Gary Fischer
Analyst · Craig-Hallum. Sir your line is open
Thank you, Leslie and good afternoon everyone. Total revenue for the third quarter of 2019 was $19.8 million. By comparison, revenue in the second quarter of 2019 was $24.8 million and revenue in the third quarter of 2018 was $28.6 million. Of our total revenue, substrate sales was $16.0 million compared with $20.6 million in the prior quarter. Revenue from our raw material joint ventures was $3.9 million in Q3, compared with $4.2 million in Q2 and $5.8 million in Q3 of 2018. Morris can give you some color on overall revenue, but just as a reminder, last year we were consolidating the results as three of the raw material joint ventures as of this year we are consolidating only two companies into our quarterly results. In the third quarter of 2019, revenue from North America was 9%, Asia Pacific was 66% and Europe was 25%. In the third quarter, one customer reached 10% of revenue and the top five customers generated approximately 40% of total revenue. Gross margin in the third quarter was 29.0%, down from 34.3% in the prior quarter. This decline was primarily the result of lower volume and product mix. Total operating expenses in Q3 were $6.2 million, approximately flat from the prior quarter. Total stock compensation expense for the third quarter of 2019 was $584,000. Operating loss for the third quarter of 2019 was $478,000, compared with an operating profit of $2.3 million in the previous quarter and $4.3 million for Q3 of 2018. Interest income net for the third quarter of 2019 included interest income of $41,000, and net loss of $0.2 million from the partially owned companies in AXT Supply Chain accounts for under the equity method and a foreign exchange gain and other income totaling 0.2 million. Income tax for the third quarter of 2019 was a charge of $29,000, compared with the charge of $597,000 in Q2. Our Q3 results included approximately $234,000 in tariffs as a result of the 25% tariff charge on importing wafers into the United States from China. For Q3 2019, we have a loss – a net loss of $898,000 or a loss of $0.02 per share. By comparison, we had a net income of $1.5 million or a profit of $0.04 per diluted share in the second quarter of 2019 and the net income of $3.9 million or a profit of $0.10 per diluted share in Q3 2018. The base of share count for Q3 2019 was 39.466 million shares. Cash, cash equivalents and investments increased to $38.5 million, as of September 30, by comparison. At June 30, it was $37.5 million. We also have a $10 million line of credit with Wells Fargo Bank, which we have not utilized and this quarter established a bank loan of approximately $5.8 million in China. We expect to spend approximately $5 million on our relocation in Q4 in line with our expectation for the year of approximately $21 million. Depreciation and amortization in the third quarter was $1.3 million and capital expenditures were $4.6 million. Accounts receivables net of reserves were $17.4 million at September 30, 2019 compared with $18.2 million at June 30, 2019. Net inventory at September 30 decreased by $1.2 million to $49.1 million, compared with $50.3 million in inventory at June 30. Ending inventory consists of approximately 47% in raw materials, 46% in work in progress and only 7% in finished goods. As we noted previously, the reduction in inventory has been a focus for us in 2019. This concludes our financial review. I will now turn the call over to Dr. Morris Young for a review of our business. Morris? Morris Young Thank you, Gary, and good afternoon everybody. Despite a promising beginning, Q3 turned out to be a particularly challenging quarter for us. Visibility was proven to be quite poor and the demand environment weakened consumer leads in July and September. Revenue from every one of our product categories came in lower than expected indicating broad based market declines. We saw a negative shift in customer sentiment regarding expected second half improvement in applications across our portfolio, such as datacenter connectivity, power, LED lighting, lasers, and satellite sources. Geographically, the U.S. market for compound semiconductor substrates was particularly hard and possible impact of retentions. Amidst this backdrop, we continue our strong focus on the execution of our relocation in China and made important progress. After a lengthy process, I am very pleased to report that we have reached a significant milestone in completing the necessary permitting requirements for both our Beijing and Chaozhou locations. In addition, we now have sufficient capacity outlying in both facilities to be able to handle large volume production. What is particularly exciting for us is that these are state-of-the-art facilities and they are the newest in our competitive landscape. They are built to China’s exactly environmental standards and optimized for best practice manufacturing processes for crystal growth and wafer processing.
methodical: We are encouraged by the quality of talent we are being able to attract and retain and believe we now have all the essential components in place to meaningfully ramp up production in both locations over the coming quarters. As such, that we are prepared for renewed growth when the demand environment improves as expected in 2020. Now turning to our end-markets. 2019 has proven to be a challenging year given the turbulent geographical, geopolitical and global economic conditions. In 2018 you may recall that the demand environment in Q2 for datacenter connectivity and PON applications was weak by comparison to the prior year as a result of business and macroeconomic challenges. However, our revenue results in Q2 were strengthened by the completion of a large order from the telecommunication customers in Asia. That we did not expect to repeat in second half. Coming into Q3, our customers in datacenter and PON markets were predicting a improvement in the demand environment which would have resulted in renewed growth in demand for our substrates. However, this improvement in demand environment did not materialize. Datacenter was particularly soft compared to expectations which maybe a result of again U.S. China trade tensions. Ultimately, our Indium phosphide substrate revenue for datacenter and PON remained fairly steady sequentially in Q3, but we were not able to make up for the absence of the telecommunication order that we had in Q2. Despite these near-term challenges in environment, we remain optimistic about underlying large-scale technology trend that build the demand for our products. The datacenter upgrade cycle is well underway to accommodate massive growth in bandwidth requirements at hyperscale and large enterprise datacenters. We believe that the silicon photonics market will continue to grow driven by the technology transition to 100G and beyond to that 400G. Related to the datacenter upgrade, it’s the nascent 5G infrastructure roll up and the continued build out and upgrade of massive optical network worldwide. The increase in video streaming, new services enabled by 5G and strong growth in data-intensive cloud-based services will continue to drive increasing demand for optical components that will require indium phosphide substrates. Turning to the gallium arsenide, LEDs and lasers have been slow to recover from the down trend of recent quarters. Automotive applications have been particularly hard hit and continue to be weak in Q3. Wireless applications are holding steady at their reduced rates. As we look ahead however, the gallium arsenide market holds significant opportunities. We believe that our traditional applications will recover in 2020, so that we see great promise in applications such as power lasers for industrial welding and cutting, big shows for variety of customers, industrial and automotive aggregations and micro LEDs which use gallium arsenide for the red portion of the rare green blue light spectrum. Gallium arsenide is not going away LED, it has a diverse and broad number of applications. Turning to germanium substrates, our sales took a step back in Q3 in the softer demand environment. It is expected to remain soft in Q4 as excess inventory at certain customers is digested. Overall, the satellite solar cell market is expected to grow in the coming year with a number of several launches increasing worldwide. Long-term we are also sequentially down in Q3 by about 8% compared to Q2’s revenue. The sluggishness in the substrate market appear to have a negative ripple effect on the raw material companies that we consolidate. Now in closing, this is a difficult quarter in a difficult market environment. But despite the near-term market softness, we are confident that the underlying technology trend fueling the applications that drives our success are intact. In the mean time, we are taking the opportunity to effectively execute our relocation and we are pleased to have net significant milestones with permitting and volume production readiness. These will allow us to support the expected customer volume add over the next couple of quarters, as well as new business opportunities when the demand environment stretches. This concludes my prepared comments. I will now turn the call back to Gary for our fourth quarter guidance. Gary?