Chris Diorio
Analyst · Canaccord Genuity. Please go ahead
Thank you Chelsea. Thank you all for joining the call. We have four items to cover today. Number one, the market environment and our first quarter 2018 expectations. Number two, our long term vision and our roadmap to deliver that vision. Number three, our fourth quarter 2017 results, and number four, our 2018 financial outlook. I will focus on the first and second topics. Evan will cover the third and fourth. During my remarks, I will refer to a graphic in the script. So if you haven’t yet downloaded the script from the Impinj website, I encourage you to do so now. Starting with an overview of our results and guidance, fourth quarter revenue was $26.9 million, below our preliminary estimates. Our first quarter revenue outlook is between $23.25 million and $25.25 million, above our prior estimates. Both numbers were affected by us accommodating a partner’s request for a product exchange as Evan will cover shortly. System sales exceeded expectations, with reader and gateway unit volumes up 42% year-over-year, our third consecutive quarter with greater than 40% unit volume growth. For the most part, we sidestepped reader and gateway supply constraints by operational execution and our customers requesting a different product mix than we expected at the beginning of the quarter. Our 2017 endpoint IC shipments were 7.1 billion units, in line with our revised guidance. Turning now to our target verticals, retail, logistics and healthcare, the primary driver of our 2018 endpoint IC volumes will be retail. But because retail will still use mostly handheld readers in 2018, meaningful retail systems revenue is farther out in time. By contrast, logistics and healthcare offer 2018 systems opportunities, but with small 2018 endpoint IC volumes because today’s use cases mostly track pallets and assets, with consumables tagging farther out in time. Consequently, rather than provide annual endpoint IC guidance in 2018 as we have done in the past, we will instead provide quarterly revenue results for endpoint ICs and for systems, the latter comprising our platform’s connectivity and software layers. We believe this segmentation better aligns with how we view our business and how we track the fixed reading adoption waves I have discussed on prior calls. Starting with endpoint ICs, our endpoint IC lead times have contracted from an average of 10 to 12 weeks in 2016 to an average of 4 to 6 weeks today. As a consequence, we have seen a significant reduction in our order backlog and we expect our inlay partners to further reduce their inventory by between 500 million and 1 billion units, mostly in the first and second quarters. As a result, even though we anticipate 15% to 20% growth in end user endpoint IC consumption in 2018, our first half 2018 unit volume growth will lag end user consumption. Regarding pricing, we expect our 2018 competitive environment to remain unchanged from the second half of 2017. We also expect to at least maintain end user market share on a full year basis compared with 2017. Turning now to systems, we are enthusiastic about our 2018 opportunities because we believe we can address compelling unsolved problems in logistics and healthcare. The end user and partner engagements I have cited on prior calls, such as for Faurecia in logistics or with Stanley Healthcare, and many others like them, fuel our enthusiasm. Because our opportunities are project based, size, timing and mix will play an important role in our results when viewed on a quarterly basis. Let me now add a few clarifying comments. First, we remain confident in both our market opportunity and our market position. Second, we continue investing in our integrated platform, with a focus on retail’s coming transition to fixed reading and logistics and healthcare adding consumables tagging, while at the same time, supporting partners who are driving our platform’s adoption in other verticals such as airlines, laundry and automotive. Focusing for a moment on our platform, we link its three layers to deliver advanced capabilities and performance that surpasses mix and match solutions built from competitor products. Today, those linkages are primarily algorithms shared by our operating system software, readers and gateways. Over the next three years, we will extend those linkages substantially, with our next generation reader delivering item authentication features that our operating system will deliver as a cloud service, and our next generation endpoint IC connecting via our platform to that cloud service. We are driving a future where every item in our everyday world has a digital counterpart, a digital twin, in the cloud. The essence of our platform roadmap is to connect physical items with their digital twins. Today, we deliver each physical item’s identity, location and authenticity. Our future is linking those physical items with cloud based twins that include the item’s history, ownership and available services. Our operating system will include some of those services, including those essential for developers to link business and people with items. Step by step, we are creating that platform to connect everyday items to their digital twins. To highlight our vision and our business opportunity in concrete terms, I’d like to walk you through a representative healthcare example that we believe will improve medical device traceability, hospital reimbursement and ultimately patient care. Consider a medical device such as a heart valve as it journeys from manufacturer to distributor to hospital to patient. The manufacturer uses our platform to associate our endpoint IC in the valve’s packaging with the valve’s digital twin in the cloud. Our platform tracks the valve from WIP through shipment to a distributor. The distributor uses our platform to read the IC, authenticate the valve, create a new digital twin, chain this new twin to the prior twin cryptographically and automate the chain of custody transfer. A hospital that uses our platform for automated restocking autonomously orders the valve. Upon receipt, the hospital uses our platform to read the IC, authenticate the valve, create a new digital twin, chain this twin to the prior twin and automate chain of custody transfer. Prior to a surgical procedure the operating room autonomously orders the valve from stock, ensuring receipt and surgical kit completeness. During surgery, the OR automatically bills the valve’s use and associates the valve’s digital twin with the patient’s medical record, all without human intervention. To enable and win opportunities like this healthcare example, we are investing in revolutionary product developments and lighthouse accounts. Yes, our vision is audacious. Yet, we intend our three year platform roadmap to enable opportunities such as that healthcare example and others like it. And while we are disappointed on our recent short term financial performance, our focus on our vision is unwavering and our dedication intense. We recognize that RAIN is one of many item to cloud connectivity technologies. Yet we firmly believe that RAIN’s capabilities, unique identifiers, no battery, low cost, long range, not line of sight, 1000 reads per second, essentially unlimited life and cryptographic authentication are unmatched by any other technology and enable RAIN to coexist with those other technologies yet dominate item to cloud connectivity. If you’d like to see that coexistence and RAIN’s differentiated capabilities, then consider attending the open day of the Connections Summit hosted by the RAIN Alliance, the NFC forum and Google in Sunnyvale on March 7th. Before I turn over the call over to Evan to give you a detailed look at our fourth quarter results and our first quarter outlook, I would like to take a moment to comment on his departure. I know I speak for the entire Impinj team when I express my gratitude for Evan’s countless contributions over the past 17 years. We will miss the partnership we have forged. Evan will remain with the company through March 30th and we are actively searching for his successor. I’m confident we will add an outstanding CFO and together, we will win this gigantic market opportunity. Evan?