Cristiano Amon, President, CEO, Qualcomm on Q4 2022 Earnings Call

“As we look to fiscal ’23, further deterioration of the macroeconomic environment and extended China COVID restrictions have resulted in demand weakness and temporary elevated channel inventory across the industry. As good stewards of capital for our stockholders, we are committed to managing our business in light of the current environment without losing sight of the significant growth opportunities ahead.

To that end, we’re being very disciplined in managing operating expenses while optimizing our R&D investments to prudently focus on growth within automotive and IoT. We have already implemented a hiring freeze, and we have planned spending reductions across our mature product areas and SG&A to fund our diversification. We are continuing to evaluate additional actions, and we are prepared and committed to making further reductions to operating expenses as needed.

It is important to note that the current inventory drawdown is a cyclical adjustment that has no impact on the underlying growth and earnings power of the company in the long term. And we are in a strong position to manage the near-term headwinds.

Beyond 2023, we see a number of our strategic growth initiatives increasing in scale. We anticipate automotive revenues will grow consistent with our auto Investor Day projections as the design win pipeline materializes. We expect to see an inflection point in Windows on Snapdragon PCs in 2024 based on a significant number of design wins to date.

XR is just at the beginning of its growth curve. 5G wireless fiber presents significant opportunities in regions such as India and other developing economies that have just started to deploy 5G networks. Lastly, the digital transformation of industries will continue to gain momentum, driving connectivity and intelligence at the edge.

In summary, despite the short-term challenges, the fundamentals of our growth strategy remain intact. We remain confident in our ability to navigate the current economic downturn given our strong balance sheet and consistent history of strong free cash flow generation. We will continue to focus on stockholder returns and executing on our ongoing diversification opportunities.

The powerful secular tailwinds driving multiyear demand for our One Technology Roadmap across multiple end industries are unchanged and resilient. We remain on track to expand our addressable market by more than 7x to approximately $700 billion in the next decade and firmly establish Qualcomm as the connected processor company for the intelligent edge.”

CT Bureau