Jerry Colella
Analyst · Dougherty. Please go ahead
Thanks, Seth. Good morning everyone and thank you for joining us on the call today. I’ll begin with the results for the fourth quarter and for the full year 2016. Following that, I’ll provide a few highlights on our business and update on our integration of Newport Corporation. Finally, I’ll provide our outlook for the first quarter of 2017. Seth will follow me with further details on our financial results, and then we’ll open the call for your questions. The fourth quarter was another record quarter for MKS in both overall sales, as well as sales for the semiconductor market. Overall, quarterly revenue increased 6% sequentially to $405 million, while sales for the semiconductor market were $229 million, up 9% from the third quarter of 2016. For the full year 2016, pro forma sales for the semiconductor market was $790 million, an increase of 14%, compared to pro forma 2015 sales. This increase is more than twice the analyst consensus view of WFE growth in 2016. Our success in the semiconductor market is a result of a number of factors, our significant offerings at etch and deposition had allowed us to benefit from the continued use of multi-patenting and continued adoption of 3D NAND memory. Additionally, the acquisition of Newport has expanded out SAM to include additional semiconductor market segments including lithography, metrology and inspection. We’ve made a concerted effort to focus on key customers with the combined organization to share roadmap, extend our offerings and cross sell our combined portfolio. Semiconductor growth in Asia, particularly in Korea and China has also created additional opportunities for MKS. Several years ago, we implemented our technical localization strategy targeted at bringing improved technical expertise and support closer to our customers. We made significant investments in Korea including infrastructure, staffing and acquisitions. These investments have resulted in revenue growth from $62 million in 2012 to $112 million in 2016, almost doubling sales. New 3D NAND fabs are under construction in Korea and we continue to benefit from numerous design wins for pressure, flow, power, plasma and ozone if these fabs come online. Additionally, in Q4, our gas analyzers were designed in on multiple tools for a major memory supplier in Korea displacing an entrenched competitor. Product performance and reliability along with our strong reputation in the Korean marketplace were factors in this competitive win. Recently, we have also seen increased demand for RF Power to support ALD, one of the fastest growing segments in wafer fab equipment spending. Korea is a growing center for semiconductor innovation and production and our investments in tech localization allow us to share that expansion. In a similar fashion, we’ve invested to increase our capability in China, the next growth region for semiconductors. 2014, the Chinese government announced its intent to fund the strengthening Chinese IC industry. Their plan is proceeding recently SEMI announced they are tracking at least 20 new fab projects in China with more on the horizon. We are well positioned leading Chinese OEMs it’s on longstanding personal relationships and in Q4, we were designed at four major Chinese semiconductor and LED customers for numerous etch and deposition applications with our power, plasma, pressure, flow, valves and analytic instruments. In a number of cases we displaced competitors due to our technical capability and localization in China. In addition to the growth in the semiconductor industry, we have set a goal to accelerate our growth in other advanced and growing markets including electronic thin films, life and health sciences, process and industrial technologies, and research defense where our sales were up 3% to $176 million from $171 million in Q3. Consumers continue to drive demand for mobile communication devices that are feature rich, smaller and more powerful and advances continue to be made in mobile devices in the construction creating new opportunities for MKS. Consumers are looking for water and scratch resistance. Touch screen responsiveness, durability, and even attributes like new styles and colors. Industrial coating utilizing physical vapor deposition is used to impart many of these features. This is another area where many MKS technologies play a significant role. In Q4, MKS was selected to provide a significant number of flow controllers, a new sputter coating process for mobile device manufacturing. During and after production, mobile devices undergo numerous inspections often using lasers, this past quarter a laser-based inspection system OEM aimed MKS to help profiling, measuring their laser beams with some old device inspection. We worked closely with them and rapidly customized software to optimize performance for their application. And based on our recommendations in testing, this OEM selected our laser beam profilers and power measurement instruments. In process control, within the life science market, we’ve been working with a major supplier of medical devices which having manufacturing challenges. MKS provided our new PAC 1000 Automation Controller for real-time quality prediction to help the customer improve and control their manufacturing. Improved process control and real-time process data and MKS enabled them to reduce scrap and solved their problem. We expect that they will deploy the MKS solution to more than 30 sites in the future. Moving to the Newport integration, we continue to make great progress on our integration efforts through unified company and have recently completed our first combined trade show, Photonics West under the MKS brand. We continued to strengthen relationships with key customers, increasing our cross-selling efforts, expanding technical and roadmap discussions. The Newport integration is proceeding very well and exiting 2016, we have realized approximately $20 million of synergies on an annualized basis. We are tracking ahead of the plan and are pleased to announce that we expect to achieve of synergies $40 million by the end of 2018, up from our previously announced goal of $35 million. As I said in the past, a core strength of MKS is to make continuous improvement in our operating model that allows us to continue to find new opportunities, provide growth for our employees and enhance shareholder value. We have updated our target operating model several times in the last several years and this morning, we posted to the Investor Relations section of our website an updated 2017 target operating model reflecting a number of improvements as well as investments we will make to drive profitable and sustainable growth. The midpoint of this illustrative model, we expect an incremental improvement of 11% in non-GAAP EPS from our most recent model. This reflects the hard work of both the light and motion of the acumen analysis team. At this point, I’d like to turn to our outlook for the first quarter of 2017. Projecting the strength in the semiconductor market, we entered 2017, but we are well positioned to leverage our broad portfolio of products, solve complex customer problems. Our integration activities with Newport are tracking ahead of plan. We are well positioned to drive growth in life sciences, industrial process and research markets as well. Based on these factors and looking at current business levels, we anticipate sales in the first quarter of 2017 may range from $385 million to $425 million and at these volumes, our non-GAAP net earnings could range from $0.93 to $1.17 per share. With that, I’ll turn the call over to Seth to discuss our financial results and expand upon our guidance.