Steve Humphreys
Analyst · B. Riley FBR. Craig , your line is live
Thanks, Sandra. As our results and our higher guidance show, we are growing faster than we expected as the beginning of 2020. Just as we beat our goals in the first half, we think we are in a strong position for the rest of the year, with some opportunities that can be transformational in 2022. That was always a focus on our core business drivers of design wins, current customer volume growth and programs to drive growth. For the design wins in Q2, more in the pipeline for Q3, and our current customers all staying with us and some extending designs and volumes, we have got solid visibility into the second half of the year and into 2022. As a result, as Sandra said, we are raising our guidance for 2021. We started the year with 96 million at the beginning of the range. We then moved the lower end of the range up to 100 million. We are now moving the top of the range 206 million. Demand actually could be higher, but we have to be realistic about the same supply situation that much bigger companies are also dealing with. So I would like to focus on the higher end of the range, and how we are thinking about that. We all know about the tight supply chain every business is facing. Now I want to be very clear, we are meeting all of our customer demand, and even some upside, which is letting us take share from competitors that let us raise the bottom line of our guidance and now the top ends 206 million. So we are confident of our ability to keep our supply chain solid, despite the tough situations facing everyone. We are also confident of the demand side, both near-term as of 2022. We are not giving formal guidance today for 2022. But we do expect some of the specific transformational projects will ramp in mid-2022, driving much higher revenues in the second half of next year and really changing the profile of the overall business. We also think that chip shortages we are all dealing with, we are mostly resolved by next year, at least in the chip categories relevant to our business. Remember, these of course are RFID and NFC related chips, not necessarily the broader base of chip categories across the industry. They might even start to hit the usual cyclical downturn right around the time that these large projects are starting to ramp for us in the middle of next year. We know everybody’s over ordering right now to try to get to the front of the line. And anyone in the semiconductor industry seen this before. And it could well result in at least some oversupply. For us, this time, we would be perfect. Our main breakout projects like the auto injector, other medical devices, cannabis scaling up pressure sensors and others will be much higher and more complicated supply volumes. Right as we think there could be an oversupply, or at least very good availability. In the meantime, applications like prescriptions mobile devices, the early phases of cannabis, and the wide range of other use cases I described earlier, will drive strong sustained growth. Even if the charges don’t end will be in a solid position will place the orders to support growth because we have good visibility into what they demand levels will be. And if there is an oversupply mid next year, we could see very strong growth and higher margins as demand and supply are both moving in the right directions for our business in 2022. So with that context, I want to get back to this year and our guidance. We are confident we will meet our demand growth and the raised guidance range. We pre-ordered supply in some areas we think could go over. So we are as ready as we can be. But it is still possible that some of the excess demand could come from products that we haven’t ordered ahead. So we might not be able to drive shipments even higher right now. I want to be clear, we are not saying we are constrained by supply like some companies, we are not. Our business is growing and we are meeting demand for the base of that increased guidance. It is possible that customer requests that come in above our plans, or for products that we haven’t pre-ordered for, could be hard to fulfill. This keeps us in a relatively narrow range for our shippable revenue outlook. Now, if we get demand as above, we expect it will certainly go into backlog and set up for even stronger 2022. But we don’t want to set excessive expectations for shipments in 2021. You know recovers what we can see, but there is some very new designs, we might not be able to fulfill upside opportunities on short notice. Now, I know that was a lot of detail. And I want to go into some of the growth drivers we are executing on in Q3 for the rest of the year and into 2022, but ultimately, it is reflected in our shippable revenue growth. So I want to put it all in context. So turning now to our growth drivers design wins for new customers and expansion of existing customers, which is always the core. We have got a solid system in place, that is proving to be a winning combination. So scaling system and paralyzing our reach across the industry are the keys. To scale we are adding people in key areas. These include project management and engineering to support more design wins. We are also adding in sales, marketing and business development, to broaden our pipeline and reached end users. Now we have a high profile as the innovator and industry leaders, so we are able to attract the best. In terms of project managers and engineers, we are adding to our already best in the world technical teams. Now anyone in tact knows the great engineers join other great engineers, and we are seeing this affects. Our Engineering Center in Germany is turning into a huge competitive advantage with great people, equipment, and exciting projects that all draw great talent. In the past few months, we have hired strong project managers, more engineers and added to our technical intern team there. On the business development, sales and marketing side, because of our business success and our focus on the most interesting differentiated solutions, we are attracting some of the strongest players in the industry. This week, we announced the hiring of a Amir Khoshniyati from SMARTRAC Avery Dennison. Amir was the leader of SMARTRAC’s k high-end NFC solutions business, and he has been tasked to run an expanded NFC group with an Avery. Instead, he saw the opportunity to drive the industry’s next leader and joined us. Now there are others with similarly high profiles that we are in the process of bringing on. Too early to disclose right now, but the people side of our business is fast becoming recognized as the clear best-in-class. The natural complement to this great people presence is to build the developer and application community. This month, we are officially launching our NFC Developers Kit as well as launching our Identiv RFID community. Now we had to onboard some of these key people and expand a team of project managers and engineers before launching the Developers Kit. Developer community has to be engaged with design shared questions answered. We now have the people who are both visible in the industry and enthusiastic to help our developer community thrive. Another update is that we have design and started the build process of the multi device automated production system I mentioned last quarter. This will enable more analog sensors and components to be integrated. This drives up average prices and margins, strengthens customer retention and increases rate of adoption of multisensor RFID subsystems which is core to our strategy and margin expansion. So great industry leading people, our RFID developers getting community, multi device automated production and are expanding pipeline of design wins are strategic drivers, we think will give us upside over our baseline 2021 and especially our 2022 outlook. Now I focused on RFID because that is our core growth driver. The premises part of our business is also lined up for strong growth in the near-term. In particular, federal, state and local government sales look strong as to our recurring revenue products. With a focus on physical security in both the Federal Government and at the state and local level, we are seeing great demand strength. Combine the need for improved physical security, expanding federal spending, fiscal health at the state level, and infrastructure investments. And we see lots of drivers for growth and increasing market share. Specifically in the third quarter, we expect the Federal government’s fiscal year end to be especially strong for security overall, and especially for our highly secure platform, as well as with our newly launched video intelligence system. So we are on-track, we are extending our competitive leadership with continuing design wins, with key industry hires for broader sales and business development reach and deeper engagement with trade association influencers and partners, community building through our Developers Kit as a competitive moat, and a market that is expanding fast. Now, before wrapping up these comments, one other topic I would like to touch on is Sandra’s departure. Over the past four years, she has been a great partner in the financial structuring of the business as we turn it around and build a world-class company to win in our nearly unlimited market. She is moving on to other opportunities, and we wish her very well in those. In the meantime, she is continuing to be really supportive of the team and our business. In parallel, we have got a search well underway for finance leader and business partner to support our growth to the next levels. We are also fortunate to have a very strong finance and accounting team in place that will keep doing the terrific job supporting our growing business. Lastly, we will also be appointing an interim CFO in the next few days, who will bring us an extra level of strength and professionalism, making sure we don’t miss a beat on our business progress while we are finding the right long-term financial leader. So to wrap up, here are some growth indicators in just the last few weeks. As I mentioned earlier, we have over $6.3 million in new bookings in just the first three weeks of the third quarter, up 44% versus the same time last year. We have designs underway are one with over a dozen more RFID customers. We are launching cross industry marketing programs to replicate solutions and medical devices, prescriptions, bicycles and personal transportation, controlled substances like alcohol and cannabis and others. Federal spending is clearly growing fast and is always strong in Q3 for their fiscal year-end. And our revenue predictability is strengthening from the expansion of consumable use cases, returning customers and recurring revenues. We see the third quarter and the rest of 2021 continuing these trends, supporting our projection of higher growth for 2021 and likely even higher targets for 2022. As growth expands, and as some of the revenue multiplying projects fully ramp during the second half of next year. So with that I will open the questions and discussion. But let me also mention we again have Dr. Manfred Mueller with us who runs RFID business of course, and this time, he is actually in the conference room with us since travel from Germany yet has opened up. So if there are RFID related questions, we can cover them in whatever depth we need. So, operator, please open the lines for the discussion.