Gene Sheridan
Analyst · Needham & Company. Your line is open
Thank you, Steve, and thanks to everyone for joining the call today. As we continue our mission to electrify our world with next-generation power electronics, I'm pleased to announce another record quarter for Novitas as our gallium nitride and silicon carbide technologies continue to displace legacy power silicon in traditional markets and enable and accelerate new energy markets. Our Q3 revenues increased to $22 million, up 22% quarter-on-quarter and up 115% from Q3 of last year. On a non-GAAP basis, gross margin also continued to increase for the fourth quarter in a row to 42.1%, up from 41.5% sequentially and up from 38.4% in Q3 last year. We also remain confident that we will more than double revenues in total for 2023 as compared to 2022. Just yesterday, Navitas' dramatic growth stories was recognized for the second year running by Deloitte, including our company in their Fast 500 list, with annual revenue increasing over 2,000% in just three years, Navitas is one of the fastest growth tech companies. In addition to our strong financial performance, it's a very exciting time at Navitas as we're launching four major new technology platforms in the second half of this year. Our GaNSafe technology launched last quarter set the new benchmark in our industry as the world's most protected, most reliable and highest performance GaN power semiconductors with advanced protection, higher power capability in cool operation, GaNSafe breaks the glass ceiling that has prevented gallium nitride from entering the high-power high-reliability markets for a decade. Now applications from AI data centers and solar inverters to EV powertrains and traction drives can benefit from this high-speed feature-rich technology for higher power density, higher efficiency, robust reliability, faster charging and lower system costs. We are also launching our Generation 4 Ganfen tapered ICs, which are our most integrated GaN IC, replacing dozens of components with a single Ganis to reduce footprint, simplify design and enable switching frequencies up to two megahertz and mobile fast chargers and consumer adapters. For home appliance motors, pumps and compressors, these application-specific generation core ICs feature lossless current sensing and programmable turn on and turn off for efficient, small, quiet power delivery. This quarter, we are also launching a new generation of our GeneSiC technology called Gen-3 Fast with switching performance up to 50% better than competition. Together, Gen-3 Fast silicon carbide and GaNSafe power ICs are targeting electric vehicles, roadside chargers, solar inverters, energy storage, data center and industrial applications in the 1 to 30 kilowatt range. The fourth and potentially the most exciting and impactful announcement is a breakthrough innovation called bidirectional GaN. Now for the first time, the GaNICs can operate quickly and efficiently conducting and blocking currents in both directions. This bidirectional GaN allows the replacement of up to four discrete power transistors providing similar functionality while dramatically reducing component count, cost and complexity and delivering the speed and efficiency benefits of gallium nitride. We believe this invention has the potential to create innovative advances in energy storage grid infrastructure, motor drives and many other emerging topologies and architectures across multiple markets, much more to come on this front. Let me now turn to updates for each of our target markets and how these new technologies are already having an impact. In the mobile market, we continue to see strength and upside led by our major Tina OEMs, Xiaomi and OPPO as they are rapidly expanding their use of GaN in a broader range of their mobile chargers. In fact, we now anticipate that about 30% of their total mobile charger shipments in 2024 will utilize GaN. This is a major milestone for our whole industry. GaN has moved from beachhead to Main Street. In addition, we just announced a major win as Navitas GaN has been adopted at Samsung Sandstone to power the latest Galaxy S-23 among other models and is already contributing to our Q3 and Q4 revenue ramp. Our new Gen 4 GaN [indiscernible] is further accelerating our success in mobile as we now have over a dozen customer projects in development, targeting the fastest charging segment of 100 watts or more already projected to contribute over $10 million per year in revenue ramping next year. In the solar and energy storage markets, we observed the same near-term macro market softness that others have observed, creating headwinds for our silicon carbide business. However, as GaN and silicon carbide are displacement technology versus legacy silicon MOSFET and IGBT, we also see robust growth in our customer pipeline. Our current outlook for the solar market, consistent with what we've seen from various analysts is for a recovery in the second half of 2024 and based on our pipeline and customer activity, we expect our revenue growth in solar to exceed that of the industry in 2024 and beyond. It's a similar story in EV, while some OEM forecasts have been tempered; we are experiencing significant increases in our customer pipeline in both onboard and roadside chargers. Our EV system design center has just completed development of a 6.6 kilowatt, 800-volt onboard charger platform, which sets all new industry benchmarks and system efficiency, density and cost. We see significant customer interest in this exciting new hybrid platform, which achieved such high performance by integrating both our latest Gen 3 fast silicon carbide devices and our new GaN safe IC. In data center, as discussed previously, the recent dramatic technology and market developments surrounding AI have created unprecedented demand for more power, higher energy efficiency and greater power density. Our system design center has really stepped up to the challenge with a new 4.5 kilowatt AC to DC platform design that offers energy efficiencies well in excess of 96% titanium plus standard and has sliced the power density of previous best-in-class legacy silicon designs. As a result, the number of projects in our customer pipeline have grown significantly in the past quarter. The customer pipeline in appliance and industrial is also growing significantly at major OEMs initiate GaN or silicon carbide programs to meet regulatory requirements for energy efficiency and consumer demands for power density improvements, along with the transitions from gas-powered heating and cooling systems to fast adoption of heat pump technology. As mentioned earlier, our Gen-4 GaNSense ICs are application optimized and a big draw for 100 to 1,000 watt home appliance applications with Gen-3 Fast silicon carbide and GaNSafe Power ICs addressing higher power industrial markets. Looking across all of our target markets, the system benefits derived from GaN and silicon carbide are amplified by long-term secular trends. These include electrical energy source conversion from fossil fuels to renewables, gas-powered vehicles transitioning to all forms of electric transportation and the intense and rapidly accelerating power demands of AI and edge computing. Additional momentum is provided by continued energy efficiency and noise pollution regulations. While we’re not immune to some market slowdowns as displacement technologies in traditional markets and is accelerating and enabling technologies in the energy markets, we expect Navitas' GaN and silicon carbide revenues to far exceed market growth rates in 2024 and for years to come. You can hear more about our growth plans at our exciting in-depth in-person Investor Day held in conjunction with our new headquarters opening day in Torrance, California on December 12. This agenda includes a deep dive into our four new technology platforms, highlighted applications in growing markets, customer pipeline review, financial outlook, insightful customer presentations and an immersive introduction to Planet Navitas, the future of our electrified planet. We encourage you to join the Navitas management team, Board of Directors, customers, media and special guests at our new headquarters for this important event. And now over to Ron to review the financials.