Hey, guys. Thank you for joining us today for a conversation with Liam Griffin. He is the CEO of Skyworks. The company has done exceedingly well. It's 1 of the 3 dominant players in the RF space.
And there's a lot to ask because there's a lot going on in the RF chain. So let me just jump right into it, Liam. Let me ask you about the supply chain because that's something we hear about all over the press. You guys have done a tremendous job so far. But I wanted to see if you could provide just kind of any update on how you see the angle?
Yes. Well, first of all, thanks for the invite for the conversation today. Appreciate your words, Harish, to kick this off. And yes, I mean, it's a very interesting time in technology and the supply chain issues that are among us right now are very unique. But you also have to look at supply chain customer by customer or supplier by supplier.
And for Skyworks, I think you know that we've been an investor in technology. We have our own labs. We have our own fabs. We have our own gallium arsenide. We have our own highly customized packaging.
We've invested 1, 000, 000, 000 of dollars in filter technology, starting with standard SAW, then moving to temperature compensated SAW, then moving to bulk acoustic wave technology. So we've always been a company that prides itself on technology generation and building that technology in house, not just more things and expanding capacity with more machines, it's different technologies and growing those cores. And that comes from customer needs and complexity that our customers have. And so for Skyworks, having these building blocks, very unique assets that we've invested in allow us to do really creative things when the market turns up or down. So certainly, there are some challenges in supply chain that is absolutely a fact.
And in any finished device, there's going to be 100 or 1000 of incremental devices and pieces that will need to come together for a full solution. So we're doing everything we can with our partners to ensure that they get products that they need and they can sell to the end user and consume to the end user. And we're also doing tremendous work on our end, really appreciating the value of in house technology and it's to bear right now. So that's how we see it. In the long term, we think some of these changes will abate and I think that's starting to happen.
But our conviction on technology development and scale will not go will be unwaver. We're going to continue to play with that book and we think it's what our customers want and we have a great team within Skyworks operationally to deliver these results. So maybe a lot to start for the first question, but that's how we see it.
Appreciate it, Liam, as always. But there's what I struggle with, Timna, there's 2 sides to your business, right? There's the filtering side, which is somewhat unique and the RF side, which is very, very kind of complex to tune and tweak to a specific phone. And then there's the broad side, which is your typical semiconductor business. And I'm sure that the supply angle is a little different on each of those.
I was curious if we could differentiate between 1 and the other.
Yes. No, that's a great question. At the outset, at the finished product, if you backed up, you could see lots of different technologies in a finished unit. So there's a lot there. And for Skyworks, we have that flexibility to do very, very high scale, really high scale device count saw, our factory in Japan, for example, is a 10, 000, 000, 000 unit TC soft factory per year.
Our bulk acoustic wave technologies are growing in the multimillion level. So a lot of scale. There's a lot of scale. And because we are not a company that develops technologies and sells these devices, we integrate and sell solutions. So it's a very, very different model.
We're not a company that it's not a fabulous play for us. We basically develop and deliver the solutions largely internally with internal cores. But at the same time, we have that flexibility, Harsh, to deliver a product that may be in an IoT device, not a handset, or maybe in an automobile, also an infrastructure. A lot of these core technologies can be ported and scaled for any of these markets. And then you have the size, right?
You have sizes, you look at a mobile device and a mobile scale, things are measured in 1, 000, 000 or 100 of 1, 000, 000. So you've got to have that expertise and operations and scale and execution. Broad market is more like it's more like an artisan in broad markets. You have to craft and develop shoulder to shoulder with your customer. It's not the same thing.
Everybody has a different approach, a different current budget, a different cost budget and maybe what the functionality could bring to bear to the market. So there's a lot of that going on, which I think is great, because again for us, owning those building blocks, having an engineering team that knows how to put things together flexibly opens the aperture up for us on the demand side. So you've got your broad market piece, a lot of complexity, probably smaller order sizes, but a lot of growth. And then you have your core mobile that is really tough with tremendous complexity, early in 5 gs and that is our bread and butter. So we bring that together to deliver the results that you've been seeing and look at the last year, we grew our revenues by $1, 700, 000, 000 on a year over year basis and that's still early innings for 5 gs.
So we're really excited about the opportunities in front of us. The supply chain issues we think will abate and the outlook for us continues to look very good.
I know it's complex and I know you guys work very hard, but every time you guys report numbers, you guys make it look easy because it always comes to. And I think investors appreciate the consistency and the reliability. But with these shortages, which is unprecedented right now because of COVID, the world's like turned over. What kind of conversations are you having with customers in terms of how they want to stock in the future or how they want to work with you to maybe have safety stock and things of that nature. Is that a conversation that you even brought up anymore?
Yes. I mean to some degree that's a theme. It's less of a theme for us though, because again, we have our in house capabilities and it allows us to be extremely agile when the market shifts. That's another key point. If you're in a distribution fabulous world, you have multiple layers before you get to the final product.
We have a direct shot to the final product, right? We do what we've got to do. We execute with our customer and in a collaborative way as well, Harsh. So there can be opportunities that the supply chain issues or some other nuance creates a wrinkle. We have the ability to help correct that for our customer even, right?
So because we don't have to look at a 3rd party 2, 3 steps away from us and hope that we get what we asked for. We can control our destiny that way. And it's been a signature of this company for years. I'm 100% behind it. And it's not like I said, it's not just making more of things.
It's about growing the technology in house, building your factory with a purpose built approach, knowing exactly what is going to be made there and for who it's going to be made for. So there's a unique approach there with Skyworks. And certainly, you've got a long tail of other core technologies. The work that we're doing now and bringing in the Silicon Labs, INA business is going to be really special for us. Perfect, perfect opportunity to take extremely high-tech devices and IP and lever the scale opportunity that we've been talking about on this call, about Skyworks' ability to deliver, build it in house, customize packaging and go after some of the biggest customers on the planet.
So it's going to be a lot of fun when we get our wheels going on that. Things are still looking solid, long way to go, but we're really, really pumped about that deal.
Yes, that was a really good deal. I think it's going to be really, really good for you guys in the future. When I talk to Liam, when I talk to investors, they often bring up the momentum guys in particular often say, well, 5 gs started with a bang and the numbers sort of accelerated pretty huge. And now we're sort of at the peak and we're looking to come down. And I'm curious what you have to say to this.
I try to make the case to these investors that there will be sustained continued RF growth because of 5 gs. But I'm curious how you think about that sustained steady growth from the point of acceleration and now what do investors look forward to in content?
Sure, sure. Well, I will tell you that we are still and I know you've heard the phrase from us, but I'll say it 1 more time, it's still very early innings in 5 gs, it truly is. I mean, the largest customer only launched last year. We see a multi year cycle with and the reason we're going to get to content, but before we use another word, I'm going to tell you about complexity. This complexity is what drives this.
And complexity becomes more and more important when you put a higher burden of usage case on your device. So it's the usage cases that drive the effort, the energy, the data rate, the speed, the needs, that creates tremendous complexity. And then that complexity at Skyworks gets resolved by all of those individual technologies that I spoke about. We're very focused on core markets. And so what we're able to do is take that complexity and make it very simple and very easy for our customer to digest and implement.
And that is a core feature. And that is why you don't see a huge wide, wide, wide, wide scale in multiple different technologies and multiple fabs. We want to do it ourselves, we want to craft it, we want to be able to course correct, add and subtract from our customers' current budgets and make the solution work for them. And that's extremely unique and different in semiconductors. And it's something that we're very proud of and it's a strategy that we're going to continue to employ.
So Liam, when I ask you to maybe elaborate on that a little bit, what do you what kind of things will be needed in the phone of the 5 gs? I know that 5 gs is very early and you can call it quasi marketing right now because not all the bands are there. But as you think about 5 gs 2, 3, 4 years out, what are some of the things that you would provide as a company, Skyworks can provide as a company to enable that content growth?
Yes. So certainly, there's a device by device opportunity in content growth. More spectrum is being added every year, 1st of all. The technology bar is going up every year. The need for improved latency, speed, data rate continues to grow.
All that matters. But then we also have the opportunity to step out of the mobile device and think about the opportunity of 5 gs as what I would call the universal connector. It can take share from opto, it can take share from cable, it can take share from all kinds of wire technologies and continue to grow and take share in mobile devices, that continues to grow. So I think that the market is starting to embrace wireless technologies in a whole new way. Some of that was pandemic driven or work from home driven and seeing that these technologies really can make a difference.
But at the same time, it needs to get better. I don't think everyone is completely satisfied with what they have. And that's something that we can improve on as an industry and as a company. So we see tremendous needs for connectivity, doesn't have to be in a mobile phone, it can be an IoT, it can be an automotive, it can be in base station. Usage cases like Wi Fi have been tremendous for us.
We have every configuration you could imagine for Wi Fi, very, very high grade technology with great outcomes for the customers. So that's a segment that is being populated in a number of broad market applications, also in mobile device. So the and then if you think about the general demographic around this, I mean, the younger audiences are living and breathing on these technologies, They're not going away. We have super essential products for healthcare, for markets that education, a So we see that opportunity continuing to grow. There will be inflections, there will be changes, there will be wants and desires from our customer that we would certainly like to get ahead of, but it's those core technologies and building blocks and deep customer engagement in a way that allows us to put together and makes a very, very complex solution easy for the customer to use.
And Liam, let me talk about the other thing. When we're talking content, we've been talking about what you can do to make the experience better. But how about the units? Do you think that 5 gs units are at the peak? Or I'd be just curious as an insight into the industry, what your viewpoint is in terms of units of 5 gs going forward?
Yes. As I said, I really, really believe and our team and our company believes that we're still in the very early innings. 1 way to look at this thing is just think about total global mobile subscribers. I think we're around 7, 000, 000, 000 ish. We're not even at 1, 000, 000, 000 in 5 gs smartphones and we're in the 100 of 1, 000, 000.
So there is a long, long tail here in front of us. And at each inflection, there's a content upgrade. Sometimes that upgrade is really steep, sometimes it's incremental depending on the customer. But also what we're seeing is not only is it the core classic RF devices, but we're seeing the upgrades go all the way through the phone. The Wi Fi devices tend to pop up and do more.
The GPS technologies are asked to do more. Data rates and speed, everybody wants it faster. Battery life, that's all about current consumption. We can control that. So even if units appear to be at a certain rate, the content needs to evolve to deliver the experience that the customers want.
So clearly in the early innings of 5 gs, without question, is a tremendous opportunity globally to drive 100 of 1, 000, 000 and 1, 000, 000, 000 of incremental units from today's position to the next 4 or 5 years. And certainly, new inflections and new standards will come about along the way and it's been been a relatively consistent path for years, but what's different now, it's not just the mobile phone. And a and a market that I think we're going to execute in very, very well.
And what about so you brought up you almost segued into my next question 150 dollars $2.50 phone call it versus the mid end versus the top tier phones. Can you talk about the incremental content opportunity and 1 versus the other low versus the middle versus the top end?
Yes, sure, absolutely. Well, I mean, at the high end, it really is complexity, performance driven, usage case driven and the best and the brightest on the engineering side to execute on that. And we do phenomenally well there. But at the same time, and this is it's an obvious point, but it's often missed. At the mid tier or the low end, the incremental move from 4 gs to 5 gs is substantial on a dollars per dollar basis.
So you could have a device that would be maybe $3 to $4 of RF opportunity and now you move that to 5 gs, you could have a you could go to 6% and have a 50% improvement in content from a low base. And there's a lot of units there. There's a lot of units there. So you've got a high number of units and the incremental move on RF and performance that we deliver, whether it's RF and Wi Fi and our portfolio, we can typically drive that a couple of dollars, 2 dollars $3 $4 maybe incrementally. So you've got very, very high end markets that demand the best and the brightest and push that technology hard, wonderful, we love it, we're there for them.
And then in the same factories, in the same core technologies, we can develop solutions that are a little bit more focused country by country, market by market and deliver those solutions. And like I said, even though the total content opportunity in 1 of those devices may be less, the incremental from 4 gs to 5 gs is actually quite large.
So, right after your earnings, I was informed that you are now the largest RF provider to the iPhone or very close to that, if not the largest. So that also means and I know that there's only like 3, 4 guys that do this, that do this really well that have the scale to be supplying to these units that have millions of units. That also means that you're more somehow tightly integrated into the design process. Could you talk about how that's changed over the last 5, 6, 7 years where you're becoming much more important to the large OEMs that make phones? And how are you becoming important?
Yes, I mean, without any specific customer here, I would tell you that, as I said, the richness of complexity, the daunting challenges that the best and brightest companies want to go after, which is wonderful for us, It's about a collaborative approach. It's having those core building blocks, having the know how, having the know how to put them together, having the know how to be working in harmony with the customer's end device and the customer's needs and performance. So for us, it starts with the building blocks that I said. And 1 of the reasons why we put up these incredible fabs that, look at our CapEx, it put us in great position to endure a chip shortage or anything in supply chain. We invested early.
Our customers love that. That's what you want to see. You have a trusted supplier that's investing in technology every year, trying to work with our customers together to take the ball up higher to raise our game. And it's a great experience. It's not easy.
There's a lot of experimentation. That's why we literally say labs to facts. We've got engineers shoulder to shoulder in bunny suits working on gallium arsenide, TC SAW, bulk acoustic wave, whatever it may be, it's real. And those same folks are talking to the sales and marketing team, how can we can make it better? I just had a meeting with this customer.
This is what they need. We got to figure out how to get it done. So it's a really collaborative approach, but we also have the muscle behind it to execute.
So broad markets, which we never talked about thus far, always gets missed out. It gets sort of over in investors' mind gets overshadowed and it's happening again in this conversation. So I do want to shed some light on it. Liam, what are the things that you're most excited about in broad markets? Not today.
We know what's working today. You're doing extremely well. But as you look out maybe 3 to 4 to 5 years, what would be some of the shining stars that you're monitoring within that business that could be big?
Yes, absolutely. Well, I think the IoT space is really going to be an incredible, incredible winner for Skyworks. We're in there now. And because of the size of our business in mobile, some of our investors forget that we're delivering substantial incremental revenue in broad markets, well over $1, 000, 000, 000 a year. We grew a tremendous amount of content this year in broad with multiple new customers.
So that's great. Now to add to that, our acquisition of the Silicon Labs I and A business is just a wonderful, wonderful opportunity for us to put core technologies together, bring the scale that we have at Skyworks operationally, bring the unique technologies that the INA portfolio provides and really, really good stuff, much deeper in automotive, doing work in timing, doing work in frequency control markets, industrial markets and also now having the ability to leverage the scale and manufacturing capabilities in core Skyworks, leveraging Mexicali, like leveraging Japan, Korea, all of our spots and Gallium arsenide in Boston, all of that stuff can come together where some of the smaller players are really at the whim of the fabless market. And sometimes you're in the back of the line, there's nothing you can do. When you have that facility and you have your assets, you can be a lot more flexible. So we think the technologies and we really believe this and did a lot of hard work with the team, the INA team, an incredible, incredible group of people that are all coming with us now.
Great, great ideas, great designs, great technology course, let's bring it together with our scale operationally, let's bring it together with the customers that we have that we could introduce and vice versa, get some introductions on the I and A side. So we're really excited about it and the customer conversations have already begun, of course, and getting some great input, great advice from our customers and how we can be a better supplier there. But certainly, that's going to be a big driver to broad markets and broad markets as a standalone portfolio continues to do very, very well within the Skyworks team.
And my last question for you, Liam. So you're clearly very excited about the I and A business. It's been, in my opinion, a fantastic deal for you. But I was curious, as you made that acquisition, does it require any change in philosophy from a CapEx R and D angle to the way you've been running broad market? Is there something you need to tweak from those kind of metrics?
Or does it just fit in right away and you sort of like clean up house or clean things as you go and then you're on your way to success?
Yes. The nice thing here is this house is clean. It is the team, the IA team has done a great job of driving this portfolio for years. I think 1 thing I know we can add, we can add our financial power to this. So we're not going to have to make decisions on whether it's going to be $20, 000, 000 or we're not going to have to make that decision.
We're going to do the right thing and grow the business. So we're going to take the core technologies that they brought and they've earned and we're going to wrap that around with our financial powder and also our manufacturing excellence and the wonderful customers that trust Skyworks.
Well, Liam, thank you so much for your time. I'm super excited about Skyworks' future, but can't thank you enough for taking the time out if you're busy for our clients and for ourselves. Thank you.
All right. Thank you, Harsh and Piper. Appreciate the time.
Appreciate it. Thanks,