Rafael Sotomayor
Analyst · Bank of America Securities
Thank you, Jeff, and good afternoon. We appreciate you joining us today. Our first quarter performance exceeded expectations with broad-based improvements across all our focus end markets, led by our company-specific growth drivers and importantly, with momentum now visibly broadening into the core of our business. What we're seeing today is the compounding result of sustained investment, disciplined execution and deepening customer adoption across our differentiated portfolio that is increasingly well positioned for the most durable secular trends in semiconductors, software-defined vehicles, physical AI and now with greater visibility than before, data center infrastructure. The remainder of 2026 is set up to be stronger than we anticipated just 90 days ago. Now I want to walk you through the key drivers behind that improvement. Turning to the quarter. We delivered revenue of $3.18 billion, up 12% year-over-year and seasonally down 5% sequentially. All end markets grew year-over-year. And in aggregate, we outperformed by $31 million, above the midpoint of our guidance. Our company-specific strategic growth drivers across the auto and industrial and IoT end markets grew 18% year-over-year year and represented roughly 1/3 of first quarter revenue, 120 basis points above last year and 40 basis points above the midpoint of our guidance. Taken together, we delivered non-GAAP earnings per share of $3.05, $0.08 above the midpoint of our guidance. Now turning to end market performance. In automotive, revenue was $1.78 billion, up 6% year-over-year and in line with expectations. Adjusted for the sales of the MEMS Sensors business, automotive growth was 10% year-over-year. During the quarter, the growth was driven primarily by accelerating customer software-defined vehicle programs, improved electrification trends and continued momentum in radar and connectivity. Together, the auto accelerated growth drivers contributed nearly 90% of the year-over-year growth. From a customer adoption perspective, we're seeing strong design win traction for our S32N and S32K5 products, platforms that will serve as the backbone of our automotive processing franchise for years to come. We also secured new radar awards for imaging radar solutions, along with wins for our 10-gigabit automotive Ethernet products. These are multiyear platform commitments that expand NXP content per vehicle and deepen the structural relationship with our customers. The automotive opportunity is a long-duration compounding story and our progress reinforces that trajectory. In industrial & IoT, revenue was $628 million, up 24% year-over-year and near the high end of our guidance. Growth was driven by our newer industrial processing solutions, including i.MX, RT and MCX. Together, these products grew about 75% year-over-year and contributed nearly half the end market growth versus Q1 2025. Within the end market, industrial was strong with notable strength in factory automation, data centers and energy storage. Looking ahead, the industrial & IoT market is entering a transformative phase as physical AI moves intelligence into real-world systems and robotics. This is creating significant content growth opportunities for NXP, particularly in processing, connectivity and security. As AI is deployed at the edge, customers need greater processing headroom to future-proof their platforms. As a result, we're seeing customers making deeper multigenerational commitments to NXP because of the strength of our AI-enabled product portfolio. Now I want to take a moment to speak directly about our data center exposure because this is an area that we haven't previously emphasized. In 2025, revenue related to data center applications was about $200 million, and it was reflected evenly in both our industrial & IoT and communication infrastructure end markets. Based on our other programs now ramping, we believe this business will be north of $500 million this year with a similar end market split. We have established meaningful positions in system cooling, power supply, board management and control plane switching applications. Across these subsystems, customers choose NXP for our processing depth and security capabilities. Based on customer engagements, we are reinforcing our i.MX application processor family for this opportunity, creating a durable and expanding revenue presence in data centers. With communications infrastructure, revenue was $380 million, up 21% year-on-year and at the high end of our guidance. Growth was driven by digital networking exposure to data center and continued ramps of our UCODE RFID product. And lastly, mobile revenue was $391 million, up 16% year-over-year and in line with guidance, reflecting continued strength in our secure mobile transactions franchise. Now turning to the second quarter. Our outlook is better than we anticipated 90 days ago. We are guiding second quarter revenue to $3.45 billion, up 18% year-over-year and up 8% sequentially. This sequential growth represents an acceleration of our company-specific drivers. We expect all regions and all end markets to be up year-on-year, a reflection of expanded customer adoption of our differentiated portfolio. At the midpoint, we expect the following trends in our business during Q2. Automotive is expected to be up in the low double-digit percent range year-on-year and up in the high single-digit range sequentially. Adjusted for the sales of the MEMS Sensors business, our guidance implies a high teens percentage growth year-over-year and 10% sequentially. Industrial & IoT is expected to be up in the high 30% range year-over-year and up in the high teens range sequentially, continuing the acceleration we saw in Q1. Mobile is expected to be up in the low single-digit percent range year-over-year and down in the low double-digit percent range on a sequential basis. And finally, communications infrastructure and other is expected to be up in the mid-30% range versus Q2 2025 and up in the mid-teens percent range versus Q1 2026. In summary, our second quarter outlook and our growth trajectory in 2026 reflect the story of breadth, depth and acceleration. Our company-specific growth drivers are performing as designed. Our core business is inflecting. And today, we have made the growth of our data center revenue transparent to support your understanding of our exposure to this important market. Data center revenue is ramping now, and it will more than double in 2026 from a year ago. We remain disciplined in how we invest, how we allocate capital and how we manage the factors we can control. Our framework is unchanged: invest for growth, pursue targeted M&A to strengthen the portfolio and return excess cash through dividends and buybacks, consistent with our long-term model. And now, I would like to pass the call to Bill for a review of our financial performance.