Gideon Wertheizer
Analyst · Cowen
Thank you, Richard. Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We are pleased to have delivered a robust third quarter on the back of another excellent quarter in licensing and substantial step-up in our royalty revenue. Total revenue for the third quarter was $23.5 million, up 28% sequentially and 10% on a year-over-year basis. License revenue was $11.3 million, up 15% year-over-year. Royalty revenue was $12.2 million, up 61% sequentially and 5% on a year-over-year basis. We concluded 14 agreements in the quarter, of which 13 were for connectivity and 1 for smart sensing. 5 of these agreements were with first-time customers. Customers’ target products include automotive ADAS, hearing aids, smart meters, true wireless stereo earbuds and a wide variety of IoT devices. Of the deals signed in the quarter, 3 were of strategic importance with marquee names. I will elaborate on these shortly. Overall, we continue to show consistent execution in signing up new customers and to build up the pipeline for new agreements. Our comprehensive portfolio for wireless connectivity and smart sensing intersects with the IP needs of almost every semiconductor-company and OEM. Our customer reach is global and we are winning prominent businesses in every geography. In the U.S., we are seeing opportunities in smart edge devices for consumer, robotics and automotive. In Europe, digital health and smart city applications are strong areas of interest. In APAC, excluding China, we see interest for ADAS and consumer electronics. And in China, we are engaging with customers across many verticals including wireless infrastructure, smartphone, robots and a wide variety of IoT devices. Let me take the next few minutes to expand on 3 important licensing agreements signed in the quarter. The first is a comprehensive agreement with a name brand semiconductor incumbent in the automotive market, which is a new customer for CEVA in this space. The customer selected our AI processor technology, which we announced last month along with our reputable CDNN AI software framework for its next generation ADAS chips. We are extremely excited by the engagement with this key player, targeting mainstream and high-volume ADAS use cases, such as automatic emergency braking, which is now mandated by multiple regulatory groups such as NCAP of Europe, adaptive cruise control, lane keeping, blind-spot detection, surround view and more. This design win anchors our position in the automotive space and adds to our already key automotive related customer, which include ON Semiconductor, the industry leading supplier of ADAS image sensor and one of the world’s largest automotive OEM. To this effect, last month, we announced our latest NeuPro-S AI processor that addresses the requirement for data bandwidth efficiencies and performance scalability. We also unveiled a novel extension for our CDNN framework, called CDNN-Invite API, which allows automotive OEMs or Tiers 1 customers who own proprietary AI processor to couple it with our comprehensive CDNN software framework, which saves them costly and complicated development of AI compiler technology. The second agreement that we would like to highlight is a sizeable Bluetooth Low Energy IP agreement with one of the world’s largest manufacturer of hearing instrument products, an industry that is going through continuous technology innovation involving digitization and wireless integration. Our extremely low power BLE technology will be deployed inside an advanced hearing instrument, to enable the user of the device to flawlessly connect with smartphones and access useful applications and services, such as stereo audio streaming, voice, transcript and remote tuning. This new comprehensive agreements with our customer, exposes us to a growing industry that according to the company research addresses about 1 billion people that experience hearing difficulties. The third key agreement in the quarter was with a very large European semiconductor company who decided to license our comprehensive Dragonfly NB-IoT IP, initially for a smart meter application. It is our first agreement with this large customer, who owns a broad product portfolio, and has a diverse customer base, and strong synergies with our broader product lines. The adoption of NarrowBand-IoT by cellular operators throughout the world is progressing. Beyond China, where the deployment is ongoing, India, led by Reliance JIO, is pushing forward an aggressive program. In its recent annual general meeting, the Reliance Chairman stated that JIO aims to connect 1 billion NB-IoT devices within the next two years. He also mentioned that 300 million smart meters need to be connected in India for real-time monitoring and to enable consumers with visibility and full control on costs. On royalty revenue, we had a strong quarter, including first time contribution from the Hillcrest Labs sensor fusion business. Our baseband customers benefitted from the launch of new premium tier smartphones and market share gain in the low tier of LTE phones targeted for developing economies. In the non-baseband segment, we continued the momentum with excellent progress, contributing $3.9 million, an all-time high with units up 29% sequentially and 27% year-over-year, reaching also an all-time high quarterly high of 123 million units. During the quarter, we started to reach out to customers in regards to our Hillcrest Labs sensor fusion technology that we recently acquired. The feedback has been very constructive on the potential intersection points with customers’ needs and the potential business growth. The motion sensor space is a big and fragmented market, growing to over $6 billion in MEMS semiconductor content by 2024 according to industry research firm Yole Developpement. Initially, our focus will be around robotics, laptops, mobile headset, and advanced remote controls. Hillcrest Labs is a household name with strong technology fundamentals and solid customer relations. This particularly applies to OEMs where our revenue composition will be primarily from royalties based on the device price rather than upfront license fees and per-chip royalties that we engage with semiconductor customers. In summary, we had an excellent third quarter both in licensing – on the licensing and royalty fronts. We remain focused on executing licensing agreements and gaining key customer adoption, as evident across the first 3 quarters of this year. Licensing is the precursor for royalty growth and the earnings leverage that we outlined in our January Investor Day. Our royalty revenue reflected a strong uptick in cellular baseband, and a growing contribution from the non-handset segment from new product ramps, new customers getting into production and from Hillcrest Labs’ OEM customers. With that said, I’ll now turn the call over to Yaniv, who will outline our financials and guidance.