Balu Balakrishnan
Analyst · Deutsche Bank. Your line is now open. You may ask your question
Thanks, Joe and good afternoon, everybody. This was another record quarter for power integrations, with revenues of $180 million, up 69% from a year ago. Demonstrating the leverage in our model, our non-GAAP operating margin surpassed 30% for the quarter and the increased our non-GAAP EPS by more than 2.5 times year-over-year. For the first half of 2021, the revenues grew 63% from the prior year. We are growing well above the growth rate of the analog industry, thanks to broad market share gains and secular trends that will endure even as demand normalizes over the coming quarters. One such trend is energy efficiency, which has been a key part of our story, since the introduction of our EcoSmart technology over two decades ago. Energy efficiency has provided a tailwind ever since, driving OEMs to redesign their products in response to regulatory standards and consumer demand. At times, these tailwinds have been boosted by highly impactful standards like the 2007 California regulations on external power supplies, which quickly drove linear power supplies out of that market. Power Integrations were an outside share of that opportunity because of our LinkSwitch ICs were an ideal replacement for Linears. A similar transition has now taken place in the air conditioning market due to China's Nanotori standards for room AC units, which will announce late 2019 and have been phased in over the past year. China's updated minimum efficiency performance standards essentially rule out fixed frequency AC units, which accounted for nearly half of China's production, before the Chinese look at back. In the response to the standards, manufacturers have transitioned most of their production to variable speed brushless DC motors and have also converted from linear to switch mode power supplies to drive the electronics. Power Integration is a market leader in Switched mode power supplies for air conditioners and our incumbent position has allowed us to capture much of the volume transitioning away from Linears. It has also created opportunities for our BridgeSwitch motor drive chips, which drive brushless DC motors such as those used in variable speed AC units. In fact, we won one of our largest big switch designs to date in Q2 at a major customer in the air conditioning market. We are also gaining share in major appliances, where we are already the leader in AC-DC power supplies, thanks to the efficiency and reliability benefits of our products. Our share gains have accelerated as competitors with capacity constraints have prioritized other products ahead of the power supply chains. And other competitors have deemphasized or exceeded the power supply market altogether. These gains are compounding the revenue benefit of rising dollar content in appliances, driven by tighter efficiency standards and the increasing penetration of electronic features, such as network connectivity, electronically controlled motors, and LED lighting. We also expect meaningful revenues from motor drive applications next year, as BridgeSwitch begins to ramp in earnest. Another important secular trend in the power supply market is the adoption of advanced charges for mobile devices, which continues to drive strong growth in our communications and computer categories. Combined revenues from these categories more than doubled year-over-year in Q2, reflecting the market shares we have gained in OEM branded charges for smartphones, tablets and notebooks, as well as multipurpose charges from a wide range of aftermarket brands. We have made it a priority to win share in this market today, knowing that the revenue stream will be stickier, less volatile and more profitable than the commodity cell phone charger business of the past. Charger designs have always had longer life cycles, than the mobile devices themselves, which are refreshed every year. But while simplistic low power chargers could easily be redesigned, just to shave a few pennies of the BOM cost, today's highly sophisticated charges are more like appliances with a greater focus on features and performance and longer design life cycles. In short, we expect many of the designs in our pipeline to be in production for a long time and we are pressing our advantage to lock in these designs today. We won a wide assortment of advanced charger designs in Q2, including a 33-watt in box charger that will significantly increase our penetration at a top-tier handset OEM. Another OEM recently placed the largest single order to date for our GaN-based InnoSwitch products, which they have selected for a new 67 MOT inbox cell phone charges for use with high-volume four models. We also won a 130-watt design for a leading supplier of gaming notebooks, featuring four charging ports and using three GaN-based InnoSwitches. As announced in May, we have also been designed into Anker’s next-generation Nano II chargers, which comes in 30, 45 and 65 watt versions. Notably the 65 watt version is approximately the same size as a 30 watt charger from the first generation of Nano chargers. This improved power density is enabled by our latest product InnoSwitch4 which will be produced exclusively with GaN. GaN enables InnoSwitch4 to operate at higher frequency, resulting in a significant reduction in the size of the power supply transformer. We made the InnoSwitch4 device with our new ClampZero chip, which implements Active Clamp technology to recover losses associated with the higher switching frequency, enabling a truly exceptional level of efficiency. And then, combined with our mini cap, which uses GaN to enable the use of a much smaller input capacitor, we can deliver power density far superior to any solution available in the market today. The synergy between these products demonstrates the value of our comprehensive approach to power supply technology, including proprietary process technologies, high-voltage transistor technologies, highly integrated controllers, proprietary packaging and system-level know-how. This has always been our approach and we have continued it with our GaN technology, which we have seamlessly folded into our product offerings. In fact, a GaN InnoSwitch works exactly like a silicon-based InnoSwitch, such that the customer doesn't have to know anything about GaN in order to realize its performance benefits. Other GaN devices offered in the market, including some marketed as ICs are essentially discrete switches that require dozens of external components and many times even a separate circuit board which are incorporated into a power supply using an external controller chip sourced from a third-party. Engineers must learn the idiosyncrasies of GaN to design a working power supply. And even when successful, they end up with the design containing two to three times as many components and multiple circuit boards. This greatly complicates manufacturing and brings compromises on reliability, time to market, cost and form factor. While the transition to GaN is a secular trend that will lift many boards, the benefit of integration are in is capable and we believe our approach is proving superior in the GaN world, just as it has with silicon over the past three decades. In fact, based on recent design wins, we are accelerating our capacity additions for GaN to accommodate a substantially higher level of growth than previously expected. Looking ahead, we have been anticipating significantly lower revenues in the second half, reflecting reduced demand for cellphone customers after aggressive handset builds meant to capitalize on the Huawei sanctions. We now believe that a significant portion of this adjustment took place in Q2, as evidenced by a sharp reduction in sell-through, as customers rapidly adjusted their charger inventories. With this correction largely behind us and taking into account our continuing market share gains and new design wins, we expect a more moderate reduction in the second half revenues compared to our prior expectations. For Q3, we expect a 3% sequential decline in revenues, plus or minus 5% and we believe we are on track for a full year revenue growth in excess of 40%, compared to a projected growth rate of about 20% for the analog semiconductor industry according to WSTS. With that, I'll turn it over to Sandeep.