Earnings Labs

NVE Corporation (NVEC)

Q4 2015 Earnings Call· Wed, May 6, 2015

$77.60

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the NVE Conference Call on Fourth Quarter Fiscal 2015 Results. At this time, all participant lines are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session and instructions will follow at that time. [Operator Instructions]. I would now like to introduce your host for today’s conference, Dan Baker, President and CEO. Sir, you may begin.

Dan Baker

Analyst · Lake Road Partners. Your line is open. Please go ahead

Thanks. Good afternoon, and welcome to our conference call for the quarter and fiscal year ended March 31, 2015. As always, I’m joined by Curt Reynders, our Chief Financial Officer. This call is being webcast live and being recorded. A replay will be available through our website, nve.com. After my opening comments, Curt will present a financial review of the quarter and fiscal year-to-date; I’ll cover business items and we’ll take questions. We issued our press release with audited financial results and filed our quarterly report on Form 10-K in the past hour following the close of market. Links to documents are available through our website and the SEC’s Website and on Twitter at NVE Corporation. Comments we may make that relate to future plans, events, financial results, or performance are forward-looking statements that are subject to certain risks and uncertainties, including among others, such factors as uncertainties related to the future revenue, risks related to our reliance on several large customers for a significant percentage of revenue, uncertainties related to future dividends and stock repurchases, as well as the risk factors listed from time-to-time in SEC filings including our just filed annual report on Form 10-K. The company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements we may make. We’re pleased to report a strong quarter to complete a record fiscal year. For the quarter, total revenue increased 27%, product sales increased 29% and net income increased 43% to $0.75 per diluted share. For the fiscal year, net income increased 29% to $2.95 per diluted share driven by 17% increase in product sales and a 63% increase in contract R&D. And operating cash flow was a record $14.9 million. We also announced a quarterly dividend of $1 a share payable this month. Now I’ll turn the call over to Curt for details of our financial results.

Curt Reynders

Analyst

Thanks, Dan. I’ll cover quarterly results, fiscal year results, the balance sheet and our quarterly dividend. As Dan said, fourth quarter total revenue increased 27% to $7.57 million from $5.98 million due to a 29% increase in product sales partially offset by an 81% decrease in contract R&D revenue. Product sales increased 28% sequentially from the immediately prior quarter as we appear to have recovered from calendar year-end inventory adjustments by medical device customers which affected revenue in the December quarter. Contract R&D for the quarter decreased to $23,000 from $125,000 last year despite a good deal of contract activity because of the timing of revenue recognition milestones. We expect the work we did in the past quarter to result in contract revenue this quarter. Gross margin increased to a record 82% of revenue for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2015 compared to 77% last year due to more favorable revenue and product sales mixes. Total expenses decreased 6% for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2015 compared to the prior year quarter due a 15% decrease in R&D expense partially offset by 9% increase in selling, general and administrative expense. The increase in SG&A was primarily due to increased sales commissions and performance based compensation. The decrease in R&D expense was due to the completion of certain product development activities and an increase in contract R&D activities which caused resources to be reallocated from expensed R&D. With the large increase in revenue, increased gross margin and decreased expenses, income from operations increased 51% to $4.96 million and our operating margin was a record 65% compared to 55% in the prior year quarter. Interest income decreased 5% for the quarter due to a decrease in marketable securities related to our dividend payment. We expect interest income to continue to decrease in…

Dan Baker

Analyst · Lake Road Partners. Your line is open. Please go ahead

Thanks Curt. I’ll cover patents, product development, governance and I’ll review accomplishments for the past fiscal year. On patents, we received notices of allowances for two patents in the past quarter a notice of allowance is a written notification that a patent application is nearing issuance. The first allowance was for a patent titled, spin-dependent tunneling devices with magnetization states based on stress conditions. We also received an issue notification for this patent. Spin-dependent tunneling or SDT is a spintronic effect that produces a large change in resistance through a normally insulating layer. This allows spin to be sensed as electrical resistance for interface to conventional electronics. SDT devices use structures as thin as a few atomic layers. Most of our products use another spintronic effect, giant magneto resistance or GMR that we’re developing more products with SDT. Also in the past quarter, we received a notice of allowance of a patent titled thin-film structure magnetize-able beat detector. The patent relates to a system for detecting the presence of selected molecular species which could be used in biosensors. The patent was allowed after a favorable ruling by the board of patent appeals and interferences of the U.S. Patent and Trade Mark Office. The ruling was in response to an appeal we filed 2011 of a patent examiner’s rejection of the patent. The application has had a long journey since it was filed in 2008, we believe in the patent’s merit and we were pleased, the board of appeal supported our position. The patent will strengthen the value of our biosensor intellectual property portfolio. We typically issue information bulletins when patents are granted. You can subscribe to these e-mail alerts from our investor events webpage or you can follow us on Twitter at NVE Corporation. Turning to new products in the…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions]. And our first question comes from the line of Thomas Caffrey of Lake Road Partners. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Thomas Caffrey

Analyst · Lake Road Partners. Your line is open. Please go ahead

Hello Dan and congratulations on an outstanding quarter. This is great news and it will be wonderful to achieve that dividend too. But you fellows at NVEC get the highest return on sales of any company in America and this has been going on for years and years, quarter-after-quarter, which always to me suggested there must be other people who would appreciate other customers who are willing to pay for what you got. But even the increase in revenues you just reported came really from a recovery in some of your present customers. Can you tell us a little about what is going on in new directions for the company?

Dan Baker

Analyst · Lake Road Partners. Your line is open. Please go ahead

Yes, absolutely. Thanks Tom and thanks for the kind words. So, we have a number of efforts to broaden our benefit proposition to new customers and particularly in fast growing areas. I touched on a couple of them, medical instruments and power management systems, so, just to give a little bit of color on power management systems. So, there is a lot of focus on how we can internet a variety of inanimate objects, the so called internet of things, vision that could result in billions of sensors being deployed over the next few years and decades as we build a smarter infrastructure. So, our sensors can help with that by sensing things like motor currents to help them run more efficiently and our couplers can help with that by providing the nerves to connect to a variety of inanimate objects. So, we’ve been working to reach-out to potential customers in this area to help our distributors to be more effective in this area. We developed demonstrators that helped show our benefits, we recently introduced to demonstrator that shows how our customers can make an extremely efficient power supply using our couplers to provide the feedback and to provide the nerves of these types of systems. So, those are some area that we’re looking at. And we see some extremely bright prospects. And our distributors are motivated and very excited. So I hope that you’ll find our devices helping to manage our energy grid in the next few years.

Thomas Caffrey

Analyst · Lake Road Partners. Your line is open. Please go ahead

Okay. Thanks Dan. I look forward to the next quarter.

Dan Baker

Analyst · Lake Road Partners. Your line is open. Please go ahead

Thanks Tom.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions]. And I’m showing no further questions at this time. I’d like to turn the call back over to Dan Baker for any closing remarks.

Dan Baker

Analyst · Lake Road Partners. Your line is open. Please go ahead

Well, thank you. If there are no other questions, we can wrap up. We were pleased to report record product sales, net income and cash flow for fiscal 2015, a productive year for product development and significant cash dividends. We look forward to reporting our first quarter results in July and through our Annual Meeting in August. Thank you for participating in the call.