Okay, let's get started. Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to the Goldman Sachs Communicopia Technology Conference. My name is Jim Schneider. I'm the Senior Director Analyst here at Goldman Sachs. It's my pleasure to welcome GlobalFoundries and CFO John Hollister to the stage today. Thank you, John. It's great to be here. Appreciate it. Thank you for being here. Maybe John, I just want to start off and level set with a couple of higher-level questions about GlobalFoundries and your business. The company stands as a foundry provider providing specialized CMOS processes, focused on nodes served above 10 nanometers, with sites spanning the U.S., Asia, and Europe. At the highest level, tell us a little bit about some of the capabilities that you bring to the table, why customers come to you, and why you win. Yeah, certainly. Jim, I want to start out with an overview of our strategy. We have three pillars to the strategy for GlobalFoundries. First, it starts with our differentiated technology. We have the ability with analog mixed signal to, as you mentioned, pursue opportunities in the manufacturing space that's above 10 nanometers, from 12 and 14 nanometer FinFET up to 180 nanometer and many points in between there. Within that, we can provide highly differentiated technology where we can address our customer needs. That takes me to the second pillar, which is that we have deep, strong, long-standing relationships with our customers. Part of our approach here is to really understand what the customer is trying to accomplish from a performance perspective, power, and overall performance. We can differentiate the technology to address what the customer is trying to accomplish. This is clearly a virtuous cycle of understanding what they need and having the ability to differentiate in that regard. Because this is all we do, this is our complete corporate focus on this segment of the semiconductor industry. Finally, the third element of this, or the third pillar, is our unique geographical footprint. Our 300mm fabs are located in Malta, New York, in Singapore, and in Dresden, Germany. We have 200mm fabs in Singapore and in Burlington, Vermont. As you can see, the fundamental footprint that we have is not in China or Taiwan. That gives us a very compelling, unique geographical footprint in the world. By combining these three pillars and understanding the virtuous cycle between the three of them, this allows us to win business. We see a lot of design win momentum in the company right now. Very good. Maybe touching on the last piece of the geographical focus, you know, there's been a new framework introduced by the administration, tied to tariffs, for semiconductors. Obviously, you have a U.S. presence. What's your understanding in terms of your presence, in terms of your global shipments, and are they exempt from tariffs worldwide because of your position in Malta? Or maybe help clarify what your understanding of the current situation is. Certainly, Jim. There are a lot of details here yet to come out and yet to be determined. My understanding is that concept is relevant and could be possible, that there may be an allowance or a credit or understanding that because we do have domestic manufacturing and the plan to expand our domestic manufacturing, that may deliver some tariff benefits even to the global footprint. There is a lot to that that is unknown. We are awaiting more details as the industry watches what may happen in this regard. That is obviously tremendously, potentially, beneficial to the company and to the third pillar of the strategy. Because of that, we are seeing customer interest coming in, in working with GlobalFoundries more as this concept is emerging. Yeah. From a strategy perspective, where are you as a management team most concentrated today and focused on? What do you say are the one or two most critical objectives you feel like you really need to execute on over the next six to 12 months? Yeah, the core of what will make us continue to be successful over the long term here is to keep our opportunity pipeline full, keep winning new designs, gaining more mind share and market share with our customers across our four end markets. We see a lot of opportunities to do that. If I take them in turn, on the smart mobile devices end market, which is our largest end market today, that's about 40% of our revenue mix. We have a really strong position in the RF front ends for smartphones. We're a leader there. We also have additional opportunities in wireless transceivers, audio, haptics, display, imaging. We are doing a lot of work to diversify the application footprint we have even within the smart mobile device landscape. We also have new initiatives in areas like smart glasses that are part of smart mobile devices to expand and diversify even more within that end market. On the automotive side, we've had a tremendous run of market share gain in automotive. Our 40nm platform is a leader in the industry and has allowed us to grow this business from roughly $100 million several years ago to more than $1 billion last year. We expect mid-single digit or mid-teens growth for automotive this year in fiscal 2025, with again growing diversity in the technologies that are being deployed. Our 22FDX platform is becoming a highly sought-after solution for radar for ADAS applications. We also see power delivery over time here as well. On IoT, with our 22FDX and even a 12nm footprint, we see RF, low power, ultra-low leakage, again, these differentiated technology features that make our products attractive for our customers and what they're trying to accomplish. Finally, on the comms infrastructure and data center end market, we see a lot of growth ahead in areas like silicon photonics and satellite communications, where we're seeing some of the strongest growth in the company right now in fiscal 2025 are in those two domains. There is a lot to be excited about at GlobalFoundries. We will see how the market develops over the next 12 months as far as demand recovery and overall economic conditions. Fundamentally, we have a good strategy, highly differentiated footprint, and see good traction in our end markets. Very good. You've talked a little bit about what you call your China for China strategy. Can you maybe walk through what that opportunity is? Why is now the time to kind of capture it? What end markets are you prioritizing when it comes to China? Yeah, Jim. We've seen an opportunity to expand our business in China, particularly in the automotive space, where sourcing locally is an important strategic objective for some of the customers in China. We have an opportunity to partner with a supplier in China who will work within our framework and deliver the technology that is not available in China to the domestic market in China. This is not a joint venture. This is a supplier relationship, not unlike what we do in the back end sometimes when we work with the outsourced assembly and test houses. We're very excited about it. It will be controlled by GlobalFoundries and staffed at the management level by GlobalFoundries as well. We see this as a good opportunity to expand our business in China. I think the market opportunity is related to the strength that some of the Chinese automotive OEMs are showing out on the market globally. Have you identified those partners? At this point, no, we haven't. Got it. Okay. In terms of capital allocation, you made a rather interesting move recently with the acquisition of MIPS. You know, can you maybe contextualize what that deal is about? What's the objective in terms of new sources of revenue, what it means strategically for your products, and what does it mean for your customer relationships in MCU and IoT over time? Definitely, Jim. MIPS has been a leader in RISC-V technology for many years. We saw an opportunity here to combine forces and both continue the good work that they've done on a standalone basis to deliver RISC-V technology from a licensing perspective. We will continue to develop IP in that regard and continue that business as it has been operating. In addition to that, we see really the longer term strategic objective here is to combine RISC-V technology with our wafer fabrication capabilities and offer, again, under the first pillar of our strategy, even more technically differentiated solutions for our customers. The customer response has been quite strong and quite positive. I think this will bode well for creating additional wafer sales by leveraging the RISC-V technology that MIPS has brought to us here. Over what time do you expect that to be kind of meaningfully synergistic to you? Yeah, I think what we expect to see is revenue contribution from this next year on the IP licensing front, and from a wafer sales perspective, it will take a few years to get that fully implemented. You can think of that as a, call it, three to five-year time horizon. Maybe switching to the core CRM markets for a minute, maybe just kind of give us a sense about, you know, coming out of your last earnings call, a bit of an update on the end market momentum you're seeing across the different markets that you serve and, you know, what you're seeing into the next quarter and through the end of the year. Yeah, so, you know, we see, again, the opportunity with both the automotive end market and the comms infrastructure and data center end market to see, you know, mid-teens to high teens growth on CID. For the IoT and smart mobile devices market, those are more, you know, flattish, down slightly for the year. We have seen some, you know, impact on consumer sentiment with the tariff and some of the forces that are at work, and we'll see how the recovery goes. I think on the inventory front, we're seeing signs of improving inventory at customers, particularly IoT customers, and we'll look forward to that, you know, leading into hopefully a stronger demand pull in 2026 as we could get closer to shipping to end demand, as inventory can continue to normalize. Got it. As you mentioned, 40% of your business is roughly tied to smart mobile devices. The end market demand from a year perspective seems to be doing relatively well from a demand standpoint. Maybe share your perspective between what you just said and what we see in the end market in terms of what is happening from a customer inventory perspective. Was there any pull forward impact from tariffs from a consumer sell-through perspective? When do we think the inventory situation normalizes across the industry? We did see some inventory increase at certain smart mobile device customers mid-year, although we ourselves did not see any particular pull forward on our particular wafer shipments. We did observe some increases in inventory for certain customers. Got it. Okay. Related to smart mobile devices, staying on that for a second, you've communicated the negotiated agreement with a few of your key customers in that market for lower wafer prices in exchange for capturing a bigger part of their business over the longer term. You know, that's impacting your revenue and outlook in the near term, but can you maybe quantify for us the level of price concession you made with those customers and give us a sense for how much more share you can get with them, now that they've committed to GlobalFoundries? Yeah, we saw an opportunity this year to work with one of our larger smartphone customers to offer some price concession in exchange for a meaningful uptick in their share of wallet, committed to us. That's over a multi-year period of time. It's a win for GlobalFoundries that brings in more top line, more fixed cost absorption in our manufacturing, and something that we undertook this year. Yeah, I see it as a positive outcome. When do you see that deal being kind of net revenue created for you? Yeah, it'll kick in next year. Got it. You'll get that crossover of what volume increases overshadowing the price decline. Okay. Yeah, great. In recent quarters, you gave a little bit of color on your revenue contribution from satellite communications and silicon photonics, right, as part of your comm infrastructure and data center segment. Maybe let us know what opportunity you see for GlobalFoundries over the shorter and longer term, and where specifically you're winning with those particular solutions. Sure. Let me take them one by one. For Silicon Photonics, we're seeing that business near double this year and estimated to be roughly $200 million in top line for 2025. We're seeing a lot of success in the puzzles space and believe that will be true as we head into next year as well. Over time, we see an even larger opportunity in co-package optics as data center operators will seek to add even more density up and down racks within the scale-up architectures that they're developing. This will take some more time, roughly 2027 and beyond for the CPO to come to full fruition. We see this as a tremendous opportunity over time for GlobalFoundries and it speaks to both our history in Silicon Photonics as well as our analog and mixed-signal differentiation. Again, back to that point. Very, very bullish about this opportunity over time. In the satellite communications realm, this is part of our RF product family. We have very, very much differentiated technology in RF for this application and see success with multiple satellite operators, both in the satellites themselves and in the user terminals, which would now be kind of the next wave of growth as satellites are deployed. Receivers are needed on the ground to receive those signals. That's where you're seeing more opportunities with multiple chips per receiver, for example, in those applications. We see both of these trends as very favorable for our CID business going forward. Interesting. If we look five years out, how big could they be within that segment or just as an overall number? Yeah, I mean, I think this has an opportunity to continue to grow at a very high rate. As we're talking about this now approaching half of our CID end market, which is roughly $700 million in that neighborhood, you can see this growing to multiple hundreds of millions of dollars, if not approaching a billion dollars over time. This is very exciting business for us and allows us the ability to expand our margins and leverage our manufacturing footprint. Fair enough. Maybe we want to touch on this idea of long-term supply agreements that you have with some of your customers. You know, clearly the importance here and the nature of them is slightly different than it was during the pandemic. As we go forward, you maybe think about, on the go forward piece, what purpose do the agreements serve? What kind of customers actually find them most attractive? What portion of your revenue do you think steady state is going to be covered by them long term? Yeah, so, you know, we had an interesting time in the industry a few years ago where capacity was short, the need to expand capacity was very strong, and the strategic relevance of semiconductor manufacturing became, I would say, more clear to global operators, you know, around. This led to requests really from customers to enter into long-term supply agreements and capacity commitments. That led to, you know, some of these agreements that became reinforcing where, you know, customers were requesting capacity commitment and we in turn requested commitments on volume to support that capacity commitment. I think that's probably something that you will continue to see, particularly in areas that are longer life cycles in terms of the product life cycle itself. You can think of automotive, aerospace, and defense being, you know, some clear examples of that. I think in some of the more, you know, faster moving consumer markets, we may see less of this going forward, but we'll have to see how it plays out, you know, as the industry can recover and we can come off of this downturn and the need to add capacity may again emerge, perhaps sooner than later. This could lead to, you know, some of these conversations renewing on capacity commitments being exchanged for volume commitments. You know, we learn along the way. It may not look precisely the same as it did a few years ago, but I think the net effect of that has been very positive for the company to plan its capital execution and also at a time when we saw demand suppressed more, we had the ability to soften the impact of that on the company's financial execution by having those agreements. I think this will continue to be a part of our story, but the exact fine-tuning of it, let us get down the road a little bit and see how that develops. What kind of end markets or, you know, what products or end markets do those customers find most? I would say for the automotive industry and the aerospace and defense industry is likely where you're going to see the most interest in that. Okay, maybe just kind of pivoting to some of the financial questions for a second. You know, we touched on it a bit earlier, but can you maybe share with us your view on sort of longer-term pricing trends, setting aside the concessions you made for those two larger customers? You know, when you think about the trajectory of pricing off of a load base this year, is there kind of some more stability that you would expect given your kind of 90% sole-sourced position on most of your design wins, or is there still pressure from a broader market perspective, a better perspective over the next several quarters? There's always pressure, Jim. You know, we have a lot of factors that add to our overall price stability. Overall, our pricing is quite stable. I expect that to continue to be the case. The industry has, as we've seen, the progression into Moore's law begin to slow down across a broader application set. The industry is kind of institutionally becoming more stable from a pricing perspective as there's less of the migration taking place. Overall, see stable pricing environments. When you look at the strategic advantages that we talked about at the beginning of the conversation, that adds more to that. You're right. Our general design win sole source statistic is running at about 90%. You've got about two-thirds of the business running in a sole source mode. That's also conducive to price stability. Surprisingly, one of the things that investors ask me a lot about is your non-wafer revenue. Sometimes just kind of give us a little bit of a sense about, you know, just remind us what is in that bucket of revenue and, you know, the key drivers. Longer term, is about 10% sort of the right level to think about for that non-wafer revenue? Sure. 10% is the right general average to think about. It can float up and down at times, but what is inside that category is tape out revenue, revenue from new tape outs. We also have engineering service charges that show up in that category. IP and licensing, to the extent that we do that, will show up in that category. If you think about the first two elements that I discussed, you can think about that as a leading indicator of customer activity in wafer sales by seeing more tape out activity, more engineering services being provided. That's showing a positive momentum on customer traction, which leads to more design wins, which leads to more revenue. On the gross margin front, heading into next year, what do you see the points of leverage being for the company to sort of expand profitability? Is the long-term objective still at kind of a 40% target? It is. What we see driving that are several factors. Our capital discipline has been strong over the past couple of years. We've been running at about 10% of revenue in terms of our new CapEx. We've been leveraging the installed base of capital in the company and driving that forward. We also see the opportunity to expand production utilization and drive fixed cost absorption stronger going forward as the volumes pick up. Third is product mix. We see the opportunity for the mix of product and the mix of end market contributions to be favorable. We're constantly working on cost and looking at all factors of cost and what we can do to optimize that. Finally, you mentioned non-wafer revenue. We want to continue to push tape-out activity and serve our customers with what they need to be successful in their programs to drive incremental revenue and contributions as well. Finally, it won't be a huge factor, but the MIPS acquisition and the licensing and IP that's associated with that is incrementally positive as well. Okay. OpEx, as you think about getting to a better part of the cycle, right? What pace of OpEx growth do you expect to manage the business to? When we think about the relative growth in R&D versus SG&A, can you give us a bit of a framework for what kind of operating leverage you want to drive the model? Yeah, sure. If we think about it, we have some interesting dynamics this year with some tool sales, which are a credit to OpEx in the first half that were a bit higher. The third quarter guide is being a more normalized level of OpEx to expect for us going forward. The leverage points here are to continue to drive top line, drive gross margin expansion, and grow our OpEx at a lesser rate than the revenue and gross profit margin, obviously. Where we would put incremental OpEx is more on the R&D side and go-to-market, less on the G&A side, where we can look to new tools and think about digital capabilities to leverage our G&A spend overall. It's really going to be primarily on the R&D side as well as our go-to-market spending. Fair enough. From a model perspective, I think your long-term model still calls for a 20% CapEx level technically, but obviously you've been running below that. How comfortable are you with running below that for longer? Is kind of 10 or 10 to 15% more of an accurate range over the next couple of years? I think when you're looking at 2025, and I'll say most of 2026, that's right in the 10% to 15% range is a good way to think about it. We'll have to see, Jim, as we see the production pick up, see demand stabilize, inventories continue to improve, and our factory utilization move up from the low 80s into the low 90s. This can then get us into probably more of an intensive CapEx cycle, but I think it can happen in a way that is progressive and will definitely, you know, that will happen in concert with improvements in the demand profile. From a DNA perspective, you've got that coming down roughly 15% in 2025. Is now kind of like exiting this year the right baseline to think about in terms of DNA and maybe go forward? What are some of the puts and takes? Any more large pieces of DNA rolling off because of factory maturity or write downs or anything else? Sure. No, I think we're kind of getting to the asymptote at this point. I would expect another $5 million to $10 million improvement in DNA for third quarter and fourth quarter of this year and roughly half that rate of improvement through the course of next year. The good news there is with recovery in demand and the top line growing, we're seeing DNA overall as a mix of revenue coming down as we can hold DNA stable. Obviously, you know, CapEx out in the future could add some increases to it, but really kind of reaching a point of stabilization on DNA. On inventory, you know, from a balance sheet perspective, your inventory levels have kind of been this $1.7 billion marker over the last year or so. How do you think about that going forward? Is that something that actually stays constant or even could it go down, as you sort of get to a better point in the cycle? Do you feel like you've got, broadly speaking, the right amount of product on hand, even if we do see a recovery? Yeah, I do. I do think we have the right amount of product on hand. We look at this carefully. I think we can see how things progress over the next six to 12 months. I think as we look further out into 2026, we could see that come down, see the days come down, even if the absolute amount of inventory remains relatively constant. We're pretty comfortable with where that stands. Okay. One thing that I was going to touch on before, but I thought it was interesting to talk about here, is just the U.S. CHIPS Act and maybe give us a bit of an update on sort of when you expect that to see a bigger benefit to GLOBALFOUNDRIES. Do you expect to still see a bigger financial step up in terms of the benefit to you? Any kind of changes that the administration or others have communicated to you in terms of the complexion of that program? Yeah, no changes in the complexion of the program. We are receiving benefits from it at a modest level right now. Let me talk about it more broadly. Really, the framework overall calls for roughly $16 billion of investment in our factories in the United States. That's across diversifying the Malta fab, expanding the Malta fab, doing incremental work on the Burlington fab, including some modernization work there, as well as our advanced packaging initiatives that are happening in New York. It's quite comprehensive. The concept is that this would take place over a decade plus period of time. It is more of a long-term framework. As I mentioned, we are beginning to see benefits of it in fiscal 2025. We expect that to continue as we progress up the investment curve. That's on the grant side. In addition, the investment tax credit has been expanded from 25% to 35%. Between these two elements of U.S. support, it's quite strong. Even compared globally with what's out there, it's a robust support from the government and speaks to the U.S. government seeing semiconductor manufacturing as very important for strategic economic security, national security, and the view that it is strategically important to have a robust, resilient supply chain here in the country for semiconductors. We are a great part of that story. As we close out, two questions for you. One is, you know, what do you think investors should really focus on in terms of the opportunity on the investment case for GlobalFoundries over the next three to five years? You know, what are the things that are both, you know, maybe obvious to people that people are focused on already and things that people may be missing about the story going forward? Yeah, I think, you know, we have a tremendous opportunity in an $80 billion market that's growing to expand our market share. We offer compelling advantages in terms of our technology differentiation, our relationships with our customers, and our unique geographic footprint to drive that business forward. As we progress, we have the ability to ramp our profits and earnings in a way that investors will find very compelling. We've been disciplined in our capital execution. We generated more than $1 billion in free cash flow last year. We see the ability to do that this year. Strong profit and cash generator over time here with the growth in the industry and our ability to maintain a differentiated profile. Great. Anything else you think is important to get across? I think we summarized it there. Okay. Very good. John, thank you very much for being with us. We really appreciate it. You bet, Jim. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks so much.