Rick Clemmer
Analyst · SunTrust. Your line is open
Thanks Jeff, and welcome everyone to our conference call today. Hopefully, you've all seen announcement that Qualcomm has decided not to extend the purchase agreement and did not move forward with the proposed acquisition of NXP. It is an understatement to say we are all disappointed in the outcome of the regulatory approval process in China. Before we start today, I'd like to acknowledge the Qualcomm team and in particularly, Steve Mollenkopf and all of his executive team in addition to the employees involved in the plan to integration process. The combination of the two companies would have represented the true semiconductor industry powerhouse. The product portfolios for highly complementary including the market leading NXP auto portfolio and the Snapdragon processors and the strong NXP EMC portfolio in Qualcomm connectivity portfolios. However, we do not believe there is any need value to dwell on what could have been. I'll spend any time discussing the events of the last two years. Instead, we're going to look forward and continue to execute to our strategy and focus on what we can do to accelerate and expand our leadership. We realized that it's been 21 months since we were last able to actively communicate with our shareholders and that over the period of visibility in our operations has been limited. Therefore before we turn to the review of our second quarter performance, we would like to share four key messages which we've gotten questions over the last two years. First, I understand we've been asked about the level of commitment of the NXP executive management team. Over the course of the last 21 months, the entire executive team including both Peter and myself have been fully engaged in actively running the business. This also includes the general managers of our security businesses further down in the organization. While the organization has experienced a level of deal fatigue, the core basics of the business have actually strengthened by position in auto and IoT is now stronger than when we announced the transaction 21 months ago. With the decision announced overnight in our recent decisions with the board, the management team including Peter and myself are fully committed to continue to drive the future success of NXP. Secondly, during the transaction we have not provided any insights into the potential future performance of the company. I would like to quickly review the model we have been operating towards in which we believe shareholders should judge our future success. Consistent with our prior approach, we will provide guidance on one quarter basis and reference our three year model targets for longer term discussion. During Peter's remarks, he will provide specific guidance for the third quarter. Our long term model is consistent with what we presented prior to the Qualcomm transaction announcement in October 2016. Specifically, from a revenue perspective, we believe NXP can achieve a three year compounded growth rate of approximately 5% to 7%, which is 50% greater than the growth of our focused addressable market. In other words, our focus TAM, which WTS with memory optimal discrete [ph] removed. We will continue to target our non-GAAP gross margins in the range of 53% to 57% and we will continue to make focused investments which will drive our non-GAAP operating margin in the range of 31% to 34% which is based on an R&D investment level of 14% to 16% of revenue and an SG&A target of 6% to 8%. At our an Analyst Day on September 11, which we are now announcing, we will present a deep dive into how we will achieve our goals including a strategic update on our focused businesses in the unusually strong opportunity we have in those specific markets. Thirdly, since the Qualcomm transaction was announced in October 2016, where we suspended our capital return program. Going forward, our capillary procurement policy will be consistent with prior periods and is aimed at returning all excess free cash flow for shareholders. We just yesterday obtained authorization from our board to initiate a $5 billion share repurchase program. Our current tax position is very strong with nearly $3 billion accumulated on the balance sheet. The amount is even after we retire, $1.25 billion of gross debt in Q2 and does not include the determination fee due from Qualcomm. Our leverage is below our long term target and quarterly free cash flow generation is continues to be very strong. In a few moments, Peter will discuss the funding of the program as well as our target leg breach which remains consistent with our prior plans. Lastly, I would like to reflect on the business trends over the last 21 months. Now look at the result for 2017 that were very good. We grew our each HPMS revenue to $8.75 billion, growing solidly in our focus markets. We successfully completed the Freescale integration and began to see the anticipated revenue synergies. We be and see solution synergies in our automotive business, our general purpose microcontroller business performed very well, did the strong adoption of both i.MX apps processor, high performance apps processor as well as continued adoption in the mass market for the kinetics and LPC MCU products. In terms of challenges, RF power business has recently seen issues of slow growth in the base station market which we again see weakness also in the digital networking business in 2017 and the bottoming of our bank card business came into clearer focus. We are at the halfway mark in 2018. We continue to see some of the same trends. Our auto and microcontroller business continue the positive trajectory seen in 2017. The severity of the transitions within the digital networking became even more apparent in the ebbs and flows of the base station market in China continue to challenge the growth of our RF power business. And after 21 months, we did begin to see some deal related impacts to the business including some of our strategic mobile customers disengaging our new expanded opportunities. However, on balance, we see far more opportunities to excel and lead in our target markets than hurdles in which we need to overcome. Based on direct impact from customers, we have the right products, the right go-to-market strategies and the best talented employees who are held in very high regard of our customers. Quite a winning combination. Our auto business continues to strengthen our unique position where we can lead with the technology to provide safer driving through level three or four on our way to actually moving to timeless driving. We now hear from our auto customers, we have a unique portfolio to also address the electric vehicle market growth, which is an incremental growth driver from what we had talked about previously. Our smarter world are as we like to refer to the LoT is in a good position as we increasingly work through the cloud providers to allow the smart edge processing to facilitate and explain full use of the capabilities of the cloud and to facilitate the connection of everything to make all of our world a more productive and better place to live. Now turning to an overview of our performance in the second quarter. Since we did not give guidance for Q2, my comments be relative to our performance in prior periods in not what analysts have assumed. Overall, our revenue in the quarter was good albeit with a few items which were out of our control creating somewhat modest headwinds. The ban on shipments to ZTE caused a short term disruption to our RF power business and to a lesser degree our digital networking and other businesses. In automotive industry shortages of discrete components caused a modest pause in demand for automotive MCU products. In addition, we continue to have capacity issues in our kinetic family of microcontrollers as their upside design wins has put us behind in ramping our manufacturing capacity to support our upside customer requirements. Looking at the specifics, total revenue in Q2 was $2.29 billion dollars, an increase of 4% year-on-year and our HPMS segment, which really is our focused revenue was $2.19 billion up 5% year-on-year. From an operating segment perspective, within automotive, revenue was a record high at just over $1 billion, up 7% year-on-year with all product categories growing nicely. One of the most encouraging trends we have seen in our auto business has been the increasing cross selling of the entire portfolio. Our engagement with customers have elevated probably to more consultative level in which we propose complete solutions that leverage products from across our entire portfolio. NXP's view by our automotive customers is having the most complete system solutions with a clear expertise and high performance processing, analog, security and functional safety. The view provides opportunity for NXP to be a true partner in the automotive market. As auto OEMs have made the journey towards safer driving and ultimately providing the building blocks for a timeless driving. Within Secure Connected Devices or SCD, revenue with $644 million, up 10% versus the first quarter of 2017. The core growth areas of general purpose microcontrollers and mobile transactions were both up year-on-year. Micros continued to experience long lead times in our kinetic family due to the tightness of wafer supply. Our mobile transaction business continue to benefit from expanding customer adoption with shipments beginning to accelerate to a large OEM in India. Within Secure Interface and Infrastructure or SI&I, revenue was $398 million dollars, down 9% versus the year ago period. While interface products were up high single digit percent with both RF power and digital networking down over 20%. The quarterly performance of the segment was impacted do the U.S. Commerce Department's ban a material shipments to ZTE. The high performance RF power business was materially impacted into a lesser extent the digital networking. Taken together the ZTE ban that cost us about $31 million in the quarter. Lastly within Secure Identification Solutions or SIS, revenue was $143 million, up 7% versus a year ago period with a growth driven by strong trends in mobility and retail market due to good demand for both our UHF tagging and MIFARE access solutions. Both the government and banking revenue were down versus the second quarter of 2017, reflecting the continued lumping project nature of this market. Turning to our distribution channel. The total months of inventory in the distribution channel held steady at 2.4. We consistently target to maintain 2.5 months of supply plus or minus half month in the channel. A range we had stayed within for 34 quarters. Distribution as a percentage of total revenue is just over 50%. We use this channel to address the mass market for products like general purpose MCU which are sold to thousands of end customers. The channel is also leveraged by our strategic customers which require NXP to position material prior to the seasonal peaks. Overall as our business grows, the percentage of business through distribution has also increased at a rate higher than that. Our channel inventory is in good shape and we will continue to target supply 2.5 months plus or minus half month. Before I turn the call over to Peter, I want to thank all of our employees for their dedication, hard work and the laser focus they have shown over the last several years as we completed the Freescale integration and preparing for the Qualcomm integration. We ask a lot of all of our employees and we ask it often. We know the deal fatigue has been an issue for the last few quarters, but now is the time to focus on our short journey and move forward to driver our future strategy which will result in the industry leadership in our focus markets. I am genuinely impressed and grateful and how our employees rose to the task presented to them. I think all of them and I'm proud of the organization and each person has contributed towards success. Now I'd like to pass the call over to Peter for a review of our financial performance.