Kenton K. Alder
Analyst · Stifel, Nicolaus
Okay, thank you, Diane. Good afternoon, and thanks for joining us for our second quarter 2013 conference call. I'm joined on the call today by Todd Schull, our CFO. As in previous calls, I'll begin with the review of our business and Todd will follow with a discussion of our financial performance. After that, we'll open the call to your questions. Now let's start with a few highlights to the second quarter. Net sales were $338 million. Non-GAAP gross margin was 14.4%. Non-GAAP net income was $7.7 million or $0.09 per diluted share. We are pleased to report that we completed the transaction to sell our equity interest in SYE plant and to acquire the remaining equity interest in our DMC plant. As part of our strategy to shift our product mix towards advanced technology products, this transaction will reduce our footprint for conventional printed circuit boards in Asia Pacific and should improve our capacity utilization. We anticipate margin improvement benefits from this transaction beginning in late 2013. Revenue for the second quarter was near the high end of guidance, and our bottom line results were at the lower end of guidance. Our second quarter results were negatively impacted by a $2 million quality issue. We worked closely with our customer to resolve the issue, and were able to satisfy our customer and maintain order flow. Our third quarter revenue guidance reflects the fact that this issue has been resolved. Our second quarter revenue grew both on a year-over-year and a sequential basis. The growth was driven by broad-based strength in our networking end market and continued solid performance in our other end markets. Our advanced technology work increased during the second quarter. HDI, substrate, rigid-flex and flex assembly accounted for approximately 53% of our Asia Pacific segment's revenue. This compares to approximately 51% in the first quarter. While a number of our facilities remained underutilized during the quarter, overall utilization levels slightly improved sequentially. Our blended capacity utilization rate in Asia Pacific remained about the same as last quarter at approximately 67%. Our capacity utilization in North America increased to approximately 69% in the second quarter. This is up from 65% in the first quarter. In the third quarter, we expect utilization levels to increase in our advanced HDI facilities in Asia Pacific. For the third quarter, we're projecting revenue to be in the range of $335 million to $355 million. Using the midpoint of guidance, this projection reflects a sequential increase of 2% despite the loss of revenue from our SYE divestiture. SYE revenue in the second quarter was approximately $25 million. Our third quarter revenue projection is driven by anticipated strong seasonal growth in our smartphone and touchpad tablet markets and further sequential growth in North America. Now, moving on to our end markets. Second quarter sales in our largest end market, networking/communications, increased strongly both sequentially and year-over-year. Networking comprised 38% of total sales, compared to 34% in the first quarter. We experienced a solid increase in demand for products supporting mobile, telecom, infrastructure and high-end networking. Trends in this end market have become positive over the last 3 quarters. We continue to expect solid demand relating to the pending 4G LTE network buildout in China later this year. Sales will decline to 29% in the third quarter due to the divestiture of our SYE plant. However, on a comparable basis, we expect sales in this end market to remain steady. Sales in the computing, storage, peripherals end market represented 16% of sales, compared to 19% in the first quarter. As expected, sales in this end market experienced a seasonal decline related to touchpad tablets. Sales to storage and high-end server customers were also softer during the quarter. We expect the computing end market will increase to approximately 20% of sales in the third quarter based on increased tablet sales. Sales in the cell phone end market remain consistent with Q1 and represented 17% of total sales. With anticipated increases in smartphone products, the cell phone end market is expected to be up sequentially to approximately 22% of sales in the third quarter. The aerospace and defense end markets remained steady at 16% of total sales. As in the past, we continued to benefit from our broad program participation in both defense and commercial aerospace. We expect third quarter sales to continue to be stable at about 15% of total sales. The medical/industrial/instrumentation end market also remained steady on a sequential basis and represented 8% of sales. On a dollar basis, sales were up slightly in this end market, primarily due to increased demand from medical customers. We expect this end market to be similar to the second quarter at about 8% of sales. Sales in the other end market were 5% of total sales in the second quarter, compared to 6% in the first quarter. We expect this end market to be up modestly to about 6% of sales in the third quarter. Now on to our customers. Our top 5 customers accounted for 38% of sales in the second quarter, compared to 35% in the first quarter. In alphabetical order, our top 5 OEM customers were the same as last quarter: Apple, CISCO, Ericsson, Huawei and Juniper. We had one customer who accounted for 14% of sales during the quarter. ASPs increased 3% in Asia Pacific from the first quarter, largely as a result of a shift in our product mix to more products utilizing advanced printed circuit boards. In North America, ASPs increased approximately 1%, again due to mix changes. We continued to benefit from our capital investments in advanced technology, which enable us to expand our business in handheld devices. In 2013, our CapEx investments are focused on enhancing our advanced technology position with capital capacity expansions in our advanced HDI, rigid-flex and substrate business, as well as further productivity improvements and maintenance. We are increasing our CapEx budget to $114 million for 2013. A significant portion of the $14 million increase is being used to accelerate our environmental compliance to meet new wastewater regulations in China. The remaining portion will be used to meet product mix requirements for high-end networking and computer customers. In summary, we were pleased to see an improvement in the demand environment in the second quarter. In North America, we continued to expand our market share in networking, and our aerospace and defense business remains consistent despite U.S. budgetary concerns. Based on our solid bookings, we continue to expect seasonal strength in the second half of this year as customer programs ramp. Overall, we like our position within our diverse group of end markets with a broad set of customers. We believe we are well-positioned to address the fastest-growing segments of our end markets through our focus on advanced printed circuit board technology. Now Todd will review our financial performance for the second quarter.