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Cirrus Logic, Inc. (CRUS)

Q2 2026 Earnings Call· Tue, Nov 4, 2025

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Cirrus Logic Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2026 Financial Results Q&A Session. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded for replay purposes. I would now like to turn the conference call over to Ms. Chelsea Heffernan, Vice President of Investor Relations. Ms. Heffernan, you may begin.

Chelsea Heffernan

Analyst

Thank you, and good afternoon. Joining me on today's call is John Forsyth, Cirrus Logic's Chief Executive Officer; and Jeff Woolard, our Chief Financial Officer. Today, at approximately 4:00 p.m. Eastern Time, we announced our financial results for the second quarter of fiscal '26. The shareholder letter discussing our financial results, the earnings press release and the webcast of this Q&A session are all available at the company's Investor Relations website. This call will feature questions from the analysts covering our company. Additionally, the results and guidance we will discuss on this call will include non-GAAP financial measures that exclude certain items. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to their most directly comparable GAAP measures are included in our earnings release and are all available on the company's Investor Relations website. Please note that during this session, we may make projections and other forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from projections. By providing this information, the company expressly disclaims any obligation to update or revise any projections or forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new developments or otherwise. Please refer to the press release and shareholder letter issued today, which are available on the Cirrus Logic website and the latest Form 10-K as well as other corporate filings registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission for additional discussion of risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from current expectations. Now I'd like to turn the call over to John.

John Forsyth

Analyst

Thank you, Chelsea, and welcome to everyone joining today's call. As you've seen in the press release, Cirrus Logic delivered record September quarter revenue of $561 million, towards the top end of our guidance range driven by demand for components shipping into smartphones. In a few moments, I'll hand the call over to Jeff to discuss the financial results for the September quarter in detail, along with our outlook for the December quarter. Before we get to that, I'd like to make a few comments about the recent progress we have been making across key areas of our business. As we have outlined previously, our long-term strategy for growth at Cirrus is based around 3 principles. First, we seek to maintain a strong leadership position in our core flagship smartphone audio business. Second, we aim to expand the value and range of high-performance mixed-signal solutions with which we serve our customers in smartphones and similar products. And third, we aim to leverage our world-class expertise and IP in both audio and high-performance mixed signal to grow and broaden our business in new markets. I want to say a few words now about the progress we've made in the past quarter in each of these areas. In our flagship smartphone audio business, during the quarter, we experienced strong demand for our latest generation custom-boosted amplifier and first 22-nanometer smart codec. These products introduced in the fall last year, represent years of engineering effort and a deep and collaborative relationship with our customer. We are proud of the crucial role they play in enhancing the power efficiency and exceptional audio quality of our customers' latest products. I think it is also worth highlighting a characteristic of this area of our business that isn't always apparent to those outside of the company. While…

Jeffrey Woolard

Analyst

Thank you, John. Good afternoon, everyone. I'll now walk through our Q2 financial performance and provide guidance for Q3, including tax updates. In Q2 fiscal 2026, we delivered revenue of $561 million, which was toward the top end of our guidance range, driven by demand for components shipping into smartphones. On a sequential basis, revenue was up 38% due to higher smartphone unit volumes. On a year-over-year basis, sales were up 4%, primarily driven by higher smartphone unit volumes and sales associated with our latest generation products. Turning to gross profit and gross margin. Non-GAAP gross profit in the September quarter was $294.7 million and non-GAAP gross margin was 52.5%. On a year-over-year basis, the increase in gross margin was largely due to a more favorable product mix. This was partially offset by higher inventory reserves. Now I'll turn to operating expenses. Our non-GAAP operating expense for the second quarter was $127.7 million, coming in below the low end of our guidance range. This was due to lower product development costs, mostly driven by shifts in project time lines. Employee-related expenses were also lower than expected. On a sequential basis, OpEx was up $8.2 million, primarily due to higher variable compensation, product development costs, mostly due to tape-outs and facilities-related costs. This was partially offset by a reduction in employee-related expenses. On a year-over-year basis, operating expense was up $0.9 million, primarily due to an increase in employee-related expenses, which are mostly related to annual merit increases. This was partially offset by lower product development costs. Non-GAAP operating income for the quarter was $167 million or 29.8% of revenue. Turning now to taxes. During Q2, we recorded the favorable tax impact of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which reinstated immediate expensing of domestic R&D. This change was retroactive to…

Chelsea Heffernan

Analyst

Thanks, Jeff. We will now start the Q&A portion of the call. Operator, we are now ready to take questions.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Tore Svanberg with Stifel.

Tore Svanberg

Analyst

Congratulations on the results. I know you can't obviously talk specifically about your largest customers' business. But this year has been quite unusual from a seasonality perspective. So I was just wondering if you could share any thoughts with us on seasonality going forward. I mean, 2026 potentially be sort of back to normal? Again, anything you could share with us would be really helpful.

Jeffrey Woolard

Analyst

Yes, Tore, this is Jeff. I think if you recall, we talked about last quarter, a change in the seasonality shape of our business, primarily driven by the camera content becoming a bigger portion of the total revenue, which shifts a little earlier as well as, as we talked about some pull-ins at the last quarter call. I think if you look at our results this quarter and our guidance for next quarter, that story remains the same that the shape is a little bit pushed into the first half versus what has been traditionally, and that's driven by just camera content being a greater piece. While we did give some insight last quarter, our view for the year because we thought it was important for everyone to understand that change. That has played out between our results and our guidance. And at this point, we are only giving guidance for the next quarter, but we don't see anything from here out that would change historically what that seasonality looks like for the rest of the fiscal year.

Tore Svanberg

Analyst

Great. That's very helpful. And as my follow-up for you, John, in the shareholder letter, you stated again, there's potential opportunities on the power/battery side in the smartphone market. Any updates there? Again, I know you can't talk about specific design wins, but clearly, battery management is becoming quite crucial for next-generation smartphones. So any updates there would be helpful.

John Forsyth

Analyst

Yes, that continues to be an area that we're excited about. And as you know, we've been investing in for some time. We do think that we have some really compelling IP in that space. And I think we've seen some validation of that from the comments reflected back to us from customers when we've been sharing silicon with them and details on what we've been developing. We've got a number of irons in the fire there. And as you alluded to, the majority of those are related to those areas around the battery where we think we can make a difference to power efficiency as a whole to system performance as batteries go through their life cycle, both on a daily basis and a long-term basis and to battery health, long term as well. So we don't have anything to say today concretely about design wins and how that's going to get commercialized, but we continue to believe that we've got some very valuable IP, and we are obviously itching to get that out into the market.

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from David Williams with The Benchmark Company.

David Williams

Analyst · The Benchmark Company.

Maybe first just on the OpEx side, you kind of mentioned that it was lower in this quarter for some pushouts. And it looks like some of that's kind of coming into the third quarter. Is it fair to assume that all of the OpEx expected in the second quarter is pushed into that third quarter? Or is there anything else maybe funny going on that we should be thinking about there?

Jeffrey Woolard

Analyst · The Benchmark Company.

No, I think that's a reasonable take. We are pretty disciplined in our OpEx. And what we saw, we did obviously come in below the guide and some of that was just delays in our spending, not necessarily delays in execution. So that product development cost can be a little lumpy. It's not a miss because it wasn't low because of execution. Some expenses that we had planned, we were just actually able to avoid. And so that came also drove our results, OpEx results being below guide. So a lot of that is just a timing issue. So we will continue to stay disciplined on that. But that being said, it was a push. But if we see other opportunities that we think have. We have high confidence in to create value, we will be comfortable increasing that in the future.

David Williams

Analyst · The Benchmark Company.

Okay. Good. And then maybe just on the non-flagship customer, your largest customer revenue, that contribution in the quarter was maybe a little bit lower than we had anticipated. But just trying to get a sense of the progress in the general markets and in that computing space, how we should think about that revenue trending maybe through this year? And just generally, what that growth trajectory should look like outside of your largest customer?

John Forsyth

Analyst · The Benchmark Company.

Yes. I think on the picture for this quarter, in particular, there are a number of things going on there. And I think the softness in the Android space is certainly part of it, and that's been widely reported. We don't invest a huge amount in Android as a strategic business area for us, but it still remains a valuable contributor. So to some extent, we saw some impact from that. And then when we look to the rest of our general market business, certainly, the biggest kind of growth area that we see there right now is the PC, as you alluded to. And we're continuing to track the way we expected there or broadly in line with that. We're still kind of early in the ramp for that as regards the business it can become for us in the future. But we've passed a number of really, really excellent milestones this year and then in this past quarter as well, which kind of indicate the great progress we're making there, and we continue to be very excited about what's going on in the PC space. I think one of the things we called out in the shareholder letter that's a particular highlight is the win in mainstream consumer laptop because those mainstream devices, as I've highlighted previously, they really deliver so many more units than the devices in the flagship and premium tiers. And so a big part of our objective is to penetrate down through the tiers and be well penetrated in both the commercial and the consumer mainstream segment and then obviously expand to as much content in those devices as we can get. This year, earlier in the year, we reported that we won our first mainstream commercial laptop and then we've now added to that with success in the consumer space. So I think that proves we can do it, and that's going to be one of multiple drivers that help us continue to accelerate in the PC space.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Christopher Rolland with Susquehanna.

Dylan Ollivier

Analyst · Susquehanna.

This is Dylan Ollivier on for Chris Rolland. So for my first question, so last quarter, you said that you didn't have any material changes to your smartphone unit outlook for the year despite your better results. Would you now have any changes to your unit outlook? Or are units still tracking in line?

Jeffrey Woolard

Analyst · Susquehanna.

Yes. I'm going to stick with sort of that previous answer of -- we obviously had a good quarter here driven by smartphone units, and we explained the shape between the last quarter -- last 2 quarters. And we're only guiding for the next quarter, but we see -- at this point, we think seasonality looks like it historically has. We don't see anything to change our view on the upcoming seasonality.

Dylan Ollivier

Analyst · Susquehanna.

Great. So secondly, I'd love to hear more about these new products that you talked about that you're developing for AI PCs. So does this expand your SAM? And when can we expect revenue here? Are you getting a lot of initial interest from customers?

John Forsyth

Analyst · Susquehanna.

Yes. Actually, that's an area which I think has become much more significant in our modeling of our PC SAM more recently rather than -- or at least compared to when we set off down the road of getting into the PC market. The interest across our customer base in voice-related features is really pretty significant as a major enabler for AI. So I mean, I think if you step back just for a second to look at all the drivers, which are currently kind of accelerating our momentum in the PC space. There's one I alluded to in the previous answer, which is just our penetration down through product tiers to get into higher volume segments. There's another factor which we alluded to in the shareholder letter, which is the propagation of the SoundWire device class audio interface and standard. So we're seeing that increasingly propagate across designs that generally is something that's favorable to us, and that's something that we've designed to and that we can deliver a lot of features around. Then as we also mentioned in the prepared remarks, we've also been expanding our support across multiple PC platform vendors. So again, that's kind of expanding our reach and the number of devices that our products can get into and the number of reference designs that enable our customers to pick up our silicon and create products around very rapidly. And then the fourth of these drivers would really be the voice features that we see coming over the horizon. And that's been a more recent topic of conversation with OEMs, but it's a significant one, and it's one where our IP is really best-in-class. We're able to provide significantly better voice and audio capture, noise reduction, voice cleanup, voice detection, speaker detection and so on. And then you combine that with our low-power codec technologies, we can enable features like waking up the entire system, being able to speak to the system even when it's in an ultra-low power standby state and so on. So this is -- I mean, this is all part of the SAM that we model out in the investor presentation out into the future that we think can continue to be really significant for us in the PC space. But I think given where we're at and the IP we have in the voice area, in particular, I would expect us to really benefit from that. Specifically in the last quarter, we started sampling the first device specifically focused on enabling those features to customers. So it will be a while before those start showing up in end products, but we have a great road map around those features in particular.

Chelsea Heffernan

Analyst · Susquehanna.

Thanks, Dylan. And with that, we will end the Q&A session. I will now turn the call back to John for his final remarks.

John Forsyth

Analyst · Susquehanna.

Thank you, Chelsea. In summary, Cirrus Logic delivered record revenue for the September quarter while also continuing to make excellent progress on each pillar of our long-term strategy. I'd like to extend my appreciation to all of our employees worldwide for the hard work and commitment to excellence that has delivered these results. And I'd like to thank our customers for their trust and support. We're excited about the opportunities ahead for Cirrus, and we thank you for your continued interest in the company. Before we close, I'd also like to note that we will be participating in the Barclays Global Technology Conference on December 11. Please check our investor website for the details. Thank you, everyone, for participating in our call today. Goodbye.

Operator

Operator

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect.