Gideon Wertheizer
Analyst · Cowen
Thank you, Richard. Good morning everyone and thank you for joining us today. CEVA delivered a very strong quarter, highlighted by record royalties from our base stations and IoT product category and licensing agreements with major players in key industries. Before we expand on our third quarter results, I would like to acknowledge the tireless efforts of our talented employees around the world that continue to deal with the challenges COVID-19 presents. Through their hard work, we are successfully growing our business, keeping the commitments to our customers and maintaining the fast pace of innovation and new technology developments. Thank you all. Total revenue for third quarter was $25 million, up 6% year-over-year. Our licensing business continues to be solid, at $12.4 million for the quarter, up 10% year-over-year. Royalty revenue was $12.5 million, up 3% on a year-over-year basis. We concluded 13 new agreements during the quarter, of which 5 were for connectivity and 8 were for smart sensing. Six of those agreements were with first-time customers. Target applications of our new licensing agreements include a strategic design win for ADAS with one of the largest automotive semiconductor player, which I will expand on later in the call. Other target applications for our customers this quarter include digital imaging, true wireless stereo earbuds, smart TVs and digital conferencing systems for home use, a growing space as more people are switching to work from home permanently and upgrading their home office setups. On royalty revenue, we had a strong quarter, driven by record shipments for our base station and IoT product category, formerly referred to as non-handset products. Royalty revenue from this category grew 86% sequentially and 105% year-over-year to reach a record $7.9 million. We have benefitted from expedited 5G RAN deployments in China, which I will touch on later in the call, and from a series of product launches and shipments enabled by our Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and sensor fusion technologies. In our handset baseband category, we saw a strong recovery from our China-based customers targeting low tier 4G smartphones and feature phones for India and other developing economies. Royalties from premium tier smartphones declined on a year-over-year basis as new 5G smartphone series launched last month uses modems from another supplier that does not incorporate our technology. With that said, our technologies remain incorporated in the low-cost smartphone this customer launched earlier in the year, which continues to have strong market traction around the world. Let me take the next few minutes to elaborate on two key developments in the quarter. The first is a monumental agreement in the automotive ADAS space and the second is the underlying drivers that delivered a step-up in 5G RAN royalties. The digital transformation in the automotive industry, of which ADAS is a key driver, has led to a dramatic increase in the usage of software and AI to analyze data collected by the cameras and radar sensors surrounding the car. Furthermore, amidst the push by players such as Nvidia and Mobileye toward their own closed and vertically integrated solutions, automotive tier ones and OEMs are seeking for an open, high performance technology where they can take advantage of their in-house excellence while not being locked into a certain vendor. Against this backdrop, our powerful DSPs, AI technologies and our collaborative business model set a comprehensive foundation that enable OEMs to become supplier-agnostic and translate their innovation into a competitive edge. In this regard, the unique proposition of our leading-edge SensPro DSP along with our CDNN AI compiler technology were instrumental in obtaining a new comprehensive agreement we signed in the quarter with a major semiconductor player in the automotive space. This agreement is based on a project our customer won with a very large automotive manufacturer in Japan for an ADAS solution for new L2+ and L3 cars which are projected to start production by 2025. On 5G RAN, the transition from non-standalone to standalone mode of 5G new radio is already underway, in particular, in China. According to government data, Chinese operators have already deployed 480,000 5G base stations as of the first half of this year. This represents about a third of the global RAN market. CEVA is a prime beneficiary of this upgrade cycle in China through our strategic relationship with ZTE. China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom have engaged ZTE in large scale for these deployments. As a result, its market share climbed to 30% within those operators. Furthermore, in comparison to 4G, 5G presents higher content and a larger addressable market for us, resulting from the use of active antenna units, AAU, in the base station's radio units. Deployments of active antenna settings provide operators with a substantial increase in network capacity, data rates, higher energy efficiency and overall lower cost of ownership. The latest advancements in active antenna technologies require massive DSP computing for algorithms such as massive MIMO and Beamforming, which can be optimally served by our advanced CEVA-XC12 and CEVA-XC16 DSPs. We are therefore presented with additional content and higher volume opportunities, in addition to our proposition for baseband processing. Royalties from active antennas have already made a noticeable contribution to our third quarter royalty reports. So, to summarize, our third quarter performance demonstrated the continued, meaningful progress we are making across our businesses. Our technologies for sensing and connectivity are fundamental to any intelligent device and will lead the transformation in 5G networks and the automotive space. We are managing our business for the long haul and confident in our growth strategy. Yet, we remain determined and focused to drive efficiency and prudency to cope with the ongoing uncertainty COVID-19 poses. Finally, I'd like to thank again our customers, partners and CEVA's hard working employees. Your health and safety continue to be our first priority. With that said, let me hand over the call to Yaniv for financials and guidance.