Management Commentary 11-1-2021
On Semi (ON) earnings call discussing demand trends… “The demand of our intelligent power and sensing solutions in our strategic end markets continues to outpace our current supply capability. The strength and demand is driven by secular mega trends such as vehicle electrification, ADAS, industrial automation and transition to alternative energy from fossil fuel-based power generation. For the third quarter, automotive and industrial end markets together grew 42% year-over-year. On a year-to-date basis, our design win funnel for these end markets grew 55% year-over-year, giving us excellent visibility into future revenue. In addition to secular factors, demand for our products is being driven by industry-leading performance of our products in both intelligent power and sensing. Consistent with our strategy outlined at our Analyst Day, we are driving a mix shift towards automotive and industrial end markets to drive margin expansion. For the third quarter, automotive and industrial together contributed 60% of our revenue as compared to 56% in the quarter a year ago, and we will continue phasing out low-margin, noncore revenue into next year. We are seeing a more than 2x growth in our design win funnel from alternative energy customers for our power solutions and expect the alternative energy market to be a long-term driver for our business as utility scale power plant installations are expected to grow worldwide to reduce the climate impact of fossil fuel-based power plants. Industrial power tools are another area of growth as power tools are transitioning from brushed motors to brushless motors and from AC to battery powered, both trends driving significantly higher content for us.”
Arista Networks (ANET) earnings call on its routing products… “Customer demand remains strong for Arista products as we’re gaining market share in 100- 200- and 400-gig high-performance switching according to market analysts. Recently, we have witnessed the progress of our routing products with key customers and the acceptance of our routing edge use cases. Similar to cloud titans, carriers and large enterprise customers are deriving immense benefit from Arista’s EOS and rich routing features. We deliver simplification and unified service delivery with the support of segment routing with traffic engineering and EVPN as well as rapid failover techniques. This provides that ideal alternative to today’s complex legacy router deployments with much more improved total cost of ownership and CapEx benefits. Arista’s third-generation R3 series based on EOS-4.26 delivers 3 new edge use cases this year. The first one is a multi-cloud edge that brings provisioning and programmatic traffic steering. The second is a metro edge for single protocol adoption across multiple edge VPN services into the Metro Ethernet fabric. And the final use case is a 5G RAN edge with the 5G edge disaggregating the radio area network with scale-out routing.”
Zoom Info (ZI) earnings call on the deal pipeline and larger deals… “So we’re landing larger and our pipeline for landing larger accounts on the land side is expanding a couple of quarters ago. We made the decision to specifically carve out some of our more tenured reps to manage the larger enterprise opportunities that were coming in the lead funnel. And those transactions, they are buying more than just the core intelligence layer. They’re often buying the engagement layer. They are buying data as a service. They’re buying enrichment inside of their CRM and marketing automation systems, many are buying Engage as a sales automation solution. And so we do have a much broader set of solutions to sell at the point of new business sale, we’re accelerating that, and we see a large pipeline — we’re building a large pipeline of larger deals for the future as well.”
Varonis (VRNS) earnings call discussing customer trends… “So what we see definitely is that customers understand that they need to protect data. The perimeter are very hard to define. Service explosion is endpoint, they are more like access points. Most of the data is in what we call sanction repositories on-prem and in the cloud. So when customers are already investing in us, the return of investment many times is tremendous. And if why — you have security efforts in order to protect your digital assets, Varonis is one of — the top platform that you have. Definitely, the other thing that we see is that more is more when you have more licenses, there is much higher capability that will consume much more licenses over time and customers want to have the most efficient way to do it. So it’s still early stages, but we definitely think about it and we constantly think about what is the right way to make sure that it will be easy for our customers to consume more products and that they will benefit from it, and we will benefit from it. But this is something that is in the world, and we’ll see how it will play out, but we definitely think about it.”
Fabrinet (FN) earnings call on optical communication trends… “That 400G silicon photonics and also the 400ZR starting to take off. We certainly feel very good about the optical communications business, and again, both across telecom and datacom. But yes, it’s a good time right now with that transition from, let’s say, 100 and 200G to 400G. We’re right in the middle of that. And 100G remains strong as well. So we have 400G ramping, 100G remains strong, and then 400ZR is starting to come on as well. So overall, the demand segments we’re seeing are quite strong, and we’re quite optimistic about that. Now within our telecom number, we don’t really break out, let’s say, traditional telecom versus silicon photonics-based intra data center products. So we don’t really break that out. But what I would say is, overall, the demand trends we’re seeing are quite strong across the board in both telecom and datacom.”