GCT (GCTS) Q1 2026 Earnings Transcript

Wednesday, March 25, 2026 at 4:30 p.m. ET Chief Executive Officer — John Schlaefer Chief Financial Officer — Fong (Edmond) Cheng Need a quote from a Motley Fool analyst? Email pr@fool.com John Schlaefer: Thank you, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today for our first quarter 2026 earnings call. I ll start by discussing the operational progress we ve made during the first quarter as we drive commercial expansion of our 5G products. Following my remarks, our CFO, Edmond Cheng, will walk through the financial results for the first quarter in more detail. Building on the groundwork we laid at the end of 2025, our first quarter results reflect the advancements we ve made on our 5G acceleration, which is reflected by growing 5G chipset shipments, expanding engagement and continued early adoption across leading customers. In the first quarter, we delivered 3,000 5G chipsets, a sequential increase of 58% versus Q4. This growth is an important indicator that customers are continuing to move through the final stages of testing and into initial deployments. While 5G product shipment volume today remains modest relative to the long-term opportunity ahead, we are in an early but critical step of the product cycle. Customer confidence in the performance, reliability and integration of our 5G chipset is building, and we expect 5G chipset shipments to continue trending upward as customers advance their programs. We are also broadening the scope and depth of our customer relationships and chipset use cases. We continue to support a growing number of programs across multiple verticals, FWA, IoT, and NTN, and we are working closely with our lead customers as they move through integration, certification and deployment planning. These engagements often push beyond traditional licensing into deeper platform-level collaboration where our technology serves as the foundation for next-generation systems and user equipment development. Early design wins and platform integrations remain critical in establishing the framework for future volume shipments and long-term adoption. Notably, we expanded our previously announced engagement with one of the world s largest satellite communication providers to fast-track global 5G deployment through a reference platform agreement. Under this framework, we will provide a reference design based on our 4G and 5G chipsets to help accelerate the development of our partners next-generation user equipment, enabling high bandwidth and high-speed communications across satellite and terrestrial networks. This agreement reinforces GCT s role in enabling seamless connectivity across both terrestrial and nonterrestrial networks and broadens the deployment scope of our technology. It also highlights the growing importance of GCT s technology in enabling converged connectivity solutions that span multiple network environments. We view this as a multiphase opportunity that can drive incremental adoption of our solution over time as next-generation user equipment platforms are introduced. As these platforms are developed and deployed, we expect our technology to play an increasingly important role in supporting global connectivity use cases. Initial 5G chipset shipments to this partner remain on track to begin in the second half of 2026. Our focus continues to revolve around driving 5G chipset commercial traction by strengthening our supply chain and operational infrastructure to support higher 5G chipset volumes as customer demand accelerates. Supported by increasing activity from our lead customers, we continue to expect sequential growth in 5G chipset shipments as commercialization continues to scale throughout the year. Further, the headway achieved thus far reinforces our expectation and aligns with our previous product launches such as our 4G chipsets. We believe the work we are doing now will ensure that we are positioned to scale efficiently. At the same time, we remain mindful that the timing and pace of deployments can vary as customers finalize their rollout plans. As a result, we are maintaining a disciplined approach with a focus on execution and operational readiness moving through this next phase. Overall, we believe the first quarter represents meaningful progress in our transition from development to commercialization of our 5G chipset. We are encouraged by the momentum we are seeing and believe we are building a strong base for continued growth throughout 2026. And with that, I ll turn the call over to Edmond to discuss our first quarter results. Edmond? Fong Cheng: Thank you, John. Over the past several quarters, we have noted that our path to 5G commercialization will not be defined by a single event, but rather consistent strides forward like customer sampling inaugural commercial shipments, real-world customer deployments and production scaling, all of which will ultimately culminate in significant revenue contribution. In the first quarter, we delivered meaningful improvement

GCT (GCTS) Q1 2026 Earnings Transcript

Key takeaways

Also covered by

GCT (GCTS) Q1 2026 Earnings Transcript

Key takeaways

Also covered by

More in business