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Sequans Communications S.A. (SQNS)

Q3 2014 Earnings Call· Thu, Oct 23, 2014

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Welcome to the Sequans Third Quarter 2014 Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session; instructions will be given at that time. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. Before I turn the conference over to our host, Mr. Georges Karam, I’d like to remind you of the following important information on behalf of Sequans. This call contains projections and other forward-looking statements regarding future events or our future financial performance. All statements other than the present and historical facts and conditions discussed in this call, including any statements regarding our future results of operations and financial positions, business strategy, plans and our objectives for future operations are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 as amended. These statements are only predictions and reflect our current beliefs and expectations with respect to future events and are based on assumptions and subject to risks and uncertainties and subject to change at any time. We operate in a very competitive and rapidly changing environment. New risks emerge from time-to-time. Given these risks and uncertainties, you should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. Actual events or results may differ materially from those contained in the projections or forward-looking statements. More information on factors that could affect our business and financial results are included in our public filings made with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Please go ahead, sir.

Georges Karam

Management

Thank you, Tania. Good morning everybody. This is George speaking. I’m with Deborah Choate, our Chief Financial Officer. We are very pleased to welcome you to our third quarter 2014 results conference call. And thanks for joining. Our third quarter revenue reflected a 68% increase in LTE product revenue compared to second quarter. Driven mainly by the strong growth in our router business from emerging and Greenfield carriers. We also had over a $1 million of module business this quarter. Reflecting shipments for a mobile computing design win. We are also very happy to say that two of our large design wins targeting the U.S. market are moving through the final phases of testing and approval and we expect to have related volume shipment in the fourth quarter. On the less good news, we had some product timing issue that puts Q3 revenue at the low-end of our guidance and reduces our growth expectation for the fourth quarter. Despite all these challenges it’s important to get in the mind that these timing issues are unrelated to Sequans and do not affect our relationship with customers or operator because they are not a reflection on our performance. We are not losing business to competitor in fact the opposite is true. We have replaced the original vendor in some recent design wins. Finally, in most of the cases we continue to be engaged with these customers on products to launch in 2015. This means the business potential remains valid despite the short-term timing issue. Before I get into to the outlook by category and region, I will address a few additional accomplishments during the third quarter that are not reflected in the revenue line or even in our guidance. We added two new design wins during the third quarter and made additional…

Deborah Choate

Management

Hello everyone. I would like to add some details about our Q3 financial results cover our guidance for Q4 and update you on some sources of additional funding. Revenues in the third quarter of 2014 were $6.5 million, a 27% sequential increase and a 59% increase compared to the third quarter of 2013. LTE sales were about 80% of total revenues up from about 60% in Q2. We shifted approximately 400,000 units in the quarter which is about the same as the second quarter which showed an increase in LTE modules and chips offset by a decrease in WiMAX shipments. We had three 10% customers in the quarter Gentech with 48% of the total, our distributor for several Chinese customers with 18% and Huawei with 13%. We have realized an overall IFRS gross margin of 39.4% slightly better than our guidance of above 35%. The decrease in gross margin for the second quarter was due to a higher proportion of modules in the sales mix in Q3. Operating expenses were $10.5 million in the third quarter slightly lower than a level in the second quarter. Our third quarter operating loss which includes stock-based compensation expense was $8 million compared to an operating loss of 8.7% in the second quarter and an operating loss of $8.8 million in the third quarter of 2013. Net loss was $8.1 million in Q3 compared to net losses of $8.7 million in Q2 and $8.8 million in the third quarter of 2013. Basic and diluted loss per share was $0.14 in the third quarter of 2014 based on 59.1 million shares outstanding compared to a net loss per share of $0.15 in the second quarter also based on 59.1 million shares. Basic and diluted loss per share was $0.20 in the third quarter of 2013.…

Georges Karam

Management

Thanks Deb. So to conclude, Sequans and mainly focuses on three main bullets just to conclude on the business segment the first bullet to say is that our business and the home and portable router is strengthening and going very well. We are very successful and we have a dominant market share in the emerging market and now we are expanding to other markets where we are going to start seeing more revenue to come specifically that we expect coming from the United States. In our other segment, which is more emerging business for Sequans, the mobile computing and machine-to-machine and Internet of things area this business is heading really in the right direction with some design wins turning now to revenue in the United States. Obviously, the potential of Internet of things is huge and we are just at the beginning of the business wave there. The third bullet to mention is that our technology leadership position is opening to us few opportunity for strategic engagements this will help financing some of our future LTE roadmap allowing us to reinforce our cash resources and open new market. So all in all we remain excited about our future and very confident about our ability to succeed. Before we open the call to questions, I’d like to mention that we are doing our best to inform the investment community in a transparent and timely way within the constraints of our contextual agreements with customer. Since it’s often less complicated to obtain permission to refer to something already in the public domain or linked to something relevant our customers or/and operator has made public we are letting you know that we may be using Twitter our blog page and other social media channel to keep you informed; in addition, obviously, to press releases and other more formal types of disclosure. Therefore, we encourage you to follow us on Twitter and keep up with us on other social media channels. We are practical we’ll try to distinguish communications expected to be of interest to the investment community by including our cash tag, the dollar sign before our ticket symbol and relevant social media content. Now I will be happy to take your questions. Operator?

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And our first question will come from the line of Quinn Bolton with Needham. Please go ahead. Quinn Bolton - Needham & Company: Wanted to start George you gave a good summary of some of the specific projects you’re working on with some of the unit opportunities. I was wondering if you might be able to take a step back now that we’re closing in on the end of 2014 and as you look out to next year. Can you perhaps size the overall opportunity for single mode LTEs you see it now between the emerging markets, home portable routers perhaps the opportunities in China and India not necessarily what you expect to get. But just the entire market how many units do you think could ship next year?

Georges Karam

Management

So, essentially the way we’re looking to it today we’re working with obviously evaluating bottom up and some studies and specifically we’re referring quite our number to strategic analytics there. The way we look we are I mean I think comfortable in single mode LTE I am talking here about data devices for next year. We are talking about something more than 30 million units. This is what we see as addressable market for single mode LTE on the data devices. And this is more or less we see close to one third of this coming from the home router portable router and then maybe little bit more on mobile computing and then machine-to-machine and the rest is machine-to-machine. So this is how we look to that’s kind of 35 million unit, 33 million to 35 million units this is the number I have in mind. And as I said more split one-third mobile router than the remaining two-third it’s a little bit more in favor of the mobile computing than machine-to-machine. And obviously now if you project this for Sequans I mean what I said, we are honestly in the home router space all this work in the last three years positioned us really in a good position. Because this is the segment we start addressing at the beginning being the national segment to be single-mode LTE at the beginning. And this is obviously as I said emerging market as I feel like we are really in very very strong market share of that. And we are coming to the U.S. we have a reported in Europe, in China and India. So all this is making an good move for us and we hope that we should have a decent market share in this segment which say 10 million…

Georges Karam

Management

I mean essentially what we in terms of business itself, I mean the information we have today from our customer that this will go until Q1. So we are planning some shipment as well in Q4. But honestly, we are very very cautious not to build inventory on our WiMAX, the ship [ph] uses some special configuration if you want a little bit that makes it the kind of building new and new [indiscernible] I mean using our some of our inventory but not all of inventory to go there. And we are really kind of building back-to-back. And just to mention these days there is demand, there is some demand for Q4 that’s why we are not even able to serve or we are struggling to serve on time. But definitely we are not talking too much about this because we believe that this is vanishing sometime next year at the beginning of the next year. And I am not too much interested on this revenue. But we believe we will see similar level in Q4 as we did in Q3 in terms of revenue. Quinn Bolton - Needham & Company: Great. And the last question for me and I will get back in the queue. You mentioned at couple of different times advanced discussions about some long-term projects that sounds like not only do they give you revenue opportunity but could provide some financing. I am sure the nature of those discussions are pretty confidential. But is there anything you can say in terms of technology direction is it or trying to advance LTE up in the cat 6, 7, 8 kind of higher speed LTE or is it more around some of the lower speed LTE opportunities for the Internet of things. Any additional color you might be able to provide?

Georges Karam

Management

What they can say there here obviously without keeping kind of confidential nature of the discussion is that. What we are doing is something which is part of our main strategy. We are not reinventing something new just to get partnership and get cash funding and so on. The only thing I am interested in is really delivering on the vision we have there. And when you look to our roadmap and how we see LTE, I believe we are one of the unique player who has positioned a clear picture on this by saying there are two ways there. One driving more for the rich performance and this is the cat 9 and beyond now we are at cat 6 so going further. And one towards the Internet of things the low power, low cost solution which we call this the cat 0 technology. So bus are on our table; bus technology are very important for the future of the company. We are really great now with cat 4 and cat 6. But as you know this is really the kind of moving target technology there is always a new development and this is one of the challenge we faced as a company because we cannot reduce our R&D investment if we want to maintain our leadership on this. But on the same time we have a lot of things to do so aligning with partners makes sense but address more about give more colors on what we are doing. But definitely in something we are planning to do in anyway.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Next we’ll go to the line of Jaeson Schmidt - Lake Street Capital Markets

Jaeson Schmidt - Lake Street Capital Markets

Analyst

Thanks for taking my questions. George just want to see if without the customer launch delays on push outs, if you would have been closer to achieving your prior goal of exiting the year at double digit revenues?

Georges Karam

Management

I mean definitely yes. I mean to be honest I spoke about two delays that happened in Q4 and until Q3 we are thinking that this would be there. And this definitely impacted us by a couple of million dollars. There is also positivity which is in any case in our guidance that there is some of the because there are new products launching to market we could have good supply just in terms of volume and so on. It’s very, very hard to estimate what will happen in the holiday season so we have a cautious approach part of this but there is definitely an impact of the project that get delayed for the next year.

Jaeson Schmidt - Lake Street Capital Markets

Analyst

Okay and I know their launch date are completely out of your hands and not related to your products. But how confident are you into your own visibility into some of these schedules?

Georges Karam

Management

I mean for the one launching or whatever I mentioned soon before I am quite confident I mean anything can happen at some time you could launch a product and the customer won’t buy it anything can happen. But in general the one we are mentioning here there are really we’re talking about the last steps also we don’t see there is a lot of resources behind it and so on reason from our customer to get the top earnings so I am confident on this. On the other aspects I mean there is some disappointment essentially we had more struggle with the mobile computing devices where they are specialized if you want SKU and the guys when they miss for whatever reason or what problem they have sometimes it could be commercial problem sometimes just only technical problem is they miss it then window of opportunity is too late it’s close and then they move it for the next window. And you have essentially three windows in a year and this is really was painful for us because we had a few like this in the past and we have recently one with the kids tablet. And we have another one which as I mentioned on the call router that we are now last year. It has been a little bit put on hold for some, I will say, good reason that for the time being is I don’t have [indiscernible] that this is kind of delayed, we’ll see hopefully this will come back.

Jaeson Schmidt - Lake Street Capital Markets

Analyst

Okay. And then just the last one from me, it sounds like you guys are taking some nice share from the competitors. Just wondering why you guys are waiting? I mean is it performance? Is it price? Is it your long standing relationship with the carriers or combination?

Georges Karam

Management

There is combination of many things. I mean first of all it’s a lot of fault on our side I mean I appreciate the patience of all the investors for two years we’re developing this technology coming really with leading edge technology sell it to the carriers wait for the windows of single-mode opportunity to open it and capture it. We lost the winning over last week we didn’t participate of one or two opportunity that we could be there if we were there I believe we’d included we were not ready to get it, that’s all what happened. But now as we are coming with our technology much better performance because this is the cat 4 product where the guys shipping there at cat 3, it’s cat 4 and cat 6 it’s really mature and ready in Sequans. And also we have this unique the Colibri approach which is early the kind of changing the game because we have this is not just only optimizing tricks and just only cat to reduce solution it’s by design build really to come with very aggressive cost factor not only the cost of the chip but as well the cost of the [indiscernible] solution. That mix has been very attractive for the people to have more essentially when you go to M2M when you go to some devices that they can live with Wi-Fi and now we are offering them low cost LTE solution we talk about Colibri start $20 module full solution in the hand of the customer early this is very, very aggressive and attractive. So for all those good reasons really sometimes performance we come with cat 6 for example one project because we came with our cat 6 with one other project because we are ready with cat 4. And some reasons sometimes because of the Colibri cat position.

Operator

Operator

Thank you (Operator Instructions). Next we will go to the line of Tom Sepenzis of Northland Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Tom Sepenzis - Northland Capital Markets

Analyst

What is the R&D tax credit for 2014?

Deborah Choate

Management

For 2014, well, typically, we are earning somewhere between 3 million and 4 million a year. For 2014, we’ll be closer to the 3 million level.

Tom Sepenzis - Northland Capital Markets

Analyst

And then with the strategic partnerships, I know you can’t go into great detail as they are but I think you did mentioned that they’ll might be contributing to the R&D line is there a figure that that we know about in terms of how much there might be contributing there.

Deborah Choate

Management

Not at this time.

Tom Sepenzis - Northland Capital Markets

Analyst

Okay. And then George if you could just talk a little bit about China and what you are seeing there I think you said that China mobile is going to be Q2 2015 launch now I’m just wondering what you are seeing with some of the other carriers.

Georges Karam

Management

Tom I mean China I mean just to be obviously China mobile is launching and you are hearing a lot of stuff and they are selling the smartphones and some. So this is not an issue this is happening and the way this big and I believe -- they are doing a lot of investment but is going to take them further may be one or two more years to reach the level of coverage and that we would like to see in China for single-mode LTE what happens in the past that you want that opportunity was still close for single-mode LTE despite the fact that could had a device like home router, portable router while these really fall back into 3G but for whatever reason political reason in China they were sticking in one, insisting on the TDA CDMA and this has obviously put us in a -- not in a favorable position because we didn’t invest in TDS and putting two chip solution we did this at the beginning but it’s not really viable from cost structure in a market like China. So what we are seeing now we’re seeing new opening for single-mode, it’s not really public in the sense; it’s not really official position of China mobile change. But at least the eco system, the customer in China, the partner as I mentioned we have two new design win offering there; both of them are single-mode, both of them are very serious to put product in the market in mid next year. And this gives us really more and more confidence that this is happening finally. And obviously this will allow us to have some nice revenue from China next year. And in China telecom, the challenge is different they didn’t come with the request for 3G, we have already a business and design win in China Telecom and a product qualified. There is more to move it to the region. They had some delay in finishing the specification or call it the safe [ph] approval on top of those product for just only the reason that they were so busy by finishing the devices, the priorities, top priority devices that they are smart phone. But this is now we are in the final, we were almost done we have two devices that going and we are hearing as well some good position that can come as well next year.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Currently no questions in queue please continue.

Georges Karam

Management

Okay so thanks very much guys thanks for the interest on all the questions and hope to see you soon and we’ll stay in touch with all -- more in the news that we can announce to the market obviously as we move. Thank you, Operator.

Operator

Operator

Thank you ladies and gentlemen this conference will be available for replay after 10 AM today until November 23 at midnight. You may access the AT&T executive playback service at any time by dialing 1800-475-6701 and entering the access code 338240. International participants may dial area code +1 320-365-3844. Again those numbers are 1800-475-6701 and +1 320-365-3844 the access code of 338240. That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for your participation and for using AT&T executive teleconference service. You may now disconnect.