Dr. Morris Young
Analyst · Craig-Hallum. Your line is now open
Thank you, Gary. The demand environment in Q1 was largely what we expected as a result of general economic slowdown around the world including semiconductor industry plus the combination of trade retentions, weakness in the LED market, a slowdown in the growth in the data center market as well as inventory rebalancing at several of our large customers. In short, the demand environment was weak. During this time, we used opportunity to focus on the fundamentals of our business and concentrate effort where we believe we could make meaningful improvements that will provide, both short term and long term pay-offs. As I noted last quarter, we have four priorities. First, to drive improvement in our gross margin. In Q1, despite a sequential decline in revenue, the positive shift in product revenue mix coupled with good discipline in our manufacturing group enabled us to achieve better results. Going forward, we believe that is more leveraged in the model. We will have increasing depreciation, but our underlying markets are expanding and we believe this will lead to a higher production volume that can absorb this increase. Second, we're committed to discipline use of our cash. As Gary mentioned, we will continue to reduce inventories, scrutinize expenditures and again, align our capacity expansion with market conditions. Third, we continue the improvement work of assigning, assisting and supporting our customers through the transfer of our production to our new facilities. I'm pleased to report that the relocation is on schedule. In addition, the vast majority of our customers including all our large customers are now qualifying our Dingxing facility. The next important phase is working with them on a schedule to ramp up their acceptance of shipments from our Dingxing facility over the course of the year. Our goal is to have a large majority of the customers' revenue for gallium arsenide and germanium coming from the new facility by the end of the year. Our first focus is innovation. As we said many times, we continue to set the pace in our industry for low-EPD characteristics in both gallium arsenide and indium phosphide. In fact, we have been unrelenting in our pursuit of tighter specifications for those materials. In Q1, we saw a meaningful return on that investment. We believe our competitive advantage in our low-EPD indium phosphide contributed to our winning a large order related to 5G telecommunications infrastructure. I will talk more about this order in a moment, but I want to emphasize here that among our peers, there is a tangible difference between vendors. And in applications where low-EPD is a critical spec, AXT continues to differentiate itself. Now, let me turn to our markets. Q1 was a solid quarter for indium phosphide. In fact, it was the second largest indium phosphide revenue quarter in AXT's history. It is also the first time that indium phosphide surpassed gallium arsenide as our largest sales contributor. As I mentioned, we received a large order from a customer in Asia that we believe relates to 5G telecommunication infrastructure. As many investors who follow us know, historically, the vast majority of our indium phosphide revenue has come from data center connectivity and passive optical networks. 5G represents a sizable new opportunity for indium phosphide, which is broad used in multiple points across the network including small cells, fronthaul, backhaul and the data center. As with any emerging technology, the industry drive towards 5G will likely to be lumpy. But it is driven by significant global economic impact, with crazy projected to enable more than $12 trillion in economic output worldwide, but year 2035. As such, this is yet another technology application trend underlying our business that promises to be meaningful and prolonged. Most important for AXT, it has begun. Further, we are in a strong position to be able to grow alongside the commercial adoption of 5G. We have the ability to add capacity quickly and more cost effectively than other substrate provider in this limited competitive field. In the data center market, we continue to see some inventory adjustments going on, but we expect this contribution to grow modestly in Q2 over to Q1. Customer are expressing optimism about the continued adoption of silicon photonics technology in cloud and large enterprise data centers, as well as the transition overtime to 100G or 400G technologies. In addition, the commercial adoption of 5G is likely to fuel data center upgrades. With new data intensive services, 5G networks will need to be able to move increasing amount of data between locations, resulting in greater performance of the requirements from interconnects throughout the entire architecture. In total, indium phosphide remains a strong driver for our business. The application as I mentioned as well as others on the horizon, such as house monitoring, lidar, HBTs for 5G wireless devices, provide a strong and diversifying foundation for current and future opportunities. As always, we believe that growth in our indium phosphide business will be incremental and the application that we sell into will fluctuate in strange quarter-by-quarter. But collectively, we believe that we're building a powerful portfolio of opportunities tied to some of the most significant and transformative in technology trend of the next decades. Turning now to gallium arsenide. Our revenue for both wireless and LED applications have been -- have seen setbacks in the recent quarters and as expected were soft in Q1. This was related to both a weak global demand environment and customer-specific challenges. As we head into Q2, we're taking a cautious view regarding our near-term expectation for our products. However, neither market is going away. The LED market is sizable and we have Tier-1 customers in Japan, Europe, Korea, and Singapore. Though, it is difficult to predict exact timing of a recovery, LED devices are fundamental to a wide variety of infrared sensors and the high-end lighting applications. In addition, semiconducting gallium arsenide wafers are used in VCSEL proximity sensing. The introduction to Android phones with this capability could provide us our first entry point into laser-based sensing late this year or in 2020. Now, before I hand the call back to Gary for Q2 guidance, I want to say a few words about raw materials. As Gary mentioned, in Q1, we took steps to reduce our majority ownership in Ji-Ya, a gallium-based raw material company. We also rolled off our partial ownership of Tongmei, a germanium-based raw material company. Both of these companies have faced significant business headwinds over the last several years. As a result of depressed market conditions have seen a drag on our overall results. In addition, both are partially stay owned in China, which means that we didn't have the same level of influence in making changes that could have resulted in their improved performance. All our joint ventures have strategic importance to our business in providing a source of essential raw materials, visibility, as well as from price protection from market fluctuations. But it is also important to us that, they contribute positively to our results. We believe that actually we talk in Q1 will be beneficial to our business moving forward. In closing, Q1 was an important quarter for AXT. We're building a strong fundamental foundation for growth in our indium phosphide business this year. In addition, our technology innovation continues to position us well for strategic applications across our portfolio. We also continue to execute the relocation of our facility unscheduled and with positive customer qualification results. Finally, we're taking opportunity to strengthen our financial structure by reducing inventory, being careful of our spending, focusing on gross margin improvement and making appropriate adjustment in our joint venture portfolio. We're excited by the significant technology trends that are likely to drive growth in our business overtime. And we believe that also our on fundamentals of our business model today will provide positive returns as the demand environment improves. This concludes my prepared comments. I will turn the call back to Gary for our second quarter guidance. Gary?