Bryan Murray
Analyst · Raymond James. Your line is open
Thank you, Erik and thank you everyone for joining today’s call. Net revenue for the quarter ended October 3, 2021, was $290.2 million, down 23.3% year-over-year and within our guidance reigns despite greater than anticipated worldwide supply chain challenges. We’re also able to achieve non-GAAP operating margin of 6.7% or 70 basis points above the top end of our guidance range, helped by continued strong performance in our higher margin SMB business. We remain confident in our long-term strategy of providing premium WiFi products to lead innovation in the consumer networking markets and expand our paid service subscriber base. The hybrid and remote work models are becoming the norm for employees worldwide, whose home office requirements continue to increase the complexity, connection speed and coverage needs. We retained our leadership position in U.S. consumer WiFi market share, which remained at roughly 46%. Meanwhile, the wave of businesses reopening and new startups worldwide continue to propel our SMB business forward, with double-digit growth of 33% year-over-year. Even with our topline being held back by the aforementioned supply disruptions, we experienced our third quarter in a row of double-digit year-over-year growth and our highest quarterly SMB revenue in nearly seven years. This was spearheaded by strong demand from BART [ph] channels worldwide, where the team did a great job in securing demand towards available products. SMB wireless products and our managed switches propelled by ProAV applications were the driving forces behind this solid result. In the third quarter, we generate non-GAAP operating income of $19.5 million. This translated into a non-GAAP operating margin of 6.7%, which is 420 basis points below the prior year period, primarily as a result of significant topline leverage in the prior year period, aided by opportunistic demand in the service provider channel tied to the pandemic. Our both supply constraints hinder our higher margin SMB business from reaching its full topline potential in the quarter, strong SMB demand, in combination with slightly lower than expected investments in marketing and promotional activities, combined to deliver stronger operating income perform than originally anticipated. For the third quarter of 2021, net revenue for the Americas was $195.1 million, a decline of 29.8% year-over-year and down 8.2% on a sequential basis. EMEA net revenue was $56.9 million, which is down 10.6% year-over-year and down 7.8% quarter-over-quarter. Our APAC net revenue was $38.1 million, which is 4.3% from the prior year comparable period and up 10.7% sequentially. For the third quarter of 2021, we shipped a total of approximately 3.4 million units, including 2.3 million nodes of wireless products. Shipments of all wired and wireless routers and gateways combined were about 1.2 million units for the third quarter of 2021. The net revenue split between home and business products was about 72% and 28%, 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 33% of our third quarter shipments. While products introduced in the last 12 months contributed about 24% of our third 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 release distributed earlier today. The non-GAAP gross margin in the third quarter of 2021 was 30.1%, which is down 20 basis points, as compared to 30.3% in the prior year comparable period, a down 30 basis points, compared to 30.4% in the second quarter of 2021. Total Q3 non-GAAP operating expenses came in at $67.9 million, which is down 7.2% year-over-year and up 0.125% [ph] sequentially. Our headcount was 780 as of the end of the quarter, up from 769 in Q2. We continue to manage our headcount, but we will add resources and invest in areas that we believe will deliver future growth. Our non-GAAP R&D expense for the third quarter was 7.6% of net revenue, as compared to 6.2% of net revenue in the prior year comparable period and 6.9% of net revenue in the second quarter of 2021. To continue our technology and subscription service leadership, we’re committed to continue investment in R&D. Our non-GAAP tax rate was 21.6% in the third quarter of 2021. Looking at the bottomline for Q3, we reported non-GAAP net income of $15.3 million and non-GAAP diluted EPS of $0.50. Turning to the balance sheet, we ended the third quarter of 2021 with $292.2 million in cash and short-term investments, down $43.1 million from the prior quarter. While we saw an increase in inventory carrying levels sequentially, continued elongation of transit times much of this supply was in transit at the end of the quarter. During the quarter, $17 million of cash was used by operations, which brings our total cash provided from operations over the trailing 12 months to $37.6 million. We used $2.4 million in purchases of property and equipment during the quarter, which brings our total cash used for capital expenditures of the trailing 12 months to $11.1 million. In Q3, we spent $32.5 million to repurchase approximately 953,000 shares of NETGEAR common stock at an average price of $34.07 per share. Since the start of our repurchase activity in Q4 2013, we have spent $610 million to repurchase 17.3 million shares. Further demonstrating our commitment to returning value to our shareholders, our Board of Directors has authorized the repurchase of up to an incremental 3 million shares of the company’s common stock or approximately 10% of outstanding shares. Our fully diluted share count is approximately 30.8 million shares as of the end of the quarter. Now turning to the third 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 $208.5 million during the quarter, which was down 34.2% on a year-over-year basis, and down 9.3% sequentially. Year-over-year decline was experienced in both retail and service provider channels, with Q3 2020, being boosted by heightened demand in response to the pandemic. In the third quarter, we saw a slowdown in the growth of the U.S. consumer networking market, which landed about 15% higher relative to the same period in 2019. This adjusts for Prime Day timing and falls short of our expectations for 20% growth for the back half of the year that we shared in July. Although, we have made meaningful progress in the stocking the U.S. retail channel in dollar terms, we expect these efforts to continue in the fourth quarter, adjusting for market size that we expect to remain at approximately 15% above the comparable period in 2019. The SMB segment continue to execute well against a supply constrained environment and generate a net revenue of $81.6 million for the third quarter of 2021, which is up 33% on a year-over-year basis and up 3.4% sequentially. The growth was once again driven by exceptionally strong demand, buoyed by new business formations and demand for flexible working environments. We continue to see strong demand for our SMB wireless solutions and POE switches. But we were most excited about our ProAV business, which experienced exceptional year-over-year growth. Our market share in switches sold through the U.S. retail remained strong at 60% in Q3. Notably, in the face of the component and chip shortages and other supply constraints, our SMB business achieved its highest quarterly revenue in almost seven years. I’ll now turn the call over to Patrick for his commentary, after which I will provide guidance for the fourth quarter of 2021.