Todd DeBonis
Analyst · Roth Capital
Thank you, Steve, and good afternoon to those joining us on today's call. Let's begin with a quick recap of our financial results for the quarter. Revenue in the third quarter was $13.7 million representing approximately 9% sequential growth and coming in at the higher end of our 13 to $14 million guidance range. We also did a good job of managing our OpEx for the quarter which resulted in incremental reduction of our net loss per share quarter-on-quarter. Lowering the revenue level required to achieve breakeven and ultimately profitability was one of the primary objectives behind the restructuring we implemented in the first half of the year. I'm pleased with our results and significant progress towards achieving that objective. I will let Steve speak to the specifics of our guidance for the current quarter but most importantly our expectations for the fourth quarter include us delivering on our prior commitments of year-over-year growth and achieving cash flow breakeven by year-end. While clearly those milestones aren't the endgame, they do reflect the improvement we've made to our financial model in a relatively short period of time. And more importantly going forward, the model we now have in place today has improved leverage and will allow incremental revenue growth to accelerate fall through to the bottom line. As mentioned last quarter, we substantially completed all the work associated with the restructuring and we have since shifted the balance of our efforts and focus to further solidifying our position in the projector market and strengthening our sales capabilities in support of driving increased adoption of Pixelworks' technology in the Mobile market. Although we did not make any formal product or customer announcements during the quarter, there continues to be a significant amount of positive activity across both of our businesses. Starting with the Projector Business, as many of you are aware, our Projector Business as well as our product offerings have had consistent fundamentals for quite some time. However, the projector market itself has presented a series of challenging headwinds that we've had to navigate over the last several quarters, including a severe inventory correction that began in late 2015 and a more recent 3LCD panel supply disruption that impacted a number of our customers. Today, I think we can finally say with a high degree of comfort that these two market headwinds appear to be behind us. We are no longer seeing weakness in our customers related to the availability of 3LCD panels although we believe certain projector OEMs not reliant on Sony panels were able to take advantage of the supply disruption to gain incremental market share. Given our broad position in the 3LCD market we don't anticipate any of these shifts among customers to have a meaningful impact on our market share. More specific to Pixelworks, we saw order patterns from both OEMs and distributors increasingly begin to normalize throughout the third quarter and as reflected in our fourth quarter guidance we have seen further improvement since quarter end. In fact, we believe the supply chain is now somewhat tighter and potentially even healthier today with reduced inventory in the channel compared to the levels prior to the 3LCD supply disruption. Based upon our current read of customer order patterns and inventory in the channel, we expect in our normal modeling internally for a more normalized revenue cycle with typical seasonality for 2017. And lastly on our Projector Business we've completed the streamlining of the business including the EOL process for multiple legacy chips in our portfolio many of which consists of either low unit volumes and or less favorable ASPs. We effectively have all the expected EOL orders in hand today and therefore have a reasonably good estimate of what the revenue contribution will be from these products in the first half of 2017. In general, our customers have continued to be accepting of these product transitions and consistent with prior expectations, we do not anticipate any negative impact to Pixelworks' market share. During the quarter, we also completed the end of life for our legacy products that we had historically sold into non-strategic applications such as Ultra High Definition TVs and HD monitors. Similar to the EOL for legacy projector chips, we now have a large majority of the expected EOL orders for these legacy TV panel products in hand today, and collectively they will represent a larger portion of the total EOL revenue contribution we expect to record in the first half of 2017. Steve will provide further details on the total expected EOL revenue contribution as part of his guidance commentary towards the end of the call. Turning now to our Mobile Business, we've made meaningful progress on multiple initiatives during the quarter in support of our objectives to strengthen our sales capability and drive incremental adoption of Pixelworks technology. I'll start with a brief update on ASUS. On our earnings call last quarter we highlighted that ASUS had launched two mobile devices that incorporates Pixelworks' Iris processor, the ASUS ZenFone 3 Ultra and the ZenPad Z8. The ZenFone 3 was our first ever design-win for a smart phone and then the ZenPad Z8 was a 7.9-inch Tablet with a 2K resolution that's available exclusively at a Tier 1 North America carrier. We continued to ship volume production in support of both of these devices in the quarter, however the total number of units on these respective platforms is expected to remain fairly small. Early in the month ASUS announced the launch of another new tablet, the ZenPad Z10 which also incorporates Pixelworks' Iris processor. It is now available exclusively at the same Tier 1 North America carrier. The ASUS ZenPad Z10 features a larger 9.7-inch, wide-angle, 2K display and a Pixelworks enabled blur-free mode which is capable of 60 million pixel-optimizations per second to eliminate blur. The Tablet retails for $329 or can be purchased cheaper with a new contract but regardless, this device's display and video quality are truly impressive especially at this price point. Although we expect this device to also have fairly modest unit volumes we believe that ASUS repeated choice to incorporate Iris in additional new devices speak strongly to the value proposition that Pixelworks technology offers as ASUS looks to continue differentiating with superior mobile viewing experience. We look forward to maintaining our strong collaboration with ASUS and enabling best-in-class video quality on more of their future platforms. Regarding future platforms, as highlighted in today's press release we recently began sampling our 3rd Generation Iris Processor at key smart phone and tablet customers. This latest mobile device is a result of our ongoing product development aimed at further increasing the value proposition of Iris while at the same time lowering the hurdles that OEMs must overcome as part - as part of designing a new component into a next gen mobile device. Accordingly, our 3rd Generation Iris Processor has smaller physical footprint requiring less space on the board and it consumes less power by intelligently leveraging multiple power modes based upon display content to extend battery life. This new processor also includes a series of advanced features and functionality that we are actively demonstrating to target OEMs as an impactful way that they can differentiate their next-generation smart phones and tablets. We are also working to cultivate increased awareness of advanced video processing more broadly in the industry which features such as ACR or High Dynamic Range. In support of this feature - this effort, during the quarter Pixelworks became a contributing member of the UHD Alliance, an inter-industry group charged with advancing the Ultra HD ecosystem as well as promoting the benefits of Ultra HD entertainment technology across a wide array of consumer devices. Specific to Iris, we are actively engaged with multiple OEMs on potential new design win opportunities, including with our 3rd generation device just mentioned. The early feedback we received from prospective company customers sampling the device has been positive and we are convinced based upon conversations with these and other industry participants that Pixelworks maintains a material lead over alternative partial solutions for improving video quality on mobile devices. If we are successful, the sampling of our 3rd Generation Iris Processor should enable us to win designs on higher unit volumes mobile devices that are targeted for launches in the second half of 2017. More generally, we continue to make progress on our dual go to market strategy consisting primarily of device sales in the near term while simultaneously seeding the intermediate to longer term opportunities through dedicated IP licensing efforts. Ultimately, both elements of our strategy share the same objective of driving broader adoption of Pixelworks' technology across a greater number of customers and mobile platforms. As we've talked about before in previous conference calls, Pixelworks has done an impressive job of evangelizing the benefits of our technology and superior video quality to establish awareness with mobile OEMs. We now are intensely focused on converting this awareness to commercial adoption, broad adoption of most features and functionality on the mobile devices as well as components that enable them often depends on gaining visible success as part of one OEM trying something new to differentiate a device or a platform, which then leads to other OEMs replicating the feature or function in an attempt to stay competitive and avoid falling behind the competition. This underlying concept of the adoption process along with the increasing need for OEMs to differentiate is fundamental to our strategy of increasing Pixelworks sales capability and focus on China. In addition to providing a relatively large group of prospective target customers, the number of mobile OEMs in China creates a competitive landscape with the potential for accelerated adoption. Mobile OEMs in China are increasingly willing to experiment with new features and functionality in an effort to differentiate their products. And OEMs have also become very quick and efficient at copying new features that are introduced by competitors. As a result, the market dynamics in China are particularly attractive for Pixelworks as we work to drive increased adoption Iris in our mobile technology. As part of the strengthening our mobile sales capabilities in China, we announced in today's press release that we recently hired Ting Xiong as Pixelworks' Senior VP of Worldwide Sales. Ting joins Pixelworks after having held multiple roles at Qorvo, previously TriQuint Semiconductor where most recently he headed the Asia Pacific sales organization as part of their IDP Group. He will be based primarily Shanghai and largely complete the planned expansion of our mobile sales team and capabilities that we discuss throughout the year. During the quarter, we also appointed a country manager in Korea. As a reminder, last quarter, we also hired a vice president of sales in China to focus on opportunities with mid to high end smart phone OEMs in China. In addition, I mentioned last quarter the addition of Dave Sabo who is dedicated to leading our business development and IP licensing opportunities across the Company but also serves as a valuable resource in some of our current mobile efforts. These individuals combined with the additions -- the other additions that we've made to our sales team and capabilities throughout the year provide us a broader sales footprint with coverage across all the key markets in Asia. We now have significantly more depth in sales experience than Pixelworks has ever had focused on our mobile initiative. In summary, we continue to make meaningful progress during the quarter as demonstrated by our improved financial results as well as the business updates that I've just outlined. Looking forward, the revenue growth we're guiding to in the fourth quarter combined with our recently reduced cost structure has us poised to deliver on our commitment to achieve cash flow break-even, by the end of this year which will provide a solid foundation for further financial improvement in 2017. From a business development standpoint, the Company sales capabilities have never been more focused and proficient given the team we've assembled year-to-date. Moreover, with our strength and sales team in place our newest Iris processor sampling and our continued commitment to intermediate term licensing efforts, we are well-positioned to advance the adoption of Pixelworks' technology in the mobile market. I look forward to reporting on our additional progress, as we continue to execute over the coming quarters. With that I'll turn the call over to Steve Moore to review our Third Quarter Financials and Fourth-Quarter guidance in more detail, Steve?