Thomas Caulfield
Analyst · JPMorgan. Your line is open
Thank you, Sukhi and welcome everyone to our first quarter 2022 earnings call. We started the new year building on the strong momentum from last year and delivered records Q1 results that are well ahead of our outlook we provided in February. Amidst the backdrop of sustained and robust demand, our global team 15,000 strong continues to over deliver despite inflationary, geopolitical and pandemic related challenges. This type of execution builds upon itself and creates a foundation of confidence, confidence that we convey to our customers and partners and as a result builds their trust in GF. So a huge, huge shout out to the entire GF team, all 15,000 of you, great Q1. Let's together deliver another record quarter in Q2. In addition to strong manufacturing and operational performance, I am pleased to report that our commercial teams continue to win new, accretive designs with both new and existing customers, customers that are winning in their markets with GF's solutions. We continue to see strong demand across all of our strategic and secular growing end markets with a majority of that demand built upon GF's differentiated process technology. In fact, Q1 single-source wafer shipments grew 48% year-over-year, also and as largely expected. We see some areas of the market normalizing, notably low-end handsets and PCs. As previously communicated, neither of these markets are areas of strategic focus for GF, with the exception of a few applications in these end markets that require unique and differentiated technology. In summary, the demand environment is largely as we expected, and our revenue visibility remains strong. It's backed by multiyear long-term customer agreement. We remain fully sold out in 2022 and 2023 and we are increasingly confident that we can deliver the long-term business model we outlined and articulated in our roadshow. With that as context, let's move on to our first quarter results. We are pleased to report another quarter of record results for the company. First quarter revenue grew 37% year-over-year and was driven by year-over-year increases in both wafer shipments and ASP. This, coupled with strong operational execution across all our fabs resulted in significant improvements to adjusted gross margin, which increased to 25%. This is an 18% point improvement from a year ago quarter. And as a result, we reported first quarter adjusted earnings per share of $0.42, which is $0.15 higher than the high end of our guidance and more than double the $0.18 adjusted earnings per share we reported last quarter. Dave will discuss in more detail our financials later in his commentary. But first, let me provide a summary of our first quarter revenue by end markets, starting with smart mobile devices. Smart mobile devices represented approximately 50% of first quarter revenue and it grew 28% year-over-year. This growth was primarily driven by the continued transition of the market for more feature rich handsets, which is happening concurrently with the transition to 5G connectivity. Our 8SW platform is a great example of our differentiated technology. It is the industry's first and leading 300 millimeter RF SOI platform with best in class switch and LNA performance. It delivers superior data rate, range and battery power. Additionally, we are also seeing strong double-digit year-over-year growth for RF transceiver, mobile image sensor, and specialty power solutions. Our portfolio of technologies which includes 8SW, 12LP RF, 22FDX, and both 55 and 28 nanometer BCD light, enable our customers to design products that win in their markets, which in terms helps us participate in the most attractive segments in this end market. Next, our communications infrastructure and data center end market which comprised approximately 17% of first quarter revenue grew approximately 80% year-over-year. Growth was driven by a combination of higher shipments, higher ASPs and better mix. Data center demand, especially for two chip product solutions is starting to ramp and GF is well positioned to grow in this market. We also saw strong demand from our communications infrastructure customers who leveraged GF's IP rich and differentiated 12 nanometer RF and silicon germanium solutions. The robust demand in cellular infrastructure is due to the transition from 5G MIMO to 5G millimeter wave. This transition increases available spectrum, bandwidth and capacity, all of which culminates into improved user experience. In the quarter we also announced our second generation silicon photonics platform. This is garnering strong and broad customer attraction. Our branded photonics platform is the industry leading monolithic solution for optical interconnects, serving switches, GPUs, accelerators, and pluggable transceivers. This platform also provides the next level of RF performance for 800 gigabit transceivers. The best proof of this leadership solution is in our customer set. Industry leaders such as NVIDIA, Broadcom, Marvell and Cisco are designing high bandwidth, low power optical interconnects for high performance computing, networking and cloud data centers, using GF's photonics and silicon germanium platforms. Further, our differentiated photonics platform has been extended to the quantum computing market, and is gaining significant traction with some of the most innovative startups. For example, PsiQuantum is designing and building the world's first usable, scalable quantum computer on our photonics platform. Our silicon photonics business, which already has a majority share position is on track to grow over 50% in 2022. In summary, we believe the communications infrastructure and data center end markets remain on track to be one of our fastest growing end markets this year. Moving on to our home and industrial IOT end market, revenue was approximately 17% of GF's total first quarter revenue, and it grew 55% year-over-year. The strong growth in this end market was driven by higher demand, better ASPs, and richer mix. GF's strength and feature rich technologies are focused on superior wireless connectivity performance at the lowest possible power consumption has enabled our strong growth in home and IoT end market. This is an end market that continues to experience secular growth with the ongoing global proliferation of smart connected devices. Now within this end market our wireless connectivity solutions saw significant growth due to the accelerated adoption of 22FDX technology for WiFi 6 applications. We are also seeing strong traction for our IoT microcontrollers that feature non-volatile memory for a number of smart card applications, such as digital payments, access control, and electronic IDs. In addition, growth in this end market is being driven by our differentiated power and analog technologies for applications such as building automation and security. The trend of integrating wireless, secure compute, analog and multiple sensors is squarely playing to our strengths and is at the heart of this strong home and IoT growth for GF. We are on track for this end market to be the fastest growing for GF this year. Touching next on automotive, revenue in this market was approximately 4% of our total first quarter revenue, and grew approximately 170% year-on-year. As we previously indicated, our growth in this market will be lumpy as we are constrained by how quickly we can build capacity. Now as new capacity comes online, we expect our revenue growth to accelerate in this end market. In Q1, we also began to ramp some exciting new products that have been developed over the last few years that enable automobile electrification safety. We are also seeing continued ramp of our sole source business with a top tier automotive radar IDM that will drive significant growth over the next several years. Our pipeline of design wins in automotive remains robust. This is driven by one, the acceleration of plans for EV production and two, automakers desire to recover lost vehicle shipments during the pandemic. These two together will pull forward demand for advanced automotive architectures. And it's these architectures that have higher semiconductor content per vehicle, and the majority of which is serviced by feature rich technology across GF's portfolio. Examples range from our 130 BCD technologies that enable advanced battery management systems to our best in class 22FDX technologies that are quickly becoming the market standard for millimeter wave solutions. They're at the foundation to enabling safety in the future autonomous driving. Next, and as expected, our compute end market decline year-over-year, and it comprised approximately 2% of our total first quarter revenue, and expect this market to be less than 5% of our total 2022 revenue. As mentioned earlier in this call, our investments in this market are focused upon areas which we can provide differentiated technology. Specifically, we have targeted mixed signal, power management and companionship solutions. From a percent of total revenue perspective, we expect Q1 to be the trough of this end market, and that it will steadily improved throughout the year. I would now like to provide a brief update on our ongoing capacity expansion plans. In Q1 wafer shipments increased 14% year-over-year. We are particularly pleased with the output from our Dresden fab, where wafer shipments increased more than 50% year-over-year. In short, we are executing to plan and converting our capacity investments to the wafer output required to satisfy our long-term customer agreement. We are on track to increase wafer output more than 10% year-over-year. Also as committed and despite COVID related challenges, our new fab construction in Singapore is largely progressing to plan and we are on schedule to install tools at the beginning of Q3 with production ramping in the first half of 2023. In addition to our ongoing capacity expansion, we continue to make solid progress towards enhancing our differentiated technologies. For example, we completed six technology qualifications in the first quarter, including new features that we added to our industry leading 8SW RF SOI platform for front end modules in mobile handsets. In addition, we also released our enhanced SiGe high bandwidth technology in the quarter. We are pleased to report we have nearly 20 product tape outs on our next generation photonics technology platform in the first quarter alone of this year, with more than 30 customer tape outs scheduled for this year. This reflects the rapid and broad adoption of our differentiated photonics technology. And finally, given the unprecedented demand on our 22FDX platform, we have commenced a technology transfer from Dresden, Germany to our Malta, New York facility to establish our second 22FDX corridor. To summarize, I'm pleased to report a quarter of solid execution as we continue to demonstrate strong momentum across our business and are making significant progress towards our long-term business model. With that, let me turn the call over to Dave to provide the financial details for the first quarter and also provide you with our guidance for the second quarter.