Gideon Wertheizer
Analyst · Cowen. Please go ahead
Thank you, Richard. Good morning, everyone and thank you for joining us today. Firstly, our heartfelt sympathies are with those around the world that have lost their loved ones or their jobs due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We are all hopeful that the measures taken by governments around the world will lead for a sustainable recovery. At CEVA, we are taking proactive steps to protect all our employees’ health and adjust our operation to work-from-home. Our IP structure is advanced and scalable, which allowed a seamless migration from office to work-from-home. Our ongoing R&D development remains at high level of productivity, and our interactions with customer for sales and support activity is optimum. We continue to monitor government instructions country-by-country, and are taking careful steps to enable our employee’s to return to our offices. Against this backdrop, we have an excellent quarter with revenue of $23.6 million, up 39% year-over-year. The licensing environment continues to be robust and we recorded $14.5 million in licensing revenue, up 32% year-over-year. We signed 13 new agreements, of which 10 were for connectivity and three were for small cells. Three out of the 13 deals were with first-time customer. Target applications for our technologies include 5G for base station run, 5G fixed wireless access, 5G back-haul, Wi-Fi 6 for IoT devices, true wireless ear-buds, vision and AR for drones, and voice assistance for range of smart home and IoT devices. Royalty revenue came in at $9.1 million, up 53% year-over-year. Above seasonal weakness in the Chinese handset market resulting from the COVID-19 lock down in China, was more than offset by solid IoT-based product shipments and the introduction of new low-cost model from a leading smartphone company. Let me take the next few minutes to provide you with additional perspective on two growth vectors that are central in our strategy, 5G RAN and Wi-Fi 6. These spaces represent secular trends and are expected to come increasingly into focus on the back of COVID-19 as they are key to enabling better work-from-home practices and support the proliferation of the use of robust remote medical diagnosis and treatments in the future. On 5G 1, our largest 5G OEM customer extended the use of our technologies and signed new licensing agreements during the quarter for development of next generation 5G chipset to address the 5G Phase 2 network services. These services include ultra-reliable low latency communication, URLLC, targeting robotics, smart manufacturing, automotive, medical; and Massive Machine Type Communication, MMTC, that enables billions of low power sensor, to be connected to the cloud for aggregation and AI services. URLLC and MMTC will drive the upcoming capital investments in 5G and the focus of our customers with their new RAN design. In this context, a few weeks ago, we unveiled our latest generation DSP, the CEVA XC 16, this is the most advanced and powerful DSP platform available today, offering unprecedented performance and state-of-the-art architecture, innovation in operating speed, parallel processing, and multi-threading. We are also encouraged by the recent traction our customer ZTE has had in 5G. Today, it has 45 commercial contract and most recently won 29% share of the $5.2 billion contract to deploy 5G base station in China for China Mobile, a substantially bigger share that it had in prior engagement for China Mobile. In Wi-Fi 6, we are experiencing good momentum and customer interest with two new agreements signed during the quarter, targeting a variety of IoT devices ranging from BTV, smart set up boxes, smart speaker to smart door locks. Wi-Fi 6 is the latest Wi-Fi standard also referred to as 802.11ax. According to Cisco forecast, nearly 60% of mobile data traffic worldwide will be offloaded to Wi-Fi network by 2022. According to recent study from ABI Research, Wi-Fi 6 market is forecasted to reach $2.2 billion units by 2024 as compared to less than $300 million in 2019. The recent FCC approval to free up additional spectrum at the 6 gigahertz band will enable compliant Wi-Fi 6E devices to achieve speeds comparable to 5G mobile network support low latencies required for application like virtual and augmentation reality in mobile gaming, and is also expected to boost the Industry 4.0 update for smart manufacturing. In summary, our thoughts are with those people suffering from the impact of COVID-19. While the situation is still dynamic, we are encouraged by the persistent design activities of our customers’ interest in our product. We are laser focused to continue to expand our business to capitalize on the momentum we gained last year. We are closely monitoring the dynamics and developments concerning our customer shipment and we will take prudent step until COVID-19 impact is contained and supply and demand resume some normalcy. We hope you are all safe and look forward to meeting you face-to-face again in the near future at conferences and roadshow. With that said, I hand over the call to Yaniv for financials and guidance.