InterDigital at William Blair Conference: Strategic Growth Insights

On Tuesday, 03 June 2025, InterDigital Inc. (NASDAQ:IDCC) presented at the 45th Annual William Blair Growth Stock Conference. CEO Liren Chen outlined the company’s robust growth strategy, highlighting both challenges and opportunities. InterDigital’s strong business momentum and strategic focus on innovation in wireless, video, and AI technologies were emphasized, alongside its commitment to maintaining a strong balance sheet and returning capital to shareholders.

Key Takeaways

• InterDigital aims for $1 billion in total revenue by 2030, driven by growth in smartphones, consumer electronics, IoT, and cloud streaming video.
• The company has signed over 40 agreements, with an economic value exceeding $3.7 billion.
• InterDigital’s largest contract with Apple is a seven-year deal, providing 15% higher revenue than the previous agreement.
• The company is targeting a 14% year-over-year growth in recurring revenue and maintaining a 60% adjusted EBITDA margin.
• Significant investments are being made in 6G and next-generation codecs to secure future growth.

Financial Results

InterDigital has demonstrated impressive financial performance:

• Revenue has grown at a 20-25% compound annual growth rate over the past four to five years.
• The adjusted EBITDA margin is increasing, growing faster than revenue.
• The company has increased its dividend by 50% in the last twelve months and reduced shares outstanding by 45% since 2011.
• Earnings per share have grown by more than 600% in recent years.

Operational Updates

InterDigital’s business development highlights include:

• Signing over 40 new agreements in the past four years, with a total economic value of more than $3.7 billion.
• Smartphone licensing has expanded from 50% to 80%, contributing over $400 million in recurring revenue, with a target of $500 million in a few years.
• Consumer electronics licensing generates $86-87 million annually, with a target of $200 million by 2030.
• Connected cars are expected to reach nearly 100% in the coming years, from roughly half today.

Future Outlook

InterDigital’s growth strategy focuses on:

• Achieving 14% year-over-year growth in recurring revenue and maintaining a 60% adjusted EBITDA margin.
• Targeting over $600 million in adjusted EBITDA by 2030.
• Investing in 6G, AI, and next-generation codecs.
• Expanding markets in smartphones, consumer electronics, IoT, and cloud streaming video, with a revenue target of $1 billion by 2030.

Q&A Highlights

Key points from the Q&A session include:

• 94% of 2024 revenue is expected from fixed fee agreements, minimizing tariff impacts.
• The Apple contract, signed in 2022, extends to September 2029 and is 15% higher than the previous agreement.
• Litigation is pursued only against entities infringing on InterDigital’s intellectual property without a license.
• The company focuses on fair competition among licensees, aiming to secure payments for past infringements while remaining open to negotiations.

For a more detailed understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript.

Full transcript - 45th Annual William Blair Growth Stock Conference:

Arjun Bhatia, Analyst, William Blair: Alright. We’ll go ahead and get thanks everyone for coming. For those of you that don’t know me, I’m Arjun Bhatia. I’m the analyst here at William Blair that covers InterDigital. For a full list of disclosures, you can go to williamblair.com.

It’s a pleasure to have the CEO of InterDigital, Liren Chen. Liren, thanks for coming.

Liren Chen, CEO, InterDigital: Thank you.

Arjun Bhatia, Analyst, William Blair: Liren’s gonna run through presentation, give a little background on the company, and then we’ll go from there. So far is yours, Liren.

Liren Chen, CEO, InterDigital: All right. Thank you. Thank you, Arjun. Good afternoon. Thank you for joining me.

My name is Liren. I’m the CEO for the company. Before I get into my presentation, may I have a a raise of hand from the audience to see how many of you already knew something about interdigital? Okay. That’s pretty good.

And, so for those of you who met me for the first time, I’ll go through our prepared remark. You know, there’s we actually have quite a few slides because we want to distribute the slides offline. And then I’m trying to hopefully use a few, five to ten minutes for Q and A in the end. Okay? All right.

I’ll get started here. What I’ll cover is we’ll go through our company introduction, who we do, who we are, what we do, the business momentum we have built and also I’ll present to you our long term growth strategy by long term, all the way to 02/1930. This is a one pager. We are a technology company. Our company was founded in 1972, so we are, you know, fifty plus years in business.

We do foundational research. I’ll explain to you what exactly does foundational mean. We focus on wireless, video, and artificial intelligence. We build a very large and, evergreen patent portfolio, based on our research and we licensed them to some of the largest, vendors in our industry and our industry is growing. Our technology is more important than ever.

We have built a lot of business momentum by signing new customers and the bottom is our financial result, driving revenue growth, driving, earning per share even faster than revenue and we have very healthy margin and we are sitting you know, a large amount of cash position, which I’ll also explain our capital allocation strategy in a later slide. These are our exact team. My name is Lurin. I joined the company four years ago. Before I joined InterDigital, I was Qualcomm for twenty five years.

I’m an inventor. I’m an attorney. I’m also a licensing, veteran. I’m not gonna go through all of them, but it’s important for you guys to know that I believe we have put together the, best team in our industry. Each one of us are expert in our field.

We all have decades and decades of occurrence, more importantly, we work really well together as a team. Let me explain to you our business model. Okay? Our business model is somewhat complicated and very often misunderstood. We are a foundational technology company.

We invest in research, try to be roughly five to ten years ahead of the curve. We employ some of the best people in the industry. Our company is not gigantic. We have roughly 500 people, full time employees, but we are in seven different countries, we are in 14 different sites. We try to get the best people in the world.

Our R and D site generally is co located with the best university in the world. We try to get them when they are in PhD program. We offer them internship. We hope they work for us afterwards. What separates us from most of our competitors, we have the highest concentration of inventors.

Most of our employees are scientists and engineers. Although scientists and engineers, ninety plus percent of my inventors. In most other company, that percentage is in single digit percentage. In us, think of us as an inventory driven company. Over our R and D work, we build one of the largest patent portfolio, we license them, but that’s only half the story.

The other half of the story is we participate and lead in standard development. By standard, I mean open global standard that driving enormous amount of value creation and standard is how we disseminate our primary technology to many vendors and to many customers worldwide. Let me get into the next slide here. And, again, I’ll just focus on we have three pillars of research. We do foundational research in wireless.

By wireless, I mean cellular technology. I also mean WiFi technology. And we are one of the key driver for video technology. I’ll explain why video is super important in a later slide. We are also a AI technology company.

We have been driving AI ever.

Arjun Bhatia, Analyst, William Blair: This presentee

Liren Chen, CEO, InterDigital: driver for video technology. I’ll explain why video is super important in a later slide. We are also a AI technology company. We have been driving AI evolution for the last multiple decades. And combined, we are one of the very few people in the world who know all three of them.

No wireless, no video, and no AI in combination. Is video really important? Right? So as you guys probably know, radio traffic drive a vast majority of Internet traffic. The number varies quarter by quarter.

Roughly, it’s 80% of the Internet traffic driven by radio. That’s true in the fixed network. That’s also true in your smartphone. Right? People don’t buy smartphone to send text message, even they do.

But the real driving use case for video for smartphone is video sharing, uploading, downloading in real time, and streaming all these different things. This is the illustration of the power of video codec. I’ll walk you through it. This is a four k movie. Let’s call it, you know, roughly two hours long, a little bit longer than two hours.

Uncompressed, this will be about 11 terabytes. It’s hard to put our arm around what is 11 terabytes, right? So if you try to download a movie uncompressed, we’d say a typical home speed network, let’s call it, it will take you close to seven days to download that movie. Okay? With compression, we are taking if you draw on the sort of bottom right corner, that’s compressed with multiple generation of codec, which is a compression algorithm.

We are able to compress the content roughly a thousand times to one. And we are driving multiple generation of video codec. Every generation is generally, you know, 30 to 50% better. By better, I mean, you are using less bandwidth for the same amount of traffic or you’re the same traffic for much higher resolution, better user experience. Okay.

That’s sort of the the core. And as I said earlier, global standard system is really important because standard promote compatibility, standard support interoperability. Those two are related but not the same concept. Just without standard, your iPhone would not be able to talk to Android phone. Without standard, you would not have a device that support five gs, four gs, three gs at the same time.

When you travel to different places, your phone wouldn’t be able to work everywhere, right? So in the global standard, it offer you scalability, lower the barrier to entry, frankly, a lot of economic value, but that’s also what make our engineers’, you know, innovation so much more effective in many, many different use cases. And, we are we don’t just participate, we did them. Okay. I’ll demonstrate in later slide what do I mean.

But we work with everyone in the industry from universities to research companies to our peer company to implementing of the standard. We work with all of them. We share our technology. And those are some of our engineers. Okay?

I did not download those pictures from the Internet, random people. These are our employees. And, I for respect of privacy, so I took their name off, but they are all our employees. They are some of the most respected technical expert in the field, but they also happen to be leading many important standard creation. Their chairs are very different things here.

I know the fund is very small, but you will recognize some of them as wireless technology standards, some of them is video technology, some of them literally is artificial and machine learning standard bodies and we are leading them. Right? So just a kissing point. Right? So I I think everyone heard of five g, which is our cellular standard.

By the way, our engineers are already working on six g, which will come out by end of the decade, 2029, ’20 ’30 time frame. In three g p p, which is a standard body that defines five g and six g, there’s only 15 chair position. That’s everything. There’s many, many company in our industry try to fight for those leadership position. By the way, those leadership position are not they are elected.

They’re elected by participating company. They are based on, you know, what do we bring to the table, how valuable you are in the value. As of today, InterDigital is one of the very few companies having more than two chairs, more than one chair. And so there’s really 15 of them in the world and we currently occupy multiple chairs. That just demonstrate to you, our engineers are very well respected.

Our company is being viewed as a leader in our industry. All right. So this is not just me. I’m the CEO for the company. Obviously, I’m biased.

I say, our company is awesome. You know, every CEO said their company is awesome. But this is ranked by LexisNexis, which is, one of the more respected company. They published an annual report. They identified the 100 most innovative company in the world.

It’s not just in our industries, it’s everybody. And for four years in our role, we have been ranked as one of the most respected company, most innovative company in the world. This specifically says our technology lead the current impact, but more importantly, impact the future. Right. Now let’s talk about patents.

Right? This is our patent portfolio. I’m taking two snapshot, mine is 2017, mine is 2025. And so historically, we are pioneered in wireless communication technology. So our portfolio, as you can tell, largest slide is wireless patents.

But now we are no longer just purely wireless. We have done major acquisitions with Technicolor. We have combined our research. We are driving up our technology innovation. Our portfolio has almost doubled in that period.

It has different slices of the value, but equally important, this is an evergreen patent portfolio. On average, every single day, we are getting six new patterns every single day, including weekends. Alright? So but pattern, I like to say pattern is about quality. Patent is not a number.

By definition, every patent is different. So the quality really matters. Right? So again, this is not my word. This is ranked by LexisNexis.

They rank portfolio by quality. Our patent quality is ranked number one in five gs, ranked top five in video, and number in WiFi. So if combine them, we are one of the very few company that ranked high in all three category. I think it’s worth seeing that they are all important technology. Okay?

All right. That’s essentially what we do. What’s the patent portfolio? We license everything here. Now let’s talk about business momentum.

I joined the company in 2021, and 2021 happened to be an interesting point for our company. At that time, we have two of our larger contract out for renewal, so we wanted to renew them, which is Apple and Samsung, But we also try to keep on adding things here. So this is a chart for annualized recurring revenue. This is a portion of revenue. Right?

So we demonstrate on the bottom key events. But the top lines, during the four years I’ve been with the company, we have signed 40 plus agreement with economic value of this agreement of more than $3,700,000,000 Right? They’re adding on top of each other. So the power of our business is when we sign people up for the first time, they are adding and we keep adding them, adding them. Most of our contracts are long term.

By long term, I see roughly five years plus or minus. So once you start building them on top, you can start driving a more you know, incremental growth of the annualized recurring revenue. And the next chart is really what I call the full panel chart. If our CFO is in the audience, he will tell you this is his favorite chart. I’ll try to do justice.

So on the top left side, this is our revenue growth year over year. So in the last five years or four years, we are able to grade by 20%, twenty five % CAGR. But our business, inherent to power of the business model is once we invest in corporate R and D, invest in patent portfolio, our new license agreement carry a 100% margin. So that’s the way we drive revenue growth here. Our profitability measured by adjusted EBITDA, the margin actually keep on going up.

The adjusted EBITDA is growing faster than revenue. But our part of our business, frankly, also generates substantial amount of cash and we use the cash to increase our dividend. In the last twelve months alone, we have increased our dividend by 50%. But in the last ten plus years, since 2011, we reduced our share outstanding by 45%. So if you combine those multiple forces in power, we are able to grow our earning per share in the last few years by 6.5 x.

So that’s 600 plus percent. Right? That’s our financial strengths, if you would. Now let’s talk about long term. Right?

I I know folks always say, that’s awesome. You have done, you know, good things in the last few years, but what’s next? So we are laying out our long term strategy. So one thing I want to make sure you understand, the technology we create is super important. It’s more important than ever.

Everything is wirelessly connected. There’s an enormous amount of value being built on top of the foundational technology we build. If you try to measure the overall economic impact for the mobile ecosystem alone, these are the $5,700,000,000,000 economy. If these were a separate country, these will be the third largest GDP, only behind US and China. These are bigger than Germany, bigger than Japan in terms of annualized impact for overall economic impact.

Our technology support many, many millions of jobs and by the way, it’s only going to be more important going forward. So let me explain. Going forward, we are addressing three market. Our core market has been smartphone market and smartphone is a highly concentrated market. There’s frankly roughly top 10 smartphone vendor captures 95% plus of the market and we have done well and I’ll explain to you.

We also licensed our technologies to consumer electronics, that’s TVs, set top box, laptops. And then we are also licensing a large use case, a mono use case called IoT, internal things. Right? That’s cars. I like to see cars adjust smartphone on wheels from the connectivity and multimedia technology and sensing.

And then, by the way, going forward, we have identified a very large greenfield opportunity in, streaming video in the cloud, which I’ll cover that also. Alright. Let’s go through it. What is the current opportunity we are thinking? So on the past, we are currently on the recurring revenue piece.

We are a little bit more than 500,000,000. We have announced in our q one, that’s a record high for our company. But we believe given time, with these three drivers, we will grow our revenue to about $1,000,000,000 in total revenue, okay? And they are breakdown by those three buckets. Our smartphone is the most mature market.

We are currently at more than $400,000,000 plus and we believe in about a couple of years, we’ll grow it to be about $500,000,000 in recurring revenue. Our second bucket, are about eighty seven eighty six million dollars per year in annualized recurring revenue. And just for reference, when I joined the company four years ago, that was $20,000,000 So we had to grow it by 4x in the last four years and we believe we can grow that market to be about $200,000,000 by 02/1930. But the largest greenfield option to us is cloud. It’s a streaming video on demand.

We believe by 02/1930, we will grow it to be about $300,000,000 Okay? All right. Let’s get to it. So for the smartphone, we are doing really well. And in the last four years, we have groomed the device and their license from about 50% to about 80%.

So the driver, there’s a few vendor left and we feel confident that we are going to be groomed. Adding those few vendors, we’ll get to $500,000,000 recurring revenue. On the CE side, it’s actually multiple bucket. There’s PC side, we just signed an agreement with HP, we announced in Q2, and we are currently having more than 50% of the PC under license. And also, we have tablets and we have TVs.

We have signed Samsung. We have signed some flagship customer in the space, but we have enough groups in the field. We are confident about able to grow them. On the automobile side, I’ll give you a couple of things here. So currently, about a hundred million cars being sold on the market, roughly.

You know, some of them, you know, it’s 80, depending on year by year, roughly half the cars are connected. We believe over time, there will be roughly close to a %. I can’t imagine the world in a few years where the car wouldn’t have connectivity in them. Right? You have navigation, you have infotainment, you have all kind of use case for it, but it’s also important, currently, most of the cars are still connected by four And there is a evolution and there will be to add five gs to it.

Car automobile, probably many of you guys have had a longer life cycle for technology refreshing. Unlike cell phones, pretty much all the phones sold in advanced market are five gs enabled. So there will be a higher penetration of five gs into the automobile use case and we get a higher valuation when the upgrade from four gs to five gs. Okay. We are part of a licensing platform.

So, the adoption is quite promising in that field. And we also have identified a quite a big large of cellular IoT opportunity, that’s internal things. That can be a number of things, asset tracking, point of sales, and smart meters, and that’s a market currently is untapped for us. We absolutely plan to grow it. So let me talk about video on demand.

Right? We have streaming video on demand. We have advertised video on demand. So they are really large opportunity for us. Third party data, in about a couple years, that market combined in time, annualized revenue for that whole industry, it’s about $500,000,000,000 They are roughly the same size as the smartphone market.

I think I don’t have to dive too much into the important video codec to that industry because video codec overall allows them to drive higher revenue by offering higher resolution content, which they do charge more for those of who pay a lot of subscriptions. And they also allow them to drive a lot of subscriber with the investment for their infrastructure. I’m talking about storage. I’m talking about power. Talking about coding.

I’m talking about memory footprint, all kinds of stuff here. So it’s really important. Let me touch about capital allocation. Again, I’m going pretty fast speed because I want to see a little bit of time So our capital allocation is pretty straightforward.

We maintain our fortress balance sheet. We want to be very strong. The reason being our business model requires to negotiate with very large customers. Company value for a hundred times bigger than we are. So we want to damage the strengths of financial, capability to sustain our business, to demonstrate creating value over time to them.

So that’s important. Second thing is really we keep on investing a higher percentage of our recurring revenue to R and D. Combining R and D and IP portfolio creation enhancement, we invest 50% of recurring revenue back into that front end of the process. That’s very high percentage. Okay.

We do keep dry powders. We have large balance sheet. We do keep them. We are optimistic in terms of doing M and A. Our larger acquisition so far, it’s our Technicolor acquisition where we require their patent asset, we require their team, which allow us to open new field for different device licensing, frankly, give us the opportunity to license in the cloud space.

And while largely, as I already touched on, our business created a lot of free cash flow and we do invest quite a bit in returning capital back to the shareholders. And in the last ten year plus, we have done a lot. Okay? So I believe this is my second to last chart. These are long term growth.

Where do we go from here? So in order to reach, you know, our target in 2030, we are targeting to grow our recurring revenue at 14% year over year. We are going to maintain our margin at roughly 60% adjusted EBITDA margin, which translates into over $600,000,000 plus of adjusted EBITDA in net dollars and we feel we are well positioned to drive value. And by the way, this has built in certain amount of investment we will keep on making, building how we sustain and keep on driving future technology like six AI, and next generation of codec. Okay?

Alright. Let me finish on this one chart, then I’ll this in summary, as as I like to say, you are investing in our company by investing in our team, in our people. I do believe we have a world class team in everything we do. All the major blocks, we work well. We have clearly accelerated our business momentum, actually, really well in demonstrating, our licensing success, IP creations.

We have very large marketing in front of us. Smartphones are bread and butter. We are doing well, but we identify different devices, different cloud space. And we have a clear path to grow the company and we have hopefully demonstrated enough capability to execute. And I think we are just getting started.

With that, I’m happy to take any questions you may have.

Arjun Bhatia, Analyst, William Blair: Great. Any questions from the audience? Maybe, Laren, if we start off, can you talk a little bit about how you actually do contracting and how your licensing agreements are structured? Because one of the questions that I think a lot of that I get from a lot of investors is, you know, you do a lot of business in China with the Chinese smartphone OEMs. And obviously, the tariff noise has kind of created some questions about that.

So how does that impact your business in light of your kind of licensing practices? Yeah.

Liren Chen, CEO, InterDigital: That’s a great question. So in general, we are open and flexible in negotiating contract. There’s generally license or two way to negotiate contract. One is in our industry called running royalty. We say, hey, I’ll strike to you on the pricing, you report to me on your sales and volume and price tier.

Every quarter we get together generating a real view, just last quarter, this is how much you sold, this is my pricing, you do the multiplication and you get to a number. Right? That’s one way to do it. The other way to do it is we negotiate a fixed dollar amount. And by the way, those numbers are not, you know, in vacuum.

You basically make a lot of forecast based on volume, based on technology penetration, based on price tier. I like to see in the perfect world of information, they are the same. They are just NPV calculations spread by different years, but that’s not in perfect world. Right? There’s risk shifting, there’s people, you know, may or may not meet their target, but most are contract with large customers fixed dollar amount.

I’ll give you a number. In 2024, real dollar wise, 94% of our revenue come from fixed fee agreement, which means we are not subject to quarter by quarter variance of the volume. Right? So back to the tariff situation here, if you look at our business, we are doing foundational research, we are contributing to the open standard, we are licensing IP, right, that’s intangible. So there’s really no future of goods of across the border.

So frankly, tariff doesn’t really apply in our core business. And in terms of revenue impact, most of our deals are fixed dollar amount. So short term, why there’s really no where it’s up and down. Longer term, we obviously want the industry to be healthy. We wanted our customer to be increasing their sales, everything.

Longer term, we obviously wanted the tariff to be resolved. But in short term why there’s not direct impact, just for ballpark wise. Our main contract generally is five years plus or minus. Our largest contract is public info and we’ll be able to communize with Apple. It’s it’s a seven year deal, right, which they signed in 2022 and that lasted all the way to September of twenty twenty nine.

And, and so we are able to get actually 15 higher than the previous Apple contract and that’s that’s the same revenue every year. That’s just a thing.

Arjun Bhatia, Analyst, William Blair: Yes, super helpful. And maybe, yes, go ahead.

Liren Chen, CEO, InterDigital: Yeah. Absolutely. So there’s really two main question in your question. Right? One is how do we negotiate contract for the first time to catch up versus recurring model?

Second thing is really what’s the relation with your customer? Why do we keep on seeing there’s litigation part of your business? Right? And some people will say you have to sue your customer, which is which is a malperse it’s a wrong perception. I’ll clarify that issue.

So on the catch up revenue side, keep in mind our technology, most our technology are part of the open standard, which means people who have been using it for a long time. Right? We are going to a person convince them to take license. Those negotiations are complicated. Sometimes it takes, you know, more than a year.

You know, it’s lengthy. So we will demonstrate to them this is our technology, these part of the standard, this our patent portfolio, this is how we read on it, this is how much your customer is paying, your competitor is paying. And, most of the time, we are successful. Out of the 40 plus agreement I’ve informed you guys in the last four years, vast majority, when I say mass majority, I mean 90 plus percent of them are signed bilateral negotiation, including our largest family, including Apple. Right?

Signed without litigation, done. So in the first time, we will try to demonstrate, hey, you have been using our patent for all these years, you should pay for past infringement as well going forward. And frankly, we try to meet them halfway for the past side because very often, they have been using our technology for years and years and years. There’s many millions of devices being shifted. I’m practical.

I recognize some of those people have not reserved enough money on the side, so we try to meet them halfway. But going forward, we say, hey, look, you need to pay your fair share. And by the way, it’s a funny dynamic. Once people started paying, they want to make sure their competitor also pay. They act on our side afterwards because I always say, hey, it’s not just me wanting to enforce our ride It is not fair to us you are not paying, but I also say it is not fair to your law abiding competitor.

You by not paying, you have a cost advantage. That is not fair. Right? So that is generally the dynamic. Regarding our litigations, as I said, we rarely use litigation But once in a while, we do have to enforce our right and that’s just what’s not fair to us as people who are essentially cheating us, stealing our IP without paying, but also not fair to their competitor who are paying us.

Right? So so that’s generally the stuff. So we don’t sue our customer. We love our customers. We only chase the people who steal our IP without paying us.

That’s the reality.

Arjun Bhatia, Analyst, William Blair: Alright. The red light is blinking. So we are out of time. Liren, thank you so much. That was great.

And for if there are other questions, we are upstairs in Burnham. Oh, no. Sorry. We’re upstairs in Richardson for the breakout, if you have more questions.

Liren Chen, CEO, InterDigital: So we do have a breakout session. I’m happy to follow-up the discussion for any question you may have. Thank

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