A Website That Serves a Hundred Thousand CustomersNarrow moat
Texas Instruments (TXN) — moat facet
A salesperson cannot call on a hundred thousand accounts. A website carrying eighty thousand parts can.
TI.com is the part of the business that makes a hundred thousand customers economically possible.
A company with more than 80,000 products and more than 100,000 customers cannot serve most of them with people.1 The median customer buys a small quantity of a handful of parts, and the cost of a field sales call exceeds the annual revenue. What makes that customer profitable is a website carrying the entire catalogue with datasheets, evaluation boards, samples, pricing and shipping.
TI has been investing in exactly this, and reports that more than 80% of revenue was direct in 2025, including TI.com. The direct share is the visible measure of a decade-long shift.
The strategic value is not the margin, though that is real. It is that TI sees the design activity: which parts are being sampled, by whom, for what, and how early. A distributor used to hold that information.
The limit is that this is replicable. Every large analog supplier has a web channel and every distributor has an e-commerce front end. TI's advantage is the breadth of the catalogue behind the website, not the website.
About half of revenue comes from customers outside the largest fifty, which is the clearest evidence the long tail is actually being served rather than merely counted.
TI.com and the direct capability keep extending what can be served without a salesperson, which is what makes about half of revenue from outside the largest fifty customers economically possible.
The direct channel's home market; its share falling would mean the website reaches less of the demand.
- ReportedA company with more than 80,000 products and more than 100,000 customers cannot serve most of them with people.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 ↗