Too Small to Attack, and There Are 80,000Wide moat
Texas Instruments (TXN) — moat facet
Every individual part is too small to be worth attacking, which is the entire protection and also its exact limit.
The catalogue defends itself through arithmetic rather than through technology: each part is too small to attack alone, and there are eighty thousand of them.
TI's portfolio includes more than 80,000 products used in almost every kind of electronic equipment.1 A competitor wanting to displace TI from a customer's board does not face one design problem; it faces the question of whether developing a part that might sell a few million dollars a year is worth the engineering, the qualification and the decades of support that follow.
For any single part the answer is usually no. That is why the analog market remains, in TI's own description, highly fragmented — dozens of large and small suppliers, both broad-based and niche.2 Nobody has built a second catalogue of this size, because there is no year in which doing so pays.
What the breadth buys commercially is the whole board. An engineer who can specify one supplier for power, signal chain, interface and control has fewer vendors to qualify, one set of support relationships and one purchasing arrangement.
The weakness is that the same arithmetic works for an attacker with a lower cost of capital and a policy objective. Chinese analog firms are picking off high-volume commodity parts one at a time, which is the only way the catalogue can be attacked and also a viable one.3
The economics that make each individual part not worth attacking are the same as they were: too little revenue per part to justify a rival's development, qualification and decades of support.
Which is the whole defence, stated as arithmetic: no individual part generates enough revenue to justify a competitor’s development, qualification and decades of support. It is also the exact limit, because the highest-volume parts are far above that average and are worth attacking one at a time.
- ReportedTI's portfolio includes more than 80,000 products used in almost every kind of electronic equipment.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 ↗
- ReportedThat is why the analog market remains, in TI's own description, highly fragmented — dozens of large and small suppliers, both broad-based and niche.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 ↗
- ReportedChinese analog firms are picking off high-volume commodity parts one at a time, which is the only way the catalogue can be attacked and also a viable one.Texas Instruments Incorporated, Form 10-K FY2025 — consolidated statements of income and segment results. Revenue $17,682M, up $2.04bn or 13.0%; gross profit $10,081M; operating profit $6,023M; other income net $230M; interest and debt expense $543M; income before income taxes $5,710M; provision for income taxes $709M at an effective rate of 12.4% (12.0% in 2024); net income $5,001M against $4,799M in 2024 and $6,510M in 2023. Basic EPS $5.47 and diluted EPS $5.45, against $5.20 and $7.07 in the two prior years, on 913 million diluted shares. By segment, Analog revenue $14,006M (2024 $12,161M, +15%) with operating profit $5,412M (2024 $4,608M, +17%) at 38.6% of revenue (37.9%); Embedded Processing $2,700M; Other the remainder. Revenue peaked at $20,028M in 2022 with operating profit of $10,140M, and troughed at $15,641M in 2024 with operating profit of $5,465M. — FY2025 · publ. 2026-02-06 · source ↗