John Kibarian
Analyst · Craig-Hallum. Your line is open
Thank you for joining us on today's call. If you've not already seen our earnings press release, management report and 10-Q for the second quarter, please go to the Investors section of our website where each has been posted. We hope you and your families are staying safe, and we appreciate you taking time to join us today. With the continued impact of COVID-19, I will start with an update on how we have adjusted the business given the present governmental restrictions, then I will provide a commentary on Q2 highlights. Many of you have probably seen our announcement about our partnership with Advantest. I will use sometime today to provide more details and explain why we are excited about this development. I will conclude with our impressions of the semiconductor industry, before handing it over to Adnan for the financial update. The COVID-19 situation remains very dynamic globally, and the health and safety of our employees continues to be a top priority. We have been fortunate that our employees remain healthy and able to maintain a high level of productivity. In the U.S., employees are mostly working from home. Our teams in Asia have been able to, for the most part, returned to the office and traveled for customer visits. In the EU, employees are primarily working from home, but our customers are returning to their offices. Towards the end of the third quarter, we will assess whether our European employees can travel to visit customers. Overall, for planning purposes, we expect little travel across the oceans for the remainder of the year. Highlights for the second quarter validate our long-term strategy. While the second quarter bookings were lower than the exceptionally high Q1, they were meaningfully above Q2 of last year. Moreover, the booking strength was in analytics, driven by renewal contract for DFI, expanding characterization contract for a leading IDM and a number of Exensio contracts, including, again, customers moving to our cloud deployment. Overall, business activity as measured by bookings in the first half of this year was larger than all of 2019, even before including the Advantest contract booked in July. On top of the continued move in to Exensio in the cloud, in the quarter, we experienced meaningful demand and interest from fabless foundries and integrated device manufacturers that provide chips for high-performance computing, or HPC. Our engineering activity for that segment of the market was also high in the second quarter. We believe that this speaks to the fact that the challenges of manufacturing HPC chips and 7-nanometer, 5-nanometer and below silicon are felt across the industry. We anticipate that demand for – that we experienced in HPC in the second quarter will continue for the remainder of the year. In the second quarter and continuing into the third quarter, we achieved a number of important technical milestones for the lead DFI customer. We believe this, combined with growing technical need at the leading edge, particularly for HPC, will provide the tailwind to drive market adoption of DFI. During the second quarter and continuing this quarter, we have begun to provide webinars to highlight Exensio's capabilities for our customers. The first two events, one in Chinese and one in English were well received. Overall, we are very pleased with the progress achieved in the first half of the year, while working under COVID-19-based restrictions. On a year-over-year basis, we grew analytics revenue 21% in the first half of the year and 27% in Q2, met our technical objectives for DFI and other new products and migrated our marketing and selling online. Moving to discuss our partnership with Advantest, a copy of the press release is available on our website. At the top level, PDF Solutions and Advantest have entered into a five-year partnership agreement. This is a significant step for PDF Solutions, the Exensio analytics platform and our cloud offering. Some key points about this transaction. The direct revenue from Advantest for the deployment of Exensio on the cloud as well as supporting technologies is a minimum of $50 million over the five-year term of the agreement. Initial deployment is expected by the end of the year. We also added approximately $65 million to our balance sheet from the sale of common stock to Advantest. Combined with the already $100-plus million on the balance sheet, we are in a very strong position to accelerate our business investments. Advantest cloud powered by Exensio, will be the foundation of Advantest analytics and will be used by their customers as well as them internally. As the name implies, Advantest cloud is built on the Exensio platform. The partnership will accelerate PDF's deployment of hardware and software that we call DEX at the OSAT to facilitate Advantest ability to offer value-add software-based services for their fleet of tools. This expansion of DEX nodes will benefit PDF customers who can use the expanded network to improve their production. Initial deployments are expected to be within the next 12 months. The agreement allows Advantest to include Exensio software agents on any Advantest tools, making it much easier for us to engage with prospective customers. Before this contract, we reported Exensio connections to over 40,000 tools in the front-end fabs, test and assembly facilities. As the largest market share test equipment company in semiconductors, Advantest brings the potential of additional tens of thousands of tools – tool connections. Our customers value direct connections to their tools in their factories as well as their partners test and manufacturing facilities. The additional tool connections and DEX nodes in this contract help both Advantest and PDF better serve our customers. PDF Solutions and Advantest intend to jointly develop applications, which will result in additional revenue for both companies. And to be clear, PDF remains independent and will continue to support over 200 equipment vendors, including all major test vendors. The community of Exensio users tell us they value PDF's commitment to tight connections to tools across the entire supply chain. This has been a relationship that has been in development for quite a while. We have been working with Advantest for more than a year on the development of our first joint products. In the press release, Yoshida San, Advantest's CEO, made mention of the customer validation of this product. We believe this partnership validates the technical and marketing strategy we have set for Exensio, namely that company such as Advantest want to customize the platform for their needs. Yet they want to be on a standard platform like Exensio, so they can collaborate with their suppliers and customers, many of whom also use Exensio. We are thrilled that Advantest shares this vision. We believe other companies in the IC supply industry may be interested in leveraging Exensio in a similar fashion. Since Exensio spans all data types required to build wafers, test chips and assemble them, Exensio is becoming an important platform for the industry. And we are honored that Advantest selected Exensio. I would now like to turn to what we're seeing in the industry. Overall, there continues – the continued investment in the industry, despite the COVID-19 impact on the general economy. We believe that we see an accelerated interest in our products in the second half of the year. While the second quarter business activity was driven by fabless foundries and IDMs using leading-edge technology for HPC, we anticipate broader-based insights in our products during the second half of the year. We are pleased with the progress we made in the first half of the year and our relationship with Advantest, as we also spilled recurring revenue streams to provide greater visibility and predictability of our financial results. Finally, I want to thank our employees for nimbly moving from working in our offices to working from home, while still supporting our customers in the COVID-19 environment. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Adnan for a review of the financials, after which, we will open up the call for your questions. Adnan?