Great. Good morning, guys. My name is John Vinh. I cover semis here at KeyBanc Capital Markets. Really pleased to have the Silicon Laboratories team with us. We have Dean Butler, Chief Financial Officer, and Thomas Haws, Director of Investor Relations. Welcome, guys.
Thanks, John. Thanks for having us.
Yeah, maybe we can just start talking kind of big picture cycle recovery. You know, clearly you guys have seen a recovery now for several quarters. Just maybe talk about what you're seeing right now from this recovery. I think some of your peers have been saying that one of the things that's making it hard to kind of get better visibility into the back half is the nature of the recovery. There's a lot of turns-based orders given how short lead times are, so you're not getting that backlog being built up in the back half. Maybe just talk about what you're seeing and how you're trying to navigate kind of the visibility into the back half of the year.
Sure. One, I would say we have a large set of applications that we service. We see things on the industrial side, we see things on the consumer side, increasingly on the medical side, in the commercial retail space. We have lots of sort of pockets of business that we service. My general take is I think things are better demand-wise than people sort of let on. I think what's sort of holding things back more than anything is changing noise in the macro. I think there's, hey, tariffs are on, tariffs are off, things are happening, geopolitical changes. I think people are waiting for what's going to happen with the Fed. There are a lot of macro things that I think sort of slow things down. However, across the board in almost all of the applications that we serve, I would say demand is reasonably healthy.
I think people aren't taking big gambles on lead time. Some of the peers have said, hey, a little bit limited in visibility, turns orders. We see the same, but it hasn't really changed for three quarters. The last three quarters have been kind of turns based, and that really hasn't changed. I think that more than anything, people as customers are just putting forward the next quarter or two worth of demand and giving themselves the flexibility to sort of change without saying, hey, I'm going to give you nine months' worth of POs, 12 months' worth of POs. I think you're looking at three or four months' worth of POs to allow some of that flexibility. We've, over the last year, really rallied around ramping up a lot of our new designs.
That has made us a little more agnostic on what's happening with all the macro and more focused on driving new design ramps up. That's really been driving the revenue uptake over the last several quarters. That is likely to continue. As a macro observation, things are probably better than the macro would sort of let on across most applications.
Okay, that's helpful. Maybe if we kind of dig down a layer, can you just talk about what you're seeing in home and life versus industrial and commercial? You talked about some of the volatility related to some of the tariff uncertainty. Do you think one segment or the other is a little bit more resilient to some of that tariff risk?
I would say our observation has been that the industrial and commercial side of our business has been doing relatively better than the other side of the business over the last two quarters, March quarter, June quarter. That looks like that probably continues, from at least what we can see so far. I think that's really around what are the drivers in industrial and commercial. This is sort of broad strength on pulling back from inventory and starting to come back to more normal demand rates. I think that's what we see on the industrial side. We don't see cracks and weakness around industrial customers. Maybe late 2024, some of the industrial, like in Europe, was weak and we don't see that anymore. We see actually industrial in Europe doing reasonably well. On the home and life side, there are two sides.
One's kind of like smart home and one's more medical centric. On the smart home, it's steady, slow, and steady. I think things are doing pretty well. We see the business doing well. That one we think is a little bit attached to interest rates and therefore home price sales and renovations. I think that's pausing and waiting a little bit more to see what happens in the real estate market. I think the real estate market does better, that market does better. Medical, I think, is agnostic to all of that. Medical, I think, is sort of a growth business for us, agnostic of what happens in the macro. That more than any of the others has been design-win driven. That looks like that deal is going to be separate from any of the other activities.
Great. Maybe we can talk about continuous glucose monitoring. Where are you in the ramp of your continuous glucose monitoring wins? You know, maybe you can talk about in context of maybe what editing we're in at this point in time.
CGM is a new application that the business has been involved in. In 2024, I think it's important to know, in 2024, we had almost no sort of CGM-related business. We foresee that application becoming 10% of revenue. When we sort of made that statement, we said, hey, in four to six quarters, we think it can go basically zero to 10% of revenue. We're about halfway into that sort of ramp up. It's still pretty early. Even at 10%, I'm not sure that's the cap. We continue to engage with more and more customers there that continue to drive that even higher, I think, as you go forward. As you recall, we have about a dozen customers in sort of the CGM space that we've won that are at various stages of qualifications and ramps. Some started at the end of 2024.
Many started early in 2025, and some are sort of starting to ramp now. What I would say is like any new production ramps, the timing is sort of not always perfect, and people are still working on some of the qualification work. That looks like that's still on track to drive 10% of revenue, or more as we sort of look a couple of quarters out.
Right. Of those 12 customers, can you give us a little bit more color on who these customer profiles are? Obviously, you've announced Dexcom, but do you, are these 12 customers, are they in the top five, top 10 in the world? Just how large are the scale of these customers?
Yeah, there's one that we've named that you got right, John. If you look at the makeup of that industry, there's about four or five that hold the dominant portion of the market size, and they drop off relatively fast after that. We've only got one of those top players, and fortunately for us, it actually happens to be a very good one, a very fast growing customer. Beyond that, they drop off pretty fast into that next tier two type designs. I think what's important to know is, and we said it on this last public call, we have confidence that that's not all we can win. We have confidence that we can win more. We said previously we've engaged with 60 now in total.
I think given the technology advantage that we've brought into that application set, it looks like we have a pretty good shot in converting some of those others into design wins, which would be in addition to that 10% ramp up.
Great. Maybe we can talk about the other big growth driver for you, which is ESL. Can you give us an update on what you're seeing within ESL?
Yeah, ESL is a good business that the company's been in the last few years. The last two or three years in a row, electronic shelf labels have been one of our fastest growing applications. We continue to lead the market in a lot of respects here. I think over the last couple of years, you've seen a lot of trial deployments in the retail space. I think what is starting to happen now is you're starting to see bigger, broader deployments where people may have been deploying in a specific geography, maybe it's a state or a province or a city, to now saying, hey, we're going to start to roll this out nationwide or globally in some cases. ESL is a market I think will continue to grow. I think you'll continue to see these in the future.
I think eventually a lot of these shelves are going to get, you know, switched over. We are pretty early. If you walk around in our everyday lives, if you go in a grocery store or a retailer, you're not yet seeing broad deployment. I think that's still coming. I think there's a lot of room to grow, and that market has been a very fast grower, and I think it's continued to be a very fast grower into the future.
I have seen ESL , not often. I see it more outside the U.S. Where are you seeing geographically ESL being most aggressively deployed? What's the TAM? Can you size it for us?
I mean, you can multiply a lot of things to get a huge TAM for ESLs. Like, you know, how many SKUs in a store times that's, you know, how many, you know, labels you need times how many stores. It actually quickly adds up into billions and billions of units, like pretty quickly. I think what we end up seeing is in the Americas, it tends to be sort of big box retailers that tend to deploy this. I think if you look at like a Best Buy, there's sort of pretty heavy users. Whole Foods is a pretty heavy user. Walmart has announced, you know, plans to roll out, you know, more ESLs across their stores, big box-wise. Target, I think, has become more vocal about sort of their deployments. In Europe, interestingly enough, you see them a lot with grocers.
Europe, I think, has gotten a bit more uptick, specific grocers. I think it's interesting to see sort of different use cases on, hey, does, you know, food waste versus, you know, maybe simplicity at retail. In Asia-Pacific, that one hasn't quite taken off. I think in the Koreas, like South Korea, you see that a little bit more, but not sort of broadly across Asia yet.
Okay. You guys talk a lot about your work with Matter, Thread, Amazon Sidewalk. Can you just talk about what the importance of these standards are and why it's important for flat ?
Yeah, so Matter, Thread, 15.4, Zigbee, Z-Wave, they're all sort of in the same family. These tend to be probably the most well-suited smart home sort of communication link that there is. Matter is the communication protocol that essentially lets different end devices that are made by different manufacturers theoretically talk together as just sort of one unified system. I think that's probably the biggest frustration as sort of smart home evolves is, hey, how does this all come together in sort of one control plane? Matter has the potential to do that. The key here is you need all of those end devices to be speaking the same language, you know, this Matter protocol so that they can all communicate and share instruction sets if that's what they need to do.
What you have seen and what we've witnessed is we've won more 15.4, so Matter-enabled applications in the last 24 months than we have in the entire six years before that combined. There is certainly an acceleration in interest and adoption in Matter. Although, as sort of an everyday citizen, it's not yet apparent. What's happening, we believe, is in the background, people are deploying these radios and making them capable of, you know, like over the air, sort of turning them on as the deployment reaches a critical mass. You see this, I think, with a lot of the handset makers now have sort of Matter. A lot of them might call it Thread. TVs actually are increasingly deploying this as well, as well as like home gateways.
Basically, hey, the end sort of control points and then all the client devices are making headway and deploying more and more of these in the marketplace. I think what we're sort of in waiting is, hey, when's the year of the Matter? I think that's probably coming soon. I don't think it's this year, but we have certainly seen signs of increasing interest.
Okay. Can we talk about Series 2 and Series 3? You know, I could be wrong here, but my understanding is that Series 3 isn't just the next generation of Series 2, that all these Series 2 devices you have are going to be replicated on Series 3. It seems like there's some differences between the two platforms, but I'm wondering if you could just clarify how those products are doing and then what are the differences between Series 2 and Series 3?
At the most simplistic level, I would say Series 3 increases the compute capability of almost everything that's in Series 2. I mean, I think what we see is across all the thousands of applications that we support and all these customers, the increasing importance of customer software code actually running in these applications. It seems like no matter what you do, customers are writing more and more software. Their end applications are getting more complicated, and Series 3 is really around, hey, enabling a larger compute capability within these customer sets. It sort of ups the level of engagement in things like security. We actually see increasing government regulatory things that are coming down that are increasing the requirements for security on embedded microcontrollers. Europe has several standards that are coming down. The U.S. has a standard that's getting rolled out.
Several of the APAC countries actually are proposing sort of different standards that are in various progress. I think that is one of the things that Silicon Laboratories has really stood out in its Series 2 is actually security capabilities and low energy capabilities that we're sort of pushing forward into the next frontier into Series 3. Our very first Series 3 is out and selling to customers now. It is also the very first device in the world that's actually qualified as PSA Level 4 security. We were the first at PSA Level 3. In fact, many of our competitors are still trying to achieve Level 3, and we're sort of already on to 4 with Series 3.
I think the intent is you give customers, hey, the upgrade path, especially as sort of AI eventually comes to the edge, more and more software will get run at the edge, more and more inference is going to get run at the edge, hence more compute capability. Give sort of that upgrade path and then sort of next generation on all the forms and features that we support, like security and energy management.
Great. Are there ASP and gross margin implications for Series 2 and Series 3? I assume they're going to be accretive.
Yeah, I mean, generally speaking, the more cutting-edge features we make available, we price to that. The more compute we make capable for customers, we'll price to that. I think it's noteworthy that not every customer actually will need Series 3. I think Series 2 is a great platform for a lot of applications that maybe are not going to require post-quantum level cryptography. Maybe there are going to be some applications that won't end up running AI at the edge and don't need the compute step up. Maybe there are applications that are sufficient in their battery usage and energy today, so they don't need the next step. We actually think Series 2 is likely to continue to win designs for a long time. Series 2 will certainly step up as features step up in ASP, but they won't cannibalize each other.
I think they'll live together for a long time.
Great. Your $10 billion design win pipeline, is there a way to think about just how much that pipeline converts to revenue in the next 12 to 24 months? Is there kind of a rule of thumb that we can think about in terms of what you think the conversion rate is going to be?
Yeah, so here's the easiest way I think to think about sort of the company's $10 billion in wins. That is $10 billion in lifetime value of design wins that the company has won. The best rule of thumb I think I would give people is that's a lifetime value, and the easiest way for most people to think about it is you have to divide kind of an average lifespan of four to five years. Basically, it says, hey, you have $10 billion, that's equivalent of somewhere in the $2 billion - $2.5 billion in annual revenue sort of equivalent. Now, as a company, we're, you know, we just got $200 million a quarter, $205 million for this quarter, we're like at $800 million.
Basically, where we are and what the potential is of this $2 billion, $800 million to $2 billion to $2.5 billion gives us ample headroom to continue to grow for quite some time. Even ample headroom to say, look, hey, I want to derate this by a certain degree. You can use any sort of level of derating that you might think is appropriate, but there's a bunch of headroom. That is actually the way I would say it is from where we are to what the awards that we have already won. The easiest way to think about where are we maybe in that journey and sort of converting them. On the Series 2, which sort of is the bulk of those wins, but not all, we have won $7 billion in units. We've shipped $1 billion out of that $7 billion.
So we were about, you know, call it, you know, one sixth or one seventh of the way in from converting that. There's a curve, right? You sort of qualify and start low and things sort of keep ramping up and keep layering in over time. I think we're relatively early in deploying all that $10 billion out there. I think there's ample room for us to grow, and that's before really Series 3 starts kicking in, before these next level of blood glucose medical things that we're working on starts kicking in. I think those are all additive.
Great. When I think about the $10 billion pipeline, you guys clearly have a lot of opportunities that you've won that are still ahead of you. As you think about investing to continue to sustain this growth, how are you balancing the trade-off between getting back to profitability, maybe getting back to mid-teens op margins versus investing enough to sustain this pipeline growth?
Yeah, I mean, the company's invested quite a bit over the years, which has sort of gotten us to where we are, you know, getting sort of this big design win pipeline, you know, in hand. The company sort of goes in phases, like every, I'm going to call it five years or so, the company attacks sort of a next vertical to add on. You know, the company generally started with sub gigahertz, and then we went into 15.4 and Zigbee and Z-Wave, and then we went into Bluetooth. Now latest, we've sort of gone into Wi-Fi as sort of our big invest areas. The way I see it, I think we're investing on everything we need to to sort of capture that, you know, superset of opportunities.
We're probably in a point in time where we're digesting, you know, those, you know, $10 billion in design wins and focus primarily on bringing those into revenue. As they come into revenue, not reinvesting, you know, dollar for dollar sort of back into R&D, our intention is to significantly move that toward the bottom line and by taking operating expenses to grow only at a third of the rate of revenue. That will very quickly accelerate sort of the bottom line. Basically, if you sort of just run the quick and dirty math on the back of the envelope, you can actually quickly get to earnings per share will grow significantly faster than top line growth. Already top line growth, we feel a very, very good amount and with the design wins in hand.
I think the next, you know, focus of the company is taking that to bottom line on EPS.
Right. Maybe last question, just touch on gross margins. What's been driving the improvement there? Are you still thinking high fifties is the right long-term model?
Yeah, so we rolled out sort of an update, which we bumped up the gross margins a little bit from what we had historically. Our stated financial model is 56% - 58% gross margin. All the benchmarking we do around peers and people that are in sort of similar industries as us and selling similar technology, we think that's sort of a leader in the pack for the most part. Gross margins are driven primarily on, you know, mix and scale with us. Right now what we're seeing, we're turning toward the higher end of that range. We just got it 57% - 58%. Right at the high end of our long-term model, that's driven on, you know, distribution mix, which is close to 70%, and industrial mix, which tends to be a little higher gross margin for us.
As we look sort of longer term out, I don't think we're going to be as heavy industrial because a lot of the design wins that we have, you know, that are ramping up will sort of keep us somewhere in this sort of high fifties range. I think there's, you know, higher is always better, but I think this is actually a very reasonable expectation is to 56% - 58%. Like absent some weird, you know, mix dynamics, I think our intention is probably to stay in that range.
Great. Looks like we're out of time. Thank you.
Okay, super. Thanks, John.