Sam Franklin
Analyst · JPMorgan
Thank you, Tim. For the remainder of the call, including guidance other than revenue cash flow and net interest income, I will reference non-IFRS metrics. GF delivered strong results in the first quarter, with revenue in the high end of the guidance range and gross margin and operating margin well above the high end of the ranges. In particular, our gross margin achieved the first quarter record and grew over 500 basis points year-over-year, representing the biggest expansion in 3 years. This is testament to our team's execution and relentless focus on the structural levers driving GF sustained improvement in profitability, and we believe we're only in the early stages of this margin expansion opportunity. Before I go deeper into the financials, I'd like to take a moment to update you on some terminology changes to our revenue categorization. The acquisition of MIPS, closed in August 2025, as well as the announced acquisition of the Synopsys ARC, our key business, which we expect to close towards the end of the first half of 2026, are both helping to transform GF into a holistic technology solutions provider. As a result, we believe that non-wafer revenue no longer captures the broader reach of our customer offerings, which we expect to include an increasing proportion of revenue from IP, licensing and software over time. Similarly, wafer revenue is evolving to capture our expanding manufacturing capabilities in custom silicon and advanced packaging, which we look forward to covering in more detail at our Investor Day on May 7. As a result, revenue previously referred to as wafer revenue will now be categorized as revenue from manufacturing services, and non-wafer revenue will now be categorized as revenue from technology services. We believe these categories better reflect the depth and breadth of our business model today and going forward. Now on to the results. We delivered first quarter revenue of $1.634 billion, down 11% sequentially and up 3.1% year-over-year. We shipped approximately 579 300-millimeter equivalent wafers in the quarter, down 6% sequentially and up 7% from the prior year period. Revenue from manufacturing services accounted for approximately 87% of total revenue. Revenue from Technology Services, which includes revenue from IP, licensing, software, reticles, nonrecurring engineering, expedite fees and other items, accounted for approximately 13% of total revenue for the first quarter. Revenue upside in the quarter for Technology Services was driven by increased mask and reticles as we ramp customer tape-outs as well as consistent momentum from within IP licensing and software as we integrate the acquisition of MIPS. As the momentum and engagements with customers grow, we expect MIPS to contribute a greater proportion of our technology services revenue going forward at an accretive gross margin to our corporate objectives. All of these factors considered, we expect revenue from Technology Services to comprise a greater proportion of our total 2026 revenue, closer to the high end of our original 10% to 12% range. Our early traction here adds to our belief that the Technology Services portion of our business will be an important long-term driver of durable, high-quality, high-margin growth. Let me now provide an update on our revenue and outlook by end markets. Communications infrastructure and data center represented approximately 14% of first quarter total revenue and increased 2% sequentially and 32% year-over-year. This marked the sixth consecutive quarter of double-digit percentage year-over-year growth for communications infrastructure and data center. Within this end market, silicon photonics drove robust growth in the first quarter and remains on track to roughly double in 2026 compared to 2025. In line with our expectations, we saw a healthy revenue contribution from Advanced Micro Foundry, which GF acquired in November of last year. The integration is progressing well as we expand our photonics capabilities at the Jeff Science Park. Combining GF's significant scale in Singapore with AMF's complementary customer base and pluggable photonics solutions for scale across networks has expanded our customer momentum in this rapidly growing market. This acquisition is already gross margin accretive to GF, and we expect to realize even greater growth and profitability tailwinds in the coming years. For these reasons, we now expect to achieve high 30s percent year-over-year revenue growth in our communications infrastructure and data center end market in 2026, up from our expectations a quarter ago of approximately 30% year-over-year growth. Automotive represented approximately 23% of first quarter total revenue. Automotive revenue decreased 11% sequentially off a strong fourth quarter and increased 24% year-over-year. In addition to our strong customer share in automotive microcontrollers, we are in the early stage of revenue ramps as a result of our accumulated design wins in smart sensors and networking as well as vehicle infrastructure. We are continuing to diversify our offerings to the automotive end market by ramping newly secured sockets in applications such as camera, ethernet, radar and power. It is our differentiated technology and disciplined execution that we believe is enabling GF to capture the growing automotive semiconductor content opportunity and outperform peers in this end market. As a result, we expect Automotive revenue to deliver low double-digit growth in 2026. Its sixth consecutive year of double-digit percentage growth. Smart mobile devices represented approximately 34% of first quarter total revenue and declined 15% sequentially and 5% from the prior year period. Current industry forecasts for overall smartphone units in 2026 indicate a low double-digit percentage year-over-year decline. With approximately 2/3 of our revenue in this end market driven by premium handsets, we expect to see a more contained impact from memory pricing dynamics compared to the broader industry. As such, we expect revenue from smart mobile devices in 2026 to slightly outperform the overall smartphone market, with an expected decline in the high single-digits percentage. Beyond the near-term dynamics, we expect smart mobile devices to gradually benefit from the growth of new AI-powered form factors, such as smart glasses, hearables and wearables where we have nascent growing traction and design wins with our customers. Finally, home and industrial IoT represented approximately 16% of first quarter total revenue and decreased 16% sequentially and 22% year-over-year. The decline in revenue from this end market in the first quarter was principally driven by the timing of certain customer shipments, a temporary impact, which we expect to reverse in the second quarter. Importantly, we continue to expect 2026 to be a growth year for IoT, driven by the normalization of core industrial customer inventory as well as the production ramp of new applications in the second half of 2026, which we believe should contribute to a healthy growth of mid-single-digit percentage year-over-year. Beyond 2026, we expect this end market to be one of the primary beneficiaries of the burgeoning physical AI revolution and serviceable addressable market expansion, where our technology platforms and solutions are well suited to enable devices to sense, think, act and communicate. In summary, we believe GF's strong secular growth drivers, including meaningful upside from our recent acquisitions will help offset smart mobile devices in 2026. As continued growth across the other end markets we serve, expand as a percentage of revenue. These strategic actions are also intended to accelerate our targeted mix shift towards margin accretive high-value growth markets and applications. We believe the result over time will be a more durable, more resilient, more profitable business. In the first quarter, we delivered gross profit of $474 million, which translates into approximately 29% gross margin, above the high end of the guidance range and up 510 basis points year-over-year. First quarter saw the largest year-over-year expansion of gross margin in over 3 years. R&D for the quarter was $114 million, and SG&A was $89 million. Total operating expenses of $203 million, were up 4% quarter-over-quarter and represented approximately 12% of total revenue. We delivered operating profit of $271 million for the quarter and an operating margin of 16.6%, above the high end of our guided range and up 320 basis points from the prior year period. First quarter net interest income, net of other expenses, was $5 million, and we incurred tax expense of $49 million in the quarter. We delivered first quarter net income of approximately $227 million, an increase of approximately $38 million from the prior year period. Diluted earnings of $0.40 per share was at the high end of the guidance range based on a free diluted share count of approximately 561 million shares. Let me now provide some key cash flow and balance sheet metrics. Cash flow from operations for the first quarter was $542 million. First quarter CapEx net of proceeds from government grants was $309 million, or roughly 19% of revenue. Adjusted free cash flow for the quarter was $233 million, which represented an adjusted free cash flow margin of approximately 14% in the quarter. This outcome was principally driven by favorable working capital movements in the first quarter, which we expect to reverse in the second quarter. At the end of the first quarter, our combined total of cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities, stood at approximately $3.8 billion. Our total debt was $1.1 billion, and we also have a $1 billion revolving credit facility, which remains undrawn. In the first quarter of 2026, we repurchased $400 million of shares of the $500 million share repurchase authorization approved by our Board of Directors, approximately $100 million remains, and we remain flexible with the deployment of the remaining authorized amount. Capital allocation, planning and decisions remain tightly linked to visibility, returns and balance sheet resilience. As we move through 2026, our focus remains consistent, disciplined capacity investments structurally improving margins and cash generation aligned with returns. We will continue to drive momentum in areas that we can control and deliberate in how we allocate capital. Next, let me provide you with our outlook for the second quarter of 2026. We expect total GF revenue to be $1.76 billion, plus or minus $25 million. We expect gross margin to be approximately 28.5%, plus or minus 100 basis points, which at the midpoint reflects over 300 basis points of year-over-year gross margin expansion. Excluding share-based compensation, we expect total operating expenses to be $225 million, plus or minus $10 million. We are ramping R&D programs in the second half of 2026 to strengthen our technology differentiation and accelerate our road map in secular growth areas, such as custom silicon, silicon photonics and advanced packaging. Taking into account these investments into R&D and the expected close of the Synopsys ARC IP business acquisition towards the end of the first half of 2026, we expect to maintain a similar quarterly operating expense run rate in the second half of 2026, as indicated in our second quarter guidance. We expect operating margin to be in the range of 15.7%, plus or minus 180 basis points. At the midpoint of our guidance, we expect share-based compensation to be approximately $71 million, of which roughly $19 million is related to cost of goods sold. We expect net interest and other for the quarter to be between negative $6 million and $2 million and income tax expense to be between $28 million and $48 million. Based on the tax environments across the jurisdictions we operate in, we continue to expect an effective tax rate in the high teens percentage range for the full year of 2026. Based on a fully diluted share count of approximately 555 million shares, we expect diluted earnings per share for the first quarter to be $0.43, plus or minus $0.05. Given the timing of tool delivery windows in order to meet forecast customer demand in critical growth corridors as well as the timing of government grants, we expect net CapEx to increase in the second quarter. For the full year 2026, we continue to expect non-IFRS net CapEx to be in the range of 15% to 20% of revenue. Our CapEx strategy continues to align the sizing and timing of our investments with customer demand while scaling our footprint efficiently. Over the last few years, we have seen notable increases in customer demand for incremental capacity in high-growth technology corridors such as silicon photonics, FDX and high-performance SiGe. In order to unlock sustainable accretive revenue growth, we are expanding capacity in these areas to support the strong demand signals from our customers. Critically, these targeted CapEx investments are supported by robust partnerships with both customers and governments. As a result, we expect that the next wave of capacity investments will be accompanied by customer prepayments in addition to meaningful government grant and tax incentive frameworks in all of the geographies we serve. Even with greater investment in enabling capacity in these key growth technology corridors, we continue to expect adjusted free cash flow margin of approximately 10% for the full year 2026 with a skew towards the second half. In summary, I'm grateful for our team's excellent execution this quarter and the strong progress we are making towards our long-term strategic objectives, which are reflected in our financial performance. We believe GF is at a definitive inflection point where years of preparation have positioned us well to capitalize on the secular megatrends defining our industry, and we very much look forward to sharing more details with you all at our Investor Day on May 7. With that, let's open the call to Q&A. Operator?