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Dolby Laboratories, Inc. (DLB)

Q4 2014 Earnings Call· Thu, Oct 23, 2014

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Dolby Laboratories Conference call discussing fiscal fourth quarter results. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this call is being recorded Thursday, October 23, 2014. I would now like to turn the conference call over to Elena Carr, Director of Corporate Finance and Investor Relations for Dolby Laboratories. Please go ahead, Elena.

Elena Carr

Analyst

Good afternoon. Welcome to Dolby Laboratories' fourth quarter 2014 earnings conference call. Joining me today are Kevin Yeaman, Dolby Laboratories' President and CEO; and Lewis Chew, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. As a reminder, today's discussion will include forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from the statements made today. A discussion of some of these risks and uncertainties can be found in the earnings press release that we issued today under the section encaptioned Risk Factors, as well as in our most recent report on Form 10-Q. Dolby assumes no obligation and does not intend to update any forward-looking statements made during this call as a result of new information or future events. During today's call, we will discuss GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation between the two is available in our earnings press release and in the Dolby Laboratories' Investor Relations data sheet on the Investor Relations section of our website. As for the content of this call, Lewis will begin with a recap of Dolby's financial results and provide our fiscal 2015 outlook. Kevin will finish with a discussion of the business. So with that introduction behind us, I will now turn the call over to Lewis.

Lewis Chew

Analyst

Thanks, Elena. And before I dive into the numbers, I was asking Kevin if we could start off with a "Let's go, Giants!" chant, but then he reminded me there could be some people on from American Century which is based in Kansas City. So instead, I think I will jump into the numbers. So good afternoon, everyone, and today I will go through the fourth quarter results in detail. I'll also recap the full year at a summary level and I'll finish up with an outlook for fiscal 2015. So let's start with the fourth quarter. Total company revenues in Q4 was $227 million versus the range we gave of $210 million to $220 million at the beginning of the quarter. Licensing revenue was $208.9 million; which was about what we originally expected. And product and services revenue was $18.1 million; which was slightly below our expectation. Licensing in the quarter grew by about $18 million over last year's fourth quarter, while products and services were down about $8 million from last year's Q4. So let's go through our major markets to discuss those trends in more depth. Broadcast licensing was the biggest contributor to the revenue above projection. They represented about 47% to total licensing in the fourth quarter. Revenues in this market increased 11% sequentially over Q3 and grew 38% year-over-year, and both those trends benefited from higher attach [ph] rates in TVs and set-top boxes as well as higher back payments. PC licensing revenues increased slightly this quarter, about 2% sequentially and also 2% year-over-year. We saw higher units reported during the quarter than we originally modeled. And PC represented about 19% of Q4 total licensing; which is a similar percentage to what we saw last quarter. Consumer electronic revenues in Q4 were about 13% of…

Kevin J. Yeaman

Analyst

Thank you, Lewis, and good afternoon, everyone. We ended fiscal 2014 on a strong note, with Q4 revenue ahead of expectations. We continue to be focused on driving sustainable long-term growth by creating and enabling compelling experiences built on our audio, voice and imaging platforms. Today, I'd like to talk about our progress. First, I'll talk about how we are continuing to raise the bar on the audio entertainment experience and making that experience available through all the new ways in which entertainment content is being consumed. Then I'll cover our new offerings, which build on our expertise in voice and imaging and extend into new markets and opportunities. So starting with the audio entertainment experience. We continue to extend our presence in digital broadcast and to establish our value proposition in online and mobile services and devices. Additionally, we've had great success in creating the next generation of audio entertainment with Dolby Atmos in the cinema and are now moving this offering beyond the cinema. Broadcast has been our most consistent growth driver in recent quarters. We work with operators and standard bodies around the world to adopt Dolby solutions. This year, our TV attach rate increased to the mid-70s and 30 new TV operators began shipping Dolby Digital Plus in their set-top boxes. A big focus of our efforts continues to be the adoption of Dolby technologies in emerging markets where the transition to digital broadcast is still in progress. During the year, Dolby Digital Plus was confirmed in 5 new standards. These were in India, Russia, United Arab Emirates, Kenya and, most recently, Nigeria. These 5 countries represent over 200 million households and further expand the addressable market for Dolby. In China and India, we also continue to see development of content ecosystems. Over 2/3 of high-definition…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And we'll go first to Yung Kim with Piper Jaffray.

Yung R. Kim - Piper Jaffray Companies, Research Division

Analyst

You mentioned back payment in this past quarter. Could you talk about how significant that was to the upside in 4Q?

Lewis Chew

Analyst

Sure. I mentioned that back payment specifically in the broadcast area. So if you don't mind, I want to remind -- I didn't put in my caveat verbiage in my prepared comments, but to remind everybody that as a total company, we always have back payments every quarter, but not necessarily in the same market segments so we try to break those out. So in the quarter, and I look at broadcast being the main provider of the -- ahead of expectation, most of that did come from, I'd call it core activities and then the rest of that would have come from the back payment. But we don't break those out separately. So hopefully, I'd given you some sense with the scale.

Yung R. Kim - Piper Jaffray Companies, Research Division

Analyst

Okay. So it's fair to say that the core activities were the primary drivers in that segment though?

Lewis Chew

Analyst

Yes. More than -- the majority of the above expectation in broadcast was from core activities, but it was helped by, also, higher-than-expected back payments.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions]

Kevin J. Yeaman

Analyst

All right. Listen, it looks like we answered everybody's questions. I want to thank all of you for joining us today, and we look forward to talking with you again soon. Thank you.