Broadcom Stock

Broadcom Inc. operates as a global technology leader that designs, develops, and supplies a broad range of semiconductor and infrastructure software solutions.

The company has assembled a large team of semiconductor and software design engineers around the world. The company maintains design, product, and software development engineering resources at locations in the U.S., Asia, Europe, and Israel, providing it with engineering expertise worldwide.

The company strategically focuses its research and development resources to address niche opportunities in its target markets and leverage its extensive portfolio of the U.S. and other patents, and other intellectual property (IP) to integrate multiple technologies and create system-on-chip (SoC) component and software solutions that target growth opportunities. The company designs products and software that deliver high-performance and provide mission critical functionality.

The company develops semiconductor devices with a focus on complex digital and mixed signal complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) based devices and analog III-V based products. The company offers thousands of products that are used in end products, such as enterprise and data center networking, home connectivity, set-top boxes (STB), broadband access, telecommunication equipment, smartphones, and base stations, data center servers and storage systems, factory automation, power generation and alternative energy systems, and electronic displays.

The company's infrastructure software solutions enable customers to plan, develop, automate, manage, and secure applications across mainframe, distributed, mobile, and cloud platforms. Many of the largest companies in the world, including most of the Fortune 500, and many government agencies rely on the company's software solutions to help manage and secure their on-premise and hybrid cloud environments. The company's portfolio of industry-leading infrastructure and security software is designed to modernize, optimize, and secure the most complex hybrid environments, enabling scalability, agility, automation, insights, resiliency, and security. The company also offers mission critical fibre channel storage area networking (FC SAN) products and related software in the form of modules, switches, and subsystems incorporating multiple semiconductor products.

In addition, the hybrid-cloud portfolio the company acquired with VMware helps enterprises simplify their information technology (IT) environments so they can increase business velocity and flexibility. The VMware portfolio spans hybrid cloud, app-delivery acceleration, zero-trust security, and software-defined edge, making it easy for customers to run their mission-critical workloads across private, public, and edge environments with security and resiliency.

Segments

The company operates through two segments, Semiconductor Solutions and Infrastructure Software.

Semiconductor Solutions segment

The semiconductor solutions segment includes the company's IP licensing.

Products and Markets

The company's digital and mixed signal products are based on silicon wafers with CMOS transistors offering fast switching speeds and low power consumption, which are both critical design factors for the markets it serves. The company also offers analog products, which are based on III-V semiconductor materials that have higher electrical conductivity than silicon, and thus tend to have better performance characteristics in radio frequency (RF), and optoelectronic applications. Examples of these materials used in the company's products are gallium arsenide (GaAs) and indium phosphide (InP).

The company provides semiconductor solutions for managing the movement of data in data center, service provider, and enterprise networking applications. It provides a broad variety of RF semiconductor devices, wireless connectivity solutions, custom touch controllers and inductive charging solutions for the wireless market. The company also provides semiconductor solutions for enabling the STB and broadband access applications and for enabling secure movement of digital data to and from host machines, such as servers, personal computers, and storage systems, to the underlying storage devices, such as hard disk drives (HDD) and solid-state drives (SSD).

The company's product portfolio ranges from discrete devices to complex sub-systems that include multiple device types and may also incorporate firmware for interfacing between analog and digital systems. In some cases, its products include mechanical hardware that interfaces with optoelectronic or capacitive sensors. The company focuses on markets that require high quality and the technology leadership and integrated performance characteristic of its products.

Set-Top Box Solutions: The company offers complete SoC platform solutions for cable, satellite, Internet Protocol television, over-the-top and terrestrial STBs. The company's products enable global service providers to introduce new and enhanced technologies and services in STBs, including transcoding, digital video recording functionality, higher definition video processing, increased networking capabilities, and more tuners to enable faster channel change and more simultaneous recordings. The company is also enabling service providers in deploying High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), a video compression format that is a successor to the H.264/MPEG-4 format. HEVC enables ultra-high definition (Ultra HD), services by effectively doubling the capacity of existing networks to deploy new or existing content. The company's families of STB solutions support the complete range of resolutions, from standard definition to high definition, and Ultra HD.

Broadband Access Solutions: The company offers complete SoC platform solutions for digital subscriber line (DSL), cable, passive optical networking (PON) and wireless local area network for both consumer premise equipment (CPE) and central office (CO) deployments. The company's CPE devices are used in broadband modems, residential gateways, and Wi-Fi access points and routers. The company's CO devices, including DSL Access Multiplexer (DSLAM), cable modem termination systems, and PON optical line termination medium access controller, are empowering modern operator broadband infrastructure. The company's products enable global service providers to continue to deploy next generation broadband access technologies across multiple standards, including G.fast, Data Over Cable Service Interface Specifications (DOCSIS), PON, and Wi-Fi to provide more bandwidth and faster speeds to consumers.

Ethernet Switching and Routing: The company offers a broad set of Ethernet switching and routing products that are optimized for data center, service provider and enterprise networks. In the data center market, its high capacity, low latency, switching silicon supports advanced protocols around virtualization and multi-pathing. The company's Ethernet switching fabric technologies provide the ability to build highly scalable flat networks supporting tens of thousands of servers. Its service provider switch portfolio enables carrier networks to support prioritized delivery of data traffic in the wireless backhaul, access, aggregation, and core of their networks. For enterprise networks, the company offers product families with secure, encrypted switching capabilities and support lower power modes that comply with industry standards around energy efficient Ethernet.

Custom Silicon Solutions: The company provides advanced technology and IP platforms for customers to design and develop application specific integrated circuits (ASICs), targeting data center compute offload, legacy and new 5G radio infrastructure, and wired communication networks. The company's custom silicon provides the platform to integrate embedded logic, memory, serializer/deserializer (SerDes) technology, IP cores, and processor cores. The ASICs are custom products built to individual customers specifications.

Physical Layer Devices: The company's high performance Ethernet transceivers are built upon a proprietary digital signal processing communication architecture optimized for high-speed network connections and support the latest standards and advanced features, such as energy efficient Ethernet, data encryption and time synchronization. The company also offers a range of automotive Ethernet products, including PHYs, switches and camera microcontrollers, to meet growing consumer demand for in-vehicle connectivity and smart vision.

Fiber Optic Components: The company supplies a wide array of optical components to the Ethernet networking, storage, and access, metro- and long-haul telecommunication markets. Its optical components enable the high speed reception and transmission of data through optical fibers.

RF Semiconductor Devices: The company's RF semiconductor devices selectively filter, as well as amplify and route, RF signals. Filters enable modern wireless communication systems to support a large number of subscribers simultaneously by ensuring that the multiple transmissions and receptions of voice and data streams do not interfere with each other. The company's RF products include multi-chip module front-end modules that integrate transmit/receive switching and filtering functions for multiple frequency bands, filter modules and discrete filters, all using its proprietary FBAR technology.

The company's expertise in FBAR technology, amplifier design, and module integration enables it to offer industry-leading performance in cellular RF transceiver applications.

Connectivity Solutions: The company's connectivity solutions include discrete and integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth solutions, and global positioning system/global navigation satellite system (GPS/GNSS) receivers, designed for use in mobile devices, including smartphones, tablets, and wearable products.

The company offers a family of high performance, low power Wi-Fi chipsets. The company offers a complete family of Bluetooth silicon and software solutions that enable manufacturers to easily and cost-effectively add Bluetooth functionality to virtually any device. These solutions include combination chips that offer integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth functionality, which provides significant performance advantages over discrete solutions.

The company also offers a family of GPS, assisted-GPS, and GNSS semiconductor products, software and data services. These products are part of a broader location platform that leverages a broad range of communications technologies, including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS, to provide more accurate location and navigation capabilities.

Custom Touch Controllers: The company's touch controllers process signals from touch screens in mobile handsets and tablets.

Inductive Charging ASICs: The company's custom inductive charging ASIC devices offer high efficiency and are highly integrated solutions for mobile and wearable devices.

SAS, RAID, and PCIe Products: The company provides serial attached small computer system interface (SAS) and redundant array of independent disks (RAID) controller and adapter solutions to server and storage system original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). These solutions enable secure and high speed data transmission between a host computer, such as a server, and storage peripheral devices, such as HDD, SSD, and optical disk drives and disk and tape-based storage systems. Some of these solutions are delivered as stand-alone semiconductors, typically as a controller. Other solutions are delivered as circuit boards, known as adapter products, which incorporate the company's semiconductors onto a circuit board with other features. RAID technology is a critical part of the company's server storage connectivity solutions as it provides protection against the loss of critical data resulting from HDD failures.

The company also provides interconnect semiconductors that support the peripheral component interconnect express (PCIe) communication standards.

Fibre Channel Products: The company provides fibre channel host bus adapters, which connect host computers, such as servers to FC SANs.

Ethernet NIC Controllers: The company's Ethernet network interface card (NIC) controllers are designed for high-performance virtualization, intelligent flow processing, secure data center connectivity, and machine learning.

HDD and SSD Products: The company provides read channel based SoCs and preamplifiers to HDD OEMs. These are the critical chips required to read, write, and protect data.

In addition, the company sells preamplifiers, which are complex, high speed, mixed signal devices that enable writing and reading data to and from the HDD heads. The preamplifier interfaces with the SoC to provide the electronics data path in a HDD.

The company also provides custom flash controllers to SSD OEMs. An SSD stores data in flash memory instead of on a hard disk, providing high speed access to the data. Flash controllers manage the underlying flash memory in SSDs, performing critical functions, such as reading and writing data to and from the flash memory and performing error correction, wear leveling and bad block management.

Industrial End Markets: The company also provides a broad variety of products for the general industrial and automotive markets, including optocouplers, industrial fiber optics, industrial and medical sensors, motion encoders, light emitting diode devices, and Ethernet ICs. The company's industrial products are used in a diverse set of applications, spanning industrial automation, power generation and distribution systems, medical systems and equipment, defense and aerospace, and vehicle subsystems, including those used in electric vehicle powertrain, infotainment, and advanced driver assistance system.

Infrastructure Software segment

The Infrastructure Software segment includes the company's mainframe, distributed, and cyber security solutions, and its FC SAN business.

Products and Markets

The company's infrastructure software solutions offer customers greater choice and flexibility to build, run, manage, connect and protect applications, and data at scale across hybrid IT environments.

The company's mainframe software provides market-leading DevOps, AIOps, Security, Workload Automation, Data Management, and Foundational Software solutions, that enable customers to embrace open tools and technologies, innovate with their mainframe as part of their hybrid cloud, and amplify the value of their mainframe investments. The company's commitment to partnering with its customers extends beyond products and technology and includes unique Beyond Code programs that address challenges, such as skills development, staffing, change management, and cost-saving initiatives that drive overall business success with the platform.

The company's distributed software solutions enable global enterprises to optimize the planning, development and delivery of software, powering their business-critical digital services. The company's solutions are designed to enable customers to innovate, improve customer experience, and drive profitability by aligning business, development, and operational teams. The company's products, organized in the domains of ValueOps, DevOps, and AIOps, deliver end-to-end visibility across all stages of the digital lifecycle and help its customers realize better business outcomes and better experiences for their customers.

The company's Symantec cyber security software solutions help organizations and governments secure against threats and compliance risks by protecting their users and data on any app, device, or network. The company's integrated cyber defense approach simplifies cyber security with comprehensive solutions designed to secure critical business assets across on-premises and cloud infrastructures. The company's Symantec solutions utilize rich threat intelligence from a global network of security engineers, threat analyst and researchers, as well as advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning engines, enabling customers to protect data, connect authorized users with trusted applications, and detect and respond to the most advanced targeted attacks.

The company also offers mission critical FC SAN products designed to help customers reduce the cost and complexity of managing business information within a shared data storage environment, enabling high levels of availability of mission critical applications in the form of modules, switches and subsystems incorporating multiple semiconductor products. The company delivers reliable and simplified management of these FC SAN products through its software-based management tools designed to maximize uptime, dramatically simplify storage area networking deployment and management, and provides high levels of visibility and insight into the storage network.

Operational Analytics and Management: These solutions combine big data, machine learning and AI with mainframe expertise to deliver meaningful and actionable insights to augment and automate day-to-day operations and deliver exceptional customer experiences.

Workload Automation: These solutions reduce manual effort by enabling customers to proactively optimize resources and orchestrate automation across enterprise applications and systems.

Databases and Data Management: These high-performance databases and management tools store, organize, and manage mainframe data to ensure optimal performance, efficient administration, and reliability of critical systems. Customers can also manage their mainframe data storage using modern mainframe solutions that securely store data on any device that customers choose, including the cloud. These software-only solutions are designed to save on costs and maintain confidence in data security.

Application Development and Testing: These solutions enable customers to accelerate software delivery while increasing code quality through the use of its agile processes and tools, and DevOps solutions. The company's open-first strategy helps customers modernize their mainframe environment through the use of open source and open application programming technologies across people, process, tooling and applications, resulting in greater synergy and alignment with their corporate information technology (IT).

Identity and Access Management: These solutions manage mainframe access and elevate it with modern practices, such as multi-factor authentication and privileged user management, and support all external security managers.

Compliance and Data Protection: These solutions protect crucial mainframe data to ensure compliance, identify risk, proactively respond to potential threats, and reduce those risks to lighten the load on security management with automated identification and authorization cleanup.

Security Insights Platform: This solution helps ensure a trusted environment for customers and their employees by quickly interpreting and assessing mainframe security posture, identifying risks, and developing remediation steps on an ongoing and ad hoc basis. This data is available for use with in-house tools for security information and event management.

Beyond Code Programs: These value-added offerings go above and beyond the leading software the company provides to help ensure its customers get the most out of their mainframe investments. These offerings unlock additional value for organizations in areas like educating and upskilling the workforce, providing expert guidance and support for change events, uncovering opportunities to improve efficiency and save costs.

ValueOps: This solution delivers value stream management capabilities that enable customers to schedule, track, and manage work throughout its lifecycle from investment planning to execution. It aligns business and development teams across the enterprise, increasing transparency, reducing inefficiencies, and improving time to value.

DevOps: This solution offers capabilities that empower users of the company's agile processes and tools to track development progress and deploy releases confidently with assurance of feature completeness, high-quality, and reduced risk. Key stakeholders have a single view of key insights into release progress, health, quality, defect trends, and metrics that drive focus, gauge readiness, and help to ensure successful, quality releases.

AIOps: This solution combines application, infrastructure and network monitoring and correlation with intelligent remediation capabilities to help customers create more resilient production environments and improve customer experience.

Endpoint Security: The company's Symantec endpoint security solutions prevent, detect, and respond to emerging threats across all devices and operating systems, including laptops, desktops, tablets, mobile phones, servers, and cloud workloads through an intelligent AI driven security console and single agent.

Network Security: Email and web access are the lifeblood and essential communication means for every modern organization. The company has a full array of network security solutions, as well as a shared set of advanced threat protection technologies to stop inbound and outbound threats targeting end users, information, and key infrastructure.

Information Security: Information protection and compliance is critical to managing risk. The company offers integrated information security solutions, based on an efficient, single-policy that can be applied across the entire environment, to help organizations identify and protect risky users, applications, and their most sensitive data everywhere across endpoints, on-premises networks, cloud services and private applications.

Identity Security: User identities are under attack by cyber criminals hoping to exploit their access and privileges and do harm. The company mitigates these attacks by positively identifying legitimate users, enforcing granular access control policies, and streamlining access governance to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive resources and data.

Fibre Channel Switch Products: The company's Brocade Fibre Channel switch products provide interconnection, bandwidth and high-speed switching between servers and storage devices which are in a FC SAN. FC SANs are networks dedicated to mission critical storage traffic, and enable simultaneous high speed and secure connections among multiple host computers and multiple storage arrays.

Payment Security Suite: This is a software as a service (SaaS)-based payment authentication service to help banks and merchants protect against fraud and ensure a hassle-free online shopping experience for their customers.

Business Strategy

The company's strategy is to combine best-of-breed technology leadership in semiconductor and infrastructure software solutions, with unmatched scale, on a common sales and administrative platform to deliver a comprehensive suite of infrastructure technology products to the world's leading business and government customers.

Customers, Sales, and Distribution

The company sells its products through its direct sales force and a select network of distributors and channel partners globally. Distributors and OEMs, or their contract manufacturers, typically account for the substantial majority of the company's semiconductor sales. Aggregate sales to Apple Inc., through all channels, accounted for approximately 20% of the company's net revenue for the year ended October 29, 2023 (fiscal year 2023).

Many of the company's semiconductor customers design products in North America or Europe that are then manufactured in Asia. To serve customers around the world, the company has strategically developed relationships with large global electronic component distributors, complemented by a number of regional distributors with customer relationships based on their respective product ranges. The company also sells its products to a wide variety of OEMs or their contract manufacturers. The company has established strong relationships with leading OEM customers across multiple target markets. Its direct sales force focuses on supporting its large OEM customers, and has specialized product and service knowledge that enables it to sell specific offerings at key levels throughout a customer's organization. Certain customers require the company to contract with them directly and with specified intermediaries, such as contract manufacturers. Many of the company's customers and their contract manufacturers often require time critical delivery of its products to multiple locations around the world.

The company's software customers are in most major industries worldwide, including banks, insurance companies, other financial services providers, government agencies, global IT service providers, telecommunication providers, transportation companies, manufacturers, technology companies, retailers, educational organizations, and health care institutions. Its customers generally consist of large enterprises that have computing environments from multiple vendors and are highly complex.

Manufacturing Operations

The majority of the company's front-end wafer manufacturing operations is outsourced to external foundries, including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC). The company uses third-party contract manufacturers for a significant majority of its assembly and test operations, including TSMC; Advanced Semiconductor Engineering, Inc.; Foxconn Technology Group; Amkor Technology, Inc.; and Siliconware Precision Industries Co., Ltd. The majority of the company's internal III-V semiconductor wafer fabrication is done in the U.S. and Singapore.

Seasonality

Historically, the company's net revenue has typically been higher in the second half of the fiscal year (year ended October 2023) than in the first half, primarily due to seasonality in its wireless communications products. These products have historically experienced seasonality due to launches of new mobile devices manufactured by the company's OEM customers.

Intellectual Property

As of October 29, 2023, the company had 15,400 U.S. and other patents and 910 U.S. and other pending patent applications. The expiration dates of the company's patents range from 2023 to 2042, with a small number of patents expiring in the near future, none of which are expected to be material to its IP portfolio.

Competition

The company's primary competitors are Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.; Amlogic Inc., Analog Devices, Inc.; Cisco Systems, Inc.; GlobalFoundries Inc.; Hamamatsu Photonics K.K.; Heidenhain Corporation; iC-Haus GmbH; Intel Corporation; Lumentum Holdings Inc.; MACOM Technology Solutions Holdings, Inc.; Marvell Technology, Inc.; MaxLinear, Inc.; MediaTek Inc.; Microchip Technology Incorporated; Mitsubishi Electric Corporation; Murata Manufacturing Co., Ltd.; NVIDIA Corporation; NXP Semiconductors N.V.; ON Semiconductor Corporation; OSRAM Licht AG; Qorvo, Inc.; Qualcomm Inc.; Realtek Semiconductor Corp.; Renesas Electronics Corporation; Skyworks Solutions, Inc.; STMicroelectronics N.V.; Sumitomo Corporation; Synaptics Incorporated; Texas Instruments, Inc.; TDK-EPC Corporation; Toshiba Corporation; Wolfspeed, Inc.; and II-VI Incorporated.

The company's primary competitors are Atlassian Corporation, Plc; BeyondTrust Corporation; BMC Software Inc.; Cisco Systems, Inc.; CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc.; CyberArk Software, Ltd.; Dino-Software Corporation; International Business Machines Corporation; Microsoft Corporation; New Relic, Inc.; OpenText Corporation; Oracle Corporation; Proofpoint, Inc.; Rocket Software, Inc.; SailPoint Technologies Holdings, Inc.; Salesforce.com, Inc.; ServiceNow, Inc.; SolarWinds Corporation; Splunk, Inc.; and Zscaler, Inc.

Governmental Regulations

The company is subject to regulation by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration and similar health and safety laws in other jurisdictions.

In addition, the company's business is subject to various import/export regulations, such as the U.S. Export Administration Regulations, and applicable executive orders, and rules of industrial standards bodies, like the International Organization for Standardization, as well as regulation by other agencies, such as the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

History

Broadcom Inc. was founded in 1961. The company was incorporated in Delaware in 2018.