Broadcom Inc. is a global technology leader that designs, develops and supplies a broad range of semiconductor and infrastructure software solutions.
The company maintains and designs product and software development engineering resources at locations in the U.S., Asia, Europe, and Israel, providing the company with engineering expertise worldwide. The company combines global scale, engineering depth, broad product portfolio diversity, superior execution and operational focus to deliver categor...
Broadcom Inc. is a global technology leader that designs, develops and supplies a broad range of semiconductor and infrastructure software solutions.
The company maintains and designs product and software development engineering resources at locations in the U.S., Asia, Europe, and Israel, providing the company with engineering expertise worldwide. The company combines global scale, engineering depth, broad product portfolio diversity, superior execution and operational focus to deliver category-leading semiconductor and infrastructure software solutions.
The company develops semiconductor devices with a focus on complex digital and mixed signal complementary metal oxide semiconductor (‘CMOS’) based devices and analog III-V based products. The company offers thousands of products that are used in end products, such as enterprise and data center networking, including artificial intelligence (‘AI’) networking and connectivity, home connectivity, set-top boxes (‘STB’), broadband access, telecommunication equipment, smartphones and base stations, data center servers and storage systems, factory automation, power generation and alternative energy systems, and electronic displays. The company differentiates itself through its high-performance design and integration capabilities and focuses on developing semiconductor products for target markets where the company can earn attractive margins.
The company’s infrastructure software solutions help enterprises simplify their information technology (‘IT’) environments so they can increase business velocity and flexibility, and enable customers to plan, develop, deliver, automate, manage, and secure applications across mainframe, distributed, edge, mobile, and private and hybrid cloud platforms. Many of the largest companies in the world, including most of the Fortune 500, and many government agencies rely on the company’s software solutions to help manage and secure their on-premises and hybrid cloud environments, private cloud infrastructure and AI data centers. The company’s portfolio of industry-leading infrastructure and security software is designed to modernize, optimize, and secure the most complex private and hybrid cloud environments, enabling scalability, agility, automation, insights, resiliency and security, making it easy for customers to run their mission-critical workloads. The company also offers mission-critical fibre channel storage area networking (‘FC SAN’) products and related software in the form of modules, switches and subsystems incorporating multiple semiconductor products.
On November 22, 2023, the company acquired VMware (the ‘VMware Merger’). Following the VMware Merger, the company sold VMware’s end-user computing business to KKR & Co. Inc. With the VMware Merger, the company has bolstered its infrastructure software solutions and is able to offer the company’s customers a greater capacity to address complex IT infrastructure issues.
Business Strategy
The company’s strategy is focused on technology leadership and category-leading semiconductor and infrastructure software solutions delivering a comprehensive suite of innovative infrastructure technology products to the world’s leading business and government customers. The company seeks to achieve this through strategic acquisitions of businesses and technologies, as well as extensive internal research and development, to ensure the company’s products retain their technology market leadership.
Products and Markets
Semiconductor Solutions
Semiconductors are made by imprinting a network of electronic components onto a semiconductor wafer. These devices are designed to perform various functions such as processing, amplifying and selectively filtering electronic signals, controlling electronic system functions and processing, and transmitting and storing data. The company’s digital and mixed signal products are based on silicon wafers with CMOS transistors offering fast switching speeds and low power consumption, which are both critical design factors for the markets the company serves. The company also offers analog products, which are based on III-V semiconductor materials that have higher electrical conductivity than silicon, and thus tend to have better performance characteristics in radio frequency (‘RF’), and optoelectronic applications. III-V refers to elements from the 3rd and 5th groups in the periodic table of chemical elements. Examples of these materials used in the company’s products are gallium arsenide (‘GaAs’) and indium phosphide (‘InP’).
The company’s product portfolio ranges from discrete devices to complex sub-systems that include multiple device types and may also incorporate firmware for interfacing between analog and digital systems. In some cases, the company’s products include mechanical hardware that interfaces with optoelectronic or capacitive sensors. The company focuses on markets that require high quality, leading technology and integrated performance characteristics of the company’s products.
Data Center, Service Provider, and Enterprise Networking Solutions. The company provides semiconductor solutions for managing the movement of data in data center, service provider, and enterprise networking applications. The company’s products offer an enhanced, open, standards-based Ethernet network interface card (‘NIC’) and switching solution to resolve connectivity bottlenecks in data centers, particularly in AI data centers where compute bandwidth and cluster sizes grow rapidly.
Ethernet Switching & Routing: Ethernet is a ubiquitous interconnection technology that enables high-performance and cost-effective networking infrastructure. The company offers a broad set of Ethernet switching and routing products that are optimized for AI data center, service provider and enterprise networks. In the data center market, the company’s high capacity, low latency, switching silicon supports advanced protocols around virtualization and multi-pathing. The company’s Ethernet switching fabric technologies provide the ability to build highly scalable flat networks supporting tens of thousands of servers. The company’s service provider switch portfolio enables carrier networks to support prioritized delivery of data traffic in the wireless backhaul, access, aggregation and core of their networks. For enterprise networks, the company offers product families with secure, encrypted switching capabilities and support lower power modes that comply with industry standards around energy efficient Ethernet.
Custom Silicon Solutions: The company provides advanced technology and intellectual property (‘IP’) platforms for customers to design and develop application specific integrated circuits (‘ASICs’) targeting AI and high-performance computing, networking and storage applications. The company’s custom silicon provides the platform to integrate embedded logic, memory, serializer/deserializer (‘SerDes’) technology, IP cores and processor cores. ASICs are custom products built to individual customers specifications.
Physical Layer Devices: These devices, also referred to as PHYs, are transceivers that enable the reception and transmission of Ethernet data packets over a physical medium such as copper wire or optical fibers. The company’s high performance Ethernet transceivers are built upon a proprietary digital signal processing communication architecture optimized for high-speed network connections and support the latest standards and advanced features, such as energy efficient Ethernet, data encryption and time synchronization. The company also offers a range of automotive Ethernet products, including PHYs, switches and camera microcontrollers, to meet growing consumer demand for in-vehicle connectivity and smart vision.
Fiber Optic Components: The company supplies a wide array of optical components to the Ethernet networking, storage, and access, metro- and long-haul telecommunication markets. The company’s optical components enable the high speed reception and transmission of data through optical fibers.
Mobile Device Connectivity Solutions. The company provides a broad variety of RF semiconductor devices, wireless connectivity solutions, custom touch controllers and inductive charging solutions for the wireless market.
RF Semiconductor Devices: The company’s RF semiconductor devices selectively filter, as well as amplify and route, RF signals. Filters enable modern wireless communication systems to support a large number of subscribers simultaneously by ensuring that the multiple transmissions and receptions of voice and data streams do not interfere with each other. The company was among the first to deliver commercial film bulk acoustic resonator (‘FBAR’) filters that offer technological advantages over competing filter technologies, to allow mobile handsets to function more efficiently in today's congested RF spectrum. FBAR technology has a significant market share within the cellular handset market. The company’s RF products include multi-chip module front-end modules that integrate transmit/receive switching and filtering functions for multiple frequency bands, filter modules and discrete filters, all using the company’s proprietary FBAR technology.
The company’s expertise in FBAR technology, amplifier design, and module integration enables the company to offer industry-leading performance in cellular RF transceiver applications.
Connectivity Solutions: The company’s connectivity solutions include discrete and integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth solutions, and global positioning system/global navigation satellite system (‘GPS/GNSS’) receivers, designed for use in mobile devices, including smartphones, tablets and wearable products.
Wi-Fi allows devices on a local area network to communicate wirelessly, adding the convenience of mobility to the utility of high-speed data networks. The company offers a family of high performance, low power Wi-Fi chipsets. Bluetooth is a low power technology that enables direct connectivity between devices. The company offers Bluetooth silicon and software solutions that enable manufacturers to easily and cost-effectively add Bluetooth functionality. These solutions include combination chips that offer integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth functionality, which provides significant performance advantages over discrete solutions.
The company also offers a family of GPS, assisted-GPS and GNSS semiconductor products, software and data services. These products are part of a broader location platform that leverages a broad range of communications technologies, including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS, to provide more accurate location and navigation capabilities.
Custom Touch Controllers: The company’s touch controllers process signals from touch screens in mobile handsets and tablets.
Inductive Charging ASICs: The company’s custom inductive charging ASIC devices offer high efficiency and are highly integrated solutions for mobile and wearable devices.
Servers and Storage System Solutions. The company provides semiconductor solutions for enabling secure movement of digital data to and from host machines, such as servers, personal computers and storage systems, to the underlying storage devices, such as hard disk drives (‘HDD’) and solid-state drives (‘SSD’).
SAS, RAID & PCIe Products: The company provides serial attached small computer system interface (SAS) and redundant array of independent disks (RAID) controller and adapter solutions to server and storage system original equipment manufacturers (‘OEMs’). These solutions enable secure and high-speed data transmission between a host computer, such as a server, and storage peripheral devices, such as HDD, SSD and optical disk drives and disk and tape-based storage systems. Some of these solutions are delivered as stand-alone semiconductors, typically as a controller. Other solutions are delivered as circuit boards, known as adapter products, which incorporate the company’s semiconductors onto a circuit board with other features. RAID technology is a critical part of the company’s server storage connectivity solutions as it provides protection against the loss of critical data resulting from HDD failures.
The company also provides interconnect semiconductors that support the peripheral component interconnect express (‘PCIe’) communication standards. PCIe is the primary interconnection mechanism inside computing systems today.
Fibre Channel Products: The company provides fibre channel host bus adapters, which connect host computers such as servers to FC SANs.
Ethernet NIC Controllers: The company’s Ethernet NIC controllers are designed for high-performance virtualization, intelligent flow processing, secure data center connectivity, and machine learning.
HDD & SSD Solutions: The company provides read channel-based system-on-chip (‘SoC’) and preamplifiers to HDD OEMs. These are the critical chips required to read, write and protect data. An HDD SoC is an integrated circuit (‘IC’) that combines the functionality of a read channel, serial interface, memory and a hard disk controller in a small, high-performance, low-power and cost-effective package. Read channels convert analog signals that are generated by reading the stored data on the physical media into digital signals.
In addition, the company sells preamplifiers, which are complex, high speed, mixed signal devices that enable writing and reading data to and from the HDD heads. The preamplifier interfaces with the SoC to provide the electronics data path in a HDD.
The company also provides custom flash controllers to SSD OEMs. An SSD stores data in flash memory instead of on a hard disk, providing high speed access to the data. Flash controllers manage the underlying flash memory in SSDs, performing critical functions such as reading and writing data to and from the flash memory and performing error correction, wear leveling and bad block management.
Broadband Solutions. The company provides semiconductor solutions for enabling STBs and broadband access applications.
Set-Top Box: The company offers complete SoC platform solutions for cable, satellite, Internet Protocol television, over-the-top and terrestrial STBs. The company’s products enable global service providers to introduce new and enhanced technologies and services in STBs, including transcoding, digital video recording functionality, higher definition video processing, increased networking capabilities, and more tuners to enable faster channel change and more simultaneous recordings. The company is also enabling service providers in deploying High Efficiency Video Coding (‘HEVC’), a video compression format that is a successor to the H.264/MPEG-4 format. HEVC enables ultra-high definition (‘Ultra HD’) services by effectively doubling the capacity of existing networks to deploy new or existing content. The company’s families of STB solutions support the complete range of resolutions, from standard definition to high definition to Ultra HD.
Broadband Access: The company offers complete SoC platform solutions for digital subscriber line (‘DSL’), cable, passive optical networking (‘PON’) and wireless local area network for both consumer premise equipment (‘CPE’) and central office (‘CO’) deployments. The company’s CPE devices are used in broadband modems, residential gateways and Wi-Fi access points and routers. The company’s CO devices, including DSL Access Multiplexer (‘DSLAM’), cable modem termination systems and PON optical line termination medium access controllers, are empowering modern operator broadband infrastructure. The company’s products enable global service providers to continue deploying next generation broadband access technologies across multiple standards, including G.fast, Data Over Cable Service Interface Specifications (‘DOCSIS’), PON and Wi-Fi to provide more bandwidth and faster speeds to consumers.
Factory Automation, Renewable Energy and Automotive Electronic Solutions. The company provides a broad variety of products for the general industrial and automotive markets, including optocouplers, industrial fiber optics, industrial and medical sensors, motion encoders, light emitting diode devices, and Ethernet ICs. The company’s industrial products are used in a diverse set of applications, spanning industrial automation, power generation and distribution systems, medical systems and equipment, defense and aerospace, and vehicle subsystems, including those used in electric vehicle powertrain, infotainment and advanced driver assistance systems.
Infrastructure Software
The company’s infrastructure software solutions offer customers greater choice and flexibility to build, run, manage, connect and protect applications and data at scale across data center and private and hybrid cloud environments.
Private Cloud Software Portfolio. The company’s private cloud infrastructure software delivers public cloud scale and agility with private cloud security, resilience and performance, and low overall total cost of ownership. The company’s VMware software supports customers’ digital innovation with faster infrastructure modernization, a unified cloud experience and better platform security and cyber resiliency. The full portfolio is available directly from Broadcom, resellers and distributors, hyperscale cloud providers, value-added OEMs and VMware cloud service provider partners. VMware Cloud Foundation (‘VCF’) provides license portability, which enables customers to purchase subscriptions of VCF software and move their VCF environments between on-premises data centers and supported cloud endpoints. Advanced services for Private AI provide customers with the benefits of AI without having to compromise control of data, privacy, and compliance by bringing the AI model to customers’ data.
VCF: VCF delivers integrated, enterprise-class compute, networking, storage, management, and security across any environment. VCF includes native Kubernetes to support both virtual machines and containerized workloads on a single platform, enables advanced AI and machine learning workloads at enterprise scale and offers integrated data services capabilities. The company’s solutions enhance its customers’ ability to continuously optimize performance and costs, protect the business from threats and enable the business to focus on outcomes instead of operations through advanced observability and insights.
VMware Cloud Foundation Edge: The edge compute stack designed to deliver frictionless management of edge apps and infrastructure across many sites with limited resources. It efficiently manages infrastructure and applications at dispersed sites.
vSphere Foundation IT Infrastructure Optimization: vSphere Foundation supports modern IT requirements by boosting operational efficiency, elevating security and supercharging workload performance, all in the support of accelerating innovation.
Private AI: This solution enables organizations to use generative AI technologies while addressing privacy and compliance needs of the organization.
Live Recovery: This solution helps organizations combat the evolving threat landscape through solutions and technologies that enable organizational resilience through rapid recovery of applications, data and critical business services.
Telco Cloud Platform: This solution supports network operations for telecom operators and communications service providers to modernize their infrastructure and allows them to create monetizable services. The modernization of the telecom infrastructure is critical to enabling operational agility, onboarding and delivering services much faster across domains and simplifying operations with automation.
Tanzu Software Portfolio. The company’s application development, operations and optimization solutions help leading enterprises deliver highly performant applications and best-in-class user experiences.
Tanzu Platform: This cloud native application platform accelerates software delivery, providing platform engineering teams with enhanced governance and operational efficiency while reducing toil and complexity for development teams. Tanzu Platform includes access to content, including enterprise-ready curated distributions of open source software technologies used for storing and processing data. It also includes Tanzu AI Solutions, a set of capabilities that help application teams deliver generative AI-powered, intelligent applications quickly, safely, and at scale. Tanzu Platform also offers teams full-stack visibility from applications to infrastructure and efficient modern application lifecycle management across public and private clouds with Cloud Foundry and/or with any conformant Kubernetes.
Tanzu Data: A suite of data services that provides advanced analytical data warehouse capabilities and real-time transactions and processing at massive scale with an in-memory data grid with vector database capabilities for AI use cases.
Tanzu CloudHealth: This solution simplifies financial management, streamlines operations, and improves organizational collaboration across the multi-cloud environment.
Tanzu Labs: This service provides hands-on cloud native consulting services to help customers move software to production while strengthening platform engineering skills.
VeloCloud Portfolio. VeloCloud provides networking solutions to connect, secure and optimize workloads across distributed locations. By combining the company’s VeloRAIN (Robust AI Networking) architecture with seamless connectivity and outcome-based quality of service, VeloCloud provides users and devices with compute and connectivity to optimize performance, security and reliability across fixed or mobile environments, while simplifying operations.
SD-WAN and SASE: The company’s SD-WAN (software-defined wide area network) solution, whether a part of the company’s SASE (secure access service edge) architecture offering or standalone, provides a platform for enterprises to distribute modern applications and advanced AI systems while delivering security and ubiquity of access for distributed applications. The company’s SD-WAN or SASE solutions bring software-defined networking, security and AIOps together to support ubiquitous access across fiber, cellular and satellite for optimal performance and availability for modern applications.
VeloRAIN: The company’s architecture uses AI or machine learning to improve the performance and security of distributed workloads.
Fixed Wireless Access: This solution provides enterprises with reliable 5G connectivity to businesses and enterprise branches at the edge while optimizing the network through intelligence and network programmability.
Application Networking and Security Software Portfolio. The company’s application networking and security software delivers zero-trust lateral security and load balancing solutions enabling global digital organizations to combat malware and ransomware. These software-defined solutions provide distributed and scale-out architectures, deep visibility, plug-and-play operations and self-service consumption. Customers can deploy the company’s solutions at speed and operate them at scale across all their private cloud applications, which can reduce the total cost of ownership.
Lateral Security Firewall: This solution enables access control for applications, protects against lateral movement of threats and provides security policy recommendations based on the workloads, and enables isolation of sensitive applications for enhanced regulatory compliance.
Advanced Threat Prevention: This solution integrates multiple threat detection and prevention technologies to deliver comprehensive protection from malware and ransomware attacks, including utilizing behavior-based techniques and advanced correlations to identify lateral threat movement and ransomware threat campaigns.
Advanced Load Balancing: This solution simplifies and accelerates application deployments and enhances application availability and resiliency to deliver load balancing at the speed of applications, allowing customers to leverage built-in automation to deploy load balancing as code as part of DevOps workflows for rapid infrastructure roll out.
Mainframe Software Portfolio. The company’s mainframe software provides market-leading DevOps, AIOps, Cybersecurity, Workload Automation, Data Management, and Foundational Software solutions which enable customers to embrace open tools and technologies, innovate with their mainframe as part of their hybrid environment, and extend the value of their mainframe investments. The company’s commitment to partnering with the company’s customers goes beyond products and technology. Through the company’s unique Beyond Code programs the company addresses challenges, such as skills development, staffing, change management and cost-saving initiatives that drive greater overall business success with the platform.
Operational Analytics & Management: These solutions combine big data, machine learning and AI with mainframe expertise to deliver meaningful and actionable insights to augment and automate day-to-day operations and deliver exceptional customer experiences.
Workload Automation: These solutions reduce manual effort by enabling customers to proactively optimize resources and orchestrate automation across enterprise applications and systems.
Databases & Data Management: These high-performance databases and management tools store, organize, and manage mainframe data to ensure optimal performance, efficient administration, and reliability of critical systems. Customers can also manage their mainframe data storage using modern mainframe solutions that securely store data on any device that customers choose, including the cloud. These software-only solutions are designed to save on costs and maintain confidence in data security.
Application Development & Testing: These solutions enable customers to accelerate software delivery while increasing code quality through the use of the company’s agile processes and tools, and DevOps solutions. The company’s open-first strategy helps customers modernize their mainframe environment through the use of open source and open application programming technologies across people, process, tooling and applications, resulting in greater synergy and alignment with their corporate IT environment.
Identity & Access Management: These solutions manage mainframe access and elevate it with modern practices such as multi-factor authentication and privileged user management, and support all external security managers.
Compliance & Data Protection: These solutions protect crucial mainframe data to ensure compliance, identify risk, proactively respond to potential threats, and reduce those risks to lighten the load on security management with automated identification and authorization cleanup.
Security Insights Platform: This solution helps ensure a trusted environment for customers and their employees by quickly interpreting and assessing mainframe security posture, identifying risks and developing remediation steps on an ongoing and ad hoc basis. This data is available for use with in-house tools for security information and event management.
Beyond Code Programs: These value-added offerings help ensure the company’s customers get the most out of their mainframe investments. These offerings unlock additional value for organizations in areas such as educating and upskilling the workforce, providing expert guidance and support for change events, and uncovering opportunities to improve efficiency and save costs.
Distributed Software Portfolio. The company’s distributed software solutions enable global enterprises to optimize the planning, development and delivery of software, powering their business-critical digital services. The company’s solutions are designed to enable customers to innovate, improve customer experience, and drive profitability by aligning business, development, and operational teams. The company’s products, organized in the domains of ValueOps, DevOps, and AIOps, deliver end-to-end visibility across all stages of the digital lifecycle and help the company’s customers realize better business outcomes and better experiences for their customers.
ValueOps: This solution delivers value stream management capabilities that enable customers to schedule, track, and manage work throughout its lifecycle from investment planning to execution. It aligns business and development teams across the enterprise, increasing transparency, reducing inefficiencies, and improving time to value.
DevOps: This solution offers capabilities that empower users of the company’s agile processes and tools to track development progress and deploy releases confidently with assurance of feature completeness, high-quality and reduced risk. Key stakeholders have a single view of key insights into release progress, health, quality, defect trends, and metrics that drive focus, gauge readiness, and help to ensure successful, quality releases.
AIOps: This solution combines application, infrastructure and network monitoring and correlation with intelligent remediation capabilities to help customers create more resilient production environments and improve customer experience.
Enterprise Security Portfolio. The company’s Enterprise Security solutions help organizations and governments secure against threats and compliance risks by protecting their users and data on any app, device, or network. The company’s integrated cyber defense approach simplifies cybersecurity with comprehensive solutions designed to secure critical business assets across on-premises and cloud infrastructures. Enterprise Security solutions utilize rich threat intelligence from a global network of security engineers, threat analyst and researchers, as well as advanced AI and machine learning engines, enabling customers to protect data, connect authorized users with trusted applications, and detect and respond to the most advanced targeted attacks.
Endpoint Security: Endpoints are the critical last line of defense against cyber attackers. The company’s Symantec and Carbon Black endpoint security solutions prevent, detect and respond to emerging threats across all devices and operating systems including laptops, desktops, tablets, mobile phones, servers and cloud workloads through an AI driven security console and single agent.
Network Security: Email and web access are the lifeblood and essential communication means for every modern organization. The company has a full array of network security solutions, as well as a shared set of advanced threat protection technologies to stop inbound and outbound threats targeting end users, information and key infrastructure.
Information Security: Information protection and compliance is critical to managing risk. The company offers integrated information security solutions, based on an efficient, single-policy that can be applied across the entire environment, to help organizations identify and protect risky users, applications and their most sensitive data everywhere across endpoints, on-premises networks, cloud services and private applications.
Application Security: Applications are increasingly targeted by cyber attackers. The company’s solutions secure critical systems, prevent unwanted changes, and ensure continuous compliance with regulatory mandates. Carbon Black solutions employ a positive security model that secures often overlooked use cases such as end-of-life operating systems, critical systems, fixed function devices, and air-gapped systems.
Identity Security: User identities are under attack by cyber criminals hoping to exploit their access and privileges and do harm. The company’s solution mitigates these attacks by positively identifying legitimate users, enforcing granular access control policies, and streamlining access governance to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive resources and data.
FC SAN Management. The company also offers mission-critical FC SAN products designed to help customers reduce the cost and complexity of managing business information within a shared data storage environment, enabling high levels of availability of mission-critical applications in the form of modules, switches and subsystems incorporating multiple semiconductor products. The company delivers reliable and simplified management of these FC SAN products through the company’s software-based management tools designed to maximize uptime, dramatically simplify storage area networking deployment and management, and provide high levels of visibility and insight into the storage network. The company’s Brocade Fibre Channel switch products provide interconnection, bandwidth and high-speed switching between servers and storage devices which are in a FC SAN.
Payment Security Portfolio. The company’s payment security suite is a software as a service (‘SaaS’)-based payment authentication service to help banks and merchants protect against fraud and ensure a hassle-free online shopping experience for their customers.
Customers, Sales and Distribution
The company sells its products through its direct sales force and a select network of distributors and channel partners globally. Distributors and OEMs, or their contract manufacturers, typically account for the substantial majority of the company’s semiconductor sales. A relatively small number of customers account for a significant portion of the company’s net revenue. Sales to distributors accounted for 48% of the company’s net revenue for fiscal year 2024. Aggregate sales to the company’s top five end customers, through all channels, accounted for approximately 40% of the company’s net revenue for fiscal year 2024.
Many of the company’s semiconductor customers design products in North America or Europe that are then manufactured in Asia. To serve customers around the world, the company has strategically developed relationships with large global electronic component distributors, complemented by a number of regional distributors with customer relationships based on their respective product ranges. The company also sells its products to a wide variety of OEMs or their contract manufacturers. The company has established strong relationships with leading OEM customers across multiple target markets. The company’s direct sales force focuses on supporting the company’s large OEM customers, and has specialized product and service knowledge that enables the company to sell specific offerings at key levels throughout a customer’s organization. Certain customers require the company to contract with them directly and with specified intermediaries, such as contract manufacturers. Many of the company’s major customer relationships have been in place for many years and are often the result of years of collaborative product development. This has enabled the company to build its extensive IP portfolio and develop critical expertise regarding the company’s customers’ requirements, including substantial system-level knowledge. This collaboration has provided the company with key insights into the company’s customers' businesses and has enabled the company to be more efficient and productive and to better serve the company’s target markets and customers. Many of the company’s customers and their contract manufacturers often require time critical delivery of the company’s products to multiple locations around the world. With sales offices located in various countries, the company’s primary warehouse in Malaysia, and dedicated regional customer support call centers, where the company addresses customer issues and handle logistics and other order fulfillment requirements, the company is well-positioned to support the company’s customers throughout the design, technology transfer and manufacturing stages across all geographies.
The company’s software customers generally consist of large enterprises that have computing environments from multiple vendors and are in most major industries worldwide, including banks, insurance companies, other financial services providers, government agencies, global IT service providers, telecommunication providers, transportation companies, manufacturers, technology companies, retailers, educational organizations and health care institutions. The company’s private cloud infrastructure suite of solutions are available directly from Broadcom, resellers and distributors, hyperscale cloud providers, value-added OEMs and VMware cloud service provider partners. VCF provides license portability, which enables customers to purchase subscriptions of VCF software and move their VCF environments between on-premises data centers and supported cloud endpoints. The company remains focused on strengthening relationships and increasing penetration within the company’s existing core, mainframe, VMware, and Symantec endpoint customers and expanding the adoption of the company’s enterprise software offerings with these customers. The company’s enterprise-wide license model will continue to offer the company’s customers reduced complexity, more flexibility and an easier renewal process that will help drive revenue growth.
Manufacturing
The majority of the company’s front-end wafer manufacturing operations is outsourced to external foundries, including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (‘TSMC’). The company uses third-party contract manufacturers for a significant majority of the company’s assembly and test operations, including TSMC, Advanced Semiconductor Engineering, Inc., Foxconn Technology Group, Amkor Technology, Inc. and Siliconware Precision Industries Co., Ltd.
Competition
In semiconductor solutions, the company competes with integrated device manufacturers, fabless semiconductor companies and the internal resources of large integrated OEMs, such as Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., Amlogic Inc., Analog Devices, Inc., Cisco Systems, Inc., Coherent Corp., Hamamatsu Photonics K.K., Heidenhain Corporation, iC-Haus GmbH, Intel Corporation, Lumentum Holdings Inc., MACOM Technology Solutions Holdings, Inc., Marvell Technology, Inc., MaxLinear, Inc., MediaTek Inc., Microchip Technology Incorporated, Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, Murata Manufacturing Co., Ltd., NVIDIA Corporation, NXP Semiconductors N.V., ON Semiconductor Corporation, OSRAM Licht AG, Qorvo, Inc., Qualcomm Inc., Realtek Semiconductor Corp., Renesas Electronics Corporation, Skyworks Solutions, Inc., STMicroelectronics N.V., Sumitomo Corporation, Synaptics Incorporated, Texas Instruments, Inc., TDK-EPC Corporation, Toshiba Corporation, and Wolfspeed, Inc. (f/k/a Cree, Inc.).
In infrastructure software, the company competes with large enterprise software vendors who continue to expand their product and service offerings and consolidate offerings into broad product lines, and smaller, niche players focused on specific markets, such as Atlassian Corporation, Plc, BeyondTrust Corporation, BMC Software Inc., Cisco Systems, Inc., CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc., CyberArk Software, Ltd., Dino-Software Corporation, Fortinet, Inc., Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company, International Business Machines Corporation, Microsoft Corporation, New Relic, Inc., OpenText Corporation, Oracle Corporation, Palo Alto Networks, Inc., Proofpoint, Inc., Rocket Software, Inc., SailPoint Technologies Holdings, Inc., Salesforce.com, Inc., ServiceNow, Inc., SolarWinds Corporation, Versa Networks, Inc., and Zscaler, Inc.
Intellectual Property
As of November 3, 2024, the company had 20,870 U.S. and other patents and 2,650 U.S. and other pending patent applications. The expiration dates of the company’s patents range from 2024 to 2043, with a small number of patents expiring in the near future, none of which are expected to be material to the company’s IP portfolio.
Governmental Regulations
The company is subject to regulation by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration and similar health and safety laws in other jurisdictions.
In addition, the company's business is subject to various import/export regulations, such as the U.S. Export Administration Regulations, and applicable executive orders, and rules of industrial standards bodies, like the International Organization for Standardization, as well as regulation by other agencies, such as the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
Seasonality
Historically, the company’s net revenue has typically been higher in the second half of the fiscal year than in the first half, primarily due to seasonality in the company’s wireless communications products. These products have historically experienced seasonality due to launches of new mobile devices manufactured by the company’s OEM customers. However, from time to time, typical seasonality and industry cyclicality are overshadowed by other factors such as wider macroeconomic effects, the timing of customer deployments, significant product transitions and launches by large OEMs, particularly with the company’s AI and wireless communications products. The company has a diversified business portfolio and its overall revenue is less susceptible to seasonal variations as a result of this diversification.
History
Broadcom Inc. was founded in 1961. The company was incorporated in Delaware in 2018.
