Stephen Schwartz
Analyst · Stifel Nicolas. Please go ahead
Thank you, Lindon. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining our call. We are pleased to have the opportunity to report the results of the second quarter of our fiscal year 2016. Q2 was an all-around strong quarter. We delivered the improvements we had forecasted, and we saw strength in our businesses across the board, including higher gross margin and profitability. Revenue increased to $135 million, up 13% from Q1, made up of a 13% increase in BPS, a 27% boost in life sciences, and a modest 2% decrease in our global services business. Entering Q3, we forecast another quarter of growth in each of our segments. In spite of this strong result, I am sure that the headlines are already highlighting an $80 million loss related to the reserve against our deferred tax asset. I am going to leave that topic for Lindon to address and I will focus my commentary on the operational results and our preparation for the future. For the past few years, we have been focused on building two strong business platforms: semiconductor and life sciences. As a means toward that end, we have purposefully double-taxed the strong semiconductor business. We have reinvested in semiconductor new product development and entered critical new market segments that enable growth, even in a market that is consolidating and slowing. In this endeavor, we've been very successful, as demonstrated by the rapid growth in our vacuum automation segment, fueled by the acceleration of deposition and etch process steps, and compounded by our share gains with all Tier 1 and most Tier 2 OEMs. We have also grown the combination of backend advance packaging and contamination control solutions from less than $10 million three years ago to more than $85 million this year. In addition, we used the profits, cash, and even our technologies from semiconductor to support the build out of our life sciences growth platform. It has been a few years in the making and has required much patience were shareholders, but we believe that the payoff begins now. In Q2, we crossed an important threshold by getting life sciences to a $100 million annual run rate. This is now a business of meaningful size and growing even faster than our high-growth semiconductor segment, and we expect it to grow more steadily and with less volatility. We made effective use of our assets to create a solution to the cold chain sample management problem, which has plagued the life-sciences field since the inception of cold sample storage. In doing so, we have created a market for standard and reliable solutions that heretofore did not exist, as every institution solved this problem in a different way. With our current product solutions and our critical mass, our life sciences group is now positioned for success, and we are keenly focused on the growth and profitability of this business. We recognize that it may seem curious that, at a time when we are heading into a period when we can most afford to carry the infrastructure they got us to this point, we are taking such aggressive actions to restructure the company. But the actions we implemented were very deliberate in the reshaping of a more efficient and profitable company. As we have a life sciences business that can stand on its own, we no longer need to have as much support built into the infrastructure of the company. We have an experienced and talented management team and strong product and market positions. Our leaner and flatter organization will allow us to deliver these capabilities with better efficiency and lower cost. I will now turn my comments to specific results from the quarter, and I will give some color as to why we are positive on our outlook and our prospects in the exciting semiconductor and life sciences segments that we serve. In semiconductor, our business rebounded nicely from December, which was consistent with the strong market share and growth trajectory we reported on our last call. Overall, our semi business was up 17% in the quarter, with the front end up 18% and back end advanced packaging up 10%. The front-end business was led by a rebound in vacuum robots and vacuum systems, primarily driven by the numerous OEMs we supply with automation for deposition and etch platforms, as 10 nanometer production begins to ramp. Additionally, our market share gains continued as we added another very significant win from a top five OEM, who confirmed us as the vacuum robot supplier for their CVD product lines. This win replaces yet another in-house design that had been their standard for more than a decade. That same customers has already challenged our engineering design team to meet the specifications for their next etch platform, as it is the last of their robots we have not yet won. Our back end advanced packaging business delivered just about $9 million, another record quarter, that was driven by a significant number of tool deliveries that are now installed in TSMC's Info line. Our strong product position with more than 25 equipment makers who serve the advanced packaging market continues to make this a significant growth opportunity for the company. Specifically, our ability to robustly handle non-traditional substrates including transparent, translucent, rectangular, and non-flat substrates has positioned us to be the preferred supplier of automation in this space. Although we see some decrease in advanced packaging in June, we are nonetheless well-positioned for a subsequent expansion of advanced packaging capacity that we anticipate will come online before the end of calendar 2016. In our contamination control solutions business, our shipments were up but our revenue was down to the timing of sign-offs that we expect to close in the current quarter. Nonetheless, we had another strong quarter of product acceptance as we received tool-of-record qualification for a FOUP cleaner for another 10-nanometer fab application. And we received orders for three tools that are planned to be installed in a 7-nanometer pilots line before the end of this calendar year. The penetration of our technology continues to advance, as we are now solidly in Taiwan, Korea, China, the US, Europe, and Japan. We have just begun to win business in high-volume memory fabs, and we see the continue trend for more of our CCS technologies with each smaller device node. We forecast that the second half of this fiscal year will be very strong, led by capacity build out for 10-nanometer fabs, as well as more Tier 2 foundry capacity in China. One more item of note that relates to the future of our CCS business is the potential for the adoption of EUV lithography, where contamination requirements around a very expensive mask sets are more stringent than ever and require the special handling and storage of both EUV reticles and reticle storage containers. We are not forecasting timing for the adoption of EUV for high volume production at any time in the near future, but I do want to emphasize that we have already developed contamination control solutions products that meet the demands of this critical technology. To date, we have designed, built, and installed five automated EUV reticle pod cleaners at five different customer sites and we've installed three automated EUV reticle stockers at three sites. The field performance of these EUV products gives us high confidence that if and when EUV becomes mainstream, we have already demonstrated our ability to serve this opportunity well. I would now like to give an update on our life sciences business. Q2 was one of strong accomplishment, as we have really begun to hit our stride. Revenue was $26.5 million, up 27% from December, and gross margin jumped more than 800 basis points to 38% on all around strong operational performance, as we begin to see the full impact of our structural improvements. Additionally, as we'd forecasted, we reduced our operating loss from this segment by half from the prior quarter and we have line of sight to more improvements in growth throughout the year. I would like to give some specific highlights from the business. Including BioStorage, we had new orders of $38 million. Included in this number was the largest contract in the history of BioStorage, a multi-year deal with one of the largest pharma companies in the world. The business includes the full breadth of services that we offer. We added 16 new customers in the quarter that support the expansion of our BioStorage service, cryo-automation, and consumables offerings. We recognized revenue on our first B3C automated cryo systems, and although we came up short of our target to recognize $1 million of revenue in the quarter, all of the customers who were part of that target are expected to close this quarter. And we are ramping production to be able to meet demand that is beginning to build for shipments later this year. We installed our first B3C product in our BioStorage site in Indianapolis, and by doing so, we have added automated storage and retrieval at minus 190 degrees to their services offerings. The BioStorage team is also in the planning stages to add a Twinbank BioStore into Indianapolis as well, to continue to build out the breadth of services offerings in their portfolio. And for the second year in a row, we received the new product innovation award at the Annual Meeting of the International Society of Biological and Environmental Repositories, which was held earlier this month in Berlin. This time our winning product was the TempAura, a product in our informatics product line that provides wireless, integrated, remote tracking and monitoring of temperatures of samples within and across bio-banking facilities. We are already taking orders and shipping this product, which generates a subscription-based revenue stream. We had a very strong quarter in life sciences business. We can feel our momentum and we are confident that our strong and complete product and solution offering is known and respected in the customer base. We are positioned to offer the best solutions to customers who have needs to manage samples both onsite and remotely. Our increasing backlog of orders gives us a strong recurring revenue stream in the form of storage services, consumables, and onsite large store service agreements, and is the key to stability of our future earnings. This takes us to our outlook for Q3. We expect revenue to be up approximately 4% to 10% and EPS to approximately double on a non-GAAP basis. We forecast another increase in our semi business in the June quarter, driven by 10-nanometer and 3-D NAND build-outs. And though we do not have a good visibility beyond about one quarter, we are receiving indications that we can expect more growth in the second half of the year. In life sciences, our momentum remains much the same as we outlined on our Q1 earnings call. We forecast revenue to be at least $30 million, and despite some continuing FX headwinds, we are aiming to get the business to be breakeven at the operating line. Looking further ahead, we forecast another double-digit percentage increase for the September quarter, and with that, the beginning of steady and growing profitability in the life sciences business unit. To put a cap on the last few years, our semiconductor business is strong and getting stronger. What's more is that the portfolio is solidly geared around the critical growth spaces where we provide highly differentiated value: vacuum automation, contamination control solutions, and back end and advanced packaging solutions are all high-growth, high need, highly differentiated technology areas. We serve these growing market segments with an exceptionally talented team and we have tremendous market traction. The semi business remains a profitable, strong cash generator with more upside because of the specific segment which we have targeted. In parallel, we will continue to build the life sciences business, as there is tremendous upside opportunity for a company that is solving unmet needs in a gigantic new market. And we are bullish about the prospects of adding the second profitable, cash generating engine to our strong semiconductor business franchise. That concludes my prepared remarks and I will now turn the call back over to Lindon.