Yuval Wasserman
Analyst · Needham. Your line is open
Thank you, Annie. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our fourth quarter earnings conference call. The fourth quarter punctuated an exceptional year of growth for AE and the markets we serve, as we exceeded our expectations. Revenue rose 32% and non-GAAP EPS climbed 24% year-over-year. Rising semiconductor demand and increasing capital intensity solidified and expended AE's role as a critical enabler for more sophisticated devices throughout the quarter and the year. 2017 saw record performance on both our top and bottom lines, demonstrated the ongoing execution of our growth strategy and the leverage in our model. For the full year, revenue grew 39% and non-GAAP EPS surged 53%. We expanded our industrial business with the acquisition of Excelsys, grew our market share in existing and new applications and increased our service offering. We also executed on our capital deployment strategy with a $30 million share repurchase. We begin 2018 as a larger and stronger company positioned to continue to deliver profitable revenue growth. 2017 was a phenomenal year for our semiconductor business with growth of 42% over 2016. Sales of our power solutions outpaced wafer-fab equipment industry as the investment in 3D NAND capacity continued, while advancement in technology proceeded at unprecedented levels. For the fourth quarter, revenue grew 28% over the same period last year. These results clearly demonstrate AE's success as the industry leader in precision power, enabling our customers to perform very sophisticated semiconductor manufacturing processes. Underlying demand in semiconductors continue to be strong. Currently, we see multiple vectors driving market growth, all of which are underpinned by accelerating data usage. The continuing conversion from planar to 3D architecture that is underway, the next generation devices that have more stack layers and advanced technologies, the general need for memory regardless of 3D or planar driven by the conversion of server forms from hard disk to solid state drives and the increasing memory content in mobile devices. All of these vectors are driving a significant increase in the number of units we ship, the power level of these units and the advanced features required to deliver the performance level needed. These attributes are accelerators for AE. Plasma-based processes have higher power capital intensity than the rest of the wafer fab equipment in this applications, which is why AE continues to outperform. With the growing complexity and device structures, the industry is moving to new set of tools and architectures needed to edge 32-layer, 64-layer, and 96-layer of 3D NAND with an increasing need to improve yield for which our RF power delivery strategy is critical. At the same time, DRAM investment is ramping and becoming more application specific. The same is happening with next generation logic devices as fab's and foundries require advanced dual and quad patterning. Additionally, new materials and device geometries need selective deposition to remove our processes like ALD and ALE. In general, these new device architectures are demanding more to position in its steps in more complex power delivery solutions offering increased control, mixed frequencies, and use of higher power. For example, in the fourth quarter, we ship the first units of our next generation solid-state match. This product delivers faster tuning time for leading edge sub 10 nanometers ALD and ALE applications and had this broader dynamic operating range for both power levels and frequencies. We believe all these trends will drive incremental investments in growing demand for power delivery solutions not seen before. For these reasons, we anticipate a strong start to 2018. At 39% growth in 2017, our industrial business had a strongest performance on strongest performance on record, far exceeding our long-term goal of GDP plus 2 to 3 points. Our sophisticated power suppliers are enabling highly engineered materials such as decorative, optical and functional coatings for consumer electronics, while our PV solar cell business continues to make headway in China and acquisitions add to our specialty power business. As expected, fourth quarter revenue dipped sequentially while customers digested the significant investment in consumer electronic and coating lines made in prior quarters. Also in thin film industrial, we saw an increase in major PV solar projects and gained significant share for solar cell manufacturing equipment as the majority of the large Chinese OEMs selected our power supplies, making AE the number one supplier to this market. In flat panel display, we expanded our presence in China with capacity increases in the production of mobile OLED devices. Finally, the adoption of new technology in the glass coating market with our Ascent product is resulting in continued upgrades and purchases of new equipment. In specialty power, requirements for more rigorous safety and inspection processes in global markets are growing and becoming increasingly important, driving the need for highly sensitive analytical tools. AE's high voltage power solutions providing low noise and ripple combined with small form factor are gaining traction in medical, life science, mass spectrometry and scanning electromicroscope applications for chemical and physical analysis and inspection. Our low voltage customized power solutions from a recently added Excelsys line are allowing us to expand our presence in the highly regulated clinical instrumentation market. We expect first quarter industrial revenues to be consistent with the fourth quarter, while year-over-year growth continues for market share gains in new products and applications. Excelsys continues to be strong contributor, and we’ll look to make further inorganic additions in the future as we expand our product portfolio, and provide new market opportunities worldwide. Our constant innovation is critical to maintaining our leadership semi-market position, growing share, penetrating new applications and expanding our SAM. By consistently investing in the future and leveraging our growing R&D presence close to our customers both in U.S., EMEA and Asia not only are we staying at the forefront of power delivering control technology we are capturing new opportunities to be designed into next generation tool, and secure income from other new sources. A clear example is the momentum we are seeing in our dielectric etch business where just a few years ago we had very limited exposure. Today our presence in dielectric etch continues to grow rapidly while etch in general is one of the most important and fastest growing areas of our semiconductor business. In the fourth quarter, we demonstrated our dominant presence in the semiconductor market by winning virtually all of the designs pursued in advanced memory, both NAND and DRAM, and logic applications and deposition and etch. In particular, we had wins for etch designs on the three different platforms for advanced memory and secured a PECVD win to expand our business in logic with a key customer. This quarter we saw momentum for our power solutions across a broad spectrum of our industrial markets as well. The highlight in thin-film industrial was our multiple wins in solar PV applications in China, primarily with a newer thin platform. Additionally, we had wins in flat panel display, OLED, and advanced coating for consumer electronics. In specialty power, we continue to gain share and displace competitors. In thermal, we secure wins in solar cell manufacturing in China, and won a design for lithium ion battery manufacturing with our complete certified solution in Korea. In high voltage, we had wins in applications including mass spectrometry, medical and security. Aided by our recent acquisition, we also won designs in medical equipment for therapeutic and advanced diagnostic, opening up new markets such as low voltage power solutions design for a cardiac imaging. Our Service business had a third consecutive record year, growing 26% in 2017. Our highly engineered service products and non-break fix strategy are driving market share gains as customers recognize the advantage of AE service to lower the total cost of ownership over the products lifecycle. During this incredible period of growth in the semiconductor industry, we’ve expanded our capabilities, achieved economies of scale, and improved the responsiveness, flexibility and quality of our services. This combined with opening of a new service and repair facility in Japan, led to another quarter of growth, as we ended the year with a 29 year-over-year increase in the fourth quarter. For the first quarter, we anticipate modest sequential growth. Over the longer-term, we plan to broaden our capacity, capability and footprint with a highly engineered service products and the addition of facilities in EMEA and Asia to bolster future growth. In summary, 2017 was an unparalleled year with exceptional growth across all three of our businesses. Industry fundamentals remain strong entering 2018, driven by the destructive technologies taking hold in our end markets. Our commitment to constant innovation is securing our position as a leading provider of Power Solutions, allowing our customers to address multi-year technology inflections. Building on our performance, the last few years, we've recently raised our three years aspirational goals to greater than $1 billion in revenue, between $5.5 to $6.5 in non-GAAP EPS and over $550 million in cumulative cash generation. We remain committed to outperforming the markets we serve, while executing on our capital deployment program to acquire and extend our portfolio and return value to our shareholders. I'd 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. Before I turn the call over to Tom McGimpsey, I'd like to thank Tom Liguori for his commitment and dedication over the last few years in helping me bring AE to where it is today. We wish him the best of luck in his new endeavor. With that let me turn the call over to Tom McGimpsey. Tom?