Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Qualcomm Third Quarter Fiscal 2024 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded, July 31, 2024. The playback number for today's call is (877) 660-6853, International callers, please dial (201) 612-7415. The playback reservation number is 13747430. I would now like to turn the call over to Mauricio Lopez-Hodoyan, Vice President of Investor Relations. Mr. Lopez-Hodoyan, please go ahead.

Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. Today's call will include prepared remarks by Cristiano Amon and Akash Palkhiwala. In addition, Alex Rogers will join the question-and-answer session. You can access our earnings release and a slide presentation that accompany this call on our Investor Relations website. In addition, this call is being webcast on qualcomm.com, and a replay will be available on our website later today. During the call today, we will use non-GAAP financial measures as defined in Regulation G, and you can find the related reconciliations to GAAP on our website. We will also make forward-looking statements, including projections and estimates of future events, business or industry trends or business or financial results. Actual events or results could differ materially from those projected in our forward-looking statements. Please refer to our SEC filings, including our most recent 10-K, which contain important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the forward-looking statements. And now to comments from Qualcomm's President and Chief Executive Officer, Cristiano Amon.

Thank you, Mauricio, and good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. In fiscal Q3, we delivered non-GAAP revenues of $9.4 billion and non-GAAP earnings per share of $2.33, which was above the midpoint of our guidance range. Revenues from our chipset business of $8.1 billion reflect a sequential growth in automotive and IoT and continued traction of our Snapdragon mobile platforms across leading smartphones. Our automotive and IoT revenues were the result of ongoing execution of our diversification strategy. Licensing business revenues were $1.3 billion. Now I would like to share some key highlights from the business. In automotive, we secured more than 10 new design wins with global automakers during the quarter. These include next-generation digital cockpit connectivity and/or ADAS and autonomy. Our Snapdragon Digital Chassis continue to scale across virtually all OEMs and is now a key asset for the automotive industry. As we look forward, we're focused on extending our industry-leading on-device AI solutions to the Snapdragon Digital Chassis to enable automotive-centric Gen AI use cases and applications. It's important to note that our architecture with capabilities across all domains is uniquely positioned to enable sensor data to be utilized simultaneously for ADAS autonomy workloads and user-centric Gen AI experiences in the digital cockpit. A great example is our Snapdragon Ride Flex solution, which combines digital cockpit and ADAS on a single SoC. Future drivers for automotive growth include Gen AI experiences the software-defined vehicle transition, central computing replacing microcontrollers, expansion into 2-wheelers and core to cloud services. In handsets, we are pleased that all Galaxy Z Fold6 and Flip6 are powered by the Snapdragon 803 for Galaxy, delivering extraordinary AI capabilities premium level performance and power efficiency for foldable devices. Together with Samsung and our other partners, we continue to push the boundaries of own…

Thank you, Cristiano, and good afternoon, everyone. I'll start with our third fiscal quarter earnings. We are pleased to announce strong non-GAAP results with revenue of $9.4 billion and EPS of $2.33, both of which were above the midpoint of our guidance. QTL revenues of $1.3 billion and EBT margin of 70% were in line with our expectations. QCT delivered revenues of $8.1 billion and EBITDA margin of 27%, which was at the high end of our guidance range, driven by upside in both IoT and automotive. QCT handset revenues of $5.9 billion were in line with expectations, reflecting our scale in premium Android handsets and greater than 50% year-over-year growth in revenues from Chinese OEMs. QCT IoT revenues increased 9% sequentially to $1.4 billion as we continue to see a gradual recovery in the industry environment. We delivered our fourth consecutive quarter of record QCT automotive revenues of $811 million, with sequential growth of 34%. Our revenue acceleration reflects content growth in new vehicle launches as we become the leading supplier of advanced computing and connectivity solutions to the automotive industry. Lastly, we returned $2.3 billion to stockholders during the quarter, including $1.3 billion in stock repurchases and $949 million in dividends. Before turning to guidance, I would like to outline 3 factors included in our forecast. First, Consistent with our long-term financial planning assumption of largely flat handset units, we continue to estimate global 3G/4G 5G units in calendar '24 to be flat to slightly up on a year-over-year basis. Second, our license to export products to Huawei, which was set to expire in late calendar '24 was revoked on May 7. This change will impact our revenues in both the current quarter and the first quarter of fiscal '25. Lastly, our fourth fiscal quarter includes an additional…

Thank you, Akash. Operator, we are now ready for questions.

[Operator Instructions] First question will come from the line of Matt Ramsay with TD Cowen.

I have a couple of questions, guys, really highlighting some of the diversification the company is now starting to deliver on in the revenue. I guess the first one is in the automotive business, some pretty big upside there. And maybe you could talk a little bit about like the -- you're seeing some of this revenue come through now in OEM programs that no doubt you won 2 or 3 years ago. Do you think that continues as we roll through the next several quarters? I mean what kind of momentum could we see as some of these units start to roll out from, I guess, the programs you won a long time back? And then Cristiano on the second one, people keep asking lots of questions about AI PCs. As you know, you're getting really close here to when the holiday ramp period would start for you to sell in units. So maybe you could give us your current take on your expectations of what the PC market could bring in terms of units or revenue for your company as we look forward into the next fiscal year.

Very good. Thank you, Matt. Thanks for asking the questions. Let me start with automotive. Look, we're very pleased with automotive performance. And I want to start by saying this is you continue to see signs of the pipeline translating into revenue. There are a couple of things we really like it. The first one is -- our automotive revenue is all about share of new cars being launched with our content, also is independent whether the industry is about internal combustion or EV because it's all about digital, would be the Snapdragon Digital Chassis really became a key asset for the automotive industry. And just within the quarter, we have not only the launch of 10 new models with our technology, but also we actually have 10 new design wins, which continue to add to the pipeline. So we're very excited about that. We will continue to see as new cars get launched with our technology from the pipeline, the revenue to grow. And as Akash said in the script, we're actually on track to the metric we provided for $4 billion in 2026. One side comment on your question. An upside is what Gen AI is doing in automotive. Gen AI use cases, especially using large language models for audio. It was a great user interface for were behind the wheel. We're starting to see a lot of interesting use case being developed. That upside to our model, it could be an upgrade of content in the digital cockpits that we have in. The second comment which is about PCs. I will start by saying we're very pleased is exceeding our expectations. We -- it's a new version of Windows, the Copilot+ is a new architecture with an ARM compatible. We expect that, that will ramp over a period of time. But what we have seen in the market right now with the 20 models that can launch is exceeding our internal targets. Some models, as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, had sold out. And I think we should expect that, that will continue to be a crescendo, slow and steady as the market transition. We will have new product announcements coming up at EFA, and you're going to continue to see more Copilot+ features coming from Microsoft we're very happy about that as the same thing we did with auto, we expect PC to be the next biggest driver of diversification for the company, and we'll continue to track every quarter.

Our next question is from the line of Samik Chatterjee with JPMorgan.

Congrats on the strong print here. I guess, Cristiano, if I start you off with those smartphone question here related to VI smartphones. One, can you share if you're seeing any depreciable difference in the demand for smartphones with AI features in them from consumers already. And as you look to the pipeline in terms of design wins for next year, how are you thinking about proliferation of the AI features and capabilities into more mid-tier or outside of the flagship to your phones that you work with, with your customers? And I have a follow-up.

Thank you for your question, Samik. So on smartphones, I would start by saying one thing that we really like. And I think it was reflected by some of the metrics provided by Akash he talks about in his remarks, 50% growth within China with Chinese OEMs. So I has expanded the size of the premium tier. So even in a market which it's kind of flattish to low single-digits in growth. The premium tier is actually growing faster. And we've seen that. We're seeing a larger premium tier enabled by AI. And to your specific question, we are happy with the trajectory of AI features. We used to have a few. Now we have tens of AI features. And eventually, when they get to 100, we're going to start to see a change that -- a smartphone with AI feature will become an AI smartphone. We don't have any heroic assumptions in our model, but we actually like the direction this is going that could create an interesting upside if we have an AI-driven upgrade cycle. It's still early in the process, but the use cases are becoming more interesting. I pointed to the increase of use cases in the Galaxy Flip6 and Fold6. China has a number of use cases. They're going to be launched in the next flagship. And I know you asked about bringing AI to the master. We intend to do that. The same thing we're doing with the PC which is as we expand the road map, we're not compromising on AI capabilities. We're going to see us doing that within our mobile road map. But on the premium tier, I'm actually very excited given the upcoming launch of our next Snapdragon that has our custom CPU. And you're going to see the same shift in performance that we have done in the PC ecosystem restoring the performance back to the Windows ecosystem, you're going to see doing us something similar in phones. And AI is going to be a big part of the story.

Got it. And a quick one for Akash. Akash, the guide for September revenues, that looks pretty similar to what you were sort of soft guiding us to back sort of 90 days ago, although you now have incremental headwinds with the license to export to Huawei. How should we think about sort of where you're finding the offsets? Where is the upside to help you offset that incremental headwind?

Yes. Thanks, Samik. Samik, we're pretty happy with the way the quarter has played out, right? If you look at our handset business, we are growing. We are -- we're guiding that will grow low single-digit percentage on a quarter-over-quarter basis. IoT, we're guiding low double-digit growth, and we're seeing strength across industrial edge networking and consumer. And then auto coming off of an extremely strong quarter in June, we're guiding flat revenue in the September quarter. And so all of these, both IoT and automotive are incremental to our previous expectations, and you're seeing that benefit show up in our guidance.

Our next question is from the line of Chris Caso with Wolfe Research.

I guess first question is just a clarification on the extra week in the quarter that you referred to. Can you speak about what impact you might expect it to have on both revenue and cost? And if there's any implications on that the absence of the extra week, as you go into the following quarter, which is obviously a seasonally strong quarter.

Yes. Sure, Chris. If you think about the 2 factors I outlined for the guidance, which is the extra week on one hand and then offset by the Huawei reduction, revenue reduction on the other side. Those 2 largely offset each other. And so the net impact on our overall guidance is pretty limited when you consider the impact of both factors. Specifically on the extra week, as you know, not all weeks are created equal as you think about the different parts of our business. So what we've factored in is incremental revenue on the QCT side, incremental OpEx on the OpEx side. And then within -- sorry, incremental revenue on the QTL side. And then within QCT, revenue forecast and the benefit that we have from a flagship phone launch that doesn't really change based on the number of weeks. So that remains largely consistent and these factors are already included in. But kind of the big message is when you step back and look at the 2 key factors I outlined, they're pretty much canceled out against each other.

Okay. Understood. And then moving over to QTL. The guidance for the fourth quarter is -- it's outside of the range that you have been talking about before. You haven't changed your expectation for global handset units. So can you speak to the reason for the QTL guidance and if that's sustainable going forward because typically, the first quarter is a stronger quarter for that segment.

Yes, sure. So the QTL guidance is relatively straightforward. If you look at June to September, we typically see very small growth on a quarter-over-quarter basis. So we factored that in. And then we have the extra week on top of it as well, which is also factored into our numbers. So that's how we got to the number we're guiding for QTL.

Our next question is from the line of Stacy Rasgon with Bernstein Research.

I want to ask the second half of Chris' question again that you didn't quite get to. The extra week, I should think about the implication for December quarter seasonality coming off of that. What are you guys thinking for December? If you could help us shape that a little bit?

Sure, Stacy. So as you know, well, we typically grow into the first quarter into the December quarter, and we're expecting that it's a seasonally strongest quarter of the year going forward. And as we think about the quarter, there couple of factors we consider. First is the launch of our new Android premium tier chip, which is going to be a tailwind for us. We do go back from the 16 weeks -- 14 weeks back to 13 weeks within the quarter. And then relative to last year, we'll not have Huawei product revenue going forward, which we did have last year. So net of all of this, when you look at a year-over-year basis, we expect revenue to be largely -- revenue growth to be largely consistent with the year-over-year growth we saw in December quarter last year.

Got it. That's helpful. If you could also just give us any sort of incremental color. How much of the guide actually includes how much of the guide is PC revenue at this point for next quarter? I know you said the consumer piece sounds like it's growing in IoT, that's where it is, but how much of it actually is PCs?

Yes. I mean Stacy and all candor, we're a few weeks into our launch. And so it's too early to kind of have either a bullish assumption or a specific assumption on PC. We do have indications from our customers and we've tried our best to factor it in as we usually do. But as Cristiano said, to us, this is about kind of the longer-term growth opportunity and being very specific on sell-through in the short term is not really something that we have insight into. But we will, as we get to Investor Day, we're going to give a lot more disclosure on our specific plans on revenue ramp.

Our next question comes from the line of Joe Moore with Morgan Stanley.

I wanted to come back to the 50% growth in China handset. And it sounds like you talked about growth in the premium tier there. Can you kind of give us a sense of how much of that is price versus units? And is that -- is the market expanding? And then maybe market share commentary because your numbers seem better than your competitor.

Yes. So if you look at the total handset market, our general assumption is that from '23 to '24, it's flat to slightly up. So the market is not growing. But within that, the premium tier, the trend has been very positive. We've gone from greater than $400 representing 21% of the market now to representing 31% of the market. And so that's very significant growth that we are benefiting from. And as you know, we are very strong at the premium tier. And as that market expands, we get to participate in that, not just from a revenue perspective, but content increase perspective as well.

Our next question is from the line of Christopher Rolland with Susquehanna.

I guess in your latest Q, you talked about a bunch of new licenses coming up. I think they expire early fiscal '25, including Huawei. I guess, first of all, the 4G at Huawei would this might affect these negotiations? Do you expect everyone else to sign in those negotiations as well? And then lastly, do we think about Huawei that impact is roughly $150 million a quarter. Is that a fair number on the 4G stuff from Huawei?

Chris, this is Alex. Thanks for the question. So if you look at the licensing progress basically over the last year or so, we set out to execute on a number of renewals and extensions. And we've done actually a really good job doing that. The most recent was getting on or signed up to a long-term agreement. And then, as you know, Apple extended through '27. But we also noted recently that we have 2 major Chinese OEM signed long term. Well, we haven't named them, but they are significant handset manufacturers. And then we're working through negotiations with others that we still have optimistic expectations in terms of getting them signed up. We also recently announced that we signed up tranching to a 5G license, and we're still negotiating with them. There's some litigation ongoing, but I think the important thing is to focus on the 5G license with that company and the ongoing negotiations. So Huawei is a company that we've been engaged with, just like the others in terms of trying to move negotiations forward. We expect that to continue. We don't really have any news on that just yet.

And then from a revenue breakdown perspective, as you know, we don't break down our QTL revenue by OEM, but a reasonable way of thinking about it is look at the scale of the market the number of units, any specific OEM contributes to the scale of the market and apply that to our overall revenue stream.

Our next question is from the line of Ross Seymore with Deutsche Bank.

One question, one follow-up. First one, probably more for Cristiano. I just wanted to see how you feel with your leadership position on both the modem and the apps processor side in your handset business. How do you feel about the relative market share that you'll have in the penetration at given customers? There's kind of perpetual debate about what you're doing with your lead Korean customer, year-to-year, gen-to-gen same thing with your modem only customer. So as you look forward over the next year or 2, how are you feeling about the penetration that Qualcomm can have at the major customers?

All right. Thanks for your question, Ross, loaded question. So I'm going to have to unpack one by one. I think the first part of the question, how do we think about modem technology. We feel pretty good about our modem technology. I think this is one of the core competencies of the company. We continue to be the number 1 company in the country in a number of wireless patents and extended essential patents and continue to be the company pushing for the road map. As it relates to our business with Apple, we still operate with the framework that we provided to you all. I think when we extended the chipset agreement, and we expect to be operating within that. We have no new update to provide it everything above what we said before is an upside. So we don't have that in our financial planning assumptions above what we had disclosure. When we think about the application processor, I think the conversation is a little bit more interesting because we have always said the leadership in AI performance, we always had the leadership and sustained peak and sustained performance in mobile gaming in other applications with our Adreno GPU. And now for the first time in a while, we're going to have our own custom CPU, which will be announced at the Snapdragon Summit and will be in the flagship devices launching towards the end of the year, beginning of 2025. So I will argue that our application processor advantage is accelerating. And as I said in this earnings, I think the launch of the Copilot+ PC was really a graduation for Qualcomm as it used to be perceived as a communications company isn't really a computing company. To the point that now we become the benchmark for others to follow within the PC industry. And I think that is going to be reflected in -- in the handset as well as we have our own custom CPU. As it relates to relationship with Samsung, we have executed agreements with them. It's largely consistent to what you have seen with the launch of the GS24, how is that going to continue. We're pretty happy with the relationship. And I think we both have a lot of opportunity with the AI coming into premium smartphones.

I guess as my follow-up for Akash. One, in the answer to your prior question, you said that your year-over-year growth in December would be about the same as it was last December. Just a clarification. Was that just for QCT? And then I guess my bigger picture question, how should we think about gross margins in QCT going forward? Looks like you're implying them down a bit in the September quarter, but still flat year-over-year. Has the diversification process happens, automotive, PCs, et cetera? How should we think about that line in your income statement?

Sure, Ross. So that comment was really focused on overall company, so not just QCT, but the overall Qualcomm metrics. From a gross margin perspective, we did slightly better than we expected. We had guided in the third quarter. And what we're doing is we're guiding fourth quarter in line with the guidance we had provided for third quarter. I think as you look forward beyond fourth quarter into fiscal '25 using fourth quarter as a way to model the going-forward path is a reasonable way of thinking about it.

Our next question is from the line of Tal Liani with Bank of America.

Can you hear me?

Yes, we can.

Okay. Perfect. Sorry. So I need help to define your addressable market in compute, meaning. Is it mostly about consumer laptops, enterprise? How do you envision your addressable market in the compute segment? And the second thing is you talked a lot about AI, AI inclusion in handsets. When we talk to carriers, they seem to be far away from it in the sense that they can't find the applications yet. What do you -- what do you think is going to drive the deployment? What kind of applications and what's the timing of applications that will drive the deployment of AI in handsets?

Tal, this is Cristiano. Thank you for your question. Let me take the first one. You should think about addressable market the follow way. First of all, it's Windows 11, addressable market. We're very focused right now on laptops, whether it's commercial laptops for enterprise, consumer laptops. We're ranging price points, I think, especially as we talked in the prepared remarks, extending the road map from $700 and above. That's -- and what is defined as AI PC, a metric that I can provide to you. And I think there has been a number of OEMs indicating their respective views, but we forecast about 50% of our computers sold in 2027 will be AI PCs. That's one way to think about it. And we continue to basically see the transition of as upgrades are happening to Windows 11 and Copilot+ PCs, an opportunity for us to participate with a highly differentiated solution. I think your second question...

It was on AI applications.

It was about AI applications for devices. So here's how you should think about it. AI is going to do on phones, whether you're going to text, whether you're going to talk, whether you're going to touch, it's going to be a very important part of the human computer interface. And this is going to start to change a lot of the user experience on apps. It's less of a carrier conversation. It's really more of an application conversation. And those are going to start to change a lot of the use case of existing apps or you're going to start to see as we see the development of new agents that become more relevant. For example, if you are like me, a user of WhatsApp, you're going to see the ability within WhatsApp for you to search with Llama for you to do different things with their model. And eventually, a lot of the models are going to have multiple functionality across multiple apps. The way to measure this is the number of use cases. And we're -- as I said before, we're actually very happy with the trajectory. I'd like to compare what happened with the smartphone. When the smartphone -- first, there were like 10 apps and then became 100 apps and became 1,000 of apps, became hundreds of thousands of apps and then it became very clear what was happening. I think we look at a little bit the same way. We're in the beginning, but we like the number of use cases increasing, and that's going to drive a lot more AI NPU performance in the silicon and hopefully continue to expand the premium and high tier.

Our last question is from Tom O'Malley with Barclays.

I have one for Cristiano and one for Akash. Just very recently here, obviously, in the quarter, there's a huge step-up in the auto portfolio, and I think you guys did a good job of kind of describing what drove that. But you've also, in your deck and kind of in your commentary talking more about AI PC being a driver. Cristiano, if you look at kind of the next 12 months, you hosted an Auto Analyst Day and you kind of talked about the opportunity being back-end loaded, and I think the end date was kind of the late 2020s. But if you look at the next 12 months, what opportunity do you think is more exciting to you the automotive side or the IoT in terms of revenue growth? Obviously, the buckets are different sizes, but just breaking those 2 out as to what can drive some growth there. And then on the Akash side, if you look into Q4, you obviously have an extra week there, but you are seeing OpEx step down. Could you just walk through the moving parts that I would expect it to be up a little bit just given the extra week?

Thank you, Tom. Actually, I appreciate the question. I really like the question to give me an opportunity to explain this. You should think of Qualcomm -- we're not just trying to build one big business of differentiation. Actually, we're building a number of business -- I'm sorry, of diversification. We're really focused on this. And when we talk about Auto Investor Day, that was actually in September 2022, we kind of outline how that is going to be turning into a big platform for Qualcomm and building into the financials. And then hopefully, you can see now, especially with this quarter, that's materializing. And that will continue. That's not going away. We expect -- given the size of our pipeline, we talk about $4 billion in '26. We talk about $9 billion towards the end of the decade. We're on track to do that. But the second one is PCs. And as we get -- it's early. As I said, we're very happy. It's exceeding our expectations. Some models sold out. We just launched. I think when we get to the Investor Day, we probably will feel comfortable putting a metric out there of what that's going to represent and how that's going to grow over time when we think about the total contribution to Qualcomm. That's one they're very excited. But we don't stop there. The next one, and I encourage you to so what we're going to do next quarter, I think AI and computing, it's driving the industrial road map towards Qualcomm. So we we're completely redesigning our industrial road map, and we're going to unveil that road map in the coming months. So we think about this as -- there are many markets that can benefit from technology. We're super focused on growth and diversification and it's about a number of bets, not just one bet.

And Tom, on your second question on OpEx, we had some non-labor material-related spent and tape-out related spend in the third quarter, which is why third quarter OpEx was higher and it goes down into the fourth quarter despite the extra week. And so it's just timing of non-labor spend that drove it. But fundamentally, no change in kind of the way we are managing OpEx. We're very committed to operating discipline and hiring, even when we do it, it is very focused on specific new skills that are required for diversification. So you won't see a difference in the way we are managing the OpEx for the company.

That concludes today's question-and-answer session. Mr. Amon you have anything further to add before adjourning the call?

No, I just want to just quickly thank all of our partners. Our suppliers, our employees for a great job on PC execution. I think we're very proud of what we accomplished. We will continue to drive AI across each one of our businesses. We feel we have a very unique position in the ability to run AI at the edge. We're very happy with the automotive traction, and we're actually looking forward to the next generation of products launching coming months, as I said, hopefully creating a new vector for growth of the company in the future in industrial IoT. Thank you very much.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.