Sanjay Mehta
Analyst · Citi
Thank you, Mark. Good morning, everyone. Today, I will provide details on our Q1 results, offer additional color on the operating environment, along with our plans to address a very strong demand environment and describe our Q2 outlook. During the appropriate sections, I will provide some full-year expectations. Now to Q1. First quarter sales were $782 million with non-GAAP EPS of $1.11. Non-GAAP gross margins were 59.1% and our non-GAAP operating expenses were $230 million, above our high guidance due to high variable compensation and G&A expenses. Non-GAAP operating profit rate was 29.6%. We had two 10% customers in the quarter. Tax rate, excluding discrete items for the quarter, was 14.75% on both a GAAP and non-GAAP basis. Looking at the results from a business unit perspective, semi test revenue was $528 million, was up 9% from Q1 2021. SOC revenue was $420 million, up from prior year, driven by strength in compute, industrial and automotive markets, offset by a decline and our mobility shipments. Memory revenue was $108 million, up from prior year, driven by strength in flash final test segment. System Test Group had revenue of $133 million which was up 14% year-over-year. This was driven by $95 million in storage test sales, including HDD and SLT solutions and $38 million in defense and aerospace and production board test. At LitePoint, revenue of $41 million was above plan, but down about 6% from prior year due to lower cellular test shipments. Looking at our test portfolio overall. We are very optimistic about the market and technology trends unfolding over the midterm. The growing attach rate of electronics across the economy, the increasing complexity of those devices and significantly, a faster refresh rate for many of these complex devices benefit all of our test businesses. Looking at a significant example, the increasing number of companies creating high-performance processors to serve a growing range of end applications, each with unique performance and design cycles, is driving an estimated doubling of the compute portion of the SOC test market this year compared with 2018. We have designed our UltraFLEXplus platform to serve this growing market and are having early success. This trend has complementary impacts on memory and SLT markets as well. Now to Industrial Automation. Given 2020 was a contraction year; I will provide revenue metrics comparing Q1 2021 results with Q1 2020 and Q1 2019. Industrial Automation revenue was $80 million, was up 33% year-over-year and 21% over Q1 2019. Q1 2021 was a record for the seasonally soft first quarter of the year. U.S. and Europe represented over 70% of our IA revenue in the first quarter. As Mark noted, strength in China for UR, I will add that we saw the IA group revenue in China more than double year-over-year and grow greater than 50% over Q1 2019. UR sales were $66 million in Q1, up 32% year-over-year and 15% over Q1 2019. MiR sales were $14 million, up 55% from both Q1 2020 and Q1 2019. Sales increased in every region over Q1 2020. In addition to the success of MiR 250 that Mark noted, we also are starting to see a positive shipment trend towards higher payload MiR 500 and MiR 1,000 models, which should improve our ASPs overtime. Demand at both UR and MiR continues to improve as the global economy recovers and companies work to add production capacity. The opportunity of automation is growing. Our IA portfolio is solving problems for companies such as improving economics with a typical ROI of approximately one year, addressing labor shortages experienced by manufacturing and warehousing firms and adding supply chain resilience over the long-term. From a financial perspective in IA, we continue to lean into engineering, ecosystem and distribution investments to expand the range of applications in IA products - our IA products address and extend our global distribution reach. Our goal in the short-term is to balance investments with sales growth in order to deliver an annual IA group operating profit of between 5% and 15%. However, given the reset mark described at AutoGuide, we now expect Ag revenues of less than $10 million in 2021, and Ag will not be profitable in 2021. As a result, at the IA group level, we expect we will operate above breakeven in 2021, but below that target profit range. We do expect both UR and MiR each operate above the rule of 40 in 2021. That is the sum of the operating profit; revenue growth will be over $40 million. We continue to have confidence in our IA growth over the midterm, as articulated in our January earnings model update and expect the overall group to grow revenue over 30% in 2021. Shifting to supply. As Mark noted, the test market size has increased significantly across the board. From a supply perspective, we are dealing with increasing lead times and cost increases, predominantly in the semiconductor area. Given the significant demand increase in the challenging supply environment, we are experiencing some shipment delays. This is most acute in the automotive and industrial tester markets where demand is significantly outstripping supply. We are working with our customers on a daily basis to minimize the impact of these delays. We see this challenge accelerating into the third quarter with supplier lead times increasing. I appreciate the incredible pace of our operations team and partners around the world have operated for over a year and continue to be impressed with their efforts to meet the needs of our customers. To sustain that pace and create a more resilient operation, we are continuing to invest in manufacturing capacity around the world. This includes qualifying redundant suppliers, production sites for critical components and redundant manufacturing capacity in new locations. Shifting to the balance sheet and cash flow. Our cash and marketable securities at the end of the quarter totaled $1.43 billion. We had $1 million in negative free cash flow in the quarter and spent $45 million and $17 million on buybacks and dividends, respectively. To-date, $67 million of the RTI convertible bondholders have elected to convert early. And in Q1, we paid $51 million of it to the bondholders. Regarding the buyback, we plan to increase our daily buying throughout the year and expect to purchase a minimum of 600 million in 2021, as noted in January. The relatively low volume of buybacks in Q1 was planned for three reasons. First, recall Q1 is a seasonally high use of cash, where we typically pay out our variable compensation and ramp up our prepayments to support increased Q2 test production. Second, we wanted to understand how much of our convertible debt would be redeemed in Q1. Third, we wanted to confirm the global recovery from the pandemic remained on-track. Now to Q2. As you have heard this morning, customer demand is strong and in nearly all parts of the business, our guidance assumes that we will continue to be successful dealing with the numerous material shortages we noted earlier and that we won't see additional pandemic related issues. With that said sales in Q2 are expected to be between $1.01 billion and $1.09 billion, with non-GAAP EPS in a range of $1.62 and to $1.83 on 177 million diluted shares. The second quarter guidance excludes the amortization of acquired intangibles and the non-cash imputed interest on the convertible debt. Second quarter gross margins are estimated at 58%. OpEx is expected to run at 23% to 25% of second quarter sales. The non-GAAP operating profit at the midpoint of our second quarter guidance is 34%. Regarding OpEx for the full-year. We now expect OpEx will grow 17% to 19% over 2020. Note that this is up from our January plan for 2021, where we guided growth over 2020 at 8% to 10%. The increase from January in order of magnitude is in three general categories. One, higher revenue-driving higher estimated variable compensation and higher engineering costs related to mitigating supply constraints. Two, higher incremental spending to accelerate several engineering projects in test and IA. And three, higher-than-expected G&A spending related to legal, insurance and IT costs. As we noted in January and included in the estimate, we expect travel and marketing expenses to increase through the remainder of the year as pandemic restrictions ease. As outlined last quarter, we set our sight on reaching $5.25 to $6.75 in EPS by 2024 in our earnings model. In 2021, we expect our largest end market, semi test, to grow 14% and at the estimated midpoint above the estimate in our earnings model. Combined with industrial end markets recovering from the pandemic slump, these data points reinforce that our midterm earnings plan is on a solid foundation. We update our earnings model each January. In our next update, we will look closely at both the WFE forecast and test growth rates. To sum up, the demand environment across nearly all of our markets remain strong, and we are working closely with our suppliers and customers to expand shipments and minimize the impact of material shortages. We have had an outstanding start to the year, and we are on a path to healthy sales growth and profit growth for 2021. At the midpoint of our Q2 guidance, we will see sales grow 19% and non-GAAP EPS grow 21% above the first half of 2020, which itself was a record. We are well on our way to achieving our midterm revenue and earnings goals we set in our new earnings model. With that, I will turn things back to Andy.