Keysight Technologies, Inc. 2026 Q3 Earnings Call

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us for Keysight's third quarter earnings conference call for fiscal year 2026. Joining me on today's call are Satish Dhanasekaran, President and CEO, Neil Dougherty, Executive Vice President and CFO, Kailash Narayanan, President of the Communications Solutions Group, Jason Kary, President of the Electronic Industrial Solutions Group, and Steve Yoon, Senior Vice President of Global Sales. Following the prepared remarks from Satish and Neil, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. The press release and information to supplement today's discussion can be found on our investor relations website, investor.keysight.com. During today's discussion, we will make forward-looking statements about the financial performance of the company. Actual results may differ materially from those mentioned in these forward-looking statements as a result of risks and uncertainties.

Information about these risks and uncertainties can be found in our most recent Forms 10-K and 10-Q filings with the SEC. In addition, we will refer to non-GAAP financial measures and reference core growth, which excludes the impact of acquisitions or divestitures completed within the last 12 months and currency movements. The most directly comparable GAAP financial metrics and reconciliations can be found on our investor relations website, and all comparisons are on a year-over-year basis, unless otherwise noted. I'll now turn the call over to Satish.

Thank you, Liz. Good afternoon, and thank you everyone for joining us on today's earnings call. Keysight delivered another outstanding quarter with record results and broad-based growth across our markets. The outperformance was driven by strong execution by the team and demand extending across Keysight's full suite of differentiated products and solutions. Orders grew 56%, revenue grew 36%, and earnings per share grew 79%, alongside robust free cash flow generation. Given this momentum, we're raising our outlook for Q4 and for the full fiscal year. Customers are investing to solve increasingly complex engineering challenges across our end markets, such as AI infrastructure, advanced semiconductors, defense modernization, and next-generation communications. Our outperformance reflects the differentiation of Keysight solutions strategy and the increasing value we bring to customers across their innovation life cycle.

We remain focused on executing our strategy for long-term value creation, starting with identifying and investing ahead of structural growth opportunities, engaging early and deeply with industry leaders, and building differentiated capabilities to solve our customers' mission-critical applications. We remain confident in our ability to sustain our momentum and deliver long-term value. Now to the business segments. Communication Solutions Group order grew for the ninth consecutive quarter, establishing a new record, and revenue grew 43%, driven by compounding momentum in commercial communications and strength in aerospace, defense, and government. In commercial communications, we saw the momentum from the first half of the year continue into the second half, driven by rapid scaling of the AI infrastructure ecosystem. As a result, Wireline delivered record orders, more than doubling year-over-year.

The four pillars of opportunity associated with this business, AI infrastructure scaling, speed transitions, silicon photonics, and system-level emulation, all continue to drive growth and pipeline expansion with our customers. The breadth of our portfolio and sustained engagements with customers across this ecosystem are enabling Keysight to participate across the AI innovation life cycle, from pre-silicon design through chip and component validation and system-level emulation of data center racks and clusters to high-value manufacturing. The industry continues to scale, and we have seen a meaningful increase in the diversity of applications and a greater opportunity to expand with customers globally. Let me share a few examples of the diversity of our business. First, silicon designers are adopting Keysight's recently introduced high-performance digital and RF solutions for the lab to validate new designs with system-level requirements to ensure interoperability, performance, and reliability.

Second, interconnect manufacturers are using Keysight's high-fidelity analyzers to characterize the performance of high-speed backplanes to ensure signal integrity and manufacturing yield. Third, switch designers are using Keysight's emulators to validate network performance across AI workloads and protocols. Fourth, transceiver manufacturers are rapidly scaling 800G and 1.6T optical transceivers using our industry-leading 224G digital communication analyzers. Investments in the optical component ecosystem continues to ramp, and the key players are adopting our broad portfolio of lab products, including the industry's first 220 GHz Lightwave Component Analyzer, which we introduced at OFC this year. Finally, our strategic engagements with hyperscalers continue to deepen as they are integrating our pre-silicon emulation and workload solutions into their development pipelines. Looking ahead, the scaling challenges associated with AI data center deployments are driving a multi-year industry roadmap for new architectures, evolving technologies, and new standards.

We're well-positioned and continue to invest ahead of transitions to capture these opportunities. Turning to wireless. Orders grew significantly again this quarter with rising customer investment in next-generation connectivity and continued demand across the supply chain supporting AI infrastructure scaling. In June, the 3GPP plenary meeting in Singapore confirmed the timeline for 6G with the industry's first standard targeted for March 2029. With that milestone now set, customers are transitioning from exploratory research into funded development programs. Importantly, 6G is shaping up to be much more than the usual vectors of innovation around higher speeds and new spectrum. Three emerging technology areas are AI-RAN, integrated sensing and communication or ISAC, and non-terrestrial networks or NTN. Each of these is expanding the ecosystem and creating opportunities for us to provide end-to-end solutions for these use cases, building on our 5G solutions leadership.

We're engaged with customers across multiple applications, such as evaluating AI-enabled beamforming, high-fidelity digital twins, and network traffic steering, and the traction for our solutions continue to build. Our solutions have been architected around a flexible platform that enables customers to validate various candidate technologies by providing insights from the radio channel, network, device, and satellite emulators for early 6G use cases across terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks. Keysight's comprehensive portfolio, spanning the physical layer to emulation tools, is helping us secure early wins with industry leaders. Turning to aerospace, defense, and government. Orders were up double digits with growth across all regions, driven by a heightened global focus on deterrence and defense modernization. Modernization is raising the bar on performance across the market. In radar, the industry is accelerating its shift to advanced radar architectures.

These use cases require high-performance validation solutions, leading to rapid adoption of our multichannel RF solutions and next-generation oscilloscopes at prime contractors. New security architectures have also accelerated the adoption of lower-cost autonomous platforms from UAV to LEO satellite constellations that are increasingly delivered by venture-funded defense technology companies moving at commercial speed. We are recognizing this shift and are positioning ourselves to serve this new ecosystem. Our engagements with defense startups and neo-primes is scaling, and this year, we achieved key wins across satellite, UAV, and phased array radar applications. Resilient positioning, navigation, and timing have become a greater priority as GPS disruption around conflict zones increasingly affects security systems. Demand accelerated for Spirent's PNT solutions that emulate various multichannel jamming and spoofing scenarios in the lab, which enable customers to design and develop robust and resilient systems for these mission-critical environments.

As we integrate our teams and solutions portfolios, we have a solid set of opportunities on which to build. With record budgets, faster adoption of capabilities by customers, and a portfolio that is purpose-built for mission-critical requirements, we see a durable multi-year demand cycle ahead, and we're well-positioned to capture it. Moving to Electronic Industrial Solutions Group. We delivered another record quarter for both orders and revenue, with revenue growth of 21% and a meaningful double-digit order growth across all three markets: general electronics, semiconductors, and automotive and energy. In general electronics, growth was once again led by AI-related innovation and infrastructure investment. Test intensity continues to rise for high-performance components such as multilayer PCBs and capacitors in support of next-generation compute. Higher frequencies, tighter tolerances, and greater GPU and CPU density are increasing production complexity and quality requirements.

Our precision measurement solutions are being adopted to qualify these components in production. In addition, digital health was up double digits with growth across wearables and monitoring applications, and the growth in education was supported by our semiconductor workforce development solutions, particularly in Asia. In semiconductor, we delivered another record quarter driven by ongoing capacity expansion for advanced nodes, high-bandwidth memory, and silicon photonics. Given the increasing adoption of optical interconnects, commercial production of silicon photonics is accelerating across leading foundries and IDMs. We also saw healthy demand for our semiconductor R&D solutions. Our engagement with industry leaders remains high and gives us good visibility into their future requirements as we look into next year and beyond. Finally, in automotive and energy, orders grew solid double digits.

Investment remains focused on software-defined vehicle architectures with broad-based global demand for in-vehicle network and cybersecurity tests, where our solutions provide verifiable compliance in support of new standards. Our energy and charging business also grew this quarter with engagements across both grid and automotive customers and spanning high-power charging, storage, compliance, and infrastructure validation applications. In summary, this quarter's results reflect the strength and diversity of our business. Our portfolio is enabling the major waves of innovation shaping our markets, AI and accelerated compute today, and 6G, defense modernization, grid, and autonomous systems in the years ahead. Every one of these technologies must be designed, validated, and proven before reaching the market. Keysight, with its differentiated technology stack and consistent R&D investments, is well-positioned to outperform the market over the long term. I want to acknowledge the entire Keysight team for your hard work and commitment to our customers' success.

With that, I'll pass the call over to Neil.