Paul Arling
Analyst · Sidoti & Company. Your question please
Good afternoon and thanks for joining us today. We are excited to be speaking with you to review the most profitable year in our history, as well as to showcase one of the strongest opportunity landscapes we have ever enjoyed. As we all know, 2020 brought unprecedented challenges, immediately the UEI team took action to control what is controllable, prepare strategies to manage the unpredictable and as always invest for the continuing convergence of home entertainment and control devices. As discussed previously, our 2020 sales were impacted by elements outside of our control, including quarantines limiting truck rolls of new installations for home entertainment and security customers. However, this impact has been mitigated by careful execution of our long-term strategy to operate efficiently and free resources to invest in the future. As a company, we continue to focus on creating new innovation, ensuring product quality and building new customer relationships. Over the past several years, we have purposely implemented tactics to shift our mix toward more advanced higher margin solutions. Our work in these areas has expanded our gross and operating margins. In fact, our Q4 results beat the highs we achieved in Q3 and our full year margins reached nearly 31% for gross margin and 11% for operating margin. As a result, even with significantly lower sales, we delivered the most profitable year in our 35 plus year history. Even more exciting is where we are today and the opportunities it creates, our goal continues to be to develop the wireless control and sensing technologies of the future. In 2020, we saw a strong uptake of our advanced two-way voice-powered remote controls in our second largest market, EMEA. Over the past few years, we have been working closely with many of the biggest video service operators in Europe to help them launch their new video delivery platforms that combine linear and streaming services. Similar to the market growth we experienced in North America, our customers in Europe enjoyed strong subscriber uptake of these new platforms. Our pipeline of new customer engagements continues to be strong as customers in Latin America and India look to adopt either our new custom or our Android TV-powered control solutions with the intent of launching these hybrid video platforms to their subscribers in 2021 and beyond. Along those lines, late in 2020, we announced the launch of a new streaming service control solution for Apple TV, specifically designed for multi-channel video program distributors or MVPDs. This new Apple TV remote control supports all the original functionality, including Siri and adds functionality that helps to simplify viewing live television on the Apple TV with keys for channel surfing or accessing the electronic program guide. This remote is the only M5 certified remote control other than Apple’s own Siri remote. While we cannot disclose details around specific customer engagements, we can say, we are actively planning with many current and new customers worldwide to launch this product throughout this year. Considering the high degree of enthusiasm at our partners, we are confident on yet another success in the MVPD channel. Another major growth driver in our 2020 performance has been the strong momentum in TV sales and our increasing presence in that market. UEI QuickSet continues to be the number one licensed connectivity software and cloud service solution on television platforms worldwide, with the top three leading global OEM brands running QuickSet. QuickSet has demonstrated its long-term value on these platforms, with the addition of IoT device interoperability support on some of the newer LG TVs. Stay tuned as we expect to see more of these platforms become successful smart home hubs with the assistance of QuickSet. Moving to 2021, we broke our longstanding tradition of exhibiting at the International Consumer Electronic show held annually in Las Vegas. Instead we held our first virtual Universal Technology Summit. Our product and marketing teams created an impressive virtual experience, combining short format videos, live presentations and live stream demonstrations of our latest products and technologies. During this online event, our team hosted over 60 meetings with hundreds of participants from the world’s leading companies in home entertainment, security, IoT, HVAC, hospitality and home automation. I will review some of the highlights of our new product introductions. QuickSet Widget, a turnkey connectivity solution that adds intelligence and QuickSet Cloud to connected products and enable digital transformation of the customer experience. The solution allows OEMs to upgrade their product line up to be connected, managed and secured, as well as deliver ongoing support and services in a cost effective and scalable manner. QuickSet Widgets are available with built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth low energy connectivity, enabling interoperability and device management services offered through QuickSet Cloud. QuickSet Widget will launch later this year, initially in our new line of thermostats. The UEI comfort family, a first of a kind ambient aware connected thermostat line, leverages our 20 years of experience providing end-to-end advanced control solutions to the world’s leading HVAC brands. The line simplifies installation, daily use and ongoing support of climate control in residential, commercial and hospitality applications. With a wide range of built in sensing capabilities, the UEI comfort family is aware of the environment including temperature, humidity and CO2, as well as occupancy to optimize comfort and reduce energy costs. The first product in the line will be available to OEMs in the second half of 2021, with a version designed for the hospitality industry to follow later in the year. Prospective customers showed strong interest in this platform during our event. As with all our new product introductions, we look forward to announcing new customer wins when we are allowed to mention them publicly. And other exciting new service, which we showed last year and officially launched this year is our UEI Virtual Agent, which introduces AI powered technology that enable self-help capabilities on any screen, TV, phone, computer and tablet. The integrated support framework enhances the user experience by addressing common challenges around onboarding, feature discovery and troubleshooting. Additionally, our agent reduces the cost of managing and supporting an installed base of connected devices for manufacturers and service providers, and can be easily integrated into the connected device itself as well into -- as well as into mobile apps and online websites. Due to COVID, the focus of providing user support on the device itself is particularly compelling. The service has already been developed and is actively being used on our online global product support platform available at urcsupport.com. Our team looks forward to sharing portions of the Technology Summit at an upcoming analyst and investor event, which we are currently planning for March 19th. Please stay tuned for more information. All of these new products and many more that we will introduce in the coming months have a common theme. They make it easier for consumers to enjoy their products and technologies in their home. More and more people are watching more types of videos in more rooms, with more devices for longer periods of time than ever before. With more happening, one constant remains, home control is converging. So UEI continues to provide operators, OEM brands and integrators with a wide variety of solutions focused on the convergence of home entertainment and home automation. I will now turn the call over to our CFO, Bryan Hackworth, for a review of the financials. Please go ahead, Bryan.