Skyworks Solutions, Inc. (SWKS)
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Morgan Stanley’s Technology, Media & Telecom Conference 2024

Mar 5, 2024

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

We on? We're on. I'm Joe Moore, Morgan Stanley Semiconductor Research. Very happy to have the CEO of Skyworks, Liam Griffin, here. I think this is definitely the first time since I've covered the company. It's just been, you know, three years. But if not, it's been a while. But we really appreciate you being here to hear your insights on the company. Maybe we could, before we get into the segment, so if you could just give us an update in terms of what you're seeing in the market today, and kind of maybe the broad priorities that you have as a company, and then we can get into some of the details.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yeah. Sure. Sure. Sounds good. Yeah, I think Skyworks, as you know, we, we are a company that does many, many sectors and many, many customers, largely in-house. We do a lot of manufacturing specific to each account, each customer, and each account, and each application. So we have a different type of mix that you would see. It's not a typical silicon TSMC play. It's, it's really a curated solution, customer by customer, market by market. The majority of the revenue today is typically mobile and, and, and wireless technologies. But it isn't just the handset. We do a lot of work in Wi-Fi. We have tremendous assets now in data center. We can talk a little bit about that through some of our acquisitions. But it's also a company that does its best work with the most compelling customers, the most demanding customers.

The ability for us to curate unique solutions has really been an advantage for Skyworks. So we don't have broad semiconductor portfolios that just go across the street and through distribution. It's kind of an account-by-account, application-by-account message. And we work with those companies. And we get better. They get better. And it lifts our company. So that's kind of the high level. Certainly, mobile has been, you know, the feature in our business. And I'm proud of what we've done with the mobile business. We continue to grow that. But along the way, we've diversified the company substantially. You know, we're heavily in automotive right now. We're in data center. There are all kinds of opportunities that we're seeing in IoT, adjacent wireless opportunities and Wi-Fi and things like that.

So it's a more diversified portfolio, I think, sometimes the Street realizes. But certainly, the wireless element is core to the company.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah. Great. So maybe we'll start there, in terms of the smartphone business. And we'll start with Android. You know, you've had a couple of tough years, an inventory correction that took a long time to clear out. And it seems like we're hitting bottom there. Can you talk to the trends in the Android market?

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yeah. Yeah. Good question. So, you know, for the Skyworks team, we've always been kind of focusing on the mid to high tier. And we've done a tremendous amount of work and technology with customers there. And to be honest, we have been a little bit a step back on Android, not because we couldn't do the business that we but we had better business to do.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

So we had richer opportunities, more demanding opportunities, with not just one or two customers, but an aggregate suite of opportunities that were just a little bit lower in terms of margin profiles, for example. So we shied away a little bit on that. But if we look at the business today, we are driving more diversification across mobile, certainly the largest customer in the mid tier. But we have all the skills and tool sets to hit Android. And that's not just China, by the way. I mean, you've got Samsung in there. We have a very strong position, with Google, which, you know, units there maybe not so high so today, but they're growing.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

The content and the technical burden that they want from us to be solved has been really cool. So, I think on the Android side, it isn't so much the OPPO, Vivo, Xiaomi play. We can do that all day.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

We're also thrilled and we're also really engaged and thrilled about the opportunities with the Googles, and names like that. Samsung now, of course.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yes.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Has always been a player. And I think they're starting to reignite for us.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah. I mean, I feel like that the OPPO, Vivo pportunity, you know, probably isn't as exciting as people thought a couple of years ago anyway in the sense of.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yeah.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

You know, they were trying to fill the void that Huawei had left by doing big global phones.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Mm-hmm.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

They've sort of retreated a little bit more into, you know, really good phones that have more discrete elements for certain regions that don't need to be global.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yeah.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

And so the opportunity ought to be in the Googles and the Samsungs. And so you talked about having, you know, not the presence there and now you do. But, you know, what does that mean in practice in the sense that, you know, 'cause you see it, it really is Google and Samsung are the two focus areas. How do you grow content with those guys?

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So interestingly enough, some of the biggest design wins that we have in mobile are in the Android ecosystem, largely as we just talked about that, Google, for example, Samsung, example, you know, some of the other players in China in and out. But we're penetrating those customers. And they really like what they're getting from Skyworks. I mean, as I said, you know, we play at the high end. We have incredible technical talent. We have purpose-built talent. It's not off the shelf. And you've probably heard that from us. It's real. We have our own fabs, TC-SAW, Bulk Acoustic Wave. We do these amazing solutions that are very different. It's a different solution for our largest customer to a mid-tier play.

We know how to work through all of that to maximize the margin level, the satisfaction to the customer, and really extend the reach. And that, that's a mobile story. But it's also, you know, a Wi-Fi story. And it's a data center story. All of these markets for Skyworks, we take a thoughtful view of the opportunities. And we try to really, like, sharpen our axe. And then we go.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

That's kind of the way it is. We don't really dabble. We try to figure out how to create opportunities for our customers, how to solve problems, use the assets that we have, curate new assets that we have, with a tremendous manufacturing backdrop that, like I said before, allows us to get really flexible. So it's not a one-stop shop, as we address our customers. So a little bit of a different play than the pure silicon guys. But we like the way that's going for Skyworks. And I think there's a lot more opportunity for us to continue to drive share.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

And then on the OPPO, Vivo, Xiaomi, you know, you said you can do that all day, but it's not your primary focus. You know, is that simply because those guys, you know, they can obviously do what they need to do? But the highest margin kind of module capabilities is something that, you know, is a little less competitive, a little bit better pricing. And is there opportunity for that to change over time?

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yeah. I mean, there is an opportunity for it to change. Because as the markets move, and as volumes move and technologies move, you know, we're definitely going to be agile around the opportunity. So the good news for us is we have choices. You know, depending on the profitability and the revenue generation, we have some good choices on what we would like to do. And then there's some tough challenges.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

That we're ambitious about, you know, to continue to grow the aperture of the company. You know, the wireless business is great. And we love that. And it's been a framework for us for tremendous cash generation, great capital assets that are already in place now. We had a big CapEx cycle. That's done.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

And so there's a lot of really positives that are coming through with that narrative. So there's a lot of choice for us. We're going to have the cash to do whatever we want to do, dividends, buybacks, whatever it may be, acquisitions, are all on the table for us. But day to day, our engineers are working on technology and trying to delight the customer. I mean, that's, that's, that's really the signature.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah. Okay. And then my last question on the China phone side, the Huawei phone, which obviously, you're not shipping into.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yeah.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Because of the export control rules, you know, they have made a 5G phone. There's a certain patriotic enthusiasm for that phone, I guess. Obviously, that doesn't have direct impact on you. Does that have impact on your customers if that, you know, grows to a bigger number?

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yeah. It's not. It really doesn't impact us because we've navigated through. I mean, look, you guys, if you go back four or five years ago, we had $500 million of Huawei revenue.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Before the sanctions.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

We played. We're right by the book. We're able to continue to grow the business. Now, it would be nice to have that $500 million from that customer. Sure. But we've been able to do the right things and grow the business and diversify, so.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Well, an awful lot of that $500 million went to your biggest customer. So it.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Well, yeah. Well, some of it did.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yeah. That's true. That's true. That's true. But yeah. So it's always an evolution and you know, an opportunity to do more. I think in some ways, it made us a better company. We're you know, doing a great job in what we call broad markets, which is basically the non-handset portfolio. And it's an aggregation of multiple accounts and multiple technologies and you know, great work with our sales teams and also our technologists to really curate you know, new avenues for revenue. So that's good. And you know, we think for sure, the opportunity as we go forward is definitely going to be much better. I mean, we're, there's no question. There's you know, a little bit of a lull in the mobile ecosystem now. But I think that's going to be short-lived.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

You know, there's a lot of things we can talk about in this, in this session here about newer technologies and where we think they're going to.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah. And it and they do want to. I guess on the more mundane side, though, that, you know, away from Android.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yeah.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Your largest customer, you know, you didn't have the content gains in 2023 that you might have liked. Can you talk about the reasons for that and then any visibility that you might be able to share on 2024.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yeah.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

On the new model?

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yeah. I mean, we don't typically get into the details with the largest customer. But it's certainly, you know, I could tell you that our relationship there is outstanding. We've been an incredible partner to the largest customer. And it's been great for us. And the relationship shoulder to shoulder is very, very important. And, you know, one of the things that we believe in at Skyworks, and I certainly believe in, is what does the customer want to hear? What does the customer want rather than what can I sell you? It's if you can follow that, honestly, you know, you're going to have a better outcome. And it's not easy. I mean, sometimes you're going to get, you know, bad news every once in a while. And you got to handle that.

But what we like to do is, like, again, hit those tough problems, hit the fastballs, the things that other peers in our group can't do. That's been really important for us. And that has driven more revenue and trust and, you know, the aperture for our customers to take risks with us. All of that is really, really important. We can go quarter by quarter all the time. But when we think about the long haul, it's like, how are you really engaging with these players? And how do we make their business better by way of our technology?

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah. Okay. I guess maybe this isn't something you can answer. But, you know, to the extent that that customer has an internal baseband roadmap and which has been pushed out.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yeah.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

You know, is that something? I mean, I assume that affects the RF content. It affects which socket, too, has what. Anything you can do to share what might happen there?

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yeah. I mean, I can just give you a high level. I mean, we, we for years and years and years, we have to curate and spin derivatives around the highest end of the mobile ecosystem, not, not, not the whole entire market. I mean, some of the OPPO, Vivo, Xiaomi, you can go three or four years. But the larger player, it's, it's always going to be, let's raise the bar together. Let's raise the bar together. And that isn't just the same thing. It requires investment in technology. You know, Bulk Acoustic Wave technology is a different variant than what you would see in TC-SAW, temperature-compensated SAW.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Or pure silicon. So that, to us, we actually let that level of complexity kind of really gets our engineers fired up.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

We really do want to solve the hard problems and then certainly drive, you know, an outcome for our shareholders. We're at that all the time. I mean, we've brought technologies in-house. It took time. You know, the Bulk Acoustic Wave technology, as we've mentioned, now, we've got that going in so many new markets.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Beyond mobile phone, and it's a difficult thing. You can't pull that off the shelf. You're not going to TSMC to get BAW. It's not going to happen. And the derivatives around the BAW technology that we have now and the technology nodes and performance nodes that we're bringing to market are going to be compelling. And we'll go into multiple solutions. But yeah, we have a very heavy lift. I wouldn't call it a burden. But it's a very important part of our business is how we create these solutions. You know, the selling and the marketing and all that's great.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

But really getting behind the challenge, how can we help our customer do better? How can we make a great solution for them? Look at the markets they're in. Look at the current consumption budget that they need. Look at the economic budget that they have. And we try to work all that together. And that creates multiple tiers of revenue. You know, what's big hitters.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

are really, really, really demanding. And then you can have your mid-tier folks. And then there's some things in the middle. So the way I say it, we are much more diversified than what the market sees from us. And I'm not trying to take the words for anybody. But we always hear about how we're not diversified. We are very, very diversified.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

The technology, our broad markets business, ex-handset, wonderful portfolio, you know, automotive, data center, you know, IoT, all of these incredible solutions that we have, are they $2 billion a year plays right now? No. But they're growing.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

So I think part of it is almost that, you know, the scale of our mobile business, and because that business is very high, you know, the growth rates. They're going, we're growing.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

But you're not, you know, going to drive a 20% CAGR, you know, on a $5 billion revenue plan or something like that.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Over time, we can.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

But the other businesses, what we call broad markets, that's doing really well. And not only are we finding new opportunities and developing new solutions, we have a lot more inbound requests for the c from the customers that we work with. Can you do this, guys? Can you Skyworks, can you do this? We have this problem.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

We want to get more in automotive. We want to get more in, you know, any of these markets that we're talking about. I mean, it's really important. So I think it's, you know, one of the unique things about us is our ability to cover broadly across multiple fields, multiple businesses.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Be very honest and direct with the customer and still have that, you know, really deep-seated, technology moat that we have.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Okay. I wanted to dig into broad markets a little bit more. But a couple more smartphone things. Getting away from any individual customers, which I know gets tricky. You know, maybe first 5G and then AI. But, like, on, on the 5G side, you've had this great content increase over the last several years. 5G is now pushing into lower-end phones, where presumably, there's more cost consciousness. Are there still innovations on the high end of the 5G market that drive overall content higher?

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yeah. There are. I mean, the technical burden continues to be risen. Not in every account.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

If you look at, you know, the larger customers, you know, agnostic to anybody here. But the bottom line is, if you look at the performance with the, the largest customer, continues to go up at every node and every cycle.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah. Yeah.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

It's not the same. It isn't like, you know, it's an 88 all 88-mile-per-hour pitch. And now, it's a 90. You know, we're talking about big steps.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

We like to be part of that. We like to be working with those customers and help them deliver the solutions that they want and also gain more share.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

For them. It's really important. If you can, like I said, if you can hit the fastball at the high end, it's a lot easier to go down. So we learned a lot from those customers. And I think, you know, the opportunity broadly across wireless technologies, we still think is really important. And, you know, we see multiple solutions throughout the business that there are opportunities that we have, opportunities that we should be in. And so we're not demand-constrained at all.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

It's really on us, you know, that whatever that market's going to look like, whatever the economy is going to look like.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

You know, we certainly want to ride above those metrics.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah. And then, you know, on the AI phone, we were talking about this a bit in the hall. I mean, can you this seems like, obviously, a pretty big initiative from all of your customers. You know, how do you think about that opportunity? You look at I mean, I Samsung Galaxy S24 is being built as kind of the first AI phone. But a lot of those are still cloud-based features.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yeah.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

You know, how much do you see those features coming locally onto the phone? And, what does that mean for Skyworks?

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yeah. Yeah. No, it's a great question. So the way that we think about it now, and it's everyone, you know, there's lots of different ideas on what AI will do and bring to the mobile market or some of the other markets, adjacent markets. So, you know, the way we look at it is, you know, we all have our phone in our pockets, right? Whether it's, you know, Cupertino or whether it's Samsung, whatever. We can't be without this, okay? So we kind of know that. So the consumers used to consuming that data on a handheld device. When you look at AI, and this is our view, the technical burden in AI is going to overcome a typical smartphone. The typical smartphone today is not ready for this. We can use it.

But it's not ready. The compute power typically and again, there's probably people in here that could argue this. The technical burden on with AI.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Is going to demand a whole different set of technologies in the handheld device that are not there. They're just not there. And we can talk about a few little neat things that people call AI. But to get true AI, to deliver the kind of compute technology that you have, right, you have much more action. You need to have nearly zero latency. It's a much, much more difficult problem to solve. Typically, it's with servers.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

They don't have to worry about power.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Right.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

The thing about wireless is, you know, you're sipping the energy on your smartphone today. But when you start to put an AI burden on this thing, the compute power, it's not there.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

So we really believe that AI, and this isn't just, you know, you know, story of the week here. The AI algorithms and the compute power that's not in the phone today but needs to be is going to be a really, really big opportunity for companies like Skyworks. And because we really have been around that industry for so long, and we have lots of technologies, and we have the ability to make them in-house.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

We can curate very, very unique solutions. I think it's going to be a compelling opportunity for us. I think we're uniquely positioned. I really do.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

How much movement do you see on this from your biggest customers? Presumably, a lot of this enthusiasm just grew in the last 12 months or so.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yeah.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

So there's probably a couple-year lead time. But, like, when you start talking about doing localized AI inference on a device like this.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yeah.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

You know, do you see that movement happening now? There are people starting to design those phones.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yes. Yes. And they have to. Because the last thing you want to do is, like, come up with a great AI phone. And you can't get the compute power. You can't get the current consumption that you need. Because it's going to generate a lot more compute and power that is going to slow down your phone, number one. You're going to have to add additional nodes as well to create speed. And just a lot there. So it's a I think, you know, one of the most important cycles that we see in a handheld device. And it's obviously going to be more than just handsets.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

If you can hear it in servers as well in other markets. But the important thing is kind of the simple thought is, today's smartphone is not equipped to do the kind of algorithmic work that you would do in a typical AI environment. Typically, it would be on a PC or in a data center.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

You can't carry that around.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

You're not going to be able to do that. So, but the market's going to drive this towards a form factor that is well-received by the consumer, right? So they want to have the AI speed and compute. But they also want to have the flexibility and the mobility of a handheld device. I think that's going to be really tough. The good news is, that's opportunity. That's opportunity.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah. I mean, it seems like the counterpoint to all of this would be, you know, a really good 5G connection means that I can still do this stuff in the cloud and, you know, and have the heavy compute, heavy lifting there. I found that the idea of having it locally on the phone resonates a lot more with people in places like China because they don't want all their data to be publicly in the cloud. So how do you think about those trade-offs? And you look at the S24. And it does look like most of those features are supported by and they might still be really good.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yeah.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Because they might drive unit volume. They might drive an upgrade. But it doesn't seem like it's driving that new hardware that you're talking about. You know, how, how what does it take to get that into the phone and.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yeah.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

And to provide value to the consumer?

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yeah. It's one of those situations where, you know, you have the headline of AI. And then what it means to each one of these companies, right? Obviously, the highest-grade companies are going to go first.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

They're going to lead. And the technical know-how, the scale, you know, the quality is going to really matter. It's going to really matter. Because the last thing we want to do is you create this AI buzz. And it just doesn't work.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

It's flat.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Maybe the technical burden actually just isn't good enough. But we can't get through that hurdle because there's so much data back and forth.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

But it's not being consumed in the right way. It's not efficient. And then, you know, it's a bust. I don't think that's going to happen. But again, go to the fundamentals. You, you've got compute power in your smartphone right now is at, let's say, it's level X.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

If you want to move that up into a true Generative AI application, it's got to be here.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

I think that's elementary. I think it's really easy to kind of think about that. But from the technology perspective, the physical device portion hasn't been built. So we're going to have to take the smartphone that we have today, and it's going to, it's going to go through an entire overhaul and uplifting of performance. Along the way, it may change. I mean, certain nodes may be more important than others. You know, from the handset perspective, it's going to be untethered. You're going to be walking around with something that is powered.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

you know, current consumption is really important. And you can see the compute. You just look at what people are doing in servers. I mean, it's the same kind of thing.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah. It's yeah.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

They're rack and stack. There's, you know, unlimited power. It's plugged in.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

It's a whole different thing.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

So you start to move to mid.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

80 gigs of Embedded DRAM. And yeah.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yeah. So it's logical to see that the market wants to be a little bit more untethered from that.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

But you can't have a server in your pocket.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Right.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

So it's an interesting thing. Again, back to what we said at the beginning, we want the tough problems. We want to be able to solve them. We're not a single-chain semiconductor player. You know, we're not a TSMC. We have a very, very wide, wide set of technologies that we, we deploy depending on the application and the customer, the geography even, and even sometimes, we don't really think too much about, like, aggregating around the pricing points. It's more about the solution and how we get value.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

But you can still, you know, work with customers to make sure that they get what they need. And maybe it may not be a home-run solution. But certainly, we can hit, you know, the very, very difficult fastballs as well.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Great. So transitioning to the broad markets, you know, pretty positive trends there. Looks like you're bottoming out. And you've talked about, you know, the IoT part of it in particular kind of being past the bottom. Can you just talk tactically to the opportunity there? And then we'll get into some of the end-market drivers.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yeah. Sure. Well, so a couple of things. What is really important, you know, from us, and I think it's very helpful, is that there's quite a few, you know, linkages within the portfolio. So for the most part, we're able to drive outcomes in broad markets that aren't just singular opportunities, that it's just a certain product line. And that's it. We have really good kind of cross-pollination within the portfolio. We have a really strong IoT position. Now, IoT covers a lot of names and a lot of applications. But we really do have, you know, a large set of meaningful opportunities and revenue streams. And if you looked back at Skyworks, I've been at Skyworks for 20 years. If you looked back, you know, we really were right down the middle with mobile.

And that's great. And we did a great job. And we continue to do that. But the proliferation of new protocols, you know, the IoT protocols, the data center protocols, there's so many things that we're doing now. And then also the markets. You know, like I said, automotive. We weren't in automotive three or four years ago at all.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

And now, we're in. And the beauty of that is, that's coming, that application, that vehicle is a lot different than what we had 5, 10 years ago. There's a lot of tech in there. You know, it's not just drivetrain. I mean, it's real technical solutions that are embedded in there. So getting involved, we have, you know, designed ones with customers like Tesla, and many other automobile companies. You know, really cool stuff there. The business that we acquired from Silicon Labs has been fantastic. It's a very unique portfolio where, you know, a large portion of Skyworks is what I would call big game hunting, if for lack of a better term. A lot of big wins. But you got to, you know, they're big wins. You have to get them.

But then you have what we picked up with the I&A business from Silicon Labs, tremendous diversification. Beginning of that was great. We got diversification. We got new products.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

We have our products. You have your products. We're all together. Now, after two years, we've got an integrated play. So we've commingling great talent in Austin with that group, Skyworks DNA across our portfolios and creating really cool solutions, doing a lot of good work in automotive, for example, using both of, kind of the yin and yang of the company, and then also being able to make the stuff in-house, which is also a signature for us. So markets like that are growing, with a lot of upside. I mean, that we're doing probably, like, $250-$300 in automotive revenue. That's a drop in the bucket of what we could do. And we've really only been working on that for maybe three or four years.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

So there's a lot there. You know, the electrification of the automobile is a theme that we didn't create. It's happening. And we but we can play. And we are playing. You know, we're seeing more and more diverse, like I said, IoT portfolios that are growing for us, in all kinds of markets, all kinds of markets, that create diversification. But usually, those even though the markets are different, the core technology that we bring is proven. It's, it's technologies that we know how to use. And then we can we can work with our customer to ensure that product and that solution is working the way they want it to work.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

They have a, you know, a give and take and a voice on that as we go through it.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

OK. So maybe go a little deeper on a couple of those drivers. And I will open it up for the audience after that, if there's questions. But within IoT, you know, I guess the clearest driver is Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 7.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yeah.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Can you talk about what you're seeing there, progress of Wi-Fi 6 and the timeline for adoption of 7?

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yeah. Yeah. So as you said, we've had a really good almost like a mini-cycle that you would see in mobile. And we're seeing that kind of step function cycle to cycle to cycle opportunity for us in Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi 6 had been really strong. Wi-Fi 7, which is just now kind of launching, we have great position. We have great position there. And you're also getting – and you, I'm sure you guys know, it's not just consumer stuff. I mean, there's an enterprise Wi-Fi that you'll see in factories and, and you know, commercial opportunities. And it's an important technology. And I think it continues to grow. And it continues to proliferate into other markets beyond the consumer. We're at a very, very early inning position there. Think about what we did, you know, 3G, 4G, 5G.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

You've got a similar cycle in Wi-Fi, and the thing with Wi-Fi, which is really cool, is that it's diversified. So you've got, you know, mobile. We love mobile. Love it. We look for our cycles. We're looking for content. And it's kind of, this is what you do. And then you get the next one. The Wi-Fi portfolio right now is running on its own set of rails.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

There's a lot of discovery there. So, you know, in mobile, we love it. We know what it is. We know what it looks like. In Wi-Fi, we find applications all the time. We find opportunities, enterprise opportunities, commercial opportunities, you know, even things like video, just a lot of interesting end-use opportunities that come through with high-grade Wi-Fi technology, with Wi-Fi 7 now really lighting a catalyst underneath that portfolio.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

OK. Great. And then automotive, you know, you talked about kind of an embryonic state of that business where you have a lot of opportunity.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yeah.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

This is kind of an interesting year because you have there's an inventory correction going on in automotive. There's also a lot of negativity suddenly from investors on EV.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yeah.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Because maybe the center of gravity of the EV market has shifted a little bit more to China versus the West. But, you know, can you talk about that? And it still seems like the investment in EV hasn't stopped. It seems like that creates a lot of opportunities for you guys.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Mm-hmm.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

You know, what are you seeing in terms of, you know, automotive innovation these days?

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yeah. Yeah. So the interesting part of that is, we're relatively big. But we're not that big.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

So right now, you can still grow this portfolio.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

When you're at 60% share, it's a different issue.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Now, you're facing the market. For us, the revenue opportunity in Wi-Fi 7, we already know what we've been doing at Wi-Fi 6. There's a lot more room for us to go.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

I mean, you think about automotive. There's just, we had been, I would say, underrepresented in that segment.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

OK.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

What's helpful for us is automotive has become a tech market to some degree, right? It's been a technical application.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

It's no longer just, you know, the typical, you know, vehicle. It's a typical opportunity now with Skyworks, where you have these unique solutions that are wireless, that are very unique. And with all of the performance grades, the reliability, the testing that we can do at Skyworks.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

To create those solutions. So we've done well in automotive. We're late to that game.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

It wasn't something that we were doing much with.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

There's another case where, you know, the Silicon Labs business was, you know, small but an important catalyst.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Because they were very driven in that market. And it's been helpful. But we think there's a lot of opportunity there. The electrification of vehicles, that's definitely going to go on. Autonomous at some stage.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Certainly going to happen.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

and those are the kind of things that are right, you know, right in the mix of a Skyworks technology bench.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Great. I'll ask one more question on broad markets and then open it up. You know, you mentioned data center a couple of times.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yeah.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

You know, sort of early-stage opportunities that you might have there. Can you talk about that?

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yeah. Yeah. So we have really good position in the timing applications within data center that really kind of think of them that they're like your clock.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

In your data center that sets the nodes, sets the times, and keeps the trains on time. That's.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

I'm an engineer for a phase-locked loop 25 years ago.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yes.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

So it's been a little while. But.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

I was an AT&T engineer, surface acoustic wave, phase-locked loops.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Clock and Data Recovery, Motorola, all those days. But anyway, the bottom line is that technology is still really important. And it's starting to grow again, with definitely, you know, harder burdens and more technical hardware to do. And I think, but it's also kind of a niche market. You know, it's not the same thing that we were doing. It's not an NVIDIA situation.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

The timing and clock and data recovery, it's kind of the backroom stuff that has to happen.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

You know, to keep the trains on time and going. So that portfolio is doing really well. We had some core DNA at Skyworks. But then that came also through with the I&A business from Silicon Labs. And what's worked there is, you know, when you're a smaller company, you can do certain things. But when you're a bigger company, you can do a lot more. And so for us, we've been able to fund that INA we call it the INA business from Silicon Labs.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Fund it. And, you know, just take what they've got, great technology, and drive it.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

It's already there. So we're able to get it to cast a wider net and a broader reach on some of those portfolios. And it's, you know, we're feeling really good about that.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Great. Let me see if I have any questions from the audience. If not, I have a couple more.

Moderator

We're seeing 5G sort of go into LEO's satellites. Does that play market open up for you at all? Or is that a different end market that you don't address?

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

No. We actually have technologies that can do that. It's been a slower launch, so to speak, for satellite technology. But the 5G engines that we have and the 5G core that we have is absolutely applicable to that. So we do have some design wins there. It's kind of starting to move a little bit slow. But it's starting to finally engage, but slowly. And we think that will be, you know, definitely an opportunity. We have the technology for it. So it wouldn't require.

Moderator

Is it a different bands or different power requirements from the satellites?

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

It's yes. It's different bands. And yeah, there are definitely unique power requirements, depending on, you know, what you're doing, what the budgets are, technical budgets, what the current consumption budgets are going to be. But it is a market that is getting a lot more attention and a lot more funding. We do have a play on it. And I think there's more we could do more.

Moderator

One in the back?

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yep.

Moderator

Thanks. What's the logic, I guess, in having potentially more content in an Apple-based modem? Is it just that they may move some of the RF from Qualcomm to others? Or is it more broad than that? Why an Apple modem would be a positive for the RF industry and, and you yourselves included.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Why would it? OK. I just want to make sure I get it.

Moderator

Sure.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

So, your question is, why would give it to me one more time.

Moderator

Sure. Like, and it sounds like calendar 2023, iPhone 15.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Mm-hmm.

Moderator

Was maybe a little disappointing in part because you noted they didn't, they kept the, the Qualcomm modem. They're going to keep it for 16. Unclear on 17.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Mm-hmm.

Moderator

But you're quite hopeful on the content going up a lot more alongside an Apple modem. Why is that? Is that strictly because Apple will move away from RF from Qualcomm? Or will they move?

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yeah.

Moderator

Just add more content in total?

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yeah. Now, those are good questions. I can't answer all those, unfortunately. But what I would say is, you know, I don't want to be too controversial about it. But the larger customer, you know, definitely prefers the kind of things that we do, honestly. No one really likes to deal with contracts and, you know, agreements and this and that. That's not what people want. They want really good product, reliable. They want a company that, if something goes wrong, you're right on it the next day. You know, we're not into the IP wars. I mean, you got to do what you do. That's a public company. But yeah, it's been a little choppy in the last, you know, year or so. But it's all going to get resolved, you know?

I mean, contracts and IP agreements and all that stuff. At the end of the day, the products matter. You know, the satisfaction to the consumer matters a lot. We'll be fine with it. But those kind of little things are going to happen. And they happen in all industries. But, yeah, it's certainly, you know, there's definitely a couple of things that are flipping and flopping there. But, you know, nothing that we really can't handle.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

One more in front. You have to wrap up.

Moderator

Hey. Thanks for taking the question. I found the discussion around the AI phone really fascinating.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yeah.

Moderator

I still am a little confused as to how Skyworks has an opportunity there and where it benefits you. So, in my understanding, is it you think that because we have to miniaturize and put so much more compute on the phone that is so technically difficult, that a lot of the heavy lifting will remain in the cloud? And therefore, that's why it benefits Skyworks? Or is there other products and technologies that you have that really enable sort of this increase in compute on the phone?

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

Yeah. So I would start with the compute. So what we have today in our phones right now, it's great. Do a lot of things. But those devices right now are nowhere near the expectation of an AI application. That's what we're saying. So, you know, generative AI, it's very quick. You talk, it comes back however you want to do it. Back and forth, back and forth, right? Typically, the way I look at it is, you know, AI would start if we didn't have to worry about current consumption or any of that stuff, right? You would say, OK, I'll take a server. Tons of power. I don't care. I can do it. It's plugged in. That's one thing. And you could have tremendous compute power, like an NVIDIA chip or something like that. That's all there.

You go to the mid-section of this thing. Now, you have to say, OK, you know, how do I find a way to get that level of power onto another smaller device? And you know where that device goes? It goes to the PC. There's a lot of AI in the PC. And I think there's going to be a cycle there, a major cycle. Now, you get the mobile. Mobile is the hardest, the hardest, because it's untethered. And your compute power, even if you're sitting and plugging it, you're driving a lot more current and energy in AI. When you're with your smartphone, you get the burden of that technical drain. You've got compute power that we don't have yet in a smartphone. It's not there. And then you have the opportunity to really drive an outbound solution. So it's not there.

So the way we think about it is, foundationally, you know, AI starts with the server, goes to the laptop, goes to the mobile phone. The mobile phone is the hardest part because it's not plugged in. You're not going to carry that around with you. You're not going to carry your server around. You're going to be sipping for power. We want that because that's going to create an inflection. It's going to be a movement. It's going to be great for people. I think the technology, the opportunities that will spawn from it will be wonderful and great. But they're going to require something much more, much more powerful than what we have in our phone right now. And so we're looking forward to that.

Joseph Moore
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Great.

Well, we're out of time. Wrap it up there. Thank you so much.

Liam Griffin
CEO, Skyworks Solutions

All right. Great. Thank you.

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