Ambiq Micro Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

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May 12, 2026

Key Takeaways

  • Positive Sentiment: Ambiq said Q1 net sales of $25.1 million beat guidance and rose 59.3% year over year, with broad-based demand from edge AI customers and a new major customer entering production.
  • Positive Sentiment: Management guided Q2 net sales of $31 million to $32 million, implying about 75% year-over-year growth, and said this reflects multiple customer launch ramps and a stronger second-half outlook.
  • Positive Sentiment: The company highlighted business diversification, with its three largest customers contributing about 71% of Q1 sales versus 86% a year ago, while non-wearables remain about a quarter of the pipeline and are growing quickly.
  • Neutral Sentiment: Ambiq is continuing to invest heavily in product development, with R&D up 43.3% and plans to spend roughly $85 million on operating expenses this year, which supports growth but also keeps profitability further out.
  • Neutral Sentiment: Executives said gross margin should stay roughly flat as yield improvements and Apollo5 scaling are offset by industry-wide cost pressures, while they also acknowledged some demand may be difficult to meet due to short lead times and expediting constraints.
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Earnings Conference Call
Ambiq Micro Q1 2026
00:00 / 00:00

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Operator

Good morning, welcome to Ambiq Micro 1st quarter 2026 earnings conference call. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. I'd now like to turn the call over to Ms. Charlene Wan, Ambiq's Vice President of Corporate Marketing and Investor Relations. Charlene, please go ahead.

Charlene Wan
VP of Corporate Marketing and Investor Relations at Ambiq

On today's call, Ambiq's CEO, Fumihide Esaka, will provide an overview of the company's performance and strategy. CFO Jeff Winzeler will then discuss the quarter's financial results and second quarter outlook. Following their remarks, Scott Hanson, Ambiq's Founder and CTO, and Aaron Grassian, EVP of Global Sales and Marketing, will join Fumi and Jeff for Q&A. Our earnings release is available on the investor relations page of our website at www.ambiq.com. We have also posted our earnings presentation on the investor relations section of our website. Before I turn the call over to Fumi, I'd like to remind our listeners that during the course of this conference call, management will discuss non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to their most directly comparable GAAP measures are included in our earnings release available on the company's investor relations website.

Charlene Wan
VP of Corporate Marketing and Investor Relations at Ambiq

In addition, today's call will contain forward-looking statements representing management's beliefs and assumptions only as of the date made. Our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and other filings with the SEC provide more information on specific risks that may cause the actual results to differ materially from current expectations. Now it's my pleasure to turn the call over to Ambiq's CEO, Fumihide Esaka.

Humi Esaka
CEO at Ambiq

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. We have started 2026 with exceptional momentum. The market for edge AI is growing rapidly and is outpacing our expectations from the start of the year. Against this backdrop, our ultra-low power SPOT platform is driving market expansion, gaining share, and reinforcing Ambiq as a partner of choice in a fast-growing category. We expect this momentum to continue throughout the rest of the year. At the same time, our pipeline continued to grow and diversify, and we are investing strategically to further scale the business and extend our technology advantage. Turning to the first quarter performance, net sales exceeded guidance with strong year-over-year and sequential growth from the fourth quarter of 2025.

Humi Esaka
CEO at Ambiq

This performance was driven by broad-based demand for edge AI across our customer base, with more than 80% of units running AI algorithms, order ramps for the upcoming customer product launches, and the new customer entering production. Inventory level remains lean, and we are seeing an increasing number of expedited requests, which reinforces our view that demand is healthy across our end markets. For the second quarter, we expect net sales to grow approximately 75% year-over-year, with momentum continuing in the second half of the year. This outlook is supported by 4 key factors. First, strong and growing end user demand for edge AI solutions. Wearables continue to evolve from basic consumer products to more sophisticated health and wellness platforms. We are seeing continued diversification across form factors, including watches, display-less bands, rings, and eyewear.

Humi Esaka
CEO at Ambiq

Second, strong growth in Apollo5 as our customer upgrade to enable next generation edge AI capabilities while maintaining ultra-low power performance. Third, broader deployment of our solutions across customer portfolios with upcoming product launches and expansion into new form factors. Fourth, we expect a new scaled global customer to enter mass production this year. While wearables remains a key growth driver, adoption is expanding into healthcare, industrial, and smart home and buildings markets as customers deploy AI directly onto devices. Increasingly, end customers expect real-time insights and faster response time, driving the need to process more data directly at the edge. This rise of LLM-driven agents is accelerating this shift, increasing demand for contextual real-time intelligence at the edge and tighter integration between device data and the cloud.

Humi Esaka
CEO at Ambiq

Our solutions are purpose-built to support this evolution, positioning Ambiq as a partner of choice for leading players in the edge AI ecosystem. We're building on this foundation with focused action to expand into additional high-value markets and to develop new products that will further extend our power and performance advantage. Starting with diversification, our personal device business continued to grow and diversify. We have added multiple new customers and secured new design wins across emerging form factors, including display-less bands, smart eyewear, and rings. At the same time, customers are deploying more sophisticated edge AI capabilities on our platform, including a recently secured design win with one of our largest customers for a next-generation product line expected to enter production in 2027.

Humi Esaka
CEO at Ambiq

Beyond personal devices, our expansion into medical, industrial, and smart homes and buildings markets is gaining meaningful traction. We expect revenue from these segments to more than double in 2026. With our broad SoC platform, we offer a scalable and diverse portfolio that supports applications from entry-level designs to more advanced feature-rich use cases. As a result, Ambiq serves as a critical enabler of edge AI, allowing customer to select and to deploy the right solutions across a wide range of applications, including real-time health monitoring, intelligent audio, predictable maintenance, and smart sensing and automation. We're complementing this with a steady cadence of software tools that enhance edge AI capabilities with a focus on how customers capture, process, and derive value from data at the edge.

Humi Esaka
CEO at Ambiq

For example, by combining our ultra-low power hardware with our compressionKIT software, customers will be able to maintain multi-day battery life while storing large volumes of raw physical data and enabling real-time anomaly detection at the edge, expanding what is possible in next-generation medical devices. We are encouraged by the early traction we are seeing and believe Ambiq is well-positioned to deliver growth and diversification across customers and end market and high-value use cases. Looking ahead, we expect our expanding product roadmap to further accelerate this momentum. We continue to make progress on Apollo 340, Atomiq110, and Atomiq120, which are being developed in parallel to support strong customer demand. Atomiq110 remains on track for tape-out towards the end of this year, with initial customer ramp in late 2027.

Humi Esaka
CEO at Ambiq

For Atomiq120, we are actively engaged with several potential alpha customers and are encouraged by the strong interest we are receiving, especially in smart glasses, where customers are seeking the combination of performance and ultra-low power that Atomiq is designed to deliver. Apollo 340 is also generating meaningful traction, with multiple customers expressing interest driven by its compelling price-to-value positioning. We see 340 as an important enabler to expand into higher volume and more diverse opportunities, complementing the higher performance Atomiq family and supporting our strategy to scale across a wider range of edge AI applications. In closing, we have strong momentum across the business and believe we are well-positioned to deliver meaningful revenue growth this year. We continue to execute our strategic priorities and strengthen our leadership in ultra-low power semiconductor solutions as we expand into new edge AI markets and advance our product roadmap.

Humi Esaka
CEO at Ambiq

The edge AI opportunity ahead is tremendous, and we are confident in our ability to capture it to drive long-term growth and value creation. With that, I will turn it over to Jeff to cover the financials.

Jeff Winzeler
CFO at Ambiq

Thank you, Fumi, and good morning, everyone. We delivered a strong start to the year, with first quarter net sales and gross profit up both sequentially from the fourth quarter of 2025 and year-over-year, well ahead of our expectations. Looking ahead, we expect a meaningful acceleration in the second quarter as well, strengthening our confidence in driving meaningful growth for the full year of 2026. Along the way, we are making progress in diversifying our business. Our three largest customers accounted for 86% of our sales in the first quarter of 2025. Those same three customers accounted for approximately 71% of our first quarter 2026 sales, indicating that we are successfully diversifying our revenue stream to new customers and markets. Turning to our first quarter financial results.

Jeff Winzeler
CFO at Ambiq

We delivered net sales of $25.1 million, increasing 59.3% year-over-year, driven by broad-based strength across our customer base. We saw particularly strong demand from 2 customers supporting new product launch ramps, we also benefited from the addition of a new major customer that entered production during the quarter. Sales to end customers in China were 13.7% of total net sales, compared to 6.2% in the prior-year period. This increase was primarily driven by customer programs where our technology is enabling higher value edge AI functionality. Non-GAAP gross profit increased 56.2% year-over-year to $11.6 million. Q1 2026 non-GAAP gross margin of 46.2% was down 90 basis points year-over-year, primarily due to a Q1 2025 non-recurring credit.

Jeff Winzeler
CFO at Ambiq

Excluding this one-time impact, non-GAAP gross margin increased 210 basis points year-over-year. Turning to operating expense, non-GAAP R&D was $10.1 million, up 43.3% year-over-year, reflecting accelerated investments to support product development both across our Apollo and Atomiq platforms. Non-GAAP SG&A expenses were $8.1 million, up 31.8% year-over-year, driven by increased spending for go-to-market capabilities and public company infrastructure. Other income was $1.5 million, up $1.1 million year-over-year due to interest earned on balance sheet cash. Fourth quarter non-GAAP net loss was $5 million, a $200,000 improvement year-over-year. Non-GAAP net loss per share was $0.25. We ended the quarter with no debt and $204.5 million in cash and cash equivalents.

Jeff Winzeler
CFO at Ambiq

Our strong financial position provides the flexibility to invest in product development, software, and go-to-market initiatives to support our strategic growth priorities. Now turning to our outlook. For the second quarter, we expect net sales in the range of $31 million-$32 million, reflecting the trends that Fumi covered earlier. Non-GAAP gross margin between 45%-46%, driven by the continued progress on yield improvements and continued Apollo5 scaling. Non-GAAP operating expense of $21 million-$22 million, reflecting investments to support product development and our strategic growth priorities, including $1.7 million related to IP purchases this quarter. Lastly, we expect non-GAAP loss per share of $0.29-$0.23 based on a weighted average share count of 21.38 million shares outstanding. As we think about the trajectory of our business, we have clear visibility, and we're confident in continued momentum.

Jeff Winzeler
CFO at Ambiq

Q2 outlook reflects the timing of multiple customer launches coming into production at the same time. Importantly, we view that as a step up in the baseline rather than a peak as those programs continue to scale and are complemented by additional ramps behind them. While we continue to expect seasonality in the fourth quarter, we expect year-over-year second half net sales growth to be similar to first half. We continue to expect gross margins to be roughly flat year-over-year as yield improvements are offset by broader industry cost dynamics. We continue to expect operating expense of approximately $85 million for the year, reflecting increases to engineering headcount, utilizing contract engineering to provide flex in our model for both upside and downside, and $7 million-$10 million of IP purchases necessary for product development.

Jeff Winzeler
CFO at Ambiq

With that, I'll turn the call back over to Fumi before we open the line for Q&A.

Humi Esaka
CEO at Ambiq

Edge AI adoption is accelerating. Our pipeline is expanding and our technology continued to make us a partner of choice to enable on-device intelligence. As we execute against our roadmap and scale into new markets, we remain focused on driving sustained top-line growth, expanding our leadership in ultra-low power edge AI, and delivering long-term value for our shareholders. With that, I will open the call to questions. Operator, please go ahead.

Operator

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star one again. Please pick up your handset when asking a question, and if you are muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Liam Farr from BofA Securities. Your line is now open.

Liam Pharr
Analyst at Bank of America Securities

Hi. Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. Could you provide us an update on the percentage of your funnel that is non-wearables, and how much of 1Q revenue was consumer wearables versus medical, industrial or in smart home?

Humi Esaka
CEO at Ambiq

Right now, we still continue to have a funnel of non-wearables about one quarter of our pipeline. We continue to have a strong growth in, like I said, in Q1, we grew 100% in a non-wearable market, and we expect to continue to grow non-wearable market as fast as we've been doing.

Liam Pharr
Analyst at Bank of America Securities

Great. Thank you. With these strong results, you're kind of rapidly approaching that $40 million a quarter run rate. Could you provide us an update on the timeline to profitability? Will maybe a higher OpEx burn and maybe, you know, gross margin remaining roughly flat still, you know, keep profitability only until 2028, or is there potential for that to be pulled forward?

Humi Esaka
CEO at Ambiq

Jeff?

Jeff Winzeler
CFO at Ambiq

Yeah, Liam. So a couple questions there. The first in terms of when do we get to that profitability, if you quarterize the guidance that we gave for spending, we're spending roughly $21 million a quarter at 46% margin, which is what we just achieved in Q1. You need revenues roughly $47 million a quarter to get to that point. You know, we just guided the quarter a little bit below that, so we've got a ways to go. That said, we made big investments in terms of accelerating our product roadmap, namely our 110 product and our 340 product. The purpose of those investments is to pull that revenue stream in, which is necessary for us to get to that revenue level.

Jeff Winzeler
CFO at Ambiq

We're hopeful that that investment will allow us to pull our cash flow breakeven and our P&L profitability point from, call it, mid 2028 into early 2028 or potentially into the second half of 2027.

Liam Pharr
Analyst at Bank of America Securities

Thank you.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Tore Svanberg from Stifel. Your line is now open.

Tore Svanberg
Tore Svanberg
Analyst at Stifel

Thank you, and congratulations on the momentum here. Maybe to follow up on the initial question there as far as the diversification, you talked about some of the percentages a wee bit. Can you talk about some of the use cases out of wearables that's driving that doubling?

Humi Esaka
CEO at Ambiq

let me give you some of the examples, Tore. definitely medical market is growing, the one of the fastest one outside of wearable, ECG, glucose monitoring. we have bike computing, smart pens, battery monitors, remote controls, livestock tracking. I mean, we're seeing a lot of AI adoption outside of wearables, so we're very excited.

Tore Svanberg
Tore Svanberg
Analyst at Stifel

Very good. As my follow-up, you mentioned the new customer introduction this quarter. I assume that's not part of the three largest. Is there a chance that this particular customer will become more than 10% of revenues this year?

Jeff Winzeler
CFO at Ambiq

There's a possibility that they will.

Tore Svanberg
Tore Svanberg
Analyst at Stifel

Very good. Thank you.

Operator

A reminder, if you would like to ask a question, to please press star one. Your next question comes from the line of Quinn Bolton from Needham. Your line is now open.

Quinn Bolton
Quinn Bolton
Analyst at Needham

Hey, guys. Congratulations on the nice results and outlook. Jeff, just wanted to make sure I sort of caught your comments about how you're thinking for the full year. I think you said you would expect similar growth rates in the second half on a year-over-year basis that you saw in the first half. Looks like the first half, you were up about 68% over the first half of 2025. It sounds like you're thinking about sort of a similar 65% growth second half of 2026 over second half 2025, but just wanna make sure I heard your comments correctly.

Jeff Winzeler
CFO at Ambiq

Yeah, that's correct, Quinn. You know, I think as we look at the business outlook, clearly we had strong Q1 results. We've guided a higher Q2. I think the business model, when you think about the business model, basically just the level has gone up. We've set kind of a new baseline, if you will, in terms of how to think about 2026. We also made the comment in the call about we still expect seasonality in the fourth quarter, so the shape of the curve is pretty much in line with what we would expect.

Quinn Bolton
Quinn Bolton
Analyst at Needham

Got it. The second question is, your comments about gross margin, you know, being sort of flattish half-over-half sound like it implies a little bit of a tick down in Q3, Q4. I know you've got obviously higher revenue in the second half. You probably have mix shift to higher ASP devices like Apollo5. Just wondering, it sounds like the input price increases are, you know, the biggest factor pressuring margins. Wanted to confirm that. Second, given that you're not alone in seeing these input price increases, do you have the ability to pass along some of those input price increases along to customers to try to protect margins over a, you know, intermediate to longer term?

Jeff Winzeler
CFO at Ambiq

Sure. a couple of answers there. When we think about margins, there's 2 real dynamics that are happening in our business. First is we've done a lot of work to increase our yields across the product line, specifically, Apollo5, which is a ramping process for us. We've done a lot of work to try and pull in some of that yield improvement and make our cost base better. However, we're tempering that expectation because there are industry-wide dynamics around substrate costs, piece part costs, and other things that are out of our control that will potentially negate some of that good news. We think about that margin curve as relatively flat, you know, plus or minus 1 point from where we're at today.

Jeff Winzeler
CFO at Ambiq

In terms of our ability to pass on pricing to customers, I think one of the main opportunities we have there is we have a lot of demand for our product, and customers are asking us to pull in volumes pretty significantly. You know, the cost of doing that expediting material is certainly something that we would expect our customers to share in terms of paying for that type of expedite. In terms of actual ASP uplift, you know, we're being very strategic about where we exercise any potential ASP uplift to end customers. We still have to be very competitive. We still want to win business, and I think we can see that we're doing a pretty good job of landing new business with our pricing policy.

Quinn Bolton
Quinn Bolton
Analyst at Needham

Less for either Fumi or Jeff, just you talked multiple times about the expedites you're seeing. Are you getting enough supply from TSMC and your OSAT partners, or do you think you're leaving any demand on the table given that acceleration in expedites?

Humi Esaka
CEO at Ambiq

You know, we have a very strong partnership from the front and the back end of the manufacturing. We are very fortunate to have a great partner to support our customers. However, the market is growing much faster than we expected. Sometimes we get such a short lead time demand increase, which physically sometimes is, you know, the most difficult to do. Some of the order we just can't meet because of the too short of lead time. As long as it's in the timeframe that, you know, normal lead time, we'll be able to support, and we expect us to be able to support these customers quarter after quarter.

Quinn Bolton
Quinn Bolton
Analyst at Needham

Excellent. Thank you.

Operator

Your next question comes to the line of Tore Svanberg from Stifel. Tore, your line is now open.

Tore Svanberg
Tore Svanberg
Analyst at Stifel

Yeah, thank you. I just had two quick follow-ups. First of all, you announced a new product called compressionKIT not too long ago. I'm just wondering, is that a product that you will sell exclusively with your own products, or is that basically available to, you know, any other system that contains other components?

Scott Hanson
Scott Hanson
Founder and CTO at Ambiq

Yeah, for the moment, it's something that will be restricted to our products. Certainly long term, it's something that we could look at pairing with other products. We feel that the combination of Apollo plus compressionKIT is a situation of, you know, 1 plus 1 equals 3 rather than 1 plus 1 equals 2. Yeah. We'll restrict it for the moment to Ambiq products.

Tore Svanberg
Tore Svanberg
Analyst at Stifel

That's very helpful, Scott. My last question is on Apollo 340. You gave some sampling timelines. Anything on Apollo 340 as far as when we should start to expect some material revenue?

Scott Hanson
Scott Hanson
Founder and CTO at Ambiq

Yeah. Just to maybe reiterate, rough timeline is it's in design right now. We expect to sample in the first half of next year. We expect initial customer ramps toward the end of next year and then more meaningful revenue in 2028. I think what everyone's gonna like about this product is it's gonna be quite a bit more diverse in terms of the types of customers that we're serving with it. You know, think everything from some of the medical products that Fumi alluded to earlier, to industrial sensors and smart home sensors, smart grid sensors, that sort of thing. As well, we'll be serving wearables.

Scott Hanson
Scott Hanson
Founder and CTO at Ambiq

Think certain form factors like smart rings as being great targets for an Apollo 340. A really nice diversity of customers there. We're excited about where that will go.

Tore Svanberg
Tore Svanberg
Analyst at Stifel

Sounds good. Thanks again, Scott.

Scott Hanson
Scott Hanson
Founder and CTO at Ambiq

Thank you.

Operator

Your next question is a follow-up from Liam Farr from Bank of America Securities. Liam, your line is now open.

Liam Pharr
Analyst at Bank of America Securities

Hi. Thanks for letting me jump back in. I guess for 2026, and this step up, how do you see kind of this unit versus ASP mix kind of driving that growth? Is this step up more from the new programs and kind of unit-based, or is this combination with these new programs also providing a lot, you know, a little bit more of?

Liam Pharr
Analyst at Bank of America Securities

Premium, you know, Apollo 5 mix to kind of drive some of the ASP as well.

Jeff Winzeler
CFO at Ambiq

Liam. The answer is we're expecting uplift in both, but clearly, you know, with Q1 being 56% above where we were in the same quarter last year and the strong guidance we gave in Q2, the predominant reason that we're up is because of unit shipments. That said, we're very happy with the status of our Apollo5 ramp. It is starting to contribute more and more each quarter to our revenue profile, and it gives us some ASP uplift in the overall business.

Liam Pharr
Analyst at Bank of America Securities

Makes sense. I guess as my follow-up, can you maybe just provide an update on your pricing strategy? I think, you know, previously it's been every generation is driven by 1.5x-2x content uplift, and that's kind of driven, you know, a pricing premium in a similar ballpark. I guess with this, you know, really strong demand environment, it would make sense to me to see kind of more pricing benefit from your, you know, Apollo5 and potentially even Atomiq kind of platforms, given how much benefit they're gonna be giving your customers versus, you know, the previous generation and how fast you guys are innovating.

Jeff Winzeler
CFO at Ambiq

Yeah, I mean, certainly as we continue to proliferate Apollo 5 and Apollo 3 and Apollo 4 to multiple different markets, and enable end customer edge AI to happen, we would expect to see a higher value proposition and better pricing for those products. I think, you know, in general, when we think about the pricing or strategic pricing going forward, we're certainly looking at opportunities where we could maximize our ASPs across different customers and markets.

Liam Pharr
Analyst at Bank of America Securities

Okay, thank you very much.

Operator

There are no further questions at this time, and this concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.

Executives
Analysts
    • Charlene Wan
      VP of Corporate Marketing and Investor Relations at Ambiq
    • Humi Esaka
      CEO at Ambiq
    • Jeff Winzeler
      CFO at Ambiq
    • Liam Pharr
      Analyst at Bank of America Securities
    • Quinn Bolton
      Analyst at Needham
    • Tore Svanberg
      Analyst at Stifel
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