MaxLinear, Inc

Greetings and welcome to the MaxLinear fourth quarter 2024 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Leslie Green, Investor Relations. Thank you, Leslie. You may begin.

Thank you, Alicia, and good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us on today's conference call to discuss MaxLinear's fourth quarter 2024 financial results. Today's call is being hosted by Dr. Kishore Sindriput, CEO, and Steve Litchfield, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Corporate Strategy Officer. After our prepared comments, we will take your questions. Our comments today include forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws including statements relating to our guidance for the first quarter of 2025, including revenue, gap and non-gap growth margin, gap and non-gap operating expenses, gap and non-gap interest and other expense, and gap and non-gap diluted share count. In addition, we will make forward-looking statements relating to trends, opportunities, execution of our business plan, and potential growth and uncertainties in various products and geographic markets, including, without limitation, statements concerning future financial and operating results, opportunities for revenue and market share across target markets, new products, including the timing of production and launches of such products, demand for the adoption of certain technologies, and our total addressable market. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, including risks outlined in our risk factors section of our recent SEC filings, including our Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2024, which we filed today. Any forward-looking statements are made as of today, and MaxLinear has no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements. The fourth quarter 2024 earnings release is available in the investor relations section of our website at maxlinear.com. In addition, we report certain historical financial metrics, including but not limited to gross margin, operating margin, operating expenses, and interest and other expense of both GAAP and non-GAAP basis. We encourage investors to review the detailed reconciliation of our GAAP and non-GAAP presentations and the press release available on our website. We do not provide reconciliation of non-GAAP guidance for future periods because of the inherent uncertainty associated with our ability to project certain future changes. including stock-based compensation and its related tax effects, as well as potential impairments. Non-GAAP financial measures discussed today are not meant to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for comparable GAAP financial measures. We are providing this information because management believes it is useful to investors as it reflects how management measures our business. Lastly, this call is being webcast and the replay will be available on our website for two weeks. And now let me turn the call over to Dr. Kishore Sindhripu, CEO of MaxLinear. Kishore?

Thank you, Leslie, and good afternoon, everyone. Our Q4 results exceeded the midpoint of our guidance at $92.2 million in revenue, non-GAAP gross margin of 59.1%, along with a significant reduction in operating expenses. We continue to see meaningful improvement in our customer order rates and backlogs. The solid signs of recovery combined with new product traction in strategic growth areas such as high-speed interconnect, PON, Wi-Fi, and Ethernet provide us confidence that we can achieve continued growth and improvement in our financial results throughout this year. Looking at our key markets, in infrastructure, the expansion of cloud computing is driving significant growth and design activity in our high-speed optical data center connectivity. We made strong progress in 24 with design interaction and product calls for a 5-nanometer Keystone PAM4 product. We exceeded our revenue targets in 24 and our position for exciting growth in 25. As of this month, we have shipped approximately 1 million plus units total of Keystone products across multiple customers into high-volume opportunities. Our initial design wins in transceivers, Active optical cables and active electrical cables are ramping as expected. We anticipate additional qualification and rollout for 800 gigabit and 1.6 terabit data center applications throughout 2025 and into 2026. The superior power and performance advantages of Keystone continue to be the mainstay and focus for our differentiation even in our next-generation Rushmore family of 200 gigabit per lane PAM-4 TIAs and DSPs for 1.6 terabit interconnections. In wireless infrastructure, our wireless 5G access O-RAN single-chip radio unit and our backhaul transceivers and modems are essential for supporting increasing mobile usage and data rates, as well as new functionalities such as edge AI. We believe we are positioned strongly for content growth and share gains this year as service provider CapEx spend improves and as our continued design means that year one customers beginning to ramp particularly in the second half of 2025. Also, within our infrastructure revenues, our Panther 3 series hardware storage accelerators are providing exciting incremental growth opportunities. At the 2024 Supercomputing Conference in November, We announced a new software-defined storage solution in partnership with Quanta to address the needs of AI, high-speed computing, and other data-intensive applications. This joint solution enables rapid access to massive datasets while enhancing both performance and scalability. As we look ahead, our Path-to-Product is strongly positioned within the data center. enterprise storage applications and at the edge of the network with multiple design means with major customers and value-added resellers across key geographies. In Ethernet connectivity, MaxLink is one of the broadest and most competitive portfolios of 200-gigabit Ethernet, switch, and PHY products for the enterprise and small and medium business switch markets. Swan Creek, our single-chip integrated 8-port PHY and switch, is gaining traction across multiple enterprise customers looking to upgrade the networks to 200 gigabit ethernet rates our tier 1 north american enterprise oem customer is expected to ramp to production in 2025 and contribute to significant ethernet revenue growth over the coming years in addition we are seeing widespread interest from next generation broadband gateways and routers shifting to broadband and wi-fi connectivity are considerable focus and on pawn to expand a broadband target addressable market in addition to a strong cable data offering of DOCSIS 3.1, UltraDOCSIS and DOCSIS 4.0 solutions is bearing fruit. We have exciting design interaction for our single-chip integrated fiber PON and 10-gigabit processor Gateway SoC plus tri-band Wi-Fi 7 single-chip platform solution. We have a promising engagement at another tier 1 North America carrier which we believe can become a major opportunity for us in 2025 and 2026. In conclusion, a strong product roadmap execution has begun to deliver meaningful traction and target addressable market expansion across several high-value categories, including high-speed interconnect for data center, enterprise Ethernet and storage accelerators, wireless infrastructure, multi-gigabit broadband access, and Wi-Fi connectivity solutions. As we begin 2025, we're not only energized with the solid growth prospects in 2025, but we also feel confident of achieving sustained revenue growth in the coming years. With that, let me now turn the call over to Steve Litchfield, our Chief Financial Officer and Chief Corporate Strategy Officer.