Silicon Motion Technology Corporation - Earnings Call - Q1 2025

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Silicon Motion Technology Corporation's first quarter 2025 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in the listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session, at which time, if you wish to ask a question, you will need to press star one one on your telephone keypad. This conference call contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. Such forward-looking statements include without limitation statements regarding trends in the semiconductor industry and our future results of operations, financial condition, and business prospects. Although such statements are based on our own information and information from other sources we believe to be reliable, you should not place undue reliance on them.

These statements involve risks and uncertainties, and actual market trends and our results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in these forward-looking statements for a variety of reasons. Potential risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, continued competitive pressure in the semiconductor industry and the effect of such pressure on prices, unpredictable changes in technology and consumer demands for multimedia consumer electronics, the state of and any change in our relationship with our major customers, and changes in political, economic, legal, and social conditions in Taiwan. For additional discussion of these risks and uncertainties and other factors, please see the documents we file from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statements, which apply only as of the date of this conference call. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.

It is now my pleasure to hand you over to Mr. Tom Sepenzis, Senior Director of IR and Strategy. Please go ahead, sir.

Tom Sepenzis (Senior Director of IR and Strategy)

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Silicon Motion's first quarter 2025 financial results conference call and webcast. Joining me today is Wallace Kou, our President and CEO, and Jason Tsai, our CFO. Wallace will first provide a review of our key business developments, and then Jason will discuss our first quarter results and outlook. Following our prepared remarks, we will conclude with a Q&A session. Before we get started, I would like to remind you of our Safe Harbor policy, which was read at the start of this call. For a comprehensive overview of the risks involved in investing in our securities, please refer to our filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. For more details on our financial results, please refer to our press release, which was filed on Form 6-K after the close of the market yesterday.

This webcast will be available for replay in the investor relations section of our website for a limited time. To enhance investors' understanding of our ongoing economic performance, we will discuss non-GAAP information during this call. We use non-GAAP financial measures internally to evaluate and manage our operations. We have therefore chosen to provide this information to enable you to perform comparisons of our operating results in a manner consistent with how we analyze our own operating results. The reconciliation of the GAAP to non-GAAP financial data can be found in our earnings release issued yesterday. We ask that you review it in conjunction with this call. With that, I will turn the call over to Wallace.

Wallace Kou (President and CEO)

Thank you, Tom. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'm pleased that we delivered revenue at the high end of our range for our first quarter, as the market of PC and smartphones began to rebound. Additionally, we delivered another quarter of gross margin expansion through the successful introduction of a new product and the mix shift toward higher-end PCIe and UFS products. We continue to invest in the next generation technologies that we expect to drive long-term sustainable top and bottom line growth of our company. We are also benefiting from the increased controller outsourcing by our NAND flash maker customer, a trend that should continue as the controller capacities increase and the design costs continue to rise. Flash makers remain focused on profitability while managing their investment to serve the increasingly diverse end-market memory requirements.

Despite the macro uncertainties, we are excited by the progress we are making, securing strong design win momentum and share gain across all our end markets as we launch several new products, including exciting new win with NVIDIA's BlueField-3 DPU platform that I will discuss in greater detail in a moment, as well as new solutions for the PC, smartphone, enterprise, and automotive markets. I would like to spend a moment discussing the current business environment. The current global economy picture is increasingly difficult to navigate, and it changes day to day due to ongoing tariffs and geopolitical challenges. Regarding the current climate, we believe the impact to our business should be limited, given that the U.S. only accounts for 10% of the global smartphone market and about 25% of the PC market. For smartphones, the U.S.

market is dominated by Apple and Samsung, accounting for nearly 85% of the market, where we have historically had little to no share. Our overall exposure to U.S. consumer electronic sales is significantly lower than many other semiconductor companies in the PC and smartphone food chain. While the escalating tariff environment creates uncertainty in demand in the near term, we are going to remain focused on what we can control, delivering market-leading products, winning superior performance, expanding our market share with the flash makers that are increasingly resource constrained, supporting multiple memory technologies, and diversifying our business through the expansion into new and growing markets, including enterprise and AI storage, automotive, industrial, and more. I would now like to discuss the broader NAND flash environment.

The NAND industry experienced improvements throughout the first quarter, as the inventory level in consumer markets, including smartphones and PC, appeared to have bottomed out, and enterprise storage demand remained strong. NAND flash makers have begun to raise prices recently, given scaled-back flash production and reduced inventory levels. We will continue to focus our resources on our flash maker partners, as they will be the customer with the greatest asset to NAND in 2025 if prices continue to rise. Our business with module makers remains steady, as they are starting to build inventory ahead of increasing NAND prices and restocking low-channel inventory for aftermarket SSD. One area where we are benefiting from both the increasing NAND costs and the potentially negative pricing impact of tariffs is the rapidly growing interest in QLC NAND.

QLC allows server and device makers the ability to significantly increase memory density in a cost-effective manner, giving OEMs the opportunity to deliver higher-density storage solutions at a more reasonable price. As we have discussed during the past few investor calls, we believe we are in the best position to benefit from the increased adoption of QLC, given that we have more experience managing QLC than any other controller maker. We are experiencing significant inbound interest for developing QLC products across the enterprise market for manufacturing and the consumer market for both SSD and smartphones, and we expect to deliver multiple new products in the coming months that will capitalize on this interest and help us deliver long-term sustainable revenue and earnings growth for many years to come. Now, let me share some updates for each of our business segments, beginning with client-side controllers.

While there has been much discussion around the 2025 outlook for PC, given the current geopolitical uncertainties, as of today, we believe the market is still expecting PC to grow in the low to mid-single-digit range. We have seen some motivation by customers to purchase ahead of the NAND price increases and any potential economic effect of tariffs and potential supply disruption. We believe inventory levels remain healthy based on our current customer forecasts and continued share gain in the mid-range and high-end PC market. We are increasingly confident in our client-side business for this year and our pipeline of new programs for next year to deliver long-term growth. We are seeing stronger-than-expected demand for our new PCIe 5 8-channel controller.

As we have mentioned previously, this controller is the first 6-nanometer PCIe 5 chip in the world, and we have design win at four of six NAND flash makers and nearly all module makers, given its superior performance and lower power requirements. Introduced in December quarter, this controller already accounts for over 5% of our client-side business, and we expect they will continue to grow rapidly over the next several quarters as PC OEM, NAND flash maker, and module maker customers ramp up their high-end PCIe 5 projects to full scale. In addition to the success we are experiencing with our 8-channel controller, we have already secured four flash maker wins with our upcoming PCIe 5 4-channel DRAM-less controller, targeting the mainstream market. This 4-channel controller was taped out in Q3 last year and expected to begin shipment later this year.

We are also acting in engage with virtually every module maker for this new controller, and we anticipate that they will help us continue to drive share growth in the client-side in 2026 and beyond. In the first quarter, we began to see demand for our new PCIe 5 8-channel controller increase as our flash maker partner secured additional PC OEM wins, and our module maker customer saw significant demand from the consumer aftermarket. Additionally, there is a new market developing for the controller as the white box server market builds a lower-cost hardware platform for AI inference that can leverage more mainstream components.

Given the early strength in our 8-channel PCIe 5 controllers, in addition to the multiple wins with our upcoming 4-channel DRAM-less controller, and our strong competitive position in the mid-range PC market, we believe we are increasingly well-positioned for unit and revenue growth in client-side over the next several years, barring significant headwinds from the broader economic environment. Now, I would like to move on to our eMMC and UFS business. Like the PC market, the smartphone market showed signs of a bottoming and recovery in the March quarter. This was driven in part by increased smartphone subsidies in China post the Chinese New Year holiday and from the increased inventory restocking ahead of any disruption from geopolitical actions. While it is difficult to know how tariffs will impact smartphone sales in 2025, we have had a promising start of the year.

During the March quarter, we experienced strong booking momentum from both flash maker and module maker customers for UFS 3.1 and UFS 3.2 controller, as well as our eMMC controllers. As we mentioned during our last conference call, the market is shifting away from eMCP and uMCP solutions in the smartphone market, which have historically been dominated by flash makers. With the introduction of less expensive mobile DRAM-less solutions, module makers are gaining share using our controllers and selling UFS and eMMC solutions to smartphone OEMs. It is also leading to the adoption of third-party controller solutions by the flash makers to compete in value line markets to reduce development costs.

With our new high-end eMMC 5.1 controller and our broad-based eMMC product portfolio, we are well-positioned with both flash makers and module makers to serve the automotive, IoT, smart TV, set-top box, and other markets that account for more than 800 million units a year. Overall, we are delighted by the long-term opportunity we are seeing in the eMMC and UFS to further grow our share in the embedded smartphone memory market, as well as make a significant inroad into automotive, IoT, and other high-volume markets. I will now provide an update to our MonTitan business. MonTitan is one of the most exciting opportunities for Silicon Motion, given the large addressable multi-billion dollar market for enterprise-class controllers.

As we have discussed, this is a new opportunity for our company, and we continue to expand our product portfolio, customer engagement, and technology as we enter the market for the data center, enterprise storage, and AI solutions. Interest in MonTitan is driven in part by emerging demand for QLC solutions. In AI, given its ability to deliver high density at lower costs, we have more experience than any others and support more QLC solutions than anyone else in the industry. MonTitan also offers greater flexibility than competing solutions, given our wide range of firmware capability, with which we can meet the unique needs of different customers' applications and use cases. Our flexibility is an opening opportunity across multiple fronts in the enterprise and AI storage solution business.

Many of our early customers are focused on delivering solutions for storage system architectures, but we are now expanding our addressable market for MonTitan. We have been working with the NVIDIA team for over a year to qualify our new MonTitan server boot storage solution for use with the BlueField-3 data processing unit, or DPU, architecture, and we have been designed into the platform. BlueField-3 is a network-accelerating solution that helps deliver peak AI workloads effectively, end-to-end security, and high-performance cloud networking using NVMe over Fabrics. Our boot storage solution will be used to power BlueField-3 DPU, beginning later this year, adding a significant new revenue and unique growth opportunity for Silicon Motion. Additionally, each BlueField-3 DPU will be paired with multiple high-density enterprise-class QLC SSDs through PCIe switches.

Currently, Solidigm is the only company shipping a high-density 122 TB QLC enterprise SSD in the market, and we expect to be the second providing a 128 TB QLC MonTitan SSD turnkey solution to our customers later this year. We are thrilled to be a growing part of NVIDIA's storage ecosystem, providing enterprise boot storage and high-density 128 TB MonTitan enterprise data storage solution for AI. These solutions deliver ASPs that are significantly above our current corporate average with accretive gross margins. As our MonTitan product portfolio evolves, we look forward to engaging with new customers to expand our addressable market in other areas, as we are currently doing with BlueField.

To that end, we are currently focused on delivering a more complete family of MonTitan products, including controllers for SATA and PCIe server boot drives, higher-density and performance 8-channel and 16-channel controllers for AI storage applications. With MonTitan supporting the upcoming 2-terabit monolithic die QLC NAND, we will be able to deliver high-density, high-performance 128 TB SSD with a best-in-class rendering of 3.5 million IOPS, putting us in a great position to rapidly expand our market share in the large and growing market for AI storage solutions. Finally, we are also engaged with multiple partners with next-generation PCIe 6 controller, targeting the NVIDIA Rubin GPU platform that is expected to begin ramping in 2027. We are confident that MonTitan will begin to ramp in the second half of this year and more meaningfully in 2026 as multiple customers enter production.

Finally, I would like to provide a highlight on our automotive and other business. Our automotive market position continues to improve as we add a new product to our growing portfolio. We continue to support automotive across all our product categories, including SATA, PCIe SSD, eMMC, UFS, and our Ferri embedded solutions across a wide variety of use cases. We are the first company to receive ASPICE Level 3 certification in PCIe 4 controllers, and we are on track to deliver a PCIe 5 controller for automotive later this year. Vehicle capacity continues to increase, along with the need for faster, more dense storage solutions given the increase in processing capability, ADAS, sensors, cameras, and other advanced systems. We continue to expand our presence in the automotive market and are increasing our market share with existing and new customers alike, including Samsung, which we have added recently.

We are currently shipping to many of the biggest names in the business, including Mercedes, Tesla, GM, BYD, Xiaomi, Toyota, Honda, and many others, and are well on our way to achieving our large target of 10% revenue contribution from automotive by 2026 to 2027. Additionally, we recently introduced our SM2708 microSD express controller and have already secured a major design win with the leading South Korea flash manufacturer, supporting one of the most anticipated next-generation handset gaming platforms announced this year, the Nintendo Switch 2, by delivering PCIe SD-like level performance in microSD form factor. The SM2708 is designed to meet high-density, high-speed needed for modern portable gaming and other demanding applications. In conclusion, the start of 2025 has been challenging given the geopolitical headwinds driven by the tariff crisis.

Silicon Motion is well-positioned to expand its position across the market in 2025 as we continue to gain share with the flash makers. These partners shift and partner increasingly, look to outsource controllers given their need for operational discipline while managing significant investment in other technologies, including DRAM and HBM memory. Our position is also improving through the introduction of a new product, including our PCIe 5 client SSD controller, which is experiencing strong demand. In addition to our new UFS and eMMC products, as we progress through the year, we will also benefit from the introduction of a UFS 4.1 controller in the smartphone market, as well as the ramp of MonTitan for storage system solutions and the boot storage in BlueField-3 DPU in the second half of the year. Additionally, we are well-positioned for continued share growth in each of our other markets, including automotive.

Longer term, as our MonTitan and automotive business continues to scale for the next several years and our broad portfolio of solutions for IoT, industrial, commercial, and smart devices applications continue to gain share, I'm confident that our strategy to diversify beyond the maturing PC and smartphone market will be successful and continue to believe that we could generate more than 20% of our business in 2027 from these new opportunities. I look forward to sharing more about our successes with these products and new markets throughout this year. Now, let me turn the call over to Jason to go over our financial results and outlook.

Jason Tsai (CFO)

Thank you, Wallace, and good morning to everyone joining us today. I will discuss additional details of our first quarter results and then provide our outlook. Please note that my comments today will focus primarily on our non-GAAP results unless otherwise specifically noted.

A reconciliation of our GAAP to non-GAAP data is included with the earnings release issued yesterday. In the March quarter, sales decreased 12.9% sequentially to $166.5 million, coming at the high end of our guided range despite the weak end-user demand for PC and smartphones at the start of the quarter. Gross margins increased again in the quarter to 47.1% as we continue to benefit from improved product mix as we shift customers to newer products. Operating expenses increased sequentially to $63.6 million as we continue to invest in new enterprise storage products and given the timing of new product tape-outs. Operating margin decreased sequentially to 8.9%, but was within our guided range.

We had a one-time tax benefit due to the reversal of a risk accrual of a tax accrual that we had in the previous year, which resulted in a tax benefit of $2.5 million in the quarter. Earnings per ADS was $0.60. Total stock compensation, which we exclude from non-GAAP results, was $4.8 million in 1Q 2025. We had $331.7 million cash, cash equivalents, and restricted cash at the end of the first quarter compared to $334.3 million at the end of the fourth quarter of 2024. Cash declined slightly in the first quarter, primarily from the combination of dividend payment of $17 million and $24.3 million in stock repurchases. In the first quarter, we repurchased $24.3 million of the $50 million six-month repurchase program the board authorized on February 6, with an average price of $56.96 per share. First quarter is challenging given the geopolitical impact of the U.S.

Election and its effect on global trade. While market uncertainty remains high, our team executed well and delivered revenue at the high end and operating margin within the upper half of the guidance range while investing heavily in advanced geometry products and our emerging MonTitan platform for enterprise and AI markets. We continue to build upon our strong foundation for long-term growth. Now, I will discuss our second quarter outlook. Revenue is expected to increase 5%-10% to $175 million-$183 million, driven by the success for our PCIe Gen5, as well as continuing strong demand for UFS 3.1 and 2.2 controllers. Gross margins are expected to expand to the range of 47%-48% as we continue to transition customers to newer platforms. Operating margin is expected to be in the range of 8.9%-10.9% as we benefit from higher revenue and gross margins.

Our effective tax rate is expected to be approximately 16-17%. Stock-based compensation and dispute-related expenses are expected to be in the range of $3.1 million-$4.1 million. For the full year, PC and smartphone growth targets remain in the low to mid-single-digit range, with an above-average second half weighting. We believe that our business will reflect the broader industry with significant growth expected in the second half, barring an overly negative impact from tariffs impacting end-user demand. As such, we are not changing our annual outlook currently and target revenue growth that is in line with the performance of achieving a revenue of approximately $1 billion as we exit the year. Additionally, we expect to continue to improve our gross margins as we transition customers to new products and enter the enterprise market in the second half of the year.

We remain confident that we can drive gross margins towards the higher end of our historical range, the 48-50% by the end of this year. We'll continue to invest in advanced geometry products that will allow us to grow our market share across our businesses long-term and help us diversify our product portfolio into new markets. Despite these higher investments, we are confident that we can return to our historical operating margin range of 25% plus in the midterm as investments we have made over the past 18 months begin to scale and deliver stronger revenue growth, better gross profitability, and improve our operating profitability. Overall tax rate for this year is expected to be approximately 15%. Stock-based compensation and dispute-related expenses for this year are expected to be in the range of $27 million-$29 million.

As we enter the second quarter, we are experiencing increased design win activity and improved outlook from our customers. We see strong demand for our new PCIe Gen5 products, including 8-channel that is currently shipping, as well as for our UFS 3.1 and our new UFS 2.2 and eMMC 5.1 controllers in the smartphone and automotive markets. For our upcoming 4-channel PCIe 5 controller and our UFS 4.1 controllers, our teams have been actively securing new wins and growing our backlog meaningfully as these advanced platforms expand into mainstream PC and smartphone markets next year. Lastly, the momentum behind our MonTitan family of enterprise controllers continues to grow as enterprises and CSPs around the world continue to invest in next-generation data centers that require high-performance low-cost QLC storage solutions that we are uniquely positioned to provide.

While we are seeing a small degree of pull-ins ahead of non-price increases, we do not expect this to impact our ability to grow sequentially throughout the year. Our teams continue to execute well, are growing our product portfolio, winning new projects and customers, and expanding our addressable markets, positioning Silicon Motion for sustainable long-term revenue and profitability growth. This concludes our prepared remarks. We will now open the call to questions. Operator, please go ahead with the first question.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. To ask a question, please press star one one on your telephone keypad and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. We will now take our first question from the line of Craig Ellis from B. Riley Securities. Please go ahead, Craig.

Craig Ellis (Director of Research)

Yeah, thanks for taking the question.

I wanted to start with an inquiry on the enterprise SSD MonTitan program. First of all, Wallace, congratulations on breaking into NVIDIA. That seems like a very significant intermediate and long-term development. The question is more longer term with that business line. It sounds like the business is strongly on track with the six customer wins you talked about last quarter to begin ramping up later this year. The question is, as we look out to 2026, if we've got six customers engaged now, where would you expect the business to exit 2026 in terms of customer engagements? How many of those might be in production? Not looking for specific guidance, but just color on the degree to which the pipeline is building out, especially as you get blue chip customers into the mix.

Wallace Kou (President and CEO)

Okay, great. Thank you for the question. Let me answer your question.

First of all, our previous six major customer engagements, they are not related to current NVIDIA BlueField DPU platform engagement. These six customers were on track. They're going to ramp from second half of 2025 gradually, and 2026 will reach the more meaningful revenue growth. As in 2027, you will see much more significant. We are on track to achieve 5%-10% from 2026, 2027, our total revenue, don't change. NVIDIA BlueField DPU design win gave us a better picture into the BlueField module for boot storage. In addition, because the BlueField module with the PCIe switches, which connect to many, up to 30 PCIe enterprise SSD solutions. Each of the storage server is going to comply to maximum to 30 SSD. This portion will be the majority portion will be 128 TB high density. Give a new opportunity.

We need to leverage the opportunity with the NVIDIA ecosystem provider, such as VAST, DDN, such as Dell, NetApp, and also their end customer. Right? This will give them more opportunity to win and qualify by this ecosystem and not only grow our boot storage on NVIDIA platform, but also grow with the NVIDIA ecosystem for storage. We work with many of our module makers and partners to deliver the high-density 128 TB QLC SSD by the end of this year. This gave additional momentum to grow our revenue in the MonTitan family.

Craig Ellis (Director of Research)

That's really helpful, Wallace. Thank you. For my follow-up question, I wanted to turn one to Jason. Jason, it's clear that trailing 18 months as the company's invested in six-nanometer tape-outs.

On the other side of that, the company's done extremely well getting new design wins with NAND makers and module makers across the full range of products that the company offers. The question is this: where are we in the journey of upgrading the portfolio to six-nanometer from a mass set cost standpoint? How much of that is now behind us looking through the current 2Q? How much of that is ahead? Beyond six-nanometer, can you talk about when we would see the next node transition for the company as we think about operating expense intensity over the next couple of years? Thank you.

Wallace Kou (President and CEO)

In the near term, let me answer you. In the near term, we're going to have two more six-nanometer tape-outs in the next three quarters and one five-nanometer tape-out, which will be a cost reduction for mobile controllers.

Next year, probably around the middle of next year, we're going to have a four-nanometer tape-out for PCIe Gen 6 enterprise SSD because we have a customer waiting urgently, and we do not want to miss the schedule and deliver the result. Frank speaking, we are really in the full design pipeline, and we have many, many customers, and we do not have enough R&D resources to support many, many new designs. We are very confident in our growth momentum in client SSD, mobile controller, as well as enterprise SSD.

Jason Tsai (CFO)

I would also point out, Craig, that we do not anticipate moving beyond six-nanometer for the foreseeable future for client applications, client PCs, or client smartphone applications. The four-nanometer product that Wallace is pointing towards is for PCIe 6 for the enterprise.

I think, and historically, except with the exception of very rare cases, we really don't retape out an old controller into a new process geometry. We look at new designs supporting whether new generation of flash or new generation interfaces for new tape-outs. To Wallace's point, we've got two six-nanometer tape-outs coming up here throughout this year, which is pretty flat compared to last year. We're also looking at utilizing other foundry partners as well, potentially, to see if we can certainly get better pricing longer term.

Craig Ellis (Director of Research)

That's really helpful, guys. Thank you. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

We will now take our next question from the line of Suji Desilva from Roth Capital. Please ask your question, Suji.

Suji Desilva (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Hi, Wallace. Hi, Jason. Maybe following up on Craig's question about the NVIDIA product here, I appreciate the MonTitan guidance of 5%-10% of revenues.

How should we think about sizing the NVIDIA partnership with the ecosystem in terms of addressable market? Any framework or metrics there would be helpful?

Jason Tsai (CFO)

Yeah. So look, I think obviously the opportunity for BlueField, we're very excited about. I think there are a number of factors regarding that kind of affect the TAM. We expect the BlueField-3 products to begin ramping late this year, and we see a meaningful ramp in 2026 and beyond. With every successive win at MonTitan, it gives us more confidence around achieving our goals for 5%-10% of revenue in 2026, 2027. And the TAM really depends on several factors: the growth in the enterprise storage market, the global demand, tariff impacts, etc. We do anticipate this to be a meaningful part of our MonTitan business longer term.

Wallace Kou (President and CEO)

Let me add a comment.

We're very happy to see NVIDIA start to focus on storage. During the GTC 2025, they mentioned the storage next. They really put a new spec and performance requirement to grow the storage, especially if it's compute storage and data storage. BlueField-3 DPU, the third generation, is really for data storage for much bigger density as a storage system. We're very happy to see the momentum and for the design win. I think we cannot comment on the total unit, but we're going to start to ramp from second half this year, and there's a minimum quality revenue. We do see the momentum moving to many, many storage system integrators. In addition, I think many, many hyperscaler CSP, they are also looking for high-density QLC SSD. In the past, many, many CSP and service providers, they only needed 8 or 16 TB.

Now they really changed their mind and moving. I think, as you can see from last financial release, several players announced the major design win in the CSP. That gave you the indication about the trend. I think we're exciting for our technology from MonTitan, not just for NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPU design. Also, they're going to go many, many for AI cloud service and server storage requirement.

Suji Desilva (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Okay. That's very helpful, Colonel Wallace. Thank you. Maybe switching over to the notebook market, understanding the mix here, where's your traction on the premium notebooks? What's your outlook for the 8 versus 4-channel product here as the year progresses?

Wallace Kou (President and CEO)

Okay. If you'll take a look for the PCOEN this year, they're going to ramp up the 8-channel PCIe 5 from July timeframe.

I think all the PCIe top five will align at the same time. We're going to see about 5% of the second half, 5% of the total PC shipment. The 4-channel DRAM-less controller is designed for 2027, mid-2026 production. I think we have a design win from four of six NAND makers and nearly all module makers for both 8-channel and the 4-channel DRAM controller. That is why we believe our 8-channel will have a minimum 60% market share through with the PCIe. For 4-channel, we're going to have a minimum 50% market share when PCIe 5 moves to mainstream in full-scale production. That is why we believe we're going to continue gaining market share in client SSD, and we're going to grow from our 30%, 33% today and moving towards 40% in the next few years.

Suji Desilva (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Okay. Very helpful, Wallace. Thanks, guys.

Operator (participant)

Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Gokul Hariharan from JPMorgan. Please go ahead, Gokul.

Gokul Hariharan (Managing Director)

Yeah. Hi. Thanks, Wallace, Jason, and Tom. First of all, on this BlueField-3 DPU engagement, can you talk a little bit about how this business engagement and product sales will work? You are already qualified by NVIDIA, and then customers such as DDN or Roth Data or Dell will basically embed your controller into their storage solutions. Is that typically how that's going to work? Secondly, how many vendors have been qualified? I think you mentioned only Solidigm has been qualified so far. You're kind of the second vendor. How long do you think you can kind of keep this kind of only two kind of vendor status in this?

Maybe lastly, I think, how do you size this market compared to the regular kind of enterprise and data center controller market in the enterprise that you've been targeting with the original MonTitan target market?

Wallace Kou (President and CEO)

Let me explain maybe basically about this model. Certain things we cannot share with you. I think we started to engage with NVIDIA about a year ago. In the beginning, we don't fully understand what really the purpose for the application is. After three months' query and everything, I think we understand this is for NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPU platform. In the past, the BlueField-3 used for really is a pass-through transfer of the data between GPU to GPU and CPU to GPU. I think this is a setting for networking and really a design for the storage system.

I think the design win gave us great opportunity to fully understand NVIDIA, their plan for the storage application. It gave opportunity to approach it beyond through the ecosystem and go to the end system integrator one by one. I think NVIDIA did not own the system storage product, but it is selling the BlueField-3 module to their system integrator and storage enabler. This is a business model. We need to be qualified by NVIDIA. I think there are only two suppliers to support the boost storage. We are one of them. It is in the final stage qualification because they are going to ramp in the second half of this year. They are nearing the final stage. We are in the process to qualify our high-density QLC SSD through their ecosystem. This is in the process.

We believe by the end of the year, the customer will move into mass production. This is just in the beginning range about the storage system growing momentum for AI storage. We see there is more beyond this. When this is a mature variable, we can share more data with our investors.

Jason Tsai (CFO)

I would also point out, Gokul, that on the BlueField, when we talk about the opportunity there, and Solidigm is not in the BlueField opportunity. It is not the Boot Drive opportunity there. Solidigm is on the high-density 122 TB side that our high-density QLC data storage opportunity is. It is different than the Boot Drive opportunity that we are talking about specifically with NVIDIA on the BlueField-3.

Gokul Hariharan (Managing Director)

Got it. For the Boot Drive opportunity, according to what you know, you are currently the only one qualified. Is that fair?

Or you're the only one likely to be qualified?

Wallace Kou (President and CEO)

There's only two suppliers. We are one of the two suppliers.

Gokul Hariharan (Managing Director)

Understood. Understood. Yeah. That's very clear. Second question maybe for you, Jason, and also for Wallace. How should we think about I think you're still maintaining the exit rate of a billion dollars by Q4 of this year, which is a pretty meaningful step up from what your Q2 guidance is, roughly a 30% or 40% kind of step up from the Q2 guidance. Historically, we have never seen that kind of seasonality, at least in the last five or six years. Maybe in 2019, we saw that. I think beyond that, we have never seen that kind of step up in revenues into Q4.

I just wanted to understand, are there some specific kind of project wins, customer ramps that you are really kind of entering in, which gives you the confidence to kind of still stick to that guidance, especially given the macro environment that's changed?

Wallace Kou (President and CEO)

I think we will see Q4 momentum building the $1 billion run rate. We did not condone the enterprise business of BlueField design revenue. It's really based on last year's major design win from mobile phone, mobile controller, as well as PC, PCIe Gen5. Because these design win pipelines will create enough momentum for us to bring to $1 billion run rate in Q4.

Jason Tsai (CFO)

I would also point out that we do have a number of new programs that are scaling, right?

The 8-channel PCIe 5, we expect the PCOEM channel to scale more meaningfully in the back half of the year as PCOEMs start ramping for the holiday season, ramping for enterprise replacement cycle, ramping for the Windows 10 replacement cycle. All those things are kicking in in the back half of the year. That is still the current expectation. Obviously, the geopolitical is uncertain, but the numbers that we've seen, the forecast that we've seen today are still indicating a very back-half-centric growth profile for PCs and for smartphones for this year as well. We have the new PCIe 8-channel ramping. We have beginning late ramp of UFS 4.1. We have, to Wallace's point, some of the MonTitan boot drives, as well as the high-density 128 TB SSD controllers ramping.

We do have a number of new programs that would be supplementing the expected market strength that we're seeing.

Gokul Hariharan (Managing Director)

Got it. Yeah. That's very clear. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. We will now take our next question from the line of Matt Bryson from Wedbush. Please go ahead, Matt.

Matt Bryson (Managing Director of Equity Research)

Thanks for taking my question. I guess, first off, when I look at what was happening with some of your customers and peers in Q1, it seems like February and March picked up relatively significantly, and that momentum's carrying into Q2. Obviously, you came in ahead of your guidance range, but didn't quite see the same magnitude of momentum. If I look at Q2 seasonality or Q2 guidance, it looks relatively seasonal.

I guess my question is, our first question is, why aren't we seeing a bit more of a guide that's reflective of the pickup that seems to be happening across the industry?

Wallace Kou (President and CEO)

Because the tariff has really created many uncertainties. I think we can only base on where we are, although I believe we have almost no impact on tariff moments. We try to be cautious, but our design win pipeline is rock solid, and we're gaining market share continually. It is really, as we said, we have enough design win pipeline and ramping second half of this year. That will bring a $2 billion run rate in Q4 timeframe. We have very confident achievement. We have many, many new projects ramping, including Toyota global model for ADAS and IVI. This is a many new design win and really bring our very broad range of product mix.

I think the NVIDIA and the 128 TB enterprise in MonTitan, that will bring more momentum in 2026 and beyond. For 2025, Q4, I think the whole year, a current pipeline and design win is sufficient to carry our sale revenue growth. We do not want to have a more aggressive guidance because I think so far we try to be cautious and make sure we meet all the investor expectations.

Matt Bryson (Managing Director of Equity Research)

Great. It sounds like you're just trying to embed some conservatism in your current outlook. I guess the second question is kind of following up on Gokul's last question. In terms of how we should think about the ramp in Q3, Q4, it sounds like it's very project-based.

I tend to think about new PC designs, them starting to get built in June, July, new handset designs, particularly Chinese handset designs being more of a late Q3, Q4 timeframe type opportunity. It sounds like a lot of the enterprise designs come in in Q4. Is that kind of how we should think about those new programs layering into your revenue stream to get to that $250 million goal by Q4?

Jason Tsai (CFO)

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right, Matt. Just, again, a little bit more commentary around Q1, Q2. Just given the broader economic environment, the potential impacts of the changing tariff policies, we believe it's prudent to error on the side of caution, right? While we're seeing, as we said, some mild customer pull-ins, the amount's not material enough to change our near-term outlook.

We are experiencing increased interest in all the new products that we talked about, right? PCIe 5, UFS 4, etc. Our guide for the June quarter is pretty consistent with our peers and in line with, really more importantly, with our customer forecasts. Those are kind of the key foundation of kind of what we see in the market today in the first half of this year. Certainly, to your point, we do have some program-specific, market-specific things affecting growth in Q3 and Q4 that are going to be pretty meaningful.

Matt Bryson (Managing Director of Equity Research)

Thanks.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. As a reminder to ask a question, please press star one one on your telephone keypad. We will now take our next question from the line of Nick Doyle from Needham. Please go ahead, Nick.

Nick Doyle (Equity Research Analyst)

Hi. Thanks for taking my question.

Asking about the Switch 2 opportunity, can you help size that at all, what your market share attach rate is there, and maybe what kind of ASPs are those looking like? Thanks.

Wallace Kou (President and CEO)

There's a design for the microSD Express SD 7.0. They're used for content card for the Nintendo. I can only say we're about 80% of the share.

Nick Doyle (Equity Research Analyst)

Okay. Helpful. The importance of the boot storage application, could you just talk more about that? What exactly are you providing there, and does that help you get closer to providing the data storage part? Thanks.

Wallace Kou (President and CEO)

I think what I can say is that because through the collaboration with the NVIDIA team, we definitely understand the BlueField module and the ecosystem. Through the ecosystem, we work with the storage ecosystem together, and that's why we get an opportunity to get our product qualified in advance.

Through that, I think because we see because many companies announced their 128 TB QLC SSD, but no one can deliver the real product except Solidigm. We believe we could be the second player providing the turnkey solution to the market to feed the demand for storage system. This is a great opportunity, but we have to execute very well, deliver the result. We are very excited about the new opportunity and engage with NVIDIA. I think it goes beyond just the BlueField DPU, believe me. We cannot say too much. We do want to work because the storage system is much bigger for AI cloud and AI server. This is an opportunity. We show QLC in demand when we do see, as I said, all the cloud storage providers and changing their direction and accept higher-density enterprise SSD drive.

This is a great opportunity for Silicon Motion to shine, to grow.

Nick Doyle (Equity Research Analyst)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. I'm showing no further questions. I'll now turn the conference back to Mr. Wallace Kou for his closing comments.

Wallace Kou (President and CEO)

Thank you, everyone, for joining us today and for your continuing in Silicon Motion. We will be attending several investor conferences over the next few months. The schedule of this event will be posted on the Investor Relations section of our corporate website. I look forward to speaking with you at this event. Thank you, everyone, for joining today.

Operator (participant)

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