Item 1. BUSINESS.

Skyworks Solutions, Inc., together with its consolidated subsidiaries (“Skyworks” or the “Company”), is empowering the wireless networking revolution. The Company’s highly innovative analog semiconductors are connecting people, places, and things, spanning a number of new and previously unimagined applications within the aerospace, automotive, broadband, cellular infrastructure, connected home, industrial, medical, military, smartphone, tablet and wearable markets.

Our key customers include Amazon, Apple, Arris, Bose, Cisco, DJI, Ericsson, Foxconn, Garmin, Gemalto (a Thales company), General Electric, Google, Honeywell, HTC, Huawei, Itron, Lenovo, LG Electronics, Microsoft, Motorola, Netgear, Northrop Grumman, OPPO, Rockwell Collins, Samsung, Sierra Wireless, Sonos, Technicolor, VIVO, Xiaomi and ZTE. Our competitors include Analog Devices, Broadcom, Cirrus Logic, Maxim Integrated Products, Murata Manufacturing, NXP Semiconductors, Qorvo and Qualcomm.

We are a Delaware corporation that was formed in 1962. We changed our corporate name from Alpha Industries, Inc. to Skyworks Solutions, Inc. on June 25, 2002, following a business combination. We operate worldwide with engineering, manufacturing, sales, and service facilities throughout Asia, Europe, and North America. Our Internet address is www.skyworksinc.com. We make available free of charge on our website our Annual Report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, current reports on Form 8-K, and amendments to those reports as soon as practicable after we electronically submit such material to the SEC. The information contained on our website is not incorporated by reference in this Annual Report. Our SEC filings are also available to the public at www.sec.gov.

In August 2018, we acquired Avnera Corporation (“Avnera”) and expanded our leadership in wireless connectivity by adding ultra-low power analog circuits to enable smart interfaces via acoustic signal processing, sensors, and integrated software. The acquisition of Avnera enables us to capitalize on the rapid proliferation of audio functionality and its convergence with our advanced connectivity solutions. With our global sales channels, strong customer relationships and operational scale, we are leveraging Avnera’s innovative product portfolio and systems expertise to increase our footprint in automotive, industrial, home automation, enterprise and high-end consumer markets.

INDUSTRY BACKGROUND

Wireless connectivity is exploding on a global basis. 5G is dramatically altering the world, creating an ecosystem where everyone is connected to everything, all the time—changing how individuals live, work, play, and learn. More importantly, 5G goes well beyond simply making the mobile communications experience better by increasing reliability, adding new features, and enhancing data rates. It is creating a market for diverse and transformative applications driven by the ability to deliver greater speeds, bandwidth and capacity, significantly lower latency, and more secure connectivity.

In fact, 5G connections will approach ten to 100 times faster than 4G speeds. To put this in perspective, downloading a full-length HD movie in 3G took one day; in 4G, the same file took minutes. On a 5G network, this content can be downloaded in mere seconds. 5G will also enable increasingly efficient and safe vehicle communication, paving the way for autonomous vehicles as well as networks that could make wireless healthcare a reality.

At the same time, connectivity is expanding into an adjacent set of IoT markets. From smart homes to the smart grid and from industrial to wearables, the number of connected devices is rapidly proliferating. IHS Markit Ltd. projects the IoT market to grow from an installed base of 15 billion units in 2015 to more than 75 billion units by 2025. Skyworks is enabling these opportunities with highly customized system solutions supporting a broad set of wireless protocols including cellular LTE, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth®, LoRa®, Thread, and Zigbee®.

Looking forward, we see a market that presents a significant growth opportunity for our industry and for Skyworks. The key catalysts for Skyworks will continue to be the insatiable demand for data and the profitable usage model, as each connection becomes more valuable and the world embraces 5G. According to a June 2019 Ericsson “Mobility Report,” there are expected to be 1.9 billion mobile 5G subscriptions globally by the end of 2024 driven by “rapid early momentum and enthusiasm” in the global market. 5G technology will also support the tens of billions of connected devices, smart objects, and embedded sensors expected to come online as the IoT becomes mainstream.

Solving Connectivity Challenges

We expect that highly integrated semiconductor solutions will play an increasingly pivotal role in the deployment of this next generation standard by resolving the daunting analog and RF complexities that are challenging the capabilities of existing hardware and the supporting network infrastructure. Meeting these design challenges requires broad competencies including signal transmission and conditioning, the ability to ensure seamless hand-offs between multiple standards, power management, voltage regulation, battery charging, advanced filtering, and tuning.

Skyworks is at the forefront of this sea change in connectivity, delivering the solutions that will enable the true potential of 5G and the IoT. We have a rich heritage in analog systems design and have spent the last decade investing in key technologies and resources. Our strength is underpinned by world-class performance and scale across a broad array of capabilities that include advanced TC-SAW and BAW filters, an expanded family of MIMO, ultra-high band, and diversity receive modules and expanding into emerging technologies including millimeter wave. From our breakthrough SKY5® unifying platform to our 5G small cell solutions, Skyworks’ approach across both infrastructure and user equipment facilitates powerful, high-speed end-to-end 5G connectivity.

SKYWORKS’ STRATEGY

Our ambitious vision is to connect everyone and everything, all the time. To this end, key elements of our strategy include:

Industry-Leading Technology

As the industry migrates to more complex 5G architectures across a multitude of wireless applications, we are well positioned to help mobile device manufacturers handle growing levels of system complexity in the transmit and receive chain. The trend towards increasing front-end and analog design challenges in smartphones and other platforms plays directly into our core strengths and positions us to address these challenges. We believe that we offer the broadest portfolio of radio and analog solutions from the transceiver to the antenna as well as all required manufacturing process technologies. We also hold strong technology leadership positions in passive devices, advanced integration including proprietary shielding and 3-D die stacking as well as SAW, TC-SAW and BAW filters. Our product portfolio is reinforced by a library of approximately 3,500 worldwide patents and other intellectual property that we own and control. Together, our industry-leading technology enables us to deliver the highest levels of product performance and integration.

Customer Relationships

Given our scale and technology leadership, we are engaged with key original equipment manufacturers (“OEMs”), smartphone providers and baseband reference design partners. Our customers value our supply chain strength, our innovative technology and our system engineering expertise, resulting in deep customer loyalty. We partner with our customers to support their long-term product road maps and are valued as a system solutions provider rather than just a point product vendor.

Diversification

We are diversifying our business in three areas: our addressed markets, our customer base and our product offerings. By leveraging core analog and mixed signal technologies, we are expanding our family of solutions to a set of increasingly diverse end markets and customers. With the adoption of 5G and the opportunity to enable more applications, we are steadily growing our business beyond just mobile devices (where we support all top-tier manufacturers, including the leading smartphone suppliers and key baseband vendors) into additional high-performance analog markets, including automotive, home and factory automation, infrastructure, medical, smart energy and wireless networking. In these markets we leverage our scale, intellectual property and worldwide distribution network, which spans over 3,200 customers and over 2,500 analog components.

Delivering Operational Excellence

We vertically integrate our supply chain where we can differentiate with highly specialized internal manufacturing capabilities, or enter into alliances and strategic relationships for leading-edge technologies. This hybrid manufacturing model allows us to better balance our manufacturing capacity with the demand of the marketplace. Our internal capacity utilization remains high, resulting in an increase of our gross margin and the return on invested capital on a broader range of revenue.

Additionally, we continue to drive reductions in product design and manufacturing cycle times and further improve product yields. The combination of agile, flexible capacity and world-class module manufacturing and scale advantage allows us to achieve low product costs while integrating multiple technologies into highly sophisticated multi-chip modules.

Maintaining a Performance-Driven Culture

We consider our people and corporate culture to be a major competitive advantage and a key driver of our overall strategy. We create key performance indicators that align employee efforts with corporate strategy and link responsibilities with performance

measurement. Accountability is paramount and we compensate our employees through a pay-for-performance methodology. We strive to be an employer-of-choice among peer companies and have created a work environment in which turnover is below geographic and industry averages.

Generating Superior Operating Results and Shareholder Returns

We seek to generate financial returns that are comparable to a highly diversified analog semiconductor company. Given our product volume and overall utilization we strive to achieve a best-in-class return on investment and operating income to reward shareholders.

OUR PRODUCT PORTFOLIO

Our product portfolio consists of various solutions, including:

•	Amplifiers: the modules that strengthen the signal so that it has sufficient energy to reach a base station

•	Antenna Tuners: aperture and impedance tuning products that improve antenna performance across frequencies

•	Attenuators: circuits that allow a known source of power to be reduced by a predetermined factor (usually expressed as decibels)

•	Circulators/Isolators: ferrite-based components commonly found on the output of high-power amplifiers used to protect receivers in wireless transmission systems

•	Wireless ASoC: an intelligent 2.4 GHz and 5GHz wireless radio integrated circuit that includes all the analog and digital functions optimized for building wireless audio headsets, headphones, and wireless speaker systems

•	DC/DC Converters: an electronic circuit which converts a source of direct current from one voltage level to another

•	Demodulators: a device or an RF block used in receivers to extract the information that has been modulated onto a carrier or from the carrier itself

•	Detectors: devices used to measure and control RF power in wireless systems

•	Diodes: semiconductor devices that pass current in one direction only

•	Directional Couplers: transmission coupling devices for separately sampling the forward or backward wave in a transmission line

•	Diversity Receive Modules: devices used to improve receiver sensitivity in high data rate applications

•	Filters: devices for recovering and separating mixed and modulated data in RF stages

•	Front-end Modules: two or more functions co-packaged to optimize the performance, cost and application suitability in products, including intermediate or radio frequency signal paths

•	Hybrid: a type of directional coupler used in radio and telecommunications

•	LED Drivers: devices which regulate the current through a light emitting diode or string of diodes for the purpose of creating light

•	Low Noise Amplifiers: devices used to reduce system noise figure in the receive chain

•	Mixers: devices that enable signals to be converted to a higher or lower frequency signal and thereby allowing the signals to be processed more effectively

•	Modulators: devices that take a baseband input signal and output a radio frequency modulated signal

•	Optocouplers/Optoisolators: semiconductor devices that allow signals to be transferred between circuits or systems while ensuring that the circuits or systems are electrically isolated from each other

•	Phase Locked Loops: closed-loop feedback control system that maintains a generated signal in a fixed phase relationship to a reference signal

•	Phase Shifters: designed for use in power amplifier distortion compensation circuits in base station applications

•	Power Dividers/Combiners: utilized to equally split signals into in-phase signals as often found in balanced signal chains and local oscillator distribution networks

•	Receivers: electronic devices that change a radio signal from a transmitter into useful information

•	Switches: components that perform the change between the transmit and receive function, as well as the band function for cellular handsets

•	Synthesizers: devices that provide ultra-fine frequency resolution, fast switching speed, and low phase-noise performance

•	Technical Ceramics: polycrystalline oxide materials used for a wide variety of electrical, mechanical, thermal and magnetic applications

•	Voltage Controlled Oscillators/Synthesizers: fully integrated, high performance signal source for high dynamic range transceivers

•	Voltage Regulators: generate a fixed level which ideally remains constant over varying input voltage or load conditions

We believe we possess broad technology capabilities and one of the most complete wireless communications product portfolios in the industry.

MARKETING AND DISTRIBUTION

Our products are sold globally through a direct sales force, electronic component distributors and independent sales representatives. Certain distributors have agreements with us which allow for certain sales returns, stock rotations and price protection on certain inventory if we lower the price of those products (see “Critical Accounting Estimates” in Part II, Item 7 - Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations and Note 2 to Item 8 of this Annual Report on Form 10-K for further detail on revenue reserves). As is customary in the semiconductor industry, our distributors may also market other products that compete with ours.

Our sales engagement begins at the earliest stages of the design of an existing or potential customer’s product. We collaborate technically with our customers and reference design partners at the inception of new programs. These relationships allow our team to facilitate customer-driven solutions, which leverage the unique strength of our intellectual property and product portfolio while providing high value and greatly reducing time-to-market.

We believe the technical and complex nature of our products and markets demand an extraordinary commitment to maintain close ongoing relationships with our customers. As such, we strive to expand the scope of our customer relationship to include design, engineering, manufacturing, procurement, logistics and project management. We also employ a collaborative approach in developing these relationships by combining the support of our design teams, applications engineers, manufacturing personnel, sales and marketing staff and senior management. Lastly, we leverage our customer relationships with cross-selling opportunities across product lines in order to maximize revenue.

We believe that maintaining frequent and interactive contact with our customers is paramount to our continuous efforts to provide world-class sales and service support. By listening and responding to feedback, we are able to mobilize resources to raise our level of customer satisfaction, improve our ability to anticipate future product needs, and enhance our understanding of key market dynamics. We are confident that diligently following this path positions us to participate in numerous opportunities for growth in the future.

CUSTOMER CONCENTRATION

A small number of OEMs historically has accounted for a significant portion of our net revenue. In the fiscal years ended September 27, 2019 (“fiscal 2019”), and September 28, 2018 (“fiscal 2018”), Apple Inc. (“Apple”), through sales to multiple distributors, contract manufacturers and direct sales for multiple applications including smartphones, tablets, desktop and notebook computers, watches, and other devices) constituted more than ten percent of our net revenue. In the fiscal year ended September 29, 2017 (“fiscal 2017”), three customers—Apple, Samsung Electronics (“Samsung”), and Huawei Technology Co., Ltd. (“Huawei”)—each constituted ten percent or more of our net revenue. For further information regarding customer concentrations see Note 15 to Item 8 of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AND PROPRIETARY RIGHTS

We own or have a license to use numerous United States and foreign patents and patent applications related to our products and our manufacturing operations and processes. In addition, we own a number of trademarks and service marks applicable to certain of our products and services. We believe that our intellectual property, including patents, patent applications, trade secrets and trademarks, is of material importance to our business. We rely on patent, copyright, trademark, trade secret and other intellectual property laws, as well as non-disclosure and confidentiality agreements and other methods, to protect our confidential and proprietary technologies, designs, devices, algorithms, processes and other intellectual property. Our efforts may not meaningfully protect our intellectual property, or others may independently develop substantially equivalent or superior proprietary technologies, designs, devices, algorithms, processes or other intellectual property. In addition, the laws of some foreign countries do not protect proprietary rights to the same extent as the laws of the United States, and effective copyright, patent, trademark and trade secret protection may not be available in those jurisdictions. In addition to protecting our intellectual property, we strive to strengthen our intellectual property portfolio to enhance our ability to obtain cross-licenses of intellectual property from others, to obtain access to intellectual property we do not possess and to more favorably resolve potential intellectual property claims against us. Due to rapid technological changes in the industry, we believe establishing and maintaining a technological leadership position depends primarily on our ability to develop new, innovative products through the technical competence of our engineering personnel.

COMPETITIVE CONDITIONS

The competitive environment in the semiconductor industry is in a constant state of flux, with new products continually emerging and existing products approaching technological obsolescence. We compete on the basis of time-to-market, new product innovation, quality, performance, price, compliance with industry standards, strategic relationships with customers and baseband vendors,

personnel and protection of our intellectual property. We participate in highly competitive markets against numerous competitors that may be able to adapt more quickly than we can to new or emerging technologies and changes in customer requirements, or may be able to devote greater resources to the development, promotion and sale of their products than we can.

Erosion of average selling prices of established products is typical of the semiconductor industry. Consistent with trends in the industry, we anticipate that average selling prices for our established products will continue to decline over time. We mitigate the gross margin impact of declining average selling prices with efforts to increase unit volumes, reduce material costs and lower manufacturing costs of existing products and by introducing new and higher value-added products.

RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT

Our products and markets demand rapid technological advancements requiring a continuous effort to enhance existing products and develop new products and technologies. Accordingly, we maintain a high level of research and development activity. We invested $424.1 million, $404.5 million and $355.2 million in research and development during fiscal 2019, fiscal 2018 and fiscal 2017, respectively. The growth in research and development expenses were the result of increases in our internal product designs and product development activity for our target markets in each of these fiscal years. Our research and development expenses include new product development and innovations in integrated circuit design, investment in advanced semiconductor manufacturing processes, development of new packaging and test capabilities and research on next generation technologies and product opportunities. We maintain close collaborative relationships with many of our customers to help identify market demands and target our development efforts to meet those demands.

RAW MATERIALS

Raw materials for our products and manufacturing processes are generally available from several sources. It is our intent not to depend on a sole source of supply unless market or other conditions dictate otherwise. However, there are limited situations where we procure certain components and services for our products from single or limited sources, and we are currently dependent on a limited number of sole source suppliers. We purchase materials and services primarily pursuant to individual purchase orders. However, we have entered into certain supply agreements for the purchase of raw materials or other manufacturing related services that specify minimum prices and purchase quantity based on our anticipated future requirements. Such amounts are reviewed and included in our contractual obligations and commitments as required. Certain of our suppliers consign raw materials to us at our manufacturing facilities to which we take title as needed in our manufacturing process. We believe we have adequate sources for the supply of raw materials and components for our manufacturing needs with suppliers located around the world.

BACKLOG AND INVENTORY

Our sales are primarily from the sale of semiconductor products under individual customer purchase orders, some of which have underlying master sales agreements that specify terms governing the product sales. In the absence of a sales agreement, the Company’s standard terms and conditions apply. We also maintain Skyworks-owned finished goods inventory at certain customer “hub” locations. We do not recognize revenue until these customers consume the Skyworks-owned inventory from these hub locations. Due to industry practice, which allows customers to cancel orders with limited advance notice to us prior to shipment, and with little or no penalty, we believe that backlog as of any particular date may not be a reliable indicator of our future revenue levels. The cancellation or deferral of product orders, the return of previously sold products, or overproduction due to a change in anticipated order volume could result in a reduction in revenue and us holding excess or obsolete inventory, which could result in inventory write-downs and, in turn, could have a material adverse effect on our financial condition.

ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATIONS

Federal, state and local requirements relating to the discharge of substances into the environment, the disposal of hazardous wastes, and other activities affecting the environment have had, and will continue to have, an impact on our manufacturing operations. Most of our customers have mandated that our products comply with various local, regional and national “green” initiatives initiated by such customers or the locations in which they operate. We believe that our current expenditures for environmental capital investment and remediation necessary to comply with present regulations governing environmental protection, and other expenditures for the resolution of environmental claims, will not have a material adverse effect on our liquidity and capital resources, competitive position or financial condition. Environmental regulations are subject to change in the future, and accordingly we are unable to assess the possible effect of compliance with future requirements.

SEASONALITY

Sales of our products are subject to seasonal fluctuation and periods of increased demand in end-user consumer applications, such as smartphones and tablet computing devices. The highest demand for our products generally occurs in our first fiscal quarter ending

in December and the fourth fiscal quarter ending in September. The lowest demand for our handset products generally occurs in our second fiscal quarter ending in March and the third fiscal quarter ending in June.

EMPLOYEES

As of September 27, 2019, we employed approximately 9,000 employees world-wide. Approximately 2,850 of our employees in Mexico, 315 employees in Singapore, and 320 employees in Japan are covered by collective bargaining and other union agreements.