Gideon Wertheizer
Management
So we delivered exceptional results for the first quarter. We achieved all-time high quarterly revenue, including our strongest licensing quarter ever and our key customer wins. Once we took advantage of the world largest consumer and wireless event, CES and Mobile World Congress, to announce our next generation platform for a range of applications and number of strategic agreements with customers. I will summarize these achievements in the next few minutes. Let me begin with the financial highlights. Revenue for the first quarter came in at new record-high of $21.3 million, up 29% year-over-year. Licensing and related revenue was also record-high approximately $9.5 million, up 10% year-over-year on the back of 11 deals that were completed. Of those 11 deals, eight were for DSP platform and three were for our connectivity IPs. All of the 11 deals were for non-handset baseband application, four of which were with the first-time customer. Customers target application includes 5G base station, automotive ADAS, surveillance camera, smartphones, smart-home appliances and variety of IoT devices enabled by our connectivity portfolio. The outstanding licensing performance during the quarter not only delivered record revenue but also enabled us to grow our backlog because of a number of comprehensive agreements for our most advanced technologies executed during the quarter. Therefore provide us with higher visibility and confidence in meeting the growth in annual licensing that we guided at the beginning of the year. On royalties, revenue came in slightly better than the guidance at $11.8 million, up 50% year-over-year, primarily driven by LTE shipments during the holiday season and record shipments by our Bluetooth customers. Let me, at this stage, elaborate on four different aspects of our licensing achievements. The first relates to a comprehensive agreement we still won base station OEMs that adopted two of our most advanced DSP platforms, the XC12 and X2 for 5G base station. It is the second lead customer that selected our technology for 5G base station and a big endorsement for our unique portfolio and specialization in the emerging 5G wireless market. Deployment of 5G base station continued to progress in advance of a fully ratified 3GPP 5G New Radio standard, which is expected in 2019. This allows cellular operator to engage in earlier testing of variety of new use case that encompass the 5G standard including multi-gigabit per second mobile broadband mission-critical services in IoT. Our XC12 and X2 platform are key building growth in the 5G new architecture, allowing successful software upgrades and harmonization of the network as the market approaches commercial deployment. The second aspect relate to two agreements signed in the automotive space. One agreement is for ADAS application and the other agreement is our first agreement targeting Autonomous Driving, also referred as AD. The ADAS customer is a well-known tier-one OEM and an existing customer that selected our latest XM6 platform and CNM software for a range of camera-related products in cars. The XM6 base project will offer roughly 3x the performance compared to the prior ADAS project that centered on the XM4, and is planned for commercial deployment early next year. In the Autonomous Driving space, we signed an agreement with one of the largest car OEMs. The agreement relate to a Deep Neural Network software for performance assessment in different AI scenario applicable to level three through level five of Autonomous Driving. While it is not a full-fledged license agreement for committed AD project, it is the first time that a leading OEM allocated funds and resources to get access to our deep network software and hardware technologies for Autonomous Driving. Another noteworthy agreement is a top-tier high-volume China-based semiconductor company, who has extended its existing license agreement for vision platform to become a multi-user. In less than a year of the original license, this customer succeeded in leveraging our vision platform to develop a compact image enhancement chip for smartphones that enhances the image quality via computer vision software. The Asus Zenfone 3 Zoom smartphone with a super pixel camera sold in Asia and sold in the U.S., already makes use of the customer CEVA-based platform. The Zenfone 3 Zoom can capture 2.5x more light in a given silicon sensors versus premium phones like iPhone, iPhone 7 plus, LG G6 and others, leading to substantially sharper still picture, particularly in a low light condition. There are already few other smartphone OEMs that design in this platform in their product with production anticipated for the second half of the year. In addition, the same customers designing many other different products such as 360 degrees camera, security camera, drones and more, all based on our vision platform. The last agreement I would like to highlight is the second license agreement for the latest CEVA X2 platform targeting voice-controlled smartphone devices. This design win is for high profile device for one of the largest cloud-based service company. The perception of using voice as an alternative to touch or mouse as a way to interact with the cloud for service changed dramatically after the launch of Amazon Alexa voice assistant and its Echo devices back in 2014. It drove other cloud vendors to come out with their own smart voice assistant devices, as well to enable their OEM partners to come up with innovative use cases and devices integrating their voice assistant interface. Voice assistant devices have to ensure that they pick up good quality voice from any point in the room. It requires processing of complex DSP algorithms and workloads such as deforming echo-cancellation noise-cancellation and others. It is therefore a perfect match for what CEVA offers in terms of the CEVA X2 DSP software and algorithms. At the recent Mobile World Congress, we launched our latest DSP platform. The CEVA XC12 set a new bar in DSP performance aiming at multi-gigabit per second bit rate models for 5G, LTE Pro and 8211H [ph]. It offers 8x higher performance at half the power versus its predecessor, the CEVA-XC4500. At MWC, we also announced the Dragonfly NB1, our full solution for NB-IoT in collaboration with ASTRI of Hong Kong. The Dragonfly NB1 platform addresses the stringent requirements for extremely low power and low cost for outdoor connected devices, such as smart-meter and wireless connected transformers in cities and industrial environment. It is a full solution composed of our low cost CEVA-X1 DSP, RF transceiver and software, all packed in one chip. Reference silicon will be available for customer in the second half of the year. Turning now to royalties and the related market dynamics. On smartphones, the market backdrop looks positive with sizable untapped market for LTE. So far only 25% of the world's handsets are LTE-based and much less for LTE Advance and gigabit LTE. India in particular is experiencing a brisk environment for smartphone, which demand grew 18% last year. The feature phone space in India also grew 4% last year, in light of attractive SKUs that are LTE-enabled. CEVA-enabled phone shipment last quarter outperformed the market on a year-over-year basis, up 49% year-over-year with smartphone units up 108% year-over-year. Next I want to touch on a few important launches of new CEVA-based product, OCHIP [ph] that soon will be seen in the market. Xiaomi announced during a packed event the launch of its latest smartphone Xiaomi Mi 5C. It is enabled by new chip from its subsidiary, Pinecone that incorporates a CEVA SDR DSP. Till down analysis of DJI latest Phantom Advanced drones, the Mavic Pro and the Phantom 4 Pro revealed a CEVA-enabled SDR DSP that is used for wireless communication between the drone and the controller. Intel unveiled the specification of its latest XMM 7560. Intel 7560 feature LTE category 16, which supports gigabit per second speed. The 7560 is also a six mode and includes for the first time on-chip CDMA modem. On the non-handset front, shipments units continued to grow towards 7% for the quarter, and up 68% year-over-year, driven by global shipment. During the quarter, ON Semi announced its first CEVA-powered Bluetooth 5 chip. The RLS10 is a highly flexible ultra miniature SoC, targeted for IoT and connected hands. Dialog announced its first Bluetooth 5 chip, Dialog DA14586, a low power device for consumer products such as wireless speaker, watches and the like. Both chips are expected to be in mass production during this year. We also see the initial production ramp of smartphone enabled by our Vision Processor like the Zenfone 3 from Asus that I discussed a few minutes ago. Wrapping things up, I am very pleased with our performance in the first quarter. It is an exciting time for us, as we continue to take advantage of our strengths and specialization to expand into growing number of new market opportunity and to take our technologies into major franchises in those new areas. As we continue to progress and leverage on the dynamics in our primary market, the baseband processing for smartphone, our expansion into base stations, automotives, drones, smartphone and IoT is fully underway. We are progressive [ph] and determined to take advantage of those transformative trends to provide compelling revenue to our shareholders. With that said, let me turn the call over to Yaniv to discuss our financials and guidance.