Tom Lacey
Analyst · Krish Sankar from Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Your line is open
Hi, Don, thank you very much. Whether live or via webcast recording, thank you for joining us on the call today. Robert and I are pleased report another strong quarter and we continue to remain very positive on the developments at the company and our progress towards our growth objectives. Let me begin with some highlights for Q1 2016. We again exceeded expectations on virtually all financial metrics and delivered our ninth consecutive profitable quarter on both the GAAP and non-GAAP basis. Our financial management continues to be strong. Our Q1 revenue was $60 million which exceeded the high-end of our guidance range. FotoNation produced a record revenue quarter. This business continues to perform well. Our capital allocation program remains robust. Recall last quarter, the board authorized an additional $200 million for our share repurchase program bringing total available authorization to approximately $225 million at that time. During Q1, we purchased approximately 1.3 million shares for approximately $37 million which represents approximately 2.5% of our shares outstanding at the end of 2016. While we remain very active on our capital allocation actions, our balance sheet remains very strong. We ended the first quarter of 2016 with a debt-free balance sheet and $363 million in cash and cash equivalents. Next, I will provide an update on our IP licensing efforts and with Invensas and FotoNation during the first quarter. We continued work on a Greenfield licensing efforts. For those of you new to the Tessera story, the Greenfield term refers to customers that have not previously licensed Tessera Intellectual Property. As we have discussed, we reached the advanced stage discussions with two of our Greenfield customers. We have had multiple executive level discussions with each. Ideally, these discussions result in a multi-year go-forward license to our valuable intellectual property but in some cases litigation may be necessary to achieve this result. Since the beginning of 2016, we have initiated discussions with several additional Greenfield customers. As we have noted in the past, these engagements can often take multiple years from initial discussions to resolution. Next, let me provide an update on Invensas technology development. Our Invensas team remains engaged with several leading semiconductor manufacturers and OSATs to further the development and broadly commercialize our portfolio of advanced packaging and interconnect technologies including BVA for the integration of applications, processors and memory, ZiBond and DBI bonding technologies. Our BVA technology addresses the industry’s demand for low profile scalable interconnect technology by readily allowing the integration of the latest generation of application, processors, and memory, and mobile electronics. Through our customer engagements, we have discovered that BVA technology not only addresses opportunities in the package on package space targeting SOCs and memory, but also fits other applications such as system and package whereby a vertical interconnect technology can enable an improvement in performance and reduction in form factor when compared to currently available approaches. As we announced this afternoon, we are very pleased to have the world's largest OSAT, ASE as a development and commercialization partner on this technology platform. As we have mentioned for several quarters, we have worked closely together to define, build, and test the BVA technology. We have successfully built and tested thousands of units and expect to complete the reliability evaluation and technology qualification by June at which point we will work with ASE to pursue important customer design wins. We are very excited about the relationship we have developed with ASE and look forward to working closely together on this and other innovative packaging platforms. On the 3-D front, we continue to receive enthusiastic support from many new and existing customers. We feel strongly that ZiBond and DBI represent truly enabling and foundational technologies for low temperature bonding for a wide range of products including image sensors, stack memory, 2.5 D, FPGAs, RF front-end and MEMS devices. We are in active discussions with a number of customers both small and large to license these technologies as well as to perform demonstrations and in some cases, collaborate on the development optimization for specific products and applications. Along this vein, on April 18, we announced a license agreement with Sandia National laboratories, a premier government research institution. Sandia intends to deploy these technologies in a range semiconductor applications. In addition, Sony the world's largest image sensor manufacturer and licensee of both ZiBond and DBI technologies, recently began shipping backside illuminated image sensors with DBI. These high quality image sensors can be found in Samsung's flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S7. This is an important milestone as it validates the viability of the DBI platform in a high-volume manufacturing environment and sets a significantly higher bar for image quality and performance in smart phones. In other words, it represents an inflection point for the image sensor market. This is the first of many high volume commercial applications we see for DBI. We look forward to providing future updates on our development and commercialization efforts. On the legal front, we attended a settlement conference with UTAC and agreed to a settlement of this matter pursuant to which we will receive $18 million over a period of three years. The other terms are presently confidential. With the UTAC matter behind us, we have to remaining legal disputes. The Toshiba contract case and the OVT TSM patent case that we inherited as part of our of Ziptronix. On the Toshiba matter, the case is proceeding according to the case schedule. Trial remains scheduled for June, 2017. On the LVTT SMC matter, there have been no new material development since last quarter. The case is still pending and no trial date is currently set. Next, I will provide an update on FotoNation. There were several important developments during the quarter. We have earned a reputation as a world-class and experienced expert in high performance low power imaging, and this is being reflected in the quality of our engagements with many world-class companies. We continue to see computer vision and imaging as critical technologies for a variety of devices. From phones to drones, to activity cameras to cars, and we are well positioned to capitalize on these growing markets. First of all, a special shout out, FotoNation posted a record revenue quarter exceeding its best previous quarter ever by 27%. We continue to see very strong interest in our image stabilization technology. During the quarter, we passed an important milestone by demonstrating best-in-class performance with ultra low-power consumption to existing and potential customers. This combination is very important in mobile phone, drones, activity cameras and other applications for cameras on the move. Given our continued customer engagement at mobile world congress and elsewhere, we remain steadfast that biometric authentication will become an important capability and future generations of cell phones and other devices. During the quarter, we produced and demonstrated smartphone iris and face authentication solutions. We believe we are well-positioned to secure multiple design wins on these emerging technologies within the next 12 months. During the quarter, we announced a light focus design win with LG, and expect to secure additional smartphone OEM this year. Light focus enables faster and more accurate focus capabilities on a smartphone. And is yet another example of our heritage of delivering best-in-class DSLR level features to smartphones. We also continue to make solid progress on our automotive efforts whereby our goal is to secure an initial Tier 1 partnership to jointly developed solutions for the market. For those of you not familiar with the automotive supply chain, a Tier 1 provider is a very large corporation that delivers products to millions of cars per year. We expect to announce an initial partnership during the first half of the year. Following up on the previous SOC design wins, we continue to have traction with multiple other potential Asian based SOC providers who were showing interest in our IPU architecture. If successful, the opportunity is to significantly expand our China and other based business. Another feature capturing the headlines for tomorrow's phones is what is called dual front facing cameras. We are well-positioned with our iris biometrics face authentication and focused technologies to deliver valuable features to our customers and end-users. I will now turn the call over to Robert, who will address our Q1 financials, our second quarter and an update on our full-year 2016 guidance and other financial matters. Robert?