Designed In for a DecadeWide moat
Texas Instruments (TXN) — moat facet
Requalifying a board costs more than the component, so the purchase order renews itself for a decade without anyone deciding anything.
An analog part designed into an industrial controller in 2015 is still being bought in 2030, and that is most of why this revenue is stable.
Analog and embedded parts stay in production for decades. The reason is not sentiment: requalifying a board — re-testing, re-certifying, in automotive re-validating for functional safety — costs far more than the part, which often sells for well under a dollar. So once a component is designed in, the purchase order renews itself until the end product is discontinued.
That produces a revenue profile unlike anything else in semiconductors. There is no annual product cycle to win or lose, no design-win treadmill of the kind Qualcomm runs, and no generation in which an incumbent can be displaced wholesale.
The markets that value this most are exactly where TI is concentrated: industrial 33% and automotive 33% of 2025 revenue, both with product lifetimes measured in decades and qualification burdens to match.1 Personal electronics, at 21%, is the part of the mix that behaves like a normal semiconductor business — and it is the part that swings hardest in a cycle.
The catch is that longevity runs in both directions. A socket TI does not win stays lost for a decade too, and the Chinese analog firms winning designs today are winning them for the 2030s.
Product lifetimes in analog are set by the customer's requalification cost, which has not changed. Designed-in parts keep shipping for decades in both directions.
Analog parts are designed in and then ordered for years. Revenue recovering this fast shows the installed designs pulling orders as customers restock.
Source: Texas Instruments Form 10-Q, Q2 2026 ↗- ReportedThe markets that value this most are exactly where TI is concentrated: industrial 33% and automotive 33% of 2025 revenue, both with product lifetimes measured in decades and qualification burdens to match.Texas Instruments Incorporated, Form 10-K for the year ended 31 December 2025 (SEC, CIK 97476) — Item 1, Business. TI's two reportable segments are Analog and Embedded Processing, with remaining activities in Other; operations began in 1930 and it has design, manufacturing or sales operations in more than 30 countries. The product portfolio includes more than 80,000 products. TI states four sustainable competitive advantages: a strong foundation of manufacturing and technology, a broad portfolio of analog and embedded processing products, the reach of its market channels, and the diversity and longevity of its products, markets and customer positions, which in combination it describes as difficult to replicate. An unpackaged chip built on a 300mm wafer costs about 40% less than one built on a 200mm wafer; TI continued qualifying and ramping production at its newest 300mm fabs in Richardson and Sherman, Texas, and Lehi, Utah, supporting external foundry transfers and internal transfers from its legacy 150mm facilities, and expects to maintain sufficient internal capacity to meet the majority of its production needs, offering customers geopolitically dependable capacity. TI sells to over 100,000 customers, with about half of revenue derived from customers outside its largest 50; more than 80% of revenue was direct in 2025, including TI.com. End markets as a percentage of 2025 revenue: industrial 33%, automotive 33%, personal electronics 21%, data centre 9%, communications equipment 3%, and calculators about 1%. About 60% of revenue comes from customers headquartered outside the United States; revenue from end customers headquartered in China represented about 20% of revenue in 2025, while revenue from products shipped into China represented about 50%. The analog and embedded processing markets remain highly fragmented, with significant global competition from dozens of large and small companies including emerging companies, particularly in Asia. The company's stated objective is the growth of free cash flow per share over the long term. — FY2025 · publ. 2026-02-06 · source ↗