Chief Executive Officer, Nordic Semiconductor
Nordic Semiconductor at CES 2025
Paige West, Managing Editor, Electronic Specifier speaks with Vegard Wollan, CEO, Nordic Semiconductor about what they have on display at the show. Featuring demos of the Nordic Thingy:91X and a comparison of the nRF 54 L series compared to the popular nRF 52 series.
12:19 Demo: Compatison of the nRF 54 L Series vs the nRF 52 series
17:05 Demo: Nordic Thingy 91:X
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 (21 segments)
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Interviewer0:05
Hello and welcome. I'm here at CES 2025 and I've popped by the Nordic Semiconductor stand to have a look at what they're showcasing and to chat with the CEO. So thank you very much for joining us. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and tell us about Nordic as well?
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Vegard Wollan0:19
Thanks, thanks for coming. I'm Vegard here of Nordic Semiconductor. I worked my whole life within the semiconductor industry, a lot of that with Atmel Corporation, which was later acquired by Microchip Technology, and then with a couple of smaller semiconductor companies. About a year ago, and it actually started here at CES early 2024, I was fortunate and got the opportunity to become the CEO of Nordic, which is a great opportunity, great company, and I'm really happy about it.
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Interviewer0:55
Fantastic. So you've been CEO for a year now. So why don't you tell us what you've done over the last 12 months?
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Vegard Wollan1:01
Yeah, so I've been traveling a lot, visiting a lot of customers, visiting a lot of Nordic excellent Nordic people. And you know, Nordic is a really great company in the sense that we have extremely solid, great customer relationships. We are innovating and developing with great engineers, great employees. And having said that, we also had a situation where all of our R&D was gathered in one and the same team. So one of the major things we have done in 2024 is to restructure our already customer-centric organization to become even much more customer-centric. The way we have done that is to create four product-centric business units and product teams, which are the Short Range business unit, Long Range, Wi-Fi, and Power Management IC business units. So with those four units, we have empowered them with more autonomy, and really already now start to see the effects of improved engineering execution coming from that. We have also with that created highways in our communication and exchange with our customers, in our innovation and new product developments, where we have now four highways so to speak, instead of having a smaller road which we had in that analogy in the past. So that's really the key thing which we have worked a lot about in 2024, and we are starting to see the effects of that. The team is very enthusiastic about these changes, and particularly our customers and sales force is very positive towards what we have done there, and we are starting to see the effects of it.
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Interviewer3:01
Fantastic. And what are your plans to grow the company in 2025?
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Vegard Wollan3:05
Yes, 2025. We don't talk specifically on a one-year target, but we have outlined an ambitious growth plan which we also strategized a lot around and developed in 2024. And that growth plan is about the next five to six years, where we have the ambition to grow the company at least at a 20% average growth rate year by year in the coming time. And if you compare that to our peers in the industry at the moment and exclude the generative AI semiconductors, you would see that that's actually fairly up there in the top part of the ambitions in the industry. That is being backed by us now entering an era of capitalizing on huge technology and R&D investments which have been done in the previous years. We have two 22 nanometer technology platforms, we are now starting to launch products on, and we are going to start launching a lot of products now, which started actually in August last year and it's going to continue through 2025 and 2026.
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Interviewer4:26
Fantastic. And following on from that, you know, Nordic is at the forefront of wireless technology, so I'm interested to see what trends in wireless and IoT you see coming up over the next 12 months.
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Vegard Wollan4:38
Wow, that's a very broad question and I appreciate that. Obviously, on top of everything overarching, we do see the mega trend of everything connected, all things connected continuing, and things connecting wirelessly continuing. And I would say also for us, we are not kind of depending on a specific killer app or use case for us to get that about 20% growth in the coming years. There is a lot of adoption still happening every quarter, every year. But overall, it's obviously in the all things getting connected, in both consumer electronics, in the industrial space and industrial IoT space, but also in some of our sub-segments, like in the long range space we have sharpened our focus now such that we see areas like asset tracking, metering applications which are energy, gas, water meter applications, as well as general cellular IoT applications finally happening and getting a much stronger adoption. So those are the markets and end markets and segments we are basing that growth strategy on.
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Interviewer5:59
Are there any products or innovations that you've got on show here at CES that you're particularly proud of or that you'd like to share with us?
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Vegard Wollan6:07
Absolutely, absolutely. We have lots of solid products here, and of course we are extremely proud of the latest launches, like the nRF9151 in the long range cellular space, which is by far the smallest footprint cellular product in a coin cell type size, world leading ultra low power. And it's a complete solution with the application processor as well as cellular radio modem in one and the same system in a package. So that's truly a product we are extremely proud about, and we have a lot of traction around at the moment. Also in the recent time now being enabled for non-terrestrial network, so NTN satellite communication. After that, we have just launched our 54 series products, which is the next generation and truly setting the standard for the next generation short range products. We do have about a 40% market share in the short range BLE, Bluetooth Low Energy market. And if we compare to our previous or existing products, 54 series is really setting the stage, setting the standards for the next generation products there, with more than two times the processing performance, one third of the energy consumption of the previous generation, ultra small packages. We have multiple families being launched, all completely integrated in a system on chip solution, from the L Series which we just launched, which is a dual CPU system so it has both an Arm CPU as well as a RISC-V CPU, and H family which is a quad CPU system where you have two Arm processors and two RISC-V processors to be utilized. So very powerful compute performance, and we are really excited about the traction we are getting on the 54 series at the moment.
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Interviewer8:38
I'm interested to hear how would you say Nordic differentiates itself from its competitors? It's a highly competitive market, so what makes you unique?
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Vegard Wollan8:48
Yeah, great question. I think if there are a couple of key things, three or four things, I would say we are ultra-low power. That's really in the DNA of the company. So everything we do is ultra-low power. We are in battery powered products, in sensors, consumer electronics, everything. And that's so important, that's why a lot of people are selecting us. We are very much focused on complete integration, with memories, we have internal Nordic IP memory products, low leakage design products, total integrated solution products which are making our chip-scale packaging extremely popular from Nordic, ultra dense and small products. We can have a look at the size of one of them afterwards. And then I would say the last of our uniqueness is probably the other part of the hardware is 50%, the other part is the software and the things that make it a total solution: software design kits, support, and really the stuff that excites the developer community and makes the engineers of our customers execute towards their timelines and even beat their timelines and be happy about their development environment.
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Interviewer10:28
With the IoT ecosystem growing quite rapidly, are there any particular industries that you're focusing on this year, or which industries do you think are going to really benefit from IoT?
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Vegard Wollan10:37
Yeah, so it's a multitude of areas we are focusing on there. So obviously in the consumer space, it's going to be both in the homes of people as well as in offices and in the workspace. Healthcare and medical solutions, as we see a lot around here at CES, is obviously an area we have big expectations for in the coming time. And then of course also more traditionally, industrial automation type products are becoming markets which are finally starting to move more so in that direction.
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Interviewer11:21
And finally, if you could sum it up for us, what would you say is Nordic's overall message here at CES 2025?
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Vegard Wollan11:29
We have got to the position now that we are starting to launch products at our new 22 nanometer platforms. We have invested a lot in those technologies, as I mentioned the nRF9151 and the 54 series being the first examples of these great technologies, results of huge investments over many, many years. So come and have a look at those products. They are really great to work with, extremely powerful from a processing performance point of view as well as low power.
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Interviewer12:08
Fantastic. Well, thank you for taking the time to speak with me, and stay tuned on Electronic Specifier to find out more news from Nordic Semiconductor. Thank you.
Fantastic. So, I'm still here at CES 2025 on the Nordic Semiconductor stand, and we're just going to have a walkthrough of one of their demos. So can you walk us through this demo and tell us what's going on?
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Demo Presenter12:36
Of course. So here we're showing off our latest product series, the nRF54L Series, and we're comparing that to our nRF52 series, which is the most popular Bluetooth Low Energy SoC in the market today and has basically taken us to 40% market share. And then the nRF54L series is next level, basically taking all the things that the developers and engineers love today and making it better: even lower power consumption, more processing power, and improved processing efficiency. And we have created this demo where we compare these things between the 54L series at the bottom here and the 52 series at the top, showing the current consumption. So we have Bluetooth Low Energy advertising here, and you can see that this is running, and if you look at the average current consumption, the 54L series is using two-thirds of the 52 series. And then we can switch to Bluetooth Low Energy connection, and here the devices are connected and sending some data. If you just give it a few seconds, we can look at the average power consumption again and still see that it's about two-thirds on the 54L series. And then we also know that MCU processing power and efficiency is really important, so here both of these are solving 1 million quadratic equations, and you can see that the 54L series is doing it much quicker than the 52 series and that the average power consumption is much much lower by doing this. So we actually have twice the processing power on the 54L series and three times the processing efficiency. And with this, you have great hardware, but we also provide the things that Nordic always provides: great product reliability and quality, tech support to all including hardware review and free antenna design review. And yeah, this product is available now, it's actually in full volume production as well, but we have development kits that can be bought from distributors like Mouser, DigiKey, and so on.
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Interviewer15:00
No, amazing. Thank you very much.
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Demo Presenter15:10
Thank you. So this is the Thingy 91x, and this is something that we launched very recently, where we have the new nRF9151 chip, we have the nRF5340 on there, we have the PMP1300 on there, and the nRF7002 Wi-Fi companion IC on there. So this is packed with Nordic ICs and a lot of different sensors and a battery. And this is something that we're using in this demo where we're showing off different asset tracking technologies. We're showing off single cell locationing using cellular towers with a single cell tower, multicell using multiple cell towers, Wi-Fi locationing using Wi-Fi access points to figure out where you are in the world, and then we also have a GNSS built into this. So in this demo, we have a lot of these Thingy 91 or similar devices around the world, and you can, using this demo, compare these different technologies because they have different accuracies and different power consumption, so you always have a trade-off. But here you can actually see this live. So if we click, for example, this one goes to that one, and then you can see that this is using single cell and this is the accuracy, and then you can see that it's actually here if it's using GNSS or GPS to locate this product. So yeah.