Broadcom CEO Sees 4K ‘Opportunity’ Becoming ‘More Significant’ Next Year

For Broadcom, HEVC decoder chips in 4K TVs and set-tops are “an opportunity that will probably become more significant next year,” CEO Scott McGregor said during Q&A of a Tuesday earnings call. “But the key thing about that is that if you want to win a design today, you really have to have leading products with HEVC and 4K,” he said. “All the designs and decisions being made on what platforms and architectures are all based on your strength in that space, and Broadcom was the first there and early in that technology and so that's enabled us to win a lot of the next generation,” he said. “So those designs -- a lot of them are already won and you'll start to see those roll out over the course of time.” HEVC-based 4K is an opportunity that’s “certainly good for us” because it brings the potential for higher average selling prices and the chance “to win some customers we didn't have before,” McGregor said. “Especially outside of the United States, it's an opportunity for share gains. We talked about that as a driver for us in the past to get geographical share gain there, and certainly the 4K transition has accelerated that.” Q1 revenue in Broadcom’s connectivity business soared 13 percent on strong consumer adoption of new high-end smartphones and growing penetration of new technologies such as 802.11ac, McGregor said. Broadcom also is seeing “significant customer interest” in its latest 5G Wi-Fi BCM4359 chip that offers “industry-first” real simultaneous dual band (RSDB) support, McGregor said. “This technology is expected to ship later this year and allows a smartphone or tablet to transfer data across two bands at the same time, enabling new applications and increasing the performance of existing applications,” he said. Broadcom unveiled the BCM4359 in early March, saying that by enabling RSDB support, the BCM4359 is able to connect to the 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz bands simultaneously, “improving the throughput and latency when using multiple applications at the same time, particularly video streaming and gaming.” Broadcom also is seeing “a lot of activity” in the IoT market, McGregor said. During Q1, it shipped a large number of development kits for “prototyping” IoT products, he said. Broadcom continues to “garner new design wins in a broad set of verticals” for IoT, “ranging across automotive, medical devices, healthcare, life goods and home automation,” he said.