Keysight beat the upper end of its revenue guidance
Keysight Technologies exceeded its own expectations on revenue during its fiscal third quarter, with company revenues up 10% year-over-year to $1.38 billion.
Profits for the quarter were $338 million, up from $254 million in the year-ago period.
“Our outperformance reflects the effectiveness of our strategy, outstanding execution by our teams around the world, and the strength of our operating model,” said Satish Dhanasekaran, Keysight’s president and CEO.
Within the company’s Communications Solutions Group (CSG), revenues were up 11% to $970 million—record revenue for the unit, Dhanasekaran said on the quarterly call with analysts. For CSG, Keysight reported “strength in 5G, O-RAN, 400G, 800G, and high-speed digital applications, as well as cyber, space and satellite solutions.”
Mark Wallace, Keysight SVP of global sales, remarked on the quarterly call that “The 5G rollout and demand continues to be very strong” and that Keysight saw double-digit demand and order growth across all regions related to 5G. “One of the drivers is the adoption and upgrades around Release 16. We’re seeing that across the board,” Wallace explained. “We’re seeing adoption now with some of the certification business in the test labs.” He said that Keysight added more than 90 new 5G customers during the quarter and is also seeing “continued growth of O-RAN, where we’ve been expanding our opportunities from device manufacturers to operators to test labs, etc.”
Dhanasekaran said that Keysight is seeing new applications for non-terrestrial networks. “Over the next several years, we expect this market will benefit from elevated investments in technology modernization,” he added. Meanwhile, Keysight’s Electronic Industrial Solutions Group (EISG) saw revenues up 10% to $406 million, which the company said was driven by growth in general electronics, semiconductor measurement and its solutions for the automotive and energy sectors. Dhanasekaran told analysts that EISG has seen double-digit order and revenue growth for eight consecutive quarters now; while the unit has seen broad-based growth, the executive noted in particular that Keysight’s automotive business has nearly doubled over the past two years.
In addition to its quarterlies, Keysight also announced this week that MediaTek is using its 5G New Radio device testing solutions for lab-based over-the-air testing and validating the RF performance of devices that use multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) and massive MIMO; and that it has extended its collaboration with Synopsys in which Keysight’s flagship Pathwave software for RFIC design is integrated into Synopsys’ Custom Compiler design software and its circuit simulation solutions, for validating mmWave and complex RF designs for 5G chips and subsystems. Â Â
In other test news:
–Rohde & Schwarz and Viavi Solutions said this week that they have jointly supported Open RAN conformance certification testing of an Open Radio Unit (O-RU) from Foxconn at Auray OTIC and Security Lab in Taiwan.
The lab used a combined testbed from the two test and measurement suppliers, which included Viavi’s TM500 O-RU tester and its O-RU Test Manager as the point of control, plus Rohde’s SMW200A vector signal generator, its FWS signal and spectrum analyzer, and its Vector Signal Explorer.
-Electronic systems design company Cadence and GlobalFoundries announced a collaboration this week focused on 5G mmWave design, in which Cadence’s RF and mmWave design flow software was integrated with GF’s 22FDX platform and used to put together a 28 GHz 5G integrated circuit and design an integrated antenna.
In addition, the design was simulated with a Cadence simulator system that used Rohde & Schwarz signal creation and analysis tools, and the system “showed a high correlation to silicon measurements and lab testing performed by the German institute, Fraunhofer IIS/EAS.”