Xperi Inc. (XPER) Q1 2026 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

Good day, everyone. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Xperi First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the call over to Sam Levenson from Arbor Advisory Group. Sam, please go ahead.

Yes. Thank you, Abby. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us as Xperi reports its first quarter 2026 financial results. With me in today's call are Jon Kirchner, Chief Executive Officer; and Robert Anderson, Chief Financial Officer. In addition to today's earnings release, there's an earnings presentation on our Investor Relations website at investor.xperi.com. We encourage you to download the presentation and follow along with today's commentary. Before we begin, I would like to provide a few reminders. First, I'd like to note that unless otherwise stated, all comparisons are to the same period in the prior year. Second, today's discussion contains forward-looking statements about our anticipated business and financial performance that are predictions, projections or other statements about future events, which are based on management's current expectations and beliefs and therefore, subject to risks, uncertainties and changes in circumstances. For more information on the risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from what we discuss today, please refer to the Risk Factors and the MD&A sections in our SEC filings, including our Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025, and our Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2026, to be filed with the SEC. Please note that the company does not intend to update or alter these forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances arising after this call. Third, we refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures, which are detailed in the earnings release and accompanied by reconciliations to their most directly comparable GAAP measures, which can be found in the Investor Relations section of our website. And last, a replay of this conference call will be available on our website shortly after the conclusion of this call. I'll now turn the call over to Xperi's CEO, Jon Kirchner.

Thank you, Sam, and thank you, everyone, for joining us on our first quarter 2026 earnings call. Overall, the first quarter results are evidence of the success we're achieving in delivering on our financial objectives and the notable progress we've made in delivering on our monetization strategy that we outlined for the year. Let me first provide an overview of the progress we made during the quarter against our key goals and priorities, progress that gives us confidence in our ability to monetize our growing platform. During the quarter, our TiVo One footprint grew to exceed 5.5 million monthly active users, and our AutoStage footprint grew to over 16 million vehicles globally. In addition to footprint growth, both our product feature set and ecosystem expanded, and we continue to add advertising partners and sellers to the TiVo One platform. Taken together, this progress combined to help us accelerate advertising monetization, resulting in Media Platform revenue growth of 45% year-over-year. We've also started to reap benefits from the strategic investments made over the past few years as evidenced by our results. Turning to our financial results for the quarter. I'm very pleased with the strong start to the year, which reflects both solid execution against our strategic plan and earlier-than-planned contract signings within CE and Connected Car. As I said, I'm particularly pleased with the progress we're making on driving monetization across our business. Given these results, we reaffirm the guidance we gave for the full year. Let me now go through each of our four business areas, starting with Media Platform. We recorded $12 million of revenue for Media Platform in the quarter, reflecting year-over-year growth of 45%, primarily driven by growth in advertising monetization. We experienced progress through our direct sales programs as we continue to execute campaigns across our owned and operated inventory and also began to benefit from our new partnerships. As noted earlier, our footprint also continued to grow as TiVo One monthly active users more than doubled year-over-year to 5.5 million. Just after the end of the quarter, we signed a multiyear partnership with Samba TV, a television technology company that offers real-time insights and audience analytics. Through this partnership, we're adding intelligence and measurement capabilities to TiVo One Connected TV inventory. This collaboration bolsters our TiVo ads business by enriching our connected TV advertising platform with Samba's industry-leading data and analytics, thereby improving ad targeting and campaign performance measurement. The relationship expands TiVo's ad sales and measurement capabilities, and we believe positions the TiVo One ad platform as an even more valuable cross-screen advertising solution for advertisers and agencies seeking better CTV audience targeting and comprehensive campaign insights. Average revenue per user for TiVo One was $7.10, a slight decrease from the fourth quarter as over the trailing 12 months, the number of average monthly users grew faster than monetization revenue. As advertising monetization revenue accelerates, we expect ARPU to advance toward double-digit dollars in the second half of 2026. Moving to Connected Car. AutoStage footprint expanded over 45% year-over-year, reaching over 16 million vehicles across 13 automotive brands. Just after quarter end, we launched AutoStage Broadcast Portal, a subscription service that we believe delivers unprecedented visibility and insights into audience behavior and listening metrics across 300 U.S. radio markets. In addition, we signed multiyear HD Radio renewal agreements and launched HD Radio in new models, including from Audi, Honda, Mercedes and Toyota. We also continue to advance our connected car road map, including advanced sound features and expanding services that are expected to support broadcaster and OEM partner advertising monetization. Moving to our Pay TV business. As noted earlier, our IPTV subscriber base continued to grow, increasing 19% year-over-year to reach 3.28 million subscriber households at quarter end. During the quarter, we signed the first agreements for new service offerings such as programmatic dynamic ad insertion and our native digital rights management. In addition, we delivered an innovative 4K sports experience with multi-view capability to IPTV households for the Winter Olympics and Super Bowl. We also expanded our set-top box partnership with Kaon and executed a multiyear discovery agreement with DirecTV. Moving to our consumer electronics business. During the quarter, we renewed DTS decoder and post-processing contracts with leading TV brands, including Vizio, Xiaomi, TCL and a major U.S. retailer. We also entered into a multiyear partnership with Tencent Music, China's leading music platform for DTS:X encoding of its music catalog, offering immersive audio as a premium feature to Tencent/QQ Music subscribers. Overall, these renewals and partnerships support our focus on expanding the adoption of our consumer audio technologies. As we put our 2026 goals in context, we made strong progress toward our objectives in the first quarter. Our monthly active users on the TiVo One platform continued to grow, reaching 5.5 million at quarter end, more than doubling from the same period last year. We remain confident in reaching our target of over 7 million monthly active users by year-end. On the monetization front, Media Platform's 45% year-over-year revenue growth was driven primarily by growth in advertising monetization. As our ecosystem and advertiser engagement expands, we believe we have a clear plan to reach our goal of doubling revenue to over $80 million. Also, as monetization revenue from advertising and data sales continues to grow in line with our expectations, we expect the TiVo One annual revenue per user, or ARPU, to finish the year above $10. Lastly, we've seen some very exciting progress on AutoStage, our connected car platform. While footprint continued to expand well past all of our original goals, we are now seeing clear demand among broadcasters and advertisers for the data coming off our platform. The first data license agreements are expected in the second quarter with more to follow, and we plan to commence advertising trials with partners in the U.S. and Europe later this year. Overall, we remain very pleased with our start to 2026. Let me now turn the call over to Robert to discuss our financial results in more detail. Robert?

Thanks, Jon. Let me start by reviewing the revenue results for the quarter. Overall, revenue finished at $114 million, essentially flat year-over-year. Pay TV revenue decreased 8% as expected to finish at $46 million, driven by a decrease in core Pay TV from classic guides and end-of-life of legacy consumer products that was partially offset by growth from our IPTV solution. Consumer Electronics recorded $18 million of revenue, a decrease of 19%, primarily due to nonrecurring revenue from minimum guarantee arrangements and audit settlements in the same period last year as well as memory-related challenges in certain end product categories. Our Connected Car business grew 14% to $38 million due primarily to a multiyear minimum guarantee arrangement signed during the quarter. Lastly, Media Platform grew 45% to $12 million, driven primarily by growth in advertising monetization from a host of sources, including direct sold revenue, new partner revenue and a linear TV campaign spend. Looking at overall financial results, our non-GAAP adjusted operating expense decreased 14% year-over-year due primarily to workforce reductions that have occurred over the past year as we have focused the business on our growth areas. We posted $25 million of adjusted EBITDA or 22% of revenue, an improvement of almost 8 percentage points over the prior year. GAAP loss per share was $0.17 and non-GAAP earnings per share was $0.23. Turning to the balance sheet and statement of cash flow. We finished the first quarter of 2026 with $70 million of cash and cash equivalents. It is worth noting that in early April, we received the final $12 million payment related to the sale of Perceive to Amazon. As expected during our seasonally low first quarter, operating cash flow usage in the quarter was $18 million, an improvement of $4 million from the first quarter of 2025. Cash usage in the quarter was primarily due to the payment of accrued compensation, which occurs in the first quarter of each year, along with $8 million of payments related to employee departures from the workforce reduction announced in November. We had $23 million of free cash flow usage in the quarter, an improvement of $4 million from the same quarter last year. In terms of financial outlook for the year, we are reaffirming our annual guidance that was provided in February. As noted previously, our revenue range of $440 million to $470 million take into account our view of broader market risks across our business. In terms of revenue timing during the year, for Q1, we executed certain agreements earlier than we had planned, and we expect to see a similar trend in Q2. Therefore, we now expect revenue for the first half and second half of the year to be relatively even as opposed to being slightly more back half weighted as previously projected. Let me turn the call back over to Jon.

Thanks, Robert. To sum things up, we're very pleased with the results of the first quarter. Customers are engaging with us earlier in the year than anticipated, highlighting our relevance and growing momentum, which positions us for an even stronger start. Further, our results clearly demonstrate the progress we're making against our monetization strategy. That concludes our prepared remarks. Let's now open the call for questions. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from the line of Jason Kreyer with Craig-Hallum Capital Group.

This is [ Thomas ] on for Jason. First, Jon, you called out in the PR that you guys are beginning to see an inflection point in monetization strategy. Can you sort of talk about what the drivers are that are catalyzing this inflection?

Well, I think a couple of things. First, we have worked for the last 2 years to begin to build a broad enough footprint to have the scale necessary to begin to attract advertisers and partners to our platform to reach unique audiences. And I think those efforts as we're now at 5.5 million MAUs is certainly a key part. The second is that we have also worked in tandem to continue to build out and connect our TiVo One ad platform to the broader advertising ecosystem. And as that gets continually worked to, if you will, make sure all the plumbing is continually being optimized. I think that also enables more programmatic ad volume to flow. And thirdly, as we are now making a bigger presence known and the uniqueness of some of what our platform offers in terms of audience engagement, that is driving advertiser interest. And through partnerships, we have more sellers out there beyond just our direct sales force. And I think all of which is kind of combining to really begin to drive this business, I think, quite positively, and it's why we expect this year to see Media Platform revenue doubled year-over-year. And so I think while there's still plenty of work, I'm very, very pleased with how this seems to be taking shape.

That's great. And maybe one follow-up. When we look at your operating expenses in Q1, does that sort of represent all the cost-cutting initiatives you put in place? Just kind of trying to determine if this is the right cost base to build off of for the remainder of the year as we sort of move forward?

Yes. Most of our work on the cost cutting is complete at this point. And I would warrant that Q1 is a good representation of the run rate for the remainder of the year.

And our next question comes from the line of Matthew Galinko with Maxim Group.

Maybe firstly, can you touch on how unit availability is today in the U.S. market and how kind of that user growth is shaping up between U.S. and Europe? And then I'll ask a follow-up.

Sure. So Matt, similar to what was the case last quarter, the majority of our TiVo One Connected devices are in Europe. I think on a relative basis, you're going to continue to see that grow faster than the U.S., the U.S. being a more competitive market, et cetera. We do expect, however, there to be more TV volume in the U.S. later this year. And we have both smart TVs and connected set-top boxes. There are operators that are -- the distinction is not important because they're all connected to our TiVo One ad platform. So this is all about managing the home screen and where content is being aggregated and ultimately being selected and the ability to advertise in stream and on homepage, et cetera, across these platforms. So I would say you're probably looking at a balance, roughly 60% Europe, 40% U.S.

And just any thoughts on, I guess, the capital structure, particularly given the kind of the shift in pickup in the Media Platform business and the collection of the received payment. Does that change anything about your position towards debt on the balance sheet? Or how do you feel today?

Well I think we continue, like everyone, right, to be operating in an uncertain environment. I think nothing has fundamentally changed with our capital allocation policy. which is we carry a small amount of debt on the balance sheet. Obviously, we want to fund importantly, our growth initiatives as our first priority and then look to opportunistically return capital through buybacks as appropriate as you balance both the need for cash internally along with debt paydown and ultimately, that return of capital. So as we still -- as we sit here today on $80-some million in cash, I don't think our perspective broadly changes as we start to see more material growth as we go forward. Obviously, it's a conversation that we and the Board have regularly. And to the extent that we want to dial up any element of that slightly more than another, certainly a matter of constant conversation.

[Operator Instructions] And our next question comes from the line of Hamed Khorsand with BWS Financial.

Could you just talk about -- you're making good advancement here on how many people are using your AutoStage, but why wouldn't that translate into higher Media Platform revenue for you right now?

Hamed, certainly, it ultimately will lead to more data and advertising-based monetization. But one of the things we have talked about is that in the course of this year, as we kind of exceeded the 10 million to, let's call it, 12 million units kind of mark that there'd be enough scale to attract both advertisers and people interested in that data more meaningfully. And so it's just simply a matter of timing. It's just where we are. You will, in fact, see, I think, a very, very valuable and interesting platform to both broadcasters and advertisers take shape where there's, we think, a meaningful amount of opportunity. And you'll kind of see it as we lean ahead with our first license -- data licenses happening in the broadcaster space likely this quarter.

And we have no further questions at this time. So I will now turn the conference back over to Mr. Jon Kirchner for closing remarks.

Thanks, operator. With a great start to the year, we can see momentum building in our business, and I'd like to personally thank our customers and partners. In addition, I appreciate the commitment of the entire Xperi team as we continue to deliver on our plans and strategies. We look forward to sharing further updates on our next quarterly conference call, and thank you, everyone, for joining today.

And ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's call, and we thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.