Gideon Wertheizer
Analyst · Canaccord Genuity. Please go ahead
Thank you, Richard, and welcome, everyone. The momentum in our business continues through the second quarter deliver strong financial results and exceeded the high end of our guidance. Our licensing business continues to accelerate. And in addition to 12 licensing we have concluded, we signed a second portfolio agreement with a major customer. The visibility in our licensing business continues to strengthen this record-high backlog and solid pipeline. Therefore, we are setting another record high licensing guidance for the third quarter, and we revise upward our annual licensing guidance as well. This licensing performance fuels the value our product portfolio presents, a broad customer base and the potential for CEVA to address this smart and connected world. Revenue for the second quarter came in $20.6 million, up 20% year-over-year. Licensing and related revenue was record high at $10.4 million, up 38% year-over-year. During the second quarter, we concluded 13 deals, of which seven were from DSP cores and platform, five were from connectivity for IoT and one was the portfolio agreement that I just mentioned. 11 of the deals were from non-handset baseband applications, and four were with first-time customers. Customers' target markets for the licenses include smartphones, automotive ADAS, drones, surveillance cameras, wearables, industrial IoT and a variety of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connected consumer and medical products. On royalties, revenue came as expected at $10.2 million, up 6% year-over-year, primarily driven by new non-handset products, including initial shipments of vision processors in smartphones and base stations chips. Let me take the next few minutes to highlight a few of the new deals signed in the quarter. As I announced earlier, we signed a portfolio agreement with a major customer during the quarter, our second portfolio deal in the last 12 months. This portfolio agreement provides broad access to our cellular connectivity, vision and sound technology as well as early adoption of our future roadmap products. These types of portfolio adhere to our strategy and sell to solidify and extend our collaboration for future generations of product. It also bodes well on CEVA's lead position as a one-stop IP shop for sensing and connectivity solutions. We are delighted to have two of our major customers now signed up under these comprehensive agreements. Due to the nature of these agreements, revenue will be recognized in equal installments over the next few years. Two other agreements that I would like to highlight from the quarter are from our vision platforms. One is the large handset OEM and the other with a top-rated drone. Both are aiming to internalize the development of vision chip as a means to differentiate rear camera experience. For this customer, we capitalized on our vision platform, along with this the CEVA name, our deep renewal network, software and hardware solution. Smartphone audience are consistently enhancing their camera in advancement, in low light performance, image stabilization, zoom and new enabled applications like see detection, facial recognition and more. In the advanced stage, our platform enables a more sophisticated drone workload called [indiscernible] which allows the drones to fly autonomously. They're doing static and moving also. Overall, we had another excellent quarter for our vision platform with all these side. We now have more than 30 customers actively designing products from a range of end markets, including the multi-data AV/VR headsets, smartphone, drones, surveillance cameras, mirrorless cameras and more. In connectivity, we signed an important agreement for our Bluetooth and Wi-Fi product with a China-based SoC company that will soon emerge as a contender to many incumbents in the smartphone SoC space. This company is targeting the China domestic market, in particular the low and the mid-tier smartphone segments. We've already licensed our vision and audio platforms, and we're now extending to tiers of our IP to include Bluetooth and Wi-Fi for connectivity portion of its choosing. In addition to our incumbency in baseband processing, this agreement provides us with additional royalty opportunity when the last market of China-made smartphone, where 84% of the world's manufacturing takes flight. Turning to our second quarter. Royalty revenues reflected seasonal weakness of post-Christmas and the inventory adjustment. Smartphones are making - are setting the stage for new shipment in the second half of the year. Non-baseband shipments were particularly notable, with units up 39% year-over-year, including first-time volume shipment of vision and base stations products. On a year-over-year basis, royalty revenue was up 6%, with units up 19%. The baseband, despite the muted growth in the overall handset market is doing potential for mobile Internet-enabled smartphone, continues to be sizable. According to recent Ericsson Report, the first quarter of the year, users of mobile Internet reached a new record high of 4.6 billion out of the total 7.6 billion subscribers, of which only 2.1 billion are using LTE. Beyond the growth opportunity we have in LTE baseband processing, we actively address two other substantial growth factors in smartphone space. The third growth vessel is increased content via our vision, voice and connectivity technology. On vision, advancement in photography, such as low light zoom and the expected proliferation of augmentation reality application assumed by Google I/O and Apple's IoT are already driving customers to incorporate our vision platforms, along with our big network framework. In this context, Vivo, one of the fastest-growing companies in the smartphone space, announced last month the adoption of our visually astute platform in its latest X9S Plus flagship smartphone. On voice, use of multiple microphones for noise subtraction to enable the growing views on voice assistant services, such as open-sharing on Google Assistant as well as Voice over LTE, requires the giver of high performance and low power of DSPs, along with advanced algorithms that we are set to offer. In connectivity, new classes of wireless earbuds, like the echo IP, [indiscernible], that could potentially displace the current wired earbuds product as well in the upgrade to in midrange phones offer us additional opportunities to our connectivity portfolio was a major incumbent in the cover. The second growth vector is 5G. Our strategy view is to address both ends on the network, the base stations and the edge device, which include handsets and the anticipated brilliance of IoT notes. Our platform solution complies with the performance and the power requirement of all 5G verticals, mainly gigabit per second for smartphone, mission critical for automotive and less reliability. Our base station program are applicable to all different base stations, and one which our [indiscernible]. We are uniquely positioned in the fourth quarter of the high-ended various technologies, which has encouraged key players in this space to engage with us in the long-term on a collaborative basis. So to summarize, I'm happy with the strengths of our licensing business and the substantial opportunities we possess in developing long-lasting customer relationships and royalties. I'm also encouraged by the vision's royalty traction in the local vision and base stations process. Both are expected to be strong contributors to our royalty revenue mix in the next year NPL. With that said, let me turn the call to Yaniv for the financials and the guidance.