Doron Arazi
Analyst · ROTH Capital. Scott, please go ahead
Thank you, Rob, and good morning, everyone. Ceragon delivered another strong quarter in the third quarter of 2024, benefiting from continued execution and from robust demand especially in India. We achieved our targets for growth and profitability and narrowed our full-year outlook, maintaining the midpoint but putting a finer point on the range. Increasingly, diversification is playing an important role in our success. The geographical diversification has already proven itself this quarter, while we also make progress in diversifying our business into private network business. For example, in this quarter we added four new Private Networks customers to our customer base. And since the beginning of the year we have penetrated 16 new Private Networks customers, representing approximately $11.5 million in incremental bookings from customers in the private networks sector. We are also making good progress in our product roadmap. For example, we have generated meaningful orders from our new IP50EX, and increased interest in our Upcoming IP-50EX Premium that is about to be released shortly. This product is intended to use mmW frequency over a much longer distance, exploiting the high capacity advantage of these frequencies and reducing total cost of ownership. We have started a soft promotion of our first Neptune-based product, the IP-100E, and have already seen very positive feedback. The first version of this product is intended to deliver 25Gps capacity in a single box with a compelling total cost of ownership profile. We intend to present the first units of this product at the Mobile World Congress. We have recently started multiple new POCs for our Network Digital Twin and the initial feedback is very positive. I’d now like to provide an overview of our Q3 highlights by region. Noting that on today’s call we will focus primarily on activities in North America and India, the two regions that have, and we expect will continue to have, the greatest impact on our results in the near term. In North America, revenue was $24.5 million. In the private networks segment we have built a very strong pipeline and are working to leverage our completed projects, to build our brand in this domain. In fact, our success with the City of Cincinnati continues to be a case study deployment for us and the level of satisfaction is also driving proactive references from existing customers to new potential customers, adding to our funnel of opportunities. We are also leveraging Siklu’s strong brand in the Enterprise Security domain for attaining more business. Our bookings for private networks declined in the quarter compared to the prior quarter. We believe this was a timing factor, associated with seasonality and longer sell cycles and not a demand factor, as supported by the healthy funnel we have built. We anticipate private networks playing an increased role in our growth going forward. In communications service providers segment, Q3 has demonstrated some slowdown in the ordering pace primarily from Tier 1 customers, similar to the dynamic some of our peers have mentioned. Following multiple discussions with our main customer, we believe this was a short term phenomenon, relating mostly to timing of network build over the year. We are off to a much stronger start in the fourth quarter related to bookings, as we have received a substantial value of orders which supports our current assessment. In India, revenue was $50.5 million, an all-time record quarter for Ceragon. We have been shipping and deploying equipment related to both, our long standing customer as well as the new customer we won in Q4 2023. These deployments are supporting both customers in their expansion of 4G and 5G networks. In addition, due to our technological strength and market leader position, we are further growing our business in India and diversifying to another customer that recently announced a multi-billion dollar project for upgrading its network to 4G and 5G. Since Q3, we have received more than $18 million in orders from this customer for microwave products, further increasing substantially our market share. We expect more orders from this customer in the coming quarters for our Microwave as well as our E-Band solution. Since participating in the India Mobile Congress, we are encouraged by the increasing level of traction we are receiving in India and see large opportunities for 2025. We believe that we will see much higher demand for E-Band products in 2025 and our IP-50EX Advanced provides capabilities that fit the specific needs of the Indian market, so we are very well positioned to capitalize on incremental growth opportunities. Since there are multiple discussions about the general business environment, I would like to share with you our observations. Indeed, we have seen a slowdown in certain public network domains outside of India. We believe this is primarily driven by the global economy and the level of demand for 5G by network users. In addition, in Latin America, Africa and some countries in Asia PAC, Chinese competition is very fierce in these regions, driving business softness there. In these regions, we are increasing our focus on the private networks segment where there is lower Chinese presence. We also see an interesting opportunity in the current market conditions as multiple service providers are now focusing on Fixed subscriber growth, and using wireless technology with 5G high frequencies. We are in multiple discussions with large operators exploring opportunities to leverage Siklu’s point-to-multipoint technology to address this increasing need in other frequencies. With that, I’ll turn the call over to Ronen Stein, our CFO, to discuss the results in more detail. Ronen, over to you.