Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Pixelworks Incorporated Second Quarter 2018 Earnings Conference Call. I will be your operator for today's call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Following management's prepared remarks, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. This conference call is being recorded for replay purposes. I would now like to turn the call over to Pixelworks CFO, Mr. Steve Moore.

Good afternoon and thank you for joining us today. With me on the call is Todd DeBonis, Pixelworks' President and CEO. The purpose of today's conference call is to supplement the information provided in our press release issued earlier today, announcing the company's financial results for the second quarter 2018. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that various remarks we make on this call, including those about our projected future financial results, economic and market trends, and our competitive position, constitute forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements and all other statements made on this call that are not historical facts are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially. All forward-looking statements are based on the company's beliefs as of today, Thursday, August 2, 2018, and we undertake no obligation to update any such statements to reflect events or circumstances occurring after today. Please refer to today's press release, our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2017, and subsequent SEC filings for a description of factors that could cause forward-looking statements to differ materially from actual results. Additionally, the company's press release and management's statements during this conference call will include discussions of certain measures and financial information in GAAP and non-GAAP terms, including gross margin, operating expenses, net income loss, and net income loss per share. These non-GAAP measures exclude inventory step-up and backlog amortization, amortization of acquired intangible assets, stock-based compensation expense, restructuring expenses, discount accretion on convertible debt fair value and extinguishment of convertible debt. With the exception of stock-based compensation all of these adjusting items are related to the acquisition and integration of ViXS Systems. We use these non-GAAP measures internally to assess our operating performance. The company believes these non-GAAP measures provide a meaningful perspective on our core operating results and underlying cash flow dynamics. But we caution investors to consider these measures in addition to, not as a substitute for, nor superior to, the company's consolidated financial results as presented in accordance with GAAP. Included in the company's press release are definitions and reconciliations of GAAP to non-GAAP net income, and GAAP net income loss to adjusted EBITDA, which provide additional details. With that said, I will now turn the call over to Todd for his opening remarks.

Thank you, Steve, and good afternoon to those joining us on today's call. Highlighting our second quarter financial results was the achievement of over 25% sequential growth, driven by strong demand in projector and expanding volume shipments in mobile. Consolidated revenue of $19.3 million was above the high end of our guidance range and represented over 20% year-over-year growth after adjusting for the end-of-life revenue recognized in the first half of 2017. Operating expenses were in line with our guidance and we delivered breakeven EPS on a non-GAAP basis for the second consecutive quarter. With that, I'll now provide updates on each of our end markets beginning with our core digital projector business. As anticipated we had strong sequential growth in projector. With revenue increasing over 30% following typical seasonality in the first quarter, the increase in orders and revenue during the second quarter extended across multiple customers, which serves as a positive indicator on the health of the overall projector market. We remain well positioned in the three LCD portion of the projector market and we continue to have strong relationships with all of our existing customers. Additionally, our team continues to execute extremely well in the co-development of the next generation SoC for a large projector customer. We remain on track to release this new solution for production by the end of this year. We currently expect to achieve the final development milestone in the third quarter, which will result in an approximately $2 million offset to R&D in the back half of the year. In addition to future sale of this new SoC to our large co-development customer, upon completion of the chip we expect to further enhance Pixelworks return on this investment by leveraging the resulting intellectual property in similar solutions to our other projector customers.…

Thank you, Todd. Revenue for the second quarter 2018 was $19.3 million which reflected the combination of seasonal growth in our digital projector business and expanded shipments of Iris mobile processor in support of new smartphone launches at multiple customers. For comparison, revenue in the first quarter of 2018 was $15.3 million and in the second quarter of 2017 was $20.7 million which included $5.1 million of legacy end-of-life product revenue. The breakdown of revenue during the second quarter was as follows; revenue from digital projector was approximately $16.1 million. More revenue was approximately $720,000 and revenue from video delivery was $2.1 million. Additionally, we recorded approximately $320,000 of legacy TV and panel products sold. Non-GAAP gross profit margin was 52.7% million in the second quarter of 2018 compared to 54.2% in the first quarter of 2018 and 54.4% in the second quarter of 2017. Non-GAAP operating expenses were $10 million in the second quarter of 2018 compared to $7.8 million in the first quarter of 2018 and $7.6 million in the second quarter of 2017. Operating expenses in the both the first quarter of 2018 and second quarter of 2017 reflected the recognition of approximately $2 million offset to R&D associated with our co-development project with a large projector customer. Adjusted EBITDA was $1.1 million in the second quarter of 2018 compared to $1.3 million in the first quarter of 2018 and $4.7 million in the second quarter of 2017. A reconciliation of adjusted EBITDA to GAAP net income loss maybe found in today's press release. We reported non-GAAP net loss of $140,000 or breakeven on a per share basis in the second quarter of 2018 compared to non-GAAP net income of $38,000 or breakeven on a per diluted share basis in the prior quarter and non-GAAP net income…

[Operator Instructions] our first question comes from Suji Desilva with ROTH Capital. Your line is now open.

On the mobile side, you're wrapping up revenue here. Can you talk about how many customers roughly are contributing to the revenue now? And then how many might be contributing it sounds like you have some announcements coming toward the end of 2018 to get a sense of how quickly the rest of the, the field comes on here.

Suji, thanks for the question. We'll talk about what happened. You know I'm probably not going to get ahead of the customers on telling you what's going to happen. So what happened, I think we had the revenue in Q2 was major contribution was from Xiaomi BlackShark. We still had probably small contribution with ASUS from some trailing projects and then ASUS ramping up their new phone.

Okay, that's helpful. And then looking ahead - is the mix of phones going to stay gaming smartphone or do you see the traditional smartphone adoption coming as well?

Our engagements are broad based. So I would say the initial interest most people who are trying to put us in flagships with very expensive display, right?

Right.

And most flagship designs are the longest lead time design. Somebody design in their next-generation flagship even in China probably will take 12 to 18 months. In Korea, it's at least two years out from when they identify what they like to put in it and then what they finally decide to put it in and announce the product. The gaming market is something that's sort of picked up in the last 12 to 18 months. It seems like it's accelerating and the interest to have differentiation in the display pipeline, in the visual experience is strong. So we get a lot of interest in questions, in not all cases well they want to put our technology but in many cases, they would like to. It's a very small segment. You'll see, not today you can probably identify four phones, maybe five that are in production and are considered gaming phones. My guess is you'll see a dozen within six to eight months. But we've even seen renewed interest in the mid-tier with, they're not poor displays but they're certainly not state-of-the-art AMOLED displays and they're looking for a way to improve the [technical difficulty] in that level of phone. So to get back to your question, what area are we seeing interest it's really, it's all three.

Okay and just maybe difficult question for you to answer, but would you envision a gaming smartphone in the marketplace that does not leverage your technology, can that kind of compete with the ones that are out there, do you think kind of your table stakes for this category?

No I wouldn't, I'm not that robust and I wish that was the case. But today the Razer phone that came out they went and they definitely used display to differentiate themselves they were the first guy to go out and put 120 Hertz display in a gaming phone, but they did not use our technology inside that phone, both ASUS and BlackShark do. I wouldn't say we're table stakes, but I would say that with some of the advanced things we're doing, you'll see us overtime try to bring advanced display processing to very high frame rate displays, which I do believe high frame rate displays will become table stakes in the gaming segment.

Okay and then last question perhaps for Steven. The gross margin here in the low-to-mid 50s year ago was kind of in the mid 50s maybe even higher. Can you talk about the remind us of long-term expectations for gross margin and what the drivers and puts and takes in the trend of gross margin have been? Thanks.

Sure, our expectations are consistent for this year, consistent with our guidance sort of the mid 50s. We were a little below that or sort of the middle of the between 50 and 55 this time entirely related to mix. Our mix going forward we believe will allow us to be closer to within our range. Again it was a mix, some of the [technical difficulty] a year or so ago, [technical difficulty] in Q2 of 2017 very high margin. Going forward, we would expect mobile to be somewhat of a drag as we have currently have them at a lower gross margin contribution to our projector or video [technical difficulty]. But that will depend on a couple of things, one the strength growth of mobile and which are [technical difficulty] and the fact that we're working very hard to bring the gross margin for our mobile products in line with our projector business and we do have a lot of reason to believe that both of those two things will happen. Additionally the growth in video delivery which is slightly above our projector business it did also help in offsetting any drag we see from mobile. For the last half of 2018, I think the current guidance works well for what the people should expect.

Okay, thanks for the color Steven. Thanks guys.

Thank you. And our next question comes from Richard Shannon with Craig-Hallum. Your line is now open.

Just first question on the projector market and Todd I'm not sure if I caught your comments directly because my line was kind of clicking in and off. But can you state what you believe the inventory position with your customers [indiscernible] new chips here and I think also last call you talked about the market being flat up this year that's still your current view of the market?

Current view of the market still flat to up, I think our order pattern is consistent with that. We do reasonably good inventory checks, what we don't have access through is the end product inventories, but checks we have in the manufacturing pipeline they're leaned to [technical difficulty] they're good, they're not abnormal at all. So I don't expect to - any kind of major [technical difficulty].

Okay and a follow-up on the projector topic, Todd as you look into next year is there any reason why the projector market couldn't be at least flat and obviously you're having a very good year-on-year growth rate excluding the EOL's. And should we think about Pixelworks continuing to gain share and therefore growing faster than that flat, flat market. But I'll guess answer the first part of that question as well.

There's a [technical difficulty] segment of the projector market, today we're not really participating in it, it's called Pico Projectors or with [technical difficulty] some people in China market then there is screen less TV and they're low lumen. Predominantly DLP based projectors and fairly [technical difficulty] I would say you know sub $500 all the way down, I've seen them as low as $100, right? And it truly is for the - they're predominantly selling and it's for the migratory workforce there instead of hauling around a big LCD TV. They haul around in one of these little Pico projectors and shine around the wall. And it has media processing inside of them. That is a from a unit basis is the real growth of the projector market, that could grow to in 2019 maybe 300,000 units and probably couple years after that to 500,000 units. The rest of the market is fairly flat. Where there with an event like the World Cup or the Olympics you might see some increase in sales but in the off years when you don't have them, you could see a contraction side. Right now we're just modeling flat unit growth, we're looking at some things to participate in this lower ASP pico projector but they're probably beyond 2019. So if I was modeling our projector business I wouldn't model growth.

Okay, perfect. That's very helpful. Todd. Question to your video delivery business, you talked about couple wins with OTA. Wondering if you could characterize the potential size of these and any other kind of big opportunities that might exist out there. I know early this week Apple CEO talked about the [indiscernible] perhaps accelerating faster than previously expected and wondering if that's signaling any large players getting in this market and providing more opportunity for you.

There's a lot of discussion, right. So I'm bullish. If you look at the trend eMarketer put out a PR piece and a lot of people have been quoting recently and they say that the quote and maybe this was where Mr. Cook was leaning on, they say is that cord-cutting is accelerating this year, they expect people that do not have traditional linear Pay TV will be up to 33 and this is American household, 33 million this year alone and it will accelerate to 50 million in 2022 timeframe or something like this. And the trends are absolutely in the favor of cord-cutting. Now how many of those cord cutters will want to go at not only -- many of them are already adding antenna and they're supplementing their streaming services with free over-the-air content, very high quality content. But only a handful of them are actually taking devices to stream it, convert it and stream it to multiple TVs or phones or tablets both in and outside of the house or DVR that content. And that's what our customers are targeting. So Tablo and AirTV and previously antennas directing these customers were all targeting that segment of the market. It's a very - it started off as a very small portion of the market. I believe though as the cord-cutting accelerates the amount let's say as we get towards that 50 million number, how many of those households will want to have this type of advance capability for the free over-the-air channels. We absolutely believe it's in the millions of units. And the ASPs on these devices that we sell are low double digits. So for us, we're small company for us to have a profound impact on our growth, having a TAM of five to eight million units over the next several years is significant. And it's an area we really for the transcoding based solutions, we don't have any competition.

Okay, perfect. Appreciate those comments Todd. May be one last question for Steve. Steve I think you talked about R&D offset from a co-development happening in the third quarter I believe. Are there any other scheduled payments in the investment horizon that we should be thinking about or should we look at R&D pass the third quarter kind of in the fully loaded number fourth quarter and beyond.

So the last milestone on that contract was achieved early in Q3 and allowing us to recognize the credit at least to invoice the credit. The amount that we'll be able to recognize in the quarter is approximately $1.6 million. The full credit, the full milestone is $2 million. So there's another $400,000 that will be recognized probably in Q4. We don't have any other contracts of that nature, not that we would not enter into another one, but if we did, we would certainly let you know. But so that Q4 would be the last piece of this.

Perfect, that's all the questions from me. Thanks Steve, thanks Todd.

[Operator Instructions] our next question comes from Charlie Anderson with Dougherty and Company. Your line is now open.

On mobile I was curious you sort of highlighted the accessory dock that had also your solutions some content there. I wonder if these dozen or so gaming phones that you expect to see, could we see more accessory docks and maybe a high contemporary device than you would traditionally see and then I got a follow-up.

The ROG phone is accessory rich and it comes with many accessories. And it's sold as a bundled package. The docking station is the one optional piece to it. There maybe - I take that back, there is a phone that's looking [technical difficulty] approach to do a external viewing of the - and they would be using [technical difficulty] they're using Iris technology. I don't want to get ahead of myself. I don't know, I'm not high on it Charlie, that's going to be a huge market. You never know, I think that this segment of the market is targeting avid gamers, but avid gamers that are on a mobile platform. I think if they're really [technical difficulty] on a monitor, they're probably going to have a very high end PC, it's a different gaming experience, right? The mobile gaming experience is about being with the mobility piece, right? So I think it's a nuance, I think it's interesting, but no I'm not planning on it being a big contributor. The phones themselves I'm, but not the docks.

Got it, okay. And then on the video delivery side, you talked about OTA, I'm curious you had some other pieces of business that I know there was an opportunity in Japan, with set top box. I just wonder how that's playing out and do you expect to see some growth there, the rest of the year.

That's a very good question because that was a nuance in my prepared remarks that maybe didn't come out completely clear. This is probably the, this is what's really driving the sequential growth in Q3 and we'll drive, I would say the majority of the growth for the video delivery business probably through 2019. I mean we saw high expectations for OTA, but this ADSB new broadcast standard it's a 4K HDR broadcast for Japan and Japan's been working on it for a while, it's been, they've had trial channels out for the last two years from their development to work on. It's expected to go live in December. And new TVs are starting to be introduced that are ADSB capable, but they're just starting to be released for availability. There's approximately by the time we get to the end of the year, there's probably 10 million 4K HDR TVs sold in Japan that do not have an ADSB tuner [indiscernible] they can't receive the signal, they're 4K, they're HDR. There's a lack of content that can really accentuate which is the reason why these individuals bought these TVs. But you would need either a converter box or you will need an advanced PVR that has ADSB capabilities which will become your converter box, but will also record the content. This is unique to Japan right now when there is a lot of people that have these boxes. They also can rip them right on Ultra High Definition Blu-ray disc to store them as long as they have the - they come with this content access system. So as long as they have the rights to do that they can do it. This is a segment of market we want some good design wins with top two player in the market. And so we expect the opportunity for us over the next several years is in both these converter box [technical difficulty] and upgrades of the PVR segment. If you [technical difficulty] a decade ago when HD was transitioning in, the peak year of this PVR market they shipped I think eight million PVRs into the Japanese market. It since subsided down to sort of stable run rate of about two million a year, they come out with some advanced features etc. but it's refreshing to the homes that exist to have them. There was no real catalyst to drive a big upgrade cycle. This new broadcast standard is a catalyst. I don't know how many people will go out and tune into them, but the opportunity is clearly there and the initial stocking orders we're getting from our partners say that they're trying to get ahead of the curve and be prepared for the demand.

Got it. Thanks so much.

Thank you. And I'm not showing any further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the call back over to management for any further remarks.

So continuing on the journey of making progress on our growth initiatives in mobile and video delivery. I think going into Q3 we've turned the corner, the video delivery business is now accretive and the engagements in mobile are they're definitely stretching the resources of the company and so, we need to go convert them. Get our customers to release and get to revenue, but right now all the indictors are very positive. Look forward to giving you another update in three months.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating in today's conference. This does conclude today's program and you may all disconnect. Everyone have a wonderful day.