Stefan Murry
Analyst · Raymond James. Please go ahead
Thank you, Thompson. Total revenue for the fourth quarter grew 60% year-over-year to reach a record $84.9 million, driven by continued strong demand for our market-leading datacenter products. Datacenter revenue in the fourth quarter increased 76% year-over-year to $68.1 million. Our growth this quarter was driven by record demand for both our 40G and 100G products. In this quarter, 74% of our datacenter revenue was derived from our 40G datacenter products and 20% was from our 100G products. Our strong and sustained growth in the datacenter reflects the continued evolution of computer networks into highly interconnected cloud based and always available resources upon which consumers and businesses are becoming increasingly reliant. Additionally, we believe the economic forces that influence the demand for our business in the datacenter are fundamentally different from other businesses, like telecommunications, which are characterized by alternating waves of investment interspersed with periods of relatively low expenditures on network infrastructure. As a result, we believe we have many new opportunities ahead of us to drive further growth as datacenter operators transition to 100G and continue to expand their datacenters and upgrade their infrastructure to handle higher bandwidth needs. Our ability to internally manufacture lasers and light engines combined with our ability to quickly transition production between 40G and 100G products provides us with cost-leadership advantages, a faster time to market, and the ability to quickly scale and adjust our throughput to meet growing demand. And lastly, the added capacity from our new fab in Sugar Land enables us to expand our avenues to market for 100G. For example, as we demonstrated with 40G, we were able to expand our share and ramp quickly to the demand of our hyper-scale operators. Based on our analysis, we believe we are now the leading supplier of 40G optics for hyper-scale datacenter operators and expect to maintain our leadership position as we continue the transition to 100G. Turning to our CATV market. Revenue from cable TV products increased 22% year-over-year to reach $13.4 million compared with $11 million in Q4 of last year. Demand for our CATV products was in line with expectations and we continue to anticipate improved demand in this business, as cable MSOs evolve and transition to a more fiber deep network architecture with DOCSIS3.1. Our telecom segment delivered revenue of $2.9 million, up 3% year-over-year with consistent results coming from ongoing deployments of advanced mobile telecom networks around the world. In the fourth quarter, we had two datacenter customers that contributed more than 10% of revenue. Our largest datacenter customer contributed 63% and our newest datacenter customer contributed 11%. For the full year, we had two datacenter customers contribute 55% and 18% of total revenue, respectively. Given our tremendous top line datacenter growth in the year, we did not have a cable TV customer contribute more than 10% of revenue in the year. However, revenue for our two top CATV customers combined grew 2% for the year. For the full year, revenue grew 37% over last year to reach $260.7 million. By end market, 77% of our revenue was from datacenter products, 17% from cable TV products with the remaining 6% from FTTH, telecom and other. Moving down the income statement, as Thompson mentioned, we delivered a record non-GAAP gross margin of 38%, which is ahead of our guidance and current target model and reflects an increase of 490 basis points when compared with the 33.1% reported in Q3 of 2016, and an increase of 850 basis points from the 29.5% reported in Q4 of last year. The increase in our Q4 non-GAAP gross margin was driven by increased scale and the investments we made to simplify and automate our light engine and transceiver manufacturing processes for both 40G and 100G products. For the full year, our gross margin was 33.4%, up from 31.9% in 2015. R&D expense was $7 million or 8.3% of revenue compared with $8.2 million or 11.7% of revenue in the prior quarter. Sales and marketing expense was $1.6 million or 2% of revenue, up from $1.5 million or 2% of revenue in the prior quarter. G&A expense was $6.6 million or 7.7% of revenue, up from $5.5 million or 7.8% of revenue in the prior quarter. The sequential increase in G&A was due to year-end audit fees and higher performance-based employee compensation as we exceeded our plan for the year. This brings total operating expenses to $15.3 million or 18% of revenue, slightly up compared with $15.2 million or 21.6% of revenue in the prior quarter. Non-GAAP operating income in Q4 increased to $17 million, up 111% when compared with $8.1 million in the prior quarter and up 366% from $3.6 million in Q4 of last year. Our non-GAAP operating margin in the quarter was 20%, up 850 basis points from the prior quarter and up 1,310 basis points from Q4 of last year. Non-GAAP net income after tax for the fourth quarter increased to $15.5 million, up 123% when compared with $7 million in the prior quarter and up 294% from $3.9 million in Q4 of last year. We reported non-GAAP net income of $0.84 per diluted share, up from $0.38 in the prior quarter and $0.22 in Q4 of last year. GAAP net income for Q4 was $14.2 million or $0.77 per diluted share compared with GAAP net income of $17.7 million or $0.97 per diluted share in the prior quarter. The Q4 weighted average fully diluted share count was approximately 18.5 million shares. Turning now to the balance sheet. We ended Q4 with $52 million in total cash, cash equivalents, short-term investments and restricted cash compared with $60.2 million at the end of the previous quarter. Accounts receivable increased to $49.8 million compared with $44.2 million last quarter and accounts payable increased approximately $4 million over Q3. As of December 31, we had $51.8 million in inventory, a decrease of $3.1 million from Q3. We raised approximately $27.2 million of net proceeds in our at the market offerings which allowed us to pay down $48.5 million of our debt, giving us greater flexibility with our capital structure and a positive net debt ratio. We made a total of $10.4 million in capital investments in the quarter, including $6.2 million in production, equipment and machinery and $3.6 million on construction and building improvements. For the year, this brings our total capital investments to approximately $49.4 million. And it is evident from our growth and scale that we are already seeing the benefits of our investments. We will continue to invest in capacity as we see near-term revenue opportunities evolve. With our record results and our strong focus on working capital management, I’m pleased to announce that we generated approximately $15.6 million in free cash flow for the quarter. Before we move to the Q1 outlook, I’d like to take the opportunity to update our target model. As you know, we are exiting the year with record gross margins and operating margins at the high end of our target range. Taking this into consideration and as we factor in expected future cost and price reductions, we are increasing our target for gross margin to 37% to 40% from our prior range of 33% to 35%. As a reminder, when we ramp new products, we tend to see gross margins fluctuate from quarter-to-quarter and we believe we should perform within this new target range. Our target net income before tax is expected to be in a range of 18% to 22%. We believe this new target model to be sustainable. Moving now to Q1. We expect Q1 revenue to be between $87 million and $91 million, representing 73% to 80% year-over-year growth. As we mentioned last quarter, we have fewer production days in Q1 as a result of the Chinese New Year holiday. However, strong customer demand for datacenter and solid execution by the AOI team will drive higher sequential datacenter revenue. We also expect to experience less than normal seasonality in cable TV. We expect Q1 non-GAAP gross margin to be in the range of 38% to 40%. Non-GAAP net income is expected to be in a range of $15.5 million to $17.2 million and non-GAAP EPS between $0.80 per share and $0.88 per share using a weighted average fully diluted share count of approximately 19.5 million shares. Our first quarter non-GAAP net income guidance assumes an expected annual effective tax rate of 18.4%. With that, I will turn back over to the operator for the Q&A session. Operator?