Earnings Labs

Applied Optoelectronics, Inc. (AAOI)

Q4 2019 Earnings Call· Thu, Feb 27, 2020

$146.44

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon. I will be your conference operator. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Applied Optoelectronics Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2019 Earnings Conference Call. All participants have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. [Operator Instructions] After today’s presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. [Operator Instructions] Please note this event is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to Lindsay Savarese, Investor Relations for AOI. Ms. Savarese you may begin.

Lindsay Savarese

Analyst

Thank you. I'm Lindsay Savarese, Applied Optoelectronics' Investor Relations, and I am pleased to welcome you to AOI's Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2019 Financial Results Conference Call. After the market closed today AOI issued a press release announcing its fourth quarter and full year 2019 financial results and provided its outlook for the first quarter of 2020. The release is also available on the company's website at ao-inc.com. This call is being recorded and webcast live. A link to that recording can be found on the Investor Relations section of the AOI website and will be archived for one year. Joining us on today's call is Dr. Thompson Lin, AOI's Founder Chairman and CEO; and Dr. Stefan Murry, AOI's Chief Financial Officer and Chief Strategy Officer. Thompson will give an overview of AOI's Q4 results and Stefan will provide financial details and the outlook to the first quarter of 2020. A question-and-answer session will follow our prepared remarks. Before we begin, I would like to remind you to review AOI's Safe Harbor statement. On today's call management will make forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions and current expectations, which could cause the company's actual results to differ materially from those anticipated in such forward-looking statements. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by terminology such as believes, anticipates, estimates, intends, predicts, expects, plans, may, should, could, would, will or thinks and by other similar expressions that convey uncertainty of future events or outcomes. Forward-looking statements also include statements regarding management's beliefs and expectations related to the expansion of the reach of our products into new markets and customer responses to our innovation as well as statements regarding the company's outlook for the first quarter of 2020. Except as required by law,…

Thompson Lin

Analyst

Thank you, Lindsay, and thank you everyone for joining us today. We delivered revenue in line with our guidance range and achieved better-than-expected results on the bottom line. AOI delivered Q4 revenue of $48.7 million, non-GAAP gross margin of 27.6% and a non-GAAP net loss of $0.18 per share. During the quarter, the datacenter demand environment remained consistent with our expectations. While we are continuing to see improved order pattern among two of our hyperscale datacenter customers, we remain cautiously optimistic as demand continues to stabilize among our customers. We are pleased to report that we recently received a design win for our 400G product with a Tier one network equipment manufacturer and we are encouraged by the customer interest we are seeing with this product. In CATV, the overall CATV demand environment continued to be soft. While we expect this condition to influence, our performance in the near term, we believe AOI remains well positioned, given our innovative technology as MSO move to next-generation architectures. We continue to make good progress in diversifying our customer base. And during the quarter, we secured nine design wins with eight out of nine design wins coming from new customers. We had 31 total design wins for the year, which is nearly 20% higher than our total design wins in 2018. We believe that this market trend of new custom design wins activity, reflects favorably on our technology domain and manufacturing execution and it also demonstrates the ongoing success of us to extend sales beyond our core hyperscale customer base. Before turning the call over to Stefan for additional details in our outlook, I would like to first address the coronavirus outbreak as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak in China. We experienced change in our operation there in Q1. Our operation in…

Stefan Murry

Analyst

Thank you, Thompson. Our Q4 financial performance and demand environment were broadly in line with our expectations. Total revenue for the fourth quarter was $48.7 million, which was at the high end of our guidance range. Our data center revenue came in at $39.3 million compared with $42.6 million in Q4 of last year. In the fourth quarter, 49% of our data center revenue was from our 40G transceiver products and 42% was from our 100G products. As Thompson mentioned, we are pleased to report a design win for our 400G product with a Tier 1 network equipment manufacturer, which we received subsequent to quarter end and are pleased with the interest and customer engagement that this product is generating. We remain in active qualification with other customers for their 400G data center transceiver needs and look forward to additional design wins as these activities culminate over the next few quarters. Data center market dynamics played out similarly to the last few quarters with a slight improvement in Q4 compared to Q3. We are continuing to see a modest recovery among two of our hyperscale data center customers while one customer continues to purchase product from us but with reduced demand. Looking ahead, we remain cautiously optimistic about the demand picture in the near term. We had seven design wins in the quarter in our data center segment with four out of the seven wins coming from a new data center operator customer. We are very pleased with this new customer traction and expect to begin generating revenue from this new relationship this quarter. Turning to our cable television products segment. Revenue from CATV products was $6.8 million compared to $12.7 million in Q4 of last year, primarily driven by weakened demand from our North American MSO customers. We continue…

Operator

Operator

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Samik Chatterjee of JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Bharat Daryani

Analyst

Yeah. Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my question. This is actually Bharat on for Samik. So the first question I had on the data center side, it looks like the 100-gig revenues were up sequentially quite a bit. And then if I'm not wrong you highlighted three data center customers that were greater than 10%. So that one large hyperscale customer that we had talked about in the last call that had a higher inventory and was at reduced spending levels. So, are you seeing that return to normal? And are you seeing normal CapEx levels return from that customer?

Stefan Murry

Analyst

So, just to clarify during the quarter, we had two 10% or greater customers in the data center segment.

Bharat Daryani

Analyst

Okay.

Stefan Murry

Analyst

That were 39% and 28% respectively. So, not three but two. With respect to the -- we did have -- for the year, we had three data center customers, just to clarify. So, two in the fourth quarter and three for the year. I would say, the -- as we noted in our prepared remarks two of our data center customers are increasing their orders and one continues to order from us but with a reduced level from what it had been historically.

Bharat Daryani

Analyst

Okay. Yeah. Thanks for that. And then one follow-up I have is the new 400-gig design win that you talked about. How should we -- can you quantify probably the magnitude of that? And how should we think about the benefit of that coming through? Do you expect that meaningfully come -- starts to benefit the revenue towards the later half of this year? Or that's more a 2021 kind of story? Thanks.

Stefan Murry

Analyst

We may see some contribution late this year. I'm expecting it frankly to be more of a 2021 ramp, but it could come early as later this year depending on how things play out. This particular win is a sizable opportunity for us. But I think more than the absolute dollars that could come from this win, I think it really is a testament that the technology that we have is playing well with customers. As we noted in our prepared remarks, we have a number of ongoing qualifications with other customers. And I think this provides some tangible evidence that the product is working as intended and customers are accepting the product and the pricing and other aspects of the product that we have. So, we're -- we think it demonstrates our capabilities, and we're excited about the other qualifications that we have ongoing now.

Bharat Daryani

Analyst

Yeah. Great. Thanks for taking the questions. Thank you.

Stefan Murry

Analyst

My pleasure.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Joe Flynn of Craig-Hallum. Please go ahead.

Joe Flynn

Analyst

Hi, guys. I'm on for Richard Shannon. Just a quick question regarding the 400-gig products. Would you be able to tell us if they're a 4-channel or 8-channel product design?

Stefan Murry

Analyst

It's a 4-channel design.

Joe Flynn

Analyst

Okay. Thanks. And I guess, looking out forward, what does the path of breakeven look like? Anything you can offer like maybe like, on sales levels, gross margin? And maybe the main market drivers that will get you there?

Stefan Murry

Analyst

Yeah. I think, obviously, there are a couple of different knobs that we can turn. One is, increasing gross margins. And the other is increasing revenue. I think our operating expenses are likely to be relatively well controlled at around this level. They may -- on a quarter-by-quarter basis they may bounce around a little bit. But overall, I don't expect major changes in our operating expenses, at this point. And so really it comes down to revenue increase in gross margin. And I think, as far as revenue contribution, I think, the main factors that we expect to see are improvement, especially in the back half of the year, in our cable TV market. Q1 is always a seasonally down, quarter for us in cable. And as we noted in our prepared remarks, we're also kind of a natured in terms of industry, revenue. I believe, at least from the commentary that I've heard from other companies in the industry, so far this reporting season. It seems like revenues are generally depressed across the cable TV space. We do believe that, several MSOs are in the process of contemplating or making plans to begin upgrades, later on in the year. And that should be good for the industry as a whole and hopefully AOI in particular, participating in that. We do think some of our newer technologies like Remote PHY. And some of our other newer products for the cable space could contribute positively, to both obviously revenue and gross margins as well. So that's one factor, I think, that could lead us to improving conditions. The other is continued growth in our 100-gig, data center products. As you noted, in our 100-gig -- sorry it wasn't you. It was -- previous question noted that the 100-gig was up…

Joe Flynn

Analyst

All right. Thanks this helpful.

Stefan Murry

Analyst

Okay. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] At this time, we have no further questions. And I will turn the call over to, Dr. Thompson Lin, for closing remarks.

Thompson Lin

Analyst

Okay. And thank you for joining us today. As always, thank you to our investors, customers and employees for your continued support. And we look forward to see many of you, at our upcoming investor conference, at OFC.

Operator

Operator

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.