Good morning, everyone. I'm Chris Caso, Semiconductor Analyst at Raymond James. Welcome to our technology conference. With us for our next presentation is Skyworks Solutions. Presenting from Skyworks is their CEO, Liam Griffin. We were talking on the break. Liam and I go back longer than I care to remember.
Mm-hmm.
Liam, thanks for coming out with us today.
Oh, no problem, Chris. I appreciate it.
Liam, maybe I start and we'll get into some of the details, but I'll just give you an opportunity to kind of get us started with, you know, just broadly some of the opportunities available to Skyworks. You know, we know about the 5G opportunity. You guys are capitalizing that nicely, but you know, I think you're gonna tell us that the opportunities are pretty broad for the company.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, certainly, you know, you know us for mobile, but we've been doing a great job expanding the portfolio and driving diversification, doing it both organically within the core business and then also, you know, leveraging the new opportunities that we've acquired with the Silicon Labs opportunity. You know, we see incredible new vectors of demand for us, Chris, and the technology that we bring to the market is really critical and as you see now with the supply chain issues, how critical and important it is to have a company that can scale those devices. We've spent a lot of time, you know, crafting our fabs, leveraging everything from our gallium arsenide in the U.S., going to Japan for filtering, engagements in Singapore and Mexicali to really drive that.
We feel good about the opportunity and, you know, doing everything we can to try to get product out. There's quite a bit of demand there. On the other side, the diversification theme continues to grow. Our solutions in Wi-Fi have been phenomenal and continue to see great demand. Continuing to drive 5G and further cycles in mobile, and then just a vast array of broad market products that we've been able to deliver. In broad markets, for example, and we're talking about a business now that's about $1.4 billion in revenue. You know, you've followed our company for years, and that's a pretty big number for Skyworks, with a lot more room to go and a lot more opportunities that we haven't yet consummated.
Right. Maybe a place to start is that, yourselves, like a lot of the industry, there seem to be more opportunities out there than you're able to address at the moment, which is a bit of a high class problem, but I know that's consuming a lot of your time right now. Maybe you could talk a little bit about some of the supply constraints that Skyworks and the industry is facing and how you're working through those now.
Yeah, sure. Well, I mean, just to frame it at a high level, you know, Skyworks is a unique company. We develop, design, and often manufacture all the way through packaging in our own facilities. It isn't just about the scale, although scale is important. The way that we go about it is we craft and curate technologies that are purpose-built for the end solution. What I mean by that is at inception, we're developing a filter or leveraging a certain method of gallium arsenide and bringing our packaging together. We know exactly where it's going. We don't have a great dependency on third parties. I mean, there's some incoming upstream fabs that we lever, but the lion's share of our production comes in-house.
What's interesting about that, and we've all learned in this industry that it doesn't take much for a gap in supply chain to really wreak havoc in the industry. For Skyworks, we've been navigating this better than most because of those assets and because of those investments that we put in place. Working with some of our third-party players in fab land that is outside of Skyworks, right? We happen to do that. Today, the problem is, and you've heard the same analogy from others, but if you could have, you know, 99% of the bill of material ready to go, but 1% is not available, it's gonna create some wrinkles, and frustration with customers and just, you know, friction around free flow of demand, supply and demand.
That is starting to wane off and skies are starting to brighten a little bit. Again, fortunately, the investments that we made, fueled by the way, by our financials, which we can talk about in a bit, but our ability to drive that success with CapEx really comes from the quality of the business and the earnings power that we bring to the market. That's kinda how we see it. Honestly, as we come through this, Chris, we're gonna come through this better than we were and where we started, because we built you know a new set of customers and relationships.
We've done some really good work supporting customers that urgently needed our material, and we were able to expedite that material because it was in the walls of our company. That's kind of how it's going. We're also advancing the technology on another vector, Chris, by really expanding, you know, the usage cases around our filtered portfolio. We have our temperature compensated SAW filter, we have mid-band, and we're also developing high band BAW solutions. Actually more than developing, and we're actually delivering them at scale. There's a great deal of internal investment in technology and scale together, knowing that those technologies and investments are going to certain end markets. Maybe it's broad market, maybe it's high-end mobile, but there's no guessing. We know exactly where we're gonna take the technology and what customers and markets we're gonna pursue.
that makes our strategy a little bit more cohesive and a little bit more resilient when you have this kind of a choppy supply chain environment.
Right. You mentioned that the skies are starting to brighten a bit. You know, maybe you could expand on that a little bit. I guess my perception is that for your business, at your largest customer, you know, Skyworks has not been the bottleneck. There's been bottlenecks elsewhere. You know, I imagine there's other places where secondary markets for you maybe where there are bottlenecks. Maybe you could kind of put that in perspective of where the sky is brightening and where and for what.
Sure. Yeah, I mean, the major significant accounts in mobile and also in broad market, kind of the tier one players in those spaces, we're seeing more flow of demand and execution and things starting to improve, right? Again, we have the ability to deliver, but we are dependent on a few outside suppliers. That looks pretty good.
That's from availability of other suppliers, making that customer more able to make more units and therefore consume more of yours. Is that correct?
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You know, again, 99% is there, 1% is not there. Then finally, a couple weeks later, hey, that last 1% is ready, boom, the product's out, right? That kind of action is starting to gain a little bit of strength on the positive side. I think it's, you know, industry wide, and it's a matter of, you know, limiting your risk and making sure that you have the capability to, you know, pivot as the market pivots. I think owning, again, all the things that I said upfront about, you know, having control of your factories and your assets and your people under one roof makes it better for us and better for our customers.
The more challenging parts of the portfolio is when you get into the very granular pieces where it's very high mix and kind of lower unit volume. Those areas are a little trickier. It isn't because we can't execute to that, but that's where we have more upstream third-party sources that are really, you know, still battling right now to try to get even in terms of demand, supply and demand. It's not the lion's share of the business at all, but there's the level of our portfolio that is a little bit more diverse and broad and more dependent upon third parties on the fab side. That wheel's spinning, but we can do better, and we are gonna do better.
We can see, you know, the light in front of us here. If you looked at how the impact would roll out, it would be more, you know. We're doing very well with the tier one players and the larger mobile players and even the significant broad market players. Then executing within our factories, as I noted, and then continuing to drive demand. Then second, now hitting some of the lower volume, high mix players. That's where it goes on the supply chain. The upside of this is that, you know, we've really expanded the roster of our accounts. In some cases, we've had companies come to us that have never been a customer, never been a Skyworks customer. Probably should have been, but hasn't yet.
We formed relationships with these companies, and these are significant players. So, you know, we've been able to demonstrate a capability that's been very attractive to our customers, current customers and new customers, as we go through this supply chain situation. As we, you know, talked about, we all think it's gonna mitigate and we'll find our way in a better position. But again, having that flexibility, customer relationships, being able to curate a solution, craft the solution, customize your product, I think all of that is gonna lead to some great success as we go forward.
Right. Do you feel that becomes a tailwind as you go to next year? Where, you know, that you know, some of these things loosen up, some of those, you know, lower volume customers, you know, is the demand still there and just waiting for product and therefore becomes a tailwind as you go to next year?
Yeah, we believe that. I think, you know, the opportunities and the design wins and the work our teams are doing in the labs right now is all positive. You know, we see, you know, again, the supply chain issues abating and the opportunity for us to demonstrate the great technology that we have here and the level of customization that we bring too, which is important. You know, as the market evolves, there's no question that, you know, the connectivity sector is where you wanna be, and whether it's Wi-Fi, whether it's 5G, whether it's Bluetooth, all these types of connectivity nodes are not going away. You know, the performance requirements continue to go up. All good for us.
You've heard it from me, and you've heard it, you know, probably in other areas, but complexity for Skyworks is our friend. You know, we like to do the hard things and simplify really difficult problems for our customers and bring those in a elegant, you know, module-like environment. Sky5, for example, where we integrate all the key components within a single platform and provide that to customers all over the world, but each one could be highly customized and different. That kind of a business process will continue to roll. It's not just in mobile, it's in broad markets, it's in the Wi-Fi portfolios.
We're gonna be doing a lot of that same kind of positioning with the Silicon Labs acquisition, leveraging that strategy that has worked so well for our company, and we're gonna continue to lever that.
Right. What about with respect to seasonality for the business and, you know, just as we're in this supply-constrained environment, what we've seen in the past is that, especially when you leave customers constrained through the year, there was some bleed over in there into the beginning of the year. We also normally notice that there's a switch over to Android as you go to the beginning of the year where-
Yeah
... you know, even the foundries, you know, that just free up a bit once the seasonal demand is done for iPhone. You know, how do you see that playing out this year? Does some of that demand still bleed into the beginning of next year as because of some of the supply constraints that we're seeing now?
Yeah. No, you're right. I mean, we normally do see in a kind of a baseline environment, you see, you know, the tier one players come through the holiday season in the U.S., and then you have an Android follow-through, getting into the January through March quarter. We think that'll continue to happen. I think there's more opportunity for us because the ability for us to do the hard things. It's not gonna be as clean as it has been because of all of these gaps in supply chain and having to configure in different ways. Like I said, that's all good for us. That's on a relative basis, we will perform better in a more challenging operational field. We will. We just will.
We also have the IP and, you know, the technical know-how to drive those solutions. You know, we're I think you're gonna see that we're just much closer to the customer and we we're in the conversation as to how to get to the right answer. It's not gonna be cookie cutter. Like I said, we're not a put it on the shelf distribution company, take your parts. We're a company that crafts, curates, works with customers, finds the best way to create the optimal solution that hits the performance merits, and then for Skyworks, you know, provides the level of profitability that we deserve.
We actually, in some ways, it's a better environment for us when things are a little bit more difficult because that's where, you know, the cream rises to the top, right? We'll continue to do that. You know, we definitely think that supply chain situation will clear itself out as we get into 2022, and then we're back to, you know, high performance technology, whether it's in the broad market business, you know, whether it's in markets like automotive, markets like mobile, we're ready to go on all those vectors.
What are you planning for capacity as you go out into 2022, 2023?
Yeah. Yeah.
You know, what sort of investments are you gonna make? I know, you know, with some of that, you said you've relied on some of the third parties for some things. Do you pull some of that in-house? Because that's, you know, you spoke over the years as that's one of your competitive advantages is the in-house manufacturing.
Yeah. Yep, exactly. I'm glad you brought that up. To kinda back that up a little bit, and obviously you know these numbers, but we went from our fiscal 2020 $3.3 billion to $5.1 billion year-over-year. Okay? We're talking about $1.7 billion of incremental revenue. That would not have happened if we didn't six-nine months prior position ourselves with great scale and capacity and putting that CapEx in early and on time, to drive those results. That's, you know, those kind of numbers, it's share gains globally. It's driving technology that just wasn't there before, that we had to make ourselves in our own sites to drive that kind of outcome.
We're really proud of that, and I think it's been missed actually in the valuation of the company right now. It demonstrates the scale that we can bring. Again, this is a one-year move with COVID, by the way, and still getting nicked up a little bit with supply chain. Despite all of that, the technologies we brought were valuable enough to drive a 3.3%-5.1% top line. Those are big numbers. You know, by the way, that's. We're not stopping there, but it demonstrates our ability to execute.
When we think about the next legs as we go forward in the markets that we're in and the markets that we'll pursue, you know, having that ability to fund strategic capital is going to be a weapon for us, and we're gonna continue to fund that. It's been highly accretive. Again, we know what we're making. Capacity for Skyworks isn't we have 10 machines, now we have 12. It's not that. It's we have this technology, we keep it. Now we're gonna build bulk acoustic wave. Now we're gonna leverage, you know, millimeter wave or whatever it may be. It's the ability to build and craft in-house technology and then put it on your own production line. We know exactly where it's going end to end, from design and inception to finished goods.
That is a very unique business model for us. It's not cheap. You have to fund it. You have to have the cash flow to get it done. The returns on that approach when successful are very strong.
Segue into my next question, which is, you know, this is not cheap. What we've seen elsewhere in the industry, and really the first time I've been doing this is broadly prices starting to go up. The justification for that is, you know, certainly third-party manufacturing costs are going up. That's getting passed along to customers. Customers seem to be willing to accept it given the supply conditions.
Yeah.
Does that hold for the RF space as well? I mean, question one is the hold for the RF space. Then secondly, you know, does your position having, you know, so much more capacity in-house insulate you from some of those to give you some sort of a competitive advantage in an overall pricing environment where pricing is going higher?
Yeah. Well, I think the RF space still is massively undervalued, honestly. I think the technologies that our company and our peers bring to the market are exceptional. They're vital. They're critical. You can't live without them. I mean, that's just a fact. You know, that is a very important part of the market in semiconductors, and I think, you know, we're really happy to be one of the leaders in this industry. You know, obviously, there's some other peers as well that we compete with, but this is a great market to be in. You know, you and I were talking a few minutes ago before we started the call about what we were doing 10 years ago. How different was it the way that we communicated, right?
I mean, the ability to communicate with wireless technologies has really changed the way we work, live, play, educate. We can go on and on. That's not gonna change. Those technologies are not gonna change. The performance behind it and the R&D and the investments and the technical scale, all of that is gonna change. The demand vector is gonna be there. It's gonna probably get higher and more demanding, and it could, you know, change the peer group a bit. There's no end to the opportunity here. No one that we work with or talk to is satisfied with the level of technology performance in mobile RF wireless across the industry.
We all want more, think of the way, you know, our kids are being educated, people are entertained, people learn. There's so many great attributes about the industry that we play in here, and so we're proud to be a part of it. I definitely think, you know, there's gonna be challenges in front of us that are daunting, that we'll have to conquer. Having those assets, the technology, the know-how, and being kind of purpose-built around the products that we make here, is unique for our business and I think, you know, strategically very important.
Where does that content come from over the next couple of years? I think this is maybe, you know, one of the investor perceptions that, you know, certainly in the developed world, 5G is now kind of penetrated. You know, overall the penetration rate is not quite there. You know, maybe you talk about the content gains just from, you know, going from 4G to 5G and then, you know, even in the developed markets, you know, your biggest customer phone, iPhone, is there still an avenue of content gains and for how long will that last?
Yeah. Well, I mean, we've seen, you know, the incremental technology, we'll call it content, but the incremental technology reach continues to expand. It happens because the application burden and the opportunity for the consumer to gain more is what's driving it. People really are not satisfied. They wanna see the next thing. In some cases, they don't know that they need to see the next thing until it's there, and then they can't, you know, live without it, right? It's kind of an interesting dichotomy there. What we definitely know is that, you know, the technology really drives, you know, the end applications, and it allows the interface and the user to really engage in so many different ways. It's not just the mobile phone.
I mean, we're thinking obviously, we've got autonomous vehicles here now that are gonna be important. You know, the Wi-Fi products are going through an incredible cycle right now that would really match kind of the vector of a 5G launch when you start to look at 6 and 6E and Wi-Fi permeating everywhere. You think about things like the Metaverse, right? We can call it what we want, but there's going to be many, many more billions of nodes of connected devices that go way beyond, you know, the hundreds of millions a year that we talk about in classic mobile. In those markets, you're probably gonna be a little bit more autonomous. You're unlikely to be plugged in and, you know, things like power levels are gonna be important. You know, RF performance has to be really good.
You know, the unit count could be exceptional. We're talking billions and billions a year, right? You know, I think that's where this industry is headed. You know, wearable devices are also right now really starting to tip a bit. We would play very well there. We have great assets. We did our deal with Avnera a few years ago that's been working out phenomenally. Also some other places that we've been looking at. I think there's gonna be an expansion of what we call the device, right? I mean, we talk about handsets and if it's, you know, we're doing things that, you know, are so different now than we were doing four or five years ago.
I think over the next five-ten years, connectivity is still gonna be one of the most vibrant elements in the market, but the form, the shape, current consumption, usage cases could all change. That's all good for us because we're right in the middle of that. We're in the heartbeat of those technologies and then applications, and we have a voice in shaping those with our customers.
Right. I'm gonna pivot a bit and speak to another technology, BAW. You know, it's not where the bulk of your revenue comes from today, but you've done a lot of work on it. Maybe you could talk about, you know, how that ramps over the next year or two, you know, where you see the opportunities and, you know, how much, you know, does that give you just another shot on goal and becomes accretive to the revenue opportunity?
Yeah. We've been working with BAW and working on that technology for quite some time and crafting our unique recipe. If you look at the numbers that we talked about, the $3.3 billion-$5.1 billion, there's a significant piece of BAW in there. What we do, Chris, we don't sell filters discreetly at all. You can't buy a BAW filter from Skyworks. You can buy a Sky5 solution that could have multiple unique BAW filters that are packaged and curated and side by side with core RF to give you a full solution. That's how we go to market. We're leveraging our BAW assets.
You know, it's very high scale right now, but you don't see it until you get into one of our modules and identify it. That's happening. We're raising, you know, our ability to go in a new spectrum. Our feedback with customers has been exceptional. You know, as you may know, we try to shoot for the very, very highest performance, and that rewards us with an opportunity to be with the highest performing players. That continues. We're looking forward to that. There's a lot of business that we haven't yet captured in that area, a lot. That's something we are going to absolutely be engaged as we go on. You'll see more and more of that.
You know, expanding that aperture technically is super important. Looking at the acquisition, the Silicon Labs deal that we talked about, we think there's a tremendous suite of products that we could bring scale to. A lot of good products there, very diversified, but within the level of diversification, there's you know, kind of a sweet spot of highly scalable products that can go quickly to customers that we know already. Even some customers that the SLAB team can bring to us. There's some good karma going there and that's another vector for us as we get into the 2022 plan.
Well, what about mid-high band? You know, again, you know, historically, you know, your sweet spot has been in the lower band with TC SAW. Historically, that's been a big part of your revenue.
Yeah.
Are you planning on capturing more of those mid-high opportunities as you go forward?
Absolutely. I mean, if you look at the portfolio now, you know, I can't give you all the puts and takes here, but I will tell you that the mid and high band are very significant and drive a tremendous amount of revenue. They will drive a lot of revenue in 2022. Those products are there. They're there today, and they're in production. Mid-band, low-band, high band, all of that, and it comes with, you know, the right filtering and the ability to coexist, to create that complete solution. You're not gonna see, you're not gonna see a, you know, a bulk acoustic wave product on the shelf that you're gonna buy from Skyworks. You're not gonna see that.
You could see a Sky5 engine that could have mid-band, high-band, low-band PAMiD, plus, you know, other elements to give you that complete full solution. That's how we would go to market. We are very much, you know, in the BAW business here now. A lot of hard work. It's, you know. Again, there's more and more spectrum out there that we can capture, but that was one of the elements that supported that $3.3 billion-$5 billion, that $1.7 billion incremental revenue path. A great deal that was levered by some of our BAW technology.
Right. I think one of the other areas has been diversity receive, which is, you know, one of the technologies you were early on. You know, I think you have a very large share of that market today. Maybe you talk about the opportunities there and maybe some more about. That's an area where I'd say, you know, you'd be defending your position against competition. You know, what do you think is your competitive advantage there, and do you think you can, you know, maintain and expand your share of diversity receive as, you know, I imagine diversity receive still becomes a bigger part of the market?
Yeah. Yeah. Diversity receive is really important. It's really, you know, bringing the downlink volume and speed way up, right? We created that product really through engagement with some top-tier customers that were having difficulty matching uplink and downlink and recognizing that so much of the energy is coming down. We gotta figure out a way to match that. We created that technology called our DRx. You know, we continue to do things like that that are unique. Again, that's a product that if you look under the hood, there's a lot of different discrete technologies that come together. Not only do they come together, they come together in a way that's highly efficient.
You know, one of the things that everybody knows about RF and wireless, when you're not wired, and so power and current consumption is really important. So things like diversity receive, they're intelligent devices. They know when to turn on and when to turn off, and they know when the data rates need to be, you know, very, very fast or not. So there's all of that kind of nuance under the hood, and it drives our product. We're always developing a solution that comes about with a customer problem. A customer has a problem, they come to us, we talk about it. We're in the labs. We're shoulder to shoulder with engineers. Maybe it's the customer, maybe with Skyworks. In our lab, it's a lot of conversation, and there's a lot of collaboration to get to the right answer.
You don't see, you know, cookie-cutter products from Skyworks. We don't sell filters at all. I mentioned it already. We don't sell like a standard TC SAW filter or a SAW filter. We could sell those all day, but they're commodities. That's not our business. We wanna move up and hit the high grade and the mid-grade and continue to move. That's what we've been doing. There's a lot more in, you know, the R&D pipeline right now that we can't share until those, we're ready to go to market. That's sort of our style here. There's definitely no end for the demand. We're seeing, you know, a lot of inbound requests for different types of technologies, you know, levered on speed, levered on efficiency, current consumption, and the application usage.
With all of that experience and that technology can go way beyond, you know, the classic handset mobile device. It moves into things like, you know, the Wi-Fi world, the Metaverse world. Wearables, I think are gonna be a pretty significant part of this industry over the next five-10 years as well. You know, the form factors will change, but the companies that have the core building blocks and have, you know, the aptitude to be unique and crafty and flexible in the architectures that we bring, I think are gonna be really critical. We're thinking about that as we go forward.
Okay. You know, kind of moving into some of those broad markets. You know, one of the big events for you is the acquisition of the business from Silicon Labs. Maybe you could talk about that a bit and in particular, you know, how you expand that business. How does that business grow faster as a part of Skyworks as compared to where it was in the past?
Yeah. Yeah, sure. Good question. Well, you know, when we pursued that acquisition, we were thinking about what it's gonna be when we get it, right? That's kind of our mindset. We weren't looking at the deal for revenue or, "Hey, this would be nice to have." I mean, it was a opportunity that we really liked and basically, you know, the playbook for us is this is a company that's got great technology. We need to scale it. It's, you know, it's high mix, lower volume, but the portfolios and the products that they have are really good. Very strong, high performance, you know, high quality, great portfolio.
We're now leveraging that, and we're going through the product line, and looking at where the opportunities could be raised, and brought to scale with multiple customers that we have right now, and also working with the existing portfolio that came to us and how we can look at that portfolio and scale it better. It's kind of two ways. I mean, you can attract new customers with the technology and then in some cases where the technology is already in place. Back to your capacity discussion at the beginning, the SLAB team, great company, you know, and we love the acquisition, but they didn't come with a great deal of scale operationally. That's something that we can do, and bring that within the walls of Skyworks.
At the same time, take advantage of the great customer relationships that the Silicon Labs team has brought. So, you know, if you think about broad markets for us now, we're at 1.4. We're gonna grow that thing much faster now because we have a roster of companies that are already customers now for Skyworks by way of the SLAB deal. So there's some unique things in that transaction. It's still very early, and there's a long way to go, but we like what we see and I like even more what I think we're gonna do. So, kind of stay tuned on it. But we're thrilled with it. You know, great team in Austin. You know, we're collaborating very well. The integration has gone very well. It's exceptional actually.
You know, we're working through all that, and I think new products, new customers, you know, it's gonna be great harmony as we go forward with that transaction.
With that, I mean, what you've talked to us in the past about is, you know, confidence that the broad markets business, you know, grows double digits sustainably into the future. Are you still comfortable with that? You know, I guess investors are naturally paranoid that, you know, some business might have been pulled forward. The Wi-Fi business did very well in the pandemic. You still have a confidence that you still grow that business double digits from these levels sustainably into the future?
Yes, absolutely. I mean, you know, if you look at where our numbers have been here, we're up 31% year-over-year, Q4 to Q4. You know, these numbers, the broad markets. We continue to expand the customer reach. We continue to create unique content within that reach of customers and applications. There's a lot of inquiries that we're getting inbound, you know, with customers that want help from us how to develop product. Big companies too. We're not talking about small players. How do we get more efficient as a team? There's gonna be a lot there. Like I said, some of the great IP and assets that we brought forward with the SLAB business are ripe for high scale.
You know, we're in the very early innings of taking that product line and bringing it to known customers that absolutely could use this technology but just haven't been customers before. We're gonna be able to drive that. Our key tier ones will have a great opportunity to look at this portfolio, and we'll find ways to create some great engagement across the board.
Okay. I'll pivot to margins a bit. One of the things that you've noted through the pandemic is you've taken on some additional cost to make sure that your customers were taken care of, and that's been a bit of a headwind to margins. When do those headwinds come off? You know, is that something that we can expect to be a tailwind for margins next year as some of those COVID related costs hopefully start to abate?
No, good question. I think our margin trajectory had been coming up very well and strong, and obviously we want to do better. Operating margins are still very high in you know the mid-30s% or higher. You know, we've been you know free cash flow margin. If you look at all of the metrics, you know, from top to bottom, you've got some pretty powerful numbers, and I'd match them against you know our peers any day. I think they're solid. Obviously, we can do more and we will do more. As we go out, we certainly had you know some bumps and are still enduring those bumps with supply chain. Our team did a really good job navigating COVID.
You know, again, I've said it a couple of times, but going from $3.3 to $5.1 in a COVID environment, that wasn't much of a supply chain headwind there. That was just Skyworks driving it. Now on the supply chain side, things are getting a little bit better. We have much more control than others in driving that. I think we should be okay. When we get to the other side of it, you know, you've got a lot of new technologies that are being developed right now in our labs. We know what we're shooting for. One of the things, Chris, and I think you know this, and when we talk about the business, we don't speculate. Like, we're not, you know, put parts on the shelf, hope people buy.
That isn't our thing. It can be for some other companies, but that's not ours. We tend to go and work with the top-tier players across the board, and it's more than one or two companies. We're talking about a lot of companies that are high scale capable, and work with them on how do we get you to the next level, whether it's going from 4G to 5G, whether it's the next node in Wi-Fi, whether it's, you know, wearable technology with audio, whatever it may be, we work through that. We kinda know what's coming, and we provide options to that customer on how to make it better. What do you really want? Is it performance? Is it current consumption? What markets are you gonna pursue? What's your price point?
All of that stuff goes on. It's very different than, you know, typical semiconductor, where you're basically just driving, you know, nodes every year and driving your scale without, you know, thinking about where the customer is. We like to look at what the customer wants and then figure out how to solve that problem rather than tell them, "This is what you can buy." That's kind of our play, and we're looking forward to it. We learn a lot from that. You know, you learn a lot when you're in those situations, and you tend to make less mistakes or if you do make mistakes, they're smaller bets.
Yeah.
You know, we're excited about that. We think going into 2022, a lot of this stuff, a lot of these headwinds will abate. The opportunity for us will continue to grow. The markets that we're in right now are the markets that you wanna be in. They really are. We're excited about the opportunity as we're going forward.
Okay, how about use of cash? You know, one of the things when you did the acquisition for Silicon Labs, you paused the buyback for a bit. I think your CFO's comments in the last call sort of implied that he was unpausing that. You know, maybe you could talk about one year commitment to buybacks as you go in the next year. Do they resume? In general, what are your plans for uses of cash? Is it gonna be mostly buybacks? Are there still strategic opportunities such as like Silicon Labs going forward?
Yeah. I think everything is really an option. I will say, you know, buybacks are definitely on the table. I wouldn't worry about, you know, the acquisition was not a very large transaction to do SLAB's. So that's not at all impacting us. So buybacks are on the table for sure. Continue investments and CapEx strategically, absolutely there. You know, we are maniacally focused on the performance of our financials, so we can do better than what you're seeing today, 'cause in our numbers today still has, you know, these headwinds that we've talked about over the last half hour, right? So there's room to move on that. Then continuing to look strategically at opportunities if we see the right ones.
You know, we've been very conservative with it. One of the reasons is that we have great opportunities internally to pursue. It's one of the reasons why we've done less on the M&A side, but the deals that we've made have been strategic. They've worked out well. You know, we'll keep our aperture up there. You know, the cash flow that we put forward is really solid, and, you know, buybacks are, you know, right there. So that's something that we'll be able to continue to pursue as we pursue other strategic opportunities.
Okay. Well, looking at the clock, I think we're just about at the end of time. I think I'm gonna leave it there. Liam, we appreciate you being here, and I look forward to doing this in person rather than through the TV camera from in the near future.
Sounds good. Thanks, Chris. Appreciate you guys hosting. Have a great afternoon.
All right. Thanks everyone for joining.
Take care.