Chris Diorio
Analyst · Canaccord Genuity. Please go ahead
Thank you, Ellen. Thank you all for joining the call. Our fourth-quarter results were strong, with revenue exceeding $40 million for the second consecutive quarter and setting a third straight quarterly record. For the full year, we delivered 24.6% revenue growth, driven by strength in both endpoint ICs and systems. Fourth-quarter endpoint IC revenue growth was healthy. Compared with last quarter, year-over-year growth accelerated. We were especially pleased with our results as we faced a difficult year-over-year growth comparison to fourth-quarter 2018 and seasonal fourth-quarter endpoint IC headwinds. Full-year endpoint IC revenue set an annual record with performance apparel and footwear a key growth driver. We expect retail apparel overall, including the performance segment, to lead endpoint IC volume growth in 2020. We believe the retail apparel market was only roughly 15% penetrated in 2019 so there is plenty of room for growth. We also expect the new Impinj M700 IC family to be a key driver of that growth, with retailers excited about the M700 because it enables the highest performing, smallest, worldwide-tuned inlays with fast inventory and exceptional readability. It also introduces Protected Mode, a patented Impinj innovation, enabling new opportunities for loss prevention with automated self-checkout and seamless product returns. Fourth-quarter year-over-year systems revenue growth was healthy, with strength in both readers and gateways. We continued to win in retail, tracking items at back-store to front-store transitions and at point-of-sale and store exits, and in the supply chain, verifying shipments moving through dock doors. Full-year systems revenue delivered the strongest growth rate in the past five years, with double-digit reader and triple-digit gateway revenue growth, partially offset by a decline in reader IC revenue. While our reader IC business faced difficult comparisons to a very strong 2018, the underlying market dynamics remain healthy and we continue investing in this important business. Overall, I am pleased with the traction our systems business delivered in 2019. In 2020, we will continue investing in our platform, end-customer adoption and linking silicon to applications. In February, we announced our next-generation fixed reader, the Impinj R700, designed for enterprise-grade RAIN deployments. Building on our rich heritage of innovation, the R700 delivers industry-leading performance with the best wireless sensitivity, fastest network connectivity, powerful edge processing and intelligent on-reader algorithms that simplify solutions development. We are currently shipping R700 readers in limited quantities for North American deployments as we execute our production ramp. We anticipate worldwide regional support by third-quarter 2020. While we are excited by the advancements the R700 delivers, we will continue offering our Speedway readers, with the R700 enabling us to execute a tiered selling strategy. For applications that require the R700’s advancements, we offer our customers a smooth transition from Speedway to the R700 via backward-compatible APIs and programming environments. Although we have modest 2020 revenue expectations for the R700, we expect the R700 to meet increasing end-user demands for enterprise-grade security, performance, reliability and product longevity. The R700 exemplifies our commitment to innovating across our platform. Expanding on that innovation theme, in 2020 we will increase our research and development spend in absolute dollars, focusing on growing our engineering team, accelerating our product advancements, strengthening our platform linkages and driving our growth. We will also invest in operations, focusing on ROI-driven capital investments that shorten our endpoint IC wafer post-processing flow to improve inventory turns, increase operations responsiveness and broaden our geographic and partner diversity. These R&D and operations investments are focused on growing and scaling our company to win the gigantic opportunity in front of us. Turning to the market, in January we exhibited at the National Retail Federation tradeshow in New York City. In my view, this year’s NRF was our best ever. A key take away from the show was how retailers are extending their RAIN deployments from handheld inventory counting, which has driven retail apparel tagging, to now include back-store to front-store transitions, consumer self-checkout and monitoring store exits. Also, 14 partners featured our products in their booths. Cisco showed an Impinj xArray gateway in their Grape-to-Glass demonstration, tracking a wine bottle from vineyard to consumer. Lexmark showed a printer that both printed and encoded shipping and return labels with our Monza R6 endpoint IC embedded in the label. These use cases highlighted the power of the applications that Impinj partners can build using our platform. In our booth, we showed two M700 Protected Mode use cases, the first focused on loss prevention with frictionless self-checkout and the second on loss prevention with seamless product returns. A retailer, seeing our demonstrations, suggested a third -- using Protected Mode to inhibit fraudulent returns, which is a use case we had not anticipated. Reflecting on that interaction as well as other partner and customer conversations, I was struck by the breadth and depth of solutions our partners are delivering, the rapid pace at which RAIN has become a mainstream and essential retail technology and the scope of use cases that retailers envision using the Impinj platform, oft times surpassing our own imagination. On the organizational side, we recently announced that Eric Brodersen, our president and COO, will step down on March 6th. I would like to extend my sincerest, heartfelt gratitude to Eric for his tireless commitment over the past five years. Eric helped grow Impinj into a far stronger organization with the most talented and capable leadership team in our history. Eric, thank you for all that you have done for Impinj. We also announced our new CFO, Cary Baker, who joined us on February 17th. Cary brings a keen strategic eye, strong financial acumen and a wealth of experience in multiple industries that will serve Impinj well as we grow and scale. I am excited for you to meet him during our upcoming conferences and road shows. Turning to coronavirus, the safety and well-being of our team, partners, customers and suppliers is and remains our top priority. The virus’s impact on our business has been modest to-date, with us adjusting our operations to compensate for macro trends that include extended holidays and furloughs which have impacted product availability and customer workflows. The impact on the M700 has been larger, with coronavirus contributing to more than a month delay in our production ramp as our inlay partners, understandably, prioritize producing existing products over a new-product ramp. Regardless, we still anticipate transitioning from production ramp to volume production, and to begin fulfilling volume production orders from multiple inlay partners, late in the second quarter. We also still expect the M700 to positively impact our business in 2020. Looking forward, we anticipate coronavirus will impact sales of our endpoint ICs worldwide and may impact our systems sales, the latter at least in China and perhaps in other countries as well. We continue to monitor and adapt to the situation as it unfolds, confident in our market position and balance sheet, with our thoughts and hearts turning to those who are impacted across the world and to whom we wish a speedy recovery. In closing, 2019 was a fantastic year as Impinj delivered a string of record revenue quarters and laid the groundwork to deliver production volumes of new, industry-leading products in 2020. I would like to thank the entire Impinj team for their efforts this past year and, as always, in driving our bold vision. With a record year behind us marked by steady execution, I remain confident in our market position and energized by the opportunities ahead. I will now turn the call over to Cary for our detailed financial review and fourth-quarter outlook. Cary.