Silicon Investor - Impinj, Inc.

[Cooters] They are presenting at Cantor today, but haven't webcast the last 3.

Cooters — 3/11/2026 11:39:24 AM

[Soumaila] impinj.com

Soumaila — 2/26/2026 4:34:27 PM

[Cooters] I can't argue with the comments on business volatility and inventory cycles. Not...

Cooters — 2/6/2026 10:36:42 AM

I can't argue with the comments on business volatility and inventory cycles. Not on board with all of 2026 being a down year. That would be disappointing. They have 3 presentations coming up hopefully they can explain things a little better.
Coot

[Selectric II] PI's website says Chris Diorio is an "affiliate" college professor. I wonder ho...

Selectric II — 2/6/2026 10:28:37 AM

PI's website says Chris Diorio is an "affiliate" college professor. I wonder how he evaluates students who consistently miss deadlines and ask for extensions.

It also says he has the "biggest smile" on his face when he's racing his race car. How would he react if Impinj's earnings blew out everyone's expectations?

Impressive resume.

Chris Diorio

Chief Executive Officer, Vice Chair, and Co-Founder

Chris is the CEO, vice chair, and co-founder at Impinj and an affiliate professor at the University of Washington. Passionate about technology, Chris is a leading pioneer of RAIN RFID who spearheaded the development of the RAIN RFID radio standard and cofounded the RAIN Alliance. He has more than 200 issued patents, 69 scholarly publications, and has received numerous awards including EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Pacific Northwest, Geekwire CEO of the Year, EE Times/EDN Innovator of the Year, AIM Global Ted Williams Award, RFID Journal Special Achievement Award, and the IEEE Paul Rappaport Award. He has also received Packard, Sloan, Presidential, and ONR fellowships. Chris earned his Ph.D. from Caltech and has over 30 years’ experience in computer and radio engineering. A fan of all things fast, Chris has the biggest smile on his face when racing his car around a track.

impinj.com

[Soumaila] I agree. On X Dan is sticking with PI. Long post out this AM

Soumaila — 2/6/2026 9:51:12 AM

[Soumaila] Snips from what I found on Investing.com (that is the source) re Evercore. Perha...

Soumaila — 2/6/2026 9:44:25 AM

Snips from what I found on Investing.com (that is the source) re Evercore. Perhaps change in thesis is the wrong term, but Evercore is not modeling growth for 2026. The stock is priced for growth, it is not growing, the story keeps pushing out if you believe the Evercore model. The TAM is real if PI can deliver on it.

Evercore ISI cited two key concerns in its downgrade rationale: higher volatility in Impinj’s business model than previously assessed and slower near-term growth prospects, with the firm now modeling a 4% revenue decline for calendar year 2026 versus its previous 26% growth projection.

The research firm noted that while it still views Impinj as well-positioned in the RAIN RFID market, which it considers less than 1% penetrated with multi-trillion unit potential, the company faces challenges with supply chain inventory cycles that appear more pronounced than typical semiconductor firms.

Evercore ISI expects Impinj stock to "mark time" until there is improved visibility into near-term growth and more consistent forecasting, adding that while a new large program announcement could serve as a positive catalyst, such an event seems unlikely in the next 6-12 months.

[Selectric II] The quarter and the call were underwhelming. I had that feeling last quarter, t...

Selectric II — 2/6/2026 9:41:22 AM

The quarter and the call were underwhelming. I had that feeling last quarter, too, but decided to give it time. Was unimpressed by management's communications and explanations yesterday, and apparently not alone.

I wonder whether Dan Niles has changed his view. Late last year he thought PI could be '26's best performer, iirc.

[Cooters] Can't believe we have to endure this again. I'll be interested in any thesis cha...

Cooters — 2/6/2026 9:20:36 AM

Can't believe we have to endure this again. I'll be interested in any thesis changes from the analysts, because I didn't hear anything that changed mine.

[Soumaila] Here comes the reset: Evercore, downgrade to in-line, price cut from 273 to 112 ...

Soumaila — 2/6/2026 8:37:57 AM

Here comes the reset:
Evercore, downgrade to in-line, price cut from 273 to 112 (they changed their thesis)
Needham, maintains, price cut 255 to 175

[nicewatch] Impinj (PI) Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript My usual source has yet to post so...

nicewatch — 2/5/2026 8:22:58 PM

Impinj (PI) Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

My usual source has yet to post so pasting from here for now. fwiw.

Thursday, February 5, 2026 at 5:00 p.m. ET

CALL PARTICIPANTS
Founder and Chief Executive Officer — Chris Diorio

Chief Financial Officer — Cary Baker

Vice President, Investor Relations — Andy Cobb

Full Conference Call Transcript
Andy Cobb: Thank you, Nick. Good afternoon, and thank you all for joining us to discuss Impinj, Inc.'s fourth quarter and full year 2025 results. On today's call, Chris Diorio, Impinj, Inc.'s founder and CEO, will provide a brief overview of our market opportunity and performance. Cary Baker, Impinj, Inc.'s CFO, will follow with a detailed review of our fourth quarter and full year 2025 financial results and first quarter 2026 outlook. We will then open the call for questions. You can find management's prepared remarks, plus trended financial data on the Investor Relations section of the company's website. We will make statements in this call about financial performance and future expectations that are based on our outlook as of today.

Any such statements are forward-looking under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Whereas we believe we have a reasonable basis for making these forward-looking statements, our actual results could differ materially because any such statements are subject to risks and uncertainties. We describe these risks and uncertainties in the annual and quarterly reports we file with the SEC. We do not undertake and expressly disclaim any obligation to update or alter our forward-looking statements except as required by law. On today's call, all financial metrics, except for revenue, or where we explicitly state otherwise, are non-GAAP. All balance sheet and cash metrics, except for free cash flow, are GAAP.

Please refer to our earnings release for a reconciliation of non-GAAP financial metrics to the most comparable GAAP metrics. Before turning to our results and outlook, note that we will participate in the Barclays 43rd Annual Industrial Select Conference on February 17 in Miami, Susquehanna's 15th Annual Technology Conference on February 26 in New York, and the 2026 Tanner Global Technology and Industrial Growth Conference on March 11, in New York. We look forward to connecting with many of you at those events. I will now turn the call over to Chris.

Chris Diorio: Thank you, Andy. And thank you all for joining the call. 2025 was a tough year for our industry. Tariffs, and tariff-related supply chain whipsaws, inventory reductions at every layer of our retail markets, a downward trend in apparel imports, and protracted general merchandise adoption all weighed heavily on the RAIN market. It was also a transition year for us. We grew year-over-year endpoint IC volumes by 9%, believe we gained endpoint IC market share, made M800 our volume runner, launched Gen2X, and proved it to be a must-have for solution success. We drove Gen2X-enabled solutions at multiple Lighthouse accounts, helped plant the seeds for accelerating food adoption, and exited the year with record adjusted EBITDA and cash.

I am very pleased with how our team rose to meet the challenge. Looking into 2026, we see in the first quarter, a confluence of order timing, ongoing retailer inventory burn-down, product transitions, and a super seasonal systems decline due to project timing, driving revenue lower. Looking just a bit further out, we see conditions improving as endpoint IC volumes rebound, and growth returning as our investments in seeding new opportunities and our solutions focus pay off. Starting with first quarter endpoint ICs, like last year, our second large North American supply chain and logistics end user significantly shifted their label supplier allocations.

Partners that anticipated share gains ordered ahead in the fourth quarter, whereas those with share losses are reducing inventory in the first. Additionally, we are quickly pivoting to a custom-built endpoint IC for that end user which I'll describe shortly, causing a further temporary dip in endpoint IC orders as partners reduce prior product inventory while we ramp volumes of the new IC. Second, we see apparel retailers reducing stock and under-buying demand, impacting our first quarter outlook. And finally, food volumes remain modest in the first quarter. Turning to our expectations as we exit the first quarter, I'll start with that custom endpoint IC.

Think of it as an ASIC, developed with the end user tightly linked to their and our platforms, with added features like label authentication, that solve key business needs, while also eliminating unneeded features. They plan to fully switch to it this year. The EIC also opens new opportunities for them to unlock and for us to participate in new outward-facing customer accounts. Second, we see endpoint IC demand for apparel normalizing as soon as the second quarter. Third, we see general merchandise growing as existing categories add SKUs, and new categories get added. Fourth, we see food rollouts expanding to more stores. And finally, we see our solutions efforts opening major new accounts.

To speed our pivot to solutions, we recently added Chris Hundley as an executive vice president for enterprise solutions. Chris adds significant software and solutions talent to our team. We are also doubling down on Gen2X as a solutions enabler. Added EM Microelectronic as a Gen2X licensee, and are forging close Gen2X partnerships with leading ecosystem players. We not only see Gen2X increasing the performance and feature gap between M800 and its competition, but also see it as an essential toolkit for enterprise solutions. And we have a growing pipeline of solutions opportunities. We expect our solutions efforts to drive endpoint IC volumes and share, reader and reader IC revenue growth, and in time, meaningful software revenue.

And perhaps most importantly, a selling model that focuses on solution value rather than individual components. Of course, even as we pursue solutions, we remain keenly focused on our current products. In retail apparel, multiple new end users are talking openly about RAIN adoption. We are pursuing wins with them as well as further share shifts with existing retailers. In general merchandise, we see 2026 as the year that unlocks key new logos and current use cases, add significant new ones, and drive the IC volume goals. On the competitive front, we see Gen2X driving additional opportunities to us. In food, we see a ramp through 2026 led by bakery with proteins to follow.

And although food volumes remain modest, the opportunity is staggeringly large and we intend to lead and win it. Overall, we see industry endpoint IC volumes rebounding from an uninspiring 2025 as these growth factors layer on with our leading market share driving an outsized portion of those volumes to us. We see our solutions revenue expanding, notably as our Lighthouse end users outperform their peers, and pull us into opportunities. And in all, we expect our focus on hitting solution price points where the ROI pencils out for the end user to pay off handsomely.

Before I turn the call over to Cary for our financial review and first quarter outlook, I'd like to again thank every member of the Impinj, Inc. team for your constant effort driving our bold vision. As always, I feel honored by my incredible good fortune to work with you. Cary?

Cary Baker: Thank you, Chris, and good afternoon, everyone. Fourth quarter revenue was $92.8 million, down 3% sequentially compared with $96.1 million in third quarter 2025, and up 1% year-over-year from $91.6 million in fourth quarter 2024. 2025 revenue was $361.1 million, down 1% year-over-year compared with $366.1 million in 2024. Fourth quarter endpoint IC revenue was $75.2 million, down 5% sequentially compared with $78.8 million in third quarter 2025 and up 2% year-over-year from $74.1 million in fourth quarter 2024. Endpoint IC revenue slightly exceeded our expectations driven by Pern's orders. M800 was the volume runner with unit volumes increasing sequentially. 2025 endpoint IC revenue declined 2% year-over-year driven by the factors Chris already noted.

Looking to first quarter, we expect endpoint IC revenue to decline sequentially at a high teens percentage rate driven primarily by supply chain and logistics channel inventory reductions, retail weakness, and to a lesser extent by annual endpoint IC price reductions. Fourth quarter systems revenue was $17.7 million, up 2% sequentially compared with $17.3 million in third quarter 2025, and up 1% year-over-year from $17.5 million in fourth quarter 2024. Systems revenue exceeded our expectations driven by NRE revenue, while reader and gateway revenue and reader IC revenue declined as anticipated. 2025 systems revenue grew 2% year-over-year with reader and gateway growth more than offsetting declines in both reader ICs and test and measurement solutions.

Looking to first quarter, we expect systems revenue to decline more than seasonally, primarily due to project timing at our enterprise customers. Fourth quarter gross margin was 54.5%, compared with 53% in third quarter 2025 and 53.1% in fourth quarter 2024. The year-over-year increase was driven by higher endpoint IC direct margins, specifically from a richer mix of M800. The quarter-over-quarter increase was driven primarily by higher systems direct margins, specifically higher NRE revenue, and to a lesser extent, higher endpoint IC direct margins. 2025 gross margin was 55.3%, compared with 54% in 2024 with the increase due primarily to a richer mix of M800 endpoint ICs.

Looking to first quarter, we expect gross margin to decline sequentially driven primarily by lower revenue on fixed cost and annual endpoint IC price reductions. Total fourth quarter operating expense was $34.2 million compared with $31.8 million in third quarter 2025, and $33.6 million in fourth quarter 2024. Research and development expense was $18.6 million. Sales and marketing expense was $8.2 million. General and administrative expense was $7.4 million. 2025 operating expense totaled $130.1 million compared with $131.9 million in 2024. We expect total first quarter 2025 operating expense to increase sequentially, driven primarily by normal seasonal factors. Fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA was $16.4 million compared with $19.1 million in third quarter 2025 and $15 million in fourth quarter 2024.

Fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA margin was 17.7%. 2025 adjusted EBITDA was a record $69.6 million compared with $65.9 million in 2024. 2025 adjusted EBITDA margin was a record 19.3% in line with the long-term model we shared at our 2023 Investor Day. Fourth quarter GAAP net loss was $1.1 million. Fourth quarter non-GAAP net income was $15.6 million or $0.50 per share on a fully diluted basis. 2025 GAAP net loss was $10.8 million. 2025 non-GAAP net income was $64.2 million or $2.11 per share on a fully diluted basis. Turning to the balance sheet.

We ended the fourth quarter with record cash, cash equivalents, and investments of $279.1 million compared with $265.1 million in third quarter 2025 and $239.6 million in fourth quarter 2024. Inventory totaled $85 million, down $7.7 million from the prior quarter. Fourth quarter capital expenditures totaled $1.5 million. Free cash flow was $13.6 million. 2025 capital expenditures totaled $12.9 million. Free cash flow was $45.9 million. Turning to our outlook. We expect first quarter revenue between $71 million and $74 million compared with $74.3 million in first quarter 2025, a year-over-year decrease of 2% at the midpoint. We expect adjusted EBITDA between $1.2 million and $2.7 million.

On the bottom line, we expect non-GAAP net income between $2.5 million and $4 million reflecting non-GAAP fully diluted earnings per share between $0.08 and $0.13. In closing, I want to thank the Impinj, Inc. team, our customers, our suppliers, and you, our investors, for your ongoing support. I will now turn the call to the operator to open the question and answer session. Nick?

Operator: Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then 1 on your touch-tone phone. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, a courtesy to others, we ask that you limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. You have additional questions, please requeue, and we will take as many questions as time allows. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. And the first question will come from Harsh Kumar with Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.

Harsh Kumar: I wanted to hit upon the first quarter guidance a little bit. I think you're off something like $17 million to $18 million relative to the expectation on the street. I know you've got a shift at EPA. I'm sorry. A shift at your second customer in logistics. And you've also got some sort of a custom chip that you're developing and also seems like some excess inventory. So I was hoping that you could break down for us this miss between the impact from orders from the custom ship and the timing associated with it. Versus how much excess you have. And I'll ask my second question at the same time.

It seems like there's a lot of stuff moving around. You talked about food, sort of moving around, apparel moving around. But then you seem pretty confident that all of this will fix itself fairly fast, like in the second quarter. These are large end markets, and I'm curious what gives you the confidence that this will swing around in a better situation as quickly as the second quarter.

Chris Diorio: Okay. Thank you, Harsh. This is Chris. There's a lot to unpack in this question. I think Cary and I will tag team it here. So I'm going to start by saying that despite the starting points looking the same, we see 2026 very differently from 2025. 2025, we took a competitive lead and held our own, in what was an otherwise pretty tough year. In 2026, we're gonna press that lead in what we believe is shaping up to be a growth year for the reasons that we cited in our prepared remarks.

Relative to those prepared remarks, Cary and I will both go through some of the details on why we see things turning around and actually why I talked about exiting the quarter on an upward swing. Just before I hand over to Cary to add a few points, I will say that custom chip for our second large American supply chain and logistics end user is not just in design. We are currently shipping it. And so it is in production now. Cary, why don't I turn over to you for a bit, and then we can go back and forth?

Cary Baker: Thanks, Chris. First, let me break down the Q1 revenue guide and how we built it. So as I noted, we're expecting endpoint IC revenue to decline sequentially at a high teens percentage. That's primarily on lower volume as our inlay partners supporting our logistics customers burned down a few weeks of inventory. Think of each week of burn-down approximating about $5 million of impact. To a much lesser degree, yearly price reductions and product mix are also impacting our first quarter. We're modeling pricing at a couple million bucks, and the mix impact is smaller than that. There's also some retail weakness that we're factoring through our guide.

Now as we built our guide we wanted to be prudent in doing so. So there's a couple of things to consider in our guidance. First, the January turn orders have been strong. They're already double what Q4 was at the same point in the quarter and they're up more than 50% than they were last January. The second piece I would highlight is that the elevated rescheduling behavior that we saw all of last year has significantly moderated and is approaching a return to normal levels right now.

And then finally, I would add, our endpoint IC business is nearly 100% booked to the midpoint of the guide, despite there being a few weeks left to turn business in the quarter. So Harsh, we'll pause there. Why don't you follow on and we answer your question adequately, or did we leave parts of it open?

Harsh Kumar: No. No. Super helpful. I just wanted to follow-up on the second question that I asked, which was you've got a lot of end markets moving around food, apparel, all of which is getting hit seems like in 1Q, you mentioned. But then you're pretty confident that all of this will turn around. I was curious. Are you just looking at your orders and saying this will turn around for you, or is there something happening within the end markets that is causing the orders to have come in into the 1Q and you're expecting something to happen in the end market to drive that business up?

Chris Diorio: Yeah. So there's no easy answer to your question because the answer depends on the particular aspects of the end markets. In food, as I said in my prepared remarks, we see modest volumes but inexorable growth. And we remain incredibly excited about that food opportunity. We see the number of stores expanding, especially in bakery. And we see opportunities in the food space. In retail apparel, as we said, we see ongoing retailer inventory burn-down. We saw some of it in the latter part of the fourth quarter now that we finally have the data. And we see it continuing in the first quarter.

We expect that inventory burn-down to normalize based on input from the retailers themselves as well as from our partners. And we've seen new accounts coming online. For example, Abercrombie and Fitch, Aritzia, Old Navy, Academy Sports, and others. We see new accounts coming online. And then in the supply chain and logistics space, of course, as Cary noted, we see the inventory burn-down correcting as well as the new IC added volumes to us. So overall, we think we've got good visibility into the end opportunities that you've been you just raised here. And the reasons we feel positive about the situation exiting the quarter is that we see positive news there.

Harsh Kumar: Thank you, you guys.

Chris Diorio: Thank you.

Operator: The next question will come from Blayne Curtis with Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Ezra Weener: Guys. Ezra Weener on for Blayne. Thanks for taking my questions. Just first, wanna make sure I understand this correctly. You said apparel is gonna normalize in Q2. Do you also expect the logistics to normalize in Q2, or do you think that's take a little bit longer?

Chris Diorio: We said that we see apparel overall normalizing as early as the second quarter. We're not going to actually project the actual date. In the supply chain and logistics space, as Cary said just a minute ago and Cary, I'll have you ahead again. We see the inventory correction happening in the first quarter. Cary, anything you'd add there?

Cary Baker: Yeah. Ezra, I would say, you know, we're entering the quarter with a few extra weeks of channel inventory related to supply chain and logistics. We're gonna work very hard to burn that down in Q1. But we know from history that it's difficult to contain a correction to a single quarter, and it may spill over into the second quarter. You'll have to wait for us to give an update as we exit Q1 on how successful we are at burning that inventory down.

Ezra Weener: Got it. And then my follow-up would be in terms of ASIC, talked a little bit about pricing and solutions. Can you talk a little bit about how you view that and that solution for the customer and how you think about kind of pricing and value? Going forward with that?

Chris Diorio: Yes. I'm this is Chris. I'm happy to. You know, we've been focused for a while on understanding end-user problems designing customizations through our platform, that address the customer needs. We did Protected Mode for a visionary European retailer and brought that broadly to market, and it's being used by them and many others. If you think overall of Gen2X, it's the same idea. Custom features that we're broadly to market, and both of them see market success. In this case, you can think of the custom IC as being tailored to the specific needs of that end user. And it is an IC customized for them.

And we see it as not only meeting their critical needs and helping their business go forward, but also giving them the opportunity to drive operational efficiencies across their organization, and for them to expand their prowess in RAIN RFID to win new customer business, including with that IC. So we, as a company, are focused on working directly with those end users and truly enabling them to drive forward with their business and to expand it. And then for us to basically partner with them along the way. So expect us to do more of those kinds of opportunities.

And as we build more and more whole solutions to tie that customized endpoint IC and a radio link that supports it features in our reader ICs into an overall solutions offering more and more and less just an IC offering. So we're early in that stage where we focus on a solution sale rather than an individual IC sale. But expect us to drive in that direction.

Cary Baker: Ezra, this is Cary. The only other thing I would add is we'll price that IC to market.

Ezra Weener: Awesome. Thank you.

Operator: The next question will come from Jim Ricchiuti with Needham and Company. Please go ahead.

Jim Ricchiuti: I just want to follow-up on this. This new chip. Is this for a subset of applications with this customer?

Chris Diorio: No, Jim. It's for all applications with the It's they're gonna switch to that chip. They plan to fully switch to that chip in 2026. Okay. Customized for them, for their needs.

Jim Ricchiuti: Got it. Chris, will this, I don't recall you guys ever going down this path with a customer. What kind of concerns could this customer have about back-end sourcing being able to source the chip from someone other than you just to protect themselves. Wondering, does this have anything to do with the relationship perhaps with EM Microelectronics?

Chris Diorio: Good question and good connecting the dots, Jim. Not far enough along to speak to any possibilities along the about the relationship with EM, but you're thinking in the right direction. Right now, we're focused on delivering to the customer's needs, ensuring they have adequate supply and giving them commitments of supply so they have confidence in this chip and their ability to rely on it. As the future evolves and we do more of these things, and I wanna do more custom shifts because we've got other enterprise customers with key needs that aren't addressed without customizations. We will be looking to ensure for them that they have added support adequate supply of chips.

Labels, reader ICs, and everything else so they can feel confident moving down this path.

Jim Ricchiuti: Got it. One final question. I'll jump back in the queue. You suggested that Integu gain market share in endpoint ICUs. The major competitor has introduced a new chip. And I'm wondering how you're thinking about market share particularly with this new chip that you're introducing, and in a related question, it sounds like this competitor is still talking about a license payment in the June. So, Cary, maybe you could help me out. With is that something we should be thinking about as well for Q2?

Cary Baker: The way some Demotation you should expect the license payment in Q2, Jim. You should expect it.

Chris Diorio: We do. So, yes, we'll get the license payment. To the other part of your question, Jim. You know, we're focused on enabling solutions for enterprise end users. Those solutions are just not a are not just a chip. It's not just a chip and an antenna. It's a chip and an antenna and the AirLink supporting it and the reader IC supporting that and the firmware on the reader IC supporting it, the readers and gateway supporting it and the partnership supporting it and then and then solution software. We're focused on driving the entirety of those pieces to create an enterprise solution. And we firm and you see Gen2X as a key part of that initiative.

And we firmly believe that by delivering whole solutions, and optimizing so that the solution for the end user we can outperform mix and match efforts using competitor products. And that's our focus.

Jim Ricchiuti: Thank you.

Chris Diorio: Thank you.

Operator: The next question will come from Scott Searle with ROTH Capital. Please go ahead.

Scott Searle: Maybe to start, I just wanted to get a couple of clarifications on some of your comments and some of the initial questions. For starters, on the logistics softness, I want to clarify, is the customer that you're designing a custom chip for, are they in then working down inventory to zero from legacy M700, M800 chips and that's part of the pressure as well. And then as it relates specifically to the custom ASIC, I think you got asked the market share question, but I'll ask it maybe a different way. Know, I would imagine if they're moving in this direction, it should deliver higher share as opposed to splitting the business historically with NXP.

Should we be assuming though that you're going to be gaining 100% share with these types of customers? And it sounds like there's more custom opportunities in the pipeline. So how is this going to transition then over the course of 2026 and 2027? And then I had a follow-up.

Chris Diorio: Yeah, Scott. I'll do my best to those questions. First, we're not just designing the chip. It's in production now. Second, it's dedicated to a single customer, which is our second large North American supply chain and logistics customer. It is targeted at addressing their specific needs, and it is a chip specific to them. We already have high share at that account. It will maintain that share. And we are exploring customizations for other enterprises, that aren't as far down the path as we are this particular instance where we actually have the IC or the chip in production.

But more importantly, I view this chip as us engaging closely enough with the enterprise where they can share their needs we can share what we can do, and we can together build a chip. It's not just Impinj, Inc. chip, build a chip for them. It's we work together on it. They came forward with what they needed, and we built it for them. And they're gonna be using it and we intend to keep doing so. You know, I have a mantra in the company. And I push it at every meeting we have, which is we support our end customers. We never let an end customer down. And you should expect that us to do that here.

Cary, what did NSC Scott, let me unpack the oh,

Scott Searle: well, just one clarification. Inventory bill is just oh, sorry. Before the inventory bill, just, Chris, to clarify then, do you retain the IP and the ability then to license it to additional customers within that same sub-vertical or no?

Chris Diorio: Yes. We do in this particular instance retain the IP. I can imagine other scenarios where there might be some shared IP in this instance, we retain the IP. But our focus first and foremost, is supporting that customer. They're a lighthouse customer to us. I consider them a close partner. You should expect us to focus first on them, with this particular chip, and we built it for them specific to them.

Cary Baker: And, Scott, I'll just unpack the inventory build a little bit. Today, parcel tracking deployment uses the M800 exclusively. The M800 is our general-purpose SKU, meaning it can also support virtually any retail, apparel, or general merchandise application. And that application fungibility gave some of our partners the confidence to lean in build supply ahead of actually winning the award knowing that they can move those ICs through other applications if necessary. So when we were looking at our fourth quarter and we were building our fourth quarter, it came together as we expected.

But when we unpacked it unpacked the quarter in mid-January we matched that with our channel inventory reports from our inlay partners, we realized that the logistics-related build had masked the weakness in retail. Now this will get better. With our logistics customer now ramping to the new custom IC that Chris just described, we will have better visibility into logistics-related inventory. We'll be able to match our shipments of that custom IC directly to that end customer's monthly consumption reports. We have to prove it to you, certainly, but we think this gets better going forward.

Scott Searle: Okay. Very helpful. And if I could just as a follow-up, another market share question. Chris, you've referenced it a lot of times in your opening remarks. But Gen2X provides significant benefits and advantages. It only works with your endpoint IC. So I'm wondering as you look out over the next couple of quarters in '26 and '27, is this the primary driver, of incremental share out there? And will you start to run the table a little bit more in terms of meaningful market share within your existing accounts? Thanks.

Chris Diorio: I'm gonna yes. I'm gonna answer the question yes. I believe that Gen2X will be the significant driver of our market share gains. But you should think of Gen2X as a toolbox that we can bring to bear, for enterprise customers who have an unmet need and allow us to solve their problem. So to the extent that we have significant enterprise accounts, which we do, we need a way to solve them. Consider Gen2X to be the way we're gonna be driving the solution and going forward, even adding more features and capabilities to Gen2X as we learn and do more.

So, essentially, you should think of Gen2X as a way to improve the readability overall performance, and protection capabilities provided by RAIN RFID. To reduce labor cost to speed inventory, to provide readability work, you wouldn't have it otherwise, to localize where items are, to identify exits and theft. And many we have protect consumer privacy in many other areas where we put that whole toolbox together it's the driver of our differentiation in the market. It's kind of manifestation it, but it's also a manifestation of our overall solution strategy. For the two together, they're gonna be the drivers of our success.

Scott Searle: Hey. Great. Thanks so much. I'll get back in the queue.

Operator: The next question will come from Natalia Winkler with UBS. Please go ahead.

Natalia Winkler: Hi. Thank you so much for taking my question. I just wanted to ask one more on the fourth quarter kind of outlook for you guys. So if I understood Cary correctly, Cary, you mentioned several weeks of inventory burn for retail. Right? And it sounds like each week is $5 million. So if I'm thinking, you know, even of a sequential, you know, reduction of $20 million, it sounds like you know, more than half of that is probably related to the retail inventory burn-down. Is that kind of a fair way to think about it? Or is it more nuanced?

Cary Baker: I think that's a fair way to think about it. It's a few weeks of inventory, not several. It's primarily related to supply chain logistics for the reasons I just described. You're correct in that the impact is about $5 million per week of burn-down. And then the other factors, are far less impactful, are pricing and mix, a sized pricing at a couple million dollars, and mix of less than that.

Natalia Winkler: Awesome. Thank you so much. And then I guess a follow-up. Can you guys help us understand, you know, clearly, it's a highly complex supply chain for retail, right, with kind of multiple different steps and stages in it. Can you walk us through your, you know, forecasting process and maybe part of the reason, like, why we're seeing such a strong kind of corrections and burnout that may be a little bit less predictable than for some of the other end markets you guys cover?

Cary Baker: Yeah. So the inventory build was related to logistics. We had a similar logistics build last year at the same time, but for different reasons. It's nonetheless frustrating. This year's build is a result of our partners leaning in ahead of winning the supply rep supply or supply awards or label awards following the label reallocation process. They were comfortable leaning in because up until the custom IC ships, the M800 goes into the package the tracking deployment. The M800 is a fungible SKU across the industry in that its general purpose. It can support retail apparel. It can support general merchandise. It can support logistics.

That fungibility gave our partners the confidence to lean in build extra inventory in hopes of winning an award. Because if they didn't win the award or didn't win as much of an award as they thought, they would be able to burn that inventory down through the rest of their market opportunities. We didn't realize that in the fourth quarter as it was happening. Because our fourth quarter from a unit volume perspective was coming in right as we expected.

When we began unpacking the fourth quarter volumes in mid-January, and we matched that with the channel inventory reports we received around that same time, we realized that the logistics build had masked some weakness in retail apparel that we didn't anticipate and wasn't obvious to us until that point. Now I think next year, this gets better. And I know we have to prove that first given the last two years of channel inventory builds. But I think it gets better because we will only ship one SKU to that customer.

It's only usable by that customer, and we will be able to match our shipments with their monthly consumption reports and the difference between the two is the inventory that will be in the channel. So again, we have to prove it to you. But I think we get better next year at that.

Operator: The next question will come from Troy Jensen with Cantor Fitzgerald. Please go ahead.

Troy Jensen: Hey, gentlemen. Thanks for taking my questions. Maybe for Chris, I guess either one of you guys, you know, these customers that were leaning in, right, in the hopes for the awards, sounds like they went to a competitor. So I'm just curious why do you think we had this share loss the quarter? Was running No. They didn't go to our competitors. Right. No. No. That wasn't part of it. There was no none of that moving to a competitor. So just a awards awarded They there's a new IC coming? They, anticipated some wins. They started building to the new IC, At the same time, they know their existing inventory is gonna it needs to get burned down.

So they started buying ahead. The ones who as we said in our prepared remarks, the ones who didn't win as much now need to burn down their inventory in the first quarter.

Cary Baker: So, Troy, the only thing I'd add to Chris is that our logistics customer rebids their label suppliers each year. It's still the M800, for all labels, but the mix of inlay partners that support them each year can change. Based on that rebidding process. And that rebidding process here this year coupled with the fungibility of the M800 that I just described, gave them the confidence to lean in and buy more supplies so they could be more responsive if they won the award or to win a greater share of the award.

Troy Jensen: Gotcha. And they knew that if they didn't win as much, they would be able to take that inventory out through virtually any other retail apparel or general merchandise application.

Chris Diorio: Yep. Okay. Understood. So several partners probably thought they're gonna win the award and went to one. Exactly. It was oversubscribed. The award was oversubscribed. Exactly. And the we compound it with a new chip entering the market, and there still needs to be a further burn down of the existing M800 product.

Troy Jensen: Yep. Okay. Understood. And then, maybe just to follow-up with the, you talked about retail SKU growth you're seeing. I'm curious if that's broad-based or is that just limited to a couple of your bigger customers?

Chris Diorio: It was a SKU growth in general merchandise. You mean retail apparel? Growth?

Troy Jensen: I think it means SKU growth in general. On SKU Just the common SKU growth, was that just based on a few large customers, or is it more broad-based?

Chris Diorio: The comment on SKU growth in existing categories as well as the potential for new categories was related to a small number a pretty small number of customers in the general merchandise space.

Troy Jensen: Gotcha. Okay. Good luck this year, guys.

Operator: The next question will come from Guy Hardwick with Barclays. Please go ahead.

Guy Hardwick: Hi, good evening. Hi, guys. Hi, guys. Just a couple of questions. So I think a year ago, when you had an inventory overhang in the T&L space, you said some similar comments that it could take more than a quarter to clear the inventory, but I think you actually cleared the inventory in just one quarter. What's different this time? And then as a follow-up, it looks like you have pretty good visibility on the endpoint IC business that you're pretty much already booked for Q1 within the midpoint of your guidance, looking at your comments.

So what does that tell you or tell us in terms of what's the underlying growth in the endpoint IC market of 2025 levels?

Cary Baker: Guy, this is Cary. I'll try to take both of those questions. So, yes, it is the same in that it's the supply chain logistics space. There are a variety of different reasons, which I've already covered. We last year, we were successful in burning all that channel inventory out in the first quarter. We are attempting to do the exact same thing this year. However, we know that inventory corrections are seldom contained to one quarter and we just wanna be cautious with our guidance so that if it does spill into the second quarter, we have room to do that.

As it relates to our guidance, we are seeing strong signals from our bookings and our turns order in quarter to date. So think of January through February. That is turns at a higher rate than it was at the same time in fourth quarter more than double, and 50% up from last year January. That has put us in a position where we are 100% booked to the midpoint of our guide for our endpoint IC business or nearly 100% booked. We're giving ourselves a little bit of room because we aren't done with the annual price negotiations. We still have a couple that are outstanding there.

And also, the Chinese New Year occurs later this year than it did last year, and we typically see a low in bookings during those three weeks.

Guy Hardwick: Thank you. Good day.

Operator: The next question will come from Christopher Rolland with Susquehanna. Please go ahead.

Dylan Olivier: Hi there. This is Dylan Olivier on for Chris. Thanks for taking my question. Maybe pivoting away a bit from this inventory situation and sort of bigger picture question. I wanted to ask about sort of the competitive landscape, particularly against non-RFID components. We've heard some news flow of some end users kind of pivoting away to some more BLE and, you know, other protocols. Is that something that you consider a risk? Or do you remain confident in RFID as a long-term solution?

Chris Diorio: Dylan, this is Chris. The simple answer is we remain confident to bring our RFID as a long-term solution. The just two different technologies. And active BLE with batteries has a particular use case. For tracking things like temperature and other kind of stuff against continuous data logging. That's complementary. Passive BLE for beaconing operates in a narrow window of use cases. And again, with some different features and capabilities that I also view as mostly complementary. The volume differences between the two are gigantic. I mean, you know, our industry delivered 52.8 billion ICs last in 2024. And volume differences are gigantic. The infrastructure is different. I view them as mostly complementary.

Of course, with every complementary thing, there's a bit of overlap. But I don't really look at the competitiveness. I look at complementary things. And trying to enable the end customer with a solution that meets their needs.

Dylan Olivier: Thanks. Appreciate the color here. And then maybe more of a housekeeping question for my second for my follow-up. But, yeah, you had that EM Microelectronics license announcement in the quarter. Just wondering if Yeah. How we think about that impacting the model, if there's gonna be a recurring revenue and if that's gonna be consistent through the year.

Chris Diorio: Yeah. There's an immaterial impact to revenue in 2026. We're still working on what that first chip might be, likely a dual-frequency IC. Likely not available this year. It just view it as a strategic partnership. And then just think that it so the answers that we gave to Ed Jim's question, you know, view the strategic partnership as a way for us to deliver confidence to our end users.

Dylan Olivier: Great. Thank you.

Operator: The next question is a follow-up from Harsh Kumar of Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.

Harsh Kumar: Yeah. Hey, guys. So I was curious how long do you think it would take for you to be fully penetrated at your second largest logistics customer with the custom chip. And am I correct in assuming that custom chips typically mean better pricing than a normal chip?

Chris Diorio: So I'll take the first answer. So the customer plans to fully switch over to that ship this year. That's what I said in my prepared remarks. And as Cary said, are pricing the chip to market. Cary, anything you wanna add?

Cary Baker: Nope.

Harsh Kumar: Did I answer your question, Harsh?

Harsh Kumar: Well, I guess there is no market for a custom chip. Right? The standard in RFID, and you've got a custom product. I would suspect So are you saying that your pricing is similar to M800? Or more than that?

Chris Diorio: I'm gonna say that we're pricing it to as I also said in some of the prepared remarks, a little bit further down. To drive an ROI for the end customer and for us.

Harsh Kumar: Okay. Fair enough. Fair enough. Thank you.

Chris Diorio: Thank you.

Operator: This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Chris Diorio, Co-Founder and CEO, for any closing remarks.

Chris Diorio: Thank you, Nick. I'd like to thank you all for joining the call today. And thank you for your ongoing support. Bye-bye.

Operator: The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.

finance.yahoo.com

[waitwatchwander] $99 AH, yet another round trip.

waitwatchwander — 2/5/2026 5:30:53 PM

[Soumaila] Turning to our outlook, we expect first-quarter revenue between $71.0 and $74.0 ...

Soumaila — 2/5/2026 4:39:47 PM

Turning to our outlook, we expect first-quarter revenue between $71.0 and $74.0 million, compared

with $74.3 million in first-quarter 2025, a year-over-year decrease of 2% at the midpoint. We expect

adjusted EBITDA between $1.2 and $2.7 million. On the bottom line, we expect non-GAAP net

income between $2.5 and $4.0 million, reflecting non-GAAP fully diluted earnings-per-share between

8¢ and 13¢.

[Soumaila] Avery Dennison earnings out: Key take aways for PI - combo of press release an...

Soumaila — 2/4/2026 8:15:30 AM

Avery Dennison earnings out:

Key take aways for PI - combo of press release and investor presentation slides
1. Intelligent labels up high single digits (closest proxy for endpoint IC demand from Avery)
2. Enterprise-wide Intelligent Labels
a. Q4 up mid single digits
b. Apparel/General merch down LSD
c. Other categories up high teens
3. FY sales up LSD - apparel flat yoy
4. Key End Market Insights for 2026
a. Apparel and General Merch - tariff uncertainty still impacting, expect return to growth in 2026
b. Food - adoption to accelerate, program contribution to 2026 revenue heavily weighted to 2H
c. Logistics - Outsized growth and share in 2025: expanding pilots with additional customers in 2026

My take:
Logistics is still pilots and not rollouts (look forward to the day when the language is expanding rollouts to additional customers and not pilots).

You can really see the difference in how the verticals are discussed, apparel is not about pilots, it is about adoption/rollouts, expansion of current deployment, new use case adoption. It is business as usual, RFID is the standard in the industry. Logistics an food are still in the prove it phase, even with UPS full deployment in the US as well as the Kroger/Walmart rollouts in fresh grocery.

UPS glide down, will it impact 1H and thus Q1 glide (it did last time and details came out in the back half of hte year).

Hoping for a positive guide, my bar is pretty low, hopefully PI leaps right over it!

[Soumaila] UPS - highlighted full deployment of RFID in package cars and shipping centers i...

Soumaila — 1/28/2026 8:28:43 AM

UPS
- highlighted full deployment of RFID in package cars and shipping centers in slide deck
- revenue per package up
- expects growth in back half of 2026

First half of 2026 to wrap up Amazon glide down started last year, will reduce Amazon shipping by 1 million packages per day in first half.

nbcnews.com

[Soumaila] UBS maintained neutral lowered target $10 to $190

Soumaila — 1/27/2026 8:46:06 AM

[Cooters] How to Tag Liquids, Metals, and Small Items for Walmart’s RFID Mandate How ...

Cooters — 1/23/2026 12:54:16 PM

How to Tag Liquids, Metals, and Small Items for Walmart’s RFID Mandate

How to Tag Liquids, Metals, and Small Items for Walmart’s RFID Mandate

[Soumaila] Amazon Walkout Stores - final paragraph has some really strong data rfidjournal...

Soumaila — 1/23/2026 11:24:29 AM

Amazon Walkout Stores - final paragraph has some really strong data

rfidjournal.com

[Cooters] RFID boosts Amazon’s autonomous retail tech RFID boosts Amazon's autonomous...

Cooters — 1/21/2026 12:16:31 PM

RFID boosts Amazon’s autonomous retail tech

RFID boosts Amazon's autonomous retail tech | Network World

[Soumaila] Needham (James Ricchiuti) reiterates buy, holds price target at 255

Soumaila — 1/16/2026 7:37:37 AM

[Soumaila] I took their language as real growth is further out, yet again. Logistics stil...

Soumaila — 1/14/2026 1:28:21 PM

I took their language as real growth is further out, yet again.

Logistics still pilots - not rollouts

Food - Chris moved modest impact on endpoint ICs to the back half of 2026, previously he was more positive about it being meaningful.

Labeling pallets and cases is not going to get it done at a few cents an IC.

I think we reprice based on modest to no growth for a bit as we are currently priced based on massive opportunity and that got pushed out. "Not hockey stick growth" and "I just pulled that back."

I was disappointed, I was hoping for language that owed a pivot back to strong growth in 2026, I got none of that.

I will listen again tonight, maybe it will not seem as negative then.

[Cooters] PI @ Needham - 1/14/26 Fireside chat with CEO and CFO - NRF updates - Gen2X wa...

Cooters — 1/14/2026 12:38:55 PM

PI @ Needham - 1/14/26

Fireside chat with CEO and CFO

- NRF updates - Gen2X was everywhere, they did a presentation with Zebra. Food was a major emphasis at NRF. Multiple Android mobile devices were demo'd, QCOM did a demo and Decathlon did a great use case demo.

- EM Micro is their first licensee for Gen2X in endpoint ICs. Sounds like it is royalty bearing with products first appearing in 2027. They later said they would welcome NXP entering into a Gen2X license so clearly their existing license does not cover it.

- Logistics pipeline beyond UPS is very active with multiple pilots in place.

- WMT will at some point announce Phase 3 of general merch. They quantified WMT does chunks of categories that are 2B-4B/yr each time.

- Food - They are working with a large European grocer. They expect endpoint IC volumes in food to start slow in 1H26 and accelerate in 2H26.

- Moving to more of an 'Impinj Inside' model as the industry rapidly expands.

- Referencing the LT model they provided 3 years ago, they've already achieved the lower end of the margin model before hitting the lower revenue target. Also emphasized those revenue targets(500M/750M) did NOT include food.

Cooters

Added

- Avery/Kroger did a fireside chat where they are seeing the time it takes each morning to inventory bakery good go from an hour+ to minutes.

- Chris said Gen2X improvements in the radio link are like going from one bar to 5 bars on your cell phone.

[Selectric II] Impinj Announces Preliminary Fourth-Quarter 2025 Revenue and Adjusted EBITDA A...

Selectric II — 1/13/2026 4:32:15 PM

Impinj Announces Preliminary Fourth-Quarter 2025 Revenue and Adjusted EBITDA Ahead of Participation at 28th Annual Needham Growth Conference

January 13, 2026

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Impinj, Inc. (Nasdaq: PI), a leading RAIN RFID provider and Internet of Things pioneer, today announced that it expects fourth-quarter 2025 revenue near the high end of its prior guidance of $90.0 to $93.0 million and adjusted EBITDA above the midpoint of its prior guidance of $15.4 to $16.9 million.

The company also announced that Chris Diorio, Impinj co-founder and CEO, and Cary Baker, Impinj CFO, will participate in a fireside chat at the 28th Annual Needham Growth Conference on Wednesday, January 14, 2026, at 11:45 a.m. ET / 8:45 a.m. PT. A live webcast and replay of the presentation will be available on the company’s website at investor.impinj.com.

Fourth-Quarter and Full-Year 2025 Earnings Conference Call Details

Impinj will release financial results for its fourth quarter and full year ended December 31, 2025, after U.S. markets close on Thursday, February 5, 2026.

Impinj will host a conference call and webcast to discuss its fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 results and first-quarter 2026 outlook at 5:00 p.m. ET / 2:00 p.m. PT. Interested parties may listen to the call by dialing +1-412-317-1863. A live webcast and replay will be available on the company’s website at investor.impinj.com. Following the call, a telephonic replay will be available for five business days and may be accessed by dialing +1-412-317-0088 and entering passcode 1284856.

Management’s prepared written remarks, quarterly financial data and the financial results press release will be made available on the company’s website at investor.impinj.com on February 5, 2026.

Preliminary Results Disclaimer

The preliminary financial results in this press release are based on management’s initial analysis of results of operations for the fourth quarter of 2025. The company’s consolidated financial statements for the fourth quarter of 2025 are not yet available and remain subject to completion of financial closing procedures and potential final adjustments. This financial information is unaudited and should not be viewed as a substitute for financial statements prepared in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles and are not necessarily indicative of future results.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements include statements regarding our preliminary fourth-quarter 2025 revenue and adjusted EBITDA expectations. Forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties and are based on potentially inaccurate assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expected or implied by the forward-looking statements. Potential risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from the results predicted include, among others, those risks and uncertainties included under the caption “Risk Factors” and elsewhere in our annual reports on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The fourth-quarter 2025 revenue and adjusted EBITDA expectations are subject to further review and the actual results could differ from management’s expectations. Actual revenue and adjusted EBITDA are also subject to audit by our independent registered public accounting firm, with no assurance from our public accounting firm on the revenue and adjusted EBITDA expectations. You should not draw any conclusions from the fourth-quarter 2025 revenue and adjusted EBITDA expectations for any other financial results as of, and for the quarter ended, December 31, 2025, and they should not be considered as an indication of future performance. All information provided in this release and in the attachments is as of the date hereof, and we undertake no duty to update this information unless required by law.

Impinj Disclosure Channels to Disseminate Information

Impinj investors and others should note that we announce material information to the public about our company, products, services and other topics through a variety of means, including our website, press releases, SEC filings, blogs and social media, in order to achieve broad, non-exclusionary distribution of information to the public. We use the Impinj website, Facebook page, LinkedIn page and blog as a means of disclosing information about the company and its services and for complying with the disclosure obligations under Regulation FD. The information we post through these channels may be deemed material. Accordingly, we encourage investors and others to monitor these social media channels and our website in addition to following our press releases, SEC filings and public conference calls and webcasts.

About Impinj

Impinj (Nasdaq: PI) helps businesses and people analyze, optimize, and innovate by wirelessly connecting billions of everyday things — such as apparel, automobile parts, luggage, and shipments — to the Internet. The Impinj platform uses RAIN RFID to deliver timely data about these everyday things to business and consumer applications, enabling a boundless Internet of Things. www.impinj.com

View source version on businesswire.com: businesswire.com

For more information, contact:
Investor Relations
Andy Cobb, CFA
Vice President, Corporate Finance & Investor Relations
+1 206-315-4470
ir@impinj.com

Media Relations
Emily Schauer
Senior Corporate Communications Manager
+1 206-209-2923
eschauer@impinj.com

Source: Impinj, Inc.

[Soumaila] Avery Dennison has a report out on food waste. The comment on the Instagram post...

Soumaila — 1/13/2026 8:26:12 AM

Avery Dennison has a report out on food waste. The comment on the Instagram post by Avery is interesting 997 Kroger stores live (whatever that means). Estimate complete rollout to all 2200 by October 2026. Here is where you can download the report if you agree to receive marketing, definitely a push on meat. Here is the link to the Kroger case study and report.

averydennison.com

Here is the instagram link from AD instagram.com

[Cooters] Impinj and EM Microelectronic Announce Gen2X Licensing Agreement Impinj and...

Cooters — 1/11/2026 10:12:28 AM

Impinj and EM Microelectronic Announce Gen2X Licensing Agreement

Impinj and EM Microelectronic Announce Gen2X Licensing Agreement

[Soumaila] Uniqlo posted strong results and forecast for 2026. What they achieved and forec...

Soumaila — 1/9/2026 8:05:29 AM

Uniqlo posted strong results and forecast for 2026. What they achieved and forecast is not independent from the depth of their RAIN deployment using Impinj. Should be motivation for others in fashion to make progress in they deployments.

reuters.com

[Cooters] Key talent joins Impinj to lead enterprise solutions, platform, and marketing te...

Cooters — 1/7/2026 8:35:02 AM

Key talent joins Impinj to lead enterprise solutions, platform, and marketing teams

Impinj makes three new key hires to help drive 2026 strategy.

Impinj recently welcomed three new leaders — Chris Hundley, Steve Salazar and Suresh Palliparambil — expanding and strengthening its focus on enterprise solutions.

“I am delighted to welcome Chris, Steve and Suresh to our leadership team,” said Impinj co-founder and CEO Chris Diorio. “They each bring key talent and experience that will prove instrumental as we continue advancing our enterprise solutions efforts.”

Chris Hundley joins as an EVP, leading enterprise solutions. Chris has worked in the technology industry for three decades, spending most of that time in product, technology, and executive leadership. Most recently, he served as CTO and then President of AudioEye, a public company in the web accessibility space.

Steve Salazar joins as an SVP, leading solutions software development. Steve has been building and leading integrated software, hardware, design and product teams for more than 18 years, most recently having founded and scaled Blackbird Studios, a software engineering studio specializing in software for Web, Mobile and the Internet of Things.

Suresh Palliparambil joins as an SVP, leading marketing and market development. Suresh brings more than 25 years of experience in the RFID and IoT industry, having held leadership roles at DHL, Datalogic, NXP, Ondas Networks and the Swatch Group. He is well respected in the RFID ecosystem, is a proven market development leader in the semiconductor industry and will lead Impinj’s efforts to bring solutions to market through and with its partner ecosystem.

[Selectric II] Impinj (PI) Rings in 2026 with 3% Momentum: Why Traders are Betting on the RAIN ...

Selectric II — 1/2/2026 9:06:09 AM

Impinj (PI) Rings in 2026 with 3% Momentum: Why Traders are Betting on the RAIN RFID Leader

Published at January 1st 2026, 12:01 PM EST via MarketMinute
financialcontent.com

[waitwatchwander] Dynamic Time Warping share.google The basis of all these deterministic algorit...

waitwatchwander — 12/29/2025 10:59:08 AM

Dynamic Time Warping

share.google

The basis of all these deterministic algorithms is public domain. Shouldn't one expect it to proliferate in a commercial manner now that it's been proven viable for RFID under a variety of scenarios?

Who's doing that work?

[waitwatchwander] What properties beyond temperature can be captured by SensSync. share.google S...

waitwatchwander — 12/28/2025 4:50:49 PM

What properties beyond temperature can be captured by SensSync.

share.google

Structural integrity monitoring is also big here.

[Blabaltech] From WWW on Q thread...

Blabaltech — 12/28/2025 2:59:44 AM

[Soumaila] Cetainly something to consider, in the Madrona (spelling) interview he discussed...

Soumaila — 12/23/2025 9:48:11 AM

Cetainly something to consider, in the Madrona (spelling) interview he discussed spending a few hours away from the office with his grandchild each week. He may be looking to do family stuff and race his cars.

While I don't necessarily want to be take out either, I do have growing concerns about their size/ability to address customer needs across apparel, logistics, food, and general merchandise at the same time. I understand the partner ecosystem is critical to this model but in the end the movement occurs when Impinj solves a problem.

[Cooters] another timing issue that might be in play is Chris's age, he is approaching 65 ...

Cooters — 12/23/2025 9:35:54 AM

another timing issue that might be in play is Chris's age, he is approaching 65 and might be looking at an exit.

While I don't want to be taken out, if you told me Chris was going to step down I'd be fine with it.

Cooters

[Soumaila] It also covers the E suite in general. Timing would be interesting if they rea...

Soumaila — 12/23/2025 9:25:03 AM

It also covers the E suite in general.

Timing would be interesting if they really believe they are on the precipice of delivering on the massive TAM across multiple verticals at once.

[Cooters] Interesting 8K filed last night concerning compensation for Chris if there's a c...

Cooters — 12/23/2025 7:53:37 AM

Interesting 8K filed last night concerning compensation for Chris if there's a change of control/Buyout.

8-K

[Soumaila] Optimistic viewpoint from Avery Dennison on 2026 and going forward RFIDJournal....

Soumaila — 12/19/2025 10:31:55 AM

Optimistic viewpoint from Avery Dennison on 2026 and going forward

RFIDJournal.com Reflections 2025: Avery Dennison Smartrac’s Mathieu de Backer

rfidjournal.com

[Soumaila] Let's hope so. Barclays raised by from 200 to 211, could not find any addition...

Soumaila — 12/17/2025 4:53:54 PM

Let's hope so.

Barclays raised by from 200 to 211, could not find any additional information.

[Cooters] Sylebra didn't file an SEC form yesterday, maybe they're finally done pressuring...

Cooters — 12/17/2025 9:39:31 AM

Sylebra didn't file an SEC form yesterday, maybe they're finally done pressuring the share price.

Edit - Barclays also had an update yesterday, I don't have access to the details.

[nicewatch] Impinj, Inc. Presents at UBS Global Technology and AI Conference 2025, Dec-03-20...

nicewatch — 12/3/2025 8:22:39 PM

Impinj, Inc. Presents at UBS Global Technology and AI Conference 2025, Dec-03-2025 03:35PM

Timothy Arcuri

Good afternoon. We're going to get started. I'm Tim Arcuri. I'm the semiconductor analyst here and very pleased to have Impinj and with Impinj, we have Cary Baker, who is the CFO. So thanks, Cary.

Cary Baker

Yes. Thanks for having me.

Timothy Arcuri

Great. So let's just start with probably the biggest question that we recently initiated. And the biggest question that we have heard is just sort of the pace -- I mean, obviously, I think everyone recognizes that the TAM is huge. And the challenge is just penetrating that TAM. And can you just talk about sort of what some of the impediments are to penetrating the TAM? Maybe in some of the key end markets, I think it's probably easier in some end markets than it is in others.

Cary Baker

Yes. So if you look at any information industry and you go back in time, the industry must first build out the hardware foundation before it can realize its full potential in that. Think about mobile phones as an example. We spent the '80s and '90s, building out the hardware foundation so that by the early 2000s, we had a flip phone that you -- was just a phone. You could make calls and you could struggle with T9 text. Before the industry was sufficiently mature where you could monetize the apps and the data services and the solutions designs and even the AI in the phone foundation. That is not unlike where we are with RAIN. So the RAIN industry since 2010, has had a unit CAGR of 28%. In 2024, the total volume for the industry was $52.8 billion. It was up $8 billion from the year prior to that. And that's mostly going to the Western world, and that's mostly on the back of a single vertical, retail apparel.

Today, we are now more than 1 vertical. We have logistics, we have general merchandise, and we're just now announcing item-level food. So it's the situation where Rome is not built in a day and we're laying that foundation right now. And the unit CAGR that we have delivered is a strong indicator of the potential of this platform once the platform has reached that maturity level.

Timothy Arcuri

I mean I guess it's pretty hard to get these large global organizations to change and to adopt new things, and that's probably the single biggest thing that you kind of work against. So are there some verticals that are more -- that you would highlight that are sort of -- that are out there still that are going to still take a couple of years?

Cary Baker

Yes. I think the verticals that we focus on today, apparel, logistics, general merchandise and food. Those are all beginning to move forward. As I look further into the future, opportunities where I see use cases that exist, but the industry is not moving forward yet would be automotive, for example. German-made auto manufacturers have anywhere -- or autos have anywhere from 30 to 50 tags in them. They use it for quality control down the assembly line to make sure a U.S.-bound auto receives a U.S. spec airbag. Or that the color scheme of the seats being put in the car match the color scheme of the dash. And the goal is to identify any challenges before they get too far down the assembly line where they have to scrap the car.

Pharmaceutical, all the regulations necessary to move forward in pharmaceutical has been approved. But the industry hasn't moved forward because we haven't seen one of the big pharmacies make the decision to move forward. The drug manufacturers would bear the cost of this, but the pharmacies would reap the benefit. Those are 2 verticals where there are active use cases in deployed today, but the industries just haven't moved forward yet. So I see those on the horizon after we tackle some of these bigger ones first.

Timothy Arcuri

Got it. How do you think about the share dynamics in the endpoint IC market? Is share tied more to your existing customers or to new programs with lighthouse customers?

Cary Baker

Yes. So we -- our platform is our competitive advantage, and we put functionality in the ICs that have engaged by functionality in the readers to solve problems that you can't solve with a mix and match solution. And if we're successful at that, we will drive share to -- or drive preference to our endpoint ICs. Largely, the share gains that we've enjoyed so far have been on the back of that platform.

Timothy Arcuri

And just for the lighthouse programs, like what creates this long-lasting moat that would -- that allows you to retain that share into gain from there?

Cary Baker

It's a solution that you can't solve with a mix and match reader and endpoint IC. So it is functionality in the IC that is leveraged by the reading environment that the software and the reader creates. Some examples of that would be in our Gen 2X features. So in a normal Gen 2 environment, which is the existing radio protocol, the readers are -- the ICs are constantly responding to the reader, which clutters the environment. With Gen 2X features, we've put a capability in the IC that the reader can engage that IC, tell that IC to stop responding because it's already been read. So that the reader can focus on reading the rest of the ICs in the market and just kind of go through that process, deselecting the response as it reads.

That has a dual benefit. First, it increases the read speed because the environment has been significantly decluttered and second it increases the read range in that environment. That solution, that tag-quieting solution, as we call it, is only available with the Impinj M800, which has Gen 2X features in 1 of R700 readers or our reader ICs, our E Family reader ICs are 1 of our partners that we've licensed the Gen 2X features to like Zebra as an example.

Timothy Arcuri

And how ubiquitous is that or is that just in its nascency?

Cary Baker

It's in its early days right now. We announced Gen 2X at the end of last year. So we're just coming up on a year of Gen 2X in the market, but we're seeing real traction from that. One example is in overhead reading. So we have a customer that was a historical Impinj customer, but during the supply-constrained environment of '22 and '23, we were unable to supply them and what was kind of a dual source account where they used us and they used NXP went almost fully to NXP.

That customer, however, has always had a vision of an overhead reading solution. They want to move away from the handhelds, they want real-time reading available all the time, be an overhead solution. But the read range of standard Gen 2 was too small to make the economics pencil out. It required too many overhead readers to make it and made the program cost prohibitive.

But with Gen 2X and the tag-quieting feature that I just talked about, the read range has increased by almost 40%. And now all of a sudden, with that increased read range, the math starts to pencil on the overhead reading. So this is an opportunity to both deliver a solution that the customer has long wanted, but hasn't been able to get and also be able to drive endpoint IC volumes in that account back to Impinj.

Timothy Arcuri

And which -- how does the software factor in all of this.

Cary Baker

Yes. So with every reading environment, you need software to control it. So we are introducing software components to our reading to take the RF out of RFID to make the provisioning easier by putting machine learning at the edge. And what that does is that drives a solution that can be zero-touch provisioning while also an environment that self-monitors and adjust constantly. So we can make the reading set up much easier for our end customers.

Timothy Arcuri

And so is the competing solutions, I mean in this fully integrated solution, you have the software, you have the reader and the endpoint, all three?

Cary Baker

That's correct.

Timothy Arcuri

As we think about these more mature markets like apparel or footwear, for example, how do you think about your market share versus your primary peer going forward? And how do you estimate like self-checkout adoption thus far and how that could evolve over time?

Cary Baker

The primary use case in retail apparel today is using a handheld reader to count inventory on the store floor. And that is primarily a mix-and-match solution where any reader and any IC can be paired together and deliver sufficient performance in that case. We perform better, but the environment in a mix and match works just fine. What we're seeing in the retail market is retailers are moving towards 100% penetrated, only a handful, probably less than 10 are 100% penetrated at this point, but they're all striving to get to that point. And the reason they do is once you get to 100% tagged, you can then unlock the additional use cases. You can go beyond handheld inventory accounting to self-checkout to loss prevention, to front-store, back store management or smart fitting rooms.

In those use cases, you no longer rely on a handheld reader. You're moving into fixed or autonomous reading where there's no human in the loop and the accuracy threshold increases significantly. The Impinj platform is uniquely positioned in those cases where fixed autonomous reading is necessary to provide the solution. So we think, over time, as those use cases become more prominent, that will help drive share in the retail apparel space to Impinj. Prior to 100% tagging, the example of overhead reading, and some of the performance improvements in M800 in hard to tag categories will also help drive preference for Impinj ICs.

Timothy Arcuri

And so I guess, just structurally, until you get to 100%, you can't start to adopt some of these other innovations until everything is tagged?

Cary Baker

Yes. You can't do self-checkout until everything in the store is tagged. You can't permanently replace the hard tags that use that trigger the alarms at the doors until everything has been tagged.

Timothy Arcuri

And can we talk about channels. So in your engagements with end users, you typically supply them through inlay partners and service bureaus. And ultimately, you're exposed to sort of multilevel supply chain risk as customers or partners look to build -- burn or build inventory. So how do you manage the like multiple nodes of the supply chain and the inventory that can actually sit in those nodes?

Cary Baker

Very careful, we try to at least. So we get monthly inventory reports from our channel partners. And from our lighthouse accounts, we get forecast directly from them to track inventory levels. And then we get anecdotal information from the service bureaus, which are 2 steps removed from us. We also track a subset of public retailers that we think of as a RAIN indicator set so that we can match macro trends that the retailers are seeing with what the ordering patterns are from our direct customers to try to triangulate that. All that being said, it's still a multistep distribution model. So we'll never be 100% immune to channel inventory builds. But what we have been able to prove is that we can identify it early on, and then we're able to correct it very quickly.

Timothy Arcuri

And how much visibility do you typically have?

Cary Baker

Typical lead times are 6 to 7 weeks. We turned 50% in a quarter. And that doesn't change very much. Not usually, there's been -- typically, when there's periods of time where it changes, it's signaling something else is going on. If you go back to the fourth quarter of 2024, we saw our lead time shrink dramatically as tariffs began to be announced, specifically in China and Canada and Mexico. And what was happening at that point was our partners were adjusting their production footprint to optimize for the tariffs. So they're moving out of Mexico as an example, into Southeast Asia. And we saw the lead time shrink as they were doing that than we saw the lead times go back to normal levels thereafter.

Timothy Arcuri

I think you talked about this, you've broken up the ramp into 3 parts. It's like the first part is hard and then the middle 60% is easy and then the last 20% is hard. So where do you stand with respect to food in that life cycle?

Cary Baker

Yes. So we're at the early days of food right now. Think of that 0 to 20, 20 to 80, 80 to 100 as a proxy for how new programs ramp. So in the case of food for the most recent food announcement by Walmart, think of the -- what they've got to do to get that up and running. They've got to put in an infrastructure which is basically printer encoders in their existing weight scales. They have experience with RAIN RFID in the apparel department, but the food team doesn't have experience. So there's tens of thousands of employees across their 4,600-store network that need to be trained up on doing that. All of that happens at the first part of the ramp, and that contributes to the first 0 to 20% of our ramp going at a relatively slow pace.

Once that foundation is built, they can accelerate the program. And that's why we see typically going from 20% to 80% at a much faster pace. The -- capturing the final 20% typically comes down to solving for the hard to tag items or the edge cases that you haven't figured out just yet.

Timothy Arcuri

And how -- and so with respect to food, you've called item-level food as the single largest RAIN market. And as we understand it, there's, I think, 8 global food retailers that are exploring RAIN. Have you sized sort of a more immediately addressable market out of these folks who are looking at being the first adopters?

Cary Baker

We haven't sized it specifically yet, but what I would say is that the sell-side estimates that are out there are reasonable in the case. Where we're seeing the grocer start is in the portions of the grocery store where they control the supply chain. So think the 4 outside walls of a grocery store, where they're packaging, labeling, sometimes producing the items directly behind the counter or at their company-owned D.C. They're doing this because there's no negotiation required.

If they wanted to go to the middle of the store, they would have to negotiate with the CPG companies to put the tag on a box of cereal as an example. In this case, they skip that step and they're able to make the move much faster. They'll eventually get to the middle of the store, but they're starting where they think they can get more momentum earlier.

Timothy Arcuri

And sort of as you look into next year, I mean, you have -- obviously, you said you have very, very short lead times. However, you do have a little more visibility on sort of maybe some of these larger programs. And how they're ramping. So how much visibility do you have next year? And like what's going to be the main put and take in terms of revenue drivers next year?

Cary Baker

Yes, so we see multiple opportunities for growth next year, kind of in no particular order. So in apparel, we see expansion growth. Most retailers have adopted, most retailers are not 100% deployed. So they're growing to 100%. We'll also see net new opportunities next year like we did this year, even though there's a high brand penetration rate. Within retail, macro is always the factor that people are focused on these days. And coming out of the impact of tariffs, we saw cautious rebuying behavior from retailers despite a pretty solid back-to-school.

Fast forward to today, we've seen very strong holiday -- early holiday prints from Walmart, from American Eagle from Inditex, from Macy's even. So that tells us that the consumer is much more resilient than maybe they thought earlier in the year. And if the consumer remains resilient, I think that bodes well for 2026 rebuying behavior. So that's apparel.

In general merchandise, Walmart has announced 2 phases of general merchandise. We're not complete in tagging those 2 phases. So there'll be additional penetration in those 2 phases. We think there's an opportunity for a third phase in general merchandise. Categories have been discussed, but nothing has been announced at this point.

In logistics, our second large logistics provider achieved 100% domestic penetration in the third quarter. So there's an annualized growth rate that factors into just the domestic, and then there's an opportunity for international beyond. There are other logistics pilots going on right now and depending on how quickly those can convert to full-fledged programs that could impact growth in 2026. And then finally, on food, there's additional penetration in the Kroger bakery pilot. There's potential for additional categories with that and the Walmart food program is just getting started right now.

Timothy Arcuri

So when you talk about food, so some of the like high moisture and produce categories, they seem to have maybe packaging and some constraints that would complicate tagging. What's the sort of binding technical and operational constraints to have full food coverage. And where do you expect the real innovation to come to really unlock these like last pockets that have been hard to access?

Cary Baker

So anything that's liquid or metal interferes with the RF propagation. So you can imagine food between its properties and its packaging introduces a lot of challenges. Those challenges can be solved and likely will be solved by the ecosystem in terms of developing tags. So as an example, one of our partners developed a very clever foam spacer that can get applied to proteins. And basically, once it's applied, the stickers applied, the spacer expands and the tags on top of it. So it creates enough airspace for the RF to propagate. That works great on steak and the water content in steak. Doesn't yet work on poultry because poultry has a higher water content. So we still have to solve that.

In some of the most challenging use cases, the end customer or the ecosystem will come to us. So in the grocery space, early for the bakery pilot, tagging pies was a challenge. Not the pie itself but the aluminum pie tin that's on the -- that the pies are held by and we needed to develop a tag to solve that. Another example was tagging a gallon of milk because the milk interferes with the RF, so we can't put a sticker on the side of that. You had to design an inlay that sits on top of the milk cap. We have an in-house inlay design team. And when necessary, we can deploy them to solve those hard to tag items. And then once they've solved that, we hand out that inlay reference design to the ecosystem so they can support the end customer.

Timothy Arcuri

Yes. So I was going to talk about that, like where does the ecosystem the sort of push pull? How much of these hard to access things, like how much technology are you building around the tags? How much of it are you pushing into the ecosystem versus them coming to you and saying, "Hey, we would like to tag this. Can you please help us solve this."

Cary Baker

Yes. So we push a lot in the first in form of IC by making the IC more sensitive, to make the IC smaller, so it can fit on a milk cap or it can leverage a smaller antenna to get the targeted range. And then they take the IC from there, and they're primarily the ones that develop the inlays for that. It's only when we get to the hard to tag, the very hard to tag items that they'll come back to us for help.

Timothy Arcuri

Got it. So apparel remains your largest market, but 2025 looks kind of close to flat due to some tagging partner inventory issues and some limited full adopter penetration. What's the forward path recovery forward in the apparel market and how many new retailers and like deeper deployments would be required to have a big up year in '26 and '27 in that space?

Cary Baker

Yes. So I think, think of apparel as an $80 billion unit opportunity per year, that is roughly 40% penetrated by volume based on 2024 data, but it is over 90% penetrated by brand or by logo. As I said earlier, most retailers have made the decision to move forward. Most are not 100%. So as I look at the retail opportunity, there's a lot of expansion left in just the existing customers that have already started the program. But there are net new programs.

In 2025, we saw Old Navy, we saw Academy Sports + Outdoors and we saw Aritzia all announced programs for the first time. Those programs will continue to ramp into 2026. And I suspect there'll be new programs launched in 2026 as well. And then layer on top of that, any stabilization or recovery in the macro.

Timothy Arcuri

I want to talk about general merchandise for Walmart a little bit. And are Phase 1 and Phase 2 of their general merchandising efforts complete and do you expect more phases, I guess, I ask because the program has been quite lengthy given their vast supply chain.

Cary Baker

Yes. It was lengthy because we were tagging items for the first time working with suppliers who never had any exposure to RAIN before. So that took a little while to get it up and running. And since then, the program has been moving quite nicely. There was certainly an impact from tariffs because a lot of the goods were made in China, and it wasn't as easy as it was in apparel to find a new production home for some of the general merchandise items.

That being said, we are not fully deployed with Phases 1 and 2 of general merchandise. So I would expect continued expansion with those existing phases in 2026. There has also been a significant amount of testing new work going on to what categories could be included in Phase 3. And I expect a Phase 3 to be announced at some point in 2026.

Timothy Arcuri

And is that unique to Walmart where they have their suppliers tag the items?

Cary Baker

No. Typically, the retailers want the item tagged as close to manufacture as possible so they get the benefit throughout the chain. They do have the capabilities to tag in store, but we do not see that as a widely used option.

Timothy Arcuri

I wanted to ask about logistics. You're nearly done with the U.S. rollout of the second large North American supply chain logistics end user, obviously, UPS. In the logistics market, where do you see the next leg of growth? And are there any pilots beyond the 2 end users that you already work with?

Cary Baker

Yes. So in the logistics space, our second large logistics provider is well in front of the rest of the competition. And they've been very vocal about the ROI that they're earning from, removing manual scans to improving misload rates to taking cost out of their structure. So I think there's a general understanding that many in the industry are well behind that, and there's a sense of urgency to catch up. We see that urgency in our pipeline. We see that urgency in the pilots that are going on right now. It just depends in terms of timing and when those pilots can turn into full-fledged programs and how early in 2026, that might happen understand the impact of 2026 calendar year.

Timothy Arcuri

And do you think that there -- because of what they've done, are they winning business because of what they've done? I mean can you -- is that an example you can go to the other large North American guys and you can say, listen, you're losing ground and here's the tangible evidence.

Cary Baker

Yes. So yes, we have heard that they've won business because they have RFID solution. They are very good at being vocal about their ROI that they've achieved, about the wins that they're achieving. So I don't even need to go say that -- that's in the public domain already.

Timothy Arcuri

And is there any way for you to -- obviously, if it's that important to them, do you feel like you're getting all the economic value out of that engagement that you could?

Cary Baker

I believe so. They're a very key partner. We call them a lighthouse account. Our engineering teams work closely together. We work together on the solutions to make -- to build their solutions and then bring them to life, and it's an opportunity that we're rewarded with high endpoint IC share, which is our price.

Timothy Arcuri

I want to ask about financials and margins. And maybe you can walk through some of the main levers and the puts and takes on gross margin. I think you framed some of the different M800 and M700, -- there's a big -- I think that's a 300 basis point gross margin uplift. So just can you frame some of the puts and takes on gross margin?

Cary Baker

Yes. So we are in the midst of ramping M800 and that's what's driving the gross margin lift. If you go back in time, prior to the M700, which is our first chip in 65-nanometer node, our corporate average gross margin was roughly 50%. The M700, we delivered 2 things -- 3 things. First, it's a more performant IC than the prior generation R6, which was in 152-nanometer. Second thing we delivered was a lower price point to our inlay partners, so they could be more competitive in the market and unlock new opportunities. And third, by shrinking the size of the die, we were able to reduce our cost, and that translated to a 300 basis point gross margin increase.

The M800 is our second major chip in 65-nanometer. We get 25% more die per wafer. We get an improvement in sensitivity above M700. And what that means to our inlay partners is they can leverage a smaller antenna to get the same read range. So the M800 helps take cost out of their BOM. In addition to that, we price the M800 at slightly lower than the M700 to drive adoption, while still maintaining the cost advantage so that when the M800 is fully deployed, we expect another 300 basis points of gross margin accretion.

You're starting to see that in the fourth quarter. In the fourth quarter, the M800 will be our volume runner, meaning it crossed over 50%. It won't ever go to 100%, but it will grow above 50% of our IC mix and we signaled it would deliver over 100 basis points of gross margin accretion in the fourth quarter.

Timothy Arcuri

And can you just -- can you talk about balance sheet optimization and capital return, how you're kind of thinking about optimizing the balance sheet?

Cary Baker

Yes. The first thing that we're focused on as it relates to the balance sheet is the convertible debt. So about 6 weeks ago, we refinanced a portion of our convertible debt. So we issued $190 million, 0% convert and simultaneously repurchased $190 million of our [ 1/8 ] convert. The goal there was multifaceted first. We reduced our coupon. Second, we reduced the underlying dilution by a couple of hundred thousand shares. And then third and more importantly, we split up the maturities of our $287 million total convertible debt to sizable chunks that where we can leverage the balance sheet when it comes time to retire. This is potentially our path off convertible debt and splitting up the maturities was a key focus for us so that we could retire them in a dilutive friendly way.

Timothy Arcuri

Can you just go back to your point about gross margin, how much more upside is there for gross margin? Where do you think it can go?

Cary Baker

Yes, it's a good question. So I think there continues to be more innovation we can do. There's a more advanced process node that you should expect us to be working on, even though there's still more iteration within 65-nanometer to the extent we can take cost out and to still deliver a lower-priced IC to our end customers. I think that could drive gross margin.

We are also not yet leveraging or seeing the benefit of our -- of a cloud service or a SaaS software offering on top of that. That is our ambition is to leverage our platform and then put a software solution on top of it. We're building out the team to do it right now. We have technology. We don't have a product yet. That team will be chartered with taking that technology, developing new technology and productizing all of it in a way that drives a recurring software solution that would have SaaS-like margins.

Timothy Arcuri

Maybe to end, I just wanted to ask you about endpoint ICs versus systems. I think endpoint ICs are something like 80% of revenue today. But sounds like systems are going to start to grow a lot more software, it will begin to grow. So how do you see the mix of revenue evolving over the next few years?

Cary Baker

Yes. Over the next few years, I still see endpoint IC being the lion's share. I probably always see endpoint IC being the lion's share. While it's not recurring, it is reoccurring. So once we tag a pair of jeans, when that pair of jeans sells, we tag the next pair of jeans. So I think that continues to drive endpoint ICs to be the larger mix. There will always be a lumpiness factor to the systems business as we have a large program coming online that could drive the systems mix up in any given quarter. And we're still a few years away from the software becoming a meaningful portion of our revenue.

Timothy Arcuri

Got it. Well, thank you, Cary. We're out of time. Thank you for having us.

Cary Baker

Thanks.

[Soumaila] UBS Global Technology and AI Conference Notes below try and stick to the conver...

Soumaila — 12/3/2025 7:51:27 PM

UBS Global Technology and AI Conference

Notes below try and stick to the conversation closely and be factually correct. If you can listen, I would be interested to hear what you think of the CAGR conversation, is Cary tipping a return to impressive CAGR growth in 2026?

Cary Baker

RFID 28% CAGR since 2010, largely on apparel
the platform is capable of delivering that CAGR and is now based on the four verticals apparel, general merch, logistics, and food - the latter 3 are still foundation building (my note all are potentially, significantly larger too)
auto and pharmaceuticals are future opportunities, use cases exist but industries have not started adoption
software is being used to make reading easier and machine learning at the edge, software controls the reading environment, 0 touch, self adjusts, goal is to make it easier and faster to deploy
explained how they monitor channel inventory, monthly reports from channel partners, feedback from lighthouse customers, track some companies to get the macro
Food is at the 0-20% ramp so is slow
8 global food retailers looking at RAIN (host said this not Cary)
size of food opportunity that people are putting out there is reasonable
labeling the middle isles of the store requires getting the cpg companies to participate (like general merchandise)
logistics pilots ongoing, depending on speed there could be impact in 2026
Kroger could add meats and deli
Walmart is just getting started
Apparel going forward, 40% penetrated (2024), 90% by brand, lot of expansion left for customers adding categories (Old Navy and American Apparel new for 2025)
Walmart general merchandise has been lengthy, working with suppliers was slow and has been moving well. Tariff impacts changed location and impacted deployments
Expects a phase 3 for Walmart in 2026, have been working on categories and tags
Logistics UPS is out front and vocal about the ROI, seeing a real sense of urgency to catch up, see it in the pipeline and the pilots. Depends on how early the pilots shift to deployment will determine impact on 2026 business
convertible debt, 190M 0% convert, reduced coupon and reduced dilution. Split up the maturities of the balance, this is the path off the debt and to retire notes in a dilutive friendly way
more advanced process node to remove cost still out there, still some cost advantages at 65nm also
not seeing the SAS or cloud software yet, building the team now and they will be charged with building the product, it will have recurring revenue and SAS like margins
endpoint ICs will always be lions share, systems will be lumpy, few years out from software providing meaningful revenue

[Cooters] Data Accuracy: Helping Solve Grocery’s $473 Billion Food Waste Problem Data...

Cooters — 12/1/2025 8:57:45 AM

Data Accuracy: Helping Solve Grocery’s $473 Billion Food Waste Problem

Data Accuracy: Helping Solve Grocery’s $473 Billion Food Waste Problem

[Savant] RT United Kingdom RFID Market Trends and Strategies Report 2025-2033, Feat...

Savant — 11/20/2025 4:58:24 PM

RT United Kingdom RFID Market Trends and Strategies Report 2025-2033, Featuring Alien Technology, William Frick & Co, Invengo Technology, Impinj, CCL Industries, Nedap, and Trace-Tech ID Solutions - ResearchAndMarkets.com

United Kingdom RFID Market Trends and Strategies Report 2025-2033, Featuring Alien Technology, William Frick & Co, Invengo Technology, Impinj, CCL Industries, Nedap, and Trace-Tech ID Solutions - ResearchAndMarkets.com

[Savant] Wonder what the impact the check out free system will have on all the cashiers.....

Savant — 11/20/2025 1:06:13 PM

Wonder what the impact the check out free system will have on all the cashiers...3.2 billion are here now..

Scale of one trillion dollars – FlowingData

[Cooters] Walmart US Pilots Checkout-Free Stores with Smart Technology Walmart US Pil...

Cooters — 11/20/2025 10:16:18 AM

Walmart US Pilots Checkout-Free Stores with Smart Technology

Walmart US Pilots Checkout-Free Stores with Smart Technology – International Supermarket News

-----

apparently this was announced last week. Cooters

[Soumaila] Impinj Expands Gen2X to Unlock New Enterprise RAIN RFID Use Cases investor.impi...

Soumaila — 11/13/2025 7:52:18 AM

Impinj Expands Gen2X to Unlock New Enterprise RAIN RFID Use Cases

investor.impinj.com

[Soumaila] Baird Global Industrial Conference - Impinj Quite a bit of new info, at least ...

Soumaila — 11/11/2025 11:08:48 PM

Baird Global Industrial Conference - Impinj

Quite a bit of new info, at least for me.

Some highlights
60ish % of all endpoint ICs are apparel
Food - for proteins - chicken is still not being deployed, too much water content
Deployment pace 0 -20% deployed is slow (training), 20-80% is fast, final 20% is slow difficult to label items
Opex investments are to make deployments faster and easier - able to work with more customers at once
Logistics pipeline is very active - everyone knows they are playing catch up, takes time to get deployments rolling

Some key snips from this transcript: investing.com

Cary Baker, CFO, Impinj: Yeah. Our largest vertical is retail apparel. Upwards of 60% of the ICs we ship go into retail apparel. Our second largest vertical is logistics.

Regarding systems revenue in Q4: Ninety days ago, we thought we’d actually be up slightly in the fourth quarter, not as strong as usual, but because of the strong Q3, only up kind of on the lower side of normal seasonality, which is plus 10%-20%. What we saw, though, was we saw those projects accelerate into Q3 and then stretch a little bit into 2026. The result is we’re going to be slightly down on systems revenue in the fourth quarter. Those projects, the size and scope are unchanged. The customer’s ambitions are unchanged.

Cary Baker, CFO, Impinj: Yeah, I think anytime you have large systems deployment, it is a benefit to endpoint ICs down the road. These were actually the projects that we mentioned in Q3 that were kicking off were with two existing customers, our visionary European retailer as they’re expanding their deployment beyond inventory visibility, beyond self-checkout and loss prevention, and then at our second-largest logistics customer as they too continue expanding their deployments.
—-what could the use case be for the Visionary European Retailer? E-commerce, 3PL, something else?

Cary Baker, CFO, Impinj: Yeah, food is going to be a massive opportunity. If I compare it to the other three verticals that are more penetrated at this point, apparel is 80 billion units a year. General merchandise is 325 billion units per year. Logistics is 400 billion units per year. Food is bigger than all three of those combined. We’re very early days right now with just two programs announced, but I would say that the activity in the pipeline is very strong. While Kroger and Walmart are ahead, there are others following behind them. Like apparel, which benefited from shared learnings, once we knew as an industry, we knew how to tag a pair of jeans, every apparel manufacturer knew how to apply a tag to the pair of jeans. Food’s going to be the same way. Once we know how to tag a steak, everybody will know how to tag a steak. Once we know how to tag a bag of bagels, everybody will know how to tag a bag of bagels.

Chicken is a problem: We see that play out in terms of the pace of a deployment. Any large deployment follows somewhat of a similar path. Going from 0% to 20% deployed takes time. It is slow because you’re training the employees, you’re doing the infrastructure lift, you’re gaining the momentum of having a foundation. Going from 20% to 80% goes really fast. You have the foundation, you know what you’re doing. Now it’s just rinse, wash, repeat. The final 20%, going from 80% to 100%, takes time again because you land at your edge cases, hard-to-tag items. As an example in food that we’re dealing with right now is how do we tag a chicken, a chicken breast, poultry? Poultry has high water content. Water content interferes with RF propagation. We’ve solved it. We, the industry, have solved it for steaks by putting a spacer underneath the tag that creates enough air gap for the RF to propagate. A steak has far less water content than does a piece of chicken. It is something that we will have to solve as an ecosystem. It is entirely solvable. It will just take more time. As I mentioned before, once it is solved, then everybody in the industry benefits from it.

Cary Baker, CFO, Impinj: Retail apparel, as I mentioned, largest vertical that we have, $80 billion units per year opportunity. We think by volume, we’re roughly 40% penetrated. By brand, we’re probably north of 90% penetrated. Most retailers have made the decision to move forward. Most retailers are not yet 100% deployed. They’re following kind of a pragmatic approach to deployment. They’re going geo by geo or brand by brand or product line by product line. They’re just kind of increasing their penetration every year based on that progress. The goal is to get to 100% because then you can unlock more use cases. Up to 100%, they’re using the only use case they’re primarily driving is inventory visibility using a handheld reader. That’s making sure you know what’s on the shelf, what’s not on the shelf, and moving it from the back of the store to the front of store.

When you get to 100%, you can extract even more ROI out of that tag. You can now do self-checkout. You can now do loss prevention. You can do smart dressing rooms. You can do better front store, back store management. Those are the use cases that are happening now that we expect to continue going as our retailers reach 100% tagging. In the logistics space, we see the same type of approach. Strive to get to 100% tagging and then add on, or sometimes in parallel to getting to 100%, add on additional use cases. With our second-large logistics provider, we saw them start with conveyors, putting our R700 reader on a conveyor, in some cases in place of the six-camera array solutions to track packages more efficiently moving down the conveyors.

Cary on logistics: The logistics pipeline is very active. Everybody, I believe, in the market realizes how far behind they are. They are trying to play catch-up right now. A logistics deployment, as I just walked through, on conveyors, then on pre-loaders, then on trucks, is much more complex than an apparel initial deployment where you are using just a handheld reader, which is to say it just takes some time.

Cary Baker, CFO, Impinj: Yeah. Walmart has announced two phases of general merchandise rollout, including categories like home goods, electronics, toys, stationery, some lawn and garden. Not 100% penetration in any of those categories, but announced a dozen or so different categories. Admittedly, we’re behind on the project timing for that. There’s still expansion left within those two phases that have been announced. It has been impacted by tariffs where apparel was able to move outside of China relatively easier when the tariffs hit. General merchandise was not as able to move outside of China. So we felt the impact from that. The whole ecosystem felt the impact from that. There is additional opportunity within Walmart. We expect a phase three, the category timing TBD, but we still expect that. And then there are other opportunities within the general merchandise space.

Cary Baker, CFO, Impinj: The OpEx has been managed, yes, but not as a result of internal use of AI. We’re still exploring where we might be able to deploy AI internally. The AI resources that we have right now are focused on how do we put it into the product. Look for us to put machine learning at the edge of our reading environment in ways that help improve the ease of deployment in a RAIN solution. If you think back to Wi-Fi years ago, you practically needed a PhD to log on to a Wi-Fi network. God forbid if you had a Mac, you just had no chance at doing it. Today, it’s easy. You just click the button and the Wi-Fi works. We are trying to make RAIN work like that.

We’re trying to take the RF out of the RFID to make the deployments ubiquitous and easy to stand up.

Rob Mason, Senior Analyst, Baird: Okay. You previewed some growth investments that will start maybe in the fourth quarter. Is that focused on this effort? Other parts of the technology stack that you’re investing in that you want to call out and how we should be thinking about where you’re headed with it?

Cary Baker, CFO, Impinj: Yeah. So what we called out was an investment in software. We think there’s an opportunity to layer cloud or SaaS-like solutions on top of our platform to make deployments easier, to better manage devices. It’s nascent today. We see the opportunity. We have strong ambitions. This is one of the areas that we’re going to invest for next year is building out those cloud solutions. The other areas that we will invest next year really relate around how do we stand up and support more enterprise customers at once. Today, we can handle one to two lighthouse or large enterprise accounts at once, but the demand is much greater than that. Look for us to invest in the sales and the engineering type resources that we can deploy on site to customers to help bring solutions alive.

Cary Baker, CFO, Impinj: Yeah. Part of it is making our products more easy to use. Making the readers more simple to use, the reader ICs more simple to implement, the endpoint ICs more simple to deploy. We’re absolutely working on that. When we are working with a large enterprise customer, we’re never able to be the ones that go deploy it for that customer. Oftentimes, they’ll match us with one of their SIs to train the SI up on how to deploy. Our goal with that is to train them so that they can take the product to market in other opportunities. Those are just a couple of ways of how we address that.

[Soumaila] Baird 2025 Global Industrial Conference today at 11:15 AM EST. I will try and...

Soumaila — 11/11/2025 9:44:06 AM

Baird 2025 Global Industrial Conference today at 11:15 AM EST.

I will try and listen to the replay later today, hopefully Cary will provide some granularity on the pipeline within each vertical, how they will return to strong growth even with apparel maturing and facing tariff hell, and move beyond the size of the opportunity to what they have coming in the next 3-6-12 months

Here is a link to the Impinj page with conference link. investor.impinj.com

[Cooters] Sylebra has been a seller the past week. Not large sales but a weight that hopef...

Cooters — 11/8/2025 9:08:00 AM

Sylebra has been a seller the past week. Not large sales but a weight that hopefully has been lifted.....

archive.fast-edgar.com/20251107/AG22L22M2222J2Z2222922YBP3AC92222272/

[Savant] Why Impinj (PI) Shares Are Sliding Today What Happened?Shares of RFID manuf...

Savant — 11/7/2025 5:23:42 PM

Why Impinj (PI) Shares Are Sliding Today

What Happened?Shares of RFID manufacturer Impinj (NASDAQ:PI) fell 8.3% in the afternoon session after UBS initiated coverage on the stock with a Neutral rating and a $200 price target, citing concerns about near-term growth challenges.

The investment firm expressed caution about the company's outlook through 2026. This view was based on several factors, including uncertainty in the retail sector stemming from tariffs and inflation. Additionally, UBS pointed to less momentum from established programs and unpredictable deployment schedules at major retailers like Walmart and Kroger. The new coverage set a baseline for the stock's expected performance, and the cautious tone appeared to weigh on investor sentiment.

The stock market overreacts to news, and big price drops can present good opportunities to buy high-quality stocks. Is now the time to buy Impinj? Access our full analysis report here.

What Is The Market Telling Us Impinj’s shares are extremely volatile and have had 34 moves greater than 5% over the last year. In that context, today’s move indicates the market considers this news meaningful but not something that would fundamentally change its perception of the business.

The previous big move we wrote about was 3 days ago when the stock dropped 3.6% on the news that investors reassessed stretched valuations following a period of strong gains, sparking a broad sell-off.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq fell as much as 1.6%, with the S&P 500 also declining. The pullback was exemplified by AI firm Palantir Technologies, which dropped over 7% despite reporting better-than-expected sales. This negative reaction to positive news suggests investors are concerned about extreme valuations and are engaging in "long liquidation"—selling positions to lock in profits after a significant rally. Adding serious weight to this caution, leadership at both Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley highlighted the possibility of a correction in the equity markets over the next couple of years. Despite the euphoria driven by AI optimism and the promise of future rate cuts, these banks viewed this cooling-off period not as a disaster, but as a necessary and healthy feature of a long-term bull market.

Impinj is up 7.7% since the beginning of the year, but at $158.07 per share, it is still trading 34.7% below its 52-week high of $241.91 from October 2025. Investors who bought $1,000 worth of Impinj’s shares 5 years ago would now be looking at an investment worth $5,084.

stockstory.org

[Cooters] UBS initiated coverage of Impinj (PI) with a Neutral rating and $200 price targe...

Cooters — 11/7/2025 8:04:59 AM

UBS initiated coverage of Impinj (PI) with a Neutral rating and $200 price target. Impinj is a leading player in a vast RAIN RFID tag chip market, but UBS is concerned on near-term revenue visibility, the analyst tells investors in a research note. The set-up through 2026 looks challenged given moderating tailwinds from mature programs, retail uncertainty from tariffs/inflation, and unpredictable ramps at Walmart (WMT) and Kroger (KR), the firm says.

[Soumaila] Hi Coot! Welcome back for the annual November PI price plunge! Other than the g...

Soumaila — 11/6/2025 4:53:32 PM

Hi Coot! Welcome back for the annual November PI price plunge!

Other than the guide not indicating lots of immediate growth causing this pullback, I thought the call was very positive.

Food segment outlook: Fresh food will be a strong positive driver and is expected to have material impacts in the second half of 2026.
Grocery pilots: As you noted, PI is actively involved in all the grocery pilots. Chris emphasized that full-store RFID labeling is still being developed and piloted—essentially, as you said, “their business to lose.” Also refreshed everyone's memory that while Kroger signed a bakery deal with AD, he said a couple quarters ago they were working with another large grocer on checkout and labeling everything.
E-commerce and 3PL discussion: The conversation around e-commerce, 3PL, and logistics was particularly interesting—especially when thinking about UPS and Walmart, and also Amazon. The new board member brings 16 years of experience leading global supply chain and logistics at Amazon, which later sued him over a noncompete when he joined Target for a bit—adding another twist.
Growth and investment: Chris continues to make it clear there are multiple opportunities to grow across verticals. Impinj is actively investing to develop solutions for food and beyond, underscoring its readiness to deliver for enterprises.

The wild ride continues, hopefully the macro calms and we see growth powered by all verticals in the near future.

Cheers everyone!