Conference Transcript - IDCC 2026-05-12

Richard J. Brezski, CFO

Good afternoon. Welcome to the InterDigital presentation here at the 21st Annual Needham Technology Media and Consumer Conference. My name is Rich Breske. I'm the CFO at InterDigital, and I'm really excited about the opportunity to speak about our company and the great opportunities that I think we have in front of us. I'll move past the disclaimers. I'll let you read those. But I'm going to walk through an introduction of the company. I want to talk about the premier team that we have that's been so important to the success we've had over the last number of years, and we believe to our ability to capture the opportunity I'll describe. I'm going to talk about the essential technology development that is at the core of our business. You'll hear me say we're a research company, first and foremost. I'll talk about our accelerating business momentum. We're really proud about the results that we've turned in over the last couple of years. And I'll close with a discussion on our long-term growth strategy that we first introduced at our Investor Day in September 24 and remain very excited about today. So as I said, Interdigital is first and foremost a pioneering research company focusing on wireless and video and AI research that are very fundamental to many of the technologies, products, and services that we use in our everyday lives. On this summary, you can see some of the highlights from our 2025 financial results, $834 million of revenue, over $15 of EPS, 71% adjusted EBITDA margin, so I'll be sure to talk about the operating leverage that exists in our model and over a billion dollars of cash. We license the technology that our research team develops to the largest companies in That includes key customers such as Apple, Samsung, and Xiaomi, number one, two, and three handset manufacturers in the world, as well as companies in consumer electronics, computers, et cetera, like Lenovo, HP, and others, which I'll get into, including our opportunities in new markets, such as streaming. So I talked about in the intro that I discussed the leadership team and the key people that we have at Interdigital. Beyond the leadership team, we frankly have one of the brightest organizations that you'll ever come across. throughout the company. We have about half the company is engineers, and that includes a significant number of PhDs doing very advanced research. We have a bunch of attorneys. Even throughout G&A, a number of MBAs. So very proud to be part of the leadership team for this company. As I talk about the leadership team, I have to start with Liren Chen, our CEO. Liren joined the company in 2021. As I mentioned, we're a research company, but we monetize the research through licensing our patents to the Apples and Samsungs of the world. So we've oftentimes been called mini Qualcomm or specifically QTL, the Qualcomm technology licensing business. Liren Norman came from that business. He grew up in China, went to the MIT of China, came to the States for his master's in engineering, and then was hired out of the master's, the grad school, into Qualcomm, where he spent his first 25 years of his career initially as a researcher. Has more than two dozen patents to his name, I believe. I got an MBA and a law degree while at Qualcomm, moved into their patent department, eventually led that, rose up to become the SVP, global head of IP at Qualcomm, you know, one of the most important figures in the QTL program. So when we, Bill Merritt, our prior CEO, retired in 2021, I dare say Liren was the single most qualified person to take over as CEO of Interdigital because while at Qualcomm, he basically had significant roles in each part of our value system, our value chain, right? The innovation and research, filing patents to protect it, and then the licensing of that. Liren, after joining, recruited Rajesh Pankash, our CTO, from Qualcomm. Rajesh, I'm not going to go through everybody, but I'll definitely have to mention Rajesh. Rajesh at Qualcomm was the head of corporate R&D. So all of Qualcomm's research that went into the standards, 4G, 5G, et cetera, was under Rajesh, including their video research, including AI. So, again, Rajesh at Qualcomm was responsible for the very kinds of research that we do at InterDigital. I'll mention Ken Kaskalan also came from Qualcomm, recruited by Liren. So we have a good mix there. Whereas myself, I joined InterDigital in 2003. I've been CFO since 2012, so I guess 14 years now. Julia Mattis, our chief licensing officer, has been with the company for, I think, over 15 years. Josh and Rob Stein have also been with the company for a long time. And then Skip was recruited out of another company. So we have a good mix of longer-term interdigital folks and people from outside the company, particularly from Qualcomm. In Julia's organization, we got folks from Nokia and Ericsson and throughout the engineering organization as well. So when I think about our business model, this is how we think about it. It all starts, as I said, with research and innovation. And then there's two parallel tracks. The bottom track, I call the tech track. That's where our research, we contribute to standards, standards like 5G and now 6G, which we're working on. And through the standards, that technology is shared with the world and put into products like the smartphones I referred to before. And we make it available, but with the expectation that the companies, as they use it, that they'll ultimately pay it for us, okay? They're not permitted to use it for free. So there's a parallel track on the top, which is the business track. So to ensure that we can protect our rights, we file patents to protect the innovations that our research team develops and that we contribute to the standards. We then work with the product implementers that use the technology to enter into fair license agreements. And, you know, those two tracks, they're not exactly time sequenced. Oftentimes, the research and the sharing of the technology and even implementation of the technology, particularly in new markets, can precede the business arrangement under which they're permitted to do that. And then when we enter into license agreements, we sometimes have what's called catch-up sales. So we record revenue and relate the payments that they make for their prior use of our technology and then get them under license going forward, and that becomes the recurring revenue. So I mentioned we're doing research in foundational areas. The three areas that we focus on are wireless, including cellular and Wi-Fi, video, including video compression, and AI. We actually have had an AI lab since 2018, which we acquired when we acquired Technicolor. their entire video patent portfolio as well as their entire video research team was available to us through that acquisition. Technicolor, just as InterDigital has a very long history of technology leadership in cellular, Technicolor has an even longer one in video dating back to The Wizard of Oz, the first full-color picture shot by Technicolor cameras. So together, we think it's a great combination. And this next slide really shows why. That acquisition was in roughly the 2018 timeframe. Well, in 2017, you can see at the time, it seemed like a lot of data traffic compared to years before. But we weren't alone in this, but we anticipated that video was really going to drive a big uptick in mobile traffic. And it certainly has done that. You see the results nine times by 2022 and projected to be 28 times by 2027. And it's really eye-popping, but when you step back and think about what you were doing with your phones in 2017, and then I think about my kids on TikTok and Instagram and everything else, the usage is clearly dominated by video, which is very data-rich. And that's why the Technicolor acquisition made so much sense to us, because we had a world-class team of researchers working on wireless. But if you could combine that with a world-class team of researchers working on video, then you would become better at both. And this next slide shows a little bit how video codec impacts our daily lives. So this is codec. It's coding and decoding. it's compressing. My layman's analogy is the old WinZip files when the email was too big. So you had to zip it up and send it across, and then you could unzip it on the other side. I think of video compression in my simple mind as a dynamic form of WinZip, right? It's a way to kind of take something on one end, compress it, get it through the pipe in a more efficient manner, and then, you know, unzip it on the other side. And that compression is 1,000 to 1, the uncompressed format. There's a couple different forms of video codec on the right-hand side, but let's call it roughly 1,000 to 1. And that's being used in, you know, devices like phones to decode video or even encode it when you're going to upload it. But it's also critical to video streaming. Dare I say, how would video streaming services exist without some form of compression? We cannot stream if it was 1,000 times more data than we're shipping today. So it's a very important technology that enables a lot of different use cases that we all experience in our daily lives. um the next important thing to understand about interdigital and the cellular wi-fi and video compression technologies i just referred to is they each represent standards and uh standards are uh important in our lives in many ways if i look around the room uh these light bulbs you know we could unscrew the light bulb replace it with another brand because that's a standard so you You can have a multi-manufacturer environment. And light bulbs, if they're the same standard light bulb, they're going to work in the same socket. The power, that's a standard. It's a different standard in the US than it is in Europe, but it's a standard nonetheless. 5G is a standard. That's why I have an Apple phone in my pocket. Maybe I have a Samsung Galaxy. They're going to both work on the same network, whether it's a Nokia base station or an Ericsson base station. And they're very important when you have complex technologies like cellular or video, because these are very, very complex technologies that if everybody was trying to create their own solution, you'd have that, you know, millions and billions of dollars of research investment distributed over a number of different solutions. Whereas under the current system, all that investment is going to make the single best solution. And in doing so, as consumers, we benefit because we're going to have a better solution. It's going to create interoperability so we can make the choice as to whether we want an Apple phone or a Samsung phone or a Motorola phone, what have you. But it's also going to lower the barriers to entry. A great example would be Apple itself, who had an iPod 20 years ago and was able to do what they do best, which is have a great user interface, and because they didn't have to worry about how does it become cellular, right, they could just use the cellular standard that existed. And today, they now, you know, do research in cellular standards themselves. So very, very powerful are standards. They benefit, as I said, consumers. I just explained the implementers and the operators and service providers, you know, lowers the total cost of ownership there because now they have choice. They're not locked into one environment or ecosystem. We're not just a participant in these standards. We're actually a leader. If I go to the next slide, this is a picture of some of the leaders we have at Interdigital across many different standards that we participate in. Overall, we have more than 100 leadership positions in wireless, video, and AI standards. On the top, you see the video standards. On the bottom, some examples of the wireless. And the box in the middle is where they intersect with AI, because that's an important part of both wireless and video these days. And within 3GPP, that's the body that sets 5G and is currently working to set the 6G There are 15 working groups, and each working group has a chair. And I'm proud to say that, though you may not have heard of us before you signed up for the meeting or understood what we did, we are actually one of the leaders. There are only three companies that have more than one chair position, and that's Interdigital, Samsung, and China Mobile. Even Qualcomm, Nokia Ericsson, better known names on the street within cellular, have one each, where we have two. I'm not saying or suggesting that we're twice as good, but certainly that demonstrates that we're very good. And we're proud of that. It's more a reflection of the fact that we are good than the reason why we're good. Even beyond the chair positions, we have other recognition of 0.2 as being a global leader in innovation. LexisNexis, who you may be familiar with, they do a study, and they've done so for five years now, of the most innovative companies in the world by looking at their innovations and their patents, et cetera. And for all five years that they've done the study, Interdigital has been listed as one of the 100 most innovative companies in the world. We're relatively small compared to almost all the other names on the list because we don't have a product, but we are mighty in our research because those small were very focused on developing fundamental technologies in wireless video and AI that we use across all these products. That results in a very large patent portfolio. So in 2017, it was very large with 19,000 assets. 2025, it's double that. So very, very large portfolio. Another measure, the European Patent Office recently came out with its updated rankings of the top patent filers in the EPO. If you take the top five U.S. companies, Interdigital is on that list, along with Microsoft, Alphabet, and help me, Rayford. I'm blanking on the other one, but let's say it's Apple. I'm not positive on that, but that's the kind of company we keep in terms of our innovation and how prolific we are at innovating and filing patents. Microsoft. Microsoft. So let's talk a little bit about the momentum in our business. Over the last five years, we have signed total contract value across more than 50 licenses of close to $5 billion. So a tremendous amount of success. You see the logos there. They're all pretty much household names, including, as I mentioned before, Apple, Samsung, and Xiaomi, the top three in the smartphone space. Also, you see LG, which was signed in Q1 for TVs. You see Panasonic, Lenovo, really, who's who of technology companies. And that has resulted in tremendous growth in ARR, annualized recurring revenue. It's a term we borrowed from, you know, the subscription world because, in reality, what we are selling is subscriptions, all right? I mentioned we're a research company. Sometimes people would say, you know, who's in our digital? Oh, they're that patent licensing company. If anybody says that, I'd like you to think about whether or not you find it appropriate to say, wait a minute, they're a research company, because that's how I think of us. And that becomes important, because when people sign a license with us, they're not licensing a static patent portfolio, okay? I don't want to disparage patent licensing models, as you may think of them, because I think they have a very vital role in the ecosystem. But we don't go acquire patents and sue people. That's not what we do. We are constantly innovating. We've been around since 1972, founded to work on digital wireless telephony in 1972. So that's very forward-looking, and we remain forward-looking today. So we worked on 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G. So over the last couple decades, we keep pushing the ball down the field and making those systems better. We're now doing the same thing in video through the research team we acquired from Technicolor. Also, the AI lab that I mentioned before. And because that portfolio is huge and growing at the rate of seven patents a day, our customers typically want to take what we call a subscription to that portfolio. So they're covered for that changing portfolio over the term of their license. OK, so it's not just like, oh, we have a handful of patents. you're going to take a license to those, and then we'll deal with these other patents later. It's like, no, we have an ever-changing portfolio, ever-growing portfolio that they want a subscription to. And because that portfolio is embedded often in the standards, they're going to go, if you're making a phone and you're going from 3G, you're going to go to 4G, you're going to go to 5G, we're in those standards, you need to use the technology. You can't say, hey, I'm going to make a 5G phone and not use InterDigital's technology. We are part of the standard. And that lends itself to that subscription model. And it's also a very high leverage model. We have the risk of making significant upfront investment. So $200 million a year in research and portfolio costs. And the money that we invested this last year in 2025, that $200 million will not see a return for five years or more because we're working on 6G. We're working on video codec that isn't even developed into a standard yet. That's the long gestation period between when we do our research and then getting it into the standard and then getting it into product. It takes that long. But then when you're successful, there is a fair reward, and we can reuse that same technology across different – it gets used, you know, the same video technology that's used in smartphones, is used in televisions, is used in other devices, and is used in streaming. So when we kind of port that and license new markets, there's no new cost. We've invented the technology years ago. And therefore, a lot of our revenue, there's one small exception, but most of our revenue is 100% gross margin on an incremental basis. So that's why we've had great revenue growth, top line growth of two times. This is roughly Liren's tenure from 21 to 25. So that's a great top line. But when we look at adjusted EBITDA, three times, so even better because of that operating leverage, we generate a lot of cash. So we buy back a lot of stock, $800 million return of capital over that time period, reduce the share count by 16% over that time period, with over 600 of the 800 being dedicated towards buybacks. So when we look at non-GAAP EPS, four times. So it's two times top line, three times EBITDA, and then because of the buyback, four times on EPS. So as a CFO, this is my favorite chart. um and then uh what one more point on uh the results that we've delivered um they've resulted in in other recognitions so newsweek fortune time all naming us among you know america's greatest companies growing companies growth leaders uh and then forbes recently named us uh for coming into 2026 as the number one uh mid-cap company uh so that's something that we're very proud of So let me take a few minutes to talk about our long-term growth strategy, and then I'd love to answer any questions that anybody has. So our technologies really do benefit the world, the world economy. When you think about the billions of people that rely on their cell phones to connect to one another, When you think about, you know, the trillions of dollars that the mobile ecosystem generates, the millions of jobs it creates, and how it drives the entire global economy, you know, wireless, including cellular, Wi-Fi, and video are certainly, you know, very, very important technologies. technologies. And we take those investments in those technologies and we address three market segments. The first is naturally smartphones. I mentioned before Apple, Samsung, and Xiaomi. In fact, something like 1.2 billion smartphones shipped in 2025. 85% of them were underlicensed to interdigital, okay? That's our penetration in the smartphone space. We have, out of the top 10 smartphone manufacturers, the eight of them under license. The remaining two are Transgen and Huawei. We're presently in a recently filed litigation on Transgen because they're using our technology and we want to get paid, okay? We want a fair rate. We've obligated ourselves to take a fair rate by participating in the standards, But we do want to collect that. And where we have to, we will enforce. On the earlier slide, I mentioned $4.7 billion of total contract value across more than 50 agreements over the last five years. 90-plus percent of those agreements were through bilateral negotiation without need for litigation. So sometimes you'll hear a lot of discussion around litigation. The reality is we're most often able to sign license agreements just through a negotiation, maybe a lengthy negotiation, but a negotiation process. Where we have had to litigate, we've been quite successful. So in smartphone, we're doing really well. You'll see in a moment that we're very close to a goal that we set out, and we're proud of that track record. On consumer electronics, another big and important market, that includes IoT and within IoT auto. So we'll talk in a moment about the size of that. And then the third market is content and cloud services. That's the newest market that we're addressing. So in September of 24, about a year and a half ago, we put out our 2030 plan, our investor day. and that was our goal for $1 billion of ARR by 2030. And at the time, this is an updated chart, so let me go through the billion dollars first. That included $500 million from smartphone. And we said, that's the most mature market for us, so we don't think we need to wait until 2030. Mind you, at the time, we're now at $491. At the time, our ARR from smartphone was 340, okay? So we've, in a year and a half, gone from 340 ARR to 491 as we've grown our penetration from, I think it was roughly half to about 85%. So we're pretty close to that goal. And as we said, you know, we didn't think we'd need to take to 2030. On consumer electronics and IoT, I want to say we're maybe about 40 million when we presented this. We're now up to 90, with a goal of more than doubling it to $200 million by 2030. And then streaming and cloud services, our goal there is $300 million plus. So the $500, $200, and $300 million plus give us our billion dollars plus. On the streaming and cloud services, we're at zero. It doesn't mean that our technology is not being used in that space. it's just that we haven't yet been paid for it. I'll talk a little bit more about that as we get to that slide. So here you see the 85% coverage in the smartphone space, and Huawei, Transgen, HMD is also listed as some of the largest remaining unlicensed players. The dark blue is licensed, Red is litigation, and light blue is the primary unlicensed opportunity. So the gray kind of tells you we think it's pretty realistic to get from 85% to north of 95%. In CE, good momentum, but still a lot of opportunity. About 60% of the PC and tablet market, including Apple, Samsung, LG, Lenovo, HP. OK, Dell, Acer, others remain opportunities in TV. You see LG, TPV, Sony, all licensed. Samsung TV was licensed. They just came off at the end of last year. So we're working on getting them renewed. And then we recently filed litigation against TCL and Hisense. On the auto space, interesting story here. We're part, this is the one area that we operate within a pool. We're part of what's called the Avanzi pool, founding members along with Nokia, Ericsson, Qualcomm, have most of the 4G auto market under license. And that's really where the connected car market is today. You can see in 2025, the vast majority of the connected cars are dark blue, meaning 4G, with only a small amount being 5G. We're going to see some nice unit growth in terms of connected cars as more and more cars become connected. More importantly, a shift in mix from 4G to 5G. OK, if you look, I can't get into confidential rates on a per license or basis. But if you look at Avance's stated rates, it's roughly double for 5G versus 4G. So that's a really important shift in mix there. And if we think about other cellular IoT shipments, strong growth there from 2025 to 2030 is projected. There, it's a little bit more disaggregated across a number of different vendors and across a number of different verticals, sub-verticals, but still a lot of opportunity. And it's really hard to imagine capping where that could go post-2030 as more and more of the world becomes connected. So let's talk for a minute about streaming, and then we can maybe address questions. When I said 300-plus from streaming, we're really setting that goal off of the SVOD and AVOD market. It doesn't really include other markets like global pay TV, video conferencing, cloud gaming, that also use our technology. Not to say they're not opportunities. It's just not in that $300 million. So that's upside or further opportunity. A couple of representative logos. SVOD stands for subscription video on demand. So examples would be Netflix or Disney. AVOD is advertising video on demand. Examples being TikTok and YouTube. You can see that the AVOD market is actually larger, a larger TAM there. 300 growing to $515 billion by 2030, where SVOD is $185 growing to $240. So they're both great markets. They're both very large, both growing very fast. And our technology, we believe, is incredibly important to their delivery of service. Again, getting back to the earlier chart, 1,001 compression is what makes streaming possible. So moving on, close with capital allocation priorities. I mentioned before, we generate a lot of cash. We return a lot of capital. We also keep a lot of cash. We are in litigation right now on streaming with Disney and Amazon. We resolved prior litigations with Lenovo. We, you know, TCL and Hisense are in litigation on TV side. So we're able to take on the largest companies in the world and be successful in demonstrating that we have valid patents that are important technology that they use in their products and services. So we want to make sure we have a strong balance sheet because that helps level the playing field a bit, given that we are a smaller company compared to these behemoths. So that's why we maintain a fortress balance sheet. We have a great business. We want to keep investing in it. So we want to make sure that we keep making that organic investment in the business that we have. Important to know that that billion-dollar goal we think can be achieved with what we have. We don't need to go get anything. We have it. That said, we're looking for inorganic opportunities to continue to grow even in other areas, but only if they make sense. And then after accounting for the first three, we tend to have excess cash, and we try to be good stewards and return that to shareholders. So in addition to the more than $600 million in the share repurchase in the last five years, we had a dividend increase of 56% in 2025. I mentioned the target for 2030, 60% adjusted EBITDA margin, $600 million of adjusted EBITDA off $1 billion. And there could be catch-up revenue above that. So it doesn't mean that $1 billion is necessarily our total revenue. And with that, I'll close by saying we have a world-class leadership team, as I hope I've demonstrated, accelerating momentum, very large addressable markets in terms of our growth opportunity, and we think a clear opportunity to get to ARR of a billion dollars with 600 million adjusted EBITDA by 2030. So with that, I'd be happy to address any questions? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So let me let me say it this way. We believe our technology is very important to streaming for the reasons I said. But, you know, prior to it takes a while. One reason people say, well, why? Why? Why did it take so long? Why aren't you licensed streaming before? We wanted to make sure that we had the right case and could demonstrate the value. So we have a lot of work behind that. But just to be simplistic about it, at a very high level, the smartphone market is roughly a little bit less than half a trillion dollar TAM. The video SVOD and AVOD market today is just larger than that at $485 billion. billion. We're already getting about $500 million from smartphone as a key provider of fundamental technology to the standard that makes a smartphone a smartphone. In the streaming market, we're a key provider of fundamental technology to the standard that makes streaming possible. The streaming market is larger and growing much faster. The $300-plus million goal is 60% plus of the smartphone goal. So at the highest level, that tells me that's a reasonable place to start. Yeah. Let me say it this way. We feel that by 2030, we can penetrate the market enough to get to $300 million or more. Exactly how much that is, we don't have our first license yet, so we understand that we have to demonstrate that, but we feel like that's very possible without getting into specifics around exactly how many customers is that. Other questions? Okay. Well, thank you all for your time. I really appreciate it. Rayford and I love getting out on the road and at these conferences, we appreciate Needham for having us. We think we have a great story to tell, and we appreciate your time in listening. Thank you.