Yuval Wasserman
Analyst · Needham & Company
Thank you, Annie, and good morning everyone and thank you for joining us for our first quarter conference call. As Annie mentioned, with us today is Bill Trupkiewicz, our Chief Accounting Officer, who will present our financial results for the quarter. As I’m sure many of you saw in our announcement on April 16, we recently hired Tom Liguori as our new CFO. With over 30 years in finance and operations, Tom is a strong leader with a great deal of strategic and operational management experience. He has been CFO at a number of public companies over the last 15 years and in his current role at Multi-Fineline Electronix he has built a strong global finance organization during a period of significant growth of the company. We are thrilled to have him join us on May 18 and look forward to introducing him to you over the next several months. As we continue to invest in our future growth we have strengthened our management team with new dedicated resources. First, we hired a VP of Business Development, who will be solely dedicated to managing our pipeline of opportunities and potential acquisitions. Given our leadership and growth aspirations in precision power solutions as well as the significant size of the target markets we’re pursuing, we believe this is an important addition to our team. Also this quarter, we broadened our regional footprint to include more industrial market by hiring a Country Manager in India to focus on our local strategic objectives and expand and develop our local infrastructure. Outside of our local inverter activities, India is evolving to be a meaningful market for Advanced Energy in a variety of additional areas in mainly in industrial applications. These hires enhance our leadership team and I believe will better enable us to execute on our strategic plan. Now, turning to our results, 2016 began with a solid first quarter on the top line and a very strong bottom line result. Strong shipments in semiconductors and growth in architectural glass coating drove our Precision Power revenue this quarter, offset by some industry digestion in industrial and flat panel display applications. Additionally, our industrial business was impacted by a continued strengthening of the U.S. dollar. As expected, we experienced a weak quarter in our inverter business due to winter seasonality and price pressure, coupled with the effect of our pending strategic alternative discussions on the sale. While total revenues were in line with our expectations at $141 million, profitability far outperformed at $0.57 non-GAAP earnings per share and GAAP EPS of $0.52, due primarily to the mix of business. This was largely due to a record quarter in semiconductor revenues, improved inverter margins, higher absorption rates at our factory given the increased throughput, and lower tax rate given the mix shift. All of this resulted in stronger margins and very strong cash generation of $28 million in the quarter. We ended the quarter with a healthy cash position of $156 million. During the quarter, we built upon our strength in winning a majority of the design wins that we pursue. In semiconductors, our previous design wins for advanced applications has began to migrate to early stage 3D devices as we continue to build on our presence in etch, PE-CVD and ALD applications in the North American and Asian markets. As we noted at our Analyst Day in February, key upcoming inflection points for semiconductor process solutions, including multi-patterning 3D device architecture and 3D packaging are important drivers of the adoption of our technologies in an increasing number of applications. This quarter we saw solid new design activity in our industrial applications, aided by the expansion of our Solvix product line outside of the EMEA region in new hard coatings and defense applications. We continue to actively diversify outside of traditional thin film markets by successfully targeting new markets and applications. For example, this quarter we had a design win in the life sciences segment where we penetrated a large analytical equipment customer for DNA sequencing applications with our high-voltage power solution. Our proactive alignment with industrial automation leaders also led to the expansion of our historically European-centric power control module business into new geographies. Just this quarter, we were awarded with the first power control modules engagement in China through a strategic industrial-automation partner. More importantly, we’re changing the way we go to market from traditional OEM-based account management and into more distributive channels in relationship with key channel partners. Our partnership with global leaders in industrial automation are expanding our ability to reach customers across a wide range of markets and applications. Now, let me turn to our performance. As I mentioned, the mix of products contributed significantly to our strong bottom-line performance. For the second quarter in a row, sales to our semiconductors hit a new historical high, increasing more than 30% year-over-year and 4% from last quarter. Our back-to-back record performance was fueled by double-digit growth in advanced etch to US OEMs, early shipment of new products to advanced applications, shipments to 200-millimeter processing tools, and pull-ins from key customers in Asia. Our strong penetration in advanced etch applications is a direct result of our important design wins over the last 18 months with our Paramount RF power supplies and our matching networks. We are currently in a production phase with these products for NAND and 3 D NAND applications, which we believe should drive future business. In our other precision power application markets, we saw revenue decline due to an industry pause in flat panel display, following a strong fourth quarter due to overcapacity in LCD, TFT tools, and a small decline in industrial applications. These declines were offset by an increase in glass coating revenue, driven by the adoption of our bi-polar DC power supply to new glass coating lines, and retrofit of existing, and by strong automotive demand in Asia, and the rebound of hard coating in EMEA the Americas and Korea. With regards to our service revenue, and in spite of an increase in demand, we saw a slight decline due to exchange rates. In our solar inverter business, we experienced another challenging quarter, as seasonal declines, price pressure, and the pending outcome of our strategic alternative process weighed on the business, leading to a 24.7% sequential decline in revenue. Despite the current market environment, we continue to pursue areas of inverter that show the most promise. For example, we are currently in the process of commissioning a 250 megawatt utility project in the US with a central inverter. During the quarter, we also won a significant 34 megawatt project in the UK with a three-phase string inverter product. This is enough for the win, as it is larger than any other three-phase string inverter project in North America, and the UK has not historically represented a focus market for us. We believe this win speaks directly to the differentiation of our string inverter offering, given the overall environment for inverters in Europe is still very challenging. In the central inverter market, we are supporting our North American customers by pursuing large size projects where our highly performing bi-polar 1000NX inverter is a preferred solution. Just recently, we were awarded a 325 megawatt portfolio of solar projects by the largest solar contractor in U.S., specializing in utility sales project, Swinerton Renewable Energy. The installation and commissioning of the portfolio of projects is expected to begin in 2015, and continue through 2016. Overall, we continue to serve our customers while driving cost down, as Bill will discuss in further detail. Despite lower revenue in inverters this quarter a large service content drove higher inverter margins. The first quarter of 2015 demonstrated just how efficient and powerful our model can be. With increased volumes of higher margin precision power products running through our factory, we were able to absorb more costs, lower our tax rate, and significantly improve profitability while generating a substantial amount of cash. Overall, we’re encouraged by the strong start of the year, especially from a profitability standpoint. Looking to the second quarter, we anticipate a decline in the semiconductor industry after several quarters of significant growth. This reflects the cyclicality of the broader market as major end user reduced their CapEx spend, softness from foundries and logic continues, uncertainty regarding the timing of continued DRAM and NAND investment, and capital reuse initiative from leading IDMs continue. Revenue from other precision power application should improve, offsetting some of the cyclicality with our diversified application focus. Finally, we expect some inverter recovery in North American market after the winter which may be partially offset by continued decline in EMEA due to competition and ongoing ASP pressure. Our operating leverage and ability to manage costs should also help mitigate the impact to the bottom line. We remain committed to executing on our long-term plan to drive profitable growth, strong cash flow and EPS, as we further strengthen our position as a leader in precision power. While we continue to support our inverter customers and deliver on the demand for our products, the profitability profile of the inverter market and the required market engagement differ from our long-term business goals and financial model. As such, we plan to come to a conclusion in our strategic alternative evaluation process during the second quarter. Finally, with the recent hires we believe we have the right team in place to help propel Advanced Energy to the next level by increasing our growth prospects, broadening our global reach, and delivering value to our shareholders. I would like to thank our customers, partners, shareholders, and our valued employees for their support. Thank you for joining us, and we look forward to seeing many of you in the upcoming quarter. I would now like to turn the call over to Bill. Bill?