Goldman Sachs Communocopia - Fireside Chat
Definitely worth a listen.
1. Chris outlined the current market opportunities and future opportunities
- retail apparel and shoes - 35-40% penetration, more mature market, slower than past but growing, sees this as an 80B item opportunity
- retail merchandise and logistics, each about couple hundred billion, have the initial adopters but is early days
- food dwarfs them all, happening faster than he could have imagined but due to the size of the opportunity it will take time. Meaningful impacts in 2026. The discussions on a number of fronts really detailed the M800 tech and Gen2X as enabling food to occur. This innovation really making it happen.
2. Future vision
- For the first time, to my ears —Chris discussed the value and how software (systems) really makes the whole thing work. He had Cary back him up that approximately 1/2 their engineers are in this space and they will increase that. The cloud and machine learning opportunities are significant. He emphasized this as a growth opportunity.
- Machine learning - passive sensing of items in devices (could be edge devices, handhelds) that are collecting data while doing other things will report data on items on the move and the ML will be able to analyze that information.
- My take - this is why he is excited about QCOM regardless of the impact on reader ICs, the money is going to be in the recurring cloud and enterprise solutions through the software. He explained how Impinj had spent 20 years creating the hardware needed to make RFID happen, now they are focused on solutions. Putting it to work so to speak. It is sort of like the M800, Gen2X and the reader tech have finally arrived for prime time.
- He discussed the fix reading environments and use cases and the hand held.
- He discussed the transformative nature of the whole system, compared it to bar codes transforming retail. He took us back to when checkers and stock people had to know the items, the codes and did it all based on knowledge...Now things will go to being sensed instead of read and inventory and movement of items will be tracked, analyzed, and predicted in real time. Transforming the way business is done. Again, not as if this will happen in the future...but as we have set sail on this future and are doing that work now.
Nothing in here that was like, awesome...we landed a new contract...more of a, we can transform the way the world does business. |
