Neill Reynolds
Analyst · Wells Fargo Securities
Thank you, Gregg, and good afternoon, everyone. We delivered strong results during the third quarter as we continue to see increased demand for our silicon carbide solutions. Starting with our top line performance. Revenue for the quarter came in slightly below the midpoint of our guidance at $188 million, representing an increase of 8.6% sequentially and 37% year-over-year. We delivered our seventh consecutive quarter of sequential revenue growth. While these are strong results, our top line was impacted by COVID-19 quarantine protocols in China, which resulted in partial shutdowns at some of our packaging subcontractors and delays in some of our shipping channels. Absent these shutdowns, we would have met or exceeded the top end of our guidance range for the quarter. We are continuously monitoring the ever-changing COVID environment as we remain focused on timely delivery of products to our customers. Demand for our power device solutions continues to be strong as evidenced by revenue growth of approximately 87% over the prior year. As Gregg mentioned, our progress at Mohawk Valley is a meaningful step towards increasing power device capacity, and we remain focused on bringing more device capacity online. For RF devices, we're seeing positive momentum in the communications infrastructure and aerospace and defense markets. From a materials perspective, demand for our 150-millimeter silicon carbide substrate is strengthening as we see increasing demand from our customers, which resulted in strong year-over-year and sequential growth. And we continue to add capacity to serve this strengthening demand. Turning now to our bottom line performance. Our non-GAAP net loss was $14.3 million or $0.12 per diluted share, at the top end of our guidance range. Our third quarter non-GAAP earnings exclude $52.2 million of expense net of tax or $0.42 per diluted share for noncash stock-based compensation, acquired intangibles amortization, accretion under convertible notes, project transformation transaction costs, factory optimization start-up costs and other items outlined in today's earnings release. Third quarter non-GAAP gross margin was 36.3% compared to 35.4% last quarter. Gross margin was slightly above the midpoint of our guidance range as lower-than-expected device revenue due to the China shutdowns drove modest improvements in our product mix. Non-GAAP operating expenses for Q3 were $88.6 million, and our non-GAAP tax rate was 25%. The increase in our operating expenses was largely due to investments in our device businesses and 200-millimeter silicon carbide substrate platform. For the third quarter, days sales outstanding was 49 days, and inventory days on hand was 159 days. Cash generated from operations was negative $28 million and capital expenditures were $103 million, resulting in free cash flow of negative $131 million. We currently have approximately $1.3 billion of cash and liquidity on hand to support our plans. Additionally, we completed a successful convertible debt offering with the issuance of $750 million convertible senior notes at the end of January. This offering allows us to fund the expansion of materials capacity in Durham campus, an additional fab and back-end capacity to support the steepening demand for silicon carbide solutions we've mentioned previously. We will continue to be opportunistic from a capital market standpoint to ensure we have flexibility to continue to support our long-term growth path. During the quarter, we incurred start-up costs primarily related to Mohawk Valley totaling approximately $21 million. As we've discussed previously, we originally expected a total of $80 million of start-up costs in fiscal 2022, with the majority of these costs incurred in the second half of the fiscal year as we continue to ramp the fab. At this time, we believe start-up costs will be at approximately the $75 million level by the end of the fiscal year. We provided a non-GAAP adjustment for the start-up costs as well as a reconciliation table in our earnings release. As Gregg mentioned earlier, we are running initial lots of the fab with plans to qualify customers eventually ramp revenue. With the official opening of Mohawk Valley at the end of April, we'll improve our ability to meet the steepening demand curve for silicon carbide devices, which will only improve as we continue to ramp production capacity. We are now anticipating net capital expenditures of approximately $550 million this fiscal year versus the previously communicated $475 million. This change is related to the timing of reimbursements from New York State for the Mohawk Valley fab. We now anticipate receiving these reimbursements in the first half of fiscal 2023, and this does not represent a significant change in our fiscal 2022 gross CapEx spend outlook. The construction of this fab is not only a great accomplishment for Wolfspeed, but also has created north of 250 jobs to date for the people of Upstate New York and is attracting future talent from the surrounding universities to our partnerships with SUNY School System and others. Moving to our outlook for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2022. We are targeting revenue in the range of $200 million to $215 million. We expect revenue growth to be driven by our Power business as we continue to increase capacity across the supply chain. Our Q4 non-GAAP gross margin is expected to be in the range of 35.3% to 37.3%. As a reminder, the key to our gross margin transition from the mid-30s to 50% in 2024 is largely based on 3 elements, which we have outlined previously, optimizing Durham, transitioning from 150-millimeter to 200-millimeter wafers and driving revenue through Mohawk Valley. We continue to be on track with all 3 of these elements as evidenced by our progress this quarter. We are also targeting non-GAAP operating expenses of approximately $91 million for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2022. As we discussed last quarter, we anticipate operating expenses will continue to slowly increase over time due to increased headcount in R&D and sales and marketing, but expect this to become a smaller percentage of revenue as we near the middle of the decade. We target Q4 non-GAAP operating loss to be between $20 million and $11 million and nonoperating net loss to be approximately $1.5 million. We expect our non-GAAP tax amount to be a benefit of approximately $4 million. We are targeting Q4 non-GAAP net loss to be between $16 million to $9 million or a loss of $0.13 to $0.07 per diluted share. Our non-GAAP EPS target excludes acquired intangibles amortization, noncash stock-based compensation, project transformation and transaction costs, factory optimization restructuring and start-up costs and other items. Our Q4 targets are based on several factors that could vary greatly, including the situation with COVID-19, overall demand, product mix, factory productivity and the competitive environment. With that, I will now turn the discussion back to Gregg.