Ambarella - Q4 2026
February 26, 2026
Transcript
Fermi Wang (President and CEO)
Time starting to emerge on our SoCs. In other IoT applications, we were awarded several projects in the video conference market this quarter. Insta360 launched their Link 2 Pro and Link 2C Pro high-end web camera base on our H22 SoC. The QSC, a cloud native audio video and control ecosystem company based in California, announced their Q-Sys high-definition video conferencing PTZ camera designed on our CV72 SoC.
They are leveraging our AI ISP for enhanced video quality and use AI for face detection and intelligent pre-presenter tracking. In enterprise security, IDIS, a leading security technology customer, announced their DC-D3168 security camera based on our CV72 SoC. Our customer, Dallmeier, based in Germany, launched their Domera RDF6140 dome camera based on CV25 this quarter. They leverage our AI accelerator to offer several AI features like motion detection, tamper detection, intrusion detection, and the line crossing.
Finally, one of our leading customers, IQSIGHT, previously known as Bosch, announced two new AI products, both based on CV72. The FLEXIDOME 7100i anonymize the image inside the camera for enhanced privacy and the compliance. The DINION 7100i detects people and the vehicle accurately with maximum detail in dark, low light conditions. In our automotive safety ADAS and telematic business, I would like to share some key customer wins during the quarter. Ford recently launched the DealerFit Truck Bed Camera last quarter. It's a smart security camera for the truck bed, built on our CV25. It provides real-time truck bed monitoring leveraging AI-powered intrusion monitoring and threat detection. Thinkware in South Korea launched their QXD2 in-car digital video recorder system, which is the first of the kind to leverage our AI ISP neural network on our CV25 SoC.
Thinkware also use Ambarella's ADAS software stack to enhance perception capability for their forward-facing ADAS. Garmin announced their innovative Dual-View based on CV25. It's a rock-rugged two-camera system that enable professional truck drivers an edge in situational awareness. In summary, these 11 representative customer engagements represent the implementation of a wide variety of applications and AI workloads.
Inherent in these wins is the high degree of programmability and the flexibility in our SoC and the software platform, enabling us to serve a wide variety of applications with minimal incremental investment while the customer benefits by having the ability to reuse their software and scale. While we are seeing edge AI green shoots emerging in a very diverse range of edge applications, we currently see the largest long-term growth opportunities in the robotics, automotive, and edge infrastructure markets.
The robotic market is diverse market in a variety of applications: fixed factory automation, humanoid, mobile terrestrial, aerial drones, and more. Q4 was our first full quarter of a production revenue from the aerial drone market, which we believe is one of the highest value mobile robotic market today. With our industrial automation robotic engagement announced today, we are establishing ourselves in yet another form factor in the diverse and the nascent robotic market. In the automotive market, we have two business. One safety telematics ADAS business, which represents most our revenue and a majority of our near-term growth opportunity in autos. Also our auto autonomy business starting at Level 2+, which offers long-term growth opportunity.
At this time, the auto opportunities we have either won or been invited to bid upon in the next six years from fiscal year 2027 to fiscal year 2032 is approximately $13 billion, with the won proportion similar to the last year. In the edge infrastructure market, we are observing early customer opportunity with two different design architectures. One physical AI and the second digital AI. First, enterprise buyers want to run physical AI inference on a local edge gateway to aggregate multiple multi-modal data from multiple sensors preprocessing it in real time for use cases such as fleet management, physical security, industrial robots.
They typically design fully self-sufficient edge solutions to process data locally on devices for real-time, low latency, and secure decision making that can be summarized and sent to data centers for training and analytics. Second, we see early customer opportunities from enterprise IT buyers for digital AI application that push centrally trained and high capacity models to be distilled, quantized, and deployed in edge nodes to enable low latency, closed loop automation for secure digital application while still maintaining centralized control in the cloud. In summary, we are an edge AI market leader across a broad set of criteria. First is our credibility. We have an install base of a 42 million edge AI SoCs with more than 370 unique customers, AI customer products reaching production, and approximately $1 billion in cumulative edge AI revenue, primarily from our second generation CV2 family.
Next is our portfolio breadth. We have a 12 edge AI SoCs supporting models ranging up to 34 billion parameters. We support up to 100 billion parameters in the future, covering the full breadth of edge AI applications. Finally, our development platform is established and a critical enablement tool. The Cooper development platform scales across our edge AI portfolio and the multiple applications with customer implementing and reaching production with more than 200 different model architectures. In conclusion, I am very proud of the resilience, commitment, and execution of our team in the last year. I'm very excited about our prospect in fiscal 2027 and the years ahead. We are committed to our edge AI strategy and driving earnings growth. John will now discuss the Q4 and the fiscal year 2026 results, as well as the first quarter outlook in more detail. John?
John Young (CFO)
Thanks, Fermi. I'll now review the financial highlights for the fourth quarter fiscal year 2026, ending January 31, 2026. I will also provide a financial outlook for our first quarter of fiscal year 2027, ending April 30, 2026. I'll be discussing non-GAAP results and ask that you refer to today's press release for a detailed reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP results. For non-GAAP reporting, we have eliminated stock-based compensation and acquisition-related expenses adjusted for the impact of taxes. Fiscal year 2026 revenue increased 37.2% to $390.7 million. Automotive revenue led by telematics increased in the high single digits, and IoT increased almost 50% year-over-year, led by portable video and a continuation of strong growth in physical securities. For fiscal year 2026, non-GAAP gross margin was 60.7% versus 62.7% in fiscal 2025.
Non-GAAP OpEx increased 12.9% for the year versus 6.5% in the prior year, driven by higher costs related to employees and SoC development projects. Ending cash and marketable securities totaled $312.6 million, up from $250.3 million at the end of the prior year, driven by free cash flow of $58 million for the year, or 14.8% of revenue. For fiscal Q4, revenue was $100.9 million, slightly above the midpoint of our prior guidance range of $97 million-$103 million, down 7% from the prior quarter and up 20.1% year-over-year. Sequentially, automotive and IoT both experienced a similar seasonal decline.
Non-GAAP gross margin for fiscal Q4 was 59.8% at the midpoint of our prior guidance range of 59%-60.5%. Non-GAAP OpEx in Q4 was $56.5 million, also at the midpoint of our prior guidance range of $55 million-$58 million. Q4 net interest and other income was $2.3 million. Q4 non-GAAP tax provision was approximately $551,000, and we reported a non-GAAP net profit of $5.5 million or $0.13 per diluted share in Q4. Now, I will turn to our balance sheet and cash flow. Fiscal Q4 cash and marketable securities reached $312.6 million, increasing $17.3 million from the prior quarter and $62.3 million from the same quarter a year ago.
Increased cash and marketable securities benefited primarily from operating cash flow associated with increased revenue. Receivables day sales outstanding of 36 in Q4 was flat with the prior quarter. Days of inventory increased from 76 days to 99 days to support our current level of business. Operating Cash Inflow was $18.9 million for the quarter and $73.5 million for the year. Capital expenditures for tangible and intangible assets were $3.9 million for the quarter and $15.5 million for the year. Free cash flow was $15 million for the quarter. During the second quarter of fiscal year 2026, Ambarella's board of directors approved an extension of the current share repurchase program for an additional 12 months, ending June 30th, 2026. In the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2026, the company did not repurchase shares.
During the first quarter, we repurchased 24,152 shares of our stock for total consideration of $1 million. As of today, there is approximately $48 million available under our repurchase authorization. We had 1 logistics company representing 10% or more of our revenue. WT Microelectronics, a fulfillment partner in Taiwan that ships to multiple customers in Asia, came in at 73.1% of revenue for the fourth quarter and 69.7% for the year. I now will discuss the outlook for the first quarter of fiscal year 2027. We forecast Q1 revenue to be seasonal and in the range of $97 million-$103 million or $100 million at the midpoint. Sequentially, auto revenue is expected to increase, with IoT revenue expected to be seasonally down.
We expect fiscal Q1 non-GAAP gross margin to be in the range of 59%-60.5%. We expect non-GAAP OpEx in the first quarter to be in the range of $55 million-$58 million. We estimate net interest and other income to be approximately $2 million, our non-GAAP tax expense to be approximately $800,000, and our diluted share count to be approximately 44.1 million shares. Thank you for joining our call today. With that, I will turn the call over to the operator for questions.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. We ask that you please limit yourself to one question or one follow-up. One moment while we compile our Q&A roster. Our first question will come from the line of Quinn Bolton with Needham & Company. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Quinn Bolton (Managing Director of Equity Research)
Hey, guys. Congratulations on the next results. For me, I wanted to ask for maybe a little bit more detail on the e-commerce warehouse robotics win that you discussed in your script. Can you give us a sense, you know, is this already in production? If not, when would you expect it to go to production? You know, how many warehouses or perhaps how many robots could you guys be, you know, participating in for this customer? Is it a meaningful opportunity?
Fermi Wang (President and CEO)
First of all, it's in production, although it's a low volume production right now. We definitely expect that will continue to grow, and we think it can be a meaningful, depends on how wide this go to their warehouses. In terms of the function that we're doing, is really, like I said, it's a perception in a warehouse to help them to do automation from the production and the man, and also of the product movement. I think this is significant because that's the first such design win for us, although we are not allowed to talk about the name and also the size opportunity. We think this definitely indication that our perception system that being well, you know, respected and used in this large organization.
Quinn Bolton (Managing Director of Equity Research)
I imagine it could be a nice, you know, flagship customer that could lead to some other wins as well. Congratulations on that. The second question I had is you gave us sort of the update on the auto pipeline now standing at $13 billion. I believe that that's sort of an unprobability weighted number. In the past, I think you'd given us a $2.2 billion probability weighted forecast. I'm just wondering if you look back at the last forecast that was probability weighted, if you unweighted it, could you give us sort of an apples to apples comparison as to whether that auto pipeline has grown over the last year?
Fermi Wang (President and CEO)
Yeah. First of all, we call it, you know, automotive opportunities, not just trying to differentiate what we have been doing in the last several years. First number we quote is, the total size of, the $19 billion that's involved. All of the business opportunity that we see in the next six years, that we will, we have either won or been invited to bid on. Compared to last year, this, we do see the growth in this category. On the one business that we see, the numbers similar to last year as an apple to apple comparison. Also, I want to highlight one thing.
Although that, the one business is flat, but considering the weak automotive market in 2025, we are very happy to see the end result because that show not only we see more opportunity in the total automotive opportunity side, but also we continue to add new design wins to compensate for the, you know. For example, a lot of customers cut their forecast or delay the production, but we continue to maintain a healthy design win momentum in the automotive.
Quinn Bolton (Managing Director of Equity Research)
Great. Sorry, just a clarification for me. Did you say that the total pipeline is $13 billion or $19 billion?
Fermi Wang (President and CEO)
Sorry. It's.
John Young (CFO)
$13 billion.
Fermi Wang (President and CEO)
It's a $13 billion. Sorry, I, you know, it must be a game.
Quinn Bolton (Managing Director of Equity Research)
Okay. I just read that you had in the script.
Fermi Wang (President and CEO)
$13 billion was a total opportunity.
Quinn Bolton (Managing Director of Equity Research)
Got it. Okay. Thank you.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Tore Svanberg with Stifel. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Tore Svanberg (Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst)
Yes, thank you and congrats on the record revenue year. Fermi, I was hoping you could maybe help us look for, I guess, you know, guideposts on two particular topics. One is just your channel strategy. You know, how is that going? Are there certain things that we should look out for 2027? Then on your semi-custom ASIC business, again, any specific things that we should be keeping an eye on? And what are perhaps some of the early applications you think where you would potentially get an ASIC design win? Thank you.
Fermi Wang (President and CEO)
I think at CES, we talk about our new go-to-market strategy and also highlight several milestones we want to achieve. I think the first year, our goal for this new go-to-market strategy is to focus on build out with our partners, particularly the ISVs and as well as assisting the greater end distributors. We think that we are shooting for get at least 1,000 ISV committed to our platform, and by the end of year, so that they can help us to drive multiple different applications, different customers at the same time. Also, you know, we are targeting, you know, at least establish certain milestones with distributors and assistant integrators. That is the milestone for the first year.
You should expect us to continue to make progress on that. I think that, however, revenue probably, I am not expecting any meaningful revenue this year from this new business model, but we expect to start seeing, maybe ramping up a little bit in the next year. In terms of ASIC, custom ASIC, semi-custom ASIC business, we already talk about our first 2-nanometer chip is in this business model, and it's in the IoT space.
Our current engagement shows multiple companies are interested in this model. I won't be surprised that we continue to announce new design win in this category, but, you know, so far, only the first one is being confirmed, and we already announced it. You what you should expect is when we get new design wins, we will give you a hint that we definitely win something, but maybe we won't disclose the customer name or the business, but we should give you hints that we continue to make progress in this business model.
Tore Svanberg (Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst)
Very good. Thank you for that. As my follow-up, and on the 10%-15% growth guidance for fiscal 2027, I know in fiscal 2026, obviously IoT outgrew automotive by quite a bit. You know, just wondering how you think about the mix in fiscal 2027. I assume the 10%-15%, you know, assumes both unit growth and obviously also continuous ASP growth. Thank you.
Fermi Wang (President and CEO)
First of all, your assumption is right. Both ASP and unit growth is there, and also that we believe both IoT and auto will grow. I want to add a little bit more color on this, our growth rate. When we look at fiscal year 2026 growth over 37, it comes from two areas. One is our new product ramp up at the time, and also that to our presence of price, a strong customer new product ramp up in fiscal year 2026.
They combine, generate this growth. In this year, we are very confident that we're going to continue to ride down this momentum, and we are confident about our own new product ramp up like CV72, CV75, and CV7.What we are trying to understand is working with customer to understand their new product ramp up and how they're going to impact our growth in this year.
Tore Svanberg (Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst)
Great color. Thank you.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question is gonna come from the line of Kevin Cassidy with Rosenblatt Securities. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Kevin Cassidy (Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst)
Yeah, thanks for taking my question, and congratulations on the good year. Just what are you seeing in the competitive landscape, you know, as you're getting into drones and, you know, are we past the point where companies are trying to build their own devices and will prefer to work with you for the AI capabilities? Just what else you have as competition, say, coming from China?
Fermi Wang (President and CEO)
You're talking about China specifically. First of all, in the drone market, DJI continue to build their own silicon, but they also use external silicon solution to complement their product portfolios. Outside that, I think the majority of the other drone market will be, they don't plan to. At least we don't know anybody plan to build their own silicon. They definitely try to use external silicon, particularly that, you know, if you look at our offering to drone market is from 5-nanometer down to 4-nanometer, and then will be 2-nanometer. From that point of view, I think that will uniquely position us as one of the few that can provide to the Chinese market.
Kevin Cassidy (Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst)
Great. you know, interesting with the ASIC market with AMD and Meta announcing a partnership earlier this week. Part of the discussion was that Meta has certain models that they want to runOn a semi-custom version of AMD's MI450s. To me, it reminded me of your design where you have algorithm first type of application or the way you made your CV design in the first place. Is that where you're finding applications for the semi-custom version? Is it for certain models for running what the customer is looking for an optimized SoC?
Fermi Wang (President and CEO)
I think that's one of the areas our customer want to leverage on. I want to highlight most, in fact, most, or in fact, all of the customer that we are engaging for this business model is trying to leverage either our CV4 AI accelerator because of performance and performance efficiency, or our AI or IDSP, which is using a lot of AI performance. Third, our software platform that they can easily leverage to quickly go to market with new product and new models.
Fourth, also as important, is our capability to tape out a 2-nanometer chip. I think all customers are trying to take advantage of combination of those four factors as reason to talk to us. By the way, we are not targeting at all for the data center design. That's not where our strength. Our strength is some of the customer want to build edge AI SoC with their own algorithm. That square is our sweet spot.
Kevin Cassidy (Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst)
Okay, great. Thanks for making that clear.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Joe Moore with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Joe Moore (Managing Director and Head of U.S. Semiconductors)
Great, thank you. I heard you reiterate the 69%-62% long-term gross margin. I just wonder if you need to rethink that at all with the focus on different markets. Anything that would pull you out of that range one way or the other, just any color. Thank you.
Fermi Wang (President and CEO)
First of all, we repeat to say this year our long, our gross margin will be within our long-term gross margin 59%-62%. At CES, I also mentioned that when the custom, semi-custom chip design become more mature, if we need to change the model because of that, we will come to talk to our investor world about this. Today, I think that because the new business model is still at an early stage and we're still talking to customer for different business model, I think that's premature to talk about this in terms of gross margin for the impact for that business. For our existing ongoing business, we will continue to feel comfortable that we'll be at a 59%-62%.
Joe Moore (Managing Director and Head of U.S. Semiconductors)
Okay. Thank you.
Fermi Wang (President and CEO)
Thank you.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question is gonna come from the line of Vivek Arya with Bank of America. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Liam Pharr (Equity Research Analyst)
Hi, this is Liam Pharr on for Vivek. Thank you so much for taking my question. Wondering, are you seeing any or expecting any impacts or benefit from the recent restrictions of a Chinese competitor in the drone market?
Fermi Wang (President and CEO)
Well, we definitely watching it. Definitely, I think that's something we are talking to our customer. I think that it's not clear. Also, our current design win with that already in production is not impacted by the new regulations. Whether the next generation will be impacted is really depends on that they are going to file for FCC review. There's a possibility it will be impacted. However, I want to point out that outside U.S., there's still huge drone market, you know, that we can tap into, not only in China, but in the outside U.S. That's still a very big market that we can work with. I think overall, the answer is no direct impact right now, but we're watching the potential impact in the future.
Liam Pharr (Equity Research Analyst)
Thank you. Are you seeing any impact on the overall demand environment from component cost inflation?
Fermi Wang (President and CEO)
You're talking about DRAM? Sure. Yes, first of all, there's obviously no direct impact to us, but we talk to a lot of customers, in fact, all of customers about this issue. It's very clear that majority of them have concerns about the price increases rather than the shortage of the components. In fact, I think most of the companies that we talk to still can find supplies, but at a much higher price today. Indirect impact, in fact, in my opinion, is for the products which have a very low gross margin, which cannot sustain the DRAM cost increase will be impacted the most.
If you look at that from our customer portfolio, that means, you know, in fact, it's really low-end business, which we don't have much at all. I think from our point of view, we don't expect huge impact, because of DRAM price at this point. But we remain to watch this because it changes so quickly and so dynamic, and we want to make sure that we don't overlook this potential impact.
Liam Pharr (Equity Research Analyst)
Thank you very much.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star 11. Our next question will come from the line of Martin Yang with Oppenheimer. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Martin Yang (Executive Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)
Hi. Thank you for taking my question. My question is on seasonality in relation to CV7 launch in the latter half the year. Do you think that initial launch could change your seasonal patterns a little bit? Also, how should we think about the overall ASP uplift for the year versus FY 2026?
Fermi Wang (President and CEO)
Right. First of all, we expect the ramp up in the fourth quarter this year. We don't expect material revenue generated by CV7 this year. However, we highlight CV7 because for two reasons. One is CV7 is our first 4-nanometer chip and higher, 2.5x higher performance, AI performance than CV5. From that point of view, that we see huge interest and in fact, many design wins already engaged, and some of them will be ramping up in production later this year, is significant for us.
That means that confirm our thesis that our customer has huge demand and appetite for higher AI performance for the applications, which is very encouraging to us. In terms of ASP, we expect there's a premium ASP compared to current CV5 ASP, but we haven't finalized all the negotiation yet. I think that is an indication. That's just an indication what we are looking at in terms of total ASP for CV7.
Joe Moore (Managing Director and Head of U.S. Semiconductors)
Got it. Thank you, Fermi.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Gus Richard with Northland Capital Markets. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Gus Richard (Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst)
Yes, thanks for taking the questions. You know, as you move into the ASIC business and, you know, an indirect channel, you know, I was hoping you could discuss a little bit about how that's going to change the PNL. You know, indirect channel, you're going to have likely lower volumes, higher gross margin, and maybe higher SG&A to go along with that. In the ASIC business, you know, do you get paid for the NRE? You know, does that necessitate a lower unit cost or a lower gross margin on the units? If you just kind of talk about how you think that's going to play out over time.
Fermi Wang (President and CEO)
First of all, I think it's a little too early for us to talk about the business model for the new go-to-market strategy. We definitely need to come back to you to talk about this, considering there's no revenue generation from that this year, I would like to delay that discussion a little bit. Your question on the ASIC side is important for us. First of all, it has to have NRE associated with those kind of projects, otherwise it doesn't make sense to us to do this kind of project. However, there are all kinds of different variable we play with. For example, you know, some customers want to integrate their black box IP into a chip. Somebody wants to have a special IO design for their application.
It's a huge variety of demands, but at the end, we need to have NRE. We are willing to look at different ASP structure to make the whole overall business making sense for us and for our customers. The first product that we talk about, we only talk about the significant amount of NRE that they are paying out right now. The first revenue generated for silicon, for the first ASIC product, semi-custom chip ASIC, is going to be early next year. In terms of the gross margin impact, I think there's small. We still believe that overall, if you average out the whole business in that first silicon, that the gross margin is still within our long-term gross margin.
I also believe that to exchange for more aggressive NRE, that business model might change for others in the future. Because it's really uncertain, I don't want to talk about it. We don't want to give you indication just yet. I just want to tell you that it's a variety of possibility, and we are willing to talk with the customer that want to work with us. At the end, that has to be beneficial for both, for me, for Ambarella, as well as for our customers.
Gus Richard (Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst)
Got it. Thank you for the, for that. Then just a housekeeping question. Could you give me a sense of, in the IoT business, how much of that was industrial, how much of it was consumer?
Louis Gerhardy (VP of Corporate Development)
Maybe if we divide it, you know, by CapEx-driven businesses versus consumer-driven. Gus, this is Louis speaking, by the way. It's roughly 50/50. It didn't change much from the prior couple of quarters.
Gus Richard (Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst)
Got it.
Louis Gerhardy (VP of Corporate Development)
Think about if we break it down a little bit, you know, IoT, for the year was around 80% of revenue. Security, which is mostly enterprise security for us, obviously, that's enterprise CapEx. There's a little bit of home there. In portable video, things like wearables or enterprise video conferencing, and I think we had 3 announcements in that category this quarter. That's enterprise CapEx. You have 360-degree cameras, things like aerial drones, which did go to production for us in Q4. Those are all consumer, prosumer type related. That's how you get to the roughly 50/50.
Gus Richard (Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst)
Got it. Thanks so much.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. I'm showing no further questions at this time, and I would like to hand the conference back over to Dr. Fermi Wang for closing remarks.
Fermi Wang (President and CEO)
Yeah, thank you for joining our call today, and I hope to see you at some of our numerous events this quarter. Thank you. Talk to you next time
Operator (participant)
This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating, and you may now disconnect. Everyone, have a great day.