Todd DeBonis
Analyst · Roth Capital
Thank you, Elias, and good afternoon to those joining today's call over the phone and webcast. The third quarter played out largely as expected with revenue of $18.1 million coming in above the midpoint of our guidance range. We continue to execute well across all areas of the business and Mobile revenue grew 87% sequentially, becoming a larger portion of our overall revenue mix. Gross margin was approximately 54% and operating expenses in the quarter were $10.3 million, resulting in an adjusted EPS of $0.01 loss. All of which were also at or near the midpoint of our guidance. Throughout this year, we've remained focused on meaningfully advancing our growth initiative in Mobile. This has included expanding our portfolio of visual processing solutions to now include multiple Iris visual processors with select feature sets at compelling price points as well as the introductions of our software-only solutions, Soft Iris, and also our innovative end-to-end cinematic video platform, TrueCut. We've also secured a number of key strategic partnerships that are contributing to our current co-marketing efforts and the further development of ecosystems that encourage increased adoption of Pixelworks' technology. Together with our broader portfolio of visual processing solutions, we have significantly expanded Pixelworks' total addressable market resulting in a growing number of wins at existing and multiple first-time mobile customers. Taking a closer look at our Mobile business in the third quarter. As I mentioned, revenue from Mobile grew 87% sequentially and was up over 66% year-over-year to a quarterly record. It was comprised almost entirely of revenue contribution from our Iris solutions, including the first commercial revenue from our Soft Iris solution. As further evidence of our consistent growth momentum, the third quarter represented the eighth consecutive quarter -- eighth consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth and Mobile revenue for the first time -- 9 months of 2019, which grew 90% over the same period over 2018. During the third quarter, we formerly announced a total of 5 design wins on newly launched smartphones across 4 different mobile OEMs, one of which TCL was the first-time new smartphone customer. I discussed 2 of these wins as part of our second quarter conference call, the Shark 2 Pro, which was Black Shark's sports device to include our Iris visual processor and the ASUS launch of the ROG Phone 2 in conjunction with Tencent Games. As a reminder, both of these leading smartphones targeted for gamers leverage Qualcomm's Snapdragon 855 Plus mobile platform. And specific to the ROG Phone 2, it is the first smartphone to incorporate our Soft Iris solution. More recently, we announced wins on the Nokia 7.2 and Nokia 6.2 smartphones as part of our continued collaborative partnership with HMD Global. Both devices were launched in September at IFA 2019 and feature PureDisplay technology enabled by Pixelworks' Iris visual processor to deliver a premium mobile display experience at an affordable price. As compared to similarly priced Android smartphones, the Nokia 7.2 and Nokia 6.2 render a 64-fold increase in color tonality through a full 10-bit certified HDR display and produce up to 3x improvement in video contrast by leveraging dynamic backlight control in combination with Pixelworks' industry-leading Tone Mapping technology. Also launched in IFA was the TCL PLEX smartphone, which utilizes our Iris visual processor to provide a range of premium features, including HDR10, SDR to HDR conversion, advanced sharpness and contrast enhancement as well as auto-adaptive display. As the world's largest or second largest TV manufacturer, TCL chose to leverage Pixelworks' technology, an expertise as part of a relaunch into the mobile market and bring a marquee-leading TV experience to its first TCL branded smartphone. In addition to representing a new mobile customer, this win with TCL also serves as further validation of our advanced visual display technology for mobile devices. All of these recently launched smartphones that incorporate either our Iris visual processor or newly introduced Soft Iris solution have received excellent reviews and recognition for having uniquely high-performance displays. They each contributed to Mobile revenue during the quarter and we expect to ship and support a follow-on orders from these customers in the fourth quarter, which I'll discuss more towards the end of my prepared remarks. Also complementing our longer term growth initiative in Mobile is TrueCut. Since our commercial introduction of this innovative end-to-end solution for cinematic motion and HDR earlier this year, our primary focus has been on expanding the platform's market reach as well as the amount of content available on TrueCut format. Through ongoing close collaboration with our lead customer YOUKU, we've continued to make consistent and substantial progress on several key metrics. Over the last quarter, the amount of video content available in TrueCut format has more than quadrupled from 2,500 hours to more than 10,000 hours of available content. Additionally, Pixelworks has expanded the number of TrueCut-enabled smartphones utilizing the YOUKU app from approximately 70 existing models across 6 mobile OEMs at the end of June to now over 100 existing smartphone models across 9 different mobile OEMs. Collectively, these metrics translate into having successfully extended the reach of TrueCut content to well over 100 million mobile device users and to more than 55% of all daily average users of YOUKU in China. As a result, we firmly believe that Pixelworks' TrueCut solution is enabling the single most comprehensive ecosystem for creation, delivery and viewing of high-quality HDR video in mobile devices in China -- on mobile devices in China. Today, YOUKU now has a more standardized process in place for efficient conversion of its existing content library and they also remain committed to developing new high-quality HDR content mastered in original TrueCut format. In addition to Pixelworks' continuing to qualify additional existing mobile devices to stream high-quality HDR video content, exclusively through the YOUKU app, we are actively pursuing direct engagements for the TrueCut certification of next-generation devices with mobile, TV and set-top box OEMs. I've discussed previously, TrueCut's value proposition and total market opportunity extends well beyond the mobile device market, a fundamental part of the end-to-end platform solution that we have developed with TrueCut is a set of software tools designed to expand the boundaries for the creators of high-quality cinematic motion and HDR content. With this in mind, I want to once again acknowledge our TrueCut team following the recently announced Entertainment Technology Lumiere Award from the Advanced Imaging Society for TrueCut Motion Grading tools. This second prestigious award serves as further recognition of TrueCut's innovation and unique value it provides to content creators seeking to deliver superior quality content. Shifting to our Video Delivery business. Following several consecutive quarters of double-digit growth, revenue was up slightly in the third quarter on both the sequential and year-over-year basis. The growth of Video Delivery in recent quarters has been driven by initial customer ramps of new ADSB-compatible 4K PVRs and set-top converter boxes for the Japanese consumer electronics market. Early in the third quarter, we observed a notable decline in forward bookings as our lead customers experienced a much softer pull-through from consumers, particularly for set-top box converter products. As a result, we believe our OEM customers are focused on reducing existing inventories in the fourth quarter and through their fiscal year that ends in March of 2020. On a positive side, during the quarter, we experienced a meaningful uptick in orders of our XCode transcoders from a leading OTA customer. This increase was in support of initial builds of new dual and quad tuner OTA devices in advance of our customers' planned product launches during the next several quarters. Based upon the current bookings associated with these new product launches, we currently expect to generate record revenue from OTA transcoders in the fourth quarter. Although, this anticipated increase in OTA revenue will be more than offset in the near term by an inventory correction of the Japanese consumer electronics market, looking several quarters out, we remain well positioned with multiple engagements on new programs for next-generation in-home media and OTA devices. Additionally, we believe that the increased availability of high-quality broadcast content, particularly around Japan's hosting of the Olympics in 2020 and new introductions of feature-rich 4K ADSB-compatible devices will contribute to a broader consumer adoption and the potential for a new growth in Video Delivery during the course of next year. Turning to a brief update on digital projector. As expected, revenue declined sequentially and year-over-year, primarily reflecting increased caution among customers in reacting to prevailing macroeconomic headwinds. More specifically, the demand profile of several end markets has continued to remain soft, particularly in China where government spending on education can account for as much as 2/3 of their projector end market demand. Although, we had remained hopeful that the lower-than-normal book-to-bill entering the third quarter could firm up as the year progressed, we have yet to see a sustainable uptick in order demand from customers. Instead, the current market environment within projector is more indicative of a prolonged inventory correction. Also contributing to the headwinds and our cautious near-term outlook for projector, we expect our large co-development customer to start transitioning to our next-generation SoC in the beginning of the fourth quarter. Although, we still anticipate these customers transition to play out over at least several quarters, the new chips lower ASP will serve as an additional headwind to the project revenue in future quarters. As such, we continue to expect lower-than-historical seasonal demand in the digital projector business through at least early next year. Looking forward and also circling back to my comments from last quarter, regarding our engagement with a Tier 1 mobile customer targeting a product launch before year-end. As a result of the tremendous effort put forth by our team in recent months, the depth and scope of this engagement has expanded beyond the first program. This involves further prioritizing our resources, both on-site at the Tier 1 customer's location and expanding our local team by approximately 10 software and application engineers. Additionally, we negotiated a shared risk agreement with this customer that led to booking significant Iris 5 backlog in anticipation of a ramp of a series of programs through Q1 of next year. Although, we are building this inventory in preparation for a positive outcome on all of the programs, it increasingly looks like the launch schedule for the first program may be too aggressive for our Iris 5 digital processor to be included. As such, our guidance for the fourth quarter assumes no contribution from this first in a series of program engagements with this Tier 1 customer. Given the concentrated effort we are making at this Tier 1 customer, in addition to supporting our previously announced customers, we've had to become highly selective on further expansion of Mobile customer engagements in the near term. As you may have read, China's 3 mobile service providers today launched their 5G service in 50 cities throughout China. As of today, there is a limited number of 5G mobile devices available from the leading Chinese smartphone OEMs. And there is a race to see which OEM can fill out their 5G product line first. In addition, there's a race to incorporate high frame rate, high-performance displays in conjunction with this 5G rollout. This has created a conducive environment for our visual processing solutions. We are seeing strong interest from additional customers for both our premium, midrange and software solutions, including from additional Tier 1 mobile OEMs. As such, we are aggressively working to position new and existing resources in order to address some of these additional engagement opportunities during the course of 2020. In closing, and specific to our outlook for the fourth quarter, our guidance reflects the combined impact of a softer macroeconomic environment, seasonality and more pronounced than anticipated inventory corrections across both our projector and Video Delivery businesses. We expect these headwinds to be somewhat offset by a continued ramp and another quarter of solid sequential growth in Mobile. Specific to the ongoing ramp in Mobile, I want to emphasize that we do not expect the overall macroeconomic backdrop to meaningfully influence the near-term ramp either positively or negatively, additionally, based upon the current bookings associated with the anticipated design wins, we believe that Mobile will account for up to 20% of our revenue guidance in the fourth quarter. And finally, Mobile revenue beyond the fourth quarter will be heavily dependent on 2 critical factors. Our continued execution on the technical requirements between now and year-end. And also the market uptick of our Tier 1 customers planned launch of these new devices. With that, I'll turn the call over to Elias for a review of our third quarter financial results as well as a more detailed guidance for the fourth quarter.