Earnings Labs

Marvell Technology, Inc. (MRVL)

Q4 2006 Earnings Call· Fri, Feb 24, 2006

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon, my name is Miles and I will be your conference facilitator. At this time I would like welcome everyone to the Marvell Technology Group Ltd. Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2006 Financial Results Conference Call. As a reminder today's call is being recorded, February 23, 2006. For opening remarks and comments I would now like to turn the conference over to Dr. Sehat Sutardja, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Marvell Technology Group. Sir, please go ahead.

Dr. Sehat Sutardja, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Management

Thank you, Miles. Welcome everyone to our fourth quarter and fiscal year 2006 conference call. Weili Dai, Executive Vice President of the Communications and Consumer Business Group; and George Hervey, Vice President of Finance and Chief Financial Officer are joining me on this call. Today I am pleased to announce the results of another record year and fourth quarter for Marvell. First, our fiscal 2006 annual revenue increased 36% from the prior fiscal year and our annual pro forma non-GAAP net income grew by 71%. Also our sequential Q4 revenue increased 15% from the prior quarter to mark our 33rd consecutive quarter of revenue growth. We are experiencing strength and strong momentum from both the consumer and enterprise markets. During the quarter, our enterprise solutions in particular for the hard disk drive and Ethernet market experienced a very strong quarter of revenue growth. The success that we are enjoying in these markets is the result of the huge investment we have made over the last ten years in developing our world-class enterprise solutions. Leveraging our proven enterprise class analog, mixed-signal DSP and processor technologies for the development of our consumer products we are experiencing similar success with these products. This all comes at a time when consumer OEMs are rushing to introduce highly converged sophisticated devices that combine high performance processing, networking and storage. All of which plays right into the proven strength of our technologies that we have been shipping for years in the enterprise markets. Today as a result, we are very excited about the strength and positioning of our advance solutions to serve the needs of our customers in both the enterprise and consumer markets. Also with our consistently strong financial performance and prospects for continuous solid growth, the Board of Directors believes it is now an appropriate time to approve a two for one split of our stock. Once certified and approved by our shareholders at our upcoming annual general meeting, we believe this split will offer our investors and enhance the liquidity of our shares and make them more attractive to a broader range of investors. I will elaborate more but our opportunities and our business progress but first I will have George give our Safe Harbor statements and provide more insight into our Q4 as well as fiscal 2006 financial results.

George Hervey, Vice President of Finance and Chief Financial Officer

Management

Thank you Sehat. Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. I would like remind all participants that the following dialogue will contain predictions, estimates and other forward-looking statements covering subjects such as enterprise, consumer and emerging market trends, competition, customers, suppliers, products and demand, revenue growth, gross margin expectations, operating expenses, other income, accounts receivable and inventory. Such statements will be preceded by the words like "expects", "anticipates", "believes", "should", "will", "may", words with similar input. These statements include those related to the pace of our business for fiscal year 2006 and the impact that if we could use adoption of our solutions or our revenue growth. The following factors among others could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. They include the inability to further identify, develop and achieve success for new products, services and technologies increased competitions and its effect on pricing, spending, third party relationships and revenues as well as the inability to establish and maintain relationships with commerce, advertising marketing and technology providers. But we direct your attention to our annual report on Form 10-K, recent quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, recent current reports on Forms 8-K and other Securities and Exchange Commission filings, all of which discuss other important risk factor that may effect our business, results of operation, and financial condition. Please be reminded that we undertake no obligation to revise or update publicly any forward-looking statements for any reasons. Now moving to the Q4 financials. Marvell reports net income and basic and diluted net income per share in accordance with GAAP, and additionally on a non-GAAP basis referred to as pro forma. Marvell’s managements believes that non-GAAP information is useful because it can enhance the understanding of a company's ongoing economic performance and Marvell therefore uses pro forma non-GAAP…

Dr. Sehat Sutardja, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer, President

Management

Thanks George. As George stated, we continue to enjoy strength, both from our established position in the enterprise market, as well as our emerging penetration into the consumer market. In the enterprise market, we continue to enjoy strong revenue growth from our Gigabit products. During the year, Gigabit Ethernet continued it's transition as a replacement for Fast Ethernet in the infrastructure market as gigabit products grew to represent about 35% of the total infrastructure support in Q4 from the 25% at the beginning of the year. We are clearly seeing the benefits of this strong adoption rate and we are leading this transition with our total system level solutions, which combine our high performance software and silicon. As we look into next year, we expect another very strong year of market adoption of Gigabit along with our continued leadership across the internetworking market segments. In the high-end segment, we continue to win many new designs as the metro continues to migrate to low cost Ethernet technology. Our production proven metro class solutions continued to ship in high volume, while the competition is only now just realizing the need to invest in this segment. And in the high volume SOHO and SMB markets, we are having great success as we enable our customers very quick time to market with our complete system level approach and integration of such advance features as wireless switching and advance switching capabilities. On the client side, we are entering fiscal 2007 with great momentum as we have recently won a number of very high volume new designs with our Yukon Controllers for a number of new tire-one PC OEMs, such as Apple. This new designs will begin to rollout in the first half of the year. We continue to have great success in migrating our Yukon…

Mr. George Hervey, Chief Financial Officer

Management

Thanks Sehat. Consistent with past years, we will be including as part of our Q4 call guidance for the new fiscal year, and specifically for Q1. Additionally we will update our long-term operating model. Fiscal '06 was a very strong year for Marvell and as we made significant progressing growing our revenue in the consumer market, and our expansion into the VoIP market. In storage products, we introduced our solutions to address the optical DVD market and completed the acquisition of the enterprise Hard Disk Controller business with QLogic. We also continue with the development of our embedded high performance microprocessor, and introduce the Orion products family at CES. Entering fiscal '07, our position in our served markets continues to strengthen, that we are executing on our objective of significantly increasing our addressable span. Having reached the $1.7 billion revenue level in fiscal '06, we are now ready to continue our growth to the next level. In fiscal '07, our revenues should range between $2.250 billion to $2.300 billion. At the mid point of this guidance, our annual revenue growth from fiscal '06 to fiscal '07 would be 36%. This annual guidance excludes the recently announced planned acquisition from Avago of their printer ASICs business. Consistent with our other acquisitions, we will update our guidance once the acquisition has closed. Gross margin percentage for fiscal '07 should be above 54% plus or minus 50 basis points. And pro forma non-GAAP operating expenses should range between 25% to 26%. During fiscal '06, we were very successful in exceeding our previous long-term operating model. As we continue with our business strategy of growing Marvell into a very large semiconductor company, we believe that our long-term operating model will change from the current level. While our long-term model for gross margin percentage is…

Dr. Sehat Sutardja, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer, President

Management

Thanks George. That completes our commentary. Miles, would you please poll for questions.

Operator

Operator

Operator Instructions

Management

Q – Allan Mishan: Hi, guys, very good guidance. I just have a couple of quick questions on the QLogic business, could you tell us about how significant that was for you this quarter, whether it will reach the run rate that you had talked about previously in the coming quarter here? And also do you expect any impacts when Fujitsu moves to Serial Attached SCSI in a greater way? Thank you.

A - George Hervey

Management

So, as I said, Allan, you know for Q4, we gave the guidance for that on our Q3 call. The revenue level for QLogic products, was consistent with that level, which was not a complete quarter, and so here in Q1, it is going to be a complete quarter and I feel comfortable, although we won't continue to break it out, but we are comfortable in telling you that it is going to be at the historic quarterly rates. A – Dr. Sehat Sutardja: Regarding some impacts on the SCSI, there will be some impact, but then it will be taken into comps from day one when we acquired the business from QLogic.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Michael Masdea of Credit Suisse First Boston. Q – Michael Masdea: Thanks a lot. I am looking at that fiscal '07 guidance, I guess what some of those are trying to figure out is just what you think are true organic businesses and your acquired business growth is for the year? And really, how do we think about that going forward, where do you think the organic growth rate from Avago is? And then, as you add acquisitions on what that incremental going to be?

A - George Hervey

Management

Well, I think couple of things about it, we will probably will be doing more acquisitions as we move forward. You know we are already seeing that, and so you can start seeing the blend of the organics and the acquisitions and then the organic products starting to effect the revenue of the acquired operations as well. I think what we will say basically is that we will, in most instances give you a starting point for major piece of business like we did with the QLogic and then beyond that everything is just folded together into our guidance. So that 36% is really the combination of what was the traditional Marvell products pre-acquisition but they are all Marvell products and our growth rate is overall Marvell. A – Dr. Sehat Sutardja: Okay, let me get a little bit color about organic versus of that acquisition. In general, our philosophy is that, we would like to do things as much as possible organically, but there are certain things like the printer ASIC business from Avago, this is something that’s in - I don't know like to see them years. At least those things doesn’t make sense for us to build organically, so acquisition make a lot of sense and this gives us actually a bulkhead because we have developed numerous technologies, we had a synergistic to that existing business, but by combining the resources from their site, from the Avago's printers theme sites with I’d say the embedded processor technology or the wireless LAN technology, we could come up with a more effective products to in this case, for Hewlett Packard. So this is, we are doing the acquisition from the synergistic point of view in this case.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of William Lewis with J.P. Morgan. Q – William Lewis: Great thank you. Looking at your guidance and also your mix of business, enterprise, it sounds like it was up…

Operator

Operator

Next we will go to the line of Shelby Rafi with Hoffman Brothers. Q – Shelby Rafi: Yes. Thank you very much, may be you can talk about expectations for the sequential growth in your storage business, in the first quarter, you know the 1.8" drive market, in fact I think effected, for example by product shipments decline, do you expect your storage business to grow better or worse than your corporate growth rate?

A - George Hervey

Management

Shelby, you know we don't go to that level of detail of specifically talking about individual pieces of our business, clearly our storage business, because it is PC component, is you know, exposed to seasonal impacts but with the expansion of mobile computing across 2½ inch, 1.8 inch as well as form factor, there is lot of momentum in that business, so clearly we would not be giving a 5% to 6% overall corporate growth because we didn't expect growth on to that point of our business.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of David Wu with Global Crown Capital. Q – David Wu: Yes. Can you perhaps give us a little bit more guidance on two things. Number one, as you talked about the printer ASIC business that you bought, obviously it is going to be more of an SOC business overtime, do you have a, give us an idea, rough idea of how long it will take as you enrich the product to more to an SOC solution that the margins in the business would approach the corporate average, I assume the ASIC business quite a bit lower than your current corporate level? And secondly can you comment about Maxtor, your Maxtor desktop business, I assume it is ramping as expected, and can you talk about what are the gating factors, just to on the decision of a combined Seagate Maxtor design in the next 24 months, how do you see it working as the two product lines merge once the acquisition takes place?

A - George Hervey

Management

I think we are going to split that up. A – Dr. Sehat Sutardja: I will take the Maxtor…

A - George Hervey

Management

You will take Maxtor, David, give me the first of the question, because I am... Q – David Wu: The easy one is the gross margin on the ASIC printer business presumably is kind of typical ASIC, and quite a bit below your corporate average gross margin, and can you give us a timeframe of when by incorporating your own IT into the total solution, that you can make that business approach the corporate margin at this point.

A - George Hervey

Management

Okay. Well again, you know we are very excited about the opportunity there, and you are absolutely correct, you know a traditional ASIC business does not generate the same gross margin percentage as an ASSP type of business does, which is the majority of the our business and the opportunity for is as we have stated is to, number one improve the base product with own technology, and our own manufacturing capability, that will take at least one generation of total to incorporate some of the technology that we have into those products, although I believe it could have a quicker impact on the actual cost of the existing product by having a big part of Marvell versus, you know being part of what it was previous into the acquisition. And then of course the real side benefit to this is all of the other revenue that comes with growing alongside this product which should be at you know typical corporate contribution margin, so I have to say the ASIC business itself will never be equal to the rest of our business, just by the definition of what it is, but we do anticipate over the next say one to two years, seeing an improvement in the actual margin even from that part. A – Dr. Sehat Sutardja: And then moving to the next part of the question, the Maxtor production will start at the 160 gigabyte of 3½ inch platform. So that’s on schedule, I guess the success is up to them, so...

A - George Hervey

Management

Should be sometime in second calendar quarter. A – Dr. Sehat Sutardja: So, we are very excited about obviously about their production, from as far as I know the product certainly to be a very very competitive product, the family of the 160 gigabyte platform production is going to be very, very competitive products, is going to be very, very exciting for Maxtor, and it is also for us. We are also very excited in our Maxtor, its going to be part of Seagate, we have very good relationship with Seagate for about like 10 years now.

A - George Hervey

Management

It was one of the first customer. A – Dr. Sehat Sutardja: It is our first customer, in fact, so we have a lot of engagement, discussion with them already so, if looking at, all that I can say is the future is, it should be good. Q – David Wu: Okay. How long do these technology cycle last before we go to 250 gigabytes per platter? A – Dr. Sehat Sutardja: It is hard to pinpoint that but if you look from the historical experience, every generation will last longer and longer like the 40 gig generation was shorter than 80 gig, the 160 gig generation would be probably is going to be longer than 80 gig, and then the 320 gig generations will come quite a bit later. The 250 gigs will not be as strong a note, so it will a minor note, just like in the old, just like the 120 gig, it is just a minor note. Nobody talks about the 120 gig, even though it exists. So it is going to be a long, most likely it is going to be a long cycle. Q – David Wu: Okay great, thank you. A – Dr. Sehat Sutardja: Thank you very much.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Cody Acree with Stifel Nicolaus & Company, Inc Q – Cody Acree: Thanks guys, and George, thanks for finally raising the gross margin target. Can you talk specifically, the Wi-Fi competition, obviously a lot of the current Wi-Fi incumbents more in the desktop, laptop access point market are now realizing the potential benefits of the embedded markets, starting to move more in that direction, how long of a window do you believe you have before this becomes much more price sensitive, and do we ever start to see kind of price declines in the embedded Wi-Fi space that we have seen in the desktop, laptop market? A – Dr. Sehat Sutardja: Okay, maybe I can take care of this. So obviously as you are aware, as you are aware, and that’s what we say for the last several years, the embedded market is the bigger market opportunity, for many years nobody believed, nobody took us seriously on this one, because the market, there was no market for embedded Wi-Fi at that time. We had actually to build this market, we have to build a huge application team, software teams, to write all the codes for all the different usage model, that we had mentioned about it earlier, the different usage model for cell phones, for VoIP, for digital cameras, for wireless printers, for wireless music, there’s so many different software’s that we have to write. So, it's not just about making the chips to be able to work at low power, which we have done at the product level. But more importantly is to get all these all applications to work with each other, everyone of those are different, yet everyone of them wants to be able to talk to each other. And it’s all about, putting the years and years of software effort into this. So, we believe, as the first player to get into this market, we have a huge advantage but because this market is huge, there will be always be a in fact people they will effect, they will try to get into this market and they will introduce price pressure into the products, I mean, price pressure will always be there. But that’s okay, we live in this business, okay as the volume goes up, the price begins to go down, and it has to work there with, it works both ways, but the volume, for the volume to be big the pressure has to be lower.

A - George Hervey

Management

Well, as that’s play into, again our view of the long-term operating model of the company that has the consumer opportunity in '06 was still relatively small, is going to much, much bigger over the next 2 to 3 years. And while it's still very profitable, that’s is what Sehat was saying, it is going to… A – Dr. Sehat Sutardja: Of course, I forget to mention, this is the reason why we proactively work on new generations of devices like we introduced our 90 nanometer Wi-Fi, single chip Wi-Fi device, embedded Wi-Fi device, several quarters ago? And then meaning that we will work on that like two years ago, basically, so we have been proactive in investing for the future to addressed the fact that devices in the future has to be lower cost and lower power and more advanced capabilities. Q – Cody Acree: And guys, I would like to add just one quick follow-up, the ASIC ASP, which are getting more on to Hewlett Packard, may be if you could give us some idea on what those are running but, may be more importantly on a percentage basis, what do you think the opportunity as you move Orion in and a few other tertiary items, where can we see the dollar content in the printer market and how quickly could you start to begin benefiting from that crossover?

A - George Hervey

Management

Okay, frankly you know that we don’t go to the specific ASPs for product expect to say that, those are very complex systems that are currently being produced by the Avago team and they are actually system level, they are more than just ASICs they are actually system level and increasing the amount of system level of sales, so those are very good products from an ASP standpoint. We would hope obviously that as we bring more technology to the platform that we will get a fair ASP return for the technology that we add, so we hope to see that grow overtime but again, we don’t go to that specific breakout. Q – Cody Acree: But is there an opportunity to increase by a small percentage or a magnitude with the products that you plan on targeting in HD?

A - George Hervey

Management

Well, I think there is lot of opportunity right now, I mean, the printer group is excited about being a part of Marvell and having access to the IP portfolio whether that be wireless LAN, it’s the processor, Gigabit, there is just whole bunch of things that they can see, that they can incorporate into the system. I think, realistically you should be thinking of one generation out there, at a minimum to see some of the impact coming to, of that type of thing come in. A – Dr. Sehat Sutardja: May be, I want to add a little bit on this, that we are seeing from other printer customers that would, they are building things from scratch like this last one year, the benefits that we provide to our customers are very very significant, remember we came into this business very very late in the printer business, there were other big big players out there in the past and for us to come in the market in the last minute, and be able to take market shares away from our competition, new design wins, for some of this printer players, obviously the benefits has to be there. And the same benefits that was, that other customers seeing will the same benefits that HP will be seeing. Q – Cody Acree: Great, thanks and congratulations. A – Dr. Sehat Sutardja: Thank you.

Operator

Operator

And your next question comes from the line of Arnab Chanda with Lehman Brothers. Q – Arnab Chanda: Thank you. A question, I would like to ask a question maybe for either I assume for either Sehat or even George. You’ve talked historically about sort of three growth major drivers, the desktop storage market, wireless LAN as well as gigabit Ethernet for ’07 and '06. Could you talk about just qualitatively if there are any different drivers for say, the first quarter versus the whole year or are we missing any new ones such as maybe Orion or anything else? Thank you.

A - George Hervey

Management

I think Arnab, in general the three main growth drivers encompass much of what we do. But I think that still you know going to be evident even in Q1, we are very excited about the networking business right now. Prestera has just been a real, a real successful product family for us, you know the second half of last year, it grew dramatically from where it had previously been, so we are thinking and expecting that to be, you know very strong moving into the first half of this year. Well, all of them will play, I mean as we have talked about previously, we have just scratched the surface on the wireless LAN - embedded wireless LAN from a standpoint of platforms actually going into production. And you know as we said in our commentary, now we have seen an increase in the number of platforms which i.e. equate to a product, actually starting into production. So, you know that would be good and then of course it will be new Maxtor ramp that place into the desktop, I think so. Again the three main things still will be there, I am sure, Sehat wants to add couple more. A – Dr. Sehat Sutardja: Yeah. I mean talking about spending more than three years like in the software pool, let us say for cell phone Dual Mode, cell phone GSM plus Wi-Fi or CDMA plus Wi-Fi. It was like two years, more than three years efforts to write the codes, it is not, this is like investment for the future. Potential growth is on the rose for this Dual Mode phones. Again these are the, there are lot of things that we have been looking organically for the last several years to enable some of these new markets,…

A - George Hervey

Management

I think it is an interesting question, Arnab, because may be I should have highlighted it, our guidance that we gave has no revenue expectations for the DVD market in that number and so we are looking, it doesn't mean we are not going to have revenue this year, while we feel that we want to be again putting those realistic and conservative plan about going forward for this year. I do believe that we will see revenue it will be modest. You know, but it should occur in the second half of the year. Q – Arnab Chanda: George, Sehat, thanks for the clarifications.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Charlie Glavin with Needham & Company. Q – Charlie Glavin: Thanks. Sehat, I think Lewis got cut off, I can hear him, but as far as you guys.

A - George Hervey

Management

We never – we never heard him. Q – Charlie Glavin: It sounds like there is a cross line. Sehat, if you could go in a little more detail in terms of the synergies within the printer business, if I am not mistaken, it is obvious that previous ASP we look at more mixed base and your embedded certainly is more on an arm base, can you explain some of the synergies off of that, and how long will it take, or if you already started to do some of the software bridging with either Asia or somebody to reconcile those differences? A – Dr. Sehat Sutardja: So, obviously it is like, the businesses we have, we have number of processors that we use across many of our different businesses from PowerPC, MIPS and ARM processors. Over the last several years we have decided to consolidate our platform into ARM based, more and more products into ARM based, the way it is for the networking or printers, so the last four, five years investment in developing high performance embedded ARM processors, it will be very important for us to gain market shares in high end printers, okay, I forgot to mention, we do gain – we are gaining design wins in high end printers with using our ARM processors against MIPS already. So if we could gain design wins at the very high end, it will be very straightforward to get design wins on the mid end and low end of printer business using ARM. Q – Charlie Glavin: So, is it fair to say that historically HD has used more of a network processor based on management’s scores that… A – Dr. Sehat Sutardja: I am sure that if that is correct or not. Q – Charlie Glavin: Well,…

A - George Hervey

Management

On the consumer versus the enterprise? Q – Charlie Glavin: Yes.

A - George Hervey

Management

No, that's still the objective and I think we – we’ve done a lot, I think what you are seeing Charlie is there’s a lot of exciting things going on and we set an objective as you move from, setting the objective to ultimately getting there, there's a lot of things to happen on the way, some are enterprise related such as QLogic, some are going to be consumer related such as the printer and so forth. So, it’s really haven't as it flows, but yes our objective is still to by the end of next year to be the 50-50 split. Q – Charlie Glavin: Make sure that the question that I had was, the way you started off responding now there is certainly last thing to business sounds like here including in the '07 guidance, kind of molding in Michael's question, are you looking forward from this point forward the need to acquire companies in order to hit that 50-50, or do you believe that your organic growth rate right now can enable you to hit the 50-50 split by the end of '07? A – Dr. Sehat Sutardja: Well, first of all again, our target 50-50 that means that we are substantially make that to be exactly 50-50 by sacrificing our enterprise business, if we can grow enterprise business to the enter the 50-50 is not to able to be achieved, I mean, A – Sehat Sutardja: We are able to make sure, that the enterprise business will continue to give the investments so to continue to capture the design wins, like the SONETs against Ethernet and the metro space. We will make sure the Ethernet in the metro to win against SONET. So we are going to invest heavily into this area.

A - George Hervey

Management

So Charlie, I think, your question actually is that are we doing more acquisitions, that I think, the answer to the question is probably, just we probably will, as we look for complementary things to match up with our core competencies but we have a lot of, as I said earlier, we just scratched the surface on the wireless LAN and the processor into the consumer, so, I understand the question is very difficult to be specific, except to say that, we think, we see a lot of opportunities moving forward. Q – Charlie Glavin: Got it, thanks guys.

Operator

Operator

Next we go the line of William Lewis with J.P. Morgan.

Q - William Lewis

Management

Can you hear me now?

A - George Hervey

Management

Can hear you now.

Q - William Lewis

Management

Oh great.

A - George Hervey

Management

With Verizon of what?

Q - William Lewis

Management

What's that?

A - George Hervey

Management

Is that Verizon or Tmobile?

Q - William Lewis

Management

I think, it was their mistake, I had a hard line owing to Charlie's office, but, I guess, what I wanted to ask was, I guess, also about the guidance and little bit on this consumer enterprise mix question. I am assuming you expect to make progress in terms of growing the consumer faster making a higher percentage, how much of that is behind kind of the higher enterprise mix behind the 54% gross margin guidance you are able to provide for the year versus other factors?

A - George Hervey

Management

Well, if you look at it Will, we were running pretty close to 54% where we made any, even before we did the QLogic acquisition. So, clearly even our existing business is performing very well and it had even improved in Q4, so clearly, when we acquired the business which has very high gross margins which everyone know, understand that's contributes positively but we are, one of the things that we are very proud of is our ability to have cost reduced our products to a level that we are able to do it such that even though, we have pricing pressures and so forth like other people in our market that we are able to outperform because of that. So, I wouldn't read more, they all contribute positively and that's why we gave a range by the way its 54 plus or minus 50 basis points, so it can swing either way.

Q - William Lewis

Management

Okay, and then on the operating expense, I think, you said, up 90 basis points as a percent of sales, so, could you just talk about, where the, what the drivers are of the significant increase in operating expenses this quarter?

A - George Hervey

Management

Yeah, Q1 is always a quarter that begins the year, for us, it’s the, we do annual reviews, so we have an increase in our obviously, labor cost and associate fringe cost in Q1 and of course also everyone starts paying tax again, so we have both quarter taxes that will effect us in Q1. So clearly those things are there, and I think that probably and the appropriate comment would be, you shouldn't expect to see the same rate of increase from going beyond Q1. But Q1 is the quarter that does have higher high expenses than some of the other, that from an increase percentage standpoint than other quarters.

Q - William Lewis

Management

Okay and lastly at what point should we expect some more detailed commentary from you relative to the financial impact from the Avago acquisition?

A - George Hervey

Management

Very close.

Q - William Lewis

Management

Alright thanks.

Operator

Operator

And your next question comes, Shaw Wu with American Technology Research

Q - Shaw Wu

Management

Thanks George, first of all great quarter, just two quick ones, can you provide little more color on in terms of your hardware IP business, like how you have been doing in terms of other areas like the preamps and motor controllers? And the second question I have is do you have the strategy with these new combo drives that some other drive makers are talking about, you know the Combo, Nand, Flash drive which is like a controller or something? Thanks

A - George Hervey

Management

Well, I think the first part, let me take the first part. Shaw, we did a very, I think - in letting Wall Street know that we are not just an SOC provider for the storage business, we have a world-class preamps, motor controllers, our management memory technology and we are working very closely with our customers to see if in fact we can have them utilize more than just a be a SOC. We have made some very nice progress across all the segment by the way, its not just limited to one of the traditional segments in the market so, we will like to see, in general SOC might represent 50% of the building materials, semiconductors building materials for the drive and we would like to see that grow, significantly we report. We are having the success, it is contributing to the growth of our storage business and its primarily in those areas.

A - Sehat Sutardja

Management

And I just want the second part is the relating to the Combo, NAND and the HDD, well you are starting to hear about it, but the only thing I can say about it, we have been talking about it ourselves internally for the last two to three years. So finally people are starting to looking into it, so I don't know what’s beyond that I can talk about, it has been really looking at for more news for the future.

Q - Shaw Wu

Management

Okay, and just a quick follow-up, in terms of, George you talked about like, the contribution from these areas, would you saying, is your storage stream now its more of a function of kind of the core unit growth but chosen like the 1.8 inch program that you mentioned or is it up selling, I know upselling is the word but I guess co-selling more of these other additional storage HDD IP products?

A - Sehat Sutardja

Management

Well Shaw I think if you are just to talk about the general growth of the market then I say might be a valid in other words just the unit growth of the market and the growth of these other technologies, so there is a both kind of going along at the same pace but as you know on the storage market that isn’t really what drives growth, what drives growth is taking some major platform, adding it to your portfolio of customers and so we are excited about the BackStar opportunities Sehat said and that will fall out, you know strip anything that would be of the other things.

Q - Shaw Wu

Management

Okay thanks

Operator

Operator

And your next question comes from Arnab Chanda with Lehman Brothers. Q – Arnab Chanda: Hi thank you very much. Sehat, I have a follow-up question, you started the discussion about the processor architecture and historical obviously people have been very religious as to, in the high performance in Nands, maybe got to see, ARM has been a low powered, does this suggest that you are going to continue to sort of proliferate ARM in multiple places and just curious as to how if you think yourself some qualitative ideas where you are let say you working you talked about printers and there is a whole transition to I mean 32 with ARM controllers from the sort of 8-bit microcontroller markets so if you are doing anything there, sorry for the kind of long question? Thanks

A - Sehat Sutardja

Management

Yeah, I guess just to reiterate the mix we probably see is traditionally have been targeted for very high-end, high performance well the ARM was targeted for low power, low performance, cell phones as so low power, low speed from the market. From the architectural point of view there is no reason in the world why ARM cannot made to run just as fast as of mix of RPC. It just, we have been always the choice by ARM to develop the target, to target deeper market segment via higher volumes, maybe they would be ignoring that the lower volume seems to market to handle processors type of market in the past, so this is where we came in, we came in with our own architecture development internal, internal development, the standard ARM processor can with a single user device, single user processor. So for example we are in the high-end intermediate develop processor we have a dual chip machine, meaning that we can execute up to 3 instruction per cycle. As of they’re with that running in the deeper pipeline so you can run at higher frequencies, so all those things combined it is reason why our ARM processor now is on par with the best of the best MIPS of PC, now again to deepen this we are not targeting this for standalone devices we are targeting for integration with our SOC, and whether SOCs with storage or for Nand or for printers, its really developing for as far as our development of the processors, because they all can use the same processors, majority of the course therefore for all this application have recent only in - so the 14 from mix of RPC's to ARM is basically going forward, it is very very, we have done this…

A - Sehat Sutardja

Management

Thanks

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Karl Motey, with Wachovia Securities

Q - Karl Montey

Management

Thank you, question on gigabit controllers, you mentioned the Apple design win, I know traditionally the partnership program with Intel was targeted at the tier 1, we expect to see Marvell, more Marvell design wins at tier 1 OEMs. And if that's the case could you give as some update on with your, George? Thanks

A - Weili Dai

Management

On the interrelationship, it’s been very healthy and Apple as you know since almost 5 years ago Apple has been using our gigabit file for their laptop for the migration to integrated single chip with 8-bit controllers that - and we are very pleased to be on their platform as prior to Intel joined partnership has been very successful A – George Hervey: We are supporting Intel's PCI Express, which were completely behind, in two places.

Q - Karl Montey

Management

Thanks

Operator

Operator

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have reached end of the allotted time for questions and I will turn the call back to the management for closing remarks

Sehat Sutardja, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Management

Thank you Miles. This completes our Q4 and fiscal year 2006 conference call I would like to thank you, everyone of you for joining us and looking forward to updating you in our next quarter. Thank you very much.

George Hervey, Vice President of Finance and Chief Financial Officer

Management

Thank you. Weili Dai, Executive Vice President of Communications & Consumer Business Group: Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, we do appreciate your joining us today, this does concludes our conference call, you may now disconnect.