Silicon Laboratories, Inc.

My name is DeeDee, and I will be your conference operator today. Welcome to the Silicon Lab second quarter fiscal 2025 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. to withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to Giovanni Pacelli, Silicon Labs Senior Director of Finance. Giovanni, please go ahead.

Thank you, Dede, and good morning, everyone. We are recording this meeting and a replay will be available for four weeks on the investor relations section of our website at investor.silabs.com. Our earnings press release and the accompanying financial tables are also available on our website. Joining me today are Silicon Labs President and Chief Executive Officer Matt Johnson and Chief Financial Officer Dean Butler. They will discuss our second quarter financial performance and review recent business activities. We will take questions after our prepared comments, and our remarks today will include forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. We base these forward-looking statements on information available to us as of the date of this conference call and assume no obligation to update these statements in the future. We encourage you to review our SEC filings, which identify important risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statements. Additionally, during our call today, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial information. A reconciliation of our gap to non-gap results is included in the company's earnings press release on the investor relations section of the Silicon Labs website. I'd now like to turn the call over to Silicon Labs Chief Executive Officer Matt Johnson. Matt?

Thanks, Giovanni, and good morning, everyone. Silicon Labs delivered second quarter results in line with our outlook, driving strong sequential and year-over-year growth in both sales and profitability while closely managing operating expenses. We remain laser-focused on converting our design wind pipeline into production ramps, and this quarter's results demonstrate our consistent progress. Our current forecasts indicate that 10 of our 12 largest customer ramps are on track or ahead of plan for 2025. As we shared in our March Investor Day, our industry-leading Series 2 platform continues to drive rapid revenue growth and share gains across both of our business areas, including significant growth in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi products. Looking at Q2, our home and life business was up double digits year over year, driven by continued stabilization and smart home applications, as well as shipments to connected healthcare customers, as many of these designs began production in early 2025. In the smart home, we saw strength in home automation applications like gateways and smart lighting. Additionally, our newest Wi-Fi device, the 917, is providing battery-powered Wi-Fi connectivity for the Roku battery camera, It is now available on Walmart shelves as well as Roku Battery Camera Plus. Both models are available at Amazon and online at other major retailers. Silicon Labs enables a high fidelity 1080p camera to operate on battery power for up to two years before needing to be replaced, an incredible breakthrough. Meanwhile, our healthcare initiatives are progressing well as we continue to ramp new customers. Overall, we remain confident in the strong growth potential of this market, including in continuous glucose monitoring applications, which we continue to expect will become 10% of our revenue. Our industrial commercial business was also up double digits year over year. Sequentially, the growth was underpinned by strength in the electronic shelf labeling market and an ongoing recovery of broad-based industrial applications that are typically served through our distribution channels. We're also seeing steady shipments to global smart metering customers, including India's electric metering rollout, and expect to begin shipments for Japan's metering refresh cycle later this year. Looking beyond Q2 results, our Series 2 platform continues to drive the growth of our design wind pipeline and positions us extremely well for continued market share expansion. This includes new design winds and applications like commercial building controls, where utility companies are encouraging more efficient power consumption utilizing our best-in-class multi-protocol solutions and domain expertise, along with further traction in ecosystems like Matter and Amazon Sidewalk. We're also working towards establishing new partnerships in connected healthcare and are confident that our market share momentum in applications like diabetes management will continue. In addition, we have secured design wins in other emerging medical applications like remote vital sign monitors and medicine delivery applications, as our products emerge as best-in-class for many of these market needs. Finally, in our commercial business, we've seen strong engagement for logistics applications like real-time asset tracking. In fact, we recently won a new high-volume design win with one of the world's largest pallet makers, highlighting increasing customer interest in proximity-based tracking of higher-value assets moving through their supply chain. Building on our track record of being first to introduce new to industry innovative features and capabilities on our Series 2 platform, we are excited to announce that our first Series 3 device, the 301, is shipping in volume production and now claims the title as the world's first device to achieve PSA Level 4 security certification. This milestone reinforces our long track record of industry-first achievements and sets a new benchmark for trusted embedded computing. Additionally, another Series 3 device, the 302, will be sampling next year and will bring industry-leading energy efficiency and wireless performance to battery-powered devices that support both Bluetooth and Matter applications, setting another industry performance benchmark. Moving forward, our market share momentum driven by our Series 2 platform And the introduction of our NextGen Series 3 platform positions us incredibly well to sustain outsized growth in our accelerating markets. Looking near term, while the evolving tariff discussions somewhat limit our visibility, we have not observed significant changes to our customers' forecasts. Additionally, our customer surveys do not indicate end customer inventory bills, and in many cases reveal lower inventory positions compared to 90 days ago. Our outlook for sequential growth into the third quarter continues to be supported by share gains and secular growth markets, execution of new program ramps, and consistent improvements in our order patterns. This combination gives us confidence that we're on track to outperform the broader semiconductor market this year. Now I'll hand it over to Dean for the financial update.

Dean? Thanks, Matt, and good morning to everyone. I will first review the financial results for a recently completed quarter, followed by a discussion of our current outlook. Revenue for the June quarter was $193 million, up 9% sequentially and in line with the midpoint of our prior guidance. Year-over-year consolidated revenue was up 33%. In our industrial and commercial business, June quarter revenue was $110 million. up 14% sequentially and up 25% from the same period last year. Sequentially, the growth was driven by customer ramps in electronic shelf label deployments, continued smart meter rollouts, and a steady demand improvement for a wide range of industrial applications. Home and life, June quarter revenue was $83 million, up 2% sequentially and up 45% from the same period a year ago. driven by new design ramps with medical customers more than doubling versus the same quarter one year ago. During the quarter, distribution made up approximately 69% of our revenue mix, sell-through at distribution partners continued to grow, and channel inventory increased slightly to end at 51 days up from 48 days in the prior quarter, despite our intention to begin moving toward our target range of 70 to 75 days. June quarter gross margins saw positive improvements as the long tail channel sales and industrial applications continue to benefit our mix. Gap gross margin was 56.1%, non-gap gross margin was 56.3%, which was up 90 basis points from the prior quarter and above the midpoint of our guidance. GAAP operating expenses were $131 million, which includes share-based compensation of $20 million and intangible asset amortization of $3 million. Non-GAAP operating expenses of $107 million was consistent with our prior guidance. Gap operating loss of $23 million and non-gap operating income was $1 million. During the quarter, we recorded a gap tax charge of approximately $3 million. Our non-gap tax rate remained 20%. Gap loss per share was $0.67, and non-gap earnings of $0.11 per share beat the midpoint of our guidance by $0.02. Turning to the balance sheet. We ended the quarter with $416 million of cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments. Our days of sales outstanding was approximately 30 days. During the quarter, our balance sheet inventory remained essentially flat, ending the quarter at $81 million of net inventory. Days of inventory on hand improved to 86 days, a sequential improvement from 94 days at March quarter end. As it stands today, we have not seen a direct impact to our supply chain from the shifting tariff rules. While the outcome of ongoing tariff discussions and their potential indirect impact on global demand are still uncertain, conversations with our customers do not currently point to any meaningful pull forward in demand. Order patterns from customer bookings and distribution POS continue to show positive improvement extending a multi-quarter trend of positive progressions. This supports our view from last quarter that our end markets are making headway in their cyclical recovery. Additionally, our survey showed that our end customers' inventory ticked down in the quarter and in many cases revealed relatively low inventory positions. Now for our current outlook. We anticipate revenue in the September quarter to be in the range of $200 million to $210 million, which at the midpoint would imply a strong 23% year-over-year growth rate and a 6% sequential growth. Importantly, we believe Silicon Labs is tracking to outperform the broader semiconductor market this year based on the execution of our new customer design ramps and further supported by improving cyclical demand. With continued strength in industrial applications and sales through our distribution channel growing, we expect continued gross margin improvements in the September quarter, with both GAAP and non-GAAP gross margins expected to be in the range of 57% to 58%. We continue to manage operating expenses tightly and remain committed to our published financial model of growing expenses one-third the rate of revenue growth, allowing for rapid earnings acceleration moving forward. In line with that philosophy, we expect GAAP operating expenses in the September quarter to be in the range of $130 million to $133 million. We expect non-GAAP operating expenses to modestly increase in the September quarter to be in the range of 107 million to 110 million, as the employee bonus pool is expected to accrue at a higher contribution given our return to profitability. Finally, GAAP loss per share is expected in the range of 60 cent loss to a 20 cent loss on a basic share count of 32.8 million shares. Non-GAAP earnings per share is expected to be in the range of 20 cents to 40 cents on an expected diluted share count of 33 million shares. This wraps up our prepared remarks. I'd like to now hand the call over to the operator to start the Q&A session. Edie?

Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. In the interest of time, We ask that you limit your questions to one question and one follow-up. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. And our first question comes from Quinn Bolton of Needham & Company. Your line is open.

Hey, guys. Congratulations on the continued strong outlook. I wanted to ask a question just on the home and life business. I know it's up strongly year on year, but it was sort of up 2% quarter on quarter, perhaps a little bit below my estimates. How are you thinking about that business as you get into the second half of the year? I think you reiterated the target for continuous glucose monitors to hit 10% of sales. Is that still on track for the second, by the end of 2025? Yeah, sure.

Quinn, this is Matt. Quick answer is, let's see, big picture, CGM still on track, still committed to that 10% number on the timeline we've mentioned. I think what's going on big picture here is we've said for many quarters, the primary driver of our growth are these share gains in these major ramps. And, you know, those ramps can be lumpy. They can be some are ahead of schedule, some are behind, some are bigger, some are lower. But as we shared in the prepared remarks, we're tracking a tremendous amount of ramps. And of those, our top 12, 10 of those are on track. So in aggregate, we're able to stay on track or better to our expectations. And, you know, the easiest way to look at it is our expectations by segment, by application, and by customer haven't changed. So we feel good about the outlook and no major changes.

Perfect. And then I guess one for Dean. Dean, you've done a great job here on gross margin, getting back to sort of I think your longer-term target of 57% to 58%. Do you expect it to kind of hang out in this level going forward, or do you see room for potential further improvement above that 57% to 58% level in future quarters?

Yeah, this is an area I think the team's done super well on, Quinn. Just to reiterate what our long-term financial model is 56 to 58, so midpoint sort of 57. Where we are now, we're trending toward the high end of that range. We just got it 57 to 58, so in that higher end of that portion. My expectation is that we continue to drive into this higher end of it as distribution channel continues to contribute in a meaningful way as a lot of our industrial type customers are doing quite well in the marketplace. That's going to keep us in the high end of that zone. I do think over time, it will probably bounce between this 56 and 58. I am not at a point where we're going to reassess the long-term model and say, hey, we can go higher from that 58 mark. But at least from what we can see on the near term, over probably the next couple of quarters, given how distribution is trending, we look like we're going to stay in that high end. Perfect. Thank you, Dave.

Thank you. And our next question comes from Tori Swanberg of Stifel. Your line is open.

Yes, let me echo my congratulations, especially on the operating leverage here. My first question, Matt, is on your design wind pipeline. The growth is clearly driven by your execution towards that pipeline. Could you perhaps give us any update, you know, as far as numbers? Is it growing? Yeah, just want a little bit more color on the actual pipeline. Thank you.

Yeah, sure. Thanks, Tori. Big picture. You know, we've shared that we've had a tremendous success over the last few years from a design wind perspective. And we've really, you know, tried to pivot to making sure we ramp all those designs that we've secured. And that's exactly what we're starting to see here. And, you know, we've been consistent in, you know, the primary driver of our growth this year are those share gains and ramps that are happening. But to answer your question directly, We still like what we see and we still have that momentum. The opportunity funnel is the largest it's ever been. We are on track for design wins, which are larger than they've been. And we have great momentum. Easiest way to think about it, series two is still gaining market share and winning. Wi-Fi is allowing us to increment up and start growing even faster. And now we're putting series three in the mix with new to world capabilities and features. So, uh, no expectation that that'll slow down. Uh, so we like where we're at and we like what we're seeing.

Very good. And that's my follow up. I had a question on the glucose meter business. Um, I know you mentioned, you know, multiple customers now, um, again, you know, could you perhaps give us some color on how many customers are ramping there? Um, Because, you know, clearly, you know, you're gaining share. And I think last time you had a call, I think you talked about already working with 10 or a dozen customers in glucose meters.

Yeah, specific numbers. I hope I don't screw this up, guys, from analyst day. But I think what we shared with that is we are engaged with over 60 customers in the space. And we are ramping more than 12 in the space. So that's where we're at. And as we shared in the prepared remarks, we're continuing to make progress on that in that particular space and even expanding out into additional applications within the medical and healthcare space where we're just finding our products are really dialed in. So liking what we see there, Tori. Great. Thank you. We'll go back in line.

Thank you. And our next question comes from Tom O'Malley of Barclays. Your line is open.

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question. I have kind of the inverse question to Quinn and to June. You saw some really strong trends in the industrial and consumer business. You've seen during this earnings period other large players kind of talk about some pull forward in industrial. I was curious, was there any geographic changes in the mix of revenue in the June quarter? I think you called out self-labeling. the disty channel and then India smart metering, but anything to note in terms of geo differences in that June quarter?

Yeah, Tom, this is Matt quick answers. No, uh, pretty, pretty consistent across the board. In fact, it's worth pointing out. Uh, we're seeing that broadly that, you know, we, we acknowledge all the, uh, you know, uncertainty that's out there around tariffs. Uh, and we're watching closely for, you know, signs of build aheads, pull-ins, and there has to be something going on out there around that. But the data is encouraging. We see bookings consistent with what forecast was. No major anomalies there. Customers are in line with expectation. Consistent improvements, but linear. And inventory is in line, right? Our internal inventory looks good. Disney inventory, if anything, is low as we're trying to build that up. And end customer inventory on average is actually down over the last 90 days. The data, despite the uncertainty that's out there, the data is encouraging and going in the right direction.

Helpful. And then when I look at the gross margins, which are very impressive going into September quarter, it looks like the incremental gross margin is close to 80% quarter over quarter. That's the highest you've done in the last couple of years. So if you look at the divergence in revenue trends in the September quarter, do you continue to see more Disney and by that measure more industrial and commercial into the September quarter? But maybe you give us a little color on segment trends into September and then why you're seeing such a big step up on the gross margin side. Thank you.

Yeah, Tom, I think you got it right on sort of segment and business mix. As you know, a lot of the industrial tends to go through the channel and the channel customers generally are long tail, lower unit count and therefore generally higher ASP. So we do get a better margin step up as more and more things go through the channel. A lot of that is industrial based. There are other small benefits that you get through as revenue increases. You get some efficiencies on some of the fixed costs that run your supply chain. But the majority here is really the dynamic around industrial customers going through channel.

Thank you.

And our next question comes from Christopher Rollin of Susquehanna. Your line is open.

Hey guys, thanks for the question. Yeah, just a regarding distribution in the channel. Are there opportunities to refill the channel to grow the channel here? And like as we look over the next few quarters, maybe in terms of dollars, what could that opportunity be?

Yeah, I mean, short answer, Chris, is we've been trying for the last couple of quarters to actually fill the channel back to where it should be. We had this call 90 days ago and we said, hey, channel inventory at that point was 48 days. Now this quarter is 51. We said, hey, we'd like to fill the channel back up and start working toward our target. And in fact, during the June quarter, we, you know, anticipated trying to get more inventory in. But the reality is the dynamic that's happening within the channel is as we ship into channel and try to refill, customers actually are taking that inventory in terms of POS. And we can see it go out the other side in POS. We then follow up with a subset of our end customers that we can reach. And we survey them and ask them, hey, what's happening with the inventory? Are you just taking POS and putting it on your shelf? And in fact, that doesn't seem the case. In fact, the majority actually have lower end customer inventory. So we're sort of trying to track as it moves through channel. It looks like this is largely being consumed and deployed. I think it's a bunch of customers that are coming back slowly over time and we're seeing continued positive momentum. If we can refill the channel, we can. And like the last two quarters, we've been trying. I don't think you'll see any sort of big step up in any given quarter. But our intention is to move the channel from where we are this 51 days to start to move it toward our target of 70, 75 days. I just think it's going to take a few quarters, Chris.

Excellent. Thank you, Dean. That that's actually a lot of fill at 70 to 75. It'll, it'll be nice to see. I guess for my second question here, how are you got you mentioned tariffs? How are you thinking about tariffs? And would you be passing this on to customers? Or would you eat some of it? What what's your strategy here?

Yeah, I think generally speaking from our review of TRS, which as you know, the rules sort of keep changing. It's all about the specific rules when they get published and how those get rolled out. We've looked at a number of options among our supply chain. For the most part, it's relatively modest in its most extreme cases that we can kind of model out. It's a relatively modest impact on the company. I think our intention would largely be to pass them along if that comes. Again, we think the impact in itself is modest, so we don't think that would cause any undue harm across the customer base if that were to come to play. And there are some geographic sort of differences when we look at what is the amount of inventory that crosses the United States border with sort of the big contentious one. For us, it's kind of in the 10% range. So if whatever rate you want to assume on tariffs, and every country has a different rate, generally we're shipping directly in by Silicon Labs only about 10%. So that's how we get to this sort of pretty modest impact, if you will, Chris.

Thanks, Dean. Congrats.

Thank you. And our next question comes from Cody Cree of the Benchmark Company. Your line is open.

Thanks, guys, for taking my questions, and congrats on the progress. Maybe, Matt, if you can help us with just any of the Wi-Fi strength that you mentioned, just any of the application wins and any of the ramps that you're seeing there.

Yeah, sure. So continued progress in Wi-Fi. Biggest one that we just shared in the prepared remarks, which is really worth pointing out, is the Roku design. What's unique about that is where we have shined, where we have focused in this space is playing to our strengths, which is battery-powered applications, so long battery life. As we've shared, our device, longest battery life in the world for a Wi-Fi application. And that's what Roku is taking advantage of. So they've put a, you know, 1080p camera out there that can operate for up to two years on battery power, which is pretty remarkable. That's on store shelves now at Walmart, available at Amazon and other retailers. And I think that is a good example and indicative of what we're seeing in Wi-Fi overall, where as we bring this capability to bear in the market, customers are starting to take advantage of it, especially in battery-powered applications to do things they could not do before. So we like what we see there. We like the progress. As always, it's a new market. It always takes longer than you want, but it's going in the right direction.

Thanks for that. And maybe just lastly, with your September back now above $200 million a quarter, your trajectory is definitely promising. Any thoughts on giving your pipeline and your visibility when you would expect to be able to challenge your prior 22 highs. Do you think that that's something you can achievably get into a range in 26?

So, you know, we're not guiding beyond the quarter, but maybe the most helpful thing that we can share is kind of in line with what we shared not that long ago at our analyst day. We have been securing a tremendous amount of design wins over the last few years. And those are just now starting to ramp. And to help make that real, one stat that we shared was in our Series 2 platform, kind of the current or prior gen, however you want to think of that, of what we've secured, we've only shipped a little over a billion units in that space. We've secured more than another six billion units of wind that we haven't shipped yet that are starting to ramp or will be ramping. So that kind of gives you a sense of, you know, what's been won and what's to come. Where, as we said, at the same time, we're still many more designs in series two. It is still ultra competitive while we're bringing in series three, the next generation. You know, we had a press release yesterday where we brought, you know, the highest level security to the IoT at the PSA level four which is just an indication of what's going to start to come out on this platform as we introduce it. New to industry, new to world capabilities, features and performance. So that combination, I think, positions us really well for continued growth going into next year. But, you know, not specific on timeline. And, you know, that's obviously not easy to call.

Of course. Thanks for the call, guys. Thanks, Cody.

Thank you. And our next question comes from Peter Penn of JP Morgan. Your line is open.

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions, and congratulations on the strong results. I think back to your analyst day, you gave a number on your new customer ramps being 50% of your year-over-year growth in 2025. And if I kind of work on what the consensus numbers are, that's about $100-plus million. Just given some of the commentaries about how you said 10 of those numbers are on track, does that Are we surpassing that number? And then more importantly, I guess, does that number start to grow in 2026 as well?

So, hey, Peter, it's Matt. I don't remember the exact number you're quoting, but maybe the most helpful thing around that is we mentioned, I think, 10 of our top 12 ramps. And just to be clear, there's many more ramps that we're tracking as part of that. So that's just kind of the biggest ones that, you know, have the easiest to track most visibility, but tip of the iceberg in terms of, you know, the ramps that we're working on and managing. So tough to correlate that to a specific number. But going back to the prior question and comments, we do expect continued ramps and continued growth based on design wins and share gains. That's the fastest and easiest way I can say it. We have been gaining share, and we believe we're going to continue gaining share. And we have, you know, opportunity funnel and design momentum to support that.

Got it. Okay, that's helpful. And then when I kind of look at your, some of the seasonal trends, typically your December quarter is but you guys have been kind of driving above seasonal trends for the past several quarters. And so, just given some of these possible booking trends and design win ramps, is it possible to drive sequential growth through the remainder of the year?

Peter, you're asking about a Q4 guide, which we're not at a point we're ready to comment on. Look, most of our momentum really has been on design wins coming into production. And, you know, if that's the case, you should actually outperform seasonality. You know, one of the sort of notable things, which, you know, just so everybody has it, is all throughout 2025, you know, lead times that we're getting orders have been more and more turn space. So it limits some of our visibility a little bit to be able to comment on, hey, what does seasonality look like in, you know, a quarter or two from now and how that's evolving. But I think to the extent that design wins continue to be the primary growth driver, you should continue to do a little better than sort of a steady state, you know, market-driven only number.

Thank you. Thank you.

And we have a follow-up from Tori Svonberg of CIFL. Your line is open.

Yes, thank you. Just one quick one for you, Dean. 20% tax rate, obviously, you know, with the big, beautiful bill, that's probably going to change. So I don't know if you have any comments there. Should we just sort of wait to see how things develop? Or do you have an early read on 26 tax rate?

Well, so our non-GAAP long-term tax rate of 20%, we tend to assess that on an annual basis or as needed if a big structural change happens. In fact, this one big beautiful bill that ended up passing on July 4th actually was on the very last day of our quarter. Our quarter ended on July 5th, just given the fiscal cycle this time. So we have included all of the tax-related adjustments that we think are in, but those are on the GAAP side of the books. On a non-GAAP basis, we haven't yet assessed what that impact would be longer term. I think it's sort of marginally lower, but whether that, you know, ends up changing sort of the longer term sort of time horizon, that we have yet to come to a conclusion on, Tori. That's fair. Thank you.

Yep. Thank you. I will now hand the call back to Giovanni Pacelli.

Thank you, DeeDee, and thank you all for joining this morning, and thank you for your interest in the company. Before concluding today's call, I'd like to announce our upcoming participation in KeyBank's Technology Leadership Forum on August 11 in Deer Valley, Utah. This now concludes today's call. Thank you.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating, and you may now disconnect.