Sanjay Mehta
Analyst · Stifel. Your line is now open
Thank you, Mark, and hello everyone. In my remarks I'll review our Q3 financial results, comments on how COVID is impacting our business, provide Q4 guidance, and comment on our full-year financial outlook at the mid-point of our Q4 guidance. Our third quarter sales of $819 million were just above the high-end of the guidance range, which enabled a 30% non-GAAP operating margin and a $1.18 non-GAAP EPS, which is also above the high-end of our range. Strengthen in Semi Test and storage test were the revenue highlight. Improved profit was a result of higher sales, partially offset by a higher than forecasted tax rate. Our non-GAAP operating expenses were $211 million and our non-GAAP diluted share count in the quarter was $175 million. In Q3, our non-GAAP tax rate was 17.4%, which included a year-to-date catch-up as our estimated 2020 annual non-GAAP tax rate increase to 15.5% from our prior forecast of 14.5%. The increased tax rate is driven by higher foreign earnings, which resulted in an increase in the U.S. minimum tax on foreign earnings. We generated $280 million in free cash flow in Q3. We paid $17 million in dividends, had capital expenses of $63 million, and ended the quarter with cash and marketable securities of approximately $1.3 billion and no short-term debt. Inventory decreased to $191 million. DSO in the quarter decreased to 65 days. We had one 10% customer in the quarter. At the business unit level, Semi Test sales were $592 million, up 49% from Q3 2019. SOC shipments were $449 million and memory test had record shipments at $143 million. Semi Test saw strength in mobility and compute applications in SOC where we continued to ramp our UltraFLEXplus test system. In Memory, we saw broad shipments across flash and our Magnum EPIC solution enabled continued strength in DRAM. We expect these products to continue to gain new applications as market acceptance has been very encouraging to-date, and they're well-aligned to technology trends in both SOC and memory tests. As Mark noted, the automotive microcontroller and analog markets remained at historically low levels in 2020. But we did see some pickup in the analog markets in Q3 versus our expectations. Several analog companies have outperformed their expected results, and we are seeing some unexpected short lead time demand as a result. Shifting to System Test. Sales in the quarter were up 61%, from Q3 2019 to $118 million. Storage test was the star at $76 million as both HDD and system level test delivered strong results. Defence and aerospace and production board test combined to deliver $43 million in the quarter. Rounding out the test portfolio, after a very strong second quarter, LitePoint sales softened to $41 million down 4% from the Q3 2019 level. Industrial Automation revenue was $69 million flat from Q3 2019 and growth of 17% quarter-over-quarter. UR contributed $53 million, MiR $10 million, and AG and Energid made up the remainder. While the COVID pandemic has negatively impacted our go-to-market efforts in industrial automation, we are seeing signs of improvement in several geographies across the globe, and some seeing year-over-year increases in sales. These positive signs in different territories should be balanced by a continued uncertainty tied to COVID-19 in predicting the pace of the global recovery and IA over the short-term. Turning to the impact of COVID-19. At Teradyne, our priorities remain consistent during the coronavirus pandemic: safety of our employees, supporting our customers, and a focus on execution to achieve our financial objectives. In line with my prior earnings call remarks; I want to acknowledge the continued challenges during the pandemic that our employees, customers, suppliers, and their families are going through. Operationally we continue to work through supply line issues in the quarter. And again, I must recognize the incredible work and skill of our operations team and our supplier partners to successfully overcome a wide variety of challenges to meet our customer requirements. Great execution also by our engineering teams in introducing new products and delivering products during the quarter, while overcoming significant supply chain issues along the way. In late October, we're in a much better spot than six months ago. That said there's still uncertainty of how this pandemic will impact global supply chains and market demand going forward. We still expect to encounter spot shortages and other issues through the remainder of the year and likely into 2021. Our guidance range continues to be wider than typical to reflect the potential impacts of these uncertainties and some short-lead time business noted earlier. Our test portfolio continues to execute, grow share and revenues. As a result, we are investing alongside our contract manufacturers to increase capacity and resilience in our supply chain. Specific actions include building larger buffer stocks and some components and increasing the geographic diversity of our supply and contract manufacturing. During the pandemic, we reduced our OpEx spending, types to travel, Trade Shows, and other go-to-market activities. The savings were approximately $8 million to $10 million per quarter. Post the pandemic, when returning to normal, we expect these expenditures to come back to our P&L. Moving to the outlook for the fourth quarter. We expect revenue of $680 million to $740 million and a non-GAAP EPS of $0.90 to $1.06 on 175 million diluted shares. This guidance excludes the amortization of acquired intangibles, and non-cash imputed interest on convertible debt. In prior guidance, I noted headwinds on gross margin in the second half of the year before returning to historical levels in 2021. I'm happy to report we're ahead of that plan and gross margins are now expected to be 58% to 59% in Q4, up from 56% in Q3. The earlier than expected improvement in margins is driven by increased volume, improved mix, and supply chain execution in our new product ramps. In Q4, we expect operating expenses to be 29% to 31% of sales. The operating profit at the mid-point of our Q4 guidance is 29%. As Mark noted, you can see we've been positively surprised by both SOC and memory test demand since our last call. Continued strength in mobility test solutions for several customers was the primary driver, but we've also seen unforecasted demand with expedited lead times elsewhere in our test portfolio. For example, analog solutions utilizing our Eagle test systems and DRAM memory applications for our Magnum EPIC systems have also driven up demand in Q4. We have seen this pattern play out over the last several months. Looking at the full-year from a financial perspective, short-term slowdown in IA has been more than offset by the growth in our test businesses. At the mid-point of our Q4 guidance, our 2020 revenues should be above $3.1 billion and non-GAAP EPS will be approximately $4.50. Gross margin for the full-year should be above 57%, down from 58% in 2019, reflecting the impact of high semiconductor shipments for mobility, along with a short-term impact of faster than expected ramps of new products. Our 2020 non-GAAP operating profit rate will be in the high 20s, up from 25% in 2019. And our full-year tax rate is expected to be 15.5%. Through nine months, we spent $147 million on CapEx and we expect we'll spend $193 million for the full-year. At the start of the pandemic it was unclear as to the depth and the duration of the economic consequences. As a result, we took actions to strengthen our liquidity and cash position. For example, we suspended share buybacks on April 1, and expect to end the year with approximately 175 million diluted shares. Given that share repurchases have historically been a part of our balanced capital allocation strategy we'll update you in our January call on our Capital Return Plan for 2021. Looking ahead, at 2021, from a modeling perspective, macroeconomic conditions, timing of pandemic recovery, and political environment all add uncertainty. The environment and demand uncertainty prevents us from speculating on 2021 market sizes. But at a high-level we expect gross margins to return to historical levels and OpEx to grow. From a longer term model perspective, you can see that at the mid-point of our Q4 guidance will be inside the revenue range and above the EPS range of our 2022 earnings model. We'll provide you an update of the earnings model in our January call. To summarize, we closeout Q3 with outstanding financial and operational performance in a difficult working environment, and I again, thank our employees and partners for their incredible efforts. We entered Q4 with a forecast of higher than expected sales and earnings on the strength of mobility and memory. For the full-year share gains in Semi Test and increased traction in our storage business enable us to exit the year stronger than when we entered. The industrial automation market is showing early signs of improvement and we continue to invest in this segment as we monitor the market progress closely. While we're not immune to the macroeconomic shocks and our market visibility is limited, as you've seen since early July, overall, we feel good about our execution during 2020 in a challenging environment. It's too early to estimate demand in 2021, but we'll be prepared from a product, operation, and balance sheet perspective for whatever comes our way. With that, I'll turn things back to Andy.