Ambiq Micro, Inc.

Good afternoon and welcome to the AMVIC Micro's second quarter 2025 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. At the conclusion of today's conference call, instructions will be given for the question and answer session. If anyone needs assistance during this time, please press star followed by the zero on your touchtone phone. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded today, September 4th, 2025. I would now like to turn the call over to Ms. Charlene Wan. Charlene, please go ahead.

Good afternoon and welcome to MBIC's second quarter 2025 earnings conference call. I'm Charlene Wan, Vice President of Corporate Marketing and Industrial Relations at MBIC. I'm joined today by MBIC's CEO, Fumihide Asaka, and MBIC's CFO, Jeff As part of today's call, we will review our quarterly financial performance and provide a summary of our outlook. Our earnings release and the accompanying financial tables are available on the investor relations page of our website at www.ambit.com. Before I turn the call over to Hume, I'd like to remind our listeners that during the course of this conference call, the company will provide financial guidance, projections, comments, and other forward-looking statements regarding future market developments, the future financial performance of the company, new products, or other matters. These statements are subject to the risks and uncertainties that we discuss in detail in our documents filed with the SEC. Specifically, the final perspective related to our initial public offering and our most recent 10Q, which identified important risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements. Also, the company's press release and management statements during the conference call will include discussions of certain non-GAAP financial measures. These financial measures and related GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliations are provided in the company's press release and related current report on Form 8K. For those of you unable to listen to the entire call at this time, a recording will be available via webcast in the investor relations section of the company's website. And now, it's my pleasure to turn the call over to NBIC CEO, Gumihide Asaka. Gumi, please go ahead.

Thank you, Charlene. Good afternoon. and thank you to everyone for joining us on our first earnings call since our IPO on July 30th. Ambiq has been on an incredible journey. The company was founded in 2010 to put intelligence everywhere using the world's most power efficient chips. At this point, we have enabled more than 280 million devices in applications ranging from personal devices to medical and healthcare to the industrial edge to smart home and smart buildings. We are excited about enabling the next billion devices as AI moves out of the cloud and onto the edge. For those of you new to Ambiq's story, I'd like to give you a quick overview of our business. AMBIC is a pioneer and leading provider of ultra low power semiconductor solutions. Our mission is to enable intelligence and AI everywhere by delivering the lowest power semiconductor solutions. As many of you know, Most of today's AI computation, including both training and inference, happens in data centers which are far away from the action. Moving AI inference to the edge is a great alternative because it offers lower latency, greater privacy, improved security, and reduced cost. However, we haven't yet seen the full potential of edge AI because edge devices tends to be smaller and battery powered. Without innovation, it's nearly impossible for those devices to run AI without quickly draining their batteries. Ambiq has solved this power problem with our SPOT platform. SPOT stands for Subthreshold Power Optimized Technology. It significantly reduces total system power consumption and enables devices to run AI locally without sacrificing battery life. SPOT has been foundational for five generations of our flagship SoC family called Apollo. In addition to hardware, we also offer extensive software solutions to help our customer reduce their production design cycle. More and more people are realizing potential of running AI at the edge, as that's where the action takes place. If your smartwatch is capable of running on-device AI, you get a doctor or personal trainer on your wrist. Hearing aid with onboard AI models can filter out the noise in a restaurant and enhance the warm voice you actually want to hear. and factory machinery equipped with a wireless fault detector can identify failure before it happens and call for help without bringing the factory line down. With our energy efficient product and solutions, AMBIC is well positioned to drive and benefit from the edge AI revolution. In that, Let me now turn the call over to Jeff Winsler, our CFO, to discuss our second quarter results and third quarter outlook in more detail. And then I will talk more about our strategic priorities as we look ahead to the coming quarters and year.

Thank you, Humi, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today. Before I review the financials, Please note that I will focus my discussion on non-GAAP financial results and refer you to today's press release for a detailed reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial results. The non-GAAP adjustments relate to stock-based compensation, depreciation, amortization, warrant value, and other charges. Revenue for the second quarter of 2025 was $17.9 million, compared to 15.7 million in the first quarter and 20.3 million in the second quarter of 2024. The sequential increase in second quarter revenue was driven by increased customer demand and favorable product mix. The year-over-year decrease in net sales reflected the company's strategic decision to diversify revenue toward higher value opportunities with customers outside of China. In the second quarter of 2025, net sales to end customers in mainland China were 11.5% as compared to 42% in the second quarter of 2024. Non-GAAP gross profit for the second quarter of 2025 was 7.6 million or 42.7% of revenue compared to 7.4 million or 47.1% of revenue in the prior quarter and 6.7 million or 32.9% of revenue in the same quarter a year ago. The sequential and year-over-year increases in non-GAAP gross profit for the second quarter of 2025 were the result of a more favorable product and customer mix as the company continued to execute on its strategic prioritization of geographies outside of China. Non-GAAP operating expenses in the second quarter of 2025 were $13.8 million compared to $13.1 million in the prior quarter and compared to $14.4 million in the second quarter of 2024. The breakdown of non-GAAP operating expenses for the second quarter of 2025 are as follows. Research and development expenses were $7.3 million compared to $7 million last quarter and 7.3 million in the same quarter a year ago. One of our top strategic initiatives post-IPO is to continue growing our technical capabilities and investing in our product development roadmap to capture the opportunities ahead of us. SG&A expenses in the second quarter were 6.5 million compared to 6.2 million in the prior quarter and 7.1 million in the second quarter of 2024. Total other income in the second quarter was 315,000 consisting mainly of interest income from our cash reserves compared to 461,000 in the prior quarter and 337,000 during the same quarter a year ago. Net loss for the second quarter of 2025 was 8.5 million or $18.90 per share based on 449,785 weighted average shares outstanding. This compares to a net loss of 8.3 million or $18.96 per share in the first quarter of 2025 and net loss of 10.6 million or $34.59 per share in the second quarter of 2024. The per share amounts have been adjusted to reflect a one for 28 reverse stock split that was affected prior to our IPO. Second quarter non-GAAP net loss was 5.9 million compared to non-GAAP net loss of 5.2 million in the first quarter of 2025 and non-GAAP net loss of 7.4 million in the second quarter of 2024. The loss per share in the second quarter of 2025 was 43 cents. based on unaudited pro forma common shares of 13.6 million as disclosed in the company's S-1. Turning to the balance sheet, cash and cash equivalents were 47.5 million at the end of Q2 2025. On July 30th, the company completed an initial public offering consisting of 4.6 million shares of common stock issued at $24 per share. After deducting underwriting costs, commissions, and other transaction costs, the net proceeds were 97.2 million. Now let me turn to our guidance for the third quarter of 2025. We expect revenue to be in the range of 17.5 million to 18 million. Non-GAAP loss per share is expected to range between 35 cents loss per share and 28 cents loss per share on a weighted average post-IPO share count of approximately 18.2 million shares. This share count reflects the pre-IPO reverse split and conversion of preferred shares into common, plus the common shares issued at the IPO, and is the baseline share count for the company going forward. In summary, during Q2 2025, AMBIC grew revenue from the previous quarter, and importantly, grew gross profit dollars both sequentially and year over year in support of our ambitions for profitable growth. Subsequent to the quarter, we successfully completed the company's initial public offering and secured the necessary financial resources to execute on our strategic business plan, which Hume will now detail further. With that, let me pass the call back to Hume.

Thank you, Jeff. Since this is our first earning call, I'd like to take a moment to outline our mission and strategic initiatives. Our goal is to drive long-term shareholder value through sustainable and profitable growth. After our successful IPO, we intend to use the proceeds to support the execution of three key initiatives. Our first initiative is to expand into new markets and geographies with our existing products. This will fuel our revenue and margin growth. We have demonstrated strong end customer adoption with market leaders. These top tier brands validate the value proposition of our Apollo products and have helped us acquire a growing number of new customers. We will be expanding our sales and support resources to enable these new customers. We are proud to share one great example of a recent new customer announcement. OOP, a leader in health-oriented wearables, recently chose Apollo for their newest fitness tracker product line. The new OOP 5.0 and OOP MG products give an incredible intelligent view of your health and even your blood pressure in a small band that lasts for more than 14 days on the battery. Ambix Apollo delivers 10 times better battery efficiency, allowed OOP to utilize on-device AI to process biometric data intelligently. In addition to personal devices and wearables markets, we are pursuing new edge AI use cases such as AI VR glasses, heart monitors, smart medical patches, factory condition monitors, smart alarms and locks, and robotics. We are also shifting our geographic concentration. Historically, we had significant sales with end customers in mainland China. As the demand for HAI grows globally, we are prioritizing sales efforts towards other meaningful geographies. In 2023, 66% of our net sales were to the end customer in mainland China. This fell to 50% in 2024. In the second quarters of 2025, only 11.5% of our net sales were to end customers in mainland China. This is a big reduction compared to the 42% number we saw in the second quarter of 2024. We currently anticipate this mix to continue in 2025 and beyond. Our second key initiative is to expand our existing Apollo family and introduce the new atomic product line. As a high-growth company, we are scaling our R&D and go-to-market capability to capture the edge AI opportunities. Since we launched the first Apollo SOC in 2015, we have introduced new products nearly every year. The original Apollo 3 and 4 SOCs have been used for a variety of early edge AI deployments. The new Apollo 510 and Apollo 330 SOCs launched in the past 18 months add vector accelerated AI compute. Last week we announced the expansion of Apollo 5 line with Apollo 510B YLSSOC. It has a 250 megahertz Cortex M55 host processor alongside a dedicated 40 megahertz network processor and Bluetooth Low Energy 5.4 radio. Target applications include wearables, AR glasses, hot monitors, smart locks, and factory condition monitors. The first atomic family product is currently in development. This innovative product is expected to deliver our highest performance and lowest power consumption for AI model at the edge. It targets edge AI applications with demanding compute requirements, especially for vision. Atomic features a full neural processing unit or NPU for high performance AI acceleration along with new memory innovations. And lastly, our third and long term initiative is to build a variant of the spot platform that enables IP licensing to third party. As this is the most energy efficient edge AI chip design platform, we have received numerous inquiries to license spots. There are specialized applications that requires power efficiency, such as data centers and automotive AI processing. To reach these markets, We plan to develop Spot into IP and chip development platform. This offering will enable other companies to license or partner with us to incorporate Spot into their own low-power chip designs. Our plan to develop this IP and technology platform for licensing will take place over the next three to five years. To conclude my prepared remarks, I want to first thank our investors, customers, partners, suppliers, and employees for their support of AMBIC over the past 15 years. Thank you for helping us become a public traded company. The future of AMBIC is very bright. And we are only at the beginning of unlocking the full potential of AI at the edge. I look forward to reporting our continued progress and meeting with each of you in the coming quarters. With that, I will open the call to questions. Operator, please go ahead.

Thank you. To ask a question, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. Again, that is star one to ask a question. And our first question comes from the line of Vivek Arya with Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Thank you for taking my question and welcome to the public market. For my first question, I'm curious, how does AMBIC kind of define AGI and what percentage of your sales today would kind of fit that definition, and how do you see that mix evolving and any kind of ASP benefits as that makes the world towards more edge AI?

Again, edge AI is growing in medical, industrial edge, personal devices, smart home and buildings, and we Our sales is really focusing on enabling this edge AI market. It is very hard to define the percentage of AI use at our end customers, but most of our customers are already using intelligence. And that's where we have a lot of value. So we believe that more than half the business is already using intelligence on their devices, and we will continue to grow.

And for my follow-up, I think the IP licensing opportunity sounds very interesting, but you did mention that it might take a few years to fully develop. Is there anything that You can do, so first of all, you know, what kind of use cases and applications are asking you for that licensing and chiplet type architecture? And then can you do anything to accelerate that development of being able to license spot technology? Thank you.

Yeah, Vivek, we believe that data center, automotive, and mobile devices, those could take advantage of our SPOT technology. And as we are focusing on enhancing our R&D capability, we may be able to accelerate our development of IP with more resources and funding available. And we do have a dedicated team that is focusing on spot licensing. And as previously discussed, they are right now focusing on 12 nanometer spot platform. And with proven that 12 nanometer development, we believe that we can accelerate our plan.

Thank you for me. Good luck. Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Tim R. Curry with UBS Financial. Please go ahead.

Hello, this is Dino on for Tim. Welcome to the public markets. Could you talk about your progress on the non-wearables opportunities as of now? You previously announced some design wins in medical and industrial. Can you just give us an update on your progress there?

Well, again, about 17% of our funnel is already towards medical, industrial edge, smart home and building. And we believe that more than 20% is already working with some of the customer to define atomic edge AI in vision. So we're making great progress even since we talked last time.

Got it. And then I guess another question, just on your Q2 results, did you see any signs of pull-ins that impacted results?

So, you know, I think we had a pretty good ramp from Q1 to Q2. And if you think about our business typically seasonally, you would expect Q2 to be higher than Q1 and growth throughout the year. I think the one thing that kind of impacted this year was the announcement or the possibility of tariffs. And with the uncertainty of that, we did see some upside demand from customers in Q2 that drove revenues slightly higher than what we had originally anticipated in our model. That's really the only pull-in activity that we saw in the quarter.

Got it. Thank you.

And your next question comes from the line of Quinn Bolton with Needham & Company. Please go ahead.

Hey, Amy and Jeff. Congratulations on the successful IPO. I guess I wanted to start with just looking at some of your end customers. In the fitness tracker area, they seem to have pretty good results. Garmin, I think, reported a 41% year-on-year increase. And I guess I was wondering, can you give us a sense of just like the order trends you saw through the second quarter? Is your customer and market success leading to higher order rates? And then I guess a related question is, How far in advance would you guys ship the Apollo processor ahead of when the end device might sell? Is that typically like a quarter lead time, but any sense on how far in advance you might ship ahead of your customer's end device sale would be helpful?

Typically, our customer do place an order about 16 weeks lead time. And we do see our end customer, like you mentioned, but we cannot make a very comment about the specific customer, but we see that they have healthy growth, and we're very optimistic that they will continue to grow.

I guess maybe just on the orders, are you seeing kind of with that 16-week lead time, You know, is that order book sort of suggesting sort of a healthy second half? I think you guys had previously seen some uncertainty around tariffs that had led to perhaps some caution on the second half. Any update on the tariff impact as you look into the second half of the year?

Yeah, I mean, in terms of, you know, our guidance for Q3 revenue reflects the fact that we think there's a little bit of upside to what our financial model was. So that's a good thing. And we're cautiously optimistic. We also, you know, have seen the same news from the customers. I think in general there's a macro feel that uh some of the tariff uh is not going to be as impactful as uh our end customers previously thought um so as i said we're we're cautiously optimistic that the second half of the year will be uh better than than what we had originally built into our plans excellent and then lastly uh jeff any any thoughts on on gross margin

As you look into the third quarter, I think you were around 43% in Q2. Would you expect gross margins to be relatively flat up or down in the third quarter? Any directional comment would be helpful. Thank you.

Yeah, you know, we've taken a big step up from previous years, obviously, with the exit out of China and the focus on other markets. So the 43% that we announced in Q2, I think, is relatively indicative of where our gross margin is today. Now, going forward, you know, that will vary by a point or two depending on the product mix in any given quarter, manufacturing yields, et cetera. But in general, I think that's a pretty safe place in terms of where our business is today.

Perfect. Thank you.

And our final question comes from the line of Tor Svonberg with Staple. Please go ahead.

Yes, thank you. Welcome to the public market and congrats on that. So, Hubei, you talked about the sort of first long term strategic initiative. Clearly, you're starting to broaden the applications and markets that you are going into, especially beyond wearables. As we look at maybe in the next few months or so, which are some of the applications you expect to see revenue from? I know it's hard to kind of single out a few, but you know any color you could share with us that would be great.

Well, we we're not going to see a revenue from a new application again this coming quarter, but definitely some of the air glasses. are taking a first, working with some of the AR glass customers that definitely will be in the market very near term. And also worker safety monitors and machine health monitor, those are already in the market and we continue to, we believe that to grow that market segment. So we believe that our application is growing really fast.

Very good. Yeah, that's exactly what I was looking for. And then as my follow-up, could you just give us an update on Atomic, you know, where we sort of are in the development process there? I think you have previously talked about, you know, that product being potentially available sometime next year, but yeah, any, well, sampling obviously not for production, but, you know, any updates there would be helpful.

Oh, well, we're very excited to talk about atomic because we started working with early adopter on spec soon after we did a public offering and activity is more active than ever before. Again, I believe that. becoming public company and our customer becoming more comfortable working with Ambex. We believe that we're going to make great progress coming quarters.

Very good. Thank you, Lee.

Thank you.

I'm with no further questions. Thank you. I will hand the call back to Jeff Winsler for closing remarks.

Thank you. Before closing the call, I'd like to let you know that we'll be attending the UBS Global Technology Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona on December 3rd. And the following day, December 4th, we'll be at the Stiefel Deep Tech Forum in Menlo Park, California. If you'd like to arrange a meeting with us at these events, please contact our IR firm, the Shelton Group. You can find the relevant contact information on the investor page of our website, ambic.com. Thank you again for joining us today and we look forward to discussing our continued progress on our next earnings call. Operator, you may now disconnect.

Thank you. Thank you for joining us today. This does conclude today's conference call. You may now disconnect.