Good morning. I think we'll start. I'm Tim Arcuri. I'm the semiconductor analyst here, and we're very pleased to have Haviv Ilan, who is the CEO of Texas Instruments, with us. So thank you, Haviv.
Good morning, Tim. Thanks for having us.
Appreciate it. Great. So, Haviv, maybe we can start. You had your off-cycle Capital Canagement Day. You talked about you know spending you know a lot of money through 2026, and if the revenue growth is not there after that, you could cut the spending. So can you just talk generically about how you're thinking about basically intersecting your capacity additions with demand?
Sure. And again, if you think about our Capital Management Day, and you can find, of course, the material on our website, it was really a deeper dive into our long-term plan. This is not about 2025 or 2026. This is where we think about the company in the next 10 and 15 years and getting prepared for the opportunity. It started with description of why we think growth will come, really focus on our, you know, presence at the right market for us, industrial and automotive, growing presence over there. And they've done well over the last 10 years. They think they can do even better in the future. And then the strengthening of our product portfolio on both analog and embedded to support the opportunity. And now you have to get prepared.
And in our case, it's a preparation first for the next 10, 15 years, but also a step forward on being on controlling more of our destiny, meaning shifting our capacity internally, a higher use of building wafers and assembly and test, the finished goods inside the company, towards the end of the decade, position of above 90% on both. So we wanna really control our destiny not only again on the capacity side but also on the technology. So that's a high level of what we described over there, including a higher level of granularity of how we make the investments, what happens in phase one up until 2026, how we prepare for the longer term. And then this idea, as you said, of flexibility of capacity.
Once you get rid of or put behind you the long lead time items like clean rooms, qualification, you modulate your capacity according to what demand can do. In our case, we wanna be ready for a broad set of opportunities or outcomes. So if the market and our position continue to strengthen, we wanna be prepared to support that. But as you said, if the market, you know, weakness is more persistent and we kind of got ahead with capacity, we'll take a pause and wait for growth to resume. We do have a strong conviction that it will return to trend line and then add capacity as needed.
Just being in this position of having the clean room and qualification behind you and able to modulate output by just installing tools is a very, very good position to be at, a position that we wish we had in the previous upcycle. But we are going to have it not only in the next upcycle but for the next 10 and 15 years. And this is where the excitement is for the company.
How important has the CHIPS Act been in terms of timing some of those investments?
Look, I think we've been very transparent that our strategy was there even before the CHIPS Act was discussed or announced. We embarked on that mission in the end of 2020. We were more external about it, communicated externally in 2021. But this is something that has been in the making for the last five and six years. I think the CHIPS Act certainly helped. We are very excited about it. I think it's historic. It got support on both sides of the aisle, and it's definitely something that helps us achieve our objectives. So definitely not the reason of why doing it, but we do appreciate the help coming from the U.S. government to allow us to play on a level playing field versus our global competition.
You know, you've been at the company a long time, you know, and you've been on the board since 2021. You've been CEO since 2023. As you look back at this last cycle, what did you learn from the last cycle that you take forward with you over the next 5 to 10 years? What did the company do right, and what did the company do wrong?
First, yeah, you're right. We are continuing. That's part of our culture. We always wanna learn and improve, right? So you learn from every cycle. The last cycle was unique. It was a little bit different than others, both in the fact that it was, I think, very pronounced. Also, kind of asynchronous. Different markets behaved differently, different geographies behaving differently. So a lot to learn. I will say that, first and foremost, I'm very proud of us keeping a steady hand on our ambition to act as owners that will own the company for decades. And what I mean by that, don't let the microenvironment, if you will, change your steady hand on what you wanna do long-term. Treat your customers correctly. We didn't engage with deals like, you know, call them NCNRs.
I think we kept pricing in a very responsible way. So I think we treated our customers very, very well. We also supported growth in all markets but also biased our supply towards the markets that we think are the most strategic for our future, which are industrial and automotive. I'm very pleased about that. And in general and I hear it from customers, TI, "Oh, thanks, God, we listened to you. We wanted a deal, and you said you won't need it. And you were so right. Now we have to walk back some of the deals we've made with others." So I think we got a lot of credit on that. Also, the fact that we kept pricing competitive is helping us now as we prepare for the next upcycle. So I'm very proud about that.
Most important thing for me, also continuing to build and invest in R&Ds through the cycle, invest in capacities through the cycle rather than trying to manage a temporary or a specific year free cash flow rather than looking at the longer-term plan for the company, so very, very proud about that. We got a great support from the board, of course, from Rich and the entire team, so that was good. Now, you asked about. We can always do better and you can see some of our actions right now are related to be even more prepared for the next opportunity. You see inventory being managed differently in TI.
We are taking a higher, I think, advantage of the fact that we have a lot of diversity and longevity in our product portfolio that allows us to not wait for customers to put backlog on us but rather, you know, build ahead and get ready with a positive low risk. We wanna have enough of the stuff on the shelf to service these customers when they discover they need it, and we can see it right now.
Even in this year, customers come to us last minute, and they need parts, and we can deliver it to them, so that is playing very well, and maybe the most important point as we discussed a minute ago, just getting the capacity ahead of the demand, so this is something that we are doing. I'm very pleased with the execution. We always say, "Oh, we wish we had some of that clean room built, previously before the previous cycle." But it's definitely gonna be there for the next cycle and beyond, and that's the exciting part, just getting ready for, in a better way, for the next opportunity, when it presents itself.
So can you talk a bit about the demand environment currently? Are you seeing customers come to you with more rush orders and more expedites where they say, "I need it, and I need it now"? And is that a good sign? Do you read it that as, or would you say just as many customers are saying, "Well, you know, I'm still burning on inventory," as customers that are coming to you saying, "I need it, and I need it now"?
Yeah. And as usual, the answer is depends. And, especially in this cycle, as I mentioned before, this cycle has been very unique in the sense of the asynchronous nature, or if you think about very different behavior by markets and also by geographies, if you will. So I'll give you an example. Three markets, personal electronics, enterprise, which is mainly kind of the cloud compute and, high-performance compute, communication. These markets are already in a recovery mode. I think, PE started the earliest. Personal electronics started in the beginning of 2023, kind of its recovery, and it's continuing. It's doing very well. This is where we see real-time orders coming in, and we are very pleased to support them, as you said. I think it's a very high level of customer service, and our customers appreciate that.
But I see also similar behavior on the comms and enterprise markets. Customers are discovering that they took inventory too low, and they need kind of a last-minute order, and we have it available for them either on ti.com or through the backlog channel, where you know however we do business with these customers. So that's going very, very well. On the automotive market, it's mixed. So as I think I described in the last earnings call, we are seeing a very strong recovery in China. Q3 was a new record high for revenue on the automotive market, and the momentum is building over there. But if you take the other part of the automotive market, call it mainly Europe but also other geographies, it's just more muted. I think customers over there are going through some inventory digestion.
You're seeing a different phase of the automotive market. The industrial market is the one that has been the most persistent. I think this market is still working in some sectors. I would describe it as already hovering, you know, on a kind of a bottom and maybe wanting to recover. In other areas, still working itself down. A few sectors already growing. It's a mix of sectors, and each and every one of them in a different phase. The important point is that secular growth. Let's take the industrial market. If I look at the hundreds of end equipment, there is obvious secular growth. When I go look at architectures, when we talk with our customers, there is more content per end equipment in the next generations versus the next generation versus the previous generation.
So even with a flat unit count of the end equipment, we will see growth. This is why we call it secular growth. I think that's coming, each and every end equipment, actually, not even sector in its phase, but you know, one day, they'll all point in the right direction, and then I think this is where we can see, you know, a faster recovery. Our job, as you guys do probably a better job, is not to call when exactly it's gonna happen, but we wanna be prepared for any scenario. You know, a slow recovery with one shape or a very fast recovery with a different shape, we wanna be prepared with capacity, with inventory, with the right product portfolio for each and every case the market wants to throw at us and be successful in each case.
Is there sort of anything in the last month or two that is encouraging to you? I ask this because we had a company that's levered to the autos industry yesterday, and we were speaking with them, and they were speaking about some recent green shoots in autos, and it mostly was China, but the comment was also even beyond China, so are you encouraged by what you've seen the past couple of months, or is it still you would just say it's mixed?
Look, I think I gave you a very high-level description of what we see in the market. You know, that's what we see in Q3. Regarding Q4, you know us, Tim. Let's let it play out. If there was something very special to call out, we would. We will. But there is nothing special to call out. I think the environment I described is the mix between the different markets and even different geographies within specific markets is very clear. I expect that to continue into the future.
Great. Let's talk about market share because this is an interesting question that your share of the analog market went down about 350 basis points versus what it was pre-COVID. Now, we can debate why that was. I think part of it was the fact that you didn't have enough capacity, and you talked about that. Part of it was that you don't have, you know, take-or-pays or NCNRs, and, you know, some of your peers did. And obviously, that's not coming back to bite them, so can you talk about market share?
And when I look at my competitor's estimates, they basically are sort of superimposing today as the base and just growing you at an, you know, analog market growth when really, you know, my contention would be that you ought to regain most, if not all, of that share over the next few years. How do you think about that share? Are you confident you're gonna regain that share and sort of like, what are the mileposts that you're looking at?
No, it's a great question, I think, and you kind of answered some of it already. But it's so complex because there are so many ingredients. First, you have to look at the math, and market share is math, and I think the math is the math, right? So that's also what I use internally. Let's use it as a motivation to move even faster. Second, you said it. There is timing. I mean, we do know, and you can see it in the numbers. You know, we, I think, we started our decline a little earlier. We also have exposure to markets in a different way versus some of our competitors, and there was this asynchronous behavior. So there is a time element here that you wanna let the cycle play out to really measure it over time.
So some of it, I expect TI maybe to be an early, you know, adopter of the decline, but maybe also on the way up, we can be earlier than others. I don't know. Time will tell on that. I think there is a pricing element. We, I mentioned it before. We were very responsible. I'm very, very proud of that because I think it positions us to share gains in the future, meaning we stayed very competitive through the cycle. The team was very humble to understand market price and, you know, not rest on their, you know, previous successes. And on top of it, there is some share loss that, based on supply. I mentioned mainly in areas like personal electronics, communication, enterprise. This is where we had to make some tough choices.
So yes, my expectation from the team is to use the score to motivate us to run faster and take back some of that share. Is that what I expect the team to do? Of course. Can I tell you it's gonna happen? Again, we'll have to let it play out. But the culture should be always look at the score, acknowledge it, and act upon it. And that's the energy we drive with the team. Let's see what the market wants to do. Let's see how we behave inside this market. I will say that I'm very pleased with our momentum. I think it's being built. We saw clearly. If you look at it, forget about TI market-wise, the market from a unit perspective troughed somewhere in the first quarter of 2024. We are seeing WSTS without memory units growing since then.
And I expect, once the phases of hitting the bottom and starting growth go through the entire set of markets, sectors, end equipments, and geographies, we can go back to trendline. And I think right now, when the sun is down, some people think the sun will not shine again, to your point. I don't see it that way. I think secular growth is actually intensifying in our market, especially in industrial and automotive. And TI will be prepared to support it, as the market goes back to trendline. And I will say it will. I can't predict the exact time, but it always does, and it will.
Can we talk about China? Because China is an omnipresent debate for investors. It's the perception that it's a melting ice cube because of all the money that they're investing in these, you know, lagging nodes. Can you talk about how competitive you are in China? In many ways, I see you as one of the only Western suppliers that can compete in China over the longer term. Can you kinda talk about that?
Sure. First, before we talk about the competition, I think the market is attractive, right? China is about, you know, short of 20% of world GDP. This is a market you don't want to ignore. It's also a fast-moving customer market and customer base, very high willingness to adopt new solutions, and by that, very competitive. Now, you add, especially in the last five to seven years, and we've been watching it for five to seven years, a lot of emerging competition that I respect a lot. You know, these guys are building parts that are competitive in many areas. You know, they're still they don't have the breadth. They don't have internal capacity, so they have to share some of the margins with their foundries and their OSATs. But you do need to respect them. And I think they do beyond, you know, very simple parts.
I, you know, I see competition across our portfolio if, at the five-cents, you know, amplifier, but also at, at, a high-dollar, amount of, integrated radar on a chip. Okay? We, we see competition across the board, and we respect the competition. Having said that, I think our competitive advantages allow us to play the game in China. The fact that we are building our capacity internally, the fact that it does go into 300-millimeter wafer fabs, very, very modern, very, very attractive cost structure. Think about assembly and test. We own our technology. We own our capacity. We compare ourselves to the cost of the OSATs. We are very, very competitive. So it allows us, through this vertical integration, to support the market price that is usually set by the competition. We don't set the market price. It's set by the competition.
And we can be very, very competitive. To your point, I don't wanna characterize us. Are we, you know, are we doing better than others? But I will say that I'm excited about the opportunity in China. I think we can not only play the game but also grow market share in China. That's actually the objective I have for the team. And so far, so good. The customers really, you know, respond very well to our competitiveness. They respond very well to the level of speed and energy that TI presents, or displays. It also responds very well to our geopolitical dependable capacity. A lot of our customers in China and this is not only OEMs. I want you to think also Tier 1s, think about automotive Tier 1s. They sell to everyone. They don't sell only to Chinese OEMs.
They would sell to the European OEMs, to the American OEMs, to the Japanese OEMs, and our business in China is doing very well on both sides, both on the OEM side and the Tier 1s. They want geopolitical dependable capacity because they also have concerns about supply and, you know, not the what the world will throw at them in terms of, restrictions, so in that sense, our, strategy is very well received, not only in the Western part of the world but also, in China with our China customers.
Just on China also, there's a lot of talk about tariffs. And, you have a back-end site in Chengdu. Have you begun a strategy to sort of hedge, if you had to source back-end supply elsewhere? Could you fully source it at other sites?
That's the look. We again, as I said, this, our investment in internal capacity is a multi-year process. As I said, we started it somewhere in 2020. We are well into it right now. I think it's a six-year process that we are almost 65% done. So very excited about that. But it's not only dependable capacity. It's also very diverse. So if you think about, I mentioned China. Think about, China is about 20% of world GDP. What, how do you want your China assembly and test footprint to be versus your capacity? Probably 20%. And this is exactly how we are planning it. So as we go, you know, becoming more and more vertically integrated company in terms of supply, 95% of our parts built internally, you wanna have, you don't wanna be over-biased toward China because who knows what the world wants to do in the future.
So you align your Chengdu side to make sure that you can build every part that is built in China, also in Malaysia or in the Philippines. You keep the scale of it at about 20%. You can always if the world wants to decouple, you can do China for China and non-China for non-China. If the world stays open, and I hope it will, you can continue to have this diverse supply chain. Our customers in China and outside of China appreciate that. TI, and I'm hearing it again and again from the CEOs that I meet with, and that's from them.
TI is very, very unique in the sense of it has a diverse, dependable capacity, at scale, which means, you know, that we have the footprint according to think about world GDP and, at an affordable level. So it's not only important to be dependable. You also need to be competitive. Our capacity is affordable, very, very appreciated by our customers, which I expect will allow us to win more market share in the future.
Can we talk about the EV market in China? One surprise, I think, coming into earnings. Everyone expected autos to be weak and expected industrial to maybe be getting a little better. And it was actually the opposite. Autos turned out, you know, not just for you but for everybody. Autos was a bit better than feared during earnings, and industrial still was weaker or, you know, not getting better as people had hoped that it would. Now, a lot of the auto story is in China, and that does appear to be better than what people thought. Can you talk about exactly what's going on in China, what the dynamics are? Is it all related to EV? Are there other factors at work?
No, I think we just touched it five minutes ago. It's, it's a combination so first, EVs in China are highly adopted. It's already crossed the 50%, or it's at equilibrium. New cars in China, I think it's 50/50 EVs, non-EVs. If you look at the EVs, just small content. These are more the modern, more modern, I would say, platforms, just more content per vehicle, not only because of the EV portion, just, just more features inside the car, and you add to that, I think the Chinese customers are doing well. I just mentioned the Tier 1s. I think they are winning market share worldwide, not only in China, and that also helps the growth in China, and inventory correction was just done earlier in China. Everything gets it just goes happens faster in China.
So we've seen a very quick inventory correction at the end of 2023, bottomed in the beginning of 2024, and then recovery since then, very, very rapid one. I think the Western part of the automotive market is still taking its time. I mean, there's still some inventory digestion. And that's why you see kind of a mixed performance on the automotive market. But again, in China, this is a big market, both on the OEM ones and the Tier 1s. You wanna play in both. And I think TI is well-positioned to continue to do well over there.
Can we talk about the CHIPS Act for a moment? It's both grants and it's ITC. The ITC seems pretty bulletproof. It's, you know, whenever you're investing and you're putting in the capacity, you get a credit against that. The grants are a different animal, though. Could that change? So in the new administration, could there be maybe a renegotiation of the milestones to get the grant money? How do you sort of see the grants evolving?
Yeah, as I said before, first on CHIPS. Historic and very important for our future. I think I'm excited about it. I, as you know, TI was kind of a late announcer of, on the PMT or preliminary terms that we agreed with the administration. I will just comment. We haven't finalized our agreement, so I can't communicate anything new today, but I'll just say in general that we are very pleased with the collaboration, the speed of movement, and I'm optimistic about the future over there. When we have something to announce, we will. I won't comment about, you know, I won't speculate, let's say, what changes will be made. I just remain very optimistic about the CHIPS Act. I think it's important. I think people realize it, and we'll continue to work closely with the administration to make progress there.
Can you walk us through sort of some of the qualification? I know phase one of your current CapEx plan is largely a transfer story. You're moving, you know, 150-millimeter production, moving it into RFAB and external foundry production, you know, MCUs moving into LFAB. How is the qualification process going?
Okay. No, it's a great question. I think it's important to understand part of the reason we are investing at a higher level of a higher capacity intensity in phase one is just because we want to move more of our capacity internally. That's really the Lehi move that you've mentioned. So in the embedded business used to be, you know, predominantly done on foundry. That's gonna reverse. It's gonna go inside the TI, mainly in Lehi. And I'm very pleased about what's going on there. Look, our embedded business is mainly an industrial and automotive business. Long design cycles by the customer. They take time to qualify the parts, but the execution has been going very well. We are done with 65-nanometer. We are now on the 45-nanometer node. And so far, so good, including, you know, high-safety products in automotive.
So, that's going well. On the 150, yeah, we have a couple of fabs that are the last two fabs that run a six-inch or 150-millimeter wafer fabs. I'm excited about just putting this capacity in 300-millimeter wafer fabs, most importantly to secure supply for our customers for the next 40 years. You know, these are parts, some of them were done in the '80s, and they're still running in production. We don't wanna run them on old technology. It's actually everything every time something breaks in a fab like that, you find yourself in a challenge to find even spare parts. So moving this capacity into our modern 300-millimeter wafer fab is highly appreciated by our customers, and that process is going on right now. It's going well.
Of course, when we are done, you shut down the six-inch wafer fabs, and you get the full through. Right now, there is not a challenge over there. It's just a lengthy process because we have thousands of different parts running in, on our six-inch wafer fab. And it's an important execution to go through it, to qualify the parts, and to move the customers into the modern technology. The exciting part is once you do it, you get the next 40 years at least, of supply, resiliency on the most modern and low-cost, capacity on of 300-millimeter wafer fabs. So that's going well.
Great. Can we talk about lead times and inventory management? You have stated eight to 12-week lead times. But in reality, your lead times are basically zero because when a customer is on consignment, when they want it, they pull it. When they don't, they don't. Yet you have a pretty advanced inventory management system, and you've moved away from build-to-order. So can you talk a little bit about that? We all see the inventory number on your balance sheet so high. And I get asked this question all the time. And, you know, don't you worry about that? Isn't that a problem? And I say, "No, it's not." So I'm just sort of wondering how you think about the inventory model.
Yeah, that's a great question. I think a lot of people just look at the numbers, and it looks like, "Why do you need all this inventory?" But you're right that we are, I think, pioneers in thinking about inventory in semiconductors very differently than the past. I think the days of you just build-to-order on parts that ship into multiple customers, multiple end equipments, customers expect it to be ready on the shelf. And I think having them ready on the shelf, it's very high customer service, but that's not the objective. The objective is to win market share because of that, okay? And that's exactly what we are doing. We've used kind of data or big data to analyze what parts have very low risk of obsolescence. Think about they have diversity. They have longevity.
We have years of signals on these parts on real consumption. And let's get them built in a replenishment way. You know, you think about how many of these parts can you hold, or how many of this inventory you can hold on wafer stage or what we call. Some people call it die bank. We call it chip stock, what you hold in finished goods. And the math is related to the cycle time to build a new part and also what type of surge you wanna support, right? There is always gonna be a surge that I won't have enough inventory to support. But we have informed ourselves through history what type of market behavior in terms of demand we wanna support. Well, I have the best scientists on this problem.
This is a very complex control problem with a lot of ingredients, with different cycle time for each part, different consumption signals of each part, and unknown consumption future. But when you start to use algorithms and data to do that, you discover that you can build your inventory in a very secure way, meaning no obsolescence, and then be always there for your customers, and as more and more customers, some of them never build electronics in their life, are moving into electronic systems. That allows us to serve them in a unique way. That's part of our strategy. That's why you're seeing investment in inventory. I think it will prove itself in the next upcycle, whatever it wants to be, that TI can be very differentiated in its support level, and hopefully that translates into market share gains.
I do too. So, we've run out of time. Thank you, Haviv.
Thank you, team. Thanks. Thanks for having us. Thanks.