Fermi Wang
Analyst · Stifel. Your line is open
Thank you, Luisa. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining our call today. Before we proceed, I want to let you know that last call, our co-founder and CTO, will be stepping down from the board of directors to become our chief technology adviser. He will continue to oversee our technology direction and development but without management responsibilities, and with user time commitments. Les and I have worked closely since 1994 across four companies. I am grateful that Les will continue as my close partner for over thirty-one years and beyond. He is truly the best I could wish for. I am happy he will have more time to pursue his passions, but I will definitely miss our daily conversations on various topics. Turning to our fiscal third quarter, we are reporting another strong quarter with both revenue and non-GAAP EPS exceeding expectations. We achieved record quarterly revenue of $108.5 million, slightly above the high end of our guidance range. Edge AI, which we define as a product that integrates one of our proprietary deep learning AI accelerators, was about 80% of our total revenue, representing our sixth consecutive quarter of record Edge AI revenue. We have increased our fiscal 2026 revenue guidance, which projects an all-time fiscal year total revenue record for Ambarella. With the strength in our average selling price and the breadth of demand, we are raising our fiscal 2026 revenue growth guidance to a range of 36% to 38%, or approximately $390 million at midpoint. This compares with our prior estimate provided on August 28 for 31% to 35% year-over-year growth, or approximately $379 million at midpoint. These results are very encouraging, but I am even more excited about the Edge AI activity ahead of us. There are three key factors behind our enthusiasm and our strong commitment to Edge AI. First, the breadth of applications demanding Edge AI technology in our product is expanding. Second, the AI performance requirement for our product roadmap is expected to continue to rise, driving robust new product cycles. Third, our ASP has been increasing, and in the long run, we continue to see an excellent opportunity to capture more value per design. I will elaborate on those points. First, AI at the edge is becoming more prevalent, driving an increasing breadth of applications in both enterprise and consumer-driven parts. Our Edge AI business started in enterprise security, followed by automotive safety, smart home, and telematics. More recently, the portable video market, which includes action cameras, panorama cameras, and body-worn cameras. Looking ahead, high-value shipments into the aerial drone market are expected to commence this quarter, representing just the beginning of our realization of the large robotic market opportunity. There is also strong interest from existing and new customers in our Edge infrastructure part and roadmaps, and we are committed to developing this incremental opportunity. In addition, ADAS and the vehicle economy remain large markets that can leverage our technology to a very high degree. Second, we see a large opportunity to execute at the edge with increasingly complex AI technologies currently implemented at the core of the network or in the data center. The challenge and our opportunity is that the solutions used in the network are often not suitable for the edge. With edge performance requirements rising, in each market, low power consumption, real-time processing, privacy, security, small form factors, thermal, network bandwidth efficiency, and lower price points are critical. At Ambarella, we continue to invest heavily in our proprietary Edge AI SoC technology and products to support these unique and increasing AI requirements. For example, our 10-nanometer CV2 family supports CNN networks, and our 5-nanometer embedding our third-generation AI processors is scaling our customers into more complex CNN and generative AI applications simultaneously. Third, we see an excellent opportunity to continue to increase our ASP. The shift from CPU workload to high-level over-accelerated computing or AI is well underway. The adoption of increasingly complex data center technology for the edge is another driver. Finally, the extension of our roadmap to other edge endpoints and into the edge infrastructure and auto economy is also expected, in particular, to boost our ASP. For example, our SoC branded ASP in Q3 was up about 20% year-over-year, and as our third-generation AI SoCs and other new products become a more material portion of our revenue, we anticipate further increases in the value we earn per design wins. I will now describe some of the representative customer engagements that reflect the factors I just described. In the enterprise security market, we are very pleased to share a significant milestone with our customer, Sparsh, who became India's first security camera manufacturer to receive STQC certification for its complete range. At the heart of the collaboration is our CV28. This gives us a tremendous start to accelerate our adoption in a rapidly growing "Made in India" market. Infinity, spun out of Bosch, announced their Autodome 7100i moving PTZ camera with built-in AI analytics and Ultra HD image based on CV72. They have also announced their diamond thermal security camera is based on CV22. It runs their CNN models to detect and classify objects accurately up to 2,000 feet. WCADA announced their upcoming CV75-based AM64 Access Station Pro, which enables secure physical access with AI facial recognition, touchless face unlock alongside traditional badge and mobile access methods. The company also launched a new CR63E remote security camera that leverages the power efficiency of our CV75. They also expect the CV72-based multi-sensor security camera product line, including CH53, CH63, and CY63. Motorola has developed their additional Halo 4 smart sensor on our CV25, which is an all-in-one environmental monitoring and security device that is designed for areas where cameras are restricted to detect events like smoke, fire, and audio anomalies. In the robotic and smart home market, one of our customers, Whiskers, announced the Litter-Robot 5 Pro, their first model with facial recognition and 4K night vision clip AI-powered camera based on CV28. We are seeing great momentum in our portable video market with Arash, who released two models this quarter. The X4 AIR, at just $165, is a new lightest compact 8K 360 action camera based on CV5. It is the first in a range to support 8K 30 frames per second active HDR. Arash also launched the latest version of their body-worn camera, Go Ultra, based on CV52. It captures 4K 60 frames per second video and a 50-megapixel photo with improved performance in low-light environments. In our automotive safety, ADAS, and telematics business, I would like to share some key customer wins during the quarter. Zika, a unit of GD, has evolved their in-cabin DVR system CV28 for the NIO ES8 full-size luxury model. Xiaopeng expands their global market presence. They have built all their driver management systems for all their export models on CV28. Solara, a global leader of vehicle lifecycle management, announced their new AI-powered smart camera, October, based on our CV22. In a first for Solara, the ASR5 is powered by AI plus human input intelligence, a revolutionary approach in fleet analytics that combines AI-based analysis with human oversight to improve safety, efficiency, and operations. From these representative customer engagements I just described, the strength of our current product portfolio is clearly represented. With every example from the 10-nanometer CV2 family and seven examples from our 5-nanometer generation, these products, all available today, offer customers a wide variety of options ranging from CNN to transformer network processing, one to many sensor input support, multiple sensing modalities, all at a wide range of price points. Our new product roadmap will expand this portfolio further. In addition to our comprehensive and expanding AI SoC portfolio, another important distinguishing characteristic of our portfolio is the advanced technology we offer to customers at the edge. For example, 5-nanometer-based products represent more than 45% of our total Q3 revenue, with products based on more advanced nodes in development. In summary, the first three quarters of fiscal 2026 are steps in the right direction with strong revenue growth, new product execution, profitability, and with our cumulative year-to-date free cash flow almost 14.8%. We continue to have a large edge serviceable available market over $12.9 billion by fiscal year 2031. In the early innings, we recognize the TAM market is still developing, and to successfully address this large set, we remain highly committed to our R&D investment that enables us to build upon our existing leadership position. I hope to see you on January 6 at our CES 2026 product and technology briefing, which will give you a chance to learn about new technologies and products and meet a full set of our management team. With that, John will now discuss the Q3 results and the Q4 outlook.