Cirrus Logic Inc at KeyBanc Technology Forum Summary

The following is excerpted from the question-and-answer section of the transcript.

Question: John Vinh - KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc - Analyst : <_ALACRA_META_ABSTRACT>Maybe the first thing we can just talk through is, when you reported your results, you talked about maybe seeing some pull forward of demand of smartphones and talked about how that shaped the back half of your fiscal year. I was just wondering if we could just recap that and talk about the dynamics that are driving that?

Question: John Vinh - KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc - Analyst : Okay. Thanks for walking us through that, Jeff. Just a follow-up on that. You have been obviously shipping camera controller content for several generations right now. So if you've been shipping for several generations, why is it impacting the seasonality of this year versus previous years?

Question: John Vinh - KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc - Analyst : Okay. Carl, just question for you, Mixed-signal's been a truly success story for you guys. You've done extremely well. You've seen a lot of growth in camera controllers. It seems like historically, the drivers have been increasing attach rates, maybe higher ASPs as you migrate to latest generation camera controllers. When we think about growth going forward, do you still see growth driven in camera controllers? And what are the dynamics that you expect to drive that growth? Carl Alberty - Cirrus Logic Inc - Executive Vice President - Mixed-Signal Products Yeah. I mean, I think we expect to see what's been happening since we started this business about five years ago, we expect to see that continue. We're shipping three different generations of products, the latest of which has higher functionality, higher performance, a 6x increase and processing capability and the customers continuing to take advantage of that. So I think we see that in the road

Question: John Vinh - KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc - Analyst : Great. Can you talk about what your strategy to expand HPMS content beyond camera controllers and smartphones? Carl Alberty - Cirrus Logic Inc - Executive Vice President - Mixed-Signal Products Yes, sure. So I mean, obviously, we started by moving into haptics and then camera control. Power conversion and control was another big thing. We're super excited about the road map for the power conversion and control IC, especially with AI use cases showing up more and more and that driving kind of peak power demands on the system. The function of that power conversion and control IC is really to be able to sit between the battery and the system and deal with peak power demand such that the downstream performance of the actual device is not compromised. Obviously, a brownout or the phone not being able to handle the power demands is not good for the user experience. And so we're trying to build on that capability, not just in terms of that like system-level know-how, but also application of that, including beyond the current application in phones. And then there's certainly a whole lot of know-how we've built up in terms of sitting between the battery and the system and looking at all the different requirements around safety for the battery, health of the battery, how you intelligently charge and discharge that battery and subsequently deliver power into the system. And that plays really well into our strengths around like ultra-low power sensing, the data conversion for, again, measuring and monitoring what's happening both with the battery and the downstream power delivery. And so much like a lot of the custom things we do, we have to build and prove that IP out in silicon before really engaging on a custom product. And so we've been working on that in a variety of areas in this kind of battery and power kind of compute space. And so it's definitely a long-term endeavor. And so we're still super excited with that content expansion opportunity in camera and then building beyond that with the kind of battery and power sensing and the battery kind of power conversion and control IC. So that strategy is deliberate. It's long term in nature because we do have to build out the IP ahead of time and build it in silicon to kind of prove it works to kind of derisk and kind of jointly tie up with the customer in terms of how we do a custom product. So that's something we're working on quite actively.

Question: John Vinh - KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc - Analyst : That's great. Maybe we can talk about the PC opportunity. That's been another emerging success story for you guys. I think you've done tens of millions this year and are on track to kind of double it in the next year. It looks like if you look at the two platforms between mobile and PCs, you've been able to leverage the fact that you're selling similar products into both platforms, amplifiers, haptics, codecs. Can you just talk through what you see as maybe the obvious similarities and maybe what are some of the differences when you look at these two different platforms? Carl Alberty - Cirrus Logic Inc - Executive Vice President - Mixed-Signal Products Well, certainly, the kind of design trends and form factors are common. So thinner, lighter form factors. I mean, laptops are -- have been going through that kind of thinner and lighter form factor and how do you do that without compromising battery life and user experiences. You could argue that the laptop OEMs have maybe been slightly slower to realize the importance of the audio and video or the audio and voice kind of user experiences. We've been shipping boosted amplifiers in smartphones for over a decade, and that's really just started in laptops. So for us, it's an exciting like greenfield opportunity, reinforced with like actual like OEM customers like pulling on we just need better audio and voice solutions. So there's a lot of similarity in terms of the underpinning kind of acoustic and audio challenges to deliver a really good audio experience. Laptop speakers are on the order of twice as big as a smartphone speaker. But there's still a whole host of design and systematic kind of challenges around how do you make what fundamentally really small speakers sound good. And frankly speaking, from our perspective, the solutions available to customers were just insufficient relative to delivering that experience. And we view that as like continuing to just move forward and customers won't go backwards, right? I mean, especially when they're all competing for market share and see other competitive brands doing certain things in audio and getting really favorable reviews and feedback based on technology we're enabling, we see that to just accelerate. And to the point on the last question around AI, like voice as an interface and like that context awareness and user experience with voice as an interface to -- as one alternative to a keyboard, we just think that accelerates and drives an expansion of content opportunity for Cirrus that's super exciting. So certainly, there's a lot of commonality from that perspective. The design process and the design kind of -- well, the design process is different just with ODMs and OEMs and the kind of reliance on Intel and AMD and chipset partners and the emergence of ARM. So there's definitely complexity in the ecosystem that's different from smartphones. But the underpinning technology kind of commonality is really strong, and the customer pull is great. REFINITIV STREETEVENTS | www.refinitiv.com | Contact Us consent of Refinitiv. 'Refinitiv' and the Refinitiv logo are registered trademarks of Refinitiv and its affiliated companies. AUGUST 12, 2025 / 4:30PM, CRUS.OQ - Cirrus Logic Inc at KeyBanc Technology Forum

Question: John Vinh - KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc - Analyst : On the last call, you talked about kind of a milestone about being able to penetrate into the mainstream notebook market, right? Which you felt was a big win for you. Your gross margins continue to tick up. Can you just talk about the differences and what you did to kind of get to that next milestone of going mainstream versus high-performance, high end? Carl Alberty - Cirrus Logic Inc - Executive Vice President - Mixed-Signal Products Yeah. I mean, certainly, we've started at the top. And again, I think it is partly to do with customers wanting and needing that same level of experience and audio performance across their portfolio to not lose pace with other brands. And obviously, we've also purpose -- we've repurposed parts that were built for smartphones. And then we've also introduced multiple new families of codecs and amplifiers that are specifically built around laptops. And that obviously includes kind of broadening the portfolio to offer solutions that are more tailored for mainstream applications. So a slightly lower cost point, different configurations and different optionality for integrated amps versus external boosted amps. So again, I think it's a statement of broadening the portfolio of being mindful and super close and collaborative with customers on what they can afford and where they're willing to spend money and also contemplating the total cost of ownership, like, okay, we can build you this amplifier, you can use a cheaper speaker and like the total cost for the mainstream actually makes sense. And so REFINITIV STREETEVENTS | www.refinitiv.com | Contact Us consent of Refinitiv. 'Refinitiv' and the Refinitiv logo are registered trademarks of Refinitiv and its affiliated companies. AUGUST 12, 2025 / 4:30PM, CRUS.OQ - Cirrus Logic Inc at KeyBanc Technology Forum we've been able to win on that. And then it's just close collaboration and close road mapping alignment with customers to really dial in budgets and functionality and capabilities again, with an aim to deliver really premium experiences, not just in the flagship, but also in kind of the mainstream commercial and consumer side of the notebook space.

Question: John Vinh - KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc - Analyst : Very nice. Can you talk about the Compal partnership and how that's helping you scale your business? Carl Alberty - Cirrus Logic Inc - Executive Vice President - Mixed-Signal Products Yeah. I mean, as I mentioned earlier, in terms of like cost of ownership of using a company like Cirrus, the Compal is a new collaboration really aiming to kind of to deal with systemic kind of challenges around audibility of distortion things induced typically by mechanical rattle. So there's a lot of moving pieces in a laptop, the keyboard and a variety of different subsystems. And those over time or even on the production line can introduce vibrations and that will distort the audio signal. And that will not only cause bad user experience, but it can be variable across the manufacturing line, which can result in the same product having a different user experience. And often, it's not really optimized. And so we've used machine learning techniques and AI to model and predict where these frequencies are going to be in terms of mechanical rattle distortion, and we can automatically kind of tune that out to, again, have a uniform and consistent user experience across the manufacturing process and kind of up and REFINITIV STREETEVENTS | www.refinitiv.com | Contact Us consent of Refinitiv. 'Refinitiv' and the Refinitiv logo are registered trademarks of Refinitiv and its affiliated companies. AUGUST 12, 2025 / 4:30PM, CRUS.OQ - Cirrus Logic Inc at KeyBanc Technology Forum down the portfolio. And then over time, we expect to continue expanding on that. So it's still early in terms of that collaboration, really not about scaling the business. This message is about scaling and optimizing the user experience across the manufacturing process and ultimately kind of reducing the total cost of ownership and not compromise on audio.

Question: John Vinh - KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc - Analyst : Okay. Does HPMS just on average, have an accretive gross margin profile in general for your business?

Question: John Vinh - KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc - Analyst : Okay. Maybe switching to operating margins, you've been running kind of in the mid-20s over the last several years. What's kind of the right target that you're looking at? And how do you kind of balance that against making the necessary investments in R&D to continue to drive growth? REFINITIV STREETEVENTS | www.refinitiv.com | Contact Us consent of Refinitiv. 'Refinitiv' and the Refinitiv logo are registered trademarks of Refinitiv and its affiliated companies. AUGUST 12, 2025 / 4:30PM, CRUS.OQ - Cirrus Logic Inc at KeyBanc Technology Forum

Question: John Vinh - KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc - Analyst : Great. Jeff, you come in with an extensive background in M&A I'm just wondering if you could just talk about kind of your framework in terms of how you're looking at targets at Cirrus Logic. Maybe talk about scale. Are you looking at tuck-ins or larger size deals? And is this something that you've been asked to maybe take a closer look at?

Question: John Vinh - KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc - Analyst : Great. I get this question a lot. Just when you guys think strategically about customer concentration, how do you guys think about that? Is that a goal of yours to diversify away from that longer term? Or are you just focused on doing everything possible to grow revenues and to service that customer concentration to your best of your ability?

Question: John Vinh - KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc - Analyst : Great. Maybe just to follow up on that, historically, the Android markets, you've had kind of some fits and starts there. How are you looking at the Android market these days? Is that still going to be something you're going to be focusing on growing? Carl Alberty - Cirrus Logic Inc - Executive Vice President - Mixed-Signal Products Yeah. I think we've actually pulled back in terms of investments in Android for the purpose of it not really representing a good exciting growth market for us. Certainly, we've talked about PC. We've talked about incubating other businesses beyond smartphones as like really important, exciting long-term options for us. We certainly still have competitive products for audio and haptics in the Android space. But it's just -- as a total market, especially with a big chunk of the customers residing in China and that just having a bit of risk inherently with the geopolitical kind of climate as it is. We're opportunistically selling what we have, but not really focusing the R&D investments on Android so that we can invest in, again, just expanding the HPMS content, but also building businesses beyond smartphones, especially in markets that have a bigger growth factor that's exciting for us long term.

Question: John Vinh - KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc - Analyst : Great. It looks like we're out of time. Thanks, guys. Carl Alberty - Cirrus Logic Inc - Executive Vice President - Mixed-Signal Products Okay. Thanks, John.