Jonathan H. Chou
Analyst · Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Please proceed with your question
Thank you, Joe. While the current market environment continues to be challenging, I am pleased to share that our global sales team exceeded our adjusted revenue guidance of $100 million to $110 million issued in early September. This positive improvement was achieved by aggressively pursuing all possible sales opportunities during this soft event quarter. I will provide more insight from the market and business standpoint surely but first I want to take a few minutes to speak about the recent departure of our CEO. Effective October 5, 2015 Bruno Guilmart has decided to retire from the company as President and CEO as well as from his Executive Director position. While his departure is clearly a loss, we will like to remind investors how our functional organization is structured. With the strength of the management team build by Bruno and how we are inherently prepared for changes like this. The effective management team has and continues to be functionally organized. This global leadership team includes all of our key functional leads as well as our business head who represents the voice and direction of their respective business lines. This approach has provided us the opportunity to standardize our global processes and drive operational efficiencies at the functional level while also creating sales and marketing opportunities at the business level. The additional benefit with this approach is that our leadership team is highly capable to continue business and operational execution throughout transition such as this. While Bruno will clearly will be missed, I am very confident that the management team who have been intimately involved in developing the current corporate strategy under Bruno’s leadership will continue to pursue and execute on current strategy as well as make a refinement as needed under our strategic planning process. With that said I'd like to switch topic to our fourth quarter business results. During the fourth quarter we booked revenue of $119 million. While still relatively soft this is above our adjusted revenue guidance range of $100 million to $110 million. Since our adjusted guidance, our ball bonded business pulled through and was the main driver that helped us exceed our revised revenue outlook. Copper capable ball bonders still accounted for 72.6% and LED ball bonder’s account for 16% of total ball bonders. Our capillary business had increased by 9.1% over the June quarter as we continued to capture additional share and target specific growth markets. Our Wedge and APMR businesses also had some late wins in the quarter bringing them in towards the higher end of our revenue expectations. Sequentially both of these business performed relatively well. APMR up slightly while our Wedge Bonder equipment increased by 8.5% over the June quarter. Overall we continue to operate under a very soft market environment which we believe is centered on the luglessor [ph] PC, Smartphone, and tablet centered segments as well as generally soft emerging market consumer demand. These conditions are evident through our interactions with customers, higher inventory level, changes in CAPEX forecast across the supply chain, and the weaker outlook reported by many of our peers. Some of our industry research providers expected cyclical softness to come in during the calendar year 2016 although it seems to have started earlier. While we don’t see extremely high level of macroeconomic concerns which impact customer and demand and is the key driver of semiconductor output. It is always uncertain how long this down cycle could last. Regardless, as part of our strategic process we have prepared in advance by identifying our range of operational improvement to drive additional efficiencies across our functional organizations to further enhance the flexibility of our operating model. These changes were largely went into effect at the beginning of our fiscal year 2016 which started October 4th and resulted in organizational restructuring. A lower dependency on outside service providers and ultimately cost reductions throughout the organizations. In addition to these cost reduction which I will touch on shortly, we have also reprioritized resources and focus on those development initiatives exposed to the most meaningful opportunities. These changes have allowed us to improve our breakeven and through cycle performance and well maintaining a strong focus on our meaningful long term and growth-centric opportunities. Growth through ongoing product development initiatives to drive share and market expansion across our diversifying business lines is central to our broader corporate strategy. These opportunities are not limited to the rebound of our traditional back-end markets, but are meaningful within the sizable and growing advanced SMT segment as well as other -– as well the many new interconnect technology developing within event packaging. Our most recent cost reduction effort through the company has allowed us to sharpen this focus and we are situated to emerge from this downturn stronger, better positioned, and more agile organization. As a result of these corporate initiatives we would like to provide an update to our operating expense model which help to explain – which help explain -– to explain the scalability of our operating structure. Over the current fiscal year 2016 period, excluding prototype thing expenses related to advanced packaging development and one-time charges, we anticipate quarterly expenses to include a fixed component of approximately $45 million plus a variable component of 6% to 7% of revenue. Selectively these fixed and variable expenses have a floor of approximately $51 million. In addition to this base level of operating expense for the December quarter. We are also investing an additional $4 million of advanced packaging prototype expense and $2 million of restructuring related expense. Looking ahead to the March quarter, we anticipate the base level of fixed and variable component, plus an additional $6 million of prototyping expense. Taking the additional prototype and restructuring expenses into account, our breakeven level is anticipated to be approximately $125 million in both December and March quarters. This is down from breakeven revenue of approximately $135 million implied from our prior operating expense expectations. Beyond the March quarter, we anticipate our breakeven to fall to approximately $115 million. As a point of reference, our previously disclosed operating expectation was $50 million of fixed quarterly expense, plus 6% to 8% of variable expense tied to revenue, with $7 million of prototyping expense in the December quarter. I would now like to turn the call over to Joe Elgindy, who will cover the quarter’s financial overview in greater detail.