Gideon Wertheizer
Analyst · Barclays. Please go ahead
Thank you Richard, and welcome everyone. Before going through the highlights from the quarter I would like to draw your attention to development, it will have a positive impact on our financial guidance for the remainder of 2016. As we had weakness from the first half of 2016 and based on the initial work reports we received for the third quarter, we are now experiencing royalty trajectory that exceed our initial expectations and as such are raising our full year growth range royalties. Yaniv will elaborate more on this when he reviews the financial result for the quarter later on. Turning back to our second quarter results, we are very pleased to report another robust quarter with all time record high revenues derived from strong growth in royalties and solid execution in licensing. Total revenue came at a record high of $17.1 million up 28% year-over-year. Royalty revenue came at $9.6 million up 69% year-over-year primarily as a result of strong LTE unit shipment which grew more than 400% year-over-year to reach a record quarterly shipment total of 56 million units. Licensing and related revenue came at $7.5 million on the back of good licensing demand for our Bluetooth IP as customer expedited product design based on the next generation Bluetooth 5 standard. We also ended the quarter with stronger than normal licensing pipeline due to a number of comprehensive agreements with key customers that are in process. This agreement involves broad access to our entire technology portfolio and customization of certain technologies for their product lines. We perceive this new engagement as an acknowledgement to our unique technology portfolio in addressing some of the most exciting areas of growth in the semiconductor industry and as an opportunity to solidify long term collaborative relationship with key industry players. During the second quarter we concluded 10 new licensing deals, four of which were for CEVA DSP cores and platforms and six for connectivity products. Of the deals signed three were with first time customers and all were for non-handset based - include a first time customer intending to use our vision solution for virtual reality product, 5G base stations, Bluetooth's low energy for I-T including the upcoming Bluetooth 5 standard voice processor and storage drives. Geographically, four of the deals signed were in the U.S., four in the APAC region and two in Europe. The second quarter achievement in licensing emphasizes four key market drivers that we are capitalizing on. First, the domain for very sophisticated baseband ASPs and platforms technologies for handset and base stations is the cellular industry is looking for increased data rates and overall capacity is part of LTE advanced growth and 5G standard. Second, the proliferation of connector devices enabled by short range wireless connectivity, such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, along with emergence of voice as they primarily – as primary user interface within these devices. Third, the growing number of products and applications that are centered around embedded vision and machine learning. Fourth, the expedited and [indiscernible] deployment of cellular machine-to-machine on the heels of the 3GPP finalizing the specs for ultra low power LTE for the Internet Of Things. Ericsson predicts in its latest mobility report that IoT will although take mobile phones as the largest category of cellular connective devices by 2018. These four big industry drivers are the foundation of our product portfolio strategy and will lead to new royalty streams in the near and the longer term. Our recent achievement in licensing, as well as ongoing customer discussion, give us high confidence in our ability to capitalize on these opportunities and in our long term growth prospects. As I mentioned, we are seeing industry-wide demand for connectivity IP and in particular the new Bluetooth standard, Bluetooth 5, which was formally announced by the [indiscernible]. Bluetooth 5 also substantial features announcements versus its predecessor Bluetooth 4.2 including higher data rate of 2 megabit per second and longer range of up to 300 meters. It expands the Bluetooth's market reach from device like smartphone and PC to the Internet of Things where it will be used for the smart home, connected home networking, automotive and more. We have already signed five customers that are early adopters for the Bluetooth 5 technology. We have never had that many early adopters for technology that is yet to be ratified. In Vision, the potential of machine learning and deep viewer network was the highlight in all recent events conducted by Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Baidu, and others. The data provided at the recent conference, half of the internet searches in 2020 will come from image and voice. In conjunction with this, much more intelligence will be required at the Edge of the network in devices such as smartphones, surveillance cameras, autonomous cars, VR and AR devices, robots and more. This is where we see CEVA benefiting and leveraging its competency in computer vision and machine learning. A few weeks ago, we announced our second generation of software framework for the deep network called CBNN2 [ph]. CBNN2 essentially frees up the customer from the burden of embedded software programming on the vision processor. It therefore allows customers, partners, researchers and even students to innovate deep network based application in the cloud and seamlessly get outright views of it on product based on CEVA vision processor. In the second quarter we signed up first time customer, a widely known player in the imaging space that uses our vision DSP and deep learning software for the chip to power virtual reality products. On royalties, we continue to gain share in the LTE space. According to the latest market data from Market Research Firm Strategy Analytics our market share in LTE is 19% in Q1 2016 compared to just 5% a year earlier. LTE is the primary reason for the huge year-over-year royalty revenue growth of 69%. Moreover, this momentum more than offset the traditional seasonal weakness we normally experienced in Q1 royalties which are based on the post holiday season Q1 shipment. For the first time in a number of years we recorded a sequential increase in royalties of 23%. Also in other segments of the cellular space, we continue to maintain high market shares. In 2G we power about two thirds of the market and in 3G our market share has grown to 39% based on Q1 shipments. We aim to continue to capitalize on LTEs smartphone shipments where we are consistently gaining market share and growing unit shipments and where we benefit from higher work ASP than we get from 2G, feature phone and 3G smartphones. Looking ahead, as the Internet becomes increasingly wireless, we are experiencing greater diversity of products and suppliers that take advantage of LTE and 5G to connect to the Internet. These include products like car, wheel [ph] based security and surveillance camera, drones and smart city infrastructures. We continue to invest in new technologies addressing this space and plan to introduce new products in the coming months that will be specifically designed to cover LTE IoT space. So in summary, our good traction in LTE smartphones in 2016 compared to prior years and our diversified product line targeting intelligent and connected devices provides us solid foundation for prolonged growth. I am very pleased by the resilience of our financial model this year, despite the known market challenges and the maturity of the smartphone space. We will continue to innovate and work closely with our customers with our mutual success as the industry expands to new classes of products and services. With that said, let me turn the call over to Yaniv to discuss our financials and guidance.