Monolithic Power Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:MPWR) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Michael Hsing: Yes, I see these data we grow our small customer base in — by a few thousand in last year. And that’s kind of exciting. And it doesn’t mean we add a lot of revenues. And in the longer term, the wealthy I mean — the bigger the base, the better it is, the more stable MPS will be. And also, you don’t know — and what’s the next hardest things, okay? And our customers will decide that. But the market will decide it. Our customer will take opportunity. If it’s not this one, that one well. I mean we just explained that play the percentage. And we just have our products goes out the door. Goes to design in those — to those customers. And in terms of which segments I have to say it’s everywhere. This is okay. The — I can’t remember any numbers more than our grow orders more than five or six things. And — but that’s the beauty you won’t go 1,000. I mean that takes a few years and it will turn into bigger revenues.

Bernie Blegen: And Travis, it’s an excellent question because I think to align with Michael’s point there is that the strength of MPS as far as resilience in different market conditions, is the breadth of the customer base and not have high levels of concentration. Now obviously, with this environment where it has been generally weak except for AI we’re in sort of an unusual profile, but we don’t expect that to last over the next couple three years.

Travis Polan: Got it. Thank you for the color. That’s all from me.

Michael Hsing: Yes, okay.

Genevieve Cunningham: Our next question is from Tore Svanberg of Stifel. Tore, your line is now open.

Tore Svanberg: Yes, thank you. I just had two quick follow-ups. First of all, is on revenue capacity. So I know in the past, Michael, you talked about sort of getting to $2 billion in capacity. Obviously, you’re there now. But then also any updates on getting to $3 and even $4 billion of revenue capacity?

Michael Hsing: We are building for $4 billion revenues, again, in capacities. And we — actually we never changed. And especially out of China, and we — and that actually fits our plan. and we’ll continue to do that. And these kind of capacity issues you look at MPS business. And we see — we believe these business will grow — we grow our capacity accordingly. It’s really a disregarded, okay, what’s the current environment we address for long-term issues.

Tore Svanberg: Very good. And then the other follow-up, any updates on the e-commerce business. We haven’t heard about that in a while. So I just want to make sure we check in with you and get an update there.

Michael Hsing: Our module business is — our — pure e-commerce, I said it, okay, we didn’t know what we are talking about and wasn’t that excitement and exciting. But the combination of it and with our web service in the e-commerce and also some interactions help from our website. That generates 150 million units now — last year. And I can’t call it in — what was that, like seven, eight years ago, seven, eight years ago, we’re going to these e-commerce business customers logging our website, we’re going to — they can change their — they can input their parameters and program our ports, we ship the product within a week or so. That didn’t happen that much. But — and yes, it’s happening. But I still believe in the long term, that will be the business because we are loading the power management.

We’re loading all these product designing barriers. And — why not? People can program the part and especially younger generations. And they have — they rather program a product rather than use a solid line, putting us in the arms and get and go to a lab is okay to make it happen. And I think it’s longer younger generations would do that. And it will be different from other generations, my generation. And that business I believe in the long-term, we’re still picking up. But for now, was more than that bad. I cannot say that way.

Tore Svanberg: Great. Thank you, again.

Genevieve Cunningham: Our next question is from Melissa Fairbanks of Raymond James. Melissa, your line is now open.

Melissa Fairbanks: Hey, guys. Thanks very much. I was wondering if maybe I could squeeze one in about storage and computing business. I know it’s not quite as exciting maybe as what’s going on in enterprise data.

Michael Hsing: That’s not good.

Melissa Fairbanks: I noted that you did pick up some business on the notebook side last year that was kind of opportunistic. We’ve got some seasonal factors coming in, in March. We’ve kind of heard that channel inventories, at least on the PC notebook side have normalized somewhat. But wondering if you could just give us a little bit of color on the storage portion of that business that we don’t seem to talk about very much.

Michael Hsing: You know, the answer already. And I said, overall, it’s not good. Overall, we take on some market shares, and we start to grow a little bit.

Bernie Blegen: So I think the way to look at it is that we anticipated softness in the storage market. And so as a result, we became more competitive on notebooks an accepted lower-margin business. And it was offsetting declines, particularly in SSD where we’ve seen a decline. We increased share with a lot of the major customers in the SSD market, but their business was in decline for much of 2023. And then the other positive in the group is that we saw the initial ramp of DDR5 during the year and also graphic cards expanded pretty nicely during the year. So this is a group that has different characteristics and net-net did pretty okay in a pretty difficult market.