Patrick Lo
Analyst · Raymond James. Please go ahead
Thank you, Christine and thank everyone for joining today’s call. I’d like to use this opportunity to discuss a few key topics, which are the allusion of the Home WiFi market, our continued success with Arlo, the dynamics of our commercial business unit and Q1 highlights for the Service Provider Business Unit. As the numbers show, our retail business unit continues to demonstrate impressive year-over-year growth driven by our focus on providing premium Home WiFi solutions and unique animation for the Smart Home. The proliferation of connected devices streaming media in the home continues to drive our Home WiFi business. According to our market study, there are about dozen connected devices in the average home today in North America and we expect that number will only continue to grow. As we have spoken about several times in prior call. We view WiFi as the backbone of home connectivity. Well, the 802.11ac WiFi standard has been available to consumers for some time now, we believe that still early in its adoption. Our estimate suggest that 802.11ac is installed less than 30% of homes with broadband in the United States, which highlight just how much runway we have ahead of us in this upgrade cycle. For the last two years, our original Nighthawk router as dominated the market the Home WiFi. We put a significant amount of R&D into not only the original Nighthawk, but also the subsequent Nighthawk product released with the believe consumers will be willing to pay a premium for a better Home WiFi experience. This effort is paid off as our WiFi Router average selling price have increased approximately 50% during the last two years. We have witnessed a paradigm shift as Home WiFi has been elevated beyond utilitarian connectivity is about innovation not only speed and range, but WiFi stability, data traffic segmentation, ease of setup and use and overall user experience. We’ve stayed ahead of our competition by being first to market with key technology such as Active Antennas and Tri-band, both of which are features in highest end Nighthawk the X8. Rest assured we will continue to innovate and stay ahead in Home WiFi, just as we have done for over 20 years. As you all know NETGEAR is no longer sold via the networking company. Last year, we entered the Smart Home market with a product that fundamentally changed, what was possible in home security. The ability to put our wire free Arlo cameras outside of the home unthreatened from power outlet, made a true home security system, something that the average consumer could afford. We expanded that line with the release of Arlo Q in January. And just this month, we announce the release of the third member of the family Arlo Q Plus. Arlo Q Plus provide Power Over Ethernet and local recording backup in addition to 1080p High Definition Video, 2 Way Audio, Night Vision and Free rolling 7-day video cloud storage. It can be connected and powered over existing network infrastructure using a single Internet cable. Making it the ideal solution for shots and small emphasis. I’d like to especially thank our tight net Arlo team, which has been working tirelessly to make Arlo the number one do it yourself, IP camera in both the North America and European retail market. Next I’d like to provide a few words on the commercial business units. We are pleased with the 7.1% sequential growth generated by CBU as Christine has pointed out. We believe the U.S. distribution channel has been stabilized and de-stocking especially completed. Looking at the big picture. While large enterprise and making the shift the 40 gig and 100 gig switching, small, medium businesses are upgrading to multi-gig and 10 gig switching. Here at NETGEAR, we have focused on providing these SMBs with the equipment they need to make this upgrade as easy and affordable as possible. As alluded to you on our prior call, switching currently make-up the bulk of our commercial business. We recently with this two new series of switches for SMB, one of which the multi-gig switch is specifically designed or latest in Wave 2 wireless AC deployments. With more new products to come for the rest of the year, we are looking for to a successful 2016 for the commercial business units. Last but not least, we will extremely please with the performance of our Service Provider Business Unit or SPBU during the quarter. SPBUs revenue benefited from unexpected upside demand during Q1, while we continued to focus on generating increased profitability within the business unit. I’d like to highlight that during the quarter we launched the world’s first vDSL Wave 2 WiFi Gateway for small businesses with Telstra. We also launched the Unit Explore with AT&T, which is the blazing fast LTE Advanced mobile hotspot that is ruggedized for the outdoors. Both of these products are hit with our customers. Also both are design with the latest and greatest in wireless technology, LTE or WiFi. Which allows us to set ourselves a part from other vendors in the service provider space. As I have said on prior earnings call, our service provider business unit is focused on high value-add, cutting edge technology, such as LTE Advanced, DocSys 3.1 and vDSL rather than low margin commodity technology. To summarize, we have all three business units performing to or above our expectations and we continue gaining share in Home WiFi, home security cameras and switching. I will now turn the call back to Christine for our Q2 guidance.