Todd DeBonis
Analyst · ROTH Capital. Your line is now open
Thank you, Steve and good afternoon and welcome to everyone joining us on today’s call. Beginning with the quick overview of the numbers, as reported in today’s press release, our first quarter financial results were at or above the high-end of our guidance range. Consolidated revenue in the first quarter increased 9% year-over-year to $16.6 million. Including continued solid growth in video delivery and mobile combined with mobile related licensing revenue. As a result of the licensing revenue, gross margin came in better than anticipated and contributed to first quarter EPS at the high end of our guidance range. Additionally during the quarter, we recognized a net gain of $3.9 million on the previous announced sale of non-strategic patents acquired as part of the ViXS. Now, turning to an update on each of our end markets, our digital projector business performed largely as expected with a sequential decline reflecting typical first quarter seasonality combined with a softer demand profile due to the macro environment in late 2018, particularly in China. This resulted in an inventory correction during the quarter as work to reduce higher inventory levels in advance of the fiscal year ending in March. Although the current macroeconomic backdrop in China will likely continue to temper end-market demand, most of our projector customers appear to have made progress working down XS channel inventory. Our current booking and backlog indicate reasonable sequential growth in the second quarter and further normalization of the channel inventory and order patterns throughout 2019. As discussed in our last call, we also continue to expect our large co-development customer to begin gradually transitioning to the next-generation SoC late this year. Although this new chip will have higher gross margin profile, it also was at a lower ASP than the current generation. Currently, this product transition is forecast to start late this year and will continue through 2020. However, this transition is likely to moderate the typical seasonal trends that we experienced in the second half of the year. In our video delivery business, we had another strong quarter with revenue growth of over 60% year-over-year. Most notable we shipped to fulfill solid follow-on orders from our Japanese consumer electronics customers for our XCode family of decoder and transcoder devices. We continue to be well-positioned with previous design wins on a series of ADSB compatible in-home media devices in Japan, including both set-top box converter devices and advanced personal video recorders, or PBRs. Our highly integrated and low power XCode processors are a key enabler of the performance and advanced features of these devices. All of which allow Japanese consumers to take advantage of the newly launched ADSB broadcast standard, which supports over the year terrestrial broadcast in 4K and HDR quality. As we have stated previously, our leading customers’ recorders incorporate two XCode processors in order to leverage Pixelworks’ industry leading transcoding, which enables users to efficiently stream high-quality recorded content to display devices either directly or over Wi-Fi. Our stated transcoding solutions also continue to be utilized in a number of existing single, dual and quad over the year streaming products here in the U.S. Pixelworks technology enables these devices to wirelessly stream free high-definition over-the-year broadcast channels to Wi-Fi connected TVs, smartphones and tablets. As demonstrated by the significant year-over-year growth in our video delivery business, the initial ramp of our customer’s ADSB compatible devices in Japan has been progressing well. We do believe the current rate of growth is likely to moderate as end market consumer demand from early adopters tapers off and begins to shift towards everyday Japanese consumers that are more price sensitive and likely to adopt over time as additional high-quality 4K HDR content becomes available. That said, we still anticipate our video delivery business will continue to show solid year-over-year growth. In our mobile business, we entered the year with strong momentum following what I have previously characterized as a transformational year in 2018. In the first quarter, mobile revenue, including mobile-related licensing revenue grew more than 250% year-over-year representing the fifth consecutive quarter of year-over-year revenue growth. More importantly, we successfully executed on multiple strategic initiatives to significantly increase the size of Pixelworks’ total market opportunity. A perfect example is the strategic partner we announced in January with HMD Global to incorporate Pixelworks’ Iris technology in a broad range of Nokia’s next-generation smartphones as part of the shared vision of bringing advanced visual processing to new tariff consumers. Another example of expanded opportunity is gaming phones. In March, Xiaomi backed Blackshark launched its latest high-performance gaming smartphone, the Blackshark 2, which represented this customer’s third gaming phone all incorporating a Pixelworks’ Iris visual processor. In order to better address unique applications and requirements across a broader set of perspective OEM engagements, during the quarter, we formally introduced the feature set and began sampling our fifth generation Iris visual processor to select mobile customers. Our fifth generation device incorporates significant advancements in visual processing while simultaneously maintained unprecedented power efficiency. A few of its many advanced features include intelligent adaptive motion processing, HDR10+ tone mapping and advanced local contrast management and enhancement. In addition to significantly improve power efficiency and dramatically improved video and image quality on both LCD and OLED displays, our fifth generation Iris supports refresh rates of up to 120 Hz. Early customer interest has been strong and our early adopter customers are targeting launches of the first mobile devices incorporating Iris 5 in the second half of 2019. Also during the quarter, we announced a cooperative agreement with Qualcomm to provide smartphone OEMs with the ability to seamlessly implement Pixelworks’ display calibration software on smartphones and tablets that utilize Qualcomm’s flagship Snapdragon 855 platform. This agreement represented a major milestone as it facilitated Pixelworks’ first ever software only solution for mobile devices, in addition to this software solution being publicly endorsed by Qualcomm as part of our announcement. Together, we are bringing improved color accuracy to a broad set of customers. Importantly, our innovative soft Iris solution includes only a subset of the full features provided by our Iris family of visual processors. Currently, the subset primarily consists of advanced color calibration and progressive color management that can be implemented on Snapdragon 855 based mobile devices. This offering now expands our Iris product portfolio to include both hardware and software solutions and increases the total addressable market for Pixelworks’ visual enhancement solutions. Taken together, the announcements of our fifth generation Iris processor and our Soft Iris solution have resulted in further expansion of our mobile customer engagements over the last 2 months. Further expanding both Pixelworks’ product portfolio and market opportunity last month we introduced TrueCut, a truly unique end-to-end video platform that extends the boundaries for both content creation and the consistent delivery of high-quality cinematic motion and HDR across a large section of mobile devices, home entertainment systems and cinema displays. TrueCut is a platform that consists of independent software tools for content creators, content distributors and also individual viewing devices. In the simplest terms, the fundamental value of this innovative new platform is the ability to maintain the content creators’ intent, while also taking full advantage of the capabilities of today’s incredible mobile, home entertainment and cinema displays. In conjunction with the commercial launch of TrueCut, we announced a multiyear marketing and license agreement with YOUKU to jointly advance the ecosystem for high-quality HDR video on mobile devices in China. As brief content for those that are not familiar with YOUKU, the company operates as a subsidiary of Alibaba, it is a leading video content provider and creator of digital entertainment in China with a subscriber base of over 500 million active users. YOUKU is a great strategic partner for TrueCut due to a combination of their large existing subscriber base and focus on delivering high-quality video in China. As part of the announced agreement, YOUKU will leverage Pixelworks’ TrueCut platform to remaster its existing library of content and also master newly created content in high-quality HDR. Additionally, Pixelworks is actively in the process of qualifying a significant number of existing mobile devices that are favored by YOUKU’s subscribers and we will also certify future devices by working directly with mobile OEMs to enable high-quality HDR video stream of YOUKU content. To conclude my remarks, since the beginning of the year, we have successfully executed on a number of meaningful initiatives and support of driving continued growth in our mobile and video delivery business. This includes multiple new announced wins, initial sampling of new fifth generation Iris visual processor to mobile OEMs and the securing of a series of strategic agreements with industry leading customers and ecosystem partners. In addition to serving as further validation of our technology and increasing Pixelworks’ prominence in key ecosystems, our recently announced agreements with both Qualcomm and YOUKU provide ideal platforms to introduce Pixelworks’ software solutions for the mobile market. While nearly all of the milestones I have discussed on today’s call are the result of years of effort, the team is excited to bring these initiatives to fruition in early 2019. By meaningfully expanding our product portfolio of hardware and software visual enhancement solutions and dramatically increasing Pixelworks’ total addressable market we are positioning the company for sustained long-term growth. We continue to have a robust and growing pipeline of engagements and we are extremely focused on converting engagements into new wins and momentum, which we look forward to announcing over the course of 2019. With that, I will turn the call over to Steve for a more detailed review of our first quarter financial results and guidance for the second quarter. Steve?