2026 Could be a Growth Year After a Volatile 2025; Fair Value Estimate of NOK 140
Nordic Semiconductor designs Bluetooth Low Energy chips, the main source of its narrow-moat where it enjoys 30%-40% market share. Nordic Semiconductor has made a handful of good decisions in the last decade. The first was to bet early in the BLE market around 2009, which is the standard for short-range communications in battery-powered devices thanks to good data throughput and easy installation. Second, Nordic switched from selling application-specific integrated circuit chips, or ASICs, where each chip is designed for a specific customer and application, to selling application-specific standard products, or ASSPs, which a wide range of customers and applications can use. These caused Nordic’s revenue to multiply by 4 times from 2015 until 2022. After the pandemic boom in consumer digital products, Nordic went through a prolonged cyclical trough that lasted during 2024 and part of 2025. Nordic uses distributors as its main sales channel, which we see as the right sales channel for a mid-sized company like Nordic, given it can serve many small and mid-sized customers.
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