All right, we'd like to get started. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Toshiya Hari. I cover the semiconductor and semi-cap equipment space, here at Goldman Sachs. I'm very honored, very pleased, very excited to have Liam Griffin, Chairman, CEO, and President from Skyworks with us this afternoon. Liam, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you, Toshi, and the Goldman Sachs team for hosting today. Appreciate it. I know there's a little bit of volatility today, so hopefully we can get ourselves steady through that.
Calm things down a little bit. Again, thank you for coming, Liam. Before we spend more time on some of the longer term, strategic aspects of the business, I was hoping you could give us an update, in terms of what you're seeing in the marketplace today. It's been a little bit over a month since you reported earnings and gave guidance for September. You guided revenue up in sort of the mid-teens%. I think you spoke to December being up, just given seasonality around your largest customer.
Right.
What you're seeing in broad markets. Any changes from a demand perspective, supply perspective?
Sure. Yeah, I mean, the ecosystem for us, again, volatility today aside, you know, we've really seen some great opportunities in our core businesses. We continue to do very well extending technology growth with some of the larger players in the industry, really creating a reach now that goes well beyond what you would see two, three, four years ago. I mean, a lot of investments there, too, and a lot of capital, a lot of capital investments to put us in those positions. Our customer set has never been wider, by the way. The breadth of our customer set has never been wider. The opportunity of technology growth with some of our larger customers have never been better, quite frankly.
That's come through with a lot of, you know, engineering lab-to-fab work, and crafting and curating some really unique solutions that could proliferate a number of end markets. That continues to be strong. We've also done a very good job, and there's more and more to go on diversification. We know when the markets wanna talk to Skyworks, there's the mobile side, there's the diversification side. I'll tell you that both fronts are in very good position to grow and continue to deliver accretive earnings for us and growth. On the broad market portfolio, we have a tremendous set of diverse customers now that continue to grow, and continue to reach into new end markets.
On the mobile side, there's a lot of very unique technology investments that we're making now. Some have already been already squared away that you'll see in the next year. The opportunity for growth is there. Despite, you know, some of the headwinds in the market, we're gonna continue to put up top line strength. You know, our operating margins right now are in the 40% range. The EBITDA margins are probably like 40%-42%, actually. Gross margin's a little bit above 50%. Business is solid. You know, we certainly wanna drive growth to a higher level. W hat we're doing today and the technology reach that we have and the engagements with our key customers give us a very optimistic view as we see the rest of the year going into 2023.
Got it. Definitely wanna come back to the broad markets and your I&A acquisition, which has been going really well. I did wanna go through a couple of mobile questions and to kick off, you know, how are you thinking about the smartphone market? I appreciate content tends to be the primary driver of that business, but we spend a lot of time, you know t alking about units. What are you seeing in the marketplace, in the smartphone market overall, and what are you seeing in 5G specifically?
Sure. Well, you know, the smartphone market is a very, very vital piece of technology. The smartphone industry is very critical to what we all do, and we continue to see opportunities to get better. We have very unique strategic engagements with customers that matter. We have great people relationships with customers that matter, and there's a lot of collaboration around how to make things better. Not how to make things cheaper, how to make them better, how to wow the outside accounts. We've done a lot of work inside Skyworks developing bulk acoustic wave technologies, temperature compensated SAW filtering, our homegrown gallium arsenide RF, doing that in our own factories. The ability to curate that and deliver unique solutions account by account is a differentiator. No one does that in our industry.
We're one of the few companies that will do that, all the way through a test, assembly and test. It comes with a lot of capital allocation, right? A lot of investment in CapEx. One of the benefits, though, is a lot of that invested capital is now peaking, so we should be able to ride that curve as we look out in 2023, 2024, with the capital investments that we've made already. There's some things there that don't always show up in the P&L, but if you go behind the curtain and look at what we're doing in terms of cash and how we're investing that and bringing in new technologies and solutions, the larger customers, they wanna see that. They want a partner.
They want a company that says, "Listen, let's work together to make something amazing," and not worry about, you know, the nit talk of five cents here and there. We're talking about big strategic moves and how we can do that together, and I think it's one of the things that has put us in a position to have such a strong mobile portfolio. It's diverse, and it's very large, but it really was a homegrown technology and with a lot of coaching and a lot of collaboration with our partners to get that right. There's tremendous upside from here. We're nowhere close to where the market can be in terms of mobility.
Got it. Liam, you know, question on sort of, you know, the largest customer that you have. I understand you don't wanna get too specific here, but I think the market tends to see that concentration, you know, on the P&L and, you know, oftentimes discounts your stock. In reality, you've executed really well, and you guys doubling down on that customer has been a home run. You've got a lot of content in their high-end phones. You've got the low band, you've got the diversity path, you've got ultra-high band. As you think about that relationship and the outlook over the next couple of years, what kind of growth, content growth are you contemplating?
Yeah, I think you're gonna have a couple things. You know, we look at the physical device of a mobile phone, and that kind of, you know, creates its own imagery and portfolio management play, and that's gonna continue. What we really believe, and I think, you know, if we all look long at this, it's the technology that really drives this. It's not the physical device. Over time, you know, the wireless technologies, as they improve in speed and latency and performance, you move into things like EV, right? You look at ADAS, you know, the electrification of a vehicle. Those vectors are in the sweet spot of what we do. It's wireless, right?
We can call it whatever we want, but it's essential, high performance, incredibly reliable technology, and that can play in so many end markets. Happens to be smartphone centric today, but think about all the opportunities that are coming forward in IoT, in automotive, in data center even, right? That part of our portfolio is just really starting to lift off. If you look at our mix, when we look at broad market and mobile, you can see that our broad market business has done really well. It's about 40% of our revenue now, and you know, we're looking at a $5.5 billion Skyworks. Those are not small numbers.
The core essential know-how and hard work that we built within wireless, whatever the end market goes, the technology itself, the vector there, is gonna be really important. We think we can take that technology and those vectors to multiple end markets, and that's part of our journey here.
Okay. Got it. I guess shifting gears a little bit to more of the Android side, which has been problematic for not just you guys, but everyone.
Yeah.
From a near-term demand perspective. You know, based on what you reported in the most recent quarter, China as a region is down big time, right? To your point on the call, it's sort of de-risked at this point. I think it's 8% or 9% of total revenue. How do you see that business going over the next couple of quarters? Are we close to trough? You know, how strategic is China for you going forward? If you can kind of touch on those dynamics.
Yeah.
That'd be helpful.
No, that's a great question, and I think there's been, you know, some significant changes in the markets in China across the board, not just wireless and not even in tech here. There's a lot of things that have changed that weren't anticipated. For us, we've always been a higher end player, even in China. W hen we look at the ecosystem that we play with and the key customers that we looked at in China, primarily the OPPO, vivo, Xiaomi play, they started to erode a little bit. Part of it was, in my view, we had these lockdowns. There were so many things going on in China. You know, the very strong still did well. The very, very strong players were able to endure that.
The U.S., U.S. companies, for example, were able to endure some of that headwinds. Some of the smaller players in China, the OPPO, vivo, Xiaomi, that didn't have enough, you know, financial muster to get through it, didn't do as well. Now, for the Skyworks team, we had anticipated some of this, and we were significantly underweight in the OVX market, and that was tactical. We did that for a reason. We were able to take the scale and the production power to larger customers. Google right now is a strategic customer for us now. That's a new name, actually. It's not a new name in the industry, but for mobile, it's a great company with great opportunity. Samsung, really good returns at Samsung, right? There's a lot of good stuff happening there, and we like to play in those areas.
Those customers are also much more appreciative of high performance. It's not just the transaction. They wanna do amazing things. They wanna be the number one player. We love that, and we like to be at the table and help everybody, you know, to create a great outcome. The OVX, you know, pretty steep declines in that market. You know, fortunately, we've de-risked that portion. Would love to see it come back. If it does, great, wonderful. We'll be there. You know, I think our team did a really good job of navigating through some of those bumps.
I appreciate that point about, you know, perhaps reallocating resources away from your Chinese customers. When you think about the near-term demand dynamics, is there a point in time, is there a quarter where you feel like things bottom out and start to turn for the better, or is there a ton of uncertainty to make that call as it pertains to China specifically?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's no reason why there couldn't be a comeback there. There's no question about that. Also, you know, if you take away the brands, you still see a lot of consumption in China for the high-end player here in the U.S.. It isn't, it's not a case where there's no appetite for wireless technology. It's really about what kind of performance can you get? What will the buyer of the technology seek for, and what are they looking for, right? That's kinda where it goes. It felt to me, what we saw was some declines, maybe some declining technology, not as interesting, yet the larger players, the more sophisticated players actually did better on a relative basis. That's the way we saw it.
Got it.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, it does.
Okay.
That's helpful. Then, you know, you just touched on some of the success at Samsung and Google.
Yeah.
Can you kinda expand on that and kinda speak to what drove those significant wins?
Yeah. You know, everybody, you know, it's a very competitive market, and customers go to market and have their track that they wanna pursue. You know, the fortunate thing for us is that, you know, we're a universal donor when it comes to this, and we wanna help everybody to do great things in mobility and connectivity, whether it's a handset, whether it's IoT, whatever it may be. I feel like we are viewed from the customer side as a great company to partner with as we try to co-develop the solutions for our customer to make amazing products. We're able to do that, but the approaches that we take are very novel. It's not one size fits all.
We have to talk about, you know, what geographies are you gonna roam in? What's important to your customer set? You know, a Google product is very different than a Samsung product, and a Samsung product is different than, you know, another player in the U.S. O ur approach is very customer specific. It isn't a platform that goes. It is a curated customer-specific solution. Now, there are elements of it that are core and that leverage our core technology, our bulk acoustic wave, our TC SAW, our homegrown gallium arsenide, our homegrown assembly and test in-house in our building. A gain, 90% of our technologies are curated and built at Skyworks facilities. That's a great opportunity to get flexible.
The conversations that we have truly are one-to-one, account-by-account, and taking into account the needs for each one of our partners that we have and try to serve them in the best way possible, and very often, you know, collaborate in ways that make their company better and certainly for us to be able to serve. It's a great collaboration. You know, we work on that all the time. We're a customer-first company for sure.
You know, again, the investments that we make in fabs, with all the things that have been going on with supply chain, to have your customers come in and look at your facility that's delivering billions of units a year in high speed, highly automated automotive super super high technologies, and our customers can come in and look at that and see it, if there's something that they want differently done, we can make it happen. There's some unique stuff there that really cements a long-term engagement with the players that matter.
Got it. Liam, you just touched on your BAW technology. I remember five, six, seven, eight years ago.
Yeah.
The lack of BAW technology or the nascency of your technology was a knock on, you know, you guys relative to some of your competitors. You've made a ton of progress. Can you kind of walk us through that journey and w h at the outlook is going forward?
Yeah, absolutely. You know, filtering technologies are unique, right? They're not classical semiconductors, right? They're not silicon based, for example. If you look at you know, the journey in mobile, early days, you could use just a standard SAW filter, and then you could move up, you know, with performance. You could overlay that with temperature compensation to make it more robust. That's a TC SAW. That would bring you up into different levels of spectrum. To get to the highest levels of spectrum, you have to introduce a new technology, and that's BAW, bulk acoustic wave, and it's a different structure. If you look at TC SAW, it's a laminate kind of thing, right? You're creating layers and layers and layers on your filter.
If you think about bulk acoustic wave, it's a vertical structure. Very, very different. Really hard. That's why you look at companies that offer that technology, get a premium, and they should because it's really difficult to do. What we did is we spent a lot of time in our own labs working on a process that we built with our IP to create a really strong solution there. We have a long way to go, but we've made some exceptional progress on this. Bulk acoustic wave can be used in smartphones, it can be used in multiple applications that we see over the world, even things like timing. Really cool applications that we are just now knocking on the door, but we have the bulk acoustic wave technology today.
Bulk acoustic technology today is largely going to high-end smartphones, but we can scale that and bring it into other markets, too. A lot more to come there. We again did not wanna get over our skis and talk about how great the technology was until we made it the way we wanted to make it, and we're there now, so we're really excited about it. There's so much more to go. Much more to go, and many more markets that we can bring that technology to.
Got it. Then to your earlier point from a CapEx perspective, it sounded like you're past the peak from a BAW spending perspective. Is that the right interpretation?
Yeah. In general, yes. You know, we've been a company that invests, you know, I would say aggressively in our own facilities and it helps. The bulk acoustic wave investment was substantial. We're for the most part, you know, most of the really hard things we're getting through and now it's just scale. We'll continue to invest there and again, but the know how with our technical team, our in-house collaboration, the ability to put it all together really matters. I think to net it all out, the big dollars in CapEx right now are behind us. Of course, if things change, right? I mean, there's opportunities for us to scale. As we grow as a company, we would expect to be, you know, obviously bringing out more capital as we go forward.
The big jumps in some of these markets that we really weren't in, a lot of those hurdles have been already met.
Got it.
That will flow through when you look at the free cash flow margins too as well.
Got it. Makes sense. Shifting gears a little bit, on the broad market side, it's oftentimes a little confusing from the outside to appreciate what's growing, what's not growing.
Yeah.
Help us understand some of the near-term dynamics from broad markets. I know there's a supply element, in the near term as well, so if you can kinda summarize.
Yeah.
What you're seeing in that business, that'd be helpful.
Yeah. Yeah, the broad markets business is has been really good, you know, for a while we really didn't do a lot of breakouts on our business. We just, you know, kind of gave you the full complement of the revenue. We've in the last year or two have been talking more about broad and mobile. If you look at the portfolio right now, the broad markets business is growing at an incredible rate, a lot of opportunity. It's about 40% of our business right now, and we're, you know, roughly at $5 but we haven't finished our fiscal. We're in the $5 range for our company, so a lot of dollars.
If you look at it, you've got a broad markets business that's about $2 billion+ at today's rate, with a very wide set of customers and applications. Names and companies that we never would see. Names like Tesla. For example, you know, going into the data center. Google on the data center, not just the handset, right? Infrastructure business, you know, incredible IoT opportunities. All of these things are building up this broad markets portfolio in ways that are really, really cool and very diversified. It isn't just broad markets 'cause it's not a handset. It's broad markets and diverse, so that helps too. You think about a $2 billion highly diversified business. This is broad markets by itself with great technology knowhow, still leveraging all of those assets that we talked about in the fab.
We still do a lot of that crafting in the fab for broad markets. That makes for a very unique recipe for our customers, and there's a lot of that going on. We did the I&A business. We acquired the I&A business from Silicon Labs that has been going incredibly well, better than we. We have very high bars at Skyworks. We're, you know, pretty tough on ourselves internally. That portfolio is doing really well, and there's some really, you know, unique elements to it where, you know, some of the products that they have are just exceptional, but they haven't scaled. They haven't gone to the big names in the industry. You know, what we do, we go big game hunting. That's kind of our thing at Skyworks, and then we go downhill.
We've learned a lot together and taking the best out of both of the portfolios, the core Skyworks and the great things that we got out of the I&A team. That's gonna be really cool as we go, and so far it's been meeting its marks and exceeding its marks on the M&A side. That was the, you know. Again, more to come on that, but we're really happy with what we're seeing so far.
Yeah. I guess on that point with the I&A acquisition, I guess what specifically has surprised you to the positive side, and to the extent there are things where, you know, there's still scope for improvement, what would those things be?
Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot there. First of all, really impressed by the roster of customers. If you just think about the number of accounts, customer accounts, high quality, there's a lot of customers that are now Skyworks customers. There's a lot of markets that we haven't been in that they're introducing us to. There are some places where we're both in there together, but with different applications. You know, their timing business is really good. Power isolation and automotive really good. They've got some interesting things in audio. They've got some interesting things, you know, in vehicles. Really cool stuff. What we're doing is the same kind of approach we have at Skyworks. We wanna hunt down the most important things and grow them.
It's nice to have diversification, but you also wanna have the ability to grow in a meaningful way. There's been great collaboration with the original Skyworks team and bringing in I&A. The DNA of, you know, the big game hunter works very well when you have a technology that's great, but you haven't taken it to everyone, right? We're taking some of the really special high performance technologies and opportunities that they brought to us, and we're taking them everywhere and meeting customers that have never really met that team. It's gonna be great. Leveraging the capital assets that we have too. It doesn't snap right away. It's gonna take time, but the big investments that we have in Mexicali and in Japan, all these facilities that we own, we're gonna bring that technology here.
We're gonna bring it inside Skyworks. We won't have to go to TSMC every day or GlobalFoundries. We can do a lot of that stuff ourselves. There's some really cool things that came about and some upside surprises on the Silicon Labs deal. It, you know, is really kinda left brain, right brain kinda thing here, and when matched up together, it's been an exceptional partnership, and we look forward to more as we go forward.
Got it. It sounds like in the near term it's more of a cross-sell, go to market kind of thing from a synergy standpoint. Longer term, it's insourcing as well in the manufacturing side.
Well, yeah, but it's also an R&D. It, the cross-sell is the end, but there's also core research and development work going on with some really smart people from the original core Skyworks team and the Silicon Labs team getting together and working on solutions. The cross-sell, yep, that's good, and that's easy. T here's also some really good technical work. There's some really smart engineers that came through that deal as well, and, you know, we have a great team too, but the collaboration there has been exceptional. I'll be honest with you, that wasn't something that we looked at in the deal and said, "This is the reason why we're doing it." We're looking at the opportunity, we're looking at the revenue, looking at the EPS, wonderful, but the people side and the know-how, really strong, better than we expected.
Got it. Maybe talk a little bit about the automotive opportunity.
Yeah.
I think you called out that business, that part of your business being, you know, record high i n the quarter. You know, the breadth and the depth perhaps in that business and the outlook on a multi-year cadence.
Yeah. You know, we haven't done a lot of breaking out, you know, the portfolio in terms of dollars, but I'll give you a ballpark range. You know, we're hundreds of millions of automotive revenue. I'll just tell you that. I couldn't tell you that two years ago, but that's where it is. The engagements within the vehicle are actually quite diverse. There's a lot of wireless stuff that you'd expect, right? Especially when you're getting into, you know, ADAS and other kind of things. There's also, you know, some rich timing solution activity going on there that we work on. Power isolation within automotive, big market for us.
The dollars, you know, for us, we look at a couple of hundred million dollars, but there's a lot of growth from there. I think, again, the partnership with the Silicon Labs I&A team helped us because you know, just a different way to think about where to go and how to go. T hat's gonna be a meaningful driver for us. We're really just getting started on this, and we're already putting up, you know, a couple of hundred million a year. I would tell you that that's probably gonna be one of the fastest growth areas for us as a company. You know, of course, as you get into autonomous driving, the need for connectivity and wireless connectivity, zero latency, super high performance, no failure, right?
That's the kinda stuff, you know, when you have that legacy, and that's kind of our thing that we've been doing in wireless, you gotta take that to the next level. We're the right kinda company to go do that. I mean, we're a trusted name. When you think of if you're thinking about wireless connectivity and reliability, the speeds, the latencies, you know, the craftsmanship and the knowhow, I think that is gonna be a differentiator for us. That's revenue that hasn't happened yet. That hasn't happened yet. That's on the come. In today's world, $200 million, $300 million of automotive and IoT for us is, you know, definitely in the cards. That's something, again, we weren't doing much of that a few years back.
Got it. Just given the long design cycles in automotive.
Yeah.
I would guess you've got pretty decent visibility on a multi-year view. Is that fair to say or?
Yeah. It is. You know, and we're still from a market share position. There's a lot of room for us to go. I mean, this is far from maturity, and this is new stuff for us.
Mm-hmm.
It's got a pretty strong vector.
Right.
In terms of opportunity. Within broad markets, there's a lot of really cool things we can talk about, you know, really cool stuff. Some of it's Wi-Fi enabled, some of it could be, you know, long haul stuff. Even the infrastructure markets now are getting a little bit better for us too. Automotive, I would say, over the next three to five years could be one of the bigger drivers for us overall.
Got it. On consumer Wi-Fi, I think there's this perception that you guys are over-indexed to that market, and, you know, that market's been inflated through the pandemic and that's a risk going forward. How would you k inda address that?
Yeah. I don't know how it works with everybody else in this room, but when Wi-Fi is down, it's a problem in my house. I'll just tell you how much. I mean, it's those things. They're necessary technologies, and they've gone through their own cycle, where we're seeing, you know, Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi 7, 7E, 6E. There's a lot of need for that, and you can look at Wi-Fi as its own cycle, the way you look at 2G, 3G, 4G. You can still get some lower end kinda consumer edge Wi-Fi, and then you can go all up to really industrial grade, high speed Wi-Fi if you go all the way up to a 6E solution. The appetite for Wi-Fi, the way we see it, is still pretty strong.
It has its own cycle, similar to a mobile phone type of cycle. There's a lot of dollars to be earned there. We have a really good position. No shame in that. We have really good position in that portfolio. It is growing. The use cases on Wi-Fi are very strong. We're with all the key players in the industry. It can go anywhere from, you know, you can go from low-end Wi-Fi, you know, that you could have at the airport or something, and go to really industrial grade, enterprise grade Wi-Fi with redundancy, you know, and speeds and latencies that are very, very different that you would get in a consumer device. We can play through all of that.
Mm-hmm.
That's an element within our diversification theme within the broad markets business.
Got it. Liam, I think supply has been still an issue in broad markets. You know, what are the key pain points today? When do you expect them to ease? You know, where are you at from a supply perspective?
Yeah. You know, in general, we've done better than most in the whole supply chain world that we've gone through this year, and we're still dealing with it, right? Why would we be better than that? Well, we put a lot of investment in, and we have our own facilities. We're very unique to do that. Very unique. With that, you know, we are able to kinda navigate some of the challenges, right? For the lion's share, 75%-80% of the product is made in a Skyworks facility, homegrown, whole thing. We may be limited sometimes just by, you know, sometimes our customers. Our customers got 98% of their bill of material ready, and 2% of it isn't there, and that 2% could be a problem from.
It could be a company I don't even know. It doesn't. It could be a fab issue. Could be, you know, a downstream fab issue. Could be a piece part problem on the other end, and the customer's saying, "Hey, I got everything I need, but I can't finish my product because I'm waiting for this guy over here." So there's been. That's the kind of supply chain problem that we've had this year. It's been more around, you know, making sure our customers get a complete solution.
Okay.
We can provide everything that we can do to make it complete, but if there's some tangential technologies that are short, and that's happened, it makes it really hard for the customer, right?
Right.
I think that's cleaning up a little bit. We haven't had too much internal flux and change, but at the same time, when you're running a fab, you know, you don't wanna turn it on and off, right? You want that to run at a steady state and high performance. Couple of things, headwinds there, where customers, like I said, you know, they had orders, they had to delay it because they couldn't get the rest of the bill of materials, that kind of thing. Stopping and starting. It's getting better. It's definitely getting better. I don't think we're through it.
Mm-hmm.
Skyworks isn't the only company that's dealing with a lot of these headwinds, but.
Right.
I would look at where we are now. It's definitely improving. We've also won a lot of customers through this thing. That wasn't the intention. The intention wasn't to try to solve all of our partners that have had problems. That's not really the goal. When things went wrong, we were the fireman that would go in and fix things. We've done that. We've been very collaborative with our customer set and, you know, being really open about, you know, paths that they want us to go if there's an issue, and we've had conversations about what's the best place to go now if this went this way. It's made us a better supplier, you know, to our customers.
You know, that's gonna continue to go. We've always had a really strong operational edge at Skyworks, and I'm proud of that. There's nothing wrong with that at all. That's important. At the end of the day, these are physical products that have to work together, and be efficient and unified as you deliver a complete solution. We do a little bit more of that hard hat work than most companies in this space, but it's another reason why the engagements with really important customers, you know, stand tall every year.
Makes sense. Thanks for that. I'm gonna pause here. We have about eight minutes left. Any questions from the audience? Raise your hand if you have a question. If not, I'll keep going. I guess in terms of how to think about profitability, you know, your gross margin profile has been extremely stable, throughout the ups and downs. OpEx leverage has been really, really good. As you think about some of the levers that you can push and pull and some of the mix dynamics and so on and so forth, how are you thinking about gross margins, operating margins over the next, you know c ouple years?
Yeah. No, that's a good question. I mean, we have a pretty strong position today, but we definitely want to improve. I think I would say the metric that we would like to get after first is gross margin. I mean, you know, we have been, I'm being very honest, we've been hanging around the 50%, 51%-ish range, 52%, you know, in that ballpark. Op margins have been steadily strong, and so, you know, 40%. By the way, we can run that business fine at that level. It's not. We're not starving the company. We're developing world class products, you know, great people, great talent, making strategic investments in our fabs, all that's there. That's not. You know, we've had some people say, Well, your gross margin, you know, well, geez, you know, what, 40%.
That's really low. No, it's fine. We can do it. This is a high-scale biz. We know how to do that. G etting at the gross margins, I think that we know we're working and we have great vision on what we can do and how we can handle it. This year's also been kind of mucked up a little bit with pricing. The part of the whole supply chain issue, you know, you had a lot of craziness in pricing. Like, we have some partners, I'm not gonna name who they are, that just broke contracts.
Yeah.
Just broke them, right? We would not. I, as long as I'm the CEO, I would never do that. That was done to us. We dealt with it. You know, we figured it out, and it created a gross margin headwind in some cases. The fact that we had the vast majority of our technology in our house, we were protected. Now you got a few little windows that are open every once in a while. You, oh, we got a problem here because this supplier couldn't give it to me, or this supplier will give it to me with a 3x price increase or something crazy, right? That kind of stuff has been banged around. That's gonna clean up. It's almost done.
That's when we can get a really good, clear view on what our capabilities are on the GM line. Stay vigilant on the OpEx line. There's no reason we're totally comfortable with that. Hit the GM line a little harder. We can do that. I think coming through the supply chain issues and the headwinds and the inefficiencies of the market that we've all seen, the physical market, not the stock market, you know, we've all in this ecosystem have had to kind of deal with it a certain way. I think that's gonna improve. I think it's gonna improve for the whole industry. You know, the Skyworks aside, I think we're gonna get back to a healthier position. T he pricing dynamics got a little wonky.
We were not a company that would go in and raise prices, you know, we had a few little things that we had to do, but very, very little compared to what would have been put on us. We were able to navigate through that, which is, in a way, it's a testament of our ability to sort of endure some hardship on the cost side. We got through that. We don't wanna go through that again.
Right.
We've learned a little something from it too.
Right. When you say partners breaking contracts, you mean jacking up pricing?
Yeah.
That kind of thing? Okay.
Yep.
Figured, okay. You know, you've been cash flow generative throughout. You just talked about perhaps capital intensity peaking and moderating a little bit. How should we think about allocation of cash and capital going forward?
Yeah.
Do you just close the I&A acquisition? You do talk about diversification further. M&A, investing in the organic business, you know, steady growth in dividend buybacks. How do you think about the puts and takes there?
Yeah. There's a lot more opportunity now than there was a year ago, if you think about it, right? Think about valuations and opportunities. You know, we've always been great with, you know, shareholder returns or the buybacks and dividends and great. We've been doing that for a long, long time. You know, there's some opportunities now too with M&A, given where valuations are, opportunities are. I would also say the confidence in our team, the way that we handled the transaction, the I&A transaction, has been great, and hats off to the guys in Texas on that too. They're really smart, engaged people that were working with us on that. I feel like we have a lot more choice now. The financials in the company are outstanding.
I mean, look at the numbers. I mean, look at the free cash flow margin. You know, look at the EBITDA margin, all of that. What's not outstanding is the multiple today, quite frankly, right? That matters. You know, that's my job and our team's job to do better on that front. Everything's available right now. I mean, the upside of the situation is choice now. We have choice. You know, we have the ability to do more on buybacks, more on dividends, more on M&A. I think M&A, given some of the things that are popping up now, could be a little bit more interesting than it was six months ago. We would be ready to do something if it makes sense. Again, we're gonna be cautious, we're gonna be smart about it, and we'll look through it. We also wanna continue to grow the business internally.
Got it.
It's actually not a bad position to be in.
Great. I guess in terms of M&A, what do you look for in a company or in a business? What are some of the top three things that you sort of, you know, have to tick.
Yeah.
Tick the box, if you will?
Yeah. You know, I would say we want growth and we want purpose in the technology. We want growth, but we want growth that has vibrancy, that has legs, that's gonna be around, that's gonna be relevant. That's important. I think it's really important. We will not do deals just to create more top line. There needs to be something strategic that, you know, we really are intrigued and are really excited about 'cause it's hard. Transactions are hard. Everybody knows, everybody in this industry knows that. Even good deals are hard to do. Conditions are moving around now to create potentially some different opportunities. Our financial position is very strong, despite what we see in multiples today. The business is strong, the opportunity is strong, and I think we have more choice.
Got it. Is there a sharp focus on reducing mobile exposure or is that not necessarily? You talked about.
I would.
Liking that market, but.
Yeah, I would definitely not reduce mobile exposure itself, but I would like to see the business grow to a level where mobile would be lower as a percentage. We don't want mobile smaller in absolute dollars.
Sure. Sure.
As a percentage, that's fine.
Sure. No, that's what I meant.
You got me?
Yeah.
We also have, you know, you know, what happens every year is we do really well with a lot of these mobile guys. The other broad market business is doing great, but the mobile business is big, and design wins there move the needle quite a bit. In the vectors that we're seeing, and not just with the largest customer, but the need for. Go back to the very beginning of this thing, the technology that we're talking about is essential. It's vital. People cannot live with this. This is really important stuff, and it's gonna get more and more difficult, and it's gonna create more and more end applications that we can populate. We're excited about it.
Again, you know, working on the broad market side, got a great taste of that this year and feel really confident about what we can do as we go forward.
Awesome. In the last 60 seconds plus, anything that we may have missed, or based on all the one-on-ones and meetings that you've had with investors, anything that we collectively.
Yeah.
Underappreciate or overlook?
No. No. What I would say, honestly, you know, for... Take this mobile broad market hat off for a moment and just look at the business as it is today. The growth rates. I mean, we were at $3.1 billion in revenue, you know, in the COVID era, and now we're at, like, $5.5 billion. Okay? So we... This is a business that can grow. This is a business that can generate cash. This is a company that has unique technical assets that are very, very different than our peers. We have some of the best customers in the world, and we know how to delight them every day, and we can go with customers that are startups and uplift their business and create an opportunity. You know, and our team's fired up about demonstrating that.
You know, we know what our stock price looks like and our valuation should be, and you know, we're looking to see that really change as we get through into 2023 and beyond.
Awesome. Liam, thank you so much.
All right. Thank you. Appreciate it.
Thank you. Thank you all.