Bryan Murray
Analyst · Hamed Khorsand from BWS Financial. Your line is open
Thank you, Erik, and thank you, everyone, for joining today’s call. We delivered a great start to the year, setting the pace to achieve the full year target we put out at last December at our Analyst Day. We reported net revenue just above our guided range as both sides of the business perform well, and we saw supply constraints ease slightly. Our operations team navigated around chip constraints and the continuing elongated transportation times to bring product in from our suppliers while significantly lowering our freight spend from the fourth quarter levels. Net revenue for the first quarter ended March 28, 2021 was $317.9 million, up 38.3% year-over-year, driven primarily by strong CHP growth in the retail channel and better than expected SMB performance. Our leading WiFi 6 offerings continued their momentum in the first quarter across both businesses. Additionally, the work we continue to do to focus on the right products in support the work-from-home networking market coupled with strong Pro AV growth resulted in continued upward trajectory for our SMB business, delivering 17.9% year-over-year growth. In the first quarter, we generated a record non-GAAP operating income of $42.3 million. This translated into a non-GAAP operating margin well above the top end of our guidance range at 13.3%, an improvement of 970 basis points over the first quarter of 2020 and 230 basis points over the fourth quarter of 2020. Relative to our guidance range, we experienced better than expected performance from our SMB business, which carries higher margins. Additionally, we saw an improved mix of business coming from the higher margin e-commerce channel. As mentioned previously, our operations team was able to lower spend on airfreight meaningfully below planned levels. All three factors contributed to non-GAAP operating margin coming in well above our initial expectations. While we spent less on airfreight than originally expected, much of the improved supply arrived later in the quarter. As a result, we could only replenish the channel inventory towards the end of the quarter. And thus, we didn’t have an opportunity to increase promotional efforts and recruit even more market share from the modest gains we experienced in the quarter. We do believe we we’re in the solid position heading into the second quarter to selectively increase promotional efforts, including participation in promotional activities, planned with some key channel partners, which should allow further gains in market share and assist with our goal of driving increased paid subscribers. The strength in our business is seen across the globe as we delivered solid double digit year-over-year growth in all geographies, led by demand for our premium mesh products in our CHP business, as well as strength in our SMB business. For the first quarter of 2021, net revenue for the Americas was $219.2 million, which is up 38.5% year-over-year and down 15.6% on a sequential basis. EMEA net revenue was $61.1 million, which was up 44.9% year-over-year and down 9.4% quarter-over-quarter. Our APAC net revenue was $37.7 million, which was up 27.2% from the prior year comparable quarter and down 5.7% sequentially. For the first quarter of 2021, we shipped a total of approximately 4.1 million units, including 2.7 million nodes of wireless products. Shipments of all wired and wireless routers and gateways combined were about 1.4 million units for the first quarter of 2021. The net revenue split between home and business products was about 76% and 24%, respectively. The net revenue split between wireless and wired products was about 69% and 31%, respectively. Products introduced in the last 15 months constituted about 35% of our first quarter shipments, while products introduced in the last 12 months contributed about 30% of our first quarter shipments. From this point on, my discussion points will focus on non-GAAP numbers. The reconciliation from GAAP to non-GAAP is detailed in our earnings released distributed earlier today. The non-GAAP gross margin in the first quarter of 2021 was 35.2%, which is up 600 basis points as compared to 29.2% in the prior year comparable quarter and up 460 basis points compared to 30.6% in the fourth quarter of 2020. The year-over-year improvement was driven by improved product margins led by our premium mesh solutions. Sequentially, lower spend on airfreight, higher demand for SMB products and higher mix of revenue going through e-commerce channels, which brings the added benefit of lower costs associated with consumers returns, all contributed to improve gross margins. With improving supply, we plan to selectively increase promotional spending to accelerate market share gains, which should contribute to further growth in paid subscribers. In addition to higher promotional activities, we’ve seen an uptick in the cost of sea transportation by 2 times to 3 times historical levels. And as a consequence, we believe the Q1 ‘21 gross margin performance is not likely to repeat in the near term quarters ahead. Total Q1 non-GAAP operating expenses came in at $69.7 million, which is up 18.2% year-over-year and down 3.3% sequentially. Our team continues to navigate a challenging operating environment while adding proportionately less spend. As a result, we were able to unlock considerable leverage on a 38% year-over-year revenue growth. As always, we manage our expenses prudently while also ensuring we adequately fund the growth portions of our business so that they have the resources they need to succeed. Our headcount was 775 as of the end of the quarter, down from 818 in Q4 as we consolidated some of our offices in the APAC region to gain some cost efficiencies. This will fund further investment in other areas of the business, such as resources, supporting our paid subscription business. We continue to manage our headcount, but we’ll add resources to invest in areas that we believe will deliver future growth. Our non-GAAP R&D expense for the first quarter was 7.1% of net revenue as compared to 8.1% of net revenue in the prior year comparable period and 6% of net revenue in the fourth quarter of 2020. To continue our technology and subscription service leadership, we are committed to continued investment in R&D. Our non-GAAP tax was 24.5% in the first quarter of 2021. Looking at the bottom line for Q1, we reported non-GAAP net income of $31.6 million and non-GAAP diluted EPS of $0.99, each substantially higher than the prior year period. Turning to the balance sheet. We ended the first quarter of 2021 with $370.7 million in cash and short-term investments, up $17.3 million from the prior quarter. We were also able to strengthen our inventory position incrementally in the quarter, adding $43.6 million to our stock levels. We believe our supply position will continue to improve in the second quarter. During the quarter, we generated $13.7 million in cash flow from operations, which brings our total cash provided from operations over the trailing 12 months to $165.9 million. We used $1.6 million in purchase of property and equipment during the quarter, which brings our total cash used for capital expenditures over the trailing 12 months to $10.6 million. As we previously highlighted, we plan to reestablish normal carrying levels of our own inventory in 2021. As a result, we expect to be below our normal conversion ratio of 85% to 100% of non-GAAP net income by a fair amount as we saw in Q1, but we remain confident in our ability to continue to generate cash on a full year basis. Now, turning to the first quarter results for our product segments. The Connected Home segment, which includes the industry-leading Nighthawk, Orbi, Nighthawk Pro Gaming and Meural brands, generated net revenue of $240.9 million during the quarter, which is up 46.3% on a year-over-year basis and down 18.6% sequentially. The strong year-over-year growth was driven by heightened demand in the retail channel for our premium WiFi 6 solutions. In the first quarter, despite supply headwinds for our WiFi 6 products existing for much of the quarter, we were able to improve on our strong leadership position in U.S. market share in consumer WiFi, regaining 2 points to 43%, and we fully expect we will continue to gain share in the second quarter, given the improved supply position in the channel entering the quarter. The SMB segment executed well and generated net revenue of $77 million for the first quarter of 2021, which is up 17.9% on a year-over-year basis and up 8.5% sequentially. This is the highest quarterly revenue for our SMB business in the past two years. The growth was driven primarily by exceptionally strong demand for work-from-home solutions, including low port count switches as well as our SMB wireless solution. We are also particularly pleased with the performance of our Pro AV business, which experienced meaningful year-over-year growth as we see signs of activities resuming at business offices and sports entertainment venues. Our market share in switches sold through the U.S. retail channel came in at 56% in Q1. I’ll now turn the call over to Patrick for his commentary, after which I will provide guidance for the second quarter of 2021.