Stefan Murry
Analyst · Northland Capital Markets. Please go ahead
Thank you, Thompson. We're pleased to end the year on a high note, driven by strength in both our datacenter and CATV businesses and with solid momentum heading into 2025. As Thompson mentioned, our Q4 results were in line with our expectations. We delivered revenue of $100 million, which was in line with our guidance range of $94 million to $104 million. We recorded non-GAAP gross margin of 28.9%, which was in line with our guidance range of 27.5% to 29.5%. And lastly, our non-GAAP loss per share of $0.02 was within our guidance range of a loss of $0.04 to earnings of $0.04 per share. During the fourth quarter, we continued to execute on many of the initiatives that we laid out last year. In our data center business, on our last few calls we discussed how we had begun to receive orders for 400G products from another large hyperscale customer. In line with our expectations, we continue to see increasing orders for 400G products both from long-term hyperscale customers as well as from this new hyperscaler that we’ve been talking about for the last several quarters. We continued to make good progress on our 800G products with customers beginning to give us clear demand forecasts, which indicate ramping demand beginning in the second half of 2025, in line with our expectations. In our CATV business, as Thompson mentioned, we received a substantial order for our Quantum Bandwidth networking products from a top North American cable operator. These products began to ship this month and we expect additional orders throughout the year based on forecasts we have received from this customer. We are encouraged by the demand that we are seeing for our CATV products and are very excited to announce that our next-gen Quantum Bandwidth amplifiers have already begun to be deployed by a major North American MSO as part of its publicly announced network upgrade project. Lastly, during the quarter, we took steps to expand our production capabilities. We have been retrofitting our facility in Sugar Land, Texas to accommodate new automated production equipment, which we expect to begin to receive next month. This equipment will be used for the production of both 400G and 800G transceiver products. We also signed an agreement to lease an additional building in Taiwan, which we are outfitting in order to increase production of our data center and CATV products there. Turning to our fourth quarter results. Our total revenue was $100 million, which was up 66% year-over-year and up 54% sequentially and was in line with our guidance range of $94 million to $104 million. During the fourth quarter, 44% of revenue was from data center products, 52% was from CATV products, with the remaining 4% from FTTH, telecom and other. In our Data Center business, Q4 revenue came in at $44.2 million, which was essentially flat year-over-year and increased 8% sequentially. The sequential increase was due to shipments to existing customers along with the new hyperscale data center customer that we’ve talked about for the last several quarters. In the fourth quarter, 61% of data center revenue was from 100G products, 32% was from 200G and 400G transceiver products and 8% was from 40G transceiver products. As our data center customers work on building out their next-generation AI focused data center architectures, we remain active in our 800G implication efforts with several hyperscale customers. During the quarter we received the first significant demand forecast from one of our hyperscale customers that bolsters our previously held expectation of a second half 2025 ramp in 800G sales. In our CATV business, with the explosive growth of data consumption and rising user expectations, we are already being recognized by cable operators as a preferred partner to ensure that these upgrades minimize cable subscribers’ network interruptions and also optimize performance. As a result, CATV revenue in the fourth quarter was $52.2 million, which was up more than 4x year-over-year and more than doubled sequentially. This significant increase is due to the ramp in orders for our 1.8 GHz amplifier products. We continue to believe our CATV revenue will ramp further in Q1 and will remain elevated throughout 2025. Now turning to our Telecom segment. Revenue from our telecom products of $3.5 million was up 26% year-over-year and up 25% sequentially. Looking ahead, we continue to expect telecom sales to fluctuate from quarter-to-quarter. For the fourth quarter, our top 10 customers represented 97% of revenue, up from 95% in Q4 of last year. We had three greater than 10% customers, two in the data center market, which contributed 31% and 11% of total revenue, respectively, and one in the CATV market, which contributed 52% of total revenue. In Q4, we generated non-GAAP gross margin of 28.9%, which was within our guidance range of 27.5% to 29.5% and was up from 25% in Q3 of 2024 and down from 36.4% in Q4 of 2023. The sequential increase in our gross margin was driven primarily by our favorable product mix including growth in our CATV revenue. Looking ahead, we continue to expect that our gross margins will improve as we see the impact of manufacturing efficiencies in our CATV production and improving product mix. We remain committed to our long-term goal of returning our non-GAAP gross margin to around 40% and continue to believe that this goal is achievable. Total non-GAAP operating expenses in the fourth quarter were $31.5 million or 31.4% of revenue, which compared to $21.6 million or 35.7% of revenue in Q4 of the prior year, primarily due to increased R&D spending in 800G, 1.6 terabit and Quantum Bandwidth products. Looking ahead, we expect non-GAAP operating expenses to increase slightly next quarter and range from $32 million to $33 million. In 2025, we anticipate modest additional increase varying with quarter-by-quarter fluctuations mainly in R&D expenditures. Non-GAAP operating loss in the fourth quarter was $2.5 million compared to an operating income of $0.4 million in Q4 of the prior year. GAAP net loss for Q4 was $119.7 million or a loss of $2.60 per basic share compared with a GAAP net loss of $13.9 million or a loss of $0.38 per basic share in Q4 of 2023. Our GAAP net loss in the fourth quarter of 2024 included a one-time charge of $112 million related to the exchange of our convertible notes in Q4. On a non-GAAP basis, net loss for Q4 was $1 million or $0.02 per share, which compared to our guidance range of a loss of $1.9 million to income of $1.7 million or loss per share in the range of $0.04 to earnings of $0.04 per basic share. This compares to a non-GAAP net income of $1.6 million or $0.04 per basic share in Q4 of the prior year. The basic shares outstanding used for computing the earnings per share in Q4 were 46.1 million. Turning now to the balance sheet. We ended the fourth quarter with $79.1 million in total cash, cash equivalents, short-term investments and restricted cash. This compares with $41.4 million at the end of the third quarter of 2024. We ended the quarter with total debt, excluding convertible debt of $46 million compared to $39.4 million at the end of last quarter. As of December 31, we had $88.1 million in inventory, which compared to $64.4 million at the end of Q3. The increase in inventory is primarily for raw materials purchased for customer orders. During the quarter, we raised $53.9 million net of costs and fees on our previously announced at-the-market program. We made a total of $25.7 million in capital investments in the fourth quarter, which was mainly used for manufacturing capacity expansion for our 400G and 800G transceiver products. This brings our total CapEx for the year to $48.8 million, which was up compared to 2023 of $12.6 million, reflecting higher capital needs as we expand production to accommodate increased demand. Going forward, we expect to make sizable CapEx investments over the next several quarters as we prepare for increased 400G, 800G and 1.6 terabit datacenter product production in 2025. For the year, we expect between $120 million and $150 million in total CapEx. We expect to finance these investments through a combination of cash on hand, cash generated from operations and some equity sales, including ongoing advanced discussions for possible strategic investments. This will mark the most significant capital expansion plan in our company's more than 27-year history. Included in this plan is adding significant production capacity in Texas, which we expect will make us one of the largest, if not the largest, domestic producer of datacenter transceivers for AI applications. We continue to believe that we are poised for a sustained period of growth in both our datacenter and CATV businesses and that these capital commitments will be transformational to our company as we execute on these opportunities. Moving now to our Q1 outlook. We expect Q1 revenue to be between $94 million and $104 million and non-GAAP gross margin to be in the range of 29% to 30.5%. Non-GAAP net income is expected to be in the range of a loss of $3.6 million to breakeven and non-GAAP earnings per share between a loss of $0.07 per share and breakeven using a weighted average basic share count of approximately 49.6 million shares. With that, I will turn it back over to the operator for the Q&A session. Operator?