Stocks-in-depth

Knowles two most important businesses, MEMS microphones and hearing aid components, share a common theme of eroding market dominance.  But, management has devoted a large percentage of revenue into R&D that might address new developments.  In Part 2 of this podcast on Knowles, we discuss how Knowles has positioned itself to capture new sources of demand from the internet of things (IoT), and how it has addressed greenfield needs in hearables, e.g. small earbuds, which require distributed processing power.  We also discuss how packagers enjoyed a huge upswing in recent years, but have begun to back off, in our opinion shifting the balance of power back towards the two clear leaders in the upstream production of bare microphone dies, Knowles and Infineon.