Steven Humphreys
Analyst · the SEC, including the company's latest annual report on Form 10-K. Identiv assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements, which speak as of today. I will now turn the call over to your CEO, Steven Humphreys for his comments. Sir, please go ahead
Thanks, Operator, and thank you, all, for joining us today. In our preliminary results, we said we expected to exceed the aggressive growth projections we set in November. Today, we confirmed we beat those expectations. For the fourth quarter, we grew over 30% year-over-year, our RFID revenue grew more than 100% year-over-year for the second consecutive quarter, and we finished the year with backlog for the first quarter of 2021 that was more than double the same period last year. Now the market force behind this growth is that the RFID market has taken off. Huge leaps in chip capabilities at extremely low cost combined with the full embrace of NFC by Apple in its iPhone 12 and iOS 14 open the floodgates of product engineers integrating RFID into their products to create totally new and more engaging customer experiences, project reliability and performance. As the market hit this pivot point, we expanded both our capacity and technical leadership. We drove growth in RFID and with our new product launches and expanded customer base we positioned to grow even faster in 2021. The momentum we generated in the second half of the year, which grew 30% over the first half, showed that 2020 was an inflection point for our business. So, let me share some growth metrics that are carrying us so strongly into 2021. In our RFID business, we shipped more than 130 million units in 2020 and doubled our RFID volumes in the second half of the year over the second half of 2019. We also increased our average unit prices by 20% showing that the strongest growth is in more sophisticated products. That's also where we are the strongest, with over 150 active RFID customers, we're engaged with some of the most advanced early adapters and in 2020 we cemented our reputation as the go-to partner for advanced RFID devices. The other three growth indicators to track in RFID: customer launches, design wins, and technology launches. So here are few of each from 2020. Now we're usually not allowed to use customer names, but we can talk about the product categories where we had customer launches. One that launched and we think will scale to high volumes is in the pharmacy area. Prescription pill bottles that can speak the contents for the visually impaired, and we think this will expand to all prescriptions. Another customer launch was in accessories for mobile devices. With the power of mobile phones, having accessories that are just dumb objects is a missed opportunity. When your phone case, wallet, glucose monitors and other accessories can talk directly to your phone they become part of the mobile platform. RFID is the way to do that unless you want a bunch of wires going from your phone to your accessories. So again, a very interesting category we designed and launch products for that we think will drive major volumes going forward. The third customer launches was in medical consumables where it's critical that a part like a disposal breathing tube is the authentic part to go with the particular manufacturer's ventilator. We supported a customer launch to track the authenticity and usage of breathing tubes for ventilators and ramped faster support near-term demand. The mass markets beyond ventilators of course, every medical device consumable should be RFID-enabled to make sure the right part is used at the right machine and to make sure it's used only as it's supposed to be and then replaced with the genuine part. Another massive and recurring market were the key customer launch in 2020. Now, there are several more, but these are some good examples. Turning now to design wins in 2020. These are designs that we're working on, but haven't scaled up yet. So personal transportation companies -- think bikes, scooters, ebikes, all got very engaged in RFID in both Europe and the Americas. Our patented tag on metal RFID tags for authenticity, tracking and customer engagement are obvious uses. We're also working on tag on metal designs to track tire pressure. So you could just tap your phone to the wheel and get pressure instead of awkwardly jamming a pressure gauge on a tube stem. Another design win was for rapid blood analyzing systems. This application goes on consumable cartridges and both calibrates the testing system and confirms the authenticity and contents for the blood test assay. Again, designs are complete. And we expect to ramp in 2021. Still another category of design wins is with existing customers. Core to our strategy is continuously improving designs to leverage new chip features and price performance from companies like NXP, Impinge, TI and others. With one of our major customers, we shipped three different designs in 2020, but also developed three new designs and at least two of these will be scaling up and going to market in 2021. As we ramp these customers aggressively in the second half of 2020, we made investments in technologies to drive new processes, world-class quality and automation. These investments did impact the margins, but they've strengthened our competitive position. So despite doubling volumes, we delivered to aggressive schedules with quality and yield levels that exceeded our customers' targets and give us competitive advantages we can now apply to all of our customers and prospects. As a result, we expect the margin compression to be temporary and to contribute to faster growth because of the competitive advantages we built as a result. Now our ability to get ever more design wins depends on our best-in-class engineering and production. But upstream of that, it's built on new technologies we're constantly incorporating and designing us new capabilities for our customers. In 2020, we developed a record range of new technologies and chips we're bringing to our customers. The key technology of the launch was passive temperature sensors and patches. This lets you track the temperature of people or things without having a big battery attached -- great technology with tons of use cases. Now one of the most interesting, I think, we launched capacitive sensors integrated in our RFID devices. This senses fluid fill even through glass or other materials. So you can track medicine fills and syringes, serum bottles and anything else. Now, more on the applications later but great technology with lots of use cases. We also launched designs with integrated strain gauges to track the bending and strain of objects whether they're made of metal plastic roofing concrete. Now, another area you'll see having an impact is our multi-frequency devices. NFC and high frequency are great, but the read ranges are usually a few centimeters. Ultra high frequency has range but the readers are expensive and data rates are low. In 2020, we developed and launched combination RFID devices integrating both UHF and HF in a single device. Now there are others and especially devices incorporating new chips from NXP, Impinge ST as well, especially chip makers like Asine [ph], EM Micro and others. So behind the numbers as you can tell, we made a lot of business building progress in RFID in 2020 across customer launches, design wins and technology developments. So, in the other parts of our business, we also built business strength behind the financial results. In 2020, the federal government remains a strong growth driver. Our federal sales grew 30% year-over-year. Driven by our technology strength and by work from home and work mobile demand. We had key deployments at the Department of Energy, Treasury, NIST [ph] FBI and IRS offices nationwide, VA hospitals, multiple secret service facilities, Air Force bases worldwide and lots of others. Now, our third strategic focus is on recurring revenues and customer retention. In 2020, we launched subscription services for our entire physical security product line: Velocity Cirrus, Freedom Cloud -- both of which are our access control as a service offerings -- 3VR Prime video surveillance service and Mobile SID, our mobile identities service. Customers who adapted our service platforms in the fourth quarter included EastWest Bank, La Loma [ph] Medical Center and Acosta Apartments and others. So in 2020, our growth financial showed our strength, but just as important, we got a wide range of customer and design wins and technology launches supporting a strong 2021 and beyond. The areas of RFID leadership in growth, the federal market and recurring revenues and customer retention remain our focus. But before going into our expectations for this year, I'll turn the call over to Sandra to hit the highlights for the fourth quarter and fiscal year 2020. Sandra?