Silicon Motion Technology Q3 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
October 31, 2025

Key Takeaways

  • Positive Sentiment: Company reported a strong Q3 beat with $242 million revenue (+22% sequential), gross margin of 48.7% and operating margin of 15.8%, and guided Q4 revenue of $254M–$266M with gross margin ~48.5%–49.5% and operating margin ~19%–20%.
  • Positive Sentiment: Product momentum is driving share gains — adoption of PCIe Gen5 (8‑channel sales +45% sequential and >15% of client SSD revenue), eMMC/UFS revenue +20% sequential, and a 4‑channel Gen5 controller entering initial shipments.
  • Positive Sentiment: Management expects AI-driven demand to keep NAND/DRAM/HDD tight and prices elevated through 2026, which they argue positions Silicon Motion to gain share as flash makers outsource more controller work and module makers build inventory.
  • Positive Sentiment: Enterprise and automotive expansion is progressing — MonTitan qualifications for TLC/QLC enterprise SSDs are underway with commercial ramps expected in H2 2026 (management forecasts MonTitan to reach 5%–10% of revenue by late‑2026/2027), and automotive design wins could push auto to ≥10% of revenue.
  • Negative Sentiment: Short‑term risks include a rise in inventory (to support backlog) and a cash decline to $272.4M driven by dividend and inventory build, plus an ongoing arbitration with oral closings in Mar‑2026 and an uncertain post‑decision outcome.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
Silicon Motion Technology Q3 2025
00:00 / 00:00

Transcript Sections

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Operator

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Silicon Motion Technology Corporation's third 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. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. 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 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.

Operator

The 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 demand 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. With that, I'll now hand you over to Mr. Tom Sepenzis, Senior Director of IR and Strategy. Please go ahead, sir.

Tom Sepenzis
Tom Sepenzis
Senior Director of IR and Strategy at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Silicon Motion's third 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 provide a review of our key business developments, and then Jason will discuss our third quarter results and outlook. Following our prepared remarks, we will conclude with a Q&A session. Before we begin, 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 market yesterday.

Tom Sepenzis
Tom Sepenzis
Senior Director of IR and Strategy at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

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
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

Thank you, Tom. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'm pleased to report that we delivered another strong performance in the third quarter, exceeding our revenue and operating margin guidance. We continue to benefit from the introduction of new controllers, existing in new markets and driving increased market share across our portfolio. We remain focused on delivering both top and bottom-line growth and improving profitability while investing heavily in the next generation controllers, increasing our engineering resources to support new products and markets, and further positioning Silicon Motion for long-term market share expansion. We expect strong revenue growth to continue as we introduce compelling new PCIe Gen5 controllers, next generation eMMC, and UFS controllers that drive higher share, benefit from strong growth in our automotive and industrial sector products business, and as our MonTitan Enterprise storage products business begins to scale.

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

I'm excited about the foundation for growth that we are building across each of our major markets and believe we are well positioned to see sustained revenue and profitability growth in both the near and long term. Let me start by discussing a broader market environment and then each of our major businesses in greater detail. AI-driven demand remains a significant growth factor across memory and storage industries, driving strong demand for NAND and other technologies including DRAM and HDD. The growing AI-driven demand has, for the first time, created supply shortages in HDD, NAND, and DRAM, leading to price increases for the past three quarters, a trend we expect will continue at least through 2026. In the early stage of AI development, AI training drove strong demand for high-performance memory and storage using DRAM, HBM, and NAND for lower-capacity TLC-based compute SSDs.

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

As AI evolves, the focus is changing to inference, which relies more on high-performance, high-capacity storage rather than raw computing power. The increasing demand from inference is putting a large strain on the HDD supply chain that traditionally served this market, and this is expected to continue well into next year as HDD makers struggle to quickly meet growing demand. Inference is also increasing NAND demand for high-capacity, high-performance TLC-based SSDs, and creating a significant strain on the NAND market supply and availability. As AI is still in its infancy, we expect that these demand drivers will continue to impact supply availability across all memory technologies for quite some time as CapEx spend increases to catch up with market demand over the next few years.

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

Growing AI demand is also forcing a more disciplined CapEx spending approach and is driving difficult resource allocation decisions by the memory and storage maker to prioritize engineering resources across multiple technologies, products, and markets. Increasingly, we are seeing a greater willingness by the NAND flash maker to rely on Silicon Motion to complete their product portfolio as they shift their internal resources to focus on DRAM, HBM, and future customized memory technologies for high-performance AI performance. We are in an active discussion with all NAND makers about expanding our partnership and taking on a broader range of projects long-term to offset growing internal resource shortages. Looking ahead, we see continued NAND flash price increases and shortages given the impact of AI on overall demand, which has been amplified by reduced new capacity investment at the flash maker over the past two years.

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

Despite the challenges inherent with the NAND price increases, we believe our business will remain robust. Our module maker customers have been building NAND inventory ahead of anticipated price increases and are well positioned for next year to meet expected market demand. Our direct business with NAND makers continues to be strong, accounting for more than 50% of our revenue, and we expect to gain significant share over the next few years. Additionally, more than 70% of our business with NAND flash maker and module maker customers goes directly to PCs, smartphones, servers, and other device OEMs that are not significantly impacted by high NAND markets. We are a robust design pipeline in eMMC, UFS, client SSD, and Enterprise SSD controllers, and our Ferri product line should benefit from the increased NAND price trend.

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

Additionally, given increased NAND prices, we expect OEMs to more rapidly adopt QLC technologies, where we have a significant advantage over our competition. Finally, we are starting to scale our new enterprise products, including MonTitan, which are less price-sensitive than the consumer market. We expect AI demand to continue to put a greater demand on inference than it has. A more large learning model reaches maturity, putting more focus on the high-performance, high-capacity storage capability that a QLC-based SSD ideally is suited to address. I will now discuss each of our business units in greater detail, starting with eMMC and UFS. We experienced another exceptional quarter of growth in our eMMC, UFS business, with strength across the board in smartphone, automotive, industrial, and IoT. eMMC and UFS revenue was up over 20% sequentially as we continue to increase our market share and capitalize on new product introductions.

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

Module makers are benefiting as NAND makers have walked away from eMMC and UFS too due to lower SSD margins, which has helped module makers gain market share rapidly using our eMMC and UFS controllers. Overall, end market demand in the third quarter was higher than expected and helped us deliver strong sequential growth with our NAND flash partner as well. Smartphone OEMs continued to shift to our new UFS controllers in mainstream and now value line devices, driving better SSD and margin for our business. Additionally, we continue to have success with our direct OEM engagement with QLC controllers. Our first customer is introducing a second smartphone with our chip in the current quarter. We plan to introduce an additional model next year.

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

Given the current NAND environment, we expect that other smartphone manufacturers will increasingly look to QLC to deliver high-capacity storage at lower cost, which could lead to further customer engagement. UFS will continue to grow rapidly in the smartphone market as low-end smartphones continue migrating from eMMC to UFS to deliver better performance cost-effectively. While smartphones are rapidly shifting away from eMMC to UFS, eMMC remains an important revenue driver for Silicon Motion. As we mentioned, the market for eMMC extended well beyond mobile phones and accounted for more than 900 million units annually. The market for eMMC includes automotive, commercial, industrial, IoT, smart devices, set-top box, and streaming devices, robotics, and many more, including the rapidly growing market for smart glasses championed by Meta, Apple, Google, Amazon, Xiaomi, and others.

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

These solutions will likely continue to use eMMC, providing a strong foundation for market growth for years to come. As the NAND flash maker increasingly concentrates on the enterprise market, the opportunity for Silicon Motion, eMMC, and UFS continues to grow. We expect to see further market share expansion as the flash maker outsources more and believe that our share gain in eMMC, UFS will remain a strong contributor to our future growth, leading to expanding market opportunity and end market growth. I will now discuss our client SSD business. Our client SSD revenue was up more than 20% sequentially in the September quarter after a slower start in the first half of the year.

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

We are beginning to see greater PC demand driven by sunsetting of Windows 10 this month and the adoption of AI at the edge in commercial and consumer PCs, which require higher performance SSD solutions. We are also benefiting from the positive impact of our eight-channel PCIe Gen5 controller that launched at the end of last year, with revenue growing 45% sequentially in the third quarter and which now represents more than 15% of our client SSD revenue. This new controller has significantly higher SSD performance than our PCIe Gen4 offerings and will help drive revenue growth as it scales. As we have discussed, we have four of six NAND flash makers and nearly all the module makers using this performance-leading controller for their high-end offerings.

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

We expect to capture significant market share in the top tier for the PC market for the first time, which represents approximately 10%-15% of the overall market. We have won with all the top PC OEMs in many of their upcoming high-end models that are expected to ship later this year and scale through next year. We are introducing our second six-nanometer PCIe Gen5 controller during the four-channel version that's targeting the mass PC market and will begin initial shipments this quarter. We have already secured design wins with four NAND flash makers and nearly all the module makers for this controller as well. This new controller targets the largest segment of PC and retail SSD market, and we expect that it will help drive our client SSD market share from approximately 30% today to 40% over the next few years.

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

We expect the PCIe Gen5 will become the dominant technology in consumer applications over the next few years, and we are in the best position to benefit given our strong customer partnership with both NAND flash makers and module makers. I will now provide an update of our automotive business. We continue to experience significant design win activity in our automotive segment across each of our product units, including eMMC, UFS, PCIe, and our firmware embedded solutions. While the overall market has experienced challenges in 2025 given the broader geopolitical and tariff issues, we continue to grow our product portfolio and market share. We are also benefiting from the super trend of increased vehicle complexity, which is driving the need for additional high-speed, high-performance storage. We recently won significant design win with a tier one Japanese auto manufacturer in their global model that could contribute to top-line growth moving forward.

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

As I mentioned during our last call, we also recently won with a large South Korean customer that has started to sample our eMMC controller-based solution to multiple automotive OEMs, which we expect to drive further growth in our automotive business in 2026 and beyond. We are also on track to extend our lead in ASIL certification, which we achieved this year with the level three certification for our PCIe 4.0 controller, with a plan to tape out our next generation automotive PCIe 5.0 controller next year. Increased demand for advanced storage solutions in automotive is being driven by AI, multiple screen integration, ADAS sensors, cameras, navigation, and other applications. We are shipping to many of the leading automotive manufacturers in the world, including Tesla, BYD, Xiaomi, Mercedes, Toyota, Honda, and many others.

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

Entering the second half of 2025, we experienced greater than expected demand from our partner in China as our strong design pipeline has led to market share gains with leading car makers like BYD and Geely. Chinese automotive brands are rapidly taking market share worldwide, given their leadership in electric low-cost vehicles. As we continue to introduce compelling new automotive controllers and as we expand our customer relationship, we remain confident that automotive will represent at least 10% of our revenue by 2026-2027. Finally, I will now provide an update to our enterprise business. The requirements of AI computation, training, and inference are rapidly evolving and driving new requirements on storage and memory solutions that deliver performance, capacity, power, and affordability. These growing opportunities are expanding the prospect for Silicon Motion MonTitan family of enterprise-grade controllers.

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

The need for increased speed and lower latency is driving greater adoption of SSDs in the data centers, and the industry is increasingly looking to adopt NAND solutions in WAN storage, GPU storage, and eventually near GPU storage as well. Our MonTitan solution is ideally suited to address the increasing requirement of AI workload for both compute SSDs using TLC and high-capacity WAN storage SSDs using filler. The opportunity for compute SSDs represents most of the Enterprise SSD market today, while high-capacity SSDs are just beginning to emerge, but are expected to be a much larger market opportunity longer term. Interest in MonTitan for compute storage TLC applications is increasing. This quarter, our customers are beginning qualifications with end customer TLC, enterprise, and data center with TLC-based high-performance compute SSDs using our MonTitan controller, targeting the high-performance requirement of AI in the data center.

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

We expect these qualifications to progress into the first half of next year and begin to run commercially in the second half of next year. For high-performance, high-capacity QLC SSDs, our MonTitan-based solution helps deliver a significant advantage over HDD for the AI inference, E4 CSP, hyperscalers, and enterprise by alleviating the speed and power bottleneck inherent in HDD technology for WAN storage. The shift to NAND technology for WAN storage is being accelerated by the current supply shortage in the major HDD manufacturers, making HDD more expensive, and high-capacity QLC SSD is a cost-effective, better performance option. Longer term, WAN storage requirements offer a much bigger market opportunity when compared to the opportunity for compute SSDs, and we see increasing interest in our industry-leading MonTitan QLC solutions. We are on track to begin end customer qualifications for QLC-based high-capacity SSDs late this year or early next year.

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

We are increasingly confident in MonTitan as a significant new growth opportunity given our successes and the win today in both the compute and high-capacity WAN storage market. We remain confident that MonTitan will deliver 5%-10% of our revenue by the late 2026 or 2027 timeframe as these new opportunities and customers scale in the near and the midterm. Finally, we continue to. Collaborate with customers to deliver compelling enterprise boot drive solutions that can work across multiple platforms, engaging directly with the world-leading AI GPU makers as well as hyperscalers and the CSPs. We began volume shipments of a boot drive to the leading AI GPU makers this quarter for their current GPU product and starting qualifications of their next-generation GPU for follow-on products.

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

Working on expanding our relationship with the customer, we are also in the qualification process of our boot drive solution for a variety of switch products, including an NVLink-based design as well as Ethernet switch design, both of which are expected to run later next year. We expect the boot drive solution will add an additional long-term sustainable growth driver for Silicon Motion as we expand our storage technology and business partnership with this leading GPU/TPU maker. In conclusion, the third quarter of 2025 delivers significant growth of our business as we execute on our diversification strategy with new products and into new markets. We continue to see the reward of investment that have been made over the past few years.

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

These investments include our market-leading six-nanometer products, our new UFS and PCIe Gen5 controllers, our new MonTitan and boot storage enterprise-class solutions, our growing automotive portfolio, and our new microSD product for multiple occasions, including Nintendo Switch 2. We have never been in a better position to expand our market share given our leading product portfolio and the growing need for flash makers to shift their focus from consumer to enterprise applications. Given the growing demand in our legacy business and our new automotive and enterprise products, I'm increasingly confident that we will deliver strong, sustainable top and bottom-line growth. Given our current backlog, I'm very confident in our ability to exceed our target annual revenue run rate of more than $1 billion this quarter. Now, let me turn the call to Jason to go over our financial performance outlook.

Jason Tsai
Jason Tsai
CFO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

Thank you, Wallace. Good morning to everyone joining us today.

Jason Tsai
Jason Tsai
CFO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

I will discuss additional details of our third 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. The reconciliation of our GAAP to non-GAAP data is included in the earnings release issued today. In the September quarter, sales increased 22% to $242 million, coming in well above the high end of our guided range. We experienced a strong rebound, mobile demand, and strong growth in our PCIe Gen5 client. Gross margins were at the higher end of our guidance range and increased again in the quarter to 48.7% as we continue to capitalize on new product productions being made. Operating expenses increased sequentially to $79.5 million as we continue to invest in new projects and expand our customer engagements to further grow and support our significant pipeline of new opportunities.

Jason Tsai
Jason Tsai
CFO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

Operating margins increased sequentially to 15.8%, well above our guided range, resulting from improved gross margins and higher than expected revenues during the quarter. Our earnings per ADS was $1. Total stock compensation, which we exclude from non-GAAP results, was $5.5 million in the third quarter, and we had $272.4 million cash equivalents and restricted cash at the end of the third quarter compared to $282.3 million at the end of the second quarter of 2025. Cash declined in the third quarter primarily from a combination of dividend payment of $16.7 million and an increase in inventory to support our expected strong business ramp. Our team executed well, and our operational discipline delivered significant outperformance despite continuing investment in new advanced geometry products and our emerging MonTitan platform for the enterprise and AI-driven demand markets. Now, we'll discuss our fourth quarter outlook.

Jason Tsai
Jason Tsai
CFO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

Revenue is expected to increase 5% -10% to $254 million-$266 million, above our initial target of $250 million we had set at the start of this year. We expect fourth quarter strength to be driven primarily from our client SSD controllers and SSD solutions. Gross margins are expected to be in the range of 48.5%-49.5%, and operating margin is expected to be in the range of 19%-20%, approaching our historical operating profitability levels as we plan to benefit from higher revenue, higher gross margins, and lower operating expenses sequentially. Our effective tax rate is expected to be approximately 18%. Stock-based compensation and dispute-related expenses are expected to be in the range of $18.1 million-$19.1 million.

Jason Tsai
Jason Tsai
CFO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

Despite the uncertainty this year, given rapid geopolitical changes and tariff impacts, our team has remained focused on execution and building an incredibly strong pipeline for long-term growth. We have successfully scaled new products, engaged with new customers, and expanded into new markets that will lead to higher market share and greenfield growth opportunities in enterprise storage, and we're just getting started. We expect to continue to invest to further expand our position as a leading merchant controller maker in the world for eMMC and UFS, client SSDs, automotive applications, high-performance, and high-capacity enterprise and data storage, data center storage. As we look ahead, our pipeline for growth in 2026 and beyond has never been stronger, and we look forward to discussing it in greater detail when we report again in three months. This concludes our prepared comments. I'd like to open up for questions now, Operator.

Operator

Thank you.

Operator

We will now begin the question and answer session. 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. A moment for our first question. We will now take our first question from the line of Neil Young from Needham & Company. Please ask your question, Neil.

Neil Young
Neil Young
Equity Research Associate of Semiconductors at Needham & Company

Hey, everybody. Thanks for letting me ask a question. Could you dive a little deeper into your comment in the press release about white-box AI server makers continuing to leverage mainstream hardware components? I believe your SSD controller sales are typically to PC/other consumer applications. Can you just give us a sense of how much of the SSD controller revenue in this quarter came from the white-box AI server makers you referenced, and where you expect that to trend going forward?

Neil Young
Neil Young
Equity Research Associate of Semiconductors at Needham & Company

I have a follow-up. Thanks.

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

The mention with the white-box is an AI all-in-one server, and the primary comes from China and Taiwan, some in the deep-sea all-in-one server white-box and some in others bundled with others, training model. I think the SM2508 eight-channel PCIe Gen5 controller is well positioned in the market. We cannot comment. We don't know exactly the volume, but it's a growing momentum for all the AI all-in-one server. It's similar like NVIDIA announced the MGX DGX GPU for this kind of a market.

Neil Young
Neil Young
Equity Research Associate of Semiconductors at Needham & Company

Okay. Thanks. Looking at the gross margin guide, midpoint coming in at 49%, I was wondering if you could maybe walk through the moving pieces of the gross margin in 4Q. If possible, could you share sort of where you expect gross margin to trend next year?

Neil Young
Neil Young
Equity Research Associate of Semiconductors at Needham & Company

If not, at least what the main drivers of the gross margin improvement should be in 2026. Thanks.

Jason Tsai
Jason Tsai
CFO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

Yeah. Certainly as we continue into the fourth quarter, scaling new products like PCIe Gen5, new generation products tend to have better gross margins that offset the declining gross margins of older products. We do expect to see, as MonTitan continues to scale, to have some incremental benefits, but certainly that remains a relatively small portion of our business today. We're not guiding for 2026 at this point. We'll talk more about that in three months' time. Stay tuned for that. Certainly, we are excited that we're back to kind of the normalized range that we historically have been. Historical range has been 48% t-50%, and we're guiding smack in the middle of that.

Jason Tsai
Jason Tsai
CFO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

We're pretty happy that we've been able to recover off of, obviously, some tough times a couple of years ago, but we're back to where we historically have been.

Operator

Do you have any follow-up question, Neil?

Neil Young
Neil Young
Equity Research Associate of Semiconductors at Needham & Company

That's all for me. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. We will now take our next question from the line of Craig Ellis from B. Riley Securities. Please go ahead, Craig.

Craig Ellis
Craig Ellis
Director of Research, Senior Semiconductor, and Capital Equipment Analyst at B. Riley Securities

Yeah. Thanks for taking the question. Team, congratulations on real good execution. I wanted to start with a question that takes off from Jason's comments that the company's just getting started in enterprise storage and ask a question that's fairly broad and has a couple of parts to it.

Craig Ellis
Craig Ellis
Director of Research, Senior Semiconductor, and Capital Equipment Analyst at B. Riley Securities

If we look at what our ambition is over the next year plus with MonTitan and enterprise storage classically defined and think about what's going on currently with boot drive controllers and full solutions already starting to ship and picking up and maybe diversifying our customer base next year. This part would be for you, Wallace, as we think about some of the news that's coming out of Korea and other countries about the development of high bandwidth flash. While some could be skeptical that that may just be like storage class memory, which went nowhere for 15 years, with some leading OEMs behind it, it very likely could. How do we think about the arc of those drivers as we go from 2025 to 2026 and 2027? What can enterprise broadly defined be for the company longer term?

Operator

Thank you for your question. Please remain on the line. Your conference will resume shortly. Thank you. Presenters, you may continue your conference. Craig, you may want to repeat your question.

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

Sorry, Craig.

Craig Ellis
Craig Ellis
Director of Research, Senior Semiconductor, and Capital Equipment Analyst at B. Riley Securities

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. The question is this: if we look at enterprise storage broadly, including MonTitan as traditional enterprise storage, but also include the boot drive business with one customer shipping now, but maybe diversifying and think longer term about what's possible from high bandwidth flash if that were to be an opportunity, because certainly that's going to be QLC where you're particularly strong.

Operator

Just a moment, sir.

Craig Ellis
Craig Ellis
Director of Research, Senior Semiconductor, and Capital Equipment Analyst at B. Riley Securities

Can you talk about the.

Operator

Just a moment, sir. The conference will resume shortly. Just a moment. Ladies and gentlemen, please remain on the line. Your conference will resume shortly. Please remain on the line. Your conference will resume shortly. Please remain on the line. Your conference will resume shortly. We have the speakers back.

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

Hi there.

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

Sorry about that. We're back.

Craig Ellis
Craig Ellis
Director of Research, Senior Semiconductor, and Capital Equipment Analyst at B. Riley Securities

Okay. Should I give the question a third shot?

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

Okay. One more time, Craig. Sorry about that.

Craig Ellis
Craig Ellis
Director of Research, Senior Semiconductor, and Capital Equipment Analyst at B. Riley Securities

All right. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. So, looking at enterprise storage broadly from MonTitan classic enterprise storage that's starting to ramp with qualifications and then shipments next year, but boot drive controllers and storage getting going now, and with the potential for high bandwidth flash to come in as a much-needed AI-based solution a few years down the road, how do we think about the longer-term market storage as we just get started with boot drives this year, pick up MonTitan, and then ramp those over the ensuing few years? What could high bandwidth flash do for the business as a third driver longer term? Thank you.

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

First of all, I want to clarify.

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

The 5%-10% of our total revenue, 2026 to 2027, does not include our boot drive for the current DPU design and also for the additional switch boot drive solution. We do see moving to 2026 is a fast and challenging year for the storage industry. There are so many new opportunities coming, not as a conventional compute storage, but also warm storage SSD, high-capacity QLC SSD. Moving forward, there will be near GPU storage. There are so many new opportunities for MonTitan controller to fit in. We are also preparing to work in a growing market. We just need to have more R&D resources to meet the demand. In parallel, I think this is a great opportunity. We see MonTitan go scale up. Our boot drive solution also goes scale up quickly in 2026 and moving to some CSV design too.

Craig Ellis
Craig Ellis
Director of Research, Senior Semiconductor, and Capital Equipment Analyst at B. Riley Securities

Wallace, what's your view on the potential for high bandwidth flash to be a third driver of enterprise broadly defined longer term?

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

The high HBF, I think this is a very interesting product. This is, as you know, all designed for AI inference near GPU. We see there's an SLC 3D, 3D SLC technology moving to meet certain near GPU leaders' requirements. HBF is also very interesting in the packaging technology using the conventional standard 3D NAND. As this requires new controllers and our packaging technology, we will monitor it carefully because we believe initially this belongs to all the NAND makers' development. We are also invited to join the business. I think we are all of a resource. We want to monitor when the market becomes more mature, more stable, and we will participate.

Craig Ellis
Craig Ellis
Director of Research, Senior Semiconductor, and Capital Equipment Analyst at B. Riley Securities

Thank you.

Craig Ellis
Craig Ellis
Director of Research, Senior Semiconductor, and Capital Equipment Analyst at B. Riley Securities

The second question is regarding the comments from you and Jason around NAND sufficiency and the implications for shipments next year. You have an advantage. You're levered with all NAND suppliers. What messaging are they giving you with regard to how they're going to prioritize their output and capacity allocations across enterprise versus PC versus smartphone and then consumer applications? What does that mean for the various growth drivers of the business in 2026? Thank you.

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

I think you asked a very good question. We're facing a never-happened-before, the HDD, DRAM, HP, HBM, NAND, all in severe shortage in 2026. Most of our capacity are sold out. I did talk to many of the major makers, but I really cannot comment on what kind of allocation policy is going to do. However, the leading maker, they will keep a discipline, and they will consider balancing for the industry.

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

They're not just favoring AI and server or AI data center. They will consider a certain % for smartphone, a certain percentage for PC, and a certain percenage for automotive. Of course, the majority will go to the AI and the AI server. Balancing is very important so we can keep the whole industry moving forward.

Craig Ellis
Craig Ellis
Director of Research, Senior Semiconductor, and Capital Equipment Analyst at B. Riley Securities

Thank you, Wallace.

Operator

Thank you. We will now take our next question from the line of Suji DeSilva from ROTH Capital. Please go ahead, Suji.

Suji DeSilva
Suji DeSilva
Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst at ROTH Capital

Hi, Wallace. Hi, Jason. Congratulations on the progress here. For MonTitan, I know you had talked about two lead customers initially, now more. I know one of them was an OEM who was, I think, in turn trying to themselves secure hyperscaler customers. Has that happened with that lead customer? If so, what's the start of ramp timing for that customer?

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

I cannot comment on the ramping.

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

I think they're very close to the, as you know, tier one customers. Some were developed with the firmware themselves, some with joint development with us together. We cannot comment on the ramping, getting very close, but because MonTitan is getting a tremendous demand from multiple customers, the tier two, we're busy to provide solutions for both TLC and QLC. Hopefully, we can start a small ramp in Q4, and then we see the more meaningful ramp in 2026.

Suji DeSilva
Suji DeSilva
Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst at ROTH Capital

Okay. Thanks, Wallace. Very helpful. My other question's on the arbitration. I'm wondering if there's any update there. Thanks.

Jason Tsai
Jason Tsai
CFO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

Yeah, thanks, Suji. The arbitration, you know, the arbitration had begun. The hearing was held, was scheduled earlier this month. The tribunal has scheduled oral closing arguments to be in March of 2026, and it is expected that a decision by the tribunal will be available sometime after that.

Suji DeSilva
Suji DeSilva
Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst at ROTH Capital

Okay. Thanks, Jason.

Suji DeSilva
Suji DeSilva
Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst at ROTH Capital

Thanks, everyone.

Operator

Thank you. We will now take our next question from the line of Tiffany Yeh from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead, Tiffany.

Tiffany Yeh
Tiffany Yeh
Equity Research Associate at Morgan Stanley

Yeah. Thank you. Good morning, good evening, gentlemen. Thanks a lot for taking my questions and congrats on the great result and guidance. My first question is that it seems your inventory value rose around 62% in the third quarter. May we know the reason behind? Is it due to the inventory preparation for the BT substrates shortage? I have a follow-up. Thank you.

Jason Tsai
Jason Tsai
CFO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

Yeah. Inventory did come up. Inventory increases are to support the growing backlog of new business and orders that we have already received, and that's expected to ship over the next few quarters.

Jason Tsai
Jason Tsai
CFO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

The increase in inventory is across really all of our product categories, including some low-cost NAND that we had procured earlier, as well as controllers for SSDs, as well as eMMC and UFS. It's a pretty broad-based demand that we're seeing, and we're preparing ahead of that.

Tiffany Yeh
Tiffany Yeh
Equity Research Associate at Morgan Stanley

Okay. Got it. It seems that the BT substrates shortage has kept some of our fabless peers upside in percent next year. Do we see any impact from that, or because that's what you just indicated, we're fully loaded now, so not worry about that impact?

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

It seems the substrate and the PCB shortage, long lead time did not impact our business. We have prepared in advance, but we do need to prepare the production ramp for more controllers as well as a ferrite product line. That's why we increased our inventory right now.

Tiffany Yeh
Tiffany Yeh
Equity Research Associate at Morgan Stanley

Got it. Got it.

Tiffany Yeh
Tiffany Yeh
Equity Research Associate at Morgan Stanley

Can I, I have one more question. As we head into 2026, we see both our foundry partner and OSAT partners all initiating price tag to reflect the elevated material costs. How shall we think about the impact to our profitability, and do you think we can further pass through all these elevated costs to our customers? That's all. Thank you.

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

I think what I can say is that TSMC will increase the wafer price from 5 nm,4 nm, 3 nm, 2 nm to start from 2025. Our PCIe Gen5, the TSMC 4 nm, but it won't be production till late 2027 or 2028. There's no cost impact, foundry wafer impact for our cost in our controller in the next two to three years.

Jason Tsai
Jason Tsai
CFO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

And Tiffany, most of our products are on more trailing edge process geometry. So availability is, and pricing is certainly better at those trailing edges.

Jason Tsai
Jason Tsai
CFO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

You know, the more advanced ones we have today are the 6 nm, but a lot of our other products are 12 nm and 20 nm or even higher process geometries.

Tiffany Yeh
Tiffany Yeh
Equity Research Associate at Morgan Stanley

Right. Maybe the impact from foundry is quite nearly limited in 2026, but how about OSAT? Thank you.

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

OSAT, I think because we have a preliminary agreement, so the OSAT cost impact will be very limited to us, almost irrelevant.

Tiffany Yeh
Tiffany Yeh
Equity Research Associate at Morgan Stanley

Got it. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Next question comes from Gokul Hariharan from JPMorgan. Please ask your question, Gokul.

Gokul Hariharan
Gokul Hariharan
Managing Director at JPMorgan

Yeah. Hi, Wallace and Jason. First question, given this very rapid increase in NAND flash pricing, and it feels like we're going to be in a reasonably short supply situation all through 2026. What are the business dynamics that you're seeing from your customers?

Gokul Hariharan
Gokul Hariharan
Managing Director at JPMorgan

Historically, Silicon Motion used to be a little bit more affected when NAND flash is very tight, given OEMs try to allocate to certain customers. At the same time, QLC NAND is clearly rising. Could you talk a little bit about anything more that you see in terms of either engagement? Any reason why you're not kind of getting more bullish about your 5%-10% kind of Enterprise SSD exposure, given a lot of the activities happening in QLC NAND right now?

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

I think first of all, more than 50% of our business, we engage with the NAND OEM business. We are really well protected in the NAND, NAND maker. Second is, most of our module maker, they have prepared the potential NAND price increase and shortage in advance. They all have at least 8 to 12 months inventory.

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

I think they also, although they do have a certain contract with the NAND supplier, definitely there will be some impact. I think that most of our customers, when we discussed in the last couple of weeks, they all have a confidence they should walk through in 2026. We do not see an impact of our business as the coming quarter or even the first half of 2026. We feel very strong for our backlog, and we see we will benefit from the NAND supply shortage and become a stronger player in the industry.

Gokul Hariharan
Gokul Hariharan
Managing Director at JPMorgan

Understood. Any updates on the QLC NAND pipeline, design pipeline, and revenue pipeline? I was thinking maybe you would be sounding a little bit more bullish about Enterprise SSD, given a lot of the activity on QLC NAND recently.

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

That's exactly true.

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

We are pretty excited about the high demand for QLC high-capacity Enterprise SSD, which has a need to have a deliberate result. I think, as you can see, even it's not just the AI inferences, really require high-capacity Enterprise SSD because the HDD shortage also triggers higher demand for an urgent demand for the high-capacity SSD. That's why we are very busy. I cannot comment about the potential, the outcome, but we have to deliver result ASAP.

Jason Tsai
Jason Tsai
CFO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

Gokul, we're not changing our expectations at this point yet, you know, in spite of the strong demand. We're still targeting 5%-10% of our revenue in that 2026, 2027 timeframe.

Gokul Hariharan
Gokul Hariharan
Managing Director at JPMorgan

Okay. Are your existing customers, because new designs will obviously take time to kind of cascade in, but are your existing customers upsizing meaningfully, compared to what you thought maybe six months back for QLC NAND?

Jason Tsai
Jason Tsai
CFO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

I think across the board, we're certainly doing better, right? We're coming in ahead of where we were anticipating exiting the year at, so we're going to be above the billion-dollar run rate. We are seeing strength in eMMC UFS as we gain share there. We're seeing strength with our PCIe Gen5 as we gain share there. Across the board, we are, and our business today is certainly stronger than what we had anticipated at the start of the year.

Gokul Hariharan
Gokul Hariharan
Managing Director at JPMorgan

I think this is more to do with enterprise rather than consumer, to be very clear, but this is more to do with enterprise.

Jason Tsai
Jason Tsai
CFO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

I mean, look, our target still remains at 5%-10% in 2026, 2027. Obviously, if we can do that faster, we certainly will, but we are resource constrained. We are working as fast as we can. Our products are beginning to sample with end customers.

Jason Tsai
Jason Tsai
CFO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

As they get ready to ramp up, we're going to be ready to support them. There are a number of processes in place that right now we're working through.

Gokul Hariharan
Gokul Hariharan
Managing Director at JPMorgan

Just back to client SSDs, how are you thinking about the next couple of quarters? I think we have probably seen a lot of the benefits of the Windows 10 sunsetting and demand pulling for PC as a result of that. As we kind of start to lap that in the next couple of quarters, how do you see this pan out? Do you see a little bit of moderation in growth there or the spec migration to PCIe 5 is good enough to offset any of that volume growth tail off?

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

I think you are correct. We benefit from PCIe Gen5 market share.

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

Again, as we said, our PCIe Gen5 eight channel have a 4 nm and nearly all the module maker design win. When PCIe start to ramp from late this quarter, I think we benefit from revenue growth as well as the market share. Our four-channel mainstream dealing is PCIe Gen5, also is near production. I think we'll start to see initial production by late this quarter and start ramping up from mid of next year through the combination of 4 nanometer as well as the module maker. When PCIe Gen5 becomes mainstream in the PC market, Silicon Motion will benefit from the market trend because we will move toward 40% of the global market share.

Jason Tsai
Jason Tsai
CFO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

As I said in the comments, we do anticipate our SSD controller business to grow again sequentially in the fourth quarter.

Gokul Hariharan
Gokul Hariharan
Managing Director at JPMorgan

Just a clarification.

Gokul Hariharan
Gokul Hariharan
Managing Director at JPMorgan

For PCIe Gen5, let's say for next year, what percentage of the PC OEM market do you expect it to be? Is it like 15%, 20% or once you have your 4 channel controller also ready, or is it even higher than that?

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

We cannot comment for PC OEM whether plan to ramp. We just know when they ramp more model, we benefit from market share again.

Gokul Hariharan
Gokul Hariharan
Managing Director at JPMorgan

Got it. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. As a reminder, before we take our next question, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one one on your telephone keypad now. Our next question comes from Matt Bryson from Wedbush. Please ask your question, Matt. Matt, please unmute your line. Your line is open. All right. We are not getting a response from Matt. I'm not showing any further questions. I'll now turn the conference back to Mr. Wallace Kou for closing comments.

Wallace Kou
Wallace Kou
President and CEO at Silicon Motion Technology Corporation

Thank you everyone for joining us today and for your continuing sharing Silicon Motion. We will be attending several investor conferences over the next few months. The schedule of these events will be posted on the investor relations section of our corporate website, and we look forward to speaking with you at these events. Thank you everyone for joining us today.

Operator

Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect your lines.

Executives
    • Wallace Kou
      Wallace Kou
      President and CEO
    • Jason Tsai
      Jason Tsai
      CFO
    • Tom Sepenzis
      Tom Sepenzis
      Senior Director of IR and Strategy
Analysts
    • Gokul Hariharan
      Managing Director at JPMorgan
    • Tiffany Yeh
      Equity Research Associate at Morgan Stanley
    • Suji DeSilva
      Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst at ROTH Capital
    • Neil Young
      Equity Research Associate of Semiconductors at Needham & Company
    • Craig Ellis
      Director of Research, Senior Semiconductor, and Capital Equipment Analyst at B. Riley Securities
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