John Kibarian
Analyst · Craig-Hallum Capital. Your line is now open. Pardon me, Christian. Your line is now open. Please check your mute button
Thank you, and welcome, everyone. If you’ve not already seen our earnings press release and management report presentation for the third quarter, please go to the Investors section of our website, where each has been posted. Our results in the third quarter showed continued progress towards our objective to be the provider of choice for end-to-end analytics and manufacturing controls to the semiconductor and electronics industry. Our results reveal the ongoing evolution from being important to our customers in ramping leading-edge logic nodes to being even more valuable for controlling quality, reliability, yield and operational effectiveness across the lifetime of semiconductor production. This is leading to a growing customer base. In the past, our focus on ramping leading-edge logic resulted in only a handful of customers driving the majority of our revenue. This caused our business to be tied closely to the investment cycle on leading-edge logic. Our business is now driven by analytics, and we have over 130 customers that make everything from leading-edge logic to high-voltage discretes, mixed signal, memory and systems. The emphasis on analytics has grown our available market and will create a more predictable results from PDF. With more than 50% of total revenue in the third quarter coming from analytics-based deals and another strong bookings quarter, primarily for analytics-based products, PDF Solutions continues its strategic evolution to be the provider of choice for end-to-end analytics and manufacturing controls to the semiconductor and electronics industry. For the customers and analysts that attended our combined Exensio users’ conference in 2019 Analyst Day, our progress on the evolution was clear. We had professionals from over 50 companies attend and 11 papers presented by our customers. We also presented our perspective of the industry dynamics and our product development road map to meet our customers’ growing requirements. Our users’ presentations showed the value of end-to-end analytics, the benefit of PDF Exensio platform architecture, and the operational efficiencies and productivity gains achieved from embracing manufacturing 4.0 by deploying Exensio. We characterize the value we bring to the industry as foresight. That is beyond monitoring what is happening in production, Exensio enables users to convert this growing data into useful predictions to prevent fabrication problems. We are uniquely able to do this because our integrated measurement tools, database and analytics software span the whole supply chain, including wafer manufacturers, foundries, OSATs, IDMs, fabless and system houses. Exensio stores over four petabytes of data for the industry and talks bidirectionally with hundreds of different front-end tools, testers, back-end assembly tools from virtually every major equipment manufacturer. Today, Exensio is connected to over 24,000 front-end tools, 8,000 testers and 6,000 back-end tools around the world. This unrivaled connectivity is critical component to making industrial IoT possible in the integrated circuit manufacturing. Let me touch on highlights from the third quarter that demonstrate our continued progress. Of the over 80 contracts closed in the quarter, the vast majority for Exensio-based contract. These include contracts for numerous fabless companies, including companies deploying Exensio on the cloud. The fabless companies include a top 30 company, a European start-up company, an existing fabless company that renewed their Exensio licenses. Our retention rate on renewals is over 97%, and the last customer I mentioned is another example of our strong customer retention. We also had IDMs deploying Exensio. In July, I mentioned, we had an IDM who used Exensio analytics across their fabs who benchmarked our test capability and decided on using Exensio both in the fab and test. This contract is signed in Q3. As I discussed earlier, customers value using a single platform across the enterprise for end-to-end analytics. Winning this test business with this customer affirmed our investment in Exensio semantic layer for integrating all data types. Notable other IDM contracts in the quarter include two Exensio IDM deployments, one for a memory company and one for a top 20 semiconductor company. We also signed a contract for Exensio Foundry deployment at a new Asian fab. To give us ability into assembly flow, an increasingly important part of IC manufacturing, we licensed Exensio’s single device traceability to a largest Exensio fabless customer for assembly and packaging operations. In addition to customers seeing the value of using Exensio – I’m sorry, in addition, customers see the value of using Exensio with our unique data, such as our characterization vehicles and DFI. Two such contracts include, a top 10 semiconductor company signed a multimillion dollar plus analytics deal, including our scribe line CV, pdFasTest tester and Exensio for controlling their production of a More-than-Moore nodes, demonstrating the benefits of integrating our unique data with the analytics. The rich and vast data that scribe CV can provide makes this sophisticated in the algorithms in Exensio even more effective. Another leading global semiconductor company signed a multimillion dollar deal for characterization vehicle, which includes CV structures tested with our pdFasTest tester and DFI structures tested with our eProbe and, of course, Exensio analytics. Finally, we continue to have customers interested in our integrated yield ramp. During the quarter, a Chinese foundry signed a multimillion dollar deal for technology development on an advanced node and will deploy a DFI eProbe 150 system as part of that engagement. The activity in the quarter demonstrates the benefits of PDF’s evolution. We have more customer and geographic diversity. We added new customers in the U.S., Europe and Asia this past quarter. We are expanding the number of PDF products and modules that existing customers are deploying. As we showed at Analyst Day, PDF has over 130 customers who are virtually the who’s who in the IT industry. Most of them use some module of Exensio as a point tool. As they are starting to deploy Exensio as a platform, they get the benefits of a single source of data. We showed in our analyst meeting that customers that deploy multiple modules of our solution, in other words, move to platform deployment, are able to get much more value from the system. And as a result, the annual recurring revenue can go up many times. In other words, going from one to two, three or four modules can increase ARR super linearly. This is why PDF is focused on expanding Exensio deployment within our existing customer base. In summary, PDF’s execution on our plan to be the analytics provider to the semiconductor industry is accelerating and is recognized by our customers. As we look to the fourth quarter, we anticipate continued success in converting the pilots we started earlier this year. In particular, we anticipate more pilot cloud deployments converting to production deployments this quarter. Our investment in R&D and cloud capacity in the third and fourth quarter has been prepared for these deployments. We believe that the fourth quarter will be very similar to the third quarter, with continued momentum in our analytics business. Let me now turn the call over to Christine to review the financials. Christine?