Chris Diorio
Analyst · Pacific Crest Securities. Please go ahead
Thank you, Maria, and thank you all for joining the call. I'm delighted to be here with you today. We delivered a strong first quarter, with revenue growing 47% year-over-year, to $31.7 million, just above the top end of our guidance. All layers of our platform delivered solid results. Importantly, the momentum we see in our business today is strong. I will begin this call by briefly reviewing Impinj's vision and mission. I will then discuss that strong momentum, starting with the themes that provide context for it. I will close by reviewing Impinj's platform strategy, which I firmly believe positions us to win this enormous market opportunity. Impinj's vision is digital life for everyday items. Our mission is to wirelessly connect those items to applications. We are literally extending the reach of the internet by a factor of a hundred everyday items, and delivering to the digital world each items' unique identity, location, and authenticity, which we call Item Intelligence. Our platform enables that connectivity, and delivers that Item Intelligence to a broad and diverse range of business and consumer applications. My view of the RAIN market today is strong growth with enormous potential. Starting with that strong growth, recall on our last earnings call we guided our 2017 endpoint IC volumes to be between 7.8 billion and 8 billion units, 32% growth over 2016 at the midpoint, roughly equivalent to one IC for every person on the planet. That prior guidance, which represents growth of nearly 2 billion units over 2016, remains unchanged. I will touch on the drivers of that growth next. Then I will turn to that enormous potential, which to me paints a picture of a very bright future. Starting with today's strong growth, retail apparel has been an important driver, both for us and for the entire RAIN industry. As example, Decathlon, which hosted the recent RAIN meeting in France, said they want to drive tagging to 100%, and extract more value from those tagged items by expanding their reading infrastructure. Macy's announced its plans to have 100% of its merchandise connected by the end of 2017. At the RAIN meeting in Japan, last year, I visited Uniqlo and G.U. stores, both fast retailing brands, and saw large numbers of connected apparel items. These growth points which we see at other retailers as well deliver today's IC revenue. I also engender fixed reading opportunities for us, which we believe will be one driver of that enormous potential I mentioned previously, and will turn to now. When the retailer reaches a 100% item connectivity, they typically begin complementing handheld readers with fixed reading to enable additional use cases. For example, Decathlon's flagship store, which we toured at the RAIN event, has RAIN-enabled point-of-sale and theft detection readers. I bought an item at that store to experience these use cases in action. I also tried the RAIN-enabled self-checkout terminals in a G.U. store in Japan. And I'm excited about a joint solution that Impinj and our partner, Retail Reload, deployed at [indiscernible], a French retailer which gives shoppers an in-store experience that is online-like, but delivered the item in-store within seconds or delivers it to your home within two hours. The result, a 9.8% uplift in same-store sales, and a 40% improvement in checkup [ph] productivity. These retail example mark a trend toward supplementing manual handheld reading with fixed reading, which doesn't have labor costs, and delivers RAIN data in real-time. In logistics and healthcare, which have a compelling need for item visibility, fixed reading is really the only option. We envision and helped enable the shift from manual to fixed reading via the connectivity and software layers of our platform, and we are well positioned to benefit from it. Consider logistics; any company that transports items needs real-time visibility into those items' location and movement. Impinj's platform delivers that visibility. In the first quarter, we enabled a deployment at scale with Ubi Solutions at Viapost, the e-commerce fulfillment and logistics arm of the French postal company, La Poste. Their need, in under two hours receive billions of magazines or newspapers from publishing houses and ship them to end customers across France. The solution; our xSpan gateways and ItemSense operating system software monitor inbound and outbound shipments through dock doors. We introduced a similar joint solution with Smart Label Solutions in the United States to monitor inbound and outbound shipments through dock doors. And other examples abound. For example, at LogiMAT, the big logistics show in Stuttgart, in March, Impinj's partner [indiscernible] showed RAIN-enabled dock door and logistics applications. Turning now to healthcare, at the HIMSS Conference, in February, I introduced a discussion among panelists from the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the Medical University of South Carolina, Inova Fairfax Hospital, and the Veterans Administration. The panelists shared their experiences and avid enthusiasm for how RAIN and the Impinj platform had improved their hospital operations. For example, Will Hammond, supply chain director at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, said MSKCC, with 50 operating rooms, spends $30 million a year on perioperative supplies. Prior to the RAIN deployment hospital staff performed replenishment cycle counts every week, and still usage data didn't match purchasing. Our partner, ARC Healthcare, closed that gap, allowing MSKCC to right size the inventory, improved charge capture, find inventory, and in Will's words, "The amount of time and headaches it saves is absolutely incredible." Another example, Arpit Mehta, Pharmacy Operations Manager at Inova Fairfax, discussed the benefits of the Impinj platform in stocking crash carts which contain medicine trays and supplies. Impinj and our partner [indiscernible] cut five minutes of pharmacists' time restocking trays in 90 seconds for 300 trays per month, with improved accuracy and better patient care. And in Arpit's words, "If a medication is recalled, which does happen quite a bit, now we know exactly where the medication is, who received it, which tray it was in, and we can track it back to our patients." Healthcare is one of our enormous opportunities as I'll illustrate with three closing examples. In Denmark, a new university super hospital is deploying Impinj readers to locate beds, wheelchairs, and surgical tools. Our win, built on our platform's enterprise-class reliability and performance is a competitive takeout for Impinj. As a second example, with our partner TeleTracking, we introduced a hospital patient flow solution built on the Impinj platform that alerts hospital staff to patient discharges in real-time, accelerating hospital bed turnover to reduce lost bed time, and increase revenue. Both of these healthcare deployments used fixed reading in the healthcare facility. As a final example, in February, we announced a partnership with STANLEY Healthcare, a leading provider of visibility solutions and analytics for the healthcare industry. STANLEY Healthcare will integrate Impinj's platform with its MobileView real-time location systems software platform, and offer the Impinj STANLEY solution as part of its extensive portfolio, enabling STANLEY Healthcare to offer Impinj-based solutions for real-time asset tracking, and patient workflow management. I will close my discussion of the enormous market potential and bright future with a few final points. Kaiser Permanente just joined the RAIN Alliance. In Japan, 7-11 and four other convenience stores, which together sell 100 billion items a year plan to introduce self-checkout registers to read RAIN-tagged items in a basket with Lawson [ph] already piloting the registers in Osaka. H&M, in their full-year report said they intend to invest in technology, quote, "Such as RFID and automated warehouses." And Amazon just took a seat on the RAIN Alliance board of directors. On our last earnings call I said that, going forward, we anticipate a portion of our revenue attributable to connectivity and software to increase. The examples I just cited highlight that trend, which we saw in the first quarter, and expect to continue over time. Our platform strategy is aligned with that momentum towards fixed reading, and we stand to benefit significantly from it. Further we are and will continue competing aggressively to drive every layer of our platform into the market relentlessly competing to win share at every opportunity. Today, I remain ever more confident in our plan to invest in, read and win this enormous market opportunity that spans retail, logistics, healthcare and so many other verticals. In summary, I'm proud of the Impinj team's execution this quarter and our continued progress toward our vision of digital life for everyday items. We delivered a strong Q1 and I believe our results are a testament to our continued leadership in the market, we grew to 261 employees and continue investing in our technology, products, platform and team. We exited the quarter with up 210 issued and allowed patents an increase of six since January 1, we added three joint solutions to our portfolio, we receive the Frost & Sullivan award for customer value and leadership for RFID solutions in healthcare. And I'm thrilled to welcome two new members to our executive team Jenny Armstrong-Owen as our Vice President of People, Environment and Culture; and Jeff Dossett as our Senior Vice President of Marketing and Business Development. Jenny and Jeff are both seasoned leaders and I couldn't be more excited about the talent they bring to our team. As I noted in my opening comments, the momentum we feel today is strong. In closing, I will again note that Impinj and Amazon are co-hosting the RAIN Alliance Meeting July 18 to 20 in Seattle with July 20 an open day where non-members are welcome to attend. I will now turn the call over to Evan to give you a detailed look at our first quarter financial results and our outlook for the second quarter. Evan?