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Q4 2025 Marvell Technology Inc Earnings Call

In This Article:

Participants

Ashish Saran; Senior Vice President - Investor Relations; Marvell Technology Inc

Matthew Murphy; Chairman of the Board, President, Chief Executive Officer; Marvell Technology Inc

Willem Meintjes; Chief Financial Officer; Marvell Technology Inc

Ross Seymore; Analyst; Deutsche Bank

Vivek Arya; Analyst; Bank of America

Timothy Arcuri; Analyst; UBS

Harsh Kumar; Analyst; Piper Sandler & Co

Aaron Rakers; Analyst; Wells Fargo Securities

Mark Lipacis; Analyst; Evercore ISI Institutional Equities

Thomas O'Malley; Analyst; Barclays Bank

Harlan Sur; Analyst; JPMorgan Chase & Co

Christopher Rolland; Analyst; Susquehanna

Presentation

Operator

Good afternoon and welcome to Marvell Technology, Inc.'s fourth quarter and fiscal year 2025 earnings conference call. (Operator Instructions) Please note this event is being recorded.
I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Ashish Saran, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Ashish Saran

Thank you and good afternoon everyone. Welcome to Marvel's fourth quarter in fiscal year 2025 earnings call. Joining me today are Matt Murphy, Marvell's Chairman and CEO; and Willem Meintjes, our CFO.
Let me remind everyone that certain comments made today include forward-looking statements, which are subject to significant risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from management's current expectations. Please review the cautionary statements and risk factors contained in our earnings press release, which we filed with the SEC today and posted on our website as well as our most recent 10-K and 10-Q filings.
We do not intend to update our forward-looking statements. During our call today, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation between our GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures is also available in our earnings press release.
Let me now turn the call over to Matt for his comments on the quarter. Matt?

Matthew Murphy

Thanks, Ashish, and good afternoon, everyone. For the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025, Marvell delivered record revenue of $1.817 billion, above the midpoint of guidance, growing 20% sequentially and 27% year-over-year.
Our data center end market was the primary growth driver, fueled by strong AI demand and execution. In addition, we saw continued demand recovery across our multi-market businesses, including carrier, enterprise, networking and automotive and industrial. I am pleased to report that we achieved GAAP profitability in the fourth quarter and expect this to continue in fiscal 2026.
Our record non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.60 exceeded the midpoint of guidance, growing 40% sequentially. This earnings growth rate, dowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwuble our top line growth rate underscores the substantial operating leverage in our business model.
For the full fiscal year 2025, we delivered $5.77 billion in aggregate revenue, with our data center revenue growing 88% year-over-year. We ended the year with our AI revenue substantially above our $1.5 billion target from April 2024s AI day, and we also expect to very significantly exceed our $2.5 billion target in fiscal 2026.
Our overall revenue growth accelerated in the second half of the year, driven by our custom silicon program ramps, along with continued strong growth in electro-optics.
In fiscal 2025, we also drove a record $1.68 billion in operating cash flow and significantly increased capital returns to our stockholders through stock repurchases and dividends totaling $933 million in aggregate. I'm extremely pleased with our fiscal 2025 results and even more excited about our outlook for robust year-over-year revenue growth in fiscal 2026.
We are poised for a strong start to the new year, forecasting revenue growth of over 60% year-over-year in the first quarter at the midpoint of guidance. Let me now discuss our results and expectations for each of our end markets.
In our data center end market for the fourth quarter, we achieved record revenue of $1.37 billion, growing 78% year-over-year and 24% sequentially. These strong results were driven by our custom AI silicon programs ramping to high-volume production.
Additionally, we benefited from strong shipments of our electro-optics products and Teralynx ethernet switches with revenue from both product lines growing double digits sequentially on a percentage basis.
Within our electro-optics franchises, we continue to see strong demand for our market-leading 800 gig PAM products and our 400 ZR DCI products. We also began shipments of the industry's first 1.6T PAM DSP and 5-nanometer process technology.
To further optimize AI interconnect performance, we accelerated the cadence of next-generation products by introducing the industry's first 3-nanometer 1.6T DSP, featuring 200 gig per lane electrical and optical interfaces. This new Marvell DSP enables customers to reduce 1.6T optical module power consumption by more than 20% compared to its predecessor. And we expect to go into production in the second half of this year as 1.6T adoption accelerates.
While tremendous focus remains on GPUs and XPUs, the distributed nature of compute and AI makes connectivity just as critical as the individual processors. As a result, the design of the next generation of accelerated infrastructure is inexorably tied to how efficiently data can be moved on and off the accelerators and throughout the cluster.
This increase in the role of high-speed networking and AI data centers is perfectly aligned to our strength as an industry leader. And just like compute, hyperscalers are also customizing networking and we are seeing similar momentum for flash-based storage, HBM and CXL-based DRAM pooling.
We'd announced the design win at Meta for a custom NIC at OCP last October, and we are seeing hyperscalers more broadly adopting similar strategies. This is evident in our recent design wins, which now include multiple custom NICs as well as a follow-on custom CXL memory solution. We are also enabling new interconnect technologies such as CPO and LPO for scale-up fabrics and coherent-lite DSPs for emerging campus-wide large-scale AI data centers. Earlier this year, we announced Marvell's breakthrough co-packaged optics architecture for custom XPUs, enabling customers to integrate optics into future custom accelerators.
First demonstrated at OFC 2024, the heart of Marvell's CPO platform is our 6.4T 3D silicon photonics engine. It integrates hundreds of active and passive components in a single unified device and builds on multiple generations of silicon photonics innovations that we have been shipping in high volume in our DCI modules for several years.
Co-packaged optics can enable an increase in the size and scale of AI servers, which currently rely on passive copper interconnects. We expect this transition from copper to optical interconnects will significantly expand Marvell's interconnect revenue and market opportunities. We are engaged with customers to evaluate this advanced technology, and we anticipate a multiyear period of trial system development ahead of wide-scale industry adoption for CPO. Let me now turn to our current custom silicon programs.
Marvell has successfully ramped highly complex $100 billion plus transistor XPUs and CPUs from initial samples to high-volume production on first-pass silicon. Our custom business continues to gain momentum as customers increasingly rely on Marvell to help them achieve their custom silicon ambitions. As I mentioned, our two leading AI custom programs are on high volume production, and we expect growth to continue.
One of these is a custom arm CPU, which we expect will see expanding adoption at our customers' data centers. The second program is for a custom AI XPU, which is also performing extremely well with significant volume production ahead.
In parallel, we are fully engaged with this customer on the follow-on generation of this XPU and planning for a production ramp once it completes its sampling and qualification cycles. As a result, we expect our revenue from custom XPUs for this customer to not only grow this year, fiscal 2026 but continue to grow next year, fiscal 2027 and beyond.
Additionally, we are making tremendous progress with the new design win announced at our AI Day in April 2024 for a custom AI XPU with an additional US hyperscale. Marvell's engineering team in close partnership with the customer has successfully completed a number of key technical milestones during the joint development process. As a result, we believe we are well on track to meet our customers' desired schedule to start production in calendar 2026. This engagement is also multigenerational and we expect it to result in a very significant amount of incremental revenue for Marvell over the next several years.
I'm very pleased with our custom revenue achievement for fiscal 2025, driven by multiple program ramps. This success, coupled with strong progress on upcoming custom programs gives us even greater confidence in our ability to achieve our long-term market share targets for custom revenue.
We are continuing to invest in all aspects of our technology platform, including advanced process nodes, electrical and optical SerDes, high-speed die-to-die interconnects, embedded memory, custom HBM, 2.5D and 3D packaging and silicon photonics. This week, we announced the demonstration of the industry's first 2-nanometer silicon IP for next-generation AI and cloud infrastructure.
Produced on TSMC's 2-nanometer process, this working silicon is a critical part of the Marvell platform for developing custom XPUs, CPUs, switches and other technology critical for next-generation accelerated workloads. Now let me turn to our outlook for our data center end market for the first quarter of fiscal 2026.
We forecast that the cloud and AI portion of this end market will continue to drive sequential double-digit revenue growth. the on-premise portion of our data center end market, we expect a seasonal sequential decline in revenue to partially offset growth from cloud and AI. As a result, we expect our overall data center revenue to grow sequentially in the mid-single digits on a percentage basis.
Now let me turn to Marvell's enterprise networking and carrier infrastructure end markets.
In the fourth quarter, enterprise networking revenue was $171 million, and carrier infrastructure revenue totaled $106 million. In the fourth quarter, we saw a continued recovery in both of these end markets with revenue collectively growing 18% sequentially.
Looking ahead to the first quarter of fiscal 2026, we expect aggregate revenue from enterprise networking and carrier infrastructure to grow sequentially by approximately 10%. We are pleased with the continued recovery in these two end markets, although this forecast still anticipates Marvell products shipping below end market consumption. In the consumer end market, revenue in the fourth quarter was $89 million, declining 8% sequentially.
The first quarter of fiscal 2026, consistent with our prior comments, we expect seasonality and gaming demand to drive a sequential decline in revenue from our consumer end market of approximately 35%. Over the next several years, we continue to anticipate our revenue from the consumer end market to be approximately $300 million on an annual basis. Turning to our automotive and industrial end market.
Fourth quarter revenue was $86 million, growing 3% sequentially as we continue to see a modest recovery in this end market.
Looking ahead to the first quarter of fiscal 2026, we anticipate continued sequential growth in the automotive end market. However, we expect this to be more than offset by a decline in revenue from our industrial end market, where order patterns can be lumpy in any given quarter. As a result, we project our overall revenue from the auto and industrial end market to decline sequentially in the high single digits on a percentage basis.
In summary, we drove tremendous revenue growth throughout fiscal 2025, significantly scaling the company from an annualized revenue run rate of $4.6 billion in the first quarter to over $7.2 billion by the fourth quarter.
Building on this expanded base, we anticipate strong year-over-year revenue growth in fiscal 2026. Our AI-driven data center end market is expected to remain a key contributor, further supported by the ongoing recovery in our multimarket businesses.
Marvell's data center end market accounted for 75% of consolidated revenue in the fourth quarter. Reflecting this rapid transformation during fiscal 2025, we purposely redirected our investments towards data center relative to our other end markets to fully capitalize on the massive opportunity created by AI.
We recently evolved our organizational structure to fully enable the strategic transformation. All products focused on hyperscale customers are now managed by a single cloud data center group led by Raghib Hussain, our President of Products and Technologies. We have merged the rest of our end markets into a single multi-market business group led by Chris Koopmans, our Chief Operating Officer.
Marvell has solidified its position as a leading provider of data infrastructure semiconductors with a unique business model, spanning full custom to full merchant solutions. We are seeing strong investment in accelerated infrastructure from both established hyperscalers and a number of well-funded new market entrants as they race to build 1 million XPU training clusters. These customers are highly incentivized to increasingly use custom infrastructure to augment their merchant solutions.
Recent developments in the AI market, such as the advent of reasoning models are also expected to continue to driving strong demand for compute, networking and storage semiconductors. As a result, we remain very optimistic about our both our short- and long-term growth prospects and our role in enabling accelerated infrastructure. We look forward to updating investors on our business model and the significant opportunities ahead of us at our Investor Day on June 10 in New York.
With that, I'll turn the call over to Willem for more detail on our recent results and outlook.