John M. Forsyth
Analyst · The Benchmark Company.
Let me give a bit of color. Obviously, we just guide 1 quarter at a time, but I do want to give color to this. Clearly, we're coming off a record June and then a very strong September guide, which overall reflects strong demand for our smartphone products generally -- which is generally a very, very positive picture for us, but there are a few factors which we think are giving a somewhat different shape to the seasonality this year that you should keep in mind when thinking about your models for the rest of the year. So I'll just touch on each of the factors that we think are playing a part there. One of them I mentioned already, we think the pull-ins contributed to some extent from our position in the value chain. It's pretty much impossible to say precisely how much because we ship to customer demand. But we believe we've likely seen a pull forward of some level of demand and common sense says that has to come from somewhere. Secondly, although we don't have the perfect visibility of this, we do think it's possible that with a more complex and diverse global manufacturing supply chain on the part of certain of our customers, that we may have seen and maybe seeing a need for parts to be available and on hand a little earlier than normal, which again, would just pull forward some of the revenue ramp. And then finally, and this is certainly, I think, perhaps a secular trend for us. As you know, the quantity of our camera content has been growing over time. And that content is part of the longer supply chain process than our other products because it's typically incorporated into modules and the manufacturing time lines associated with that longer. Which means that we ship the camera parts earlier than we ship the other parts that don't go into modules, and that pulls a larger part of our revenue forward. So if you look actually last year, we also saw a comparatively stronger September quarter, and that, again, in part, reflected this trend. So I think we just guide to what we can see. But as we commented and Jeff commented in his prepared remarks, we do see these factors all playing a part in tilting the demand pattern more towards the first half of the calendar year rather than the back half as it perhaps used to be for us. That said, as Jeff mentioned, there's nothing about that shift in patent has changed our overall view and expectations for the full year.