Andy Pease
Analyst · ROTH. Your line is now open
Thank you, Sue. While Q4 revenue came in at the low end of our guidance range, our progress towards realizing strategic goals was substantially above our expectations. I am excited to outline this progress that I believe sets the stage for a very significant second half revenue increase. But first, let’s take a couple of minutes to review the quarter and our outlook for Q1. During Q4, our display bridge and mature product revenue declined a little more than expected and smart connectivity revenue increased a little less than expected. Revenue from our sensor processing solutions increased in line with our expectations, but did not fully offset the lower than expected revenue from the other product groups. This increase in sensor processing solution revenue was driven by a greater than 50% increase in the number of unique designs we supported with production shipments. As I will outline in a minute, we are building substantial depth and breadth in our sensor processing solutions customer base. For Q1, we expect display bridge revenue to be essentially flat. However, for the full year of 2016, our outlook for display bridge revenue has improved since last conference call. Last quarter, we forecasted the display bridge revenue would continue through 2016. Subsequent to that, our largest competitor announced it was seeking a buyer for its broad line semiconductor business, which includes its display bridge product line. Given this new information, we now think demand for our highly versatile display bridge solutions will continue well beyond 2016 and that the second half of 2016 display bridge revenue will be above our original expectations. As a matter of fact, we are seeing evidence of this trend. We recently won a MIPI to RGB display bridge design in a new Smartphone accessory from a top 5 smartphone company. This design is expected to move into production this summer. We are anticipating a sequential decline in smart connectivity revenue this quarter. This is mostly due to the fact that some of our older smart connectivity designs are winding down and the ramp of our new PolarPro 3 designs will not fully offset the decline in Q1. For the longer term, we are very encouraged by the level of PolarPro 3 design activity. We believe that this will lead to a revamp of smart connectivity revenue beginning in Q2. We think this trend will accelerate during the second half of the year and into 2017. These new design activities include engagements with Tier 1 and high brand name recognition OEMs. We believe mature product revenue will decline slightly in Q1 and have adjusted our outlook for 2016 to $1.5 million plus or minus $200,000 per quarter. This is a slight decrease from the $1.7 million quarterly average we forecasted last quarter. We expect that the forecasted decline in smart connectivity revenue will be offset by an increase in sensor processing revenue during Q1. As Sue will describe when she provides our guidance, we believe this will lead us to report essentially flat total revenue for the seasonally soft first quarter. There could be an upside to this outlook, if some of our new OEM customers pull in schedules that in some cases call for early Q2 shipments. However, I prefer to remain a conservative outlook that is in line with the schedules that we have today. Last quarter, I stated that we had engagements and/or design wins with nine OEMs that have high brand name recognition and our top tier players within their product sectors. This number has increased by nearly 80% during the last three months. We are proud of that accomplishment and think it will drive a very significant increase in our second half new product revenue. To help you better appreciate our understanding, our standing with these top tier OEM customers, I have assembled some data from this list of engagements and design wins. We believe, half have annual volume potential in excess of 1 million units and most of those have multi-million annual volume potential. Over half are for our new EOS S3 sensor processing platform. Approximately two-thirds use our SenseMe software algorithm library, along with one of our sensor processing platforms. Over a third offer smartphone applications and while this means nearly two-thirds of the engagements in design wins are in wearable devices, these designs are with larger OEMs, having significantly higher volume potential than the IDH designs we have won in the past. These include an EOS S3 design win with the Tier 1 smartphone customer for a new wearable device. We expect to begin shipping products to support initial production late in Q2. In addition to this design win, we have other ongoing smart connectivity and sensor processing solution engagements with the same customer. In addition to this design win, we have an EOS S3 evaluation with a world leader in wearable fitness tracking solutions that has significant volume potential. This customer has already prepared an evaluation board for our new EOS S3 samples that we are scheduled to deliver later this month. With those samples, we expect the design win process to be completed in Q2. We signed a SenseMe agreement with [indiscernible] last quarter and we have four additional SenseMe pending agreements with very large well-recognized OEMs. Out of this total of five, we believe three have the potential to become sensor processing platform customers this year. In addition to these OEM activities, we have also engaged with a large semiconductor company on a companion device for a smartphone application, using our S2 sensor processing platform. The majority of our design wins and engagements with large OEMs are leveraging the programmable logic that’s embedded in our S2 and S3 sensor processing platforms. This is a very big deal, since none of the competitors in the market today are for programmable logic in their sensor hub, this gives us a substantial and durable competitive advantage. In addition to the significant increase in engagements and design wins, we have realized with top tier OEMs, we are seeing continued design activity with our targeted IDH and ODM customers. With this significant increase in engagement activity, we are very pleased that our customers that are now involved in their second or third designs are effectively leveraging the knowledge they gained during their first design efforts. This lessens the investment in our engineering resources that we need to make with these customers to drive new design opportunities in production and demonstrates the leverage inherent to our business model. This was consistent with the strategic goals we covered in our last conference call. I am pleased to announce that we received samples of our second EOS S3 spin ahead of schedule. This platform is in our engineering lab going through verification and characterization and we expect to begin shipping it to our strategic customers by the end of this month. The early data shows the refinements we implemented in this version of EOS S3 are delivering even lower power consumption than the data we have shared during our July 2015 conference call. These refinements have also enabled us to introduce a new member to the EOS family, the EOS S3 LP. With its significantly lower power consumption, the LP platform further differentiates us in the wearables and IoT markets. We will provide you with more color on EOS S3 LP in an upcoming press release. In conjunction with these new devices, we are releasing an upgrade to our integrated development environment and software framework. This will be particularly helpful for our large OEM customers and further reduce the amount of QuickLogic engineering time it takes to win new designs and drive those designs into production. Several of our customers have been waiting for our new EOS S3 samples and our updated integrated development environment tool to complete their designs. We believe that once we get these samples into our customer hands, our design activity will accelerate and will get a much clearer picture of our customers’ production schedules for 2016 and beyond. With that, I will turn the call back over to Sue for our Q1 guidance. Following that, I will rejoin you for my closing comments.