Robert A. Bruggeworth
Analyst · Mike Burton with Brean Capital
Thank you, Doug, and welcome, everyone. We're very pleased today to report strong financial results and outstanding execution by the entire RFMD team. Revenue for the quarter was in line with our guidance provided January 28, at $256 million while earnings per share of $0.12 was well ahead of guidance on the strength of robust margin expansion and operating leverage. Despite the seasonal decline in March revenue, RFMD's gross margin for the quarter expanded sequentially by 230 basis points to 42%. That's 2 percentage points ahead of our original guidance of 40%. On our quarterly earnings call, 1 year ago, we highlighted our goal to expand RFMD's gross margin by 300 to 400 basis points in 4 quarters. Four quarters later, we've nearly doubled that goal, expanding gross margin by 760 basis points. RFMD is executing on multiple long-term structural initiatives that are enhancing our operating model and delivering robust improvements on our financial performance. Today, we have greater than 75 initiatives underway that roll up into one comprehensive effort, spanning our entire organization. We are reducing our costs, in our fab, in our packaging and test facilities, across our supply chain and in how we design our products, and we're confident we can drive margins even higher. We're also confident in our ability to outpace our industry's growth rate in fiscal '15. One of the reasons for that is the market for RF Solutions is growing faster than the handset market. As an example, the dollar content available to RFMD in today's LTE and LTE-Advanced smartphones can easily exceed $10, versus $7 to $8 in the highest tier smartphones just a few years ago. That's significantly ahead of the year-over-year growth rate in smartphone units. That's due to a number of factors. First, smartphone manufacturers and carriers are acquiring more modes and more bands, as well as 802.11ac connectivity in order to maximize data throughput and better monetize the carrier's investments in spectrum and network capacity. To support these additional modes and bands, the industry is adopting technologies like envelope tracking, carrier aggregation and transmit MIMO, all of which expand our RF content opportunities further and add complexity to the device, thereby creating greater demand for our services. In terms of timing, we are beginning to support the volume ramps of many of this year's most popular devices, and we expect this to accelerate into the September quarter with the ramp of this year's marquee smartphones and tablets, weighted towards the back half of this calendar year. We're seeing a similar dynamic play out in midtier phones. The 3G feature phones of yesterday are evolving to include additional LTE bands, and this is increasing the RF content by $2 to $3. In developing geographies, the migration from 2G voice only phones to higher dollar content 3G entry devices is increasing our content opportunity in the entry-level by as much as 2 to 3 times, depending on the band count and the addition of WiFi. What's even more exciting and is a much larger opportunity for RFMD, is the deployment of 4G TD-LTE in China. RFMD has historically enjoyed a very strong presence in China, with both customers and channel partners, and we're in the very early stages of the deployment of TD-LTE. We enjoyed meaningful revenue related to multi mode TD-LTE devices this quarter, and we see the increasingly, rapid -- we see that increasing rapidly to tens of millions of dollars per quarter, across a broad portfolio of PAs, switches and antenna-tuning components. In fact, one large multinational customer based in China, RFMD has secured as many as 10 of our parts per phone, in support of their upcoming flagship smartphone launch. The demand we're seeing today related to 5-mode TD-LTE is ahead of where many industry analysts had forecast, and some of our largest customers are telling us there could be more than 150 million TD-LTE devices produced this year. Supporting this view, TD-LTE is driving significant new investment in wireless infrastructure. According to the China News Service, China Mobile aims to install 500,000 new base stations in 2014, and another 500,000 by 2016, driving up demand for MPG's range of base stationed components. So our end markets are growing, and the RF PAM is growing even faster. There are distinct, long-term growth drivers that favor RFMD, like TD-LTE in China, two-by-two MIMO WiFi connectivity in smartphones, additional LTE bands and feature phones, additional 3G bands and entry smartphones and the advent of new cellular technologies like envelope tracking, carrier aggregation on the downlink and later, carrier aggregation on the uplink. More specific to RFMD, we're capturing additional content in new categories like antenna tuning, impedance tuning, diversity switches, power management circuits, highly integrated receive modules and soon, RF Fusion, a complete RF front-end solution for 4G world phones and tablets. RFMD is also positioned to capture additional growth created by the Internet of Things, which is beginning to add sensing, processing and connectivity capability to nearly any object imaginable, and encompasses a broad array of global macro trends like embedded connectivity, wearable technology, the connected home, automotive WiFi and others. RFMD is capturing broad opportunities in Smart Energy and home area networks, with our ZigBee and WiFi solutions, and we're at the forefront of new standards in development, like the sub-1 gigahertz standards enabling long-range mesh networks and the 802.11p standard for automotive networks. We are enjoying broad-based design win activity in WiFi for both mobile and non-mobile applications like routers, access points, set-top boxes and televisions. We see double-digit growth opportunities in WiFi, especially where device requirements favor RFMD's performance leadership. So looking at our diversified growth opportunities, our diversified product portfolio and the multiple efforts underway to expand gross margin and enhance our operating model, we are confident in delivering revenue growth ahead of our underlying markets, gross margin at the top of our industry, powerful operating leverage, robust EPS growth and strong free cash flow. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Dean.