Jerald Fishman
Analyst · UBS
Well, with regard to our market segment performance in the first quarter, I'll first talk about the industrial market. For the first quarter, our revenues from the very broad and diversified industrial market, which is 46% of our total revenues, declined 3% sequentially to $337 million, which is very much in line with typical seasonal patterns we see in our first quarter. In the industrial market, where we sell literally thousands of products to tens of thousands of customers, and our technology is often a differentiator in our customers end products. We believe that ADI continues to have an excellent opportunity to be the leading supplier in each of the application areas that we serve in the industrial market. Driven by our customers needs for increased energy efficiency, industrial automation and advanced instrumentation, we're seeing demand for ADI's high-performance signal processing technology not only in the newer areas such as energy and building automation, but also with more traditional I&I application areas. We're also seeing growth opportunities in the Asian markets as customers build out factory automation infrastructure, social infrastructure and energy management systems. And we expect that this trend will continue to drive our growth in industrial revenues for ADI. Overall, we believe that the industrial market offers strong growth opportunities for ADI, and we expect it will resume sequential growth in our second fiscal quarter, a prediction that is supported by seasonal patterns as well as by leading industrial customers, who have reported to us that they believe that the underlying conditions in their markets are solid. Within the industrial category, healthcare presents an extremely strong growth opportunity for ADI. During the first quarter, healthcare revenues actually increased sequentially as a result of our significant new product portfolio and competitive strength in imaging and patient monitoring and in instrumentation applications. In addition, we believe that healthcare sales are benefiting to some degree from the pent-up demand that goes up during the credit crisis when capital spending was severely reduced. We expect continued growth in the healthcare revenues in Q2 and solid expansion through the year as our strategic customers are optimistic about their growth prospects for 2011. Overall, we expect the number of trends to continue to increase demand for ADI technology in the healthcare market. Among these are an increasing need for higher speed and channel count in medical imaging systems to improve image resolution and throughput while achieving a lower cost per channel; to drive for improved measurement performance to increase diagnostic accuracy; the expansion of telemedicine and the requirements for portability as well as the inclusion of secured communications capabilities in healthcare application; and finally, the requirements for patient safety and system reliability. Revenues from our automotive customers were approximately $95 million in Q1, an increase of approximately 1% from Q4. This was a record for our Automotive business. Q1 marks the seventh consecutive quarter in which we've grown our Automotive business, and with our annual run rate now approaching $400 million, we're now deriving 13% of our total revenues from the automotive market. Leveraging our strength, along the signal chain in centers with signal conditioning, data converters and DSPs, ADI has developed a very compelling product portfolio in the areas of safety, infotainment and powertrain applications. This portfolio, along with a much more robust automotive market, continues to drive our automotive success. We expect continued growth in automotive revenues in our second quarter and believe that we'll continue to benefit from favorable macro trends within the automotive space in the areas of active and passive safety, of fuel efficiency and convenience, all of which drive higher dollar content for ADI. As an example, our very sophisticated lithium-ion battery monitoring products for both hybrid and electric vehicles are achieving expanding market penetration. We expect that these applications will present a particularly attractive opportunity for ADI due to the very complex nature of the signal processing challenge and the anticipated unit growth of hybrid and electric vehicles. In summary, the automotive market continues to represent an attractive growth opportunity for ADI as we have the momentum from both an increasing build of material value for vehicle and also increasing market share for ADI. Communications revenues, at $163 million in the first quarter, were down 8% versus our Q4 levels and accounted for 22% of our total sales in Q1. Wireless infrastructure sales declined as expected and were reflective of the completion of the TD-SCDMA Phase 4 rollout in China. This was partially offset by good strength in North America and Europe as a result of significant bandwidth enhancements being deployed in these regions. In addition, in Q1, our sales of wired infrastructure products grew sequentially as the build out of fixed networks continue to increase in response to the data communications demand being generated by mobile networks. In the short term, we expect our communications revenues to be flat to up slightly in Q2, with continuing strength in North America and Europe, offset by ongoing weakness in China-based deployments. However, by the second half of our fiscal year, we expect the next phase of deployments in China to begin, which should reaccelerate our growth in this segment. Over the longer term, we expect that communications infrastructure will remain a key area of opportunity for ADI. Just recently, one of our major customers, Ericsson, described mobile subscriber growth as a very key driver for wireless infrastructure capital spending, estimating that the number of global broadband subscriptions will reach 1 billion this year and top 3.8 billion by 2015. In addition, the ever increasing need for higher bandwidth to support the dramatic increases in video demand pushes this need even further. Going forward, the need for higher performance radios to support multiple communication standards, higher density of channels to support increased data payloads, new form factors in hard-to-reach places, improved power efficiency, smaller footprints and lower cost per channel are all the trends that we anticipate will drive growth for ADI and help us to continue to build on our leadership position in the communications market. Consumer revenues, while exceeding our very conservative internal plan that we had for Q1, were down approximately 12% sequentially primarily due to seasonality and overall weak consumer spending. In Q1, revenues from consumer customers were $121 million and accounted for 17% of our total revenues. We are currently expecting a lift of consumer revenues in Q2 above our Q1 levels basically from applications for cameras and home entertainment products, which are entering a historically stronger seasonal period in Q2 compared to Q1. We also continue to be very well positioned in a few niche consumer applications in the portable space and in the gaming area. Overall, we're planning for our consumer revenues to grow in the second quarter. And finally, our computing revenues were down 4% sequentially, representing just 2% of our total revenues. As I'm sure you're aware, the computing market is not a space where ADI is applying R&D resource. On a regional basis, our revenues declined sequentially in all regions in Q1, in line with our original expectations. So now let me turn to the outlook for the second quarter of 2011 and make a few comments about the longer term. Based on the stabilization in orders that we saw in the first quarter and positive feedback across our customer base, we are planning for revenue growth to resume in the second quarter. Specifically, we're planning for our second quarter revenue to be in the range of $730 million to $760 million, which is approximately flat to up 4% sequentially, and up 9% to 14% on a year-over-year basis. We're also planning for our gross margins to increase slightly to approximately 66.5% of sales based on the current mix assumptions that are built into our plan, and for our operating expenses to grow a few percent sequentially, primarily as a result of annual salary increases, which took effect at the beginning of the second quarter. For the balance of the year, we're planning for our expenses to grow slower than our revenues. On an earnings per share basis, we anticipate that our diluted earnings per share from our continuing operations for the quarter will be in the range of $0.65 to $0.69. Looking out further than the second quarter, we remain very confident about the long-term prospects for ADI. We've been operating under a new organizational structure, which divides the business into market segments and technology groups now for more than a year. We believe this model has enhanced our understanding of critical applications technology and customer needs and will continue to make us more effective in developing products that will push the envelope of signal processing technology. Most recently, we also embarked on a new initiative inside ADI to improve the effectiveness of our new product development spending. We believe that through this process, we'll drive more growth out of the R&D dollars that we're currently investing within ADI. As a result of our strong product portfolio and many of these new initiatives to enhance the productivity of our investments, we believe that our objective to grow our revenues long term in the range of 8% to 12% that we communicated well over a year ago is both realistic and achievable. We've also fundamentally adjusted our cost structure to drive more profitability, and we made our model much more variable than historically, which allows our profits to be much more reactive to changes in revenues. We've already seen the benefits of this approach in our first quarter results, where operating margins were above 35% despite a 5% sequential revenue decline. The end result, we now believe, is a business that achieves very solid growth and very attractive margins and drives very significant free cash flow and ultimately, very good returns for our stockholders.