Mohan Maheswaran
Analyst · B. Riley FBR
Thank you, Emeka. Good afternoon, everyone. I will discuss our Q3 fiscal year 2018 performance by end market and by product group, and then provide our outlook for Q4 fiscal year 2018. In Q3 of fiscal year 2018, we reported non-GAAP net revenues of $156.6 million, which was flat sequentially, and up 11% over the same period a year ago. We posted non-GAAP gross margin of 61.3%, and achieved a record non-GAAP earnings per diluted share of $0.54. In Q3 of fiscal year 2018, demand from the high-end consumer market increased over the prior quarter and represented 30% of total net revenues. Approximately 23% of high-end consumer net revenues were attributable to mobile devices, and approximately 7% were attributable to other consumer systems. Demand from the industrial market also increased over the prior quarter and represented 28% of total net revenues. Demand from the enterprise computing and communications end markets both decreased over the prior quarter and represented 31% and 11% of total net revenues respectively. I will now discuss the performance of each of our product groups, beginning with our Signal Integrity Product Group. In Q3 of fiscal year 2018, net revenues from our Signal Integrity Product Group declined over the prior quarter as expected, but declined over the quarter as expected, but increased 6% over the same period a year ago and represented 41% of total net revenues. Demand from China infrastructure remained relatively soft through the quarter as we had expected. We anticipate this weakness to continue into Q4. Weakness in the 2.5 gig PON market was somewhat upset by strengthen the 10-gig PON market. Despite the current softness in the PON market, Semtech’s PON business has experienced year-on-year growth through the first nine months of FY 2018. In Q3, our base station business driven mostly by China declined and we anticipate that this business will also remain soft in Q4. We do not expect this business to show significant growth until 5G deployments begin sometime towards the beginning of calendar year 2019. Our data center business continues to remain very healthy. Customer interest in our ClearEdge CDR platform remains very strong as our cloud infrastructure customers migrate their optical connectivity links to 100-gigabit per second. We are seeing very good design win momentum in 100-gigabit per second QSFP 28 optical modules used in mega data centers, where we believe we have a leadership position. In Q3, we announced the production availability of our latest ClearEdge product, which integrates our high performance 25-gigabit per second CDR with enhanced linear driver and TIA and targets SFP 28 short reach modules and active optical cables. Our fiber edge PMD platform, which is a complement to our ClearEdge CDR platform is now sampling. Fiber edge expands our Sem, but our first 100-gigabit second linear driver and TIA, which provides a seamless interface to 100-gigbit per second PAM4 optics. We’re seeing solid interest in our fiber edge platform from customers developing 100-gig, 200-gig, and 400-gig PAM4 modules. During the quarter, we announced the availability of the industry's first fully integrated 5PMD chipset, the single-lambda 100-gigabit per second PAM4 optical modules. This new 100-gigabit per second chipset combines our fiber edge PMD platform with MultiPhy's FlexPhy DSP platform to deliver a fully optimized seamless 5PMD solution for optical modules targeted at next-generation hyperscale data centers. Semtech’s leadership position in high speed optical connectivity will be further strengthened with the release of our PAM4 chipset and the release of next generation high performance ClearEdge based products. Despite the current demand softness in China with the steady pace of new product introductions targeted at next generation data centers, we believe that our signal integrity product group is well positioned to continue to grow on an annual basis. For Q4 of fiscal year 2018, we expect our signal-integrity product group to decline as modest growth in data center spending is expected to be offset by continued softness in China infrastructure spending. Moving on to our Protection Product Group. In Q3 of fiscal year 2018, net revenues from our Protection Product Group increased 10% sequentially and 23% over the same period a year ago and represented 32% of total net revenues. Demand from our largest Korean smartphone customer increased over the prior quarter, driven by the ramp up of several new smartphones. We also saw demand increase from our major North American handset customer. The increasing use of advanced lithography processors and the increasing use of advanced OLED display in smartphones provide Semtech with a unique opportunity as our Z platform is ideally suited to protect these systems. In Q3, our smartphones strength in Korea and North America was offset by its weakness in the China’s smartphone market. Our protection business is focused on further diversifying by introducing new solutions that specifically target the automotive, industrial, high-speed computing and communication segments. We believe this diversification along with broader customer penetration within the Smartphone segment will help drive growth in our protection business over the next several years. In Q4 of fiscal year 2018, we expect our protection business to decrease sequentially due to traditional seasonal declines associated with the year-end customer inventory management and ongoing China's smartphone softness. Turning to our Wireless and Sensing Product Group. In Q3 of fiscal year 2018, net revenues from our Wireless and Sensing Product Group decreased from the prior quarter’s record performance as expected, but increased 29% over the same quarter a year-ago and represented 20% of total net revenues. In Q3, our LoRa related business delivered another record performance with record revenues, record bookings and record design wins. We believe we are on track to meet our goal of generating between $40 million and $50 million in LoRa enabled revenues this year and between $80 million and $100 million next year. The LoRa momentum across the globe continues to deliver exciting results as we expect to have LoRa based network deployments completed or underway in more than 45 countries worldwide and over 70,000 gateways deployed by the end of this fiscal year. These global deployments are enabling the proliferation of many new and exciting used cases. In addition, the LoRa Alliance continues to grow with new global leaders joining the alliance. This week we announced selective sampling of the industry's first disposable LoRaWAN tag reference design. This low-cost, low-power disposable, long-range tag enables a number of new LPWAN use cases to be realized including smart health, smart media, and smart insurance applications. We expect that initial proof of concept using this tag will be completed in the next two quarters with production release of the tag by the second half of fiscal year 2019. Once the tag is fully available and proof-of-concept is completed, we anticipate the LoRaWAN SAM will increase dramatically as new use cases emerge. Our future roadmap includes both disposable and rechargeable, flex and paper substrates tag reference designs, which we believe will enable billions of LoRaWAN tags to proliferate the IoT industry in the future. We will communicate progress related to our LoRaWAN tag strategy on future earnings calls. During the quarter, we also made several joint announcements with partners driving the global LoRaWAN momentum. These included Advantech, a leading supplier of industrial communications solutions launched its Wizzard mode and SmartSwarm Gateway making it possible to place sensors and install gateways in remote areas and harsh environments, where they help to detect potential failures and prevent costly shutdowns. Netvox, an OEM and cloud service provider announced it is converting its current Zigbee solutions to support the growing LoRaWAN ecosystem targeted at small cities, smart buildings, and smart agriculture applications. Also a Chinese bike sharing company operating in more than 180 cities with approximately 10 million bicycles announced it would be putting LoRa connectivity on its bicycles to complement it would be putting a lower connectivity on its bicycles to complement its current connectivity options. As a LoRaWAN standard proliferates across the industry, along with our alliance partners, we continue to look for ways to effectively promote and educate the industry on LoRa technology. We recently launched the LoRaWAN Academy with the help of several alliance partners. The LoRaWAN Academy was developed to educate the next generation of hardware, software and computer science engineers on real world IoT applications. This platform provides a hands-on comprehensive curriculum for member universities to give future engineers, the fundamental skills needed to develop LoRaWAN network infrastructure and LoRaWAN end nodes and drive new IoT applications. The LPWAN market is clearly an exciting emerging market and we believe LoRa is ideally suited to lead this market. In Q3, our proximity sensing business decreased following the previous quarters’ record performance. We expect this business to continue to be a growth driver for our Wireless and Sensing Product Group as all mobile device manufacturers address the increasing global concerns around excessive smartphone RF emissions. Many more countries are now adopting stricter RF emissions control, driving increased interest and demand for our proximity sensing platforms. For Q4 of fiscal year 2018, we expect net revenues from our Wireless and Sensing Product Group decline to seasonally lower proximity sensing demand from the smartphone market. Turning to Power and High-Rel product group, in Q3 of fiscal year 2018, our Power and High-Rel product increased 7% sequentially and represented 8% of total net revenues. Our Power and High-Rel reliability product group delivered another strong quarter of new product releases with 11 new products. Customer designing activity for wireless charging products has picked up and the industry adoption of wireless charging is increasing momentum wireless charging is increasing momentum. We are seeing increased designing activity in the industrial and automotive markets and expect additional opportunities to emerge in the wearable segment. In Q4 of fiscal year 2018, we expect net revenues from our Power and High-Reliability Product Group to increase. In Q3, the total company distribution POS was approximately flat with the prior quarter’s record performance. Q3 distributor days of inventory increased to 75 days which represents the midpoint of our targeted range of 70 to 80 days. Our distributor business remains balanced, with 58% of the total POS coming from high end consumer and enterprise computing end markets, and 42% of total POS coming from the industrial and communications end markets. Moving on to new products and design wins. In Q3 of fiscal year 2018, we released 25 new products and we achieved 2,055 new design wins. Q3 was also a record design win quarter, in terms of design wins measured in dollars. Now let me discuss our outlook for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2018. Based on current bookings trends, we are estimating Q4 non-GAAP net revenues to be between $138 million and $142 million. To attain the midpoint of our guidance range or approximately $140 million, we needed net turn orders of approximately 41% at the beginning of Q4. We expect our Q4 GAAP earnings to be between $0.08 and $0.10 per diluted share, and our Q4 non-GAAP earnings to be between $0.40 and $0.42 per diluted share. I will now hand the call back to the operator. And Sandy, Emeka, and I will be happy to answer any questions. Operator?