Item 1A. Risk Factors
Our operations and financial results are subject to various risks and uncertainties, including those described below. You should carefully consider the risks and uncertainties described below, together with all of the other information in this Annual Report on Form 10-K, including the section titled “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” and our consolidated financial statements and related notes. The risks described below are not the only ones we face and we could be harmed by risks and uncertainties not currently known to us or that we do not currently believe to be material. If any of these risks actually occur, our business, results of operations, financial condition, and prospects could be materially adversely affected. In that event, the trading price of our common stock could decline, and you could lose part or all of your investment. You should not interpret our disclosure of any of the following risks to imply that such risks have not already materialized. Certain statements contained in the risk factors described below are forward-looking statements. See the section titled “Special Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements” for more information.
Risk Factors Summary
Risks Related to Our Business
• We may not sustain our growth rate, and we may not be able to manage future growth effectively;
• We have a limited history of generating net income, and if we are unable to achieve adequate revenue growth while our expenses increase, we may not maintain profitability in the future;
• We have rapidly grown as a business in dynamic and rapidly evolving markets , and we may have difficulty accurately predicting our future revenue for the purpose of appropriately budgeting and adjusting our expenses;
• We may be unsuccessful in anticipating and responding to new market trends and evolving industry standards, developing and selling new products, or penetrating new markets;
• A substantial portion of our revenue is driven by a limited number of our end customers, and the loss of, or a significant reduction in, demand from one or a few of our top end customers would adversely affect our operations and financial condition;
• If we fail to achieve design wins for our products, we may lose the opportunity for sales to customers for a significant period of time and be unable to recoup our investments in our products;
• We may experience difficulties demonstrating to customers the value of our new products or newer generations of our existing products;
• The adoption, use, and commercialization of AI technology, and the continued rapid pace of developments in the AI field, are inherently uncertain. Failure by our customers to continue to adopt infrastructure to support AI use cases in their systems, or our ability to keep up with evolving AI infrastructure requirements, could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, and results of operations;
• We rely on a limited number of third-party manufacturing partners for our manufacturing and supply chain services, and the failure to manage our relationships successfully with our third-party manufacturing partners in order to obtain adequate services and supplies could adversely affect our ability to market and sell our products and our reputation;
• Our customers require our products and our third-party manufacturing partners to undergo a lengthy and expensive qualification process, which does not assure volume product sales. If we are unsuccessful or delayed in qualifying any of our products with a customer, our business and operating results would suffer;
• Pricing for the current generation of our existing products often decreases over time, which could negatively impact our revenue and gross margins;
• We may pursue acquisitions, investments, joint ventures, and dispositions, which could adversely affect our results of operations, and any acquisitions we do make could disrupt our business and harm our financial condition;
• We generally do not maintain long-term supply contracts with our third-party manufacturing partners, and any disruption in our supply of products could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, and results of operations;
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• The complexity of our products could result in unforeseen delays or expense or undetected defects, bugs, or security vulnerabilities, which could adversely affect the market acceptance of new products, damage our reputation with current or prospective customers, and materially and adversely affect our operating costs;
• Adverse changes in the political, regulatory, and economic policies of governments in connection with trade with China and Chinese customers have reduced the demand for our products and damaged our business;
• Our business would be adversely affected by the departure of existing members of our senior management team;
• Cybersecurity risks, including cyber-attacks, cybersecurity incidents, data breaches, and system vulnerabilities could adversely affect our business and disrupt our operations;
• We may be subject to warranty claims and product liability;
• Litigation and other legal proceedings may adversely affect our business;
• Our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected by worldwide economic conditions, as well as political and economic conditions in the countries in which we conduct business;
• The occurrence of events for which we are self-insured, or which exceed our insurance limits, may adversely affect our profitability and liquidity;
• Our global operations expose us to numerous legal and regulatory requirements and failure to comply with such requirements, including unexpected changes to such requirements, could adversely affect our results of operations; and
• Changes in existing tax laws, tax rules, or tax practices may adversely affect our financial results.
Risks Related to Our Industry
• We operate in intensely competitive markets. Our failure to compete effectively, including as a result of industry consolidation, would harm our results of operations.
Risks Related to our Intellectual Property
• Our failure to protect our intellectual property rights adequately could impair our ability to compete effectively or to defend ourselves from litigation, which could harm our business, financial condition, and results of operations;
• We rely on third-party technologies for the development of our products and our inability to use such technologies in the future would harm our ability to remain competitive;
• We may face claims of intellectual property infringement, misappropriation or other violations, which could be time-consuming or costly to defend or settle, result in the loss of significant rights or harm our relationships with our customers or reputation in the industry; and
• Any potential dispute involving patents or other intellectual property could affect our customers, which could trigger our indemnification obligations to them and result in substantial expense to us.
Risks Related to the Ownership of Our Common Stock
• Our executive officers, directors, and stockholders, if they choose to act together, have the ability to control or significantly influence all matters submitted to shareholders for approval.
Risks Related to Our Business
We may not sustain our growth rate, and we may not be able to manage future growth effectively.
We have experienced significant growth in a short period of time. Our revenue increased from $115.8 million for the year ended December 31, 2023 to $396.3 million for the year ended December 31, 2024 to $852.5 million for the year ended December 31, 2025 . We may not achieve similar growth rates in future periods. You should not rely on our operating results for any prior quarterly or annual periods as an indication of our future operating performance. If we are unable to maintain adequate revenue growth, our financial results could suffer, and our stock price could decline.
To manage our growth successfully and handle the responsibilities of being a public company, we believe we must effectively, among other things:
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• recruit, hire, onboard / integrate, train, and manage additional qualified personnel for our research and development activities;
• continue to make significant investments in our new and existing products;
• add additional sales personnel; and
• continue implementing and improving our administrative, financial and operational systems, procedures, and controls.
If we are unable to manage our growth effectively, we may not be able to take advantage of market opportunities or develop new products, and we may fail to satisfy customer requirements, maintain product quality, execute our business plan, or respond to competitive pressures.
We have a limited history of generating net income, and if we are unable to achieve adequate revenue growth while our expenses increase, we may not maintain profitability in the future.
We have a limited history of generating net income. We recorded net income of $219.1 million and incurred net losses of $83.4 million and $26.3 million for the years ended December 31, 2025, 2024 and 2023, respectively. As of December 31, 2025, 2024 and 2023, we had retained earnings of $10.3 million and accumulated deficits of $208.8 million and $125.4 million, respectively. Our historical losses and accumulated deficits were a result of the substantial investments we have made to grow our business. We expect our costs will continue to increase over time and our losses may continue if such increases in costs are not more than fully offset by increases in our revenue. We expect to continue to invest significant additional funds in expanding our business and research and development activities as we continue to develop new products. We have experienced and expect to continue to incur additional general and administrative expenses as a result of our growth and increased costs to support our operations as a public company. Historically, our costs have increased over the years due to these factors, and we expect to continue to incur increasing costs to support our anticipated future growth.
If our revenue or revenue growth rate declines or our operating expenses exceed our expectations, our financial performance will be adversely affected. We will need to generate and sustain increased revenue levels in future periods in order to maintain profitability. If we cannot successfully grow our revenue at a rate that exceeds the costs associated with our business, we will not be able to maintain profitability, and the trading price of our common stock could decline.
We have rapidly grown as a business in dynamic and rapidly evolving markets, and we may have difficulty accurately predicting our future revenue for the purpose of appropriately budgeting and adjusting our expenses.
We have a rapidly growing business, a dynamic and rapidly evolving market in which we sell our products, our dependence on a limited number of customers, as well as numerous other factors beyond our control, could impede our ability to forecast quarterly and annual revenue accurately. As a result, we could experience budgeting and cash flow management problems, unexpected fluctuations in our results of operations and other challenges, any of which could make it difficult for us to maintain profitability and could increase the volatility of the market price of our common stock.
We may be unsuccessful in anticipating and responding to new market trends and evolving industry standards, developing and selling new products, or penetrating new markets.
We operate in an industry characterized by rapidly changing technologies and evolving industry standards. We believe that our future success depends on our ability to develop and introduce new technologies and products that generate new sources of revenue to replace, or build upon, existing product revenue streams. If we are not able to repeatedly introduce, in successive years, new products or new generations of existing products that ship in volume and meet customer demands, our revenue will likely not grow and may decline significantly and rapidly.
To compete successfully, we must design, develop, market, and sell new products or new generations of existing products that provide increasingly higher levels of performance while meeting evolving industry standards, and the cost and quality expectations, of our customers. The introduction of new products by our competitors, the delay or cancellation of a system for which any of our products are designed in, the market acceptance of products based on new or alternative technologies, or the emergence of new industry standards could render our existing or future products uncompetitive, obsolete, or otherwise unmarketable.
Our failure to anticipate or timely develop new products or new generations of existing products in response to technological shifts or evolving industry standards could result in decreased revenue and our competitors securing a competitive advantage. In particular, we may experience difficulties with product design, manufacturing, assembly, test, and qualification or marketing that could delay or prevent our development, introduction, or marketing of new or enhanced
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products. Although we believe our products comply with applicable industry standards, our existing and new products may not fully conform under all circumstances, and we are unable to guarantee that proprietary enhancements in the future will fully conform with applicable industry standards under all circumstances as industry standards evolve and change.
Products for our target markets are based on industry standards that are continually evolving, and industry standards are often developed and promoted by larger companies who are industry leaders and provide other components of the systems into which our products are incorporated. In choosing products to develop, we also make certain assumptions about which industry standards we believe will be adopted by industry leaders. For example, CXL connectivity solutions and UALink TM are in the early stages of market adoption. If our assumptions are incorrect, and larger companies do not support the same industry standards that we do, or if competing standards emerge, it could be difficult for our products to meet the requirements of certain customers. As a result, if we fail to introduce new products or new generations of our existing products that meet prevailing industry standards and the needs of our customers, or penetrate new markets in a timely fashion, and our designs do not gain acceptance, we will likely lose market share and our competitive position, potentially on an extended basis, and our operating results will be adversely affected.
Our competitiveness and future success depend on our and our third-party manufacturing partners’ ability, as applicable, to design, develop, manufacture, assemble, and test new products and product enhancements on a timely and cost-effective basis. Our failure to anticipate fundamental shifts in technologies in any of our product markets, to develop new technologies or to react to changes in existing technologies could materially delay our development of new products or new generations of our existing products. For example, we anticipate that our customers will continue to have increasing needs for connectivity and memory products as a result of the increased adoption of the cloud and AI infrastructure, and if we are unable to successfully design and produce products that our customers can incorporate into their cloud and AI systems, we expect that our competitive positioning and financial performance would be harmed as our competitors more effectively help our customers scale into these developing sectors.
We believe the success of new products depends on accurate forecasts of long-term market demand and future technological developments, as well as on a variety of specific implementation factors, including:
• timely and efficient completion of our design and transfer to manufacturing, assembly, and test processes;
• the quality, performance, and reliability of our products; and
• effective marketing, sales, and service.
If we fail to introduce new products or new generations of existing products that meet the demand of our customers or penetrate new markets that we have targeted, our revenue will likely decrease over time and our financial condition could suffer.
A substantial portion of our revenue is driven by a limited number of our end customers, and the loss of, or a significant reduction in, demand from one or a few of our top end customers would adversely affect our operations and financial condition.
A substantial portion of our revenue is driven by a limited number of end customers. In 2025, one end customer represented more than 70% of our revenue; the top three end customers represented an aggregate of approximately 86% of our revenue. Our distributors and end customers’ manufacturing partners provide us with information in their purchase orders about which end customer will receive the products purchased. This data allows us to estimate the portion of our revenue that is due to specific end customer demand. We anticipate that we will continue to be dependent on a limited number of end customers for a significant portion of our revenue in the future, and in some cases, the portion of our revenue attributable to certain end customers may increase in the future. However, we may not be able to maintain or increase sales to certain of our top end customers for a variety of reasons, including the following:
• our master agreements with our end customers generally do not require them to purchase a minimum quantity of our products and our end customers’ demand for our products may be volatile;
• some of our end customers may redesign their systems to use fewer or none of our products with limited notice to us; and
• many of our end customers have pre-existing or concurrent relationships with our current or potential competitors that may affect such end customers’ decisions to purchase our products.
End customer relationships often require us to develop new products that may involve significant technological and design challenges, and our end customers frequently place considerable pressure on us to meet tight development schedules. Accordingly, we may have to devote a substantial amount of our resources to our strategic relationships, which could detract from or delay our completion of other important development projects. Delays in development could impair
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our relationships with our end customers and negatively impact forecasted sales of the products under development. Moreover, it is possible that our end customers may develop their own products that may compete with our solutions, or adopt a competitor’s solution for products that they currently buy from us. If that happens, our sales would be adversely impacted and our business, financial condition, and results of operations would be materially and adversely affected.
In addition, to attract new customers or retain existing end customers, we may offer (in some cases through distributors) certain customers favorable prices for our products. In that event, our revenue and gross margins may decline. The loss of a top end customer, a reduction in sales to any top end customer, or our inability to attract new end customers could impact our revenue and materially and adversely affect our results of operations.
If we fail to achieve design wins for our products, we may lose the opportunity for sales to customers for a significant period of time and be unable to recoup our investments in our products.
Our business is dependent on design wins. Design wins occur once a customer has validated and placed an order for our product(s). We often incur significant expenditures in the development of a new product or new generation of an existing product without any assurance that our customers will select our product for use in their systems. Additionally, we are often required to anticipate which product designs will generate demand in advance of our customers expressly indicating a need for that particular design. Even if our customers select our products, a substantial period of time will elapse before we generate revenue related to the significant expenses we have incurred. The reasons for this delay generally include the following elements of our product sales and development cycle timeline and related influences:
• our customers usually require a comprehensive technical evaluation of our products before they incorporate them into their designs;
• it can take up to two years from the time a design win is secured to commencement of volume commercial shipments (assuming no changes in market conditions or customer development schedules); and
• our customers may be impacted by changing market conditions, product development issues of their own, or choose to delay their system designs.
The resources devoted to product development and sales and marketing may not generate material revenue for us, and we have needed in the past, and may need in the future, to write off excess and obsolete inventory if we have produced a product in excess of forecasted demand that does not materialize. If we incur significant expenses and investments in inventory in the future that we are not able to recover, and we are not able to compensate for those expenses, our operating results could be adversely affected.
A design win does not guarantee sales to a customer. A delay or cancellation of a customer’s plans could materially and adversely affect our financial results, as we incur significant expense in the design process and may generate little or no revenue from it. In addition, the timing of design wins is unpredictable and supporting production for a major design win, or multiple design wins at the same time, may strain our resources. In such event, we may be forced to dedicate significant additional resources and incur additional costs and expenses. Customers could also choose at any time to stop using our products, or could fail to successfully market and sell their products, either of which could reduce demand for our products.
Once a customer designs a product into its systems, the same product or enhanced versions of that product from the same supplier is likely to be used across a number of similar and successor products. This can be for a lengthy period of time due to the significant costs associated with qualifying a new supplier and potentially redesigning the product to incorporate a different solution. If a customer initially chooses a competitor’s product, it becomes more difficult for us to sell our products for use in that system because changing suppliers can involve significant cost, time, effort, and risk for our customers, and additional design opportunities may be infrequent or delayed. Thus, our failure to obtain a design win can result in our foregoing revenue from a given customer’s system for the life of that system. Our ability to compete in the future will depend, in large part, on our ability to develop products that comply with our customers’ and potential customers’ system specifications. However, even if our customers use our products in their systems, these customers may not deploy their systems in volume and we may not receive significant revenue from the sales of our products for those systems. As a result, we may be to accurately forecast the volume and timing of our orders and revenue associated with any new product introductions.
We may experience difficulties demonstrating to customers the value of our new products or newer generations of our existing products.
As we develop and introduce new products or new generations of our existing products, we face the risk that our new products do not meet the needs of our customers’ next generation systems and applications or that our customers may forego adopting one or more newer generations of our existing products. Regardless of the improved features or superior
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performance of the newer generations of our existing products, customers may be unwilling to adopt our new products due to design or pricing constraints, among other reasons. Even if customers choose to adopt our new products or new generations of our existing products, they may be slow to do so, which may result in certain of our products selling more frequently than other products for sustained periods of time. For example, most of our historical sales have been for our Aries Smart DSP Retimer product family. Because of the extensive time and resources that we invest in researching and developing new products and new generations of our existing products, if we are unable to sell new products or new generations of our existing products, our revenue could decline and our business, financial condition, and results of operations would be negatively affected.
The adoption, use, and commercialization of AI technology, and the continued rapid pace of developments in the AI field, are inherently uncertain. Failure by our customers to continue to adopt or invest in AI infrastructure to support AI use cases in their systems, or our ability to keep up with evolving AI infrastructure requirements, could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
As part of our growth strategy, we seek to attract and acquire customers focused on AI. We foresee emerging demand from companies that are dedicated to providing infrastructure for AI use cases, AI-dedicated data centers, and larger enterprises, as they begin to build systems to meet their unique requirements. However, AI has been developing at a rapid pace, and continues to evolve and change. If we are unable to keep up with the changing AI landscape or in developing products to meet our customers’ evolving AI needs, or if the AI landscape does not develop to the extent we or our customers expect, our business, and financial results may be adversely impacted.
Additionally, our efforts in developing new AI infrastructure technology solutions are inherently risky and may not always succeed. We may incur significant costs and expect significant delays in developing new products or new generations of existing products to adapt to the changing AI landscape, and may not achieve a return on investment or capitalize on the opportunities presented by demand for AI solutions. Moreover, while AI-adoption is likely to continue and may accelerate, the long-term trajectory of this technological trend is uncertain.
Additionally, we expect to see increasing government and supranational legislation and regulation related to AI use and ethics, which may also significantly increase the burden and cost of research, development, and compliance in this area. For example, the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act (“EU AI Act”), entered into force in August 2024 and, with some exceptions, becomes effective 24 months thereafter. As enacted, the EU AI Act imposes significant obligations on providers and deployers of high risk AI systems and general purpose AI models and encourages providers and deployers to account for EU ethical principles when developing and using AI technology. The scope of requirements depends on judicial interpretations and forthcoming legislative amendments, and non-compliance can lead to significant fines. If we develop or use AI systems that are governed by the EU AI Act, it may necessitate ensuring higher standards of data quality, transparency, and human oversight, as well as adhering to specific and potentially burdensome and costly ethical, accountability, and administrative requirements. In addition, we may become subject to similar or additional legislation or requirements in the United States or other jurisdictions, as well as evolving regulatory guidance and enforcement under existing laws.
The AI regulatory environment is increasingly complex and uncertain. For example, in the United States, states have advanced, and in some cases passed, laws focusing on AI, while the federal government has pursued a deregulatory agenda. Significant resources will be required to design, develop, test and maintain our products to help ensure that AI is implemented and deployed in accordance with applicable law and regulation and in a manner intended to comply with applicable laws and regulations and mitigate foreseeable risks. Our customers may also become subject to such existing or upcoming AI laws and regulations, which could cause a delay or impediment to the commercialization of AI technology and could lead to a decrease in demand for our customers’ AI systems, and may adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations. In addition, uncertainty regarding the direction of AI regulation may affect customers’ adoption of AI, which could adversely affect our business.
We rely on a limited number of third-party manufacturing partners for our manufacturing and supply chain services, and the failure to manage our relationships successfully with our third-party manufacturing partners in order to obtain adequate services and supplies could adversely affect our ability to market and sell our products and our reputation.
We operate an outsourced manufacturing business model. We currently partner with TSMC to manufacture our integrated circuits. TSMC is our sole manufacturing partner for our integrated circuits and we currently have not qualified another source. We also use Advanced Semiconductor Engineering and Amkor Technologies to assemble, package, and test our integrated circuits. We also rely on a small, limited number of other manufacturing partners for our modules, boards, and integrated circuit substrates. Relying on third-party manufacturing partners presents significant risks, including:
• failure by us, our customers, or their customers to qualify a selected supplier;
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• capacity shortages during periods of high demand;
• reduced control over delivery schedules and quality;
• shortages of materials;
• third parties infringing, misappropriating, or otherwise violating our intellectual property rights;
• impairment of the operation of our products if errors or other defects occur in the third-party technologies we use, and difficulties correcting such errors or defects because the development and maintenance of those technologies is not within our control;
• limited warranties on products supplied to us; and
• potential increases in prices or reduced yields.
The ability and willingness of our third-party manufacturing partners to perform is largely outside of our control. We have experienced and may continue to experience the failure of one or more of our third-party manufacturing partners or other outsourcers to perform its obligations in a timely manner or at satisfactory quality levels, which can negatively impact our ability to bring products to market and our reputation. In particular, if TSMC is unable to supply us with sufficient quantities of wafers to meet all of our requirements, we could have difficulties fulfilling our customer orders and our revenue could decline. In addition, if our third-party manufacturing partners fail to deliver quality services, products, and components on time and at reasonable prices, we could have difficulties fulfilling our customer orders, which would materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
Our third-party manufacturing partners and distributors, and the majority of our revenue, are concentrated primarily in Singapore, China, Taiwan, South Korea, and other countries, areas that are or may be subject to geopolitical uncertainty, trade disputes and restrictions, environmental disasters, and other risks. Any disruption to the operations of these manufacturing partners or distributors could cause significant delays in the production or shipment of our products and impact our financial condition.
Our success depends in part on the uninterrupted and reliable operation of our business, including the operation of our day-to-day business operations, or manufacturing, assembly, and testing done by our third-party manufacturing partners and other vendors. Unforeseen disruption of the production or distribution of our products could be caused by a number of events, including a maintenance outage, systems outage or other disruption, power or equipment failure, fires, floods, earthquakes or other natural disasters, social unrest or terrorist activity, work stoppages, public health concerns (including pandemics), regulatory measures, or other operational problems. For example, the foundry used by our primary manufacturer, TSMC, as well as our primary distributor, is located in Taiwan. The risk of an earthquake in Taiwan and elsewhere in the Pacific Rim region on our business is significant due to the proximity of major earthquake lines to the foundry’s facilities. Any resulting from such events could cause significant in the production or shipment of our products until we are to shift our manufacturing from the affected location to another location. We may not be to obtain alternate capacity on terms, if at all.
In addition, our dependence on our relationship with our third-party manufacturing partners or distributors may be affected by changes in governmental policies, taxation, rising inflation or interest rates, social instability, geopolitical conflicts and tensions, and diplomatic and social developments, which are outside of our control. The occurrence of such events may have an adverse impact because the majority of our revenue derives from sales into East Asia. For example, since 1949, Taiwan and mainland China have been separately governed. Although significant economic and cultural relations have been established between Taiwan and mainland China in the past few years, past developments in relations between Taiwan and mainland China have on occasion depressed the market prices of the securities of companies doing business in Taiwan, and may depress the price of our common stock. Additionally, trade tensions between the United States and China may lead to restrictions on our ability to use our third-party manufacturing partners or distributors located in China may impose restrictions such that our use of such manufacturing partners or distributors may no longer be practical or on terms favorable to us. Further, continued or heightened tension between South Korea and North Korea, an outbreak in military hostilities, or other actions or occurrences could cause significant in the production or shipment of our products until we are to shift our manufacturing, assembling, testing, or distribution from the affected contractor to another third-party.
Furthermore, our industry generally relies on a limited number of manufacturers whose operations tend to be concentrated in Taiwan and other parts of East Asia, which makes us especially susceptible to adverse developments in these regions’ economic and political conditions, particularly to the extent that such developments create an unfavorable business environment that significantly affects our and our customers’ operations. Although the governments of certain countries, including the United States, have taken actions to make their countries more attractive for chip manufacturing
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operations, there can be no assurances that the current geographic concentration of chip manufacturing will be meaningfully changed in the near term or at all.
If any of these events, or other macroeconomic trends, should cause a prolonged disruption of operations that impact our third-party manufacturing partners, we may see operational downtimes or operation at reduced capacities, preventing us from completing our operations or production in a timely manner, leading to loss of business volume and reduced productivity or profitability, which could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial conditions, and results of operations. Given the concentration of chip manufacturing in Taiwan and other parts of East Asia, as well as the other risks described herein, we may not be able to obtain alternate service or materials quickly and on favorable terms, if at all. Any unplanned production downtime or other operational problems and , if significant, could have a material effect on our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
Our customers require our products and our third-party manufacturing partners to undergo a lengthy and expensive qualification process, which does not assure volume product sales. If we are unsuccessful or delayed in qualifying any of our products with a customer, our business and operating results would suffer.
Prior to purchasing our products and deploying them in volume in their systems, our customers require that our products and our third-party manufacturing partners undergo extensive qualification processes, which involve testing of our products in our customers’ systems, as well as testing for reliability. This qualification process may continue for several months or more. Moreover, qualification of a product by a customer does not assure any sales of the product to that customer. Further, even after successful qualification and sales of a product to a customer, a subsequent revision in our third-party contractors’ manufacturing process or our selection of a new supplier may require a new qualification process by our customers, which may result in delays and in our holding excess or obsolete inventory. After our products are qualified, it can take several months or more before the customer commences volume deployment of our products in their systems. Despite these uncertainties, we devote substantial resources, including design, engineering, sales, marketing, technical support, and management efforts, to qualify our products with customers in anticipation of sales. If we are unsuccessful or delayed in qualifying any of our products with a customer, sales of those products to the customer may be or , which may our growth and materially and affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
We make substantial investments in research and development, and unsuccessful investments could materially adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
The industry in which we compete is characterized by rapid technological change, changes in customer requirements, frequent new product introductions and enhancements, short product cycles and evolving industry standards, and new delivery methods. In addition, the fabrication of semiconductor products has transitioned over time to increasingly smaller line width geometries, and failure to successfully transition to product designs utilizing smaller geometry process nodes could impair our competitive position. In order to remain competitive, we have made, and expect to continue to make, significant investments in research and development and often well ahead of the anticipated product revenue. For the years ended December 31, 2025 and 2024, research and developments expenses were $304.0 million and $200.8 million, respectively. If we fail to develop new and enhanced products and technologies, if we focus on technologies that do not become widely adopted, or if new competitive technologies or industry standards that we do not support become widely accepted, demand for our products may be reduced. Increased investments in research and development or unsuccessful research and development efforts could cause our cost structure to fall out of alignment with demand for our products, which would have a impact on our financial results.
Our future success will depend in large part on our ability to successfully execute our strategy.
Our business strategy is to maximize our return on investment by aligning with our customers to address high-value problem sets. We are still in the process of implementing our strategy to align with this select customer group, and we cannot be certain that this strategy will succeed. To succeed, we will need to significantly increase sales to our existing customers in the cloud and AI markets, continue to develop and pursue adoption of our PCIe, Ethernet, CXL and UALink TM connectivity solutions, increase our value-per-product and leverage our differentiated product families to grow with our customers into new data intensive end-markets, including developing, introducing, and marketing new products and technologies on a timely basis.
Our gross margins may decline due to a variety of factors, which could negatively impact our results of operations and our financial condition.
Our gross margins may decline due to a number of factors, including customer and product mix, revenue mix between various offerings, market acceptance of our new products, yield, pricing, packaging and testing costs, competitive
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pricing dynamics, and geographic and market pricing strategies. Increases in gross margins over certain periods may be a result of individual changes in customer need or market shifts, and may not be indicative of future results.
To attract new customers or retain existing customers, we have in the past and will in the future offer certain customers favorable prices, which would decrease the prices that we receive for our products and likely impact our gross margins. Further, we may also offer pricing incentives to our customers on earlier generations of products that inherently have a higher cost structure, which would negatively affect our gross margins. In addition, in the event our customers, including our larger customers, exert more pressure with respect to pricing and other terms with us, it could put downward pressure on our margins.
In addition, we maintain an inventory of our products at various stages of production and in finished goods inventory. We hold these inventories in anticipation of customer orders. If those customer orders do not materialize in a timely manner, we may have excess or obsolete inventory, which we would have to reserve or write-down, and our gross margins would be adversely affected. In addition, for customers that we issue warrants, we recognize the related grant date fair value of the warrants as a reduction of revenue for each sales transaction in proportion to total expected cumulative sales volume resulting in achievement of the vesting conditions, which reduces the reported gross profit and gross margin in the periods the related revenue is recognized. The timing and magnitude of these charges may vary and could cause fluctuations in our reported gross margins and results of operations.
Pricing for the current generation of our existing products often decreases over time, which could negatively impact our revenue and gross margins.
Our operating results may be impacted by a decline in the pricing for the current generation of our existing products. If competition increases in our target markets, we may need to reduce the prices of our existing products in anticipation of competitive pricing pressures, new product introductions by us or our competitors, new generations of such existing products, or for other reasons. If we are unable to offset any reductions in pricing for existing products by increasing our sales volumes or introducing new products or new product generations of such existing products with higher margins, our revenue and gross margins will suffer. To maintain our revenue and gross margins, we must develop and introduce new products, next-generation products, and product enhancements on a timely basis and continually reduce our costs as well as our customers’ costs. Failure to do so may cause our revenue and gross margins to decline.
Fluctuations in the mix of products sold may materially adversely affect our gross margins and financial results.
Price and cost differences among our products and the mix and types of products sold, including from a features and form factor perspective, may affect the pricing of our products and have a substantial impact on our revenue. Fluctuations in the mix and types of our products may also affect the extent to which we are able to recover our fixed costs and investments that are associated with a particular product, and as a result may negatively and materially impact our financial results.
We may pursue acquisitions, investments, joint ventures, and dispositions, which could adversely affect our results of operations, and any acquisitions we do make could disrupt our business and harm our financial condition.
Our growth strategy includes acquiring businesses and/or assets that offer complementary products, services, and technologies, enhance our market coverage or technological capabilities or enable us to increase the number of engineering employees.
We have in the past, and may in the future choose to acquire or make investments in companies, businesses and/or assets that are complementary to our business, including for the purpose of expanding our new product design capacity, introducing new design, market, or application skills, enhancing, and expanding our existing product lines or grow the number of engineers. We cannot forecast the number, timing or size of future investments or acquisitions, or the effect that any such investments or acquisitions might have on our operating or financial results.
Any investments, joint ventures or acquisitions we may undertake and their integration involve risks and uncertainties, such as:
• unexpected delays, challenges and related expenses, and disruption of our business;
• diversion of management’s attention from daily operations and the pursuit of other opportunities;
• incurring significant restructuring charges and amortization expense, assuming liabilities (some of which may be unexpected) and ongoing or new lawsuits, potential impairment of acquired goodwill, acquired in-process research and development charges and other intangible assets, amortization expense, and increasing our expenses and working capital requirements;
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• the potential for deficiencies in internal controls at the acquired business, or other security vulnerabilities or issues, as well as implementing our own management information systems, operating systems, and internal controls for the acquired operations;
• our due diligence process may fail to identify significant issues with the acquired business’ products, financial disclosures, accounting practices, legal, tax, and other contingencies, intellectual property rights, compliance with local laws and regulations (and interpretations thereof) in the United States, and multiple international jurisdictions;
• additional acquisition-related debt and contingent liabilities, which could increase our leverage and potentially negatively affect our credit ratings resulting in more restrictive borrowing terms or increased borrowing costs thereby limiting our ability to borrow;
• the use of a significant portion of our available cash;
• dilution of stock ownership of existing stockholders;
• difficulties integrating the acquired assets, business or company and in managing and retaining acquired employees, third-party manufacturing partners, and customers; and
• inaccuracies in our original estimates and assumptions used to assess a transaction, which may result in us not realizing the expected financial or strategic benefits of any such transaction.
In addition, current and future changes to the U.S. and foreign regulatory approval process and requirements related to investments or acquisitions may cause approvals to take longer than anticipated, not be forthcoming or contain burdensome conditions, which may prevent the transaction or jeopardize, delay or reduce the anticipated benefits of the transaction, and impede the execution of our business strategy.
From time to time, we may also seek to divest or wind down assets or portions of our business, either acquired or otherwise, any of which could materially affect our cash flows and results of operations. Such dispositions involve risks and uncertainties, including our ability to sell such assets or businesses on terms acceptable to us, or at all, disruption to other parts of our business, potential loss of employees or customers, or exposure to unanticipated liabilities or ongoing obligations to us following any such dispositions. In addition, dispositions may include the transfer of technology and/or the licensing of certain intellectual property rights to third parties, which could limit our ability to utilize such intellectual property rights or assert these rights against such third parties.
If we are unable to accurately predict end customer demand, or if our distributors or end customers’ manufacturing partners cancel or change their orders, we may hold excess or obsolete inventory, which would reduce our gross margins and may damage our relationships with our customers.
Our revenue and operating results could fluctuate materially and could be materially and disproportionately impacted by the purchasing decisions of our end customers. Due to the inability to predict demand or other reasons, some of our distributors and end customers’ manufacturing partners may accumulate excess inventories and, as a consequence, defer purchases of our products. For example, in the first quarter of 2023 we had a $9.7 million charge to write down inventory in excess of our sales forecast for a legacy customer system. Anticipating demand is difficult because our end customers face unpredictable demand for their own products and/or deployment of their own systems. If we overestimate end customer demand, or end customer demand is otherwise impacted by other factors impacting our assumptions, we might produce significant excess inventory and consequently inventory write-off, which would reduce our gross margin and adversely affect our financial results. Conversely, if we underestimate customer demand or if insufficient manufacturing capacity is available, we may revenue , potentially market share and our customer relationships. In addition, as an increasing number of our products are being incorporated into end customer systems, we anticipate fluctuations in demand for our products, which makes it more to forecast end customer demand.
We generally do not maintain long-term supply contracts with our third-party manufacturing partners, and any disruption in our supply of products could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
We generally do not have long-term contracts with our third-party manufacturing partners that require them to supply manufacturing capacity, materials, or services, and substantially all of our purchases are on a purchase order basis. We place orders with our third-party manufacturing partners for manufacturing, assembling, and testing our products and purchasing components that are integrated into our products according to our estimates of customer demand many months prior to the anticipated delivery date to our customer. This process requires us to make multiple demand forecast assumptions with respect to our customers’ demands in advance of actual purchase orders, each of which may introduce
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error into our estimates. In addition, while many of our customers are subject to purchase orders or other agreements that do not allow for cancellation without penalty within a certain number of days before the estimated ship date, there can be no assurance that these customers will honor these contract terms, and any cancellation of these orders may adversely affect our business operations and demand forecast, which is the basis for us to have products made.
Our third-party manufacturing partners may also extend lead times, limit supplies, place products on allocation, or increase prices that could lead to interruption of supply or increased demand in the industry. For example, the supply of these materials may be negatively impacted by increased trade tensions between the United States and its trading partners, particularly the People’s Republic of China. Moreover, TSMC has increased and may increase in the future the wafer prices we pay. Our products are incorporated into complex devices and systems, which creates supply chain cross-dependencies. Due to these cross dependencies, any supply chain disruptions could impact the demand for our products in the short term. In the event that we cannot obtain sufficient quantities of materials in a timely manner or at reasonable prices from third-party manufacturing partners, the quality of the material deteriorates or we are not able to pass on higher manufacturing costs to our customers, our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely impacted.
We rely on our relationships with leaders in the data center and AI infrastructure ecosystem to test and validate our products at a system level and our inability to continue to develop or maintain such relationships in the future would harm our ability to remain competitive.
We develop many of our products for systems that interoperate with other products sold by leaders in the data center and AI infrastructure ecosystem. We work closely with these industry and technology partners to test and validate our products at a system level. We believe these relationships enhance our ability to achieve market acceptance and widespread adoption of our products. If we are unable to continue to develop or maintain these relationships, or if our products test negatively with these leaders in the data center and AI infrastructure ecosystem, our products may become less desirable to our customers, which would cause our sales to suffer and our competitive position to be harmed.
The complexity of our products could result in unforeseen delays or expense or undetected defects, bugs, or security vulnerabilities, which could adversely affect the market acceptance of new products, damage our reputation with current or prospective customers, and materially and adversely affect our operating costs.
Our products may contain defects when they are first introduced or as new versions or enhancements are released, or their release may be delayed due to unforeseen difficulties during product development. If any of our products or third-party components used in our products, contain defects, bugs, vulnerabilities, or have reliability, quality, or compatibility problems, we may not be able to successfully design workarounds or resolve the issues in a timely manner. Furthermore, if any of these problems are not discovered until after we have commenced commercial production or deployment of a new product, we may be required to incur additional development costs, as well as costs to repair or replace our products, and expense previously capitalized production equipment costs, all of which could materially adversely affect our reputation, business, results of operations, and/or financial condition.
Our customers integrate our products with their products and/or systems, which may also be further integrated with a number of other third-party applications. As a result, if there is an actual or perceived breach of information integrity, security, or availability in one of our customers’ systems, it can be difficult to determine which product is at fault and we could ultimately be harmed by the failure of a third-party supplier’s product. Consequently, our reputation may be damaged, and customers may be reluctant to buy our products, which could materially and adversely affect our ability to retain existing customers and attract new customers. To resolve these problems, we may have to invest significant capital and other resources and we would likely lose, or experience a delay in, market acceptance of the affected product or products. These and similar may also result in us by our customers or others, any of which could materially affect our reputation, business, results of operations, and/or financial condition.
Adverse changes in the political, regulatory, and economic policies of governments in connection with trade with China and Chinese customers have reduced the demand for our products and damaged our business.
Regulatory activity, such as tariffs, export controls, economic sanctions, and restrictions on investment and data transfers as well as vigorous enforcement of U.S. export controls and economic sanctions laws have in the past and may continue to materially limit our ability to make sales to our customers in China, which has in the past and may continue to harm our results of operations, reputation, and financial condition. Due to the U.S. government restricting sales to certain customers in China, sales to some of our customers may require licenses in order for us to export our products; however, there can be no assurances that requests for licenses will be approved by the U.S. government. Further, augmentation of restricted or prohibited persons lists maintained by the U.S. government could reduce our ability to sell to certain customers. Fluid tariff policies of both the U.S. and Chinese governments may reduce demand for our products and could
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increase input costs. Moreover, concerns that U.S. companies may not be reliable suppliers as a result of these and other actions has caused, and may in the future cause, some of our customers in China to amass large inventories of our products well in advance of need or caused some of our customers to replace our products in favor of products from other suppliers. Additionally, the Chinese government adopted a law with respect to unreliable suppliers. Any designation as an unreliable supplier may have an adverse impact on our business and operations. Recent U.S. government restrictions on investments into China by U.S. persons and regarding access by Chinese persons to certain personal data relating to U.S. persons could hinder our Chinese operations. In addition, there may be indirect impacts to our business that we cannot easily quantify such as the fact that some of our other customers’ systems may also be impacted by export restrictions.
Significant uncertainty remains about the future relationship between the United States and China as tariffs and other trade and investment barriers remain historically high, other key areas of economic and foreign policy difference remain unresolved and tensions remain elevated. The current U.S. Administration has called for substantial changes to U.S. foreign trade policy with respect to China, and there is currently significant uncertainty about the future relationship between the United States and China with respect trade policies, treaties, tariffs and taxes.
Any customers in China that are subject to trade restrictions or tariffs, may develop their own products instead of purchasing from us or they may acquire products from our competitors or other third-party sources that are not subject to the U.S. tariffs and trade restrictions. Some customers in China may be able to cancel or defer purchase orders on short notice without incurring a penalty and, therefore, they may be more likely to do so while the tariffs and trade restrictions are in effect. If export restrictions related to Chinese customers are sustained for a long period of time, or increased, or if other export restrictions are imposed, including restrictions on trade with other countries, it will have an adverse impact on our revenue and results of operations.
If the third-party manufacturing partners, including manufacturers and assembly and test providers, with which we contract, or any additional third-party manufacturing partners with which we may contract in the future, do not achieve satisfactory yields or quality, our reputation and customer relationships could be harmed.
We depend on satisfactory manufacturing capacity, prices, and production yields, as well as timely delivery to meet customer demand and enable us to maintain gross margins. The fabrication of our products is a complex and technically demanding process. Minor deviations in the manufacturing process can cause substantial decreases in yields and, in some cases, cause production to be suspended. Manufacturers with which we contract now or in the future may experience manufacturing defects and reduced manufacturing yields from time to time. If these third-party manufacturing partners were to extend lead times, limit supplies or the types of capacity we require, or increase prices due to capacity constraints or other factors, our revenue and gross margin may materially decline. Any new third-party manufacturing partners we work with may present additional and unexpected manufacturing challenges that could require significant management time and focus.
Changes in manufacturing processes or the inadvertent use of defective or contaminated materials by the manufacturers that we work with could result in lower than anticipated production yields or unacceptable performance of our devices. Many of these problems are difficult to detect at an early stage of the manufacturing process and may be time-consuming and expensive to correct. Poor production yields or defects, integration issues or other performance problems in our products could significantly harm our customer relationships and financial results, and give rise to financial or other damages to our customers. Any product liability claim brought against us, even if unsuccessful, would likely be time-consuming and costly to defend.
Manufacturing yields for new products initially tend to be lower as we complete product development and commence volume manufacturing, and typically increase as we bring the product to full production. Our business model includes the assumption of improving manufacturing yields and, as a result, material variances between projected and actual manufacturing yields will have a direct effect on our gross margin and profitability. The difficulty of accurately forecasting manufacturing yields and maintaining cost competitiveness through improving manufacturing yields will continue to be magnified by the increasing process complexity of manufacturing semiconductor products.
Our operating results are impacted by wide fluctuations of supply and demand in the industry.
The semiconductor industry is highly cyclical and subject to wide fluctuations of supply and demand as a result of rapid technological change, rapid product obsolescence and price erosion, evolving standards, and frequent new product introductions. The industry has experienced significant downturns during recent global recessions, characterized by diminished product demand, production overcapacity, and high inventory levels. During these periods, our customers may overstock our products, which would lead to inflated demand for the given period.
Further, any upturn in the semiconductor industry could result in increased competition for access to third-party manufacturing partners. We are dependent on the availability of this capacity to manufacture and assemble our products,
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and our third-party manufacturing partners have not provided assurances that adequate capacity will be available to us in the future.
In periods when broad fluctuations or changes in business conditions occur, it is difficult to assess the impact on our business. We have sought to reduce our exposure to these fluctuations in our industry by ensuring we have adequate inventory during periods of high demand, including having sufficient supply of components needed to produce more of our products. However, we have experienced substantial period-to-period fluctuations in operating results and expect, in the future, to experience period-to-period fluctuations in operating results due to these changes in business conditions.
We previously identified material weaknesses in our internal control over financial reporting and may identify additional material weaknesses in the future or fail to maintain an effective system of internal control over financial reporting. Although these material weaknesses have been remediated, if we fail to develop and maintain effective internal control over financial reporting, our ability to produce timely and accurate financial statements or comply with applicable laws and regulations could be impaired, which could harm our business and negatively impact the value of our common stock .
We are subject to Section 404(a) and (b) of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which requires us to make a formal assessment of the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting for that purpose. In addition, our independent registered public accounting firm is required to formally attest to the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting. Maintaining effective disclosure controls and procedures and effective internal controls over financial reporting are necessary for us to produce reliable financial statements and disclosure reports. While we have remediated previously identified material weaknesses, we cannot assure you that additional material weaknesses will not arise in the future, particularly as we continue to scale our operations, integrate new systems and processes such as a new enterprise resource planning system, and as certain of our foreign subsidiaries, which historically have not been subject to full SOX‑based testing due to their size and scope, grow or otherwise become material and require expanded internal control design, documentation, and testing. Any failure to maintain effective disclosure controls and internal control over financial reporting could harm our business and could cause a in the trading price of our common stock.
We have designed and implemented new controls and measures to remediate our previously identified material weaknesses, and these measures may not be sufficient to avoid the identification of additional material weaknesses in the future. Any failure to implement and maintain effective internal control over financial reporting also could adversely affect the results of periodic management evaluations and annual independent registered public accounting firm attestation reports regarding the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting that we are required to include in our periodic reports with the SEC. Ineffective disclosure controls and procedures and internal control over financial reporting could also result in errors in our consolidated financial statements that could result in a restatement of our financial statements and could cause us to fail to meet our periodic reporting obligations, any of which could diminish investor confidence in us and cause a decline in the price of our common stock. In addition, if we are to continue to meet these requirements, we may not be to remain listed on the Nasdaq Global Select Market (“Nasdaq”).
In addition, we have relatively limited experience implementing the systems and controls that are necessary to operate as a public company. If these new systems or controls and the associated process changes do not give rise to the benefits that we expect or do not operate as intended, it could adversely affect our financial reporting systems and processes, our ability to produce timely and accurate financial reports or the effectiveness of internal control over financial reporting. Moreover, our business may be harmed if we experience problems with any new systems and controls that result in delays in their implementation or increased costs to correct any post- implementation issues that may arise.
As a result, any failure to maintain effective internal control over financial reporting could materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition, results of operations, and the trading price of our common stock.
We may experience difficulties in transitioning to smaller geometry process nodes, and tapeouts in smaller nodes are more expensive.
In order to remain competitive, we have transitioned, and expect to continue to transition, our semiconductor products to be manufactured in accordance with increasingly smaller line width geometries. We periodically evaluate the benefits, on a product-by-product basis, of migrating our product designs to smaller geometry process nodes. We also evaluate the costs of migrating to smaller geometry process nodes, including both actual costs and opportunity costs related to the technologies we choose to forego. These complex transitions are imperative for us to remain competitive with the rest of the industry.
We have been, and may continue to be, dependent on our relationships with our manufacturers to transition to smaller geometry processes successfully. We cannot ensure that the third parties we use will be able to effectively manage any future transitions. If we or any of our partners experience significant delays in a future transition or fail to efficiently
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implement a transition, we could experience reduced manufacturing yields, delays in product deliveries, and increased expenses, all of which could harm our relationships with our customers and our results of operations.
If we are unable to attract, train, and retain qualified personnel, particularly our design and technical personnel, we may not be able to execute our business strategy effectively.
Our future success depends on our ability to attract and retain qualified personnel, including our management, sales and marketing, and finance, and particularly our design and technical personnel. In addition, we permit certain of our employees work remotely, which adds to the complexity of our business operations. We do not know whether we will be able to retain all of these personnel as we continue to pursue our business strategy.
Historically, we have encountered difficulties in hiring qualified engineers because there is a limited pool of engineers with the expertise required in our field and competition for these personnel is intense in our industry. In addition, competition for these personnel in the San Francisco Bay Area, where our headquarters are located, and in other locations where we maintain offices, is intense. We have from time to time experienced, and we expect to continue to experience, difficulty in hiring and retaining employees with appropriate qualifications. As the source of our technological and product innovations, our design and technical personnel represent a significant asset. The loss of the services of one or more of our key employees, especially our key design and technical personnel, or our inability to attract and retain qualified design and technical personnel, could harm our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
Many of our key personnel are, or will soon be, vested in a substantial amount of shares of our common stock, RSUs, or stock options. Employees may be more likely to terminate their employment with us if the shares they own or the shares underlying their vested RSUs or options have significantly appreciated in value relative to the original purchase prices of the shares or the exercise price of the options or grant date values of the RSUs, or, conversely, if the exercise price of the options that they hold are significantly above the trading price of our common stock. In addition, job candidates and existing employees often consider the value of the stock awards they receive in connection with their employment. If the perceived value of our stock awards declines, it may adversely affect our ability to recruit and retain highly skilled employees.
Our business would be adversely affected by the departure of existing members of our senior management team.
Our success depends, in large part, on the continued contributions of our senior management team, and in particular, the services of Jitendra Mohan, our Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, and Sanjay Gajendra, our Co-Founder, President, and Chief Operating Officer. Effective succession planning is also important for our long-term success. Failure to ensure effective transfers of knowledge and smooth transitions involving senior management could hinder our strategic planning and execution. We do not maintain key person life insurance policies, so the loss of one or more of our executive officers or key employees (including any limitation on the performance of their duties or short-term or long-term absences as a result of illness or disability) could adversely affect our business.
Cybersecurity risks, including cyber-attacks, cybersecurity incidents, data breaches, and system vulnerabilities could adversely affect our business and disrupt our operations.
We depend heavily on our technology infrastructure and cloud partners as well as maintain and rely upon certain critical information systems for the effective operation of our business. We routinely collect, receive, process, and store personal information (which may also be referred to as “personal data” or “personally identifiable data”) and sensitive data via our information systems, including intellectual property and other proprietary information about our business and that of our customers, as well as personal data regarding our employees, suppliers, business partners, and others. We and the third parties upon which we rely face a variety of evolving threats, which could cause cybersecurity incidents or data breaches, such as cyber-attacks. Our information technology systems are subject to damage or interruption from a number of potential sources, including, but not limited to, natural disasters, destructive or inadequate code, computer malware, ransomware attacks, bugs, viruses, system vulnerabilities, social engineering (including phishing attacks), -of-service attacks, other internet-based activity, online and offline , conduct by insider employees or vendors, as well as cybersecurity , data , power , internal , , and natural .
Cyber-attacks are increasing in number and sophistication, are well-financed, in some cases supported by state actors, and are designed to not only attack, but also to evade detection, and are being facilitated or enhanced by evolving technologies, including AI. Since the techniques used to obtain unauthorized access to systems and data, or to otherwise sabotage them, change frequently and are often not recognized until launched against a target, we may be unable to anticipate these techniques or to implement adequate preventative measures. Attempts to disrupt or gain unauthorized access to our and our third-party vendors’ information systems from malicious third parties or insider threats may incorporate widely varying and frequently changing tactics, which may be enhanced or facilitated by evolving technologies
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such as AI. Geopolitical instability may also increase the likelihood that we will experience direct or collateral consequences from cyber conflicts between nation-states or other politically motivated actors targeting critical technology infrastructure. Accidental or willful cybersecurity incidents, data breaches, or other unauthorized access to our information systems or the systems of our third-party service providers, or the existence of computer viruses, malware (such as ransomware), or vulnerabilities in our or their data or software could expose us to a risk of information loss, business disruption, or the misappropriation of proprietary and confidential information, including information relating to our products or customers or the personal information of our employees or third parties.
Despite our internal controls and investment in security measures, we, and our third-party vendors, have been subject to cyber-attacks or unauthorized network intrusions. Should a cybersecurity incident or data breach occur, it could disrupt our business and result in, among other things, unfavorable publicity, damage to our reputation, loss of our trade secrets and other competitive information, litigation by affected parties, possible financial obligations for liabilities and damages related to the theft or misuse of any personal or confidential information, significant remediation costs, disruption of key business operations, and significant diversion of our resources. Any of such events could have a material adverse effect on our business, , and financial condition. In addition, our internal controls and processes, code, and cybersecurity in our products and services may our customers to and other security risks, which may result in , regulatory action, or reputational . While we may be entitled to if an event arises from our third-party service providers’ to perform under their agreements with us, any award may be to cover the actual costs incurred by us and, as a result of a service provider’s to perform, we may be to collect any .
Further, we continue to devote resources to protect our systems and data from unauthorized access or misuse, and we will be required to expend greater resources in the future. However, we cannot guarantee that our risk management processes will be effective at mitigating the risk to our information technology systems.
U.S. and foreign regulators have also increased their focus on cybersecurity vulnerabilities and risks. Compliance with laws and regulations concerning privacy, cybersecurity, data governance, and data protection could result in significant expense, and any failure to comply could result in proceedings against us by regulatory authorities or other third parties. Such proceedings could result in (among other things) unfavorable publicity, damage to our reputation, possible financial obligations for liabilities, and government orders to implement additional protective measures or adopt new protocols, which could result in additional material expense. Moreover, we may be required to make legal notifications to affected individuals, disclosures to investors, and subject to fines and other sanctions resulting from any related breaches of applicable data privacy laws and regulations. Further, customers and third-party manufacturing partners increasingly demand rigorous contractual, certification, and audit provisions regarding privacy, cybersecurity, data governance, data protection, confidentiality, and intellectual property, which may also increase our overall compliance burden. Our contracts may not contain of liability, and even where they do, there can be no assurance that of liability in our contracts are sufficient to protect us from liabilities, , or related to our privacy and data security obligations. Further, any cyber liability insurance that we maintain may not provide adequate coverage potential liabilities related to any experienced cybersecurity or .
We have incurred and may in the future incur significant costs in order to implement, maintain, and/or update security systems that are designed to protect our information systems and the design of our products and services, and we may miscalculate the level of investment necessary to protect our systems adequately. Since the techniques used to obtain unauthorized access to or sabotage and compromise systems and technology infrastructure change frequently and are often not recognized until launched against a target, we may be unable to anticipate these techniques or to implement adequate preventive measures.
To the extent that any system failure, known or unknown vulnerability, cybersecurity incident or data breach results in material disruptions or interruptions to our operations or the theft, loss, unauthorized access or disclosure of, or damage to our data (including personal information) or confidential information, including our intellectual property, or exposes our customers to cybersecurity threats and attacks, our reputation, business, results of operations, and/or financial condition could be materially adversely affected.
An impairment of the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of our IT systems, or those of one or more of our IT vendors could have a material adverse effect on our business.
Our business depends on various internally managed IT systems and outsourced IT services, including cloud-based infrastructure services, to support, among other things, the design and simulation of our products, financial reporting, product orders and shipping, human resources, benefit plan administration, IT network development, network monitoring, productivity tools, and electronic communication services. Our operations are dependent upon our and our IT vendors’ ability to protect our respective IT infrastructure against damage from business continuity events that could have a significant disruptive effect. Although these systems and services are designed to protect and secure our customers’, suppliers’, and employees’ confidential information, as well as our own proprietary information, we are dependent on our
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vendors and providers to adequately address cybersecurity threats to their systems and services. Any failure of these internal or third-party systems and services to operate effectively or any breach of such systems or services could disrupt our operations and could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
Our business is subject to complex and evolving laws and regulations regarding privacy, data protection, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, any actual or perceived failure to comply with such laws and regulations could have a material adverse effect on our business.
There are numerous U.S. federal, state, local, and international laws and regulations regarding privacy, data protection, and cybersecurity that govern the collection, receipt, processing, and storage of personal information and other information. The scope of these laws and regulations is expanding and evolving, and may be subject to differing interpretations, which may be inconsistent across jurisdictions, or conflict with other rules.
For example, the CCPA as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act, affords California residents broad privacy rights and protections, imposes specific obligations with respect to the processing and storage of personal data and provides for civil penalties for certain violations. Numerous additional states have passed and others have proposed and may in the future pass comprehensive state privacy laws that may impose additional obligations on our business. Also, if we collect and process personal data regarding individuals in the European Economic Area (“EEA”) or the UK, we may be subject to the GDPR in this report unless specified otherwise. Compliance with the GDPR will be a rigorous and time-intensive process that may increase our cost of doing business or require us to change our business practices, and despite those efforts, there is a risk that we may be subject to fines and penalties, litigation, and reputational harm in connection with our potential European activities.
Data privacy laws and regulations are constantly evolving and can be subject to significant change and/or interpretive application. The lack of a unified approach to data privacy and protection laws in the U.S. and internationally could lead to complicated and potentially conflicting compliance requirements. Varying and evolving jurisdictional requirements could increase the costs and complexity of our compliance efforts and require changes to how we conduct our business. Violations of applicable data privacy laws can result in significant penalties.
Regulators and legislators across the world are also increasingly scrutinizing and restricting certain personal data transfers. For example, the Department of Justice’s January 8, 2025, rule on “Preventing Access to U.S. Sensitive Personal Data and Government-Related Data by Countries of Concern or Covered Persons,” prohibits or restricts certain data transactions involving countries of concern, including China. Actual or alleged violations of these regulations may be punishable by criminal and/or civil sanctions and may result in exclusion from participation in federal and state programs.
We are also subject to the terms of our privacy policies and obligations to third parties, including our customers, related to privacy, data protection, and cybersecurity. Our customers may also be subject to differing privacy laws, rules and legislation, which may mean that they require us to be bound by varying contractual requirements applicable to certain other jurisdictions. Adherence to such contractual requirements may impact our collection, use, processing, storage, sharing and disclosure of personal information.
Our use of AI in our business processes may also subject us to cybersecurity, data privacy, IT, intellectual property, regulatory, legal, operational, competitive, reputational and other risks and challenges that could affect our business. Use of AI by us or our vendors could result in bias, discrimination, or harmful or inaccurate content that may be actionable under privacy, data protection, and emerging AI laws. The use of certain AI technology can also give rise to intellectual property risks, including by disclosing or otherwise compromising our confidential or proprietary intellectual property and intellectual property infringement, or by undermining our ability to assert or defend ownership rights in intellectual property created with the assistance of AI tools.
Any failure, or perceived failure, by us to comply with applicable data protection or other laws, or with regulatory obligations or industry standards in our customer contracts, could result in damage to our reputation, proceedings, or actions against us by governmental entities or others, subject us to significant fines, penalties, judgments, and negative publicity, require us to change our business practices as well as increase the costs and complexity of compliance. Any of the foregoing could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
We are in the process of transitioning to a new enterprise resource planning system (“ERP”), and our assessment of readiness, prioritization of resources, and any delays or difficulties associated with the design, implementation, or post-implementation use of our new ERP system could adversely impact our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
We rely on information systems to manage our business, summarize our operating and financial results, and provide timely information to our management. We have been evaluating the design and implementation of a new ERP system as part of our efforts to enhance and scale our operational and financial systems. As our evaluation has progressed, we have continued to assess our organizational readiness, resource requirements, and overall prioritization of initiatives before proceeding with implementation. As a result, we are continuing to evaluate the appropriate timeline for the design and
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implementation of a new ERP system and may adjust the scope, timing, or approach to implementation based on our ongoing assessments. This process is a complex project with broad scope, in which we have and will continue to invest significant financial and human capital. Despite our efforts, we may experience delays, unexpected costs, or other difficulties throughout the design and implementation process. Further, although we will need to conduct extensive testing in an effort to ensure that the new ERP system is operating as intended, post-implementation disruptions to or difficulties in use of any such system could require us to incur additional costs, or could impair, among other things, our ability to record sales, process transactions, collect receivables, and produce timely and accurate historical and forecasted financial information, which could adversely impact our business, financial condition, and results of operations. Additionally, if the ERP system we implement does not ultimately operate as intended, the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting could be harmed.
We may be subject to warranty claims and product liability.
From time to time, we may be subject to warranty or product liability claims arising from defects or perceived defects in our products or in third-party components that we integrate into our products, which may lead to significant expenses. Our customer contracts typically contain warranty provisions relating to product quality issues. While we generally seek to limit our liability to the replacement of the part or to the revenue received for the product in our agreements, we may not be successful in limiting our liability to these remedies, or these limitations on liability may not be effective or sufficient in scope in all cases. If a customer’s equipment fails in use, the customer may incur significant monetary damages including an equipment recall or associated replacement expenses, as well as lost revenue. The customer may claim that a defect in our product caused the equipment and assert a claim us to recover monetary . The process of identifying a or potentially product in systems that have been widely distributed may be lengthy and require significant resources, and we may incur significant replacement costs and contract from our customers. In certain situations, we may consider incurring the costs or expenses related to a of one of our products in order to avoid the potential that may be raised should customer a due to a design or manufacturing process . Any such liabilities may exceed any revenue we receive from the relevant products. Costs, payments, or incurred or paid by us in connection with warranty and product liability could materially affect our financial condition and results of operations. We may also be to such as a result of any acquisition we may undertake in the future.
Litigation and other legal proceedings may adversely affect our business.
From time to time we may become involved in legal proceedings relating to patent and other intellectual property matters, product liability claims, employee claims, including wrongful termination, tort, or contract claims, federal regulatory investigations, securities class action, and other legal proceedings or investigations, which could have an adverse impact on our business, financial condition, and results of operations and divert the attention of our management from the operation of our business. Litigation is inherently unpredictable and can result in excessive or unanticipated verdicts and/or injunctive relief that affect how we operate our business. We could incur judgments or enter into settlements of claims for monetary or for agreements to change the way we operate our business, or both. There may be an increase in the scope of these matters or there may be additional lawsuits, , proceedings, or in the future, which could have a material effect on our business, financial condition, and results of operations. publicity about regulatory or legal action us could our reputation and brand image, our customers’ confidence, and reduce long-term demand for our products, even if the regulatory or legal action is or not material to our operations.
The occurrence of events for which we are self-insured, or which exceed our insurance limits, may adversely affect our profitability and liquidity.
We have insurance coverage related to many different types of risk; however, we self-insure for some potentially significant risks and obligations, including those that may exceed policy limits. The risks and exposures that we self-insure include, but are not limited to, employee health matters, business interruption, natural disasters, war and terrorism, certain property matters, product defects, cybersecurity matters, employment risks, environmental matters, political risks, and intellectual property matters. Although we believe we have sufficient capital to satisfy a potential loss, should there be a loss or adverse judgment in an area for which we are self-insured, our financial condition, results of operations, and liquidity may be materially adversely affected.
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Our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected by worldwide economic conditions, as well as political and economic conditions in the countries in which we conduct business.
Our business, financial condition, and results of operations have in the past and may in the future vary based on changes in our industry, as well as the impact of the global economy on our third-party manufacturing partners and customers. Our results of operations currently depend, in part, on the demand for our products, which in turn are influenced by the amount of business that our customers conduct. To the extent that weak or volatile economic conditions, including due to a pandemic or health epidemic, labor shortages, supply chain disruptions, inflation, government shutdowns, geopolitical developments (such as international conflicts and the implementation of, or changes to or further expansions of, trade sanctions, export restrictions, tariffs, and embargoes), deterioration of the financial services industry, and other events outside of our control, result in a reduced volume of business for our customers and prospective customers, demand for, and use of, our products has in the past and may in the future decline.
Furthermore, weak economic conditions have in the past and may in the future make it more difficult to collect on outstanding accounts receivable and increase our expenses. Specifically, our distributors or customers may fail to make payments when due, default under their agreements with us, or become insolvent or declare bankruptcy, or a supplier may determine that it will no longer do business with us as a customer. Additionally, a distributor, customer or supplier could be adversely affected by any of the liquidity or other risks that are described above as factors that could result in material adverse impacts on us, including but not limited to delayed access or loss of access to uninsured deposits or loss of the ability to draw on existing credit facilities involving a troubled or financial institution. Further, in recent years, we have seen labor costs, product supply costs, and other operating expenses rise due to high rates of inflation, but have not been to offset these costs with higher prices of our products. If customers or prospective customers elect not to purchase our products, as a result of a economy or rising inflation and increased costs or otherwise, or our distributors are to continue to distribute our products, our business, results of operations, and financial condition could be affected.
Our products are manufactured, assembled, and tested outside the United States. Any conflict or uncertainty in these countries, including due to political unrest or safety concerns, could harm our business, financial condition, and results of operations. In addition, if the government of any country in which our products are manufactured or sold sets technical standards for products manufactured in or imported into their country that are not widely shared, it may lead some of our customers to suspend imports of their products into that country, require manufacturers in that country to manufacture products with different technical standards and disrupt cross-border manufacturing relationships, which, in each case, could harm our business.
We may not be able to accurately predict our future capital needs, and we may not be able to obtain additional financing to fund our operations.
We may need to raise additional funds in the future. Any required additional financing may not be available on terms acceptable to us, or at all. If we raise additional funds by issuing equity securities or convertible debt, investors may experience significant dilution of their ownership interest, and the newly-issued securities may have rights senior to those of the holders of our common stock. If we raise additional funds by obtaining loans from third parties, the terms of those financing arrangements may include negative covenants or other restrictions on our business that could impair our operational flexibility and would also require us to incur additional interest expense. If additional financing is not available when required or is not available on acceptable terms, we may have to scale back our operations or limit our production activities, and we may not be able to expand our business, develop or enhance our products, take advantage of business opportunities or respond to competitive pressures, which could negatively impact our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
If our estimates or judgments relating to our critical accounting policies are based on assumptions that change or prove to be incorrect, our results of operations could fall below expectations of securities analysts and investors, resulting in a decline in the market price of our common stock.
The preparation of financial statements in conformity with generally accepted accounting principles in the United States (“GAAP”) requires management to make estimates and assumptions that affect the amounts reported in the consolidated financial statements and accompanying notes. We base our estimates on historical experience and on various other assumptions that we believe to be reasonable under the circumstances, as described in the section entitled “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations,” the results of which form the basis for making judgments about the carrying values of assets, liabilities, equity, revenue, and expenses that are not readily apparent from other sources. Significant assumptions and estimates used in preparing our consolidated financial statements include those listed in our consolidated financial statements. If our assumptions change or if actual circumstances differ
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from those in our assumptions, our results of operations may be adversely affected and may fall below the expectations of securities analysts and investors, resulting in a decline in the market price of our common stock.
Our reported financial results may be adversely affected by new accounting pronouncements or changes in existing accounting standards and practices.
We prepare our financial statements in conformity with GAAP. These accounting principles are subject to interpretation or changes by the Financial Accounting Standards Board and the SEC. New accounting pronouncements and interpretations of accounting standards and practices have occurred in the past and are expected to occur in the future. New accounting pronouncements or a change in the interpretation of accounting standards or practices may have a significant effect on our reported financial results and may affect our reporting of transactions completed before the change is effective.
A pandemic, epidemic, or outbreak of an infectious disease may materially and adversely affect our business and our financial results.
Our business could be adversely affected by pandemics, epidemics, outbreaks of infectious diseases or other public health crises in regions where we operate or otherwise do business. Such events could disrupt global and regional economic activity, labor markets, and supply chains, including those applicable to the semiconductor industry, and could adversely affect our employees, customers, suppliers and other business partners.
Public health crises may result in cities, counties, states, and countries imposing a wide range of restrictions on the physical movement of our employees, partners, and customers, including physical distancing, travel bans and restrictions, closure of non-essential business, quarantines, work-from-home directives, and shelter-in-place orders. These measures have previously caused, and may cause in the future, business slowdowns or shutdowns in affected areas, both regionally and worldwide. If future pandemics, epidemics or other global health crises have a substantial impact on the productivity of our employees and partners, or materially impair our ability to operate our business or our customers’ ability to purchase our products, our results of operations and overall financial performance may be harmed.
To the extent future pandemics, epidemics, outbreaks of infectious diseases, or public health crises adversely affect our business and financial results, it may also have the effect of heightening many of the other risks described herein.
Changes in current or future laws or regulations or the imposition of new laws or regulations by federal or state agencies or foreign governments could impair our ability to compete in international markets, or subject us to criminal penalties or significant fines, which may adversely affect our business and reputation.
Changes in current laws or regulations applicable to us or the imposition of new laws and regulations in the United States or other jurisdictions in which we do business, such as Canada, China, Germany, India, Israel, Singapore, Taiwan and Vietnam, could materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations. See “Item 2. Properties included in Part I, Item 1 of this Annual Report” for a description of how our facilities are used in these various jurisdictions. For example, we are subject to export control laws, regulations, and requirements that limit which products we sell and where and to whom we sell our products. In some cases, it is possible that export licenses would be required from U.S. government agencies for some of our products in accordance with the Export Administration Regulations and the International Traffic in Arms Regulations. We may not be successful in obtaining the necessary export licenses in all instances. Any limitation on our ability to export or sell our products imposed by these laws would adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations. In addition, changes in our products or changes in export and import laws and implementing regulations may create delays in the introduction of new products in international markets, prevent our customers from deploying our products internationally or, in some cases, prevent the export or import of our products to certain countries altogether.
We are also subject to anti-corruption and anti-bribery and similar laws, such as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (the “FCPA”), the U.S. domestic bribery statute contained in 18 U.S.C. § 201, the U.S. Travel Act, the USA PATRIOT Act, the U.K. Bribery Act, and other anti-corruption, anti-bribery, and anti-money laundering laws in countries where we conduct activities. Anti-corruption and anti-bribery laws have been interpreted broadly and enforced aggressively in recent years, and prohibit companies and their employees and agents from promising, authorizing, making, or offering improper payments or other benefits to government officials and others in the private sector to influence official action, direct business to any person, gain any improper advantage, or obtain or retain business. As we increase our international sales and business, our risks under these laws may increase.
In addition, in the future we may use third parties to conduct business on our behalf abroad. We or such future third-party intermediaries may have direct or indirect interactions with officials and employees of government agencies or state-owned or affiliated entities, and we can be held liable for the corrupt or other illegal activities of such future third-party
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intermediaries and our employees, representatives, contractors, partners, and agents, even if we do not explicitly authorize such activities. We have implemented an anti-corruption compliance program, but cannot guarantee that all our employees and agents, as well as those companies we outsource certain of our business operations to, will not take actions in violation of our policies and applicable law, for which we may be ultimately held responsible. Any violation of the FCPA, other applicable anti-corruption laws, or anti-money laundering laws could result in whistleblower complaints, adverse media coverage, investigations, prosecutions, loss of export privileges, suspension or debarment from U.S. government contracts, substantial diversion of management’s attention, significant legal fees and , settlements, , or civil sanctions, or us, our officers, or our employees, of profits, and other sanctions, enforcement actions, and remedial measures, and prohibitions on the conduct of our business, any of which could have a materially effect on our reputation, business, trading price, results of operations, financial condition, and prospects.
Our global operations expose us to numerous legal and regulatory requirements and failure to comply with such requirements, including unexpected changes to such requirements, could adversely affect our results of operations.
We service our customers around the world. We are subject to numerous, and sometimes conflicting, legal regimes of the United States and foreign national, state, and provincial authorities on matters as diverse as anti- corruption, trade or investment restrictions, tariffs, taxation, sanctions, anti-competition, data security or transfer, and privacy. U.S. laws may be different in significant respects from the laws of the PRC or Taiwan, where we utilize a significant portion of our third-party manufacturing partners, and jurisdictions where we seek to expand. U.S. laws could also directly conflict with PRC laws, forcing businesses to choose between compliance with conflicting legal regimes. We also may seek to expand operations in emerging market jurisdictions where legal systems are less developed or familiar to us.
In addition, there can be no assurance that the laws or administrative practices relating to taxation (including the current position as to income and withholding taxes), foreign exchange, export controls, economic sanctions, or otherwise in the jurisdictions where we have operations will not change. Changes in tax laws in some jurisdictions may also have a retroactive effect and we may be found to have paid less tax than required in such jurisdictions. Compliance with diverse legal requirements is costly, time consuming and requires significant resources. Violations of one or more of these regulations in the conduct of our business could result in significant fines, criminal sanctions against us or our officers, prohibitions on doing business and damage to our reputation. Violations of these regulations in connection with the performance of our obligations to our customers also could result in liability for significant monetary damages, fines or criminal prosecution, publicity and other reputational , and by our customers that we have not performed our contractual obligations. Due to the varying degrees of development of the legal systems of the countries in which we operate, local laws might be to protect our rights.
Regulatory authorities in jurisdictions into or from which we ship our products or import supplies could levy fines, restrict or delay our ability to export products or import supplies, or increase costs associated with the manufacture or transfer of products.
A significant portion of our sales require export and import activities. Our products are subject to laws and regulations that govern international trade, including but not limited to the FCPA, Export Administration Regulations, International Traffic in Arms Regulations and trade sanctions against embargoed countries and restricted parties, including those administered by the U.S. Departments of State, Commerce, and Treasury. Licenses or license exceptions may be required for the shipment of certain products to certain countries. Regulations and laws regarding licensing may also change in the future, requiring us to obtain licenses for products that we have not previously been required to license. Any changes in laws or regulations around license requirements may delay scheduled shipments, which could have a material adverse impact on our revenue.
Further, determination by a government that we have failed to comply with trade sanctions, investment, anti-bribery, or other regulations can result in penalties that may include denial of export privileges, fines, penalties, and seizure of products, or loss of reputation, any of which could have a material adverse effect on our business, sales, and earnings. A change in laws and regulations could restrict our ability to transfer product to previously permitted countries, customers, distributors or others. For example, the U.S. Commerce Department imposes and periodically revises restrictions on advanced computing ICs, computer commodities that contain such ICs, as well as on certain semiconductor manufacturing items, and expands controls on transactions involving items for supercomputer and semiconductors and manufacturing end-uses. In October 2023, the U.S. Commerce Department issued proposed rules updating the October 2022 rule to seek additional export restrictions for certain semiconductors and related manufacturing equipment, and it is expected the U.S. Commerce Department will continue to revise such regulations in the future. The Export Administration Regulations also effectively prohibits sales of items for a “military end use,” to a “military end-user,” or for a “military intelligence end-
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user,” or end-use to certain countries, such as Belarus, Burma, Cambodia, Cuba, China, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria, and Venezuela. Any of the foregoing changes could adversely impact our operational costs due to the administrative impacts of complying with these regulations and may limit those with whom we conduct business. Any one or more of these sanctions, future sanctions, a change in laws or regulations, or a prohibition on shipment of our products to significant customers could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
The United States and other countries have levied tariffs and taxes on certain goods, implemented trade restrictions, and introduced national security protection policies. Trade tensions between the United States and China, which escalated in 2018, have continued and include the United States increasing tariffs on Chinese origin goods and China increasing tariffs on U.S. origin goods. Increases on tariffs on Chinese-origin goods may intensify pricing pressure on our products and negatively impact our operating results. Increased tariffs on our customers’ systems could adversely impact their sales, and increased tariffs on our products in comparison to those of our competitors could each result in lower demand for our products. U.S. tariffs, including those on semiconductors, could reduce demand for our products. Additionally, U.S. tariffs, including those on critical minerals, could increase our input costs. Tariff increases by other nations could similarly negatively affect demand for our products and could increase input costs.
Further changes in trade or national security protection policy, tariffs, additional taxes, restrictions on exports or other trade or investment barriers, including those taken against the United States in retaliation for U.S. policies, may limit our ability to obtain equipment, components or raw materials (including rare earth minerals), limit our ability to produce products, increase our selling and/or manufacturing costs, decrease margins, reduce the competitiveness of our products, reduce our ability to sell products, or reduce our ability to have mergers and acquisitions approved by governmental agencies, any of which could have a material adverse effect on our business, results of operations, or financial conditions.
Customer demands for us to implement business practices that are more stringent than legal requirements may reduce our revenue opportunities or cause us to incur higher costs.
Some of our customers may require that we implement practices that are more stringent than those required by applicable laws with respect to labor requirements, the materials contained in our products, energy efficiency, environmental matters, or other items. To comply with such requirements, we may also require our third-party manufacturing partners to adopt such practices, as needed. Our third-party manufacturing partners may in the future refuse to implement these practices or may charge us more for complying with them. If certain of our third-party manufacturing partners refuse to implement the practices, we may be forced to source from alternate third-party manufacturing partners. The cost to implement such practices may cause us to incur higher costs and reduce our profitability, and if we do not implement such practices, such customers may disqualify us as a supplier, resulting in decreased revenue opportunities. Developing, enforcing, and auditing customer-requested practices at our own sites and in our supply chain will increase our costs and may require more personnel.
Changes in existing tax laws, tax rules, or tax practices may adversely affect our financial results.
The rules governing U.S. federal, state, and local and non-U.S. taxation are constantly under review by persons involved in the legislative process, the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. Treasury Department, and other taxing authorities. Changes to tax laws or tax rulings, such as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act enacted into law on July 4, 2025, or changes in interpretations of existing laws (which changes may have retroactive application), could adversely affect us or holders of our common stock. These changes could subject us to additional income-based taxes and non-income taxes (such as payroll, sales, use, value-added, digital tax, net worth, property, and goods and services taxes), which in turn could materially affect our financial position and results of operations. Additionally, new, changed, modified, or newly interpreted or applied tax laws could increase our customers’ and our compliance, operating, and other costs, as well as the costs of our products. In recent years, many such changes have been made, and changes are likely to continue to occur in the future. As we expand the scale of our business activities, any changes in the U.S. and non-U.S. taxation of such activities may increase our effective tax rate and harm our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
Risks Related to Our Industry
We operate in intensely competitive markets. Our failure to compete effectively, including as a result of industry consolidation, would harm our results of operations.
The semiconductor industry is extremely competitive. We currently compete with a number of large domestic and international companies, some of which have greater financial, technical, and management resources than us. For example, we are facing, and expect we will continue to face, significant competition in the cloud data center infrastructure market. Our competitors typically compete with us with respect to some, but not all, of our solutions. Our principal competitors include Broadcom, Inc., Credo Technology Group Holding Ltd., Marvell Technology, Inc., Microchip Technology Inc.,
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Montage Technology, Parade Technologies, Ltd., and Rambus Inc,. Our efforts to introduce new products into markets with entrenched competitors will expose us to additional competitive pressures. In addition, many of our competitors have longer operating histories, greater name recognition, larger customer bases, and greater sales, marketing, and distribution resources than we do and some operate and maintain their own fabrication facilities.
Additionally, customer expectations and requirements have been evolving rapidly. As a result, some of our competitors may be better situated to meet changing customer needs and secure design wins. Increasing competition in the markets in which we operate may negatively impact our revenue and gross margins. For example, competitors with greater financial resources may be able to offer lower prices than us, or they may offer additional products, services or other incentives that we may be unable to match.
We also may experience discriminatory or anti-competitive practices by our competitors that could impede our growth, cause us to incur additional expense or otherwise negatively affect our business. In addition, some of these competitors may use their market power to dissuade our customers from purchasing from us. The semiconductor industry has experienced significant consolidation in recent years, which has resulted in several of our competitors becoming much larger in terms of revenue, product offerings, and scale. Our competitors may also establish cooperative relationships among themselves or with third parties or may acquire companies that provide similar products to ours. We expect this trend to continue as companies attempt to improve the leverage of growing research and development costs, strengthen or hold their market positions in an evolving industry, or are unable to continue operations. Companies that are strategic partners in some areas of our business may acquire or form alliances with our competitors, thereby reducing their business with us. We believe that industry consolidation may result in stronger competitors that are better to compete as sole-source vendors for customers. This could lead to more variability in our operating results. Any of these factors, alone or in combination with others, could our business, financial condition, and results of operations and result in a of market share and an increase in pricing pressure.
Unfavorable or uncertain conditions in the cloud market, as well as for AI infrastructures, may cause fluctuations in our rate of revenue growth or financial results.
Our solutions are intended to address infrastructure needs for our hyperscaler customers, specifically to support their cloud and AI infrastructure needs. If domestic and global economic conditions worsen, or adoption, use, and commercialization of AI technology does not progress as expected or if the demand for cloud and AI compute infrastructure does not develop in the manner or in the time periods we anticipate, overall spending may be reduced, which would adversely impact demand for our solutions in these cloud and AI infrastructure market. In addition, unfavorable developments with evolving laws and regulations worldwide related to AI, such as those laws that may pause or inhibit continued adoption of AI, including GenAI, may limit global adoption, impede our strategy, and negatively impact our long-term expectations in this area. Even if the demand for cloud and AI compute infrastructure develop in the manner or in the time periods we anticipate, if we do not have timely, competitively priced, market-accepted solutions available to meet our customers’ planned roll-out of their systems, particularly as they offer new AI infrastructure offerings, we may miss a significant and our business, financial condition, results of operations, and cash flows could be materially and affected.
Raw material price fluctuations or decreased availability of certain raw materials can increase the cost of our products, impact our ability to meet customer commitments, and may adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
The cost of raw materials is a key element in the cost of our products. Our inability to offset material price inflation could adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations. Many major components, product equipment items, and raw materials are procured or subcontracted on a single or sole- source basis. Although we maintain a qualification and performance surveillance process and we believe that sources of supply for raw materials and components are generally adequate, it is difficult to predict what effects shortages or price increases may have in the future. Our inability to meet our supply needs would jeopardize our ability to fulfill obligations under our contracts, which could, in turn, result in reduced sales and profits, contract penalties or terminations, and damage to our customer relationships.
Furthermore, increases in the price of certain raw materials may result in increased production costs and may result in a decrease in our gross margins. For example, in the past the industry has seen shortages of packaging materials, including substrates, and also experienced silicon wafer capacity constraints. If these shortages or other shortages of raw materials are to occur in the future, it may cause delays in our ability to produce our products if we are unable to secure adequate supply. Moreover, our third-party manufacturing partners have in the past and may in the future pass the increase in raw materials and commodity costs onto us, which would further reduce the gross margin of our products. To the extent that we are able to pass along raw material price increases to some of our customers, there is often a delay between the time we are required to pay the increased price and the time we are able to pass these increases along. In addition, because we are a
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fabless company, global market trends such as shortage of capacity to fulfill our fabrication needs also may increase our raw material costs and thus decrease our gross margins.
Our customers rely on many different service providers and component suppliers to build their systems, and the frequency at which our products are purchased by our customers and incorporated into their systems may vary.
The success of our products is heavily dependent on the timely introduction, quality, and evolving technical requirements for our customers’ systems incorporating our products, which are impacted by factors beyond our control. Our customers’ systems are often very complex and require very specific components, and as a result our customers’ systems could be delayed due to incompatible deliverables from other service providers. Our customers may experience other difficulties with the supply of the various components of their products or testing and manufacturing of their products that are outside of our control. We incur significant design and development costs in connection with designing our products for customers’ systems that may not ultimately achieve market acceptance. If our customers experience changing market requirements, failed evaluations or field trials or incompatible deliverables from other service providers, they may delay, change or cancel a project, and we may have incurred significant additional development costs and may not be able to recoup our costs, which in turn would affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
Risks Related to our Intellectual Property
Our failure to protect our intellectual property rights adequately could impair our ability to compete effectively or to defend ourselves from litigation, which could harm our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
Our success depends in part upon protecting our intellectual property. We rely primarily on patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secret laws, as well as intellectual property assignment and confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements and other methods, to protect and establish our rights in our proprietary technologies and know-how. As of December 31, 2025, we have been issued 26 patents in the United States and one patent in foreign jurisdictions. In addition, we have 35 patent applications pending in the United States, and five patent applications pending in foreign jurisdictions. We cannot guarantee that any pending or future patent applications will be issued to have the coverage originally sought, and even if the pending patent applications are granted, the rights granted to us may not be meaningful or provide us with any commercial advantage. Additionally, our patents could be opposed, contested, narrowed, circumvented, challenged, abandoned, or designed around by our competitors or be declared invalid or unenforceable in judicial or administrative proceedings. The patent prosecution process is expensive, time-consuming, and complex, and we may not be to file, , maintain, enforce, or license all necessary or patent applications at a reasonable cost or in a timely manner. It is also possible that we will to identify patentable aspects of our research and development output in time to obtain patent protection. to timely seek patent protection on products or technologies generally us from seeking future patent protection on these products or technologies. Even if we do timely seek patent protection, the coverage claimed in a patent application can be significantly reduced before a patent is issued, and its scope can be reinterpreted after issuance, and as a result we can give no assurance that any patents that have issued to may issue in the future will protect our current and future products, will provide us with any competitive , or will not be , or in the future.
The failure of our patents to adequately protect our products might make it easier for our competitors to offer similar products or technologies. To the extent we pursue any foreign patent protection, it is unlikely that such protection would be as comprehensive as our U.S. patent protection and may not protect our intellectual property in some countries where our products are sold or may be sold in the future. Many U.S.-based companies have encountered substantial intellectual property infringement in foreign countries, including countries where we sell products. Even if foreign patents are granted, effective protection and enforcement in foreign countries may not be available.
Monitoring unauthorized use of our intellectual property is difficult and costly. Although we are not aware of any material instances of unauthorized use of our intellectual property in the past, it is possible that unauthorized use of our intellectual property may have occurred or may occur in the future without our knowledge. Despite our efforts, our failure to effectively protect our intellectual property could reduce the value of our solutions, and could harm our business, results of operations, and financial condition. Further, we may in the future need to initiate infringement claims or litigation against third parties. Litigation, whether we are a plaintiff or a defendant, can be expensive, time-consuming, and may the efforts of our executives, technical staff, and managerial personnel, which could our business, whether or not such results in a determination to us.
Some of the software used within our products, as well as that of some of our customers, may be derived from and/or incorporate so-called “open source” software that is generally made available to the public by its authors and/or other third parties under open source licenses, which in some instances may subject us to certain unfavorable conditions, including
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requirements that we offer our proprietary software, which incorporates or links to such open source software, for no cost or that we make such proprietary software publicly available for free.
On occasion, companies that use open source software have faced claims challenging their use of open source software or compliance with open source license terms. There is evolving legal precedent for interpreting the terms of certain open source licenses, including the determination of which works are subject to the terms of such licenses. While we believe we have complied with our obligations under the various applicable licenses for open source software, in the event the copyright holder of any open source software were to successfully establish in court that we had or have not complied with the terms of a license for a particular work, we could be required to release the source code of that work to the public for free and/or stop distribution of that work. Any requirement to disclose our proprietary source code could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, and results of operations, could result in negative publicity and could help our competitors develop products that are similar to or better than ours.
We utilize a significant amount of intellectual property in our business. If we are unable or fail to protect our intellectual property, our business could be adversely affected.
We rely on a combination of intellectual property rights, including patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets, as well as customary contractual protections with our customers, third-party manufacturing partners, employees, and consultants to protect our intellectual property rights. We spend significant resources to monitor and protect our intellectual property rights, including the unauthorized use of our products, usage rates of the software seat licenses and subscriptions that we sell, but even with significant expenditures, we may not be able to protect the intellectual property rights that are valuable to our business. In particular, we are unable to predict or assure that:
• our intellectual property rights will not lapse or be invalidated, circumvented, challenged, or, in the case of third-party intellectual property rights licensed to us, be licensed to others;
• our intellectual property rights will provide competitive advantages to us;
• rights previously granted by third parties to intellectual property licensed or assigned to us, including portfolio cross-licenses, will not hamper our ability to assert our intellectual property rights or hinder the settlement of currently pending or future disputes;
• any of our pending or future patent, copyright, or trademark applications will be issued or have the coverage originally sought;
• we will be able to enforce our intellectual property rights in certain jurisdictions where competition is intense or where legal protection may be weak; or
• we have sufficient intellectual property rights to protect our products or our business.
Effective intellectual property protection may not be available in every country in which we offer our products. The laws of certain jurisdictions where we do business or may do business in the future may not recognize intellectual property rights or protect them to the same extent as do the laws of the United States. Any changes in, or unexpected interpretations of, intellectual property laws may compromise our ability to enforce our trade secret and intellectual property rights. In addition, when patents expire, we lose the protection and competitive advantages they originally provided to us. Failure to obtain or maintain protection of our trade secrets or other intellectual property could harm our competitive position and could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
Further, we may acquire companies with intellectual property that is subject to licensing obligations to other third parties. These licensing obligations may extend to our own intellectual property following any such potential acquisition and may limit our ability to assert our intellectual property rights. From time to time, we may pursue litigation to assert our intellectual property rights, including, in some cases, against our customers and third-party manufacturing partners where we believe they have infringed, violated, or misappropriated our intellectual property. Claims of this sort could also harm our relationships with our customers and might deter future customers from doing business with us. Conversely, third parties have and may in the future pursue intellectual property litigation against us. An adverse decision in such types of legal action could result in material expense and limit our ability to assert our intellectual property rights and limit the value of our platform, which could otherwise impact our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
We rely on third-party technologies for the development of our products and our inability to use such technologies in the future would harm our ability to remain competitive.
We rely on third parties for technologies that are integrated into our products. If we are unable to continue to use or license these technologies on reasonable terms, or if these technologies become unreliable, unavailable or fail to operate
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properly, we may not be able to secure adequate alternatives in a timely manner or at all, and our ability to offer our products and remain competitive in our market would be harmed. In addition, even if we are unable to successfully license technology from third-parties to develop future products, we may not be able to develop such products in a timely manner or at all. The operation or security of our products could be impaired if errors or other defects occur in the third-party technologies we use, and it may be more difficult for us to correct any such errors and defects in a timely manner, if at all, because the development and maintenance of these technologies is not within our control. Any impairment of the technologies or of our relationship with these third parties could our business.
We may face claims of intellectual property infringement, misappropriation or other violations, which could be time-consuming or costly to defend or settle, result in the loss of significant rights or harm our relationships with our customers or reputation in the industry.
From time to time, third parties may assert against us and our customers their patent and other intellectual property rights to technologies that are used in or are important to our business, which may be time consuming and costly to defend or settle. We may in the future, particularly as a public company with an increased profile and visibility, receive communications from others alleging our infringement, misappropriation or other violation of patents, trade secrets or other intellectual property rights. In addition, in the event that we recruit employees or contractors from other companies, including certain potential competitors, and these employees or contractors are involved in the development of products that are similar to the products they assisted in developing for their former employers, we may become subject to claims that such employees or contractors have improperly used or disclosed trade secrets or other proprietary information. We may also in the future be subject to by our third-party manufacturing partners, employees, or contractors asserting an ownership right in our patents, patent applications or other intellectual property, as a result of the work they performed on our behalf.
Claims that our products or processes infringe, misappropriate, or otherwise violate third-party intellectual property rights, regardless of their merit or resolution, could be time-consuming or costly to defend or settle and could divert the efforts and attention of our management and technical personnel. Infringement claims also could harm our relationships with our customers and might deter future customers from doing business with us. We do not know whether we will prevail in these proceedings given the complex technical issues and inherent uncertainties in intellectual property litigation. If any pending or future proceedings result in an adverse outcome, we could be required to:
• cease the manufacture, use or sale of the infringing products or processes;
• pay substantial damages for infringement, misappropriation or other violation;
• expend significant resources to develop non-infringing products or processes, which may not be successful;
• license certain components from the third-party claiming infringement, which license may not be available on commercially reasonable terms, or at all;
• cross-license our products to a competitor to resolve an infringement claim, which could weaken our ability to compete with that competitor; or
• pay substantial damages to our customers or end-users to discontinue their use of or to replace infringing product or process sold to them with non-infringing products or processes, if available.
Additionally, even if successful in such proceedings, our rights in our products or processes may be invalidated, or narrowed. Moreover, there could be public announcements of the results of hearings, motions or other interim proceedings or developments, and if securities analysts or investors perceive these results to be negative, it could have a substantial adverse effect on the price of our common stock. Any of the foregoing results could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
Any potential dispute involving patents or other intellectual property could affect our customers, which could trigger our indemnification obligations to them and result in substantial expense to us.
In any potential dispute involving patents or other intellectual property, our customers could also become the target of litigation. Our agreements with customers generally include indemnification or other provisions under which we agree to indemnify or otherwise be liable to them for losses suffered or incurred as a result of third-party claims of intellectual property infringement. Large indemnity payments could harm our business, financial condition, and results of operations. From time to time, customers require us to indemnify or otherwise be liable to them for breach of confidentiality or failure to implement adequate security measures with respect to their intellectual property and trade secrets. Although we normally contractually limit our liability with respect to such obligations, certain of our customer agreements may not include
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maximum loss clauses, which may result in substantial liability. Any litigation against our customers could trigger indemnification obligations under some of our agreements, which could result in substantial expense to us, and which could materially and adversely affect our financial results.
Risks Related to the Ownership of Our Common Stock
Our IPO occurred in March 2024. As such, there has only been a public market for our common stock for a relatively short period of time. The market price of our common stock may continue to be volatile, which could cause the value of your investment to decline, and we may not be able to meet investor or analyst expectations.
The market prices of the securities of other newly public companies have historically been highly volatile and markets in general have been highly volatile. The trading price of our common stock is likely to continue to be volatile and could be subject to wide fluctuations in price in response to various factors, some of which are beyond our control. These factors include:
• actual or anticipated changes in our results of operations, and variations between our actual or forecasted results of operations and the expectations of securities analysts, investors, and the financial community;
• any forward-looking financial or operating information we may provide to the public or securities analysts, any changes in this information, or our failure to meet expectations based on this information;
• actions of securities analysts who initiate or maintain coverage of us, changes in financial estimates by any securities analysts who follow our company or our failure to meet these estimates, or the expectations of investors;
• changes in operating the performance and stock market valuations of companies in our industry, including our competitors;
• general economic conditions and slow or negative growth of related markets;
• announcements by us or our competitors of design wins, acquisitions, new products, significant contracts, commercial relationships, or capital commitments;
• our ability to develop and market new and enhanced products on a timely basis;
• expectations of securities analysts, investors, and the financial community about the size or rate of growth of the cloud and AI infrastructure markets;
• commencement of, or our involvement in, litigation;
• disruption to our operations;
• the emergence of new sales channels in which we are unable to compete effectively;
• any major change in our board of directors or management;
• changes in governmental regulations; and
• other events or factors, including those resulting from political conditions, election cycles, government shutdowns, international or armed conflicts, war or incidents of terrorism, increased tariffs, or responses to these events.
In addition, the stock market in general has experienced extreme price and volume fluctuations. These broad market and industry factors may seriously harm the market price of our common stock, regardless of our actual operating performance. This variability and unpredictability could also result in our failure to meet the expectations of industry or financial analysts or investors for any period. If our revenue or results of operations fall below the expectations of analysts or investors or below any forecasts we may provide to the market, or if the forecasts we provide to the market are below the expectations of analysts or investors, the price of our common stock could decline substantially. Such a stock price decline could occur even when we have met any previously publicly stated revenue or earnings forecasts that we may provide.
Trading price fluctuations may also make it more difficult for us to use our common stock as a means to make acquisitions or to use options to purchase our common stock to attract and retain employees. In addition, in the past, following periods of volatility in the overall market and the market price of a company’s securities, securities class action litigation has often been instituted against these companies. This litigation, if instituted against us, could result in substantial costs and a diversion of our management’s attention and resources.
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Our revenue and operating results can fluctuate from period to period, which could cause our share price to fluctuate.
Our revenue and operating results have fluctuated in the past and may fluctuate from period to period in the future due to a variety of factors, many of which are beyond our control. Factors relating to our business that may contribute to these fluctuations include the following factors, as well as other factors described elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K:
• the receipt, reduction or cancellation of orders by customers;
• the gain or loss of significant customers;
• market acceptance of our products and our customers’ systems;
• our ability to develop, introduce and market new products and technologies on a timely basis;
• the timing and extent of product development costs;
• new product announcements and introductions by us or our competitors;
• incurrence of research and development and related new product expenditures;
• cyclical fluctuations in our markets;
• significant warranty claims, including those not covered by our third-party manufacturing partners;
• changes in our product mix or customer mix;
• intellectual property disputes; and
• loss of key personnel or the inability to attract qualified personnel.
As a result of these and other factors, the results of any prior quarterly or annual periods should not be relied upon as indications of our future revenue or operating performance. Fluctuations in our revenue and operating results could cause our share price to decline. You should not rely on our past results as an indication of our future performance.
Sales of substantial amounts of our common stock in the public markets or the perception that sales might occur, could cause the trading price of our common stock to decline.
Sales of a substantial number of shares of our common stock into the public market, particularly sales by our directors, executive officers, and stockholders, or the perception that these sales might occur, could cause the trading price of our common stock to decline.
While shares held by directors, executive officers, and other affiliates are subject to volume limitations under Rule 144 under the Securities Act, and various vesting agreements, we are unable to predict the timing of the effect that such sales may have on the prevailing market price of our common stock.
In addition, as of December 31, 2025, we had (i) 2,721,076 options outstanding that, if fully exercised, would result in the issuance of 2,721,076 shares of common stock, (ii) 9,531,296 RSU and PSU awards outstanding that would result in the issuance of 9,531,296 shares of common stock upon settlement, and (iii) 2,442,360 warrants outstanding that, if fully exercised, would result in the issuance of 2,442,360 shares of common stock. All of the shares of common stock issuable upon the exercise of stock options, subject to RSU awards and the shares reserved for future issuance under our equity incentive plans have been registered on a registration statement on Form S-8 under the Securities Act. Accordingly, these shares can be freely sold in the public market upon issuance, subject to volume limitations under Rule 144 for our executive officers and directors and applicable vesting requirements.
Certain holders of our common stock have rights, subject to some conditions, to require us to file registration statements for the public resale of the common stock or to include such shares in registration statements that we may file for us or other stockholders. Any registration statement we file to register additional shares, whether as a result of registration rights or otherwise, could cause the trading price of our common stock to decline or be volatile.
Our issuance of additional capital stock in connection with financings, acquisitions, investments, our stock incentive plans, or otherwise will dilute all other stockholders and could negatively affect our results of operations.
We expect to issue additional capital stock in the future that will result in dilution to all other stockholders. We expect to grant equity awards to employees, directors, consultants, and advisors under our stock incentive plans. We may also raise capital through equity financings in the future. As part of our business strategy, we may acquire or make investments in complementary companies, products, or technologies and issue equity securities to pay for any such acquisition or
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investment. Any such issuances of additional capital stock may cause stockholders to experience significant dilution of their ownership interests and the per share value of our common stock to decline.
Any additional grants of equity awards under our stock incentive plans will also increase stock-based compensation expense and negatively affect our results of operations. For example, during the year ended December 31, 2025, stock-based compensation expense was $160.0 million . As a public company, our equity awards are primarily subject to time-based vesting, and accordingly we expect to continue to incur stock-based compensation expense as these awards vest.
Our executive officers, directors, and stockholders, if they choose to act together, have the ability to control or significantly influence all matters submitted to shareholders for approval.
As of December 31, 2025, our executive officers, directors, and greater than 5% stockholders, in the aggregate, beneficially owned approximately 37.9% of our outstanding common stock (assuming no exercise of outstanding options warrants or settlement of RSUs in shares upon vesting). As a result, such persons, acting together, have the ability to control or significantly influence all matters submitted to our board of directors or shareholders for approval, including the appointment of our management, the election and removal of directors and approval of any significant transaction, as well as our management and business affairs. In addition, this concentration of ownership may have the effect of delaying, deferring, or preventing a change in control, impeding a merger, consolidation, takeover or other business combination involving us, or discouraging a potential acquirer from making a tender offer or otherwise attempting to obtain control of our business, even if such a transaction would benefit other shareholders.
Provisions in our charter documents and under Delaware law could make an acquisition of our company more difficult, limit attempts by our stockholders to replace or remove our current board of directors, and limit the trading price of our common stock.
Provisions in our amended and restated certificate of incorporation and second amended and restated bylaws may have the effect of delaying or preventing a change of control or changes in our management. Our amended and restated certificate of incorporation and our second amended and restated bylaws include provisions that:
• provide that our board of directors is classified into three classes of directors with staggered three-year terms;
• permit our board of directors to establish the number of directors and fill any vacancies and newly-created directorships;
• require super-majority voting to amend our amended and restated bylaws; provided, however, that majority voting shall be required to amend our amended and restated bylaws if our board of directors recommends that the stockholders approve such amendment;
• authorize the issuance of “blank check” preferred stock that our board of directors could use to implement a stockholder rights plan;
• prohibit stockholder action by written consent;
• provide that only our board of directors is authorized to call a special meeting of stockholders;
• provide that the board of directors is expressly authorized to alter or repeal our amended and restated bylaws; and
• contain advance notice requirements for nominations for election to our board of directors or for proposing matters that can be acted upon by stockholders at annual stockholder meetings.
Moreover, Section 203 of the Delaware General Corporation Law (“DGCL”) may discourage, delay, or prevent a change in control of our company. Section 203 imposes certain restrictions on mergers, business combinations, and other transactions between us and holders of 15% or more of our common stock.
If securities or industry analysts do not publish research, or publish inaccurate or unfavorable research, about our business, the trading price of our common stock and trading volume could be adversely affected.
The trading market for our common stock depends in part on the research and reports that securities or industry analysts publish about us or our business. If few securities analysts cover us, or if industry analysts cease coverage of us, the trading price for our common stock would be negatively affected. If one or more of the analysts who cover us downgrade our common stock or publish inaccurate or unfavorable research about our business, our common stock trading price would likely decline. If one or more of these analysts cease coverage of us or fail to publish reports on us on a regular basis, demand for our common stock could decrease, potentially causing our common stock trading price and trading volume to decline.
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We do not expect to declare or pay any dividends on our common stock for the foreseeable future.
We do not intend to pay cash dividends on our common stock for the foreseeable future. Consequently, investors must rely on sales of their common stock after price appreciation, which may never occur, as the only way to realize any future gains on their investment. Investors seeking dividends should not purchase our common stock. Any future determination to pay dividends will be at the discretion of our board of directors and subject to, among other things, our compliance with applicable law, and depending on, among other things, our business prospects, financial condition, results of operations, cash requirements and availability, capital expenditure needs, the terms of any preferred equity securities we may issue in the future, covenants in the agreements governing any future indebtedness, other contractual restrictions, industry trends, and any other factors or considerations our board of directors may regard as relevant.
Our second amended and restated bylaws designate specific courts as the sole and exclusive forum for certain disputes that may be initiated by our stockholders, which could limit our stockholders’ ability to obtain a favorable judicial forum for disputes with us or our directors, officers, or employees.
Pursuant to our second amended and restated bylaws, unless we consent in writing to the selection of an alternative forum, the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware is the sole and exclusive forum for state law claims for (i) any derivative action or proceeding brought on our behalf; (ii) any action asserting a claim of, or a claim based on, a breach of a fiduciary duty owed by any current or former director, officer or other employee of ours to us or our stockholders; (iii) any action asserting a claim pursuant to any provision of the DGCL, our amended and restated certificate of incorporation or our second amended and restated bylaws or as to which the DGCL confers jurisdiction on the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware; or (iv) any action asserting a claim governed by the internal affairs doctrine (collectively, the “Delaware Forum Provision”). The Delaware Forum Provision does not apply to any causes of action arising under the Securities Act or the Exchange Act, or to any claim for which the federal courts have exclusive jurisdiction. Our second amended and restated bylaws further provide that unless we consent in writing to the selection of an alternative forum, the federal district courts of the United States shall be the sole and forum for resolving any asserting a cause of action arising under the Securities Act or the Exchange Act and the respective rules and regulations promulgated thereunder (the “Federal Forum Provision”). In addition, our second amended and bylaws provide that any person or entity purchasing or otherwise acquiring any interest in shares of our common stock is deemed to have notice of and consented to the Delaware Forum Provision and the Federal Forum Provision; provided, however, that stockholders cannot and will not be deemed to have waived our compliance with the federal securities laws and the rules and regulations thereunder.
We recognize that the Delaware Forum Provision and the Federal Forum Provision in our second amended and restated bylaws may impose additional litigation costs on stockholders in pursuing any such claims. Additionally, the forum selection clauses in our second amended and restated bylaws may limit our stockholders’ ability to bring a claim in a judicial forum that they find favorable for disputes with us or our directors, officers or employees, which may discourage the filing of lawsuits against us and our directors, officers, and employees, even though an action, if successful, might benefit our stockholders. In addition, Section 22 of the Securities Act creates concurrent jurisdiction for federal and state courts over all suits brought to enforce any duty or liability created by the Securities Act or the rules and regulations thereunder. While the Delaware Supreme Court and other state courts have upheld the validity of the federal forum selection provisions purporting to require under the Securities Act be brought in federal court, there is uncertainty as to whether courts in other states will enforce our Federal Forum Provision. If the Federal Forum Provision is found to be unenforceable in an action, we may incur additional costs associated with resolving such an action. The Federal Forum Provision may also impose additional costs on stockholders who assert that the provision is not enforceable or . The Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware and the federal district courts of the United States may also reach different judgments or results than would other courts, including courts where a stockholder considering an action may be located or would otherwise choose to bring the action, and such judgments may be more or less to us than our stockholders.
General Risk Factors
We have incurred, and will continue to incur, increased costs as a result of operating as a public company, and our management is required to devote substantial time to support compliance with our public company responsibilities and corporate governance practices.
As a public company, we have incurred, and will continue to incur, significant finance, legal, accounting, and other expenses, including director and officer liability insurance, that we did not incur as a private company, and which we expect to further increase following our recent transition to large accelerated filer status. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Dodd- Frank Act, stock exchange listing requirements, the reporting requirements of the Exchange Act and other applicable securities rules and regulations impose various requirements on public companies in the United States. As a
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large accelerated filer, we are subject to enhanced reporting, internal control, and compliance obligations, including auditor attestation of internal control over financial reporting, additional reporting obligations regarding executive compensation, and the requirement to hold nonbinding advisory votes on executive compensation, and our management and other personnel devote a substantial amount of time to support compliance with these requirements. Moreover, these rules and regulations have increased, and will continue to increase, our legal and financial compliance costs and make certain activities more time-consuming and costly. We cannot predict the amount or timing of these additional costs that we will incur as a public company, and the resulting strain on management resources could adversely affect our results of operations and financial condition. These enhanced obligations may also increase the risk of errors or delays in our financial and SEC reporting, and we may not be able to effectively manage these additional requirements, which could adversely affect investor confidence and the market price of our common stock.
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