Fermi Wang
Analyst · Susquehanna
Thank you, Louis, and good afternoon. Thank you all for joining our call today. Our Q1 results were 1% above the midpoint of our guidance range, with revenue increasing 6% sequentially. As expected, both auto and IoT revenue increased sequentially, and the AI products were about two-thirds of our total revenue. As previously discussed, our customers are in the midst of recovering from a cyclical inventory correction, and the favorable impact from this is expected to carry into the second quarter. We continue to expect our fiscal ‘25 revenue to grow year-over-year, driven by both the cyclical tailwinds and the secular growth in our AI portfolio. The combination of this cyclical and the secular forces is expected to enable our AI inference revenue to grow more than 30% in fiscal 2025. Zooming out for a minute, the significant capacity being added to the AI training network infrastructure globally both help for the ultimate deployment of AI inference at edge where we participate in the market. The deployment of AI inference at edge enables end-users to more practically take advantage of so many different AI breakthroughs. As focused on AI and the edge of networks increase, we see AI inferencing proliferating in multiple areas, and we believe we are well positioned to take advantage of this. In fact, we are already in the early stage of demonstrating how it may play out for us. In Q1, for example, our customer engagement includes our first passenger vehicle wins for our 5-nanometer CV3-AD family of AI central domain controllers. We added another CV3-AD win in the commercial vehicle market, secured multiple enterprise class AI inferencing wins, and even in other IoT cameras, we are reporting additional wins for our 5nm CV5 AI process. In the midst of this great change, our opportunity and the challenge are to develop AI technology and products that not only are extremely efficient for edge deployment, but also flexible enough to execute a very wide range of AI workload across all disparate applications. We are already in mass production with our AI products for video-intensive CNN networks, such as detection, classification, fusion, planning, stitching, mapping, tracking, framing, auto-editing, and neural network image signal processing. Now our third generation of AI technology integrated into our CV3-AD and CV7 series of SoC can support transformer networks for a variety of generative AI applications. I would now like to describe customer engagements that can offer some indication how it can play out for us. As we have made significant investment into our CV3-AD family of automotive AI domain controllers. And we expect the CV3-AD family to be a major revenue driver. So we are pleased to announce our first CV3-AD family wins in the passenger vehicle market, which complements our ongoing wins with the CV3-AD family in the commercial vehicle market. In April, during the Beijing Auto Show, we reached a strategic collaboration agreement with the battery electrical vehicle company in China. This company will use our CV3-AD AI domain controllers in new passenger vehicle models. This is an important development for us in several regards. First, major by the number of EV delivering calendar 2023, this OEM is considered one of the top five new EV companies in China. While most of the OEM deliveries were in China last year, the company has an impressive plan for globalization of its business. Second, Chinese automotive OEMs are aggressively and successfully adopting next-generation technology into their vehicles, which aligns with our strategy to intersect the safety and autonomy domain with next-generation technology, in particular Level 2+. For example, to improve accuracy, many OEMs in China have aggressively adopted the BEV former AI framework for 3D perception tasks in its autonomous driving software stack. And this high-performance framework can leverage to a high degree the unique capability in our CV3-AD AI inference processors, including the ability to process transformers at a low power. Third, the efficiency and the scalability of our CV3-AD family portfolio is also a major factor in the collaboration with Ambarella, as the OEM can reuse this software on low, mid, and high end vehicles. In April, we added another CV3-AD family win in the commercial vehicle market with the announcement of a strategic collaboration with SANY Corporation. SANY is one of the world's largest engineering machinery manufacturers, providing heavy-duty commercial vehicles to the global market. SANY intent to leverage Ambarella’s CV3-AD family of automotive AI domain controllers to develop advanced automated driving solutions on its next-generation commercial and special-purpose vehicles. The companies will collaborate on the joint development and promotion of high-performance and highly integrated automated driving solutions with SANY's goal of achieving the start of production for at least one model by calendar year 2025. At the Beijing Auto Show in April, Tier1 Neusoft Reach announced a strategic partnership with Ambarella. The companies plan to expand on their existing relationship to jointly promote and explore AI-based product technology and market development in areas including autonomous driving and driver monitoring. Neusoft's third-generation forward-facing intelligent camera X-Cube 3.0 is powered by Ambarella's CV22 AI Vision SoC to target level 2 plus autonomy levels and has already been mass-produced and deployed by automotive OEMs. We are pleased to announce that Seeing Machines, the leading provider of driver monitoring systems software, selected our CV25 for its own aftermarket system for commercial vehicles. The Guardian Generation 3 meets the European Commission's general safety regulation for drowsiness detection, a requirement for all the new cars, vans, trucks, and buses across Europe. And in April, at the ISC West security exhibition, we successfully demonstrated the latest generated AI technology running region language model, VLM, on our N1 and the CV72 SoCs. Our demonstration includes using the multi-model VLMs to search video recording to detect objects defined by packs and provide near instantaneous results without the need for training specifically for that object. This capability opens up a whole new range of AI-based search capability for enterprise cameras and primus-based AI systems. Our third-generation AI inference technology includes specific support needed to efficiently run these new classes of networks. During the ISC West, we also announced and demonstrated our new 5 nanometer CV75 AI SoC, which provides the performance required to run the latest VLMs, as well as AI-based IQ enhancement. This capability very efficiently run this cutting-edge AI technologies is highly sought after for cost and the power-constrained AI cameras used in enterprise, smart city, retail stores, robotic access control, and AI-based consumer devices. At the Enterprise Connect Conference in March, Poly, a leading global provider of workplace collaboration solutions, and the wholly -owned units HP, launched its Studio E360. This center of a table system utilizes a single 5 nanometer CV5 for four 8 megapixel cameras with AI inferences processing, choosing the optimal framing angle for in-room participants. And also in Korea, the Korea activity for our AI SoCs remain high, with the leading security camera maker, Hanwha, introduce new AI model base on our CV22 and the CV2 AI SoCs. And IDES introduce CV25 -based models, and the C-Pro introduce dual-sensor AI camera based on CV22. In the other IoT market, we are pleased to see our 5 nanometer CV5 AI inference processor being utilized in another consumer cameras to significantly improve both image quality and to automate certain user interface functions. Insta360 introduced its X4 action camera in April with dual-sensor for 360-degree 8k capture. In conclusion, I mentioned last quarter our goals are to restore revenue growth and profitability while continue to drive our strategic R&D priorities. Q1 represented a step in the right direction, most skillfully highlighted by our first passenger vehicle win for the CV3-AD family by the expanding breadth of CV customer engagement stands out, and we expect this to build a growth foundation upon with multiple AI applications can drive revenue growth and result in positive earning leverage for shareholders. The further commercialization and the monetization of our technology and the product is of utmost importance to us, and I am excited about the opportunity before us and what we will achieve in the years ahead. With that, John will now discuss the Q1 results and outlook in more detail.