James Dunn
Analyst · Raymond James
Thank you, Stefan. Looking specifically at the top line, the first quarter was a very strong start to 2014. We delivered our fourth consecutive quarter of record revenue, driven by increasing demand for our data center and fiber-to-the-home products. Please notice that this strong demand wholly offsets what would have normally been a sequentially down quarter due to historical seasonality from the cable TV market. While CATV revenue decreased 31% sequentially, as expected, total first quarter revenue grew 5% sequentially to reach a record of $24.9 million.
Looking at revenue by customer, the first quarter, we derived 81% of our revenue from our top 10 customers compared with 79% in the prior quarter. This increase reflects the strong growth in data center revenue and seasonally lower CATV revenue as a percentage of total revenue. However, from a market perspective, we expect our revenue mix to continue to diversify throughout the year, with growth in the CATV, data center and fiber-to-the-home revenues.
Looking at growth trends within these markets, revenue from CATV products in the first quarter was slightly above our expectations at $9.7 million, an increase of 18% from the $8.3 million reported in the same period last year. The sequential decrease was expected and was due to normal seasonality in the CATV market from the lack of cold weather deployment and the impact of Chinese New Year on our Asian operation. For the CATV market overall, we continue to expect CATV revenue to provide single-digit growth for 2014.
Revenue from the Internet data center was very strong and again exceeded our own expectation. Data center revenue was $11.6 million, more than triple the revenue earned over the same period last year and nearly double the revenue in the prior quarter. We continue to invest in capacity expansion to meet growing customer demand. With the technological shift from copper to fiber, we see a very long revenue runway to this growth trend.
Turning to our third market, fiber-to-the-home, revenue grew 104% year-over-year and 38% sequentially to $2.2 million. Overall, fiber-to-the-home revenue was on track, however, core fiber-to-the-home revenue was slightly below our expectation as we continue to ramp the full production in order to meet the orders we already have in hand and strong customer demand.
At the end of Q1, we had 1 transceiver production line at Sugar Land at full capacity, and we are beginning to ramp production on 3 lines in Taiwan. These lines in Taiwan are now operational, and we expect they'll be near full capacity by the end of Q2. Additionally, we plan to add 3 more production lines in Taiwan and have them near capacity at the end of Q3.
Moving now to the income statement. Consolidated gross margins improved significantly over the prior quarter. First quarter gross margin was 34.9%, an increase of 670 basis points sequentially. The improvement in gross margin was primarily driven by product mix, as our Internet data center products were a higher percentage of total sales.
As a reminder, our gross margin is heavily dependent on product mix in any given quarter, both among our 3 markets and the mix of products within each of these markets. As such, we expect our gross margin to moderate in the near term back toward our historical gross margin percentage, as CATV revenue returns to a more normal revenue run rate.
Looking at operating expenses. We accelerated investment in R&D products and projects to further foster top line growth. R&D expense was $3.5 million or 14% of revenue, up $1.1 million from the prior quarter. Consistent with our announced plan, we increased our near-term R&D investment in projects designed to provide relatively near-term revenue growth. Notably, we're investing heavily in 100G data center products, our fiber-to-the-home WDM ONU transceivers and DOCSIS 3.1 technology, so that we are well prepared for the expected upgrade cycle in 2015.
So while we expect R&D investment to remain at this dollar level throughout the remainder of 2014, we expect R&D expense to continue to decrease as a percentage of total revenue. We will continue to throttle R&D investment as appropriate to capture more market share and drive top line performance, yet with an eye toward bottom line results.
Sales and marketing expense was in line with expectations at $1.3 million or 5% of revenue, up $0.1 million when compared to Q4. As Stefan mentioned, given the present and attainable data center market opportunity, we are increasing sales channel incentives in order to help expand share within our current data center customer base, as well as helping gain new customers. As a result, we expect to invest more in sales and marketing incentives and increase our sales and marketing program this year. While we expect overall sales and marketing expense to increase on a dollar basis, they should continue to decline as a percentage of overall revenue.
G&A expense was $3.1 million or 12% of total revenue, up $0.4 million when compared to Q4. G&A was slightly higher than expected primarily due to an increase in accounting costs and recognition of employee bonuses associated with 2013.
Non-GAAP operating income in Q1 was $0.8 million or an operating margin of 3.1%. And in Q1, we achieved EBITDA of $2.1 million or 8.5% of revenue. Non-GAAP net income after tax for the quarter was $0.8 million or 3.3% of revenue as compared to $0.3 million in Q4 of 2013 and a loss of $0.7 million in Q1 of 2013. We generated non-GAAP net income of $0.06 per share and GAAP net income of $0.01 per share using a weighted average fully diluted share count of approximately 13.8 million shares.
Turning now to the balance sheet. We ended Q1 with $61.2 million in total cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments, as compared with $30.8 million at the end of the prior quarter. As Thompson mentioned, we completed a very successful follow-on offering in the quarter, raising $45.7 million in net proceeds after underwriting discounts and operating expenses. We used a portion of the operating proceeds to pay down $5.7 million of our debt, and we ended the quarter with only $19.9 million in total debt.
Accounts receivable increased by $1.7 million to $23.8 million. Inventory increased by $4.3 million to reach $23.9 million in the quarter. The aging [ph] accounts receivable and inventory remain consistent with prior periods, and increases in AR and inventory were consistent with revenue trends and forecast of sales.
Consistent with our plan, we made a total of $5.6 million in capital investments in the quarter, primarily to expand production capacity for our data center transceivers and WDM-PON products in Taiwan. As announced last quarter, we continue to expect to spend a total of $16 million to $18 million across the Taiwan and Houston facilities to further expand capacity for these products, as well as our laser fabrication capacity.
Now looking forward to Q2 of 2014, we are entering the quarter with very strong bookings and forecast demand, and we expect to achieve our fifth consecutive quarter of record revenue. We expect very strong growth in patented revenue products, continued on-track growth from our fiber-to-the-home product, as we continue to ramp production to meet customer demand. Therefore, in Q2, we expect revenue to be between $28.5 million to $30.0 million, representing an impressive 45% to 53% year-over-year growth rate.
With a return to a more normalized product mix among our markets and within the CATV market, specifically, we expect our non-GAAP gross margin to be in the range of 30.5% to 31.5%. Non-GAAP net income is expected to be in the range of $1 million to $2 million, and non-GAAP EPS on a fully diluted basis between $0.06 per share and $0.13 per share, using a weighted average fully diluted share count of approximately 15.8 million shares.
With that, I'll turn the call back over to the operator for our question-and-answer session. Operator?