Bracken Darrell
Analyst · Credit Suisse. Your line is open
Thank you, Joe. And thanks to all of you for joining us today. We grew 9% in fiscal year 2016, the high end of our latest range, and delivered 20% more profit than we expected at the beginning of the year. And again, better than our latest increased guidance. Our 9% sales growth was more than twice the rate of the prior year and our best growth in five years. We grew in every region of the world with growing categories representing more than 80% of our sales. We gained share in nearly every category through meaningful innovation and strong execution. We continue to make progress transforming Logitech into a design-centric growth company. That’s not bad, but I believe you’re only beginning to see what Logitech is capable of. One distinguishing characteristic of the Logitech we’re creating is the strength and resilience that comes from our portfolio strategy. Our Q4 results demonstrate this well. In spite of the Q4 decline of our mobile speakers business which drove substantial growth over prior quarters, our Q4 sales went up and we reached the high end of our latest yearly revenue target. It was one of the key messages from our latest analyst day, all of our product categories have growth potential. Therefore, as most will be up and some will be down, we’ll sustain our growth over time. In Q4 we more than offset the impact of a weak quarter in mobile speakers with strong growth in video collaboration and gaming as well as in our core PC peripheral categories and in tablet accessories. We have a strong and balanced portfolio that will deliver sustainable growth. That resilience also exists at a regional level. Q4 sales in the Americas were down but that didn’t prevent us from reaching our growth targets as the decline was more than offset thanks to the powerful growth from the other two regions. We delivered strong double digit growth in EMEA and Asia-Pacific with accelerating growth in EMEA for the last three quarters and its strongest growth in the last three years. And in Asia-Pacific it was our fifth straight quarter of double digit growth. Looking into our product categories, gaming delivered strong growth in Q4. For fiscal year 2016, our gaming sales grew by 23%. Within the gaming category, our strongest growth in Q4 and for the year was in keyboards with roughly 60% growth for the year. We further strengthened our keyboard lineup during the quarter with the launch of two new mechanical gaming keyboards, the G610 Orion Brown and the G610 Orion Red. And we announced our best gaming mouse ever and perhaps our best ever in the company’s history, the G900 Chaos Spectrum. It breaks several rules gamers have come to live by. They believe wireless mice were slower than wired mice because of the lag time. This new professional grade wireless game mouse is faster than any other mouse, wired or wireless. They fear that wireless mice might have a short battery life but this has strong, long battery life that’s trusted by professional e-sports gamers. And it’s beautiful. It’s an amazing product at an impressive price, $150. Video collaboration accelerated, delivering the best growth for the quarter and the year with fiscal year 2016 sales up by 51%. During the quarter we launched Logitech GROUP, the transformation in team collaboration that provides high-quality HD video conferencing for groups of up to 20 and works with the video conferencing apps you already use. We also announced ConferenceCam kit with Intel NUC video conferencing system, a complete solution for conference rooms. Configured and validated by Logitech and Intel, the ConferenceCam kit is compatible with virtually all PC-based cloud services. Our solution video enables a small meeting room at an affordable price point and does not require users to bring their own computers to start a video call. Most significantly, Microsoft selected Logitech as strategic partner for Project Rigel, an initiative designed to bring a Skype meeting experience to any room with a display or projector. Our ConferenceCams will be certified for use with Project Rigel systems and we’ll deliver an affordable purpose-built smart dock to seamlessly connect the system elements in a meeting room. Stay tuned for more later. While our mobile speaker sales declined in Q4, they were up by 37% in fiscal year 2016 and we gained share. The decline in Q4 reflects several factors. The comparable to the prior year was challenging as in the prior year we shipped our highest priced speaker offering, UE Megaboom. In addition, during Q4 as the overall market growth slowed particularly in Americas, we aligned our sales run rate with the expectation of slower market growth continuing during fiscal year 2017. That said, as we stated at last month’s analyst and investor day, we expect to deliver growth in this category in fiscal year 2017. We’re excited about our acquisition of Jaybird, a leader in wireless audio wearables for sports and active lifestyles which closed just last week. This acquisition meets all of our criteria for a small tuck-in acquisition. It helps us address the fast-growing wireless audio wearables market with all the advantages of Jaybird’s strong brand and sports expertise. It leverages our combined audio engineering and design capabilities and it takes advantage of our global distribution footprint. With both Ultimate Ears and Jaybird brands now in our portfolio, we’re expanding our long-term growth potential in the music market. Both pointing devices and keyboards achieved growth for the quarter and the full year, significantly outpacing the declining market for new PC shipments. Remember what we said at analyst and investor day, users aren’t using their PCs less. In fact, they’re using them more since 2010. So, the slower the PC sales are, the older the PC is on your desk and a good mouse or keyboard can renew that experience a bit. This quarter we gained roughly 2 points of share in both categories through a combination of strong execution and innovation. This was the fourth year in a row that we grew our keyboard sales. PC webcams delivered growth of 27% in Q4, the best growth in over nine years and a 7% growth for the year. While we don’t expect to sustain this level of growth as it was largely driven by a B2B deal, this is a category that we believe will present opportunities for profitable growth ahead. There is still a market out there for people who want to enhance their video calling experience using our best of breed webcams as well as the growing segment of video bloggers and video gamers broadcasting themselves. Our tablet and other accessories category returned to life in Q4 with sales growth of 21%, the first growth for the category in over two years. This growth was driven by the success of CREATE, our well-received keyboard for the large iPad Pro. We’re not planning for consistent growth in this category but we will continue to bring innovative offerings to the market. Now Vincent will go into more details on our performance.