Chief Executive Officer, Nordic Semiconductor
CES 2025: Interview with Vegard Wollan
About Vegard Wollan
Vegard Wollan, CEO of Nordic Semiconductor, stated in interviews at CES 2025 that the company has reorganized its R&D into four product-centric teams covering short-range, long-range cellular, Wi-Fi, and power management. He said the restructuring was intended to improve engineering execution and customer focus. Wollan also discussed the launch of the nRF 54 series, describing it as a next-generation platform with increased processing performance and reduced energy consumption compared to previous products. Wollan reiterated the company's publicly stated growth ambition of achieving an average annual revenue growth rate of approximately 20% over the next five to six years. He also noted a target operating model aiming for an EBIT margin of around 25% over that period. In a December 2024 interview, Wollan acknowledged that the company's capital markets day, during which the stock fell 24%, was "frustrating," but expressed confidence in the growth plan and its execution.
Transcript (14 segments)
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Nit Darad0:03
Hello, this is Nit Darad with E Times, and I'm here at the Nordic Semiconductor booth at CES 2025 in Las Vegas, talking to the CEO Vegard Wollan. Hello Vegard, how are you? Good, good. So Vegard, this is exactly 12 months since you joined as CEO of Nordic Semiconductor. How's it been?
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Vegard Wollan0:15
I'm good, thank you.
It's been very exciting. SoC started, I would say, four or five years ago. Huge and important and great investments with a great Nordic engineering team within two 22nm platforms, one from TSMC, one from Global Foundries for its next generation products. And that's really something we are starting now to capitalize on when we are coming to a new area, launching new products, among them the new n54 series which we have been launching recently. And it's the US launch of that which happens here for us at CES. But on top of that, we have also in the last year we saw that having a large R&D team wasn't the right and the most efficient setup for us, so we have reorganized into four product-centric teams: one for the short range business which is our main engine, as well as the long range cellular business, Wi-Fi which is more on the early stages, and our power management circuitry which is tailored into our wireless connectivity SoC. Doing that, we have now got, I would say, more like four parallel highways between our customers and our engineering product development teams. So a previously very customer-centric Nordic has become much more customer-centric, and we do really see the fruition of that happening at the moment. We are executing faster, and in the coming time and in '25, '26, we're going to see a lot of new exciting product launches based on the platforms we have been developing in the 22 nanometer area.
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Nit Darad2:12
Now I think the key thing in Nordic's history has been around the short range RF, and I guess you've kind of tried to broaden that with sort of new product areas, application areas.
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Vegard Wollan2:27
Exactly. So still 95% of our business is in the short range space, and it's a very important and key area for us where we are the world market leader. But we have large growth ambitions, and we are now expanding into the long range area with our cellular IoT business, where we also recently launched the world's smallest SiP. Yeah, you showed me that earlier. It's quite small. It's the whole thing: you just need a battery and antenna, and the n9151 SiP from Nordic, and there you go with a cellular data connectivity system. And we are tailoring that for tracking products like people trackers, pet trackers, goods trackers, as well as metering applications like gas, water meters, and general cellular industrial IoT applications.
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Nit Darad3:23
I mean, that SiP kind of business is probably quite good for you in that respect.
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Vegard Wollan3:30
No, absolutely, absolutely. That's something we're really excited about.
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Nit Darad3:36
Okay. Now, in terms of this, this is your dream job by the way, isn't it? Because you actually started at Nordic many, many years ago and then you had a journey and then came back.
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Vegard Wollan3:45
Absolutely. So when T retired, it was clearly my dream job. I hope hopefully it was a good match. I think it was a good match. I have been abroad, have the experience from larger semiconductor companies, but also my journey started at Nordic back in 1990 when I was graduating from the University. And as you say, Nordic is the locomotive and the diamond in the northern Europe semiconductor fabulous area. So it's really exciting, and it's a great team, great position, great customers. So we are having a lot of fun, which is very giving, and I'm fortunate.
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Nit Darad4:30
And I mean, you're a public company so it's all public, but in terms of your vision and your strategy over the next 12 to 24 months, what are the key things you're going to be focusing on?
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Vegard Wollan4:37
So we are now focusing on capitalizing and delivering on a range of new product launches based on those 22 nanometer platforms which we have been developing for quite some years. And we have quite high growth ambitions. And we have publicly said now that we expect and have growth ambitions for the five, six years to come to be growing our topline revenues about 20% on an annual average growth rate.
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Nit Darad5:07
Now you said something to me earlier which I'm not going to repeat, but so are we going to expect a keynote from you at CES in three to five years time?
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Vegard Wollan5:15
That'll be another dream.
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Nit Darad5:17
Well, well, Vegard, thank you very much. Thank you, thank you, thank you for having it.