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GSI Technology, Inc. (GSIT)

Q4 2021 Earnings Call· Sat, May 8, 2021

$7.25

+0.97%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen thank you for standing by. Welcome to GSI Technology's Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2021 Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Before we begin today's call the company has requested that I read the following safe harbor statement. The matters discussed in this conference call may include forward-looking statements regarding future events and the future performance of GSI Technology that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated. These risks and uncertainties are described in the company's Forms 10-Q and 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Many of these risks are currently amplified by and will continue to be amplified by or in the future may be amplified by the COVID-19 global pandemic. Additionally, I have been asked to advise you that this conference call is being recorded today May 6, 2021 at the request of GSI Technology. Hosting the call today is; Lee-Lean Shu, the company's Chairman President and Chief Executive Officer. With him are; Doug Schirle, Chief Financial Officer; and Didier Lasserre, Vice President of Sales. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Shu. Please go ahead sir.

Lee-Lean Shu

Analyst

Good afternoon and thank you for joining us today to review our fourth quarter and fiscal year 2021 results. I will cover some highlights from the year and give an update on our APU products followed by Didier Lasserre with comments on products and the sales breakdown. Afterward Doug Schirle will review in detail our fourth quarter and full year fiscal 2021 financial results. Fiscal year 2021 brought several unforeseen challenges to our business. We faced a global pandemic and slowing sales from our largest customer. With that said, we stay focused on our key objective of bringing Gemini-I to market and increasing awareness of our groundbreaking technology. We made good progress on both of these fronts. Despite the challenge presented by COVID over the past year, we launched remote cloud-based data centers in Israel and the US for customers to test and demo Gemini-I. The Gemini APU is receiving more media coverage, highlighting its unique advantage and benefits. We have also received third-party validation of Gemini for certain applications including our Elasticsearch profit which Didier will discuss this section. Including the system bottleneck problem facing big data, instigating heightened attention several leading semiconductor company have recently introduced others. They have positioned a solution to eliminate system bottleneck. The system bottleneck will refer to it the Von Neumann bottleneck caused by the separate memory and the CPU in the Von Neumann architecture. The Von Neumann architecture requires a CPU to fetch data for every operation it performed. We don't believe that any of the new solutions address the actual problem. The only way to truly eliminate the bottleneck is to break the Von Neumann model. This is how the Gemini APU does. We remove the limitation of the Von Neumann architecture. With the Gemini APU, we break the von Neumann…

Didier Lasserre

Analyst

Thank you, Lee-Lean. I would like to touch on two things in my comments: the third party validation of the GSI plug-in for Elasticsearch, and the recently announced Phase 1 contract with NASA. First, a little background on Elasticsearch for those unfamiliar with the name. Elasticsearch is the most popular search engine. What makes Elasticsearch so popular is that: one, it's open sourced and free software; and number two, the way it stores documents with searchable references that allow them to be searched and retrieved and enables visualization tools for visual search. Very flexible and highly functional Elasticsearch has become the go-to search solution for scalable real-time search. Recently a third party tested our Elasticsearch plug-in powered by the Gemini APU, which demonstrated the fastest vector query speed on a one million item search compared to four other methods. At 92.6 milliseconds the Gemini APU was 82% faster than the next fastest solution and showed a 94% improvement from the slowest response solution. They also noted that unlike other methods Gemini supported batch queries. These are impressive performance results, and it's great to see them published by an independent party. Switching to the NASA contract. We issued a press release earlier this month announcing that we were awarded along with prime contractor Space Micro, a Phase 1 contract to develop a real-time sorting Inference Processing Unit, also known as an IPU, an IPU board for earth observation missions. The board will feature a radiation tolerant Gemini APU, which is the predominant force behind the IPU for satellite applications. Using inference rather than search gives the broadest potential scope for the NASA project, which is why they release references as an APU -- I'm sorry IPU. This Phase one contract is the first key step to proliferating Gemini in space by…

Doug Schirle

Analyst

Thank you Didier. For the fiscal year ended March 31 2021, we reported a net loss of $21.5 million or $0.91 per diluted share, a net revenues of $27.7 million, a net loss of $10.3 million or $0.45 per diluted share, a net revenues of $43.3 million in the fiscal year ended March 31 2020. Gross margin for fiscal 2021 was 47.7% compared to 58.5% in the prior year. Total operating expenses were $34.5 million in fiscal 2021, a decrease of 4.6% from $36.1 million in fiscal 2020. Research and development expenses were $23.3 million compared to $25.2 million in the prior fiscal year. And selling general and administrative expenses were $11.1 million compared to $10.9 million in fiscal 2020. The decrease in research and development expense was primarily due to a charge of $2.7 million during the third quarter of fiscal 2020 for purchased intellectual property that is being incorporated into our next-generation of Gemini chips. Fiscal 2021 operating loss was $21.3 million compared to an operating loss of $10.8 million in the prior year. The increase in operating loss is primarily due to the decrease in revenue and gross profit. Fiscal 2021, net loss included interest and other income of $94,000 and a cash provision of $335,000 compared to $712,000 of interest and other income and a tax provision of $247,000 a year ago. The company reported a net loss of $5 million or $0.21 per diluted share and net revenues of $7.7 million for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2021, compared to a net loss of $3.8 million or $0.16 per diluted share and net revenues of $8.5 million for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2020 and a net loss of $5.2 million or $0.22 per diluted share and net revenues of $6.8 million in the third…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our first question will come from Kurt Caramanidis with Carl M. Hennig.

Kurt Caramanidis

Analyst

Thank you. Question is the NASA win -- are we counting that as a Gemina win then? I thought it was mainly for Rad-Tolerant, but now you're saying that's the Gemini board. Is that kind of a double solution for that?

Didier Lasserre

Analyst

Correct. So it is the Gemini solution, but it will be a Rad-Tolerant version of our Gemini chip. I think if you recall I spent some time, we did some radiation testing on the Gemini. It's been about 1.5 years and the results came back very, very promising. And so, we certainly took -- we took the testing beyond Rad-Tolerant, but short of Rad-Hard. So we feel very comfortable that the solution will work at Rad-Tolerant levels.

Kurt Caramanidis

Analyst

Okay. What is your level of confidence in a design win for Gemini, whether it's facial recognition? At one point you were talking about signaling and then some other things. Now, let's say for calendar 2021, is there anything close warm hot?

Didier Lasserre

Analyst

Yes. So as Lee-Lean spoke about in his script, we certainly have a lot of customers we're talking to in different market segments. It's premature to say when some of those might hit. Is there a chance they could hit in calendar 2021? Possibly. Could it get pushed out? Hard to say. Right now, we're still in that design in phase. So it's hard to predict when some revenues may occur.

Kurt Caramanidis

Analyst

Okay. And then maybe a bigger question or -- if you're not able to get design wins, is there a path or a time where you would maybe look to license partner, or how do we view -- we just keep going until you get something or is there some point where you say maybe we bring someone else in to help sell it, or what is the thought there?

Lee-Lean Shu

Analyst

Well, as I mentioned earlier, we do have a very productive meeting with the customer and I feel comfortable right now. And we will get some -- hopefully, we will get some more concrete use along the ones that we have a more obvious result. Okay. And in terms of licensing, we do talk to customers. If it's worthwhile for us to go thereof we definitely will consider it. But from the marketing still in the IPU, we are not in demo. Okay. But if there's a specific area with a big customer as I mentioned worthwhile then we will definitely work on it.

Kurt Caramanidis

Analyst

Okay. Doug, I apologize, I might have missed that. Did you extend or expand the buyback, or then I heard you say cash conservation, can you restate that? I apologize.

Doug Schirle

Analyst

Yes. We still have $4.3 million available to repurchase shares and we'll be opportunistic with it.

Kurt Caramanidis

Analyst

Okay. So that's kind of unchanged?

Doug Schirle

Analyst

Yes.

Kurt Caramanidis

Analyst

Yes. Okay. Thanks a lot. Wait I have one more question. Am I still on?

Doug Schirle

Analyst

Sure.

Kurt Caramanidis

Analyst

The Rad-Hard, have you reached heritage yet? Have you had any launches, or is that still in wait?

Didier Lasserre

Analyst

So as we've talked about Rad-Hard is kind of a difficult area for us now because of the shutdowns. As we've recalled most if not all the Rad-Hard opportunities are some kind of a national asset that require face-to-face meetings which we're unable to do right now. The Rad-Tolerant however, as I mentioned we just got the PO two days ago for a demonstration satellite that's going to ultimately be part of a constellation. That will be Rad-Tolerant, but we're hoping that that happens by the very end of this year or beginning of next year and that will give us an elusive heritage that you're talking about.

Kurt Caramanidis

Analyst

Okay. Great. Okay. Thanks a lot.

Didier Lasserre

Analyst

Thanks Kurt.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] At this time, there are no further questions. I'll now turn the conference back over to you.

Lee-Lean Shu

Analyst

Thank you all for joining us. We look forward to speaking with you again when we report our first quarter fiscal 2022 results. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. That does conclude today's conference. We do thank you for your participation. Have an excellent day.