Tom Lacey
Analyst · Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Your line is open
Don thanks a lot. Whether live or via the webcast recording, thank you for joining us on the call today. Robert and I are very pleased to provide an update on our fourth quarter and full year 2014 results, as well as our guidance for Q1 2015. As you will continue to hear from us, we remain very positive on the developments at the company and we are optimistic about our future. Over the past several quarters, Robert and I have talked about the turnaround underway at the company. I am pleased to say the turnaround is now complete and all energies and resources are focused on continuing to grow the company by serving new and existing customers. Before I get into the details, the high level message I hope you take away from today's call is that the company has been transformed and we are already on the path to growing the company via collection of technology, products and innovations, with a talented group of employees. Before I get into the details on the fourth quarter, I would like to provide an update on comparisons between 2013 and 2014. Revenue increased by 65%, our non-GAAP operating margin increased approximately four times from 16% to 67%. As we like to talk about internally our approach to customers changed well over 100%. We settled litigation matters and/or reissue license agreements with over 10 of our customers in 2014. These efforts helped reduce our litigation expense from 36% of revenue to 9% of revenue year-over-year. We also greatly simplified our business in 2014 by focusing on our core strength, IP and technology licensing and exiting our DOC manufacturing operations. As I have shared with our Board recently and our employees as we finalize our 2015 operating plan and had a chance to reflect upon what happened last year in 2014, a straightforward statement that fits Tessera so well is, wow, what a difference a year makes. With the turnaround officially over, we are well into an extremely exciting growth phase for the company. Now turning to the fourth quarter, there were several important developments during the quarter, including, we exceeded expectations on virtually all financial metrics and delivered our fourth consecutive profitable quarter on both the GAAP and non-GAAP basis. We are extremely proud that 2014 is our first revenue growth year since 2009 based on continuing operations. Our financial management continues to be strong, management inside the company, becoming part of our culture of spend every dollar as if it’s your own is flat-out working. All facets of the company are focused on ROI consideration. We're doing more with less and improving our internal operations, focusing on continuous improvement and striving to achieve operational excellence across all facets of the company. We continue to lower our non-litigation operating expenses and in fact, we reduced our litigation expense to approximately $2.1 million, which is the lowest amount since we began breaking litigation out as a separate expense category since 2006. A recent settlement with Amkor demonstrates our continuing efforts to reach negotiated settlements even after years of litigation. Reaching settlements and license agreement frees up management and employee time, money and resources for future investment and development that might otherwise have been diverted to litigation. It also allows us to explore technical collaborations such as what we announced with Amkor, and companies with whom previously where we not able to collaborate because of outstanding disputes. During the quarter we completed the O-Film transaction which netted the company through its entirety $41.5 million in total consideration plus ongoing licensing opportunities for both our MEMS portfolio and our FotoNation products. This was a complicated and lengthy international negotiations, which has substantive positive impact on our Q4 financials, which Robert will shortly explain. The completion of this transaction wraps up our DigitalOptics chapter. I wish to extend a special thanks to the handful of employees who brought this transaction to a successful result. Our financial performance in the fourth quarter was the best percentage operating margin performance since the company went public in 2003. A world-class imaging group FotoNation continues to be part of our overall growth initiative. Given its importance to the company we have elected to provide for the first time more information regarding its performance. FotoNation produced approximately $11 million in revenue in 2013. In the past year, we grew revenues for FotoNation by more than 100% to approximately $23 million. On the strength of our best year ever for this business, we expect 2015 to continue strong growth. During the quarter, FotoNation continued to perform very well in terms of customer engagement and product development with substantive progress on both fronts. Additionally, in late December, we purchased small company to augment our biometrics capabilities. The acquisition provides us with the additional expertise in iris authentication, some important IP, algorithm and existing customers. We are excited about this talent and group of people joining Tessera, building our scale, can accelerate product development, accelerate IP creation and help accelerate revenue growth. We see iris authentication as an important technology for security and biometric recognition. Additionally, during the quarter, we made solid progress in positioning our face detection technology into the automotive segment as our technology was displayed on the floor at CES. It is clear that the car of tomorrow will have increasing technology in it, including driver monitoring. As I mentioned at the Needham Conference last month, some analyst expect there to be more than 1 billion cameras installed in automobiles by 2018. Imaging technology is not just an important differentiating feature in smartphones where we continue to perform well but also in automobiles. We also see a substantial change in the overall rate of adoption of technology into automobiles. We believe in part this is due to the Tesla effect. Incumbents in the automotive industry often took approximately five years to adopt technology. Now we are seeing faster rate of technology adoption in part to keep up with Tesla, in part due to the increased safety technology, in part due to demands of consumers who find technology an increasingly important feature in car purchase decisions. Additionally, we continue to gain traction in FotoNation’s life focus innovations that take autofocus systems to a whole new level of speed and quality. We’re able to take some of the key knowledge on autofocus gained from -- gained from our mems|cam efforts and apply it to today's VCM camera technology found in virtually every single smartphone. We expect to be able to announce important design wins because face detection and face focus is the primary subject of the billions of pictures being taken on smartphones and our technology is flat out world-class. As we said before, we continue to remain bullish on our FotoNation opportunity and overall growth prospects. We continue to execute on our capital allocation strategy which employs a combination of dividends and share buybacks to return cash to shareholders. Given our continued confidence in operating cash flow of the company and at most of our litigation matters are behind us, we’ve decided to double our regular quarterly dividend from $0.10 a share to $0.20 a share in lieu of any future episodic special dividend payments. Additionally, we have continued our share buyback program. During the quarter, we bought back approximately three times more shares in Q3 totaling about 467,000 shares of $15.6 million, an average price of $33.54. During the last quarter -- six quarters, we have purchased more than $94 million of Tessera’s stock. Innovation continues to be alive and vibrant in Tessera [Technical Difficulty] progress to FotoNation where we are engaged with industry leaders from phone OEM to semiconductor providers now into automotive sector. We made solid progress on our semiconductor packaging technology. During the quarter, we announced the final settlement with ASC, which include technical collaboration. I'm pleased to say that collaboration continues as previously announced. BVA engagements with other customers are proceeding as well. Similarly, our xFD technical collaboration continued efforts continue with micron and others. We continue to believe that DBA invention runs into high-volume production can be an important technology for many years to come. And finally, we are doing today. We continue to get the opportunity to share our progress and our opportunity with shareholders and potential investors alike. Robert and I are actively conducting substantial outreach to the investor community to keep a post on investment settlement during the quarter. The third and fourth research analyst initiated coverage on Tessera and we additionally welcome Sidoti and Benchmark for team of analysts. We believe our investor outreach along with the progress of our business has helped drive our average daily trading volume up by more than 20% over a year ago, thereby increasing our overall stocks liquidity. All these accomplishments continue to position the company very well as we move forward. I’ll now turn the call over to Robert who will address our excellent Q4 financials and Q1 guidance.