than any competing alternative, which has a big impact on battery life.
So early days, but we like the progress we're seeing there, and that will also become another growth engine for us, just like Bluetooth moving forward. But with respect to Nordic, good company, good competitor, but we like the share gains we're seeing there, and we expect that to continue.
Got it. Maybe can you just talk about just breaking down kind of the Wi-Fi market for you and the opportunity that you're pursuing? What segment of the market are you focused on, right? Is it kind of the MIMO, non-MIMO base? Are you also looking at combo there?
Yep. Sure. So quick answer, easy way to think of it, we're focused on our backyard. And what I mean by that is we're focused on our existing customers, existing applications where Wi-Fi is becoming more interesting, more relevant for them. Focusing on what we're best at, one of those things is security. Another is power consumption. That's why the first solution has great security, great power consumption. And because we're focusing on our existing customers, where most of our customer base, we have an extremely good relationship, we're seeing a lot of pull-through in that. So think of it as one-by-one, single and dual-band solutions that are focused on our type of applications getting really low power consumption for long battery life. And that's our current focus. So close to home, hyper-focused, and liking the progress we're seeing so far.
That's great. I think you recently talked about you, school is a pretty significant win in continuous glucose monitoring, CGM, which is obviously a very attractive market because it's, as you know, very much a razor-blade model. Can you just talk about just the overall size of the market? How big is CGM on a total TAM basis? I think you also alluded to that you've got other significant design wins in this space as well. Maybe just talk about qualitatively some of the other design wins. Are some of those other design wins comparable to, I think, the Dexcom that you announced?
Yeah. We did share the Dexcom name, which they're a great partner for us, and we're excited to be working with them. We've also shared that we have more than a dozen other CGM customers and design wins there as well. We're seeing those CGM designs start to ramp, which is exciting. Think of last year, basically no CGM revenue, and now we're starting to see those ramps, and that'll be a growth engine for years to come. In terms of form size, John, it's hard or difficult because I think there's a lot of debate on how big that market can be. There's hundreds of millions of people globally with type 1, type 2 diabetes that can take advantage of continuous glucose monitors. Right now, it's small single-digit percentage of people who are adopting this so far.
Arguably the potential significance is, as I think what these companies would say, but we have to see how it plays out over time. I think in terms of the adoption potential, there's significance there. In terms of its disposable and reuse model, that also compounds the potential as well. I think it's an exciting space. Most importantly, we have a very strong position there with our platform and technology that's put us in a good position to index on that growth, whatever it ends up being. Then, yes, shelf labels, metering, there's a lot of other spaces that also have meaningful potential for us as well. We shared on the last earnings call, I think in shelf labels, we've already shipped over 300 million units over the last few years as we start to ramp that space.
There's obviously a lot more there as the world and retail starts adopting those solutions. We also shared in smart metering, gas, water, electric. We are the key supplier and part of almost every major metering rollout globally with the exception of China domestic, which is quite a statement. So we're excited about what we've seen there so far and the future potential there as it continues to grow.
Great. Timing of CGM, when do we start to see it ramp in meaningful volumes? And then obviously, when you think about these opportunities that you've won, should we think about you starting to ramp in kind of new generation products that are announced by your customers, or are there situations where you could get designed into an existing generation product from your customers?
Quick answer is both. Quick answer is both. We see both happening out there where a lot of times our technology allows them to do new things that they couldn't do before, which is exciting for customers in multiple markets. And we also see cases where there's existing business that they want to move over to us as well. So both those dynamics happen.
Great. Dean, I just wanted to maybe get your two cents and have you chime in on your perspective. Obviously, you came from an IoT background, been in the industry for many years. When you kind of joined Silicon Labs, what surprised you the most about Silicon Labs that you didn't know before joining?
Yeah. Look, I do come from this background. I know wireless technology well. I know a lot of these end customers sort of well and their setup. Quite honestly, I joined because I'm a believer that this is a fast-growing opportunity within semiconductors, 10%-15% sort of growth market. Silicon Labs team is targeting 20%, sort of maybe higher growth rates. Surprising things to me, really. I knew the company as an outsider well as wireless and really a lot around Bluetooth. And Bluetooth has been doing super well for the team. And they've been winning a lot of sockets, like a lot of these CGM-related things or Bluetooth-IoT type technologies.
But what impressed me is actually there's a lot more wireless technology than I sort of originally sort of understood around sort of the use cases on sub-GHz, around some of the more sort of niche proprietary standards and how maybe some of the industrial-type applications tend to really gravitate toward that and sort of some of the moats around those types of businesses. That's been surprisingly promising for me. Just, hey, it's not a Bluetooth story. It's a much wider story. And then secondly, I always knew and heard the design win funnel that the team had had in hand over the last several years. That continues to move forward. I mean, that momentum hasn't changed. I think when I look at it, I look at it as probably the chief thing that Matt and I sort of agreed on is how do we convert that all into revenue?
How do we bring all that funnel sort of into sort of top-line growth? It's a weird time in the market to try to get all those engines running, fine. But it does look like we're kind of on the cusp of converting a lot of those ramps into sort of material growth in the coming year. When I think about the company, I don't think we can sort of count on macro. We can't count on the systemic growth rate of IoT in the next year. I think what we're counting on is design wins. And I'm really happy in the States that a lot of those qualifications are like CGM, for example, Matt and I just talked about. A lot of those qualifications are done or just about to wrap up. So those early production orders are starting to come in. Those ramps are starting to come.
So we do have line of sight on some of those things. So those have sort of been super.
Great. Thanks for that perspective. Hey, Matt, just a question on competition. I get a lot of questions on this topic. I'm just wondering if you could just help us clarify what the competitive landscape looks like. Obviously, we know you compete against Nordic and Bluetooth, but outside of that, I feel like there's a lot of misunderstanding about who you do and do not compete against in IoT. Maybe just break down the landscape for us.
Yeah, sure. Yeah, that's, I think, difficult for people fairly and understandably because so many companies, one, say they have an IoT strategy. And I think IoT means a lot of things for a lot of people in self-serving ways, so us included. So I think that everyone hears, "Oh, there's an IoT play from a lot of companies." And two, I do think as this market has clearly started showing volume potentials that are exciting to the industry in the semi space, we're seeing a lot more people say, "Hey, yeah, I want a piece of that. I'm going to do a product for there as well." But the reality of it is, simply said, because we're a broad market supplier across multiple wireless technologies, who we compete against changes depending on what the application and what the customer wants.
If they want Bluetooth, yes, you see Nordic the most. If you want sub-GHz, you see TI the most, right? If you see 15.4, everyone has a little bit of it, but our position is so strong, you don't see anyone that's a clear contender for that space. And Wi-Fi depends, right? There's multiple companies. In China, you'd see Espressif, or in the US, you might see NXP in Wi-Fi. So it varies quite a bit. But the key is what is generally unique about us is we support all those technologies. So when a customer puts yourself in the customer's shoes, we have all the technologies that work well, work well together, so they don't have to work with multiple customers or suppliers. And at the same time, we have been doing this for 15 years now. We're on our fifth-generation technology platform, which is not a trivial statement.
Almost everyone else you see says, "I have this one product or one technology." It's a point solution, not a platform with an integrated capability to scale a customer. And increasingly, our customers want partners. They want platforms, and they want all these technologies or multiple of these technologies, which puts us in an incredible position to go capture what's coming down the road. And I think, John, honestly, it's why we're winning at the pace we are in our design wins, and it's why the current platform is doing as well as it is. It took a long time to get here, and it took a lot of capability. And I think that's what you're seeing come to bear.
Great. Any questions? Great.
Maybe. Pardon my ignorance. I mean, not very familiar. I'm looking at the stock performance. It's flat-ish the last 5 years, one year down 27%. Can you tell us a little bit what was the reason why the stock has performed? Going forward, what could be the catalyst that could?
Yeah, absolutely. I think the easy way to think of that is, and obviously, no excuses. We don't like the way the stock performed full stop. So we've gone through a massive transition as a company during that timeframe, and that's yet to shine through is the quick answer. We divested everything that was unrelated to our current focus during that timeframe and then started as a shareholder company, largest in the world focused on IoT wireless, and then we went into this market cycle. Right? So the answer is, what is there to look forward to out there? I think the world's adoption of whatever you want to call it, embedded wireless devices or connected things at the edge is exploding. And we're not talking billions of units. We're talking tens of billions of units moving to over 100 billion units over this decade.
There's no company in the world that's better positioned than us to capture that, maximize that, and take advantage of that growth opportunity. And we are the largest at it already. Our vision is to be meaningfully larger, and that's what's exciting to us. That's why we've divested everything to focus on this and maximize the opportunity. That's what can drive a stock price up.
Great. Looks like we're out of time. Thank you, guys.
Thanks, John.