Impinj (PI) Baird 2024 Global Industrials Conference summary

Market trends and business outlook

• Normal seasonality has returned, with Q4 typically down 5–10% for endpoint ICs, but this year expected to be on the more favorable side of that range.

• Systems business sees a Q4 spike due to fiscal year-end budget flushes and a large loss prevention deployment, with normalization expected in 2025.

• Broad strength across key verticals in Q3, especially retail apparel, general merchandise, and logistics, drove overperformance versus guidance.

• Retail apparel remains only 30% penetrated, with significant expansion opportunities and ongoing recovery.

• General merchandise and logistics verticals are much larger than apparel, with sequential growth and new deployments expected to continue.

Industry adoption and deployment dynamics

• Retail apparel adoption is progressing, with a shift toward embedded tagging and a push for 100% tagging to enable loss prevention and self-checkout.

• European retailer is nearing completion of loss prevention deployment, shifting focus to self-checkout and new use cases in 2025.

• General merchandise benefits from shared supplier ecosystems, enabling faster piggyback deployments for new customers.

• Logistics customer increased label consumption in 2024 and will continue to grow in 2025, though at a slower rate.

Food sector opportunities and technical innovation

• Food tagging is accelerating due to grocers' need to reduce waste, starting with high-turnover perishables like bakery items.

• Technical challenges in tagging food (e.g., metal pans, liquids) have driven ecosystem innovation, such as air-gap tag placement.

• Item-level tagging in food is a high-volume opportunity, with pilots and deployments in grocery, QSR, and food logistics.

• Full deployment in food could reach trillions of items annually, far surpassing other verticals.