Sehat Sutardja
Analyst · JPMorgan
Thanks, Sukhi, and good afternoon, everyone. Today, we reported fourth quarter revenue of approximately $932 million, flat from the prior quarter and above the high end of our guidance range. During the quarter, we experienced better-than-expected demand from our storage and networking customers. We delivered the following non-GAAP results for Q4: Gross margin of 50%, operating margin of 16% and earnings per share of $0.29. We also paid approximately $30 million in dividends during the quarter. Before going into my financial commentary, I want to briefly introduce Mike Rashkin, for those of you who are not familiar with him. The board has appointed Mike to serve as our permanent CFO effective immediately. Mike has been with the company for over a decade and we are pleased that he has agreed to serve as our CFO as we drive towards the next phase of growth. Mike is well-liked and universally respected within the company and is a great team player. He has a strong background in finance, operations and tax, which will serve the company well. He is the best choice for the role and for all of our stakeholders, including investors, customers and employees. Now turning to the business. Fiscal 2014 in many respects was the start of a turnaround for Marvell. For the full year, our storage business performed strongly and grew approximately 13% from the prior year. This growth in storage was due to strong growth in our SSD business and the continued share gains in the HDDs despite a year-over-year decline in the overall HDD TAM. Our mobile and wireless end market delivered modest growth in fiscal 2014 after undergoing 2 years of customer and product transitions. And we are now well positioned to deliver strong growth in fiscal 2015. Our networking business declined in fiscal 2014, which was in line with the overall enterprise networking market. In networking, we are focused on expanding our opportunities in new areas within the enterprise market and also in the infrastructure and data center markets. We expect these new initiatives to drive better results starting the second half of this year. Before I discuss each of our end markets, I would like to reiterate our commitment to our investors that we remain focused on improving our productivity and execution. In line with this, our overall financial goals remain the same. We are targeting revenue growth that is greater than our competitors and EPS growth that is faster than our revenue growth. Now I would like to provide a brief update on each end of our end markets. In storage, we continue to execute well. For Q4, revenue from our storage end market was better than initially expected and grew 3% sequentially. Starting with HDDs, our business continues to outperform due to share gains and increased demand from our customers. Customer orders were stronger-than-expected towards the end of the quarter. This may also have been due to the timing of the Chinese New Year. We believe some of this better-than-expected demand trend can also be attributed to the stabilization in the global PC market. In addition, we believe our customers continue to see good demand for other non-PC applications. In the enterprise space, we continue to see steady share gains at a top North America-based HDD customer. For your reference, at the end of Q4, our share at this customer's enterprise business was still only 50%, compared to roughly just 15% at the beginning of last year. We expect steady share gains to continue throughout this year. I would also like to stress that we are accelerating our investment in next-generation advance HDD and hybrid technologies. We believe this will allow us to further increase our share and solidify our leadership position in the market. Now next, in SSDs. We ended fiscal 2014 with strong year-over-year growth for both of our PCIe and SATA-based products. For the full year, our SSD revenue doubled from the prior year. We are executing well and seeing strong traction for our fourth generation PCIe Express -- PCIe SSD products. Recently, in Q4, we introduced 2 new high-performance SSD products and have many new -- more products in the pipeline for the rest of the year. We expect our SSD business to, once again, grow strongly in fiscal 2015. For Q1, we expect our storage end market to seasonally decline, mid- to high-single digits sequentially. Now turning next to networking. Q4 results were above our initial expectations and increased approximately 5% sequentially. The solid results were driven by strength from our enterprise and service provider customers, which contributed to growth in most of our product lines. In Q4, we saw strong double-digit growth in our Xelerated NPU and ARMADA SoC product families. In particular, our ARMADA SoC product family is seeing good traction in the growing mass market and is leading the adoption of ARM-based architectures in the enterprise and service provider control planes. In Q4, we garnered additional design wins for our Xelerated, Prestera and ARMADA ARM SoC product lines. We also continue to invest in innovative technology to intercept the future needs of our customer base. For instance, we have invested in a new fabric technology that is ideally suited for realtime requirements for the data center and mobile infrastructure markets. Unlike the solution currently in the market, our unique fabric technology offers efficient scheduling, low latency and deterministic operation that significantly increase the performance of the network in the data centers and mobile infrastructure. To summarize, in networking, we continue to increase our footprint in the service provider market and are benefiting from modest improvements in the enterprise end markets. For Q1, we expect our networking end market to be approximately flat from the prior quarter. Next moving to mobile and wireless. Our revenue in this end market declined 14% sequentially and was below our initial expectations. For our mobile business in Q4, we witnessed softer-than-initially-expected results, mainly due to product launch delays from some of our customers. However, we expect demand for our mobile products to return to normal in the current quarter. Highlighting the turnaround that we started to see in the mobile last year, our 3G WCDMA unit shipments grew double digits from the prior year. Our unified 3G platforms are now in full production with many of our leading OEM partners. Now I would like to provide a brief update on our progress in the LTE. Unlike in the 3G where we were late to the market, our LTE products are hitting the market just in time and we are excited about the traction we are getting at multiple customers. Our focus from the beginning has been to address the high-volume part of the LTE market. And our 4G platform solutions are well suited for the RMB 1,000 and below segment. As you know, late last year, the Chinese government issued TD-LTE licenses to all 3 mobile operators in China and current expectations are for the TD-LTE market to grow strongly in calendar 2014. We have been deeply engaged with multiple customers for our 4G LTE solutions and are seeing strong orders from these customers. In North America, our 4G LTE solution is now fully certified for voice and data at AT&T. And we expect full certification to be completed at another large carrier in sometime Q1. We expect to see initial shipments of our LTE technology in Ultrabooks in North America, followed later by tablets and smartphones. Next in wireless connectivity. Revenue declined double-digit sequentially driven by seasonal decline in game console business. However, for the full year, our connectivity business grew over 15% from the prior year. This growth was driven by a combination of new product cycle, as well as increasing attach rates for our mobile platforms. From a product standpoint, during Q4, we introduced the industry highest integrated 1x1 11ac combo, specifically targeting for the smartphone market. Furthermore, our market-leading 2x2 ac combo products continue to see design win momentum and adoption across the mobile computing and video segments. For Q1, we expect our mobile and wireless end market to decline low-single digits sequentially, with growth in mobile offset by a seasonal decline in our nonmobile connectivity business. In particular, I would like to highlight that in Q1 we are expecting some revenue and unit growth for our 4G LTE mobile platform from multiple customers. Moving next to our video business. In Q4, in addition to continued volume shipments for the Google Chromecast, several service providers have also started shipping our platform video solutions for their IPTV and hybrid set-top box products. We also see leading OEMs such Hisense and Skyworks launch SmartTV and set-top box devices in the quarter. All of these products are based on our award-winning ARMADA 1500 family of scalable platform solutions. In summary, we ended fiscal 2014 on a strong note. For fiscal 2015, we are extremely well positioned to deliver solid growth across all of our end markets. We continue to make strong progress in mobile at multiple customers for smartphones and tablets. We are seeing new opportunities for our connectivity solution across multiple market segments and we continue to do better than the market in both the HDDs and SSDs. We also expect modest recovery and growth in our networking business in fiscal 2015. Finally, we remain committed to returning cash to shareholders through dividends and opportunistic buyback. With that, I would like now to return the call over to Mike to go over our fourth quarter and full year financial results, as well as the outlook for the first quarter.