Silicom Ltd Q2 2026 Earnings Call

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Silicom second quarter 2026 results conference call. All participants are at present in listen only mode. Following management's formal presentation, instructions will be given for the question and answer session. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. You should have all received by now the company's press release. If you have not received it, please contact Silicom's investor relations team at EK Global Investor Relations at 12123788040, or view it in the news section of the company's website, www.silicom-usa.com. I would now like to hand over the call to Mr. Kenny Green of EK Global Investor Relations. Mr. Green, would you like to begin, please?

Thank you, operator. I would like to welcome all of you to Silicom's second quarter 2026 results conference call. Before we start, I would like to draw your attention to the following safe harbor statement. During this call, we may make forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws. These statements may include, among other things, statements regarding the company's strategy, market opportunities, customer demands, product development initiatives, industry trends, expected deployments of the company's solutions, financial outlook, revenue expectations, margins, operating expenses, profitability, and future growth opportunities. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in such statements. These risks include, among others, those described in the company's press release issued today and in its filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, including its annual report on Form 20-F.

The company undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. With us on the line today are Mr. Liron Eizenman, President and CEO, and Mr. Eran Gilad, CFO. Liron will begin with an overview of the results, followed by Eran, who will provide the analysis of the financials. We will then turn the call over to the question and answer session. With that, I'd now like to hand the call over to Liron. Liron, please go ahead. Thank you, Kenny, good day, everyone.

I'm very happy to share a truly outstanding set of results for the second quarter of 2026. Results that came in significantly ahead of our expectations and that demonstrate the clear success of our strategic plan. Looking ahead, from our perspective in mid 2026, I have rarely been more excited about Silicom's strong momentum, upcoming potential, and the trajectory ahead. The second quarter was an exceptionally good one for Silicom, and it marked a clear acceleration of the growth inflection we talked about earlier this year. Revenues for the second quarter came in at $23.8 million, up a very strong 59% year-over-year well ahead of the $20 million-$21 million guidance range we shared with you last quarter.

Our strategic plan of the core business is tracking well ahead and of our original expectations from when we first launched the plan. Our highly predictable platform of recurring revenue, built on years of design win momentum, combined with the upside from our growth engine, is now driving a key inflection point in our business. You can see it clearly in the increasing trajectory of our revenue growth. Two quarters ago, in Q4 2025, we reported 17% year-over-year growth. We accelerated to 33% growth last quarter. Now a further step up to 59% in the current quarter. Beyond that, we are maintaining and even further building on this momentum with the guidance for the next quarter, implying a further acceleration to 66% year-over-year growth at the upper end.

This is a powerful accelerating trend. It reflects the compounding contribution of our multiple recent design wins as they ramp. Importantly, our visibility into the remainder of this year has improved markedly over the past few months. As a result, we are raising our revenue guidance for the full year 2026 significantly to a range of $93 million-$95 million, up from our previous guidance of $82 million-$83 million. This higher guidance reflects the better-than-expected improvements in our core business and is further supported by the additional multi-million dollar revenues that we now expect from AI inference production orders in 2026. We have discussed many times the long-term growth and strength of our core business are best tracked via our design win momentum. As you may remember, for 2026 as a whole, we targeted between seven and nine new design wins.

I'm very pleased to report that we are just over halfway through the year. We've already secured seven new design wins. This means we are well on track to meet and to even exceed the upper end of the range. Those design wins achieved in recent months are the foundation for continued strong growth into next year and beyond. I want to spend a few moments discussing the design wins that we secured during the second quarter and more recently. During the quarter, in April, we announced an FPGA SmartNIC design win with a European leader in advanced encryption and secure communication solutions. The customer selected our solution following a successful evaluation, testing the performance and reliability required for its advanced encryption solutions, including post-quantum cryptography. This was our third PQC design win as we continue to build post-quantum cryptography as an emerging future growth engine for Silicom.

We expect to scale towards an anticipated annual deployment of around $3 million. On top of that, we are in discussions regarding this customer's next generation higher speed FPGA SmartNIC, which is planned to launch in 2028, as well as potential full system solution combining a server with an FPGA SmartNIC. Opportunities that could each add meaningfully to our future revenues from this account. A few weeks later in May, we announced our first-ever white label switching design. This was a win with a $5 million per year potential with a tier 1 global security leader. Seeking to move away from vendor lock-in, the customer decided to replace its existing proprietary switches from an incumbent industry leader with Silicom's open white label switching solutions. The customer selected a full range of Silicom designed white label switches as the networking infrastructure for its security platforms.

First production orders are expected before the end of the year. More recently, in July, an existing blue-chip customer awarded us a new design win for a custom high-speed server adapter, engineered to exact customer specifications for a specific use case. This win triples our expected business with this customer to nearly $10 million in 2027, a significant contribution to our growth in 2027 on top of the very strong growth we are already delivering in 2026. Those wins capture the essence of our strategy. First, each successful win opens the door to the next, with satisfied customers coming back to us for additional products and additional use cases. Second, they reflect the compounding value of the long-term trusted supply relationships we have cultivated over decades of operation with blue-chip customers. Together, they strengthen the visibility we have into continued growth in 2027 and beyond.

Beyond the wins we already secured, our pipeline of potential opportunities remains very broad and deep, spanning all our core product lines, including Edge systems, SmartNICs, and FPGA-based solutions across both new and existing customers. We expect this pipeline to continue converting into design wins, laying the groundwork for sustained strong growth well beyond this year. Turning to our outlook for the third quarter, we expect revenues in the range of $25 million to $26 million, representing accelerated 66% year-over-year growth at the upper end of the guidance. For the full year, as I mentioned earlier, we raised our revenue guidance to a range of $93 million to $95 million, representing over 50% year-over-year growth. I want to emphasize a particularly important milestone.

Driven by our strong execution and the significant inherent leverage in our business model, we now expect to return to quarterly non-GAAP profitability during the second half of this year, significantly earlier than we had originally anticipated. This is a meaningful inflection point for Silicom and a clear demonstration of the earnings power that our rapidly growing revenues are beginning to unlock. Let me now turn to the exciting progress we are making in the AI inference market. We are very pleased with the tangible, strong progress we achieved on the AI front in less than nine months. I want to highlight a few of our key AI-related engagements. Recently, we secured a design win with a pioneering AI inference acceleration provider and received the first production order from this customer. This is an important milestone, establishing a foundation for what we believe can become an exceptional revenue stream.

Additionally, we successfully customized an AI NIC solution to meet the customer's specific needs, delivered the first unit to the customer evaluation, and are preparing for initial deliveries of this customized product per purchase order received from the customer, a leading AI inference ASIC and infrastructure vendor. In parallel, we are expanding our AI inference product portfolio, and based on orders secured, we are now developing a completely new bespoke inference-specific solution. We are witnessing AI spending shift decisively from training to inference, and the rise of disaggregated inference architectures is positioning Silicom as a key player, bringing our networking know-how and building blocks to the architectures that power those workloads and creating significant new opportunities for us along the way.

We view our rapid progress and expanding footprint in AI inference as a potential game changer for Silicom. Successfully capitalizing on this generational shift will significantly enhance our long-term growth trajectory. This brings me to our balance sheet, which remains exceptionally strong and provides us with the flexibility to invest in our growth while maintaining a conservative financial profile. At the end of June, our working capital and marketable securities totaled $107 million, representing approximately $19 per share, including $55 million in cash equivalent, and highly rated marketable securities with no debt. In summary, this was an outstanding quarter. It's an exciting time for Silicom. Our core business is accelerating rapidly, with 59% year-over-year growth in the second quarter. Third quarter guidance pointing to accelerated 66% growth at the upper end.

At the same time, we are making fast and exciting progress on our AI inference upside. Our design win engine is firing on all cylinders, with the lower end of our full year target already reached in only half a year. On the strength of this momentum and improved visibility, we have raised our full year revenue guidance to $93 million-$95 million. We now expect to return to quarterly non-GAAP profitability in the second half of this year. This quarter demonstrates again the exceptional performance of our core business, which is the foundation for everything else we're doing.

It is the success of our strategic plan and the strength of our core that gives us the platform, the customer relationships, and the balanced sheet strength to invest in AI inference and other additive growth engines, each of which is extension of our core expertise, capabilities, customer base, and the same IP roots. We could not be more excited about Silicom's strong and accelerating momentum. We are moving with confidence and determination to fully capture the opportunities ahead. We look forward to delivering strong and accelerating returns for our shareholders in the quarters ahead and over the long term. With that, I will now hand over the call to Eran for a detailed review of the quarter results. Eran, please go ahead. Thank you, Liron.

Good day to everyone. I will review the financial results and business performance for the second quarter of 2026. Before beginning the financial overview, I would like to remind you that unless otherwise indicated, all financial results are non-GAAP. A full reconciliation of our results on a GAAP to non-GAAP basis is available in the press release issued earlier today. We are very happy with our revenues for the second quarter of 2026, which were $23.8 million, 59% above the $15 million reported in the second quarter of last year. The geographical revenue breakdown over the last 12 months was as follows: North America, 79%, Europe and Israel, 13%, Far East and rest of the world, 8%. During the last 12 months, we had two 10%-plus customers, which accounted for about 23% of our revenues.

Gross profit for the second quarter of 2026 grew 51% to $7.2 million, compared to a gross profit of $4.8 million in the second quarter of 2025. I note that our gross margin of 30.4% in the quarter is at the upper part of our short to midterm expected gross margin range of 27%-32%. Operating expenses in the second quarter of 2026 were $8.3 million, compared with $7.2 million reported in the second quarter of 2025. I highlight that this is an increase of only 16% year-over-year, compared with 59% revenue growth, a clear demonstration of the operating leverage inherent within our business model. Operating loss for the second quarter of 2026 was reduced to $1.1 million, a solid improvement from the operating loss of $2.4 million reported in the second quarter of 2025.

This narrowing of the operating loss reflects the operating leverage inherent in our model as our revenue returned to strong growth and points clearly to the improving profitability profile we expect to deliver as our growth accelerates. Net loss for the quarter was reduced to $0.9 million, a 54% improvement compared with the net loss of $2 million in the second quarter of 2025. We are very pleased with the pace at which we are closing the gap to profitability, we expect to return to quarterly non-GAAP profitability during the second half of this year, significantly earlier than we had originally anticipated. Loss per share in the quarter was $0.16, a significant improvement compared with a loss per share of $0.35 as reported in the second quarter of last year. Turning to the balance sheet.

As of June 30th, 2026, our working capital and marketable securities amounted to $107 million, including $71 million in high-quality inventory and $55 million in cash equivalents, and highly rated marketable securities, with no debt. I would like to add a few words on the increase in inventory. We are intentionally building our inventory both to support our strong revenue trajectory and to safeguard our ability to ensure uninterrupted product delivery to our customers. This is a deliberate, proactive step, we are leveraging our balance sheet strengths to take it, effectively mitigating the impact of the currently extended lead times for memory chips and positioning us well to continue capitalizing on the growth opportunities ahead. That ends my summary. I would like to hand back to the operator for a question and answer session. Operator? Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, we will begin the question and answer session.

If you have a question, please press star one. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star two. If you are using speaker equipment, kindly lift the handset before pressing the numbers. Your questions will be pulled in the order they are received. Please stand by while we pull for your questions. The first question is from Ryan Koontz of Needham & Company. Please go ahead. Great. Thanks for the question, and just terrific results, guys.

Really You point out use cases that are particularly strong within your core business that are resulting in the outperformance here in the first half or in the second quarter?

First of all, Ryan, thank you very much. I would say, what we're seeing basically is the core business. The core business is booming, and the core business is across the board, across all the product lines. If it's FPGA, if it's our standard adapters, if it's acceleration adapters, if it's our Edge systems, all of that is really growing in revenue. All the new stuff is actually not even reflected in the revenues yet. Even the switches we announced, it will be start only later in the year and will actually ramp up significantly more next year. Same for the AI story and the PQC. I wouldn't say there's a specific market or domain, but it's really our core business that is driving all the growth.

Understood. Thanks for that. With regards to, you've been able to hold gross margins in here pretty well given the creep up in costs, I'm sure. I assume with your open BOM strategy here with your customers, that you've been able to raise price, has pricing contributed to some of the revenue outperformance? Pricing for you. First of all, it's a lot of hard work, so it's not easy to do that.

We have a dedicated team that's working very hard on sourcing the components and the best prices possible, and it's relationships of years and years that we have with manufacturers and suppliers and silicon vendors that allows us to get access to those guys, speak with them, and try to get the best prices possible, and also availability, which is not easy nowadays. On top of that, yes, it's the work with the customers, keeping them updated all the time with the situation, making sure they get from us a view of how we see the industry, what are the challenges, where do we need them to help us? Sometimes we're working together to find good solutions.

Eventually all of that is leading us to the result that you mentioned, which is exactly that, we are able to maintain the gross margin. One more thing I would like to add on top of that is because of our very strong balance sheet, we are able, and Eran mentioned that before, to build significant inventories intentionally, not by mistake. That allows us, in some cases, to keep the prices down for a very long time by buying ahead. All of that hard work, together with our strong balance sheet and very dedicated customers that we're working with for years, allows us to actually create this result that you mentioned.

That's great. Helpful to hear that. With regards to memory costs, they've obviously been just skyrocketing. I've heard from other vendors that they are in the midst of, in some cases, redesigning products with lower memory. Is that something you're looking at in some cases, or your customers are pretty pleased with your products and where they're at today?

We definitely do those kind of things. It depends on the customer. As I said, everything is a discussion with the customer for us. In some cases, it's not even a design change. Sometimes the design itself can have more memory or less memory, or more storage or less storage. We did have cases where we discussed with the customers, and when memory and storage was, let's call it cheap, a year ago or 18 months ago, then someone would say, "Okay, give me a little bit more memory. It doesn't cost me too much. I don't know if I really need it, but put it in the product." We definitely work with some customers, with all customers. Some of them wanted to make the changes, some of them didn't want to make the changes.

Definitely we had some changes in some products in order to support our customers better and get them to a price point that still allows them to sell the product. Yes, we do see generational shifts. It depends if a customer was maybe on a product that was using DDR4 and wanted to move forward to DDR5. Not necessarily they immediately see the impact of that because DDR5 prices are also increasing, but maybe over time they will see it. We are working with the customers very closely to see if they want to move to a new product or a different product that may give them a better price, or maybe they just want to change the spec for the existing one. It's a lot of work together with the customers.

One of the things, as I think about it, is one of the things we are very proud of is that we are able to customize and do modifications very quick with customers. That's one of the key things, that we managed to move customers very quickly to new platforms when they wanted to do so. It was almost for them kind of transparent. I mean, it's completely smooth.

Really helpful. That's great. With regards to your increased guidance on the balance of the year, you did mention, I think that, your inference customer and maybe your switch product is beginning to contribute. Can you give us kind of a rough magnitude of how much these brand new design wins secured in 2026 are contributing to your kind of end year revenue?

Just to make sure, are you asking about AI inference in 2026?

Yeah. Yes. AI inference. Any other major design wins that you've recently secured?

That's a little bit different. For the AI inference, I would say the total number that you can put in your head or in your models for 2026 is in the range of $3 million-$4 million. That's roughly the numbers that we expect for this year. Obviously 2027 numbers would be much higher. For the other design wins, yeah, some of them are ramping up quicker. Some of them take a little bit more time. It depends on the product. Some of them do contribute more revenue for this year, some of them less. Overall, I would say design wins we announced in 2026 will probably not be fully mature and fully in run rate in 2026, but 2027 or 2028 are more likely years to be full run rate.

Helpful. That's great. Maybe just lastly, on this inference design win, I know there's a lot of excitement from investors about that. Can you maybe summarize some of the intellectual property and some of the advantages you have that contribute to that sort of design win in the AI inference domain?

Yes. For competitive reasons, I would limit myself at some point, but we are still focusing on the knowhow that Silicom has that we built over many, many years. We now see a lot of, I would say, two areas. One is networking challenges, and the other is compute challenges. On the networking challenges, everything that we built over the many, many years, if it's around FPGA or if it's around other ASICs that we have, if it's around PCIe switches or anything else, and understanding also what are the challenges in the architecture and having the right people to have the right discussions with the customers to understand those pains.

All of that together is allowing us to understand the pain and come up with a solution and do it quickly because we have the building blocks to really provide customers very quickly a solution they can try out, and then even if we need to do some customization on top of that, we can do it very quickly.

That's one area, the other area, as I mentioned, on the compute, which is mainly on the FPGA side, is actually doing inference on the FPGA, and we mentioned that in the past, is what we call the hardware lottery, where actually, if you're doing an ASIC, you are locked down for many years, and if you're doing it on FPGA, you actually can update all the time, and as models progress over time, you can actually take all the new goodies that you have and all the industry that is doing smart things every day and put it into your FPGA and actually run models quicker and better than what you did yesterday. Again, it's all based on the same fundamentals that we have for our core business, but it's targeted in a different way and built specifically for AI inference.

That's really great. That's all I've got. Thanks for the responses. Appreciate it.

Thank you. If there are any additional questions, please press star one.

If you wish to cancel a request, please press star two. Please stand by while we poll for more questions. The next question is from Greg Weaver of Invicta Capital. Please go ahead. Good day, gentlemen.

Great quarter. Since the core business seems to be driving these results, can you maybe touch on a little bit of what's been a surprise, I guess, in terms of how things have gotten pulled in and what's caused the acceleration that you didn't anticipate, say, six or nine months ago?

As I'm trying to think about the answer to how to provide it, there's, I would say, no single customer or a single industry that is creating it. I think it's more of all of the design wins that we had and we won in the last 18 months, all of them ramping up, and as always, some customers are more successful than they anticipated, some are less successful than what they anticipated. We see a very strong demand for all of those design wins that we accumulated over the last 18 months. Obviously, those that were accumulated this year take a little bit more time, but those that we won maybe a year ago are really ramping up very, very nice. Another point that I can mention, that we are usually conservative in the numbers that we provide, but it's not that we are completely blown out.

We've seen some of the, let's say, hints to this growth coming in, but now we definitely see it coming, and also with our projection going forward, you can see it.

Okay. Great. From a gross margin outlook perspective, obviously, there's the moving parts here, but with some of this new business coming on and, say, some of this inference ramping, do you foresee much of a change as a result?

I think we expect the same. We don't think it will change dramatically.

Okay. Just lastly, maybe if you could just address here for everybody on the call about the shelf. There seemed to be a lot of consternation around that. Maybe just talk to that and what the thought process was there.

The filing is strictly standard corporate housekeeping. We like to maintain an active shelf to ensure we have maximum financial flexibility. Our focus right now is executing on the momentum as we're seeing it. If we experience higher than expected growth in our core business or see an opportunity to aggressively scale alongside the accelerating demand for our AI inference solution, this simply gives us the agility to support that working capital efficiency.

Okay. You think you could buy that much inventory or that you need, or that much receivables working capital ramp that you'd absorb $50 million in cash you got on the balance sheet now in the next six months?

Yeah, we believe so. You could ramp working capital that hard?

Sorry, I don't think I understood your question. Can you repeat? Right. You have $50 million-plus of cash and equivalents on the balance sheet currently, correct?

Correct. Right. Would you need to use that much cash for working capital needs in the next six months, do you foresee?

I think that if we will need it would maybe be for AI, if it really ramps up to the very, very high volumes.

That would be a fantastic high-level problem if that were true.

I agree. Appreciate it. Great job.

Thank you. Thank you. There are no further questions at this time.

Before I turn the call over to Mr. Eisenberg to go ahead with the closing statement, I would like to remind participants that a replay of this call will be available tomorrow on Silicom's website, www.silicom-usa.com. Mr. Eisenberg, would you like to make a concluding statement?

Thank you, operator. Thank you, everybody, for joining the call and for your interest in Silicom. We look forward to hosting you on our next call in three months. Good day. Thank you. This concludes Silicom's second quarter 2026 results conference call.

Thank you for your participation. You may go ahead and disconnect.