Analog Devices Inc (ADI) June 2, 2026 Conference Transcript

Okay, good morning. Welcome back. Really delighted to have the team from Analog Devices join us this morning, Rich Puccio, the Chief Financial Officer. We'll go through my list of questions, but please feel free to raise your hand if you would like to bring up anything. But really, warm welcome to you, Rich. Really appreciate you doing this conference.

Thanks, Rivek. Thanks for having us. We appreciate the opportunity. Wonderful.

So maybe let's just start with kind of the state of the union, right? Semi's, I guess, understatement, things are quite exciting. Your business has, you know, gone through, really stepped up, right, in terms of your growth. So maybe just walk us through how things have evolved since the start of the year, what you expected, you know, what you're seeing right now, and then we can walk through the different end markets.

Sure. So, you know, I'd say we've been on a journey since the trough of the cycle, and we've talked about this, and I've talked about this in prior calls, right? We've had some actually pretty resilient parts of our business that started to show signs of growth as early as the back half of 24. We continue to see demand in that area grow, those idiosyncratic areas. I'll go back to those in a minute. But what we talked about was we were waiting to see the sort of cycle recovery and what were the signs we would look for in the cycle recovery. And probably three, four quarters ago, I started to talk about what we really haven't seen yet cycle-wise was the growth in the mass market, broad market part of the industry. And we have now seen over multiple quarters very significant growth in the mass market part of the business, which for us is one of those classic signs of the upcycle. So I would say as we were progressing throughout the year, we were expecting to see the cycle growth add to the idiosyncratic growth, right? And we've talked about that we were very strong already in ATE, aerospace and defense, and some of the stuff that was going on data center We're in our communications business, and I think what's been a couple of things from an overall perspective that have been, you know, I don't necessarily surprising, but I guess that probably is the best word, the continued acceleration in the ramp in the AI infrastructure spend, and I really should just say infrastructure spend because they are also building non-AI data centers out there, but broadly the infrastructure spend. And the other thing that we're seeing happening, and we're just starting to see this now, is sort of this halo effect from that infrastructure build impacting the other parts and the other end markets that we serve. So whether it's in the industrial space, the companies that are helping build the infrastructure, whether it's the electric infrastructure, the power infrastructure, et cetera. So in addition to the core products that we've been selling into the data centers, we're starting to see demand in other parts of the end market. I think that's been, you know, one of the nice upside pieces of this for us from an overall perspective. And the other area, and I'm sure we'll talk more about this, for us that we saw some acceleration earlier than we expected was in automotive. You know, we had said coming out of Q1, despite what we were seeing for the early results in 26, that we were still expecting auto to be a growth business for us. Even coming off a record 25, we expected we could grow year over year. And we saw some more evidence of that with some pretty aggressive acceleration in orders in the back half of the last month of our last quarter and some record levels in a couple of our jurisdictions. So those are some pretty positive areas where we did even better than we had thought. And we already had a pretty aggressive view of how we would perform in those areas. Got it.

How do you assess, Rich? I think you have a unique perspective on the space, right? Having, you know, coming from an outsider's perspective into, you know, this analog industry. So when you look at the quality of, you know, orders, the quality of backlog, how do you make sure that it's not double ordering? How do you make sure that this is, you know, these are not pulled forward just because everyone is constrained? You know, on a relative basis, it might be easier to buy analog products versus, say, leading at Logic or DRAM. So how do you assess that?

So a couple of things, when we look at it in a number of ways, one of the things we always look at was we always are mindful of what the long-term trend across semis has been and where we are relative to that growth line, right? Because when you start to ship above that growth, you know, that consumption line is when you're potentially starting to build inventory, and that's something we focus on. We do not think we're there, right? And, you know, a good example is industrial, right? It's 50% of our business. It was the one that declined the most. It's also the one that's been growing really strong. But when you look at that business, we're very lean in the channel. We're running a leaner channel than we've run historically, you know, in that sort of six to seven weeks. And our channel is predominantly an industrial business. The other thing we look at is, you know, just look at the ordering patterns and demand. So if you think 40% of our industrial, for instance, when you look at that, that demand is coming from aerospace events and infrastructure. Those are areas where we can clearly go to the end markets and see what is driving that demand, right? And we think that that is ordering to the current period demand because they're growing so fast. So you feel very good about that. But then that leaves 60% of our industrial business. You say, how good do you feel about the growth, you know, and the long Well, 60% of our industrial business is still, you know, approximately 20% below its prior peaks and below that consumption line. Right? Which means there's still certainly room to run across the broader part of the industrial. And then you go down to the next end market, communications. Obviously, we talked about, I talked about on the call, it's now, a data center is now three quarters of our communications business. And that is growing aggressively with the infrastructure buildout. Again, so I feel good that that's real demand for actual buildout. And, you know, if you listen to the hyperscalers and the platform companies' CEOs talk, you know. What's constraining them from growing is capacity. So we haven't even scratched the itch for existing demand with capacity. So they're continuing to build. So I feel like that is also real demand. And then you look at auto, and you look at what's going on, where are vehicles trending to grow more? And where for us, ADI specifically, do you see bigger content opportunities? Obviously, EVs for us, we've talked about give us the best content opportunities. China EVs continue to grow. Even if units stay flat there, given their drive for penetration into level 2 ADAS, right? They're talking about trying to move from 10% penetrated in level 2 ADAS to 20% to 30%. So each jump in that penetration creates more content for ADI in the vehicles they're producing. And so that shows up in how our auto business has grown, right? Auto today is China Auto's 30% of our business, record year last year, running very strong again this year. And over a trendline period, if you look over 10 years, even in a flat SAR environment, we grow low double digits. Over the last five years, as the ADAS and immersive cabin experiences have expanded, our business actually grows 15% better then. The SAR units. Now, in the current environment, our best information would say that SAR numbers are probably going to be down to close to 24 levels. So we're not basing our growth expectation on units. It is our share and our content. And the other piece of data that is really helpful that we can look at, you can look at the percentage of analog parts, not analog devices, but analog parts in vehicles. Over time and over the last couple of years, you started to see a decline in the dollar value of that content. ADIs has continued to increase, which we think is one of those good evidence points that, in fact, we have been gaining share. And so the strength in that market has been really positive for us. And I don't feel like we've yet seen any of that inventory build behavior. We did in 25C buy ahead behavior in auto, but we feel like they have burned through that and are now buying back to their normal demand in the period.

Another, I think, aspect that I would give, you know, your team a lot of credit for is actually being very upfront and calling out where you, when you do see, you know, that buy ahead behavior and even quantifying it and then also quantifying, right, where pricing is, right? So I think your team, you know, deserves credit. What kind of operational things are you instituting to give you better visibility, right? I mean, you have a, you know, great AWS background. So how many of those tools are you kind of implementing, right? Or tools like them are you implementing to catch, again, back to the question of the quality of the demand and backlog that you're seeing?

So it's interesting. Our team has always, actually, when I arrived, has had an amazing amount of statistical data and tracking around bookings and order rates and backlog. Tracked very closely some of the most important metrics we look at. We're also building forecasting tools, leveraging more of the AI, which I think everybody is doing at this point, to be able to give us better signal. Because one of the, and this is a double-edged sword, one of the good things is we've kept lead times pretty well in check, right? You know, we've talked about it in the past. You know, we have kept the vast majority of our product goes out inside normal lead times. We have had some minor stretch in some of the real high mover areas. But in that environment, and this is one of the lessons I learned on the other side, in that environment where the lead times stay in check, you don't have a lot of motivation to put orders on the books early. So we see that. Now, what we started to see is we're getting more orders out a quarter beyond where we would historically have had them as things appear to be getting tighter broadly across analogs. So I think. What we then have to rely on, and these are the things our teams work really hard on, is being close to customers to get their outlook on forecast, right? Because if you think about our process, you know, we're building wafers, starting wafers now for two quarters out. We don't have, you know, 100% of that all booked in the backlog, right? We work aggressively, and mechanistically, what our teams are doing every day is getting to customers and encouraging them, look, we're getting your forecast, but your best way to help us all manage, as an industry, your production requirements is get orders in. So we are starting to see a little bit more visibility from an orders perspective, just because, you know. Folks are starting to get more visibility that they're on a sustained growth trajectory, but there still is a little bit of we have to be able to continue to get better and better forecast data to map up with the historical and backlog. But I think we've done a really good job. Our team is manufacturing. Global ops teams have been very agile. You've seen we've been able to capture a whole bunch of upside. You know, we just posted a record quarter. We've guided another record quarter. So we've been able to capture that. And we've done that, you know, while working pretty aggressively to improve our efficiencies, make sure we're getting the most out of the factories. You know, one of the other things, you know, we talked a little bit about, you know, as we think about the need and this growing demand is, you know, we've been expanding capacity now since back to the, I think, the big push started in around 22. We said we would double our internal capacity. We would expand the amount of product that we've qualified externally so that it gives us some flexibility. And essentially, by the end of this fiscal year, we'll have completed that sort of doubling of capacity. Now, obviously, just as part of the normal running the company go forward CapEx model, we've talked about a 4% to 6% CapEx model. If I take your street numbers for this year and next year, you're talking about ongoing capital probably in the $700-ish million, which we will continue to look for optimization, improvement, replacing and modernizing tools, expanding capacity as we continue to see this growth. Right. The macro indicators, as we've all talked about, they were talking about semis being a trillion dollar industry in 2030. I think we're going to be a 1.2 or 1.3 trillion dollar part of the economy this year. So we are continuing to expand our capacity. Even if you look at our production this year, we add wafer incremental wafer starts every. Right, as we continue to add more tooling to keep up. And obviously, we have very strong foundry partnerships where we've got, we've had no problem getting the capacity we need. I mean, I would say that the challenge we'll all have in going forward is getting more capacity out of those will become expensive.

All right. On pricing, you know, it seems that the industry took a lot of pricing in, I think, 22 and 23, then not as much in 24 and 25. And now we are starting to see almost, you know, everyone's start percent letters about where is ADI in terms of, you know, taking pricing? How much of this is catch up from just the last two years where it was subdued? How much of this is just the inflationary pressure that you are seeing?

So I guess there's two pieces to this. One is, you know, our pricing, you know, philosophy has always been dynamic, but I think the anchor piece of our pricing has always been, we lead with innovation, we tend to be there first with the solutions for the hardest, most complex problems where you need domain expertise and product expertise, and we're able to capture a ton of value there. So you see that, right? We've talked about having ASPs that are 4X the industry average, right? Another look at that that we look at that is very informative is we look at our products, because as you all know, we have products that produce revenue for 25 years. But if we look at and cut our products and say those that were 10 years. And older and 10 years and younger. ASPs are basically double in the 10 years and younger because we continue to add more solutions, more features, more functionality, and we capture more of that value. So that is what primarily drives our pricing. However, we'd always watch the cost inputs as we go, and you hit the nail right on the head. We had, for a period of time, been absorbing pretty significant inflation in a few areas, and we made the determination, given it was going to continue, that this was the right time to go recover some of that. Now, this was not a go improve our margin. I mean, we're basically trying to hold the margin given the inflation, whether that was, you know, significant inflation in gold in the in the more near term period here. It's it's fuel, which means transportation, etc. You know, as we think going forward from a pricing perspective, it will continue to be dynamic. We will continue to watch the inputs and outputs because there's still a lot of uncertainty. Right. We don't know what the resolution is going to be in the situation in the Middle East. The longer that lasts, the more knock-on effects that's going to have in the supply chain, right? Because it's obvious when straight-up fuel costs go up, we can all see that. But there's an awful lot of things that are petroleum-based that are part of the manufacturing process, particularly in the back end. So we'll continue to watch, and it'll be dynamic. But the other important thing around the pricing, you're absolutely right. In 2022, there were massive industry-wide pricing increases. I think TSMC did a big price increase, and everybody passed it along. But what's been different for us is, as we've talked about, our pricing has remained pretty stable across 24, 25. And then we just did our, you know, sort of first big price increase in 26. Now, we've talked in the past, we've always had some back and forth on pricing dynamics because of our legacy products that stay around forever, get price uplifts, things like that. But this is our first broad increase. We'll continue to watch the dynamic, right? Because, you know, we're trying to be prudent and fair to our customers while also trying to maintain the financial model you all expect from us.

Do you think some of your competitors in, you know, let's say power semis or, you know, other areas are actually taking on pricing even more aggressively than ADI? And if yes, do you think that gives you an opportunity? Or do you think you would rather just keep the pricing envelope you have right now to just expand market share? How do you think about just, you know, kind of both sides of that?

So certainly, you know, I've seen copies of probably all the same letters you've seen for what our competitors are doing from pricing. Without, you know, doing a detailed scrub of their cost structures, I don't know if they're margin stacking to get incremental profitability out of the pricing or if they're recovering. But for us, you know. Look, we want to be fair to customers, and we're going to continue to look at what the cost environment is, and where we think it's appropriate that the customers share in some of the inflationary pain, we might have incremental price increases. But I would say strategically, like I said, we're trying to recover from the cost we've had historically, and we'll continue to go forward. But for us, the really important pricing piece is what we do in the design in phase. Because that stuff tends to be sticky, and that's where our innovation premium shows up. So that's going to be the more important part of pricing.

Just the last question there, Rich, which is, I just want to clarify that the pricing is not because of shortages. It is because of passing along the cost inflation aspect. What is it because of true shortages? Because you mentioned your lead times haven't really changed. Sorry.

I forget that's right there. No, this was not because of shortages. Certainly, like everyone, there are places in the supply chain where things have gotten tighter, but our supply chains have worked to figure that out, and we've been able to keep up with product demand. We've had, as I mentioned, some small extension of lead times in a few places, but the majority of our stuff is still inside standard lead times. So this is not a supply shortage, so we're increasing your price. This has been, we've been absorbing costs on your behalf for a while, and we did a really good job offsetting a lot of them. You've seen that. We've had margin accretion pretty continuously coming out of the trough, but we were doing that while also absorbing pretty significant. Inflation over that period. Okay.

Now let's talk about, you know, the data center, you know, across your, you know, power and optics and your ATE business, right? It's close to 20%, right, of sales, which I think is probably the highest, right, if not the highest among, right, your analog peers. So talk to us about how do you, you know, see the sustainability of that growth, right? Among those three areas, is there a way to kind of rank order where you're seeing faster growth versus kind of more industry, right? Thank you.

Sure. I mean, look, everything we've everything I see and read and everything you probably all seen read is that the AI on the infrastructure build out is going to continue. And I have heard from any number of sources, including from some of your colleagues, that the expectation is at least out into 2030 and 2030 plus, we'll continue to need to build infrastructure because Because we still have demand, the hyperscalers and. Platform players still have demand they can't fulfill. So I think that that will continue to drive growth for us. If I look at, you know, obviously ATE will continue to grow, you know, and you can look at our, you know, the big ATE providers to see what that looks like. And for us, we've been talking about the power and the optical are pretty much equal parts of our. Data Center portfolio, and I think we talked about it being three quarters of our business. If I would have picked which one of those today I think has the bigger growth opportunity, given the strength of our position in optical, I think the power one provides a potential opportunity for bigger growth, right? If you look at us as a player in the lateral power versus what we could be in vertical power, I think there's a big growth opportunity there. You know, one of the things our team saw was this move continues to see, and you're seeing in the industry, is the move to higher and higher voltages. The move to 800 volts is going to drive increased demand for products to be able to, particularly to be able to deliver that sort of last millimeter to the chip, right? And. What we're seeing is the technologies out there. One of the ones we talked about is this IVR technology that comes with Empower. That can reduce power consumption 10% to 15%. It also reduces the footprint of that module underneath. Module is probably not the right word. The footprint on the board, it also eliminates some of the ancillary structures that have existed in the current vertical power and makes it a highly efficient structure. So we think our opportunity to be in there as an early player gives us a chance to be a much bigger player in vertical power. Now, when you think about how we know if we're being successful there, obviously, part of it's going to be, do we see this continued shift to a vertical power architecture? I think six, nine months ago, we were talking about it, you know, having one win in and people were starting to use vertical power. More and more of the discussions I have and our data center team is having is vertical power is going to be a key part of this bill. We are going to continue to be power constrained. Science has not caught up yet to fulfill all the power requirements. If you look out 10, 12 years, so reducing power loss in the data centers will be critical. Vertical power seems to be the architecture for that. So we'll be watching eagerly, along with every other power provider, what happens in the architectural design. And then getting in. Early, and this is the same in any of these spaces for us, getting in early at the first rev is where you get to learn and be part of the discussions for what the next rev looks like. Because, you know, you look out to 2030, and the next evolution of power and the next evolution of what you have to do, you know, those are going to be massive. TAM and SAM expansions for companies, because if the architecture shifts from where it is today, you know, and they build at the rate they're building, and I'm sure one of your guys is building a model right now that can tell us how many data centers they're going to build, how many racks, how many servers, which means how many VP, you know, vertical power units are going to sell, and you'll tell me that when you have it so we can plan. You know, that's going to be the metric we'll watch in the industry is how aggressive is this architecture adopted as we move into the higher voltages? Because, you know, we've all heard that we're going to pump X megawatts, even a gigawatt into it in the future. That's going to put tons of pressure on the power chain. And I think that's an area where end to end of the chain, we're very strong and getting that last millimeter with IVR will give us an advantage.

Got it. So I know that, you know, ADI is well represented in one of kind of the custom, right, TPU-like, you know, projects. What's your opportunity in kind of the broader merchant, you know, GPU-like projects? And I guess a bigger question, Rich, is that, you know, that, you know, those GPU customers have multi-year, you know. Kind of product pipelines that are planned out. How early do you get the visibility about your level of engagement, your market share, right? How do you think about that visibility over the next several years?

So as we've talked about, you know, we've had products in, you know, whether it's in vertical power or optical that get into the large players, whether they're the platform players or the suppliers in the platform players. So, you know, we'll continue to be aggressive because, as I mentioned, getting into the earliest version of products gives you the learning cycles to be part of the roadmap. So getting early engagement in those. And so we'll continue to watch. Obviously, where we have wins, we'll be working to get more wins across the peer set. So we feel pretty well positioned. And I would tell you, you know, the relationship we have across those companies are very good. They bring us in very early because, you know, it's not getting any easier to build any of these products. And what they want is somebody to help simplify the complexity. And so the more of that we can do for these customers, the more chances we're going to get to win. So I feel like we're very well positioned there and our team is aggressively going after it. And I've been involved in a number of conversations already with hyperscalers. Our teams are working across a bunch of the companies to be able to make sure we're positioned across the portfolio to support that scale out. Got it.

One other thing, you know, in a different area, this is now related to automotive, I found very interesting is that in your last earnings call, it almost seemed like, and you just mentioned it as well, that automotive suddenly started to grow, which is very different than the sense I had when the year started, right? That auto was going to be kind of a subdued year. So did that suddenly change, or was it always according to plan, or did you really see a shift in all the demand?

So for us, we actually, and there was a lot of skepticism, I will admit, when we talked to investors after Q1 and told people, hey, Q1 was a little bit better. It's softer than seasonal, but it's better than we expected. Q2, we thought we would still be maybe working off a little bit of this pre-buy, but we thought the back half would be strong because we can clearly see our share gain and the content acceleration that's happening in auto. And if you look at what's going on in the Middle East, it's going to certainly put more pressure on people buying electric vehicles. The more electric Vehicles, the more demand. So we have always thought from the start of the year that we would grow. If you talk to the team that runs our auto business, they would have told you, despite a record in 25, we will grow year over year in auto. What happened was we saw an acceleration literally in the last month of the quarter in auto demand that we were expecting to come in Q3. And I think as they look to the adoption of more and more of the L2 ADAS and potentially L3 ADAS in China by the end of the year, I think we started to see an order pick up. And as you said, I'll be transparent. We've always been transparent with what we see in the order book. But in this one, we didn't think this was a pre-buy. We could see the content increasing and the very specific drive. Now, on top of that, and that's the China piece, you know, we had record. revenues in Europe and Japan, the model. So the US is still not doing that. It's been a bit of the laggard. But the other thing that happened, which was good, we expected it, but it's also another indicator. We hadn't grown in, actually, we had had declining BMS for two years. We just had our first year-over-year growth quarter in BMS in two years, and that's really important for us. And that's indicative of the EV, right, because it's the far right of the EVs is where we get the most out of our BMS. So that's been really important for us on the auto side.

So it's time to declare the bottom of the auto cycle also, and do you want to see some more data points?

I don't know if, it's interesting, it depends how you define the cycle, because every forecast I see still shows auto units coming down, probably closer to 24 levels, which were, you know, because obviously 25 came up a little bit from 24, back down to 24. So I don't know if the units has bottomed out, but certainly for us. The content and share is continuing to allow us to grow.

Okay. Next thing on the aerospace and defense business, right, which has been, you know, pretty strong. There's a lot of media reports about the U.S. potentially, right, and other countries potentially wanting to build out, right, the stock of all, you know, products. Do you see that in your business also? Do you have that visibility that shows that aerospace and defense can continue to be strong?

Yes, certainly there's been public discussion about a number of programs, certainly in the U.S., where the government is going to expand, and we have very good visibility. In fact, you know, in addition to, you know, to talk about some of the AI data center stuff, we're starting to get a little bit more visibility in aerospace and defense. But I would say it's not just a U.S. phenomenon. If you look at what's going on globally, there's going to be build-out across the EU as they've upped their spending budgets. Even we're starting to see more upping of budgets in APAC. Um, and so the air, you know, the aerospace and defense business for us has been a strong role and we expect it to continue, you know, and, and the interesting thing for us is, you know, we have a, a, you know, obviously a very strong part in the, in the air, the defense part of that, but we, we also do have a, you know, a good presence in, in the space part of aerospace and defense, right? Um, so from, uh, obviously, you know, some of the products that we're well known for from a comms perspective and, uh, the technologies there. So we, we're, We're going to continue to see growth in Leos, where we have content in Leos, right? There's all kinds of press. You read it every day about the number of satellites that are continuing to get launched. Plus, we have a lot of product in the base stations that communicate with the satellites. So it's a pretty broad brush growth for us. But one of the great things is we have a very broad portfolio that is used across a broad spectrum. But we also, and we've talked about this in prior calls, Vince has talked about it, Our ability to deliver systems and modules into that market is an incredible value capture for us because, again, they don't want to build if they don't have to. They want to get a module, and our continued ability to go up the stack is what's helping us drive bigger and bigger ASPs on the ADAP side. So we feel like that is one of those areas that is going to have sustained momentum, just given, you know, even if things settle down calmly, there's still going to need to be a rebuild and replenish phase. So that helps us get some visibility, and we feel like our product portfolio is well positioned there.

Got it. Last two very quick ones. Gross margins we saw, right? You know, you had that one-time kind of 50 basis point benefit from pricing, but it's kind of held on to the 72.5%, right, which is the best in the industry. Are there still incremental opportunities to expand that? And then I had one final one on use of cash.

Sure. So I would say yes, but what I would say is probably different is if you go trough to peak, we've gotten a significant benefit of driving utilizations up to more optimum levels than we would have been at the trough. I would say going forward, more of the incremental gross margin improvement will come from further mixed change. You know, at this point, we're, you know, about a 50 percent industrial business. At peak margins, we're at 53. I mean, 53% and 54% industrial. So I would say the two things that we'll do it will be mixed, and then just pure revenue growth, given the flow through economics and the fact that, you know, we have been growing at very high rates and been managing the cost curves pretty aggressively. So I do think there is continued opportunity for accretion. I just don't expect increase in utilization to be one of those drivers. I think I mentioned that on the call. Gotcha.

And the last one, Rich, on just kind of use of cash. So, you know, ADI historically has done larger strategic, right, M&A. It seems now the focus has shifted a little more to kind of tuck-ins, right, and so forth. So as you look over the next, you know, several years, do you think there is still opportunity for more industry consolidation, or we should expect ADI to just kind of focus on kind of smaller tuck-in type deals?

I think the large consolidations that you talk about continue to be more difficult, just given the current concentration and regulatory environment. But for us, and we've talked about this, right, we're focused on, one, the revenue synergies that we've been talking about. And if you haven't heard me say this before, you know, we're on track to deliver a billion dollars of synergies by 27. In fact, we did hundreds of millions in 25, and we're going to do hundreds of millions more in 26. I think that's really important. But we are continuing to aggressively invest internally in software and digital capabilities and AI, and those will be areas we continue to look. And that's an opportunity where we've talked about where if it can help us solve an existing problem, help us get to market faster, help us do more for customers, those are the kind of acquisitions we're looking at. And Empower is a good example, right? It gave us a massive acceleration on a timeline For a technology that we think is going to be a really important technology for the power delivery going forward. So that will continue to be our core philosophy is make sure we get all those synergies and then evaluate digital software and AI opportunities as they come through.

Go ahead. Terrific. Thank you so much, Rich. Really appreciate your time. Thank you, Vivek. Great to see you.

Thanks, everybody.