Great, thanks. Welcome everybody. Thanks for joining our discussion. I'm Rick Shaffer-Rop, and I'm a semiconductor analyst. I'm joined today by Nakul Duggal. He's the General Manager, Auto, IoT, and Cloud at Qualcomm. Nakul has held multiple leadership positions since joining Qualcomm in 1995. I guess 30 years at Qualcomm and SoCal. Nakul, thanks for joining us. It's great to see you and appreciate you taking the time to chat with us today. Thank you for having me, Rick. Maybe I'll just go ahead and kick things off with a little bit of background on you. You know, maybe you could walk us through your journey at Qualcomm and landing the various leadership roles you've had, particularly automotive and IoT. Any milestones along the way that you'd like to share or highlight? Yeah, I'm a Qualcomm lifer. I started off, my second job out of school and, you know, the company back then was, I guess it was a large-sized startup, but we were in the very early days of digital communications, which was all the rage. This was back in the CDMA days. I've seen a lot in terms of technology evolutions, how ecosystems are created, how the mobile internet kind of came to life. I got involved in automotive over a decade ago, and it was really one of these transition points where I was looking to do something outside of the smartphone business and took on kind of new market development opportunities. I think it's been a fantastic journey with automotive. We've actually, in my mind, changed the way that the automotive architecture works, software-defined vehicles, central compute, the role of semiconductor. We also changed how automakers engage with the ecosystem in terms of how they define the car architecture, who their ecosystem is, who do they lean on, how do they do software development. We've been at this for over a decade and we've been doing it at scale. We've been doing it in every part of the world with every OEM, every tier one, understand the market really well. I think it's paid off. I think the automotive success is certainly one of the big milestones. Trying to do the same thing with industrial now, and that just started about a year or so ago. My history with the company is to really get involved in diversification and new businesses and take the strengths of the company, close out the gaps, build out teams, build out technologies, build new partnerships. Thanks for that background. Maybe we can dig into Snapdragon Digital Chassis a little bit, and what makes it unique within the auto space. You know, maybe talk about the breadth of your IP portfolio, any other attributes that you can think of, basically that's driven off your, that's differentiated, I guess, your approach and your approach. Yeah, I think when we started to think about how should we engage with the automaker, there were a couple of things that became pretty apparent. I think one was, the traditional semiconductor ecosystem wasn't really good enough for the automaker to be able to transform itself. You needed to bring in a lot of technology, a lot of innovation from other industries. I think that was kind of point one. The second thing that was apparent was the car is really this fantastic platform because, you know, it is a multi-user platform. It's a platform that has a very high bar for safety and quality. It has a much longer lifecycle than a consumer device might. At the same time, it needs to feel like a consumer device. It needs to be used by a variety of different people. It has a real-time nature to it in that you want, you know, it's about going from A to B. It's all about being in motion. It is consumed the same way the world over. Everybody has a pretty consistent way in terms of how they want to consume the product that is a car. We felt that there was a lot of opportunity to actually completely rethink what the car could look like. We coined the term the digital chassis because we have so much of technology inside the company that we either adapted the technology or we instantiated the technology into different types of products for the automotive ecosystem. That's the approach that we took towards building out a portfolio. We did this in partnership with automakers. We did this with our tier one ecosystem partners. We did it with folks that had a tremendous amount of experience with the ecosystem. We kind of embraced the industry. I think that approach paid off because it allowed us to shape what we had to do to the company to become very relevant to the automotive industry. I think that's kind of a good, maybe representation of what the journey's looked like. No, fair enough. You know, and Qualcomm's obviously established a leadership position, the Central Eastern Digital Cockpit. You know, you look at MediaTek and traditional maybe microcontroller or analog views, you know, they all seem to have aspirations in this, in this large market. I mean, it is big, and dynamic and growing and all the things. How do you perceive that competitive threat out there today? What are you doing to stay sharp and stay ahead? I think, clearly, the market has grown significantly. We've been a large part of driving that growth. It's expected that there'll be competitors. It's a very interesting market because it feels like a very exciting market from the outside. It's a tough market. You really have to know what you're doing. There is nothing that you get into that's not going to require you to be there for your customer for 10+ years. You have to be at scale. You have to really own every part of the problem from quality to supply to delivery to software to hardware. You have to be part of an ecosystem. There has to be a tremendous amount of trust that you have to build with your customer base. Today we are fortunate to be, we've changed the trajectory of our roadmap in that we are now building safety-grade silicon and we are going to commercialize our first automotive driving stack with BMW. We'll talk about that in a little bit next month at IAA. We couldn't have imagined being able to do all of this. It's only possible if you actually have a tremendous amount of trust that you build with the ecosystem. It's not a market that has very low barriers to entry. Of course, the ecosystem welcomes a lot of competition. We are very comfortable in the path that we have picked. We are very diversely deployed across many, many different types of markets, technologies, use cases, applications, regions. We have a pretty good sensor within the company in terms of what trends to pay attention to, what to not chase, where to cross-correlate. I think that has paid us, I think that's paid off pretty well. Fair enough. Shifting a little bit to ADAS, because I believe it's a third of that massive $45 billion backlog you talk about, or design win pipeline there. I think investors, I think rightly so, view that as the next big leg of growth in your auto business, maybe your overall business, given the size of that design win pipeline. I don't know if you could break down the business, break down that business a little bit between SoC and stack, and maybe hit the ADAS SoCs first if you want to talk about how you win versus the NVIDIAs and the Mobileyes in the world. I'll leave it there. I've got follow-on stuff, of course. Maybe the way I'll try and split it up is, you know, there is the stack part of the conversation, and then there is the SoC part of the conversation. The stack part of the conversation has been playing out for the last decade or so. We have gone from driver assistance all the way to robotaxis, and you see pretty much everything has been deployed, has played out. I think what it really comes down to is, what does it take for you to deploy these applications safely at scale, where it actually starts to make an impact to you as a consumer, to you as a driver? Does it make the vehicle safer? That was the premise under which we started to think about entering the stack business. For us, it was about, let's go after a market which will have a very high attach rate, that's going to make an impact to the driving experience. It will make the car safer. If you pick something like that, that's going to kind of take a life of its own. Once you build the trust, it will evolve. The SoC strategy was actually a little bit different. What we decided about six, seven years ago was if we have to be in the automotive business, we can't be seen as a smartphone company. We actually have to almost go deep into embracing not just quality, but safety. We decided to actually build a completely different architecture, different fabric for our automotive computer SoCs that was from the ground up designed for safety. We designed a lot of IP inside the company, and we decided that we will actually build a safety-grade technology IP roadmap. It was a very wise decision because, today if you think about how workloads are deployed, there isn't really any difference between whether it's a consumer workload or a safety workload or an AI workload. It's all the same. Because we went down this unique path, it gave us a lot of flexibility in terms of how our products could be used. One of the reasons why we've actually accelerated our ADAS win rate is that customers want to develop on a common platform without necessarily worrying too much about what they could run today, what they may not be able to run tomorrow, or does the architecture come in the way. We focused on some really tough customers in the early days to get them on board such that we could prove our safety chops. We did that for both the stack and the SoC. Once we did that, and there was enough trust and enough credibility built in, then it's just become a pretty standard industry platform on top of which customers design. We are starting our commercialization journey on the ADAS stack next month with BMW. The silicon has been in market for over a year now, actually more than that, probably two, three years now, but it's scaling up. I expect the rest of this decade we're going to see a lot of ADAS business. On that topic with BMW, I believe that's a co-developed stack. I'm always curious in those kinds of relationships, you know, how fungible some of that IP is, because I'm sure you're talking to other customers, potential customers on the stack side, and you'd like to leverage your earnings elsewhere, right? I mean, how does that work? I don't know if you can walk us through that at all. Everything that is computer vision is actually completely, wholly developed by Qualcomm. The rest of the stack, the driving stack, the actuation, the driving behavior, the drive policy, all of that is co-developed. You're right, there is definitely adaptation that you have to do to carry that stack over from one OEM to another. I think what is also starting to happen is that the market is kind of starting to settle down to where OEMs have a pretty good idea as to what they would like to offer at a certain vehicle trim for a certain performance, a certain price point, as opposed to, you know, everybody was rolling their own a few years ago. There were multiple stacks across multiple tiers, across multiple regions, just a tremendous amount of energy and expense spent on building these. We've been very consistent with the strategy. We will roll this out. It'll be in 100 countries by next year. That gives us the confidence that what we are building should have very high applicability for a large number of OEMs because at the end of the day, we are, you know, at some level subsidizing the cost, the expense involved in customers wanting to have the same type of safety and the same type of capability at a very large footprint. I think that has worked well. I'm pretty excited about us making a few announcements at IAA, which is coming up in September, where we'll talk about this in more detail. You mentioned 100 countries and the biggest, I think, out there maker of cars is China. I assume they're one of those 100. Is it worth carving that out for a second in this conversation and talking about basically what the stack competition is shaping up or what it already is, what it looks like in China and how you guys compete there, given it's not necessarily a level playing field with all this geopolitical noise that seems to be buzzing around all the time? It just makes the waters probably a little choppier for you to navigate, but just curious how you're approaching that. I think the approach that we took was that we wanted to build a silicon roadmap that could stand on its own feet, that had its differentiation, that made sense for the car architecture as it was evolving. We wanted to be able to get into the stack business. We always knew that the stack business is a very, you know, the stack business is a complicated business because it is all about physical AI deployed in a specific region, in a specific part of the world. That means regulation, that means you have to keep up with not just competition, but really, who's allowed to really operate at scale, who is going to be able to differentiate in the long run. The choices that we made were, let's go focus on markets that are broad-based, where we are certainly going to be able to make an impact. Let's build technology that is very horizontal. Whether it's deployed in China or deployed in any other part of the world, the same technology will scale. That approach has worked well. To your point, these 100 countries that we will launch in China are certainly part of that. I think today there is a tremendous amount of interest in driver assistance, automated driving, just because it's a pretty high-scale application of applied AI. There are many different solutions that are out there. I do feel that doing this at a global scale across every single country with meeting those safety requirements is the tall order. It's expensive, it's time-consuming, it's complicated. I think in China, while we operate with our stack, we also partner with a variety of local stack companies that are running their stack on our silicon. It's a market of many different business models. I think we are part of that ecosystem. That's a big differentiator for us. Yeah, one size doesn't always fit all. I get it. That's perfect. Thank you for all that extra color. Maybe just one or two last ones on auto, but just to summarize your progress in autos, I mean, you pulled in your $4 billion revenue contribution target, I think, by a full year versus the original expectation. I'm just curious how comfortable you are with the $8 billion that you put out for fiscal 2029. I know you're not probably going to change your forecast on this call, but I just am curious what the moving parts maybe are on that number. I think there are a lot of moving parts. Macro is always a moving part. I think the automotive industry is going through a pretty significant amount of change, disruption, competition. What makes us quite unique is that we have kind of taken the approach of being a very horizontal technology provider, solution provider that is focused on bringing best-of-breed technology and products to every automaker globally. Building advanced silicon for cars is not an easy feat. It's a complicated business. It requires a lot of experience. It requires a lot of things to kind of come together. We do it at scale. We are not doing this across half a dozen or a dozen automakers. We support every single automaker globally. I feel good about the fact that we see the execution of the roadmap. We see the launches from our OEMs. We see programs being delivered on time. We see the innovation ramping up. That gives us the confidence that every quarter we are executing through the plans that we had laid out and our customers had laid out. As long as that pans out, I think we are on a pretty good trajectory to kind of converting the pipeline into revenue. Pivoting to something we spent some good time on, automotive, you wear several hats there, it sounds like. Another one is really on the industrial and embedded side. I didn't know if you could talk us through how you're leveraging your experience in autos and all the know-how you developed there and success that you brought there. How do you leverage that into industrial and embedded? Yeah, I think there are a few similarities, but there are also many stark differences. I think the similarities obviously are, you know, the life cycles are similar. The focus on reliability and quality is there, especially when you talk about deep industrial companies. A lot of the products overlap quite seamlessly. There's a lot that we've built in automotive that we can reuse. What has been a big focus for me is how do we think about the industrial and embedded IoT business through a unique Qualcomm lens? Because we are a company that has been good at many different things. If we have to be successful in this space, we have to kind of find our stride in terms of how to get to similar scale. You know, what we have tried to do is to split the market up in a couple of different ways so that we get to view our progress from different lenses. I think one thing that we did was to create distinct product segments that were similar to the chassis strategy that we had in automotive, where we understand very deeply what are the types of problems that customers are trying to solve. Then how do we organize our product portfolio such that it's very easy for customers to understand what we have available that they can deploy. Now we have, you know, five, six different product segments from industrial connectivity, consumer and commercial processors. We have a camera processor business. We have an industrial processor business. We are building out a robotics business. That, I think, has really helped us get a lot of focus towards a market that is otherwise fragmented and noisy. The other approach that we took was to segment by verticals. There are certain verticals that we have been involved in historically. Retail has been a great vertical for us. We've spent a lot of time both with the end retailer, you know, the Walmarts and the Targets of the world, but then also their supply chain. That's allowed us to build multi-year relationships. That resembles a little bit as to what we have been doing in automotive, where you kind of create a pool for your technology and your product, but you also build an ecosystem. We are now repeating that across many other similar verticals. Enterprise is one, public safety is another, oil and gas is a third, industrial automation is a fourth. That allows you to be able to solve problems that are built around digital transformation, where we can have an outsized impact. We tried to pull a lot of our technology and our solutions together. The third thing that we kind of had to do, which we are in the process of implementing, and we'll share more later this year, is sizing up customers very differently. There are certain customers that we know and understand really well because they fit into the Qualcomm way of working. They are high-skilled customers, deeply technical, understand our level of complexity. There is a second set of customers who are much more comfortable at the application layer, where we've had to simplify and abstract our portfolio such that we can offer a solution mindset to the customer as opposed to deep development on the chip. Finally, there is a massive developer ecosystem, which has traditionally not been a Qualcomm focus. We've never been really a long-tail company, but we realized that with the industrial IoT space, you have to touch developers as well. We've kind of organized our thinking across these three different vectors. I think it's actually working quite well because you get to see the SAM through many different lenses, through lenses that are very traditional, through lenses that are new, through lenses that are at a different plane. We are in the process of implementing all of this. We should pretty much be done by the end of this calendar year. There are a few announcements coming up, a few acquisitions coming up, actually, in the remainder of this year. That should kind of lay out the full strategy for the goals that we have to deliver against by 2029. No, thanks for all the color. I believe INE is already a billion dollar or better than a billion dollar business, but I know you've talked about, again, I know this is not a forecast, it's a target, but you've got $4 billion out there, I believe, from fiscal 2029. I'm really just curious what sort of gives you the confidence in hitting that inflection in the next roughly four years or so? Yeah, I think, you know, frankly, it really comes down to the breadth of the technology portfolio. This is one thing that I think the learnings from automotive helped a lot. There is a tremendous value that exists in our technology portfolio that you can only understand if you perceive it through a lens that is unique to the market that you want to go after. That is why I kind of described our different approaches. You really have to have many different lenses through which you can understand the SAM. Once you come up with a recipe, then it's really creating the pool for your technology that is instantiated in different products. The market is large. The market, you know, I talked about it in Investor Day, the SAM is probably $50 billion. We want to make sure that we are, you know, capturing every, every type of end opportunity. We are flexing in many different ways in terms of how our products are being used. We are creating new product segments. We are creating new use cases for the technology that we are building. It requires a pretty good co-creation effort with a wide variety of segments in terms of how to find kind of new pockets of opportunity. That's what we are trying to consolidate. So far I feel like it's actually gone pretty well. Great. Oh, congrats. I wanted to dig in just for a minute, just a little deeper on my IQ series because you've had several announcements right over the last year on that product line. I didn't know if you could talk about, you know, or give any color as much as you can on initial traction, feedback from customers, things like that, kind of how it's been. Yeah, I think the IQ series, for those of you that are not familiar, was an industrial processor family that we introduced. We leveraged a lot of this from our automotive portfolio. One of the things that is obviously lacking in the industrial space is high-performance SoC products that have, you know, real-time behavior, that have a lot of camera capability, onboard AI capability, high-performance CPU cores, a GPU, display, multimedia, but that are also designed for safety, that can also be used in, you know, cell levels, cell two and three levels, can be used for robotics. This kind of Swiss knife type of product doesn't really exist in the industrial space. We recognized that gap last year and we came up with the IQ8 and the IQ9 series. It's actually done really well because it's addressing a lot of new types of customers and new types of markets that have traditionally never really had any reason to interact with Qualcomm because they looked at us mostly as a smartphone provider. Because we leveraged a lot of our automotive technology, it gave customers the confidence that, you know, not only do we have the long-term commitment, but these are high quality, high reliability parts. They're designed for safety. They're already commercial. This is a new thing that they're using. I think now there is just a tremendous amount of market expansion going on to go after a lot of segments that have either used just traditional x86 or, you know, some of our other ARM ISA competitors. I think that's where we are spending a lot of time trying to go differentiate with the IQ series. I think so far traction has been actually really good across a very wide variety of segments. Everything from edge AI boxes, surveillance, industrial automation, healthcare, retail, just very broad. Yeah, that brings up a question I kind of thought I should have asked you earlier. Some of these, it's becoming more diffuse. You're going to market, it seems like you're going into new channels, new markets that maybe you haven't been in before. A lot of times that means you got to roll your sleeves up and build channel, right? Build those relationships and get all that stuff going. As you do that, as you broaden your aperture, right? I don't know if I have a better word, I guess, as that opens up, I mean, what is your go-to-market? How do you build those channels? How much time, how much rope do you give yourself? How much time do you give yourself to develop that stuff? Yeah. Yeah, I think maybe the best way to describe it is to think about your portfolio in the context of what type of channel is best suited to carry your portfolio. We are not a company that has a lot of MCU type products. Our products are usually a bit more sophisticated. We work with a very large number of scaling partners who need to get comfortable and familiar with the products that we build. Once they do that, that creates a lot of visibility of options that are available for our end customers. For example, for our application processor portfolio, we've had to build a large number of new form factors that we were unfamiliar with, that we didn't really spend a lot of time on. We've been doing that in Germany, in Japan, in Taiwan, in China. That's basically making us a pretty straightforward drop and replace option for customers to try out something new. That to me, in the scheme of things, is fairly straightforward steps that we had to go take. We have been on this path of getting much closer to developers, and we'll share more with you on that in the coming months. That's been a pretty important journey because one thing that we needed to do well was to be able to address the really long tail. I think there is a plan in place there that I think is now working out quite well. As we roll that out, we'll be able to go get to the long tail of developers that will bring Dragonw ing and Snapdragon products in the hands of, you know, really, you can download the board from the internet and kind of scale from there. Everything else really is either a traditional Qualcomm channel that we are very familiar with and scale up nicely on, or what I described earlier, which was our vertical focus strategy, focused on many different verticals that create a lot of digital transformation efforts, create a need for your products to be relevant in that space, and then work with their ecosystem for your products to get selected. We have this very clear and regimented strategy around how to go make happen the revenue numbers that we have to deliver. It's going to come from a wide variety of market segments, different types of products. That's kind of the channel strategy that we've been on. Okay, thanks. Maybe just one more if I could, and that's, you guys have always been pretty active on the M&A side, and you've picked up a lot of, you know, different assets, some big, some small. I didn't know if you, you know, maybe you could walk us through sort of how you look at your broader acquisition strategy, and maybe, I don't know, you're not going to tip your hat on any particular names probably, but you know, the types of tools maybe that are missing from the Qualcomm toolbox. I think one area that we've been focused on quite heavily is a developer focus. We acquired Edge Impulse earlier this year, and that gave us access to becoming very capable with the model onboarding, with the model training, and running these models on limited footprint devices. I think that's one effort. There is other work going on in the developer area that we'll share in the coming months. We also have been focused on the camera space quite a bit. I think camera has been a differentiator for the company for a long time. Now we see camera really as a big AI sensor for a wide variety of use cases. We've acquired small companies that allow us to get into the solution space with cameras, where we can actually build out end-to-end solutions, SaaS solutions for video security, video surveillance. That was an acquisition that we did in the spring. We've also been strategically acquiring companies that have a very small footprint in terms of the silicon footprint that they occupy for many different types of market segments, just to round off the portfolio such that it's broadly applicable to IoT. We acquired AutoTalks, a V2X company, a couple of months ago. That's because of the promise that we believe is there in V2X, safety applications in automotive and other adjacent transportation verticals. It's not big companies, but it's companies that kind of round out the overall strategy to allow us to get closer to our goals. That's all the questions I have, and we're right on pretty much on time. I really enjoyed meeting you. I really enjoyed the conversation, and thanks again for coming, you know, carving some time out to chat with us today. Really appreciate it. It's great seeing you. Thank you, Rick. Thank you to your audience. Okay, thank you.